American Religions Workshop

The American Religions Workshop is bringing Jessica Delgado, a historian of gender, sexuality, and religion in colonial Mexico, to campus on February 24.

Jessica Delgado's book manuscript focuses on ways that laywomen’s relationships with the colonial church and state institutions shaped a culture of religiosity in New Spain. She explores how women who did not take vows affected and negotiated the relationships with priests, sacramental duties, and ecclesiastical courts that were each an integral part of a colonial world where religion imbued all interactions and no clear distinction between the secular and the spiritual existed. In this world, without the institutional power that nuns had, laywomen requested institutional support and defined themselves in relationship to church understandings of gender and spiritual status in a way that fundamentally helped shape colonial Catholic culture.