Manuscript Workshop feat. Dr. Jessica Delgado

Jessica Delgado (The Ohio State University) is an Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and History. She earned her Ph.D. in Latin American History at the University of California at Berkeley in 2009 and taught at Princeton University in the religion Department from 2009-2019. Her primary areas of teaching and research are the histories of women, gender, sexuality, religion, and race in Latin America—particularly in Mexico in the 16^th, 17^th, and 18^th centuries. Other areas of particular interest include: colonial Catholicism; gender, race, caste, and religion in the early modern Atlantic World; the materiality of devotion; the relationship between religiosity and people’s experiences of the physical world and embodiment; and the intersection between social and spiritual status. Her first book, Troubling Devotion: Laywomen and the Church in Colonial Mexico, 1630-1770, looks at the ways laywomen’s religiosity and daily interactions with religious authorities, institutions, symbols, and ideas shaped the devotional landscape of colonial Mexico. Her current book project is called The Beata of the Black Habit: Race, Sexuality, and Religious Authority in Late Colonial Mexico takes the life and trial of an unknown female mystic to explore changes in religious culture, colonial power, and racialized ideologies of gender and sexuality in late eighteenth-century Mexico.

Paul Ramírez (Northwestern University) is a specialist in the history of Mexico. He has published articles and book chapters on the coordination of response to disease epidemics, the cultural and religious aspects of medical technology, and the politics of reform in Bourbon Mexico. His book monograph, titled Enlightened Immunity: Mexico's Experiments with Disease Prevention in the Age of Reason (Stanford University Press, 2018), examines the rituals, genres, and upheavals in medicine and politics that accompanied efforts to adopt preventive methods in rural Mexico. His second book project, tentatively titled Salt of the Santos: A History of Devoted Work, explores the neglected religious associations involved in the harvest and consumption of salt in Mexico. His research has been supported by the Newberry Library, the Huntington Library, the University of California’s Institute for Mexico and the U.S. (UC MEXUS), Harvard’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, and the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study.

ABSTRACT: In the late 18th century, María Anastasia Gonzales, a woman of Spanish descent who grew up in small, rural, primarily indigenous farming villages, fell afoul of the Mexican Inquisition while she was living as a widowed mother in the Spanish town of Sayula. She was a mystic, whose former confessor had sexually exploited her as a part of their sacramental relationship. But when called to testify against him, she made heretical claims and experienced visions in front of her examiners. Throughout the thirteen-year investigation, trial, and punishment that followed, Inquisitors and local clergymen debated the cause and significance of her crimes, but Gonzales never wavered from her own perspective of events. The Beata of the Black Habit explores the politics of religious knowledge and changing ideas about race and sexuality in the final decades of Spanish colonial rule through the lens of one woman's story and her attempts to make theological sense of sexual and sacramental violence.

The Zoom link to join this event is available upon request. Please contact spitulski.1@osu.edu. 

Selected portions of Professor Delgado’s manuscript will be circulated in advance of the event.