Alone at the Altar: Single Women and Devotion in Guatemala, 1670-1870

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Description

By 1700, Guatemala’s capital used to be a mixed-race “city of women.” As in many other cities across colonial Spanish The usa, labor and migration patterns in Guatemala produced an urban female majority and high numbers of single women, widows, and female household heads. In this history of religious and spiritual life in the Guatemalan capital, Brianna Leavitt-Alcántara makes a speciality of the sizeable population of odd, non-elite women living outdoor of both marriage and convent. Even though officials frequently expressed outright hostility towards poor unmarried women, many of these women managed to position themselves at the vanguard of religious life in the city.

Through an analysis of over 500 wills, hagiographies, religious chronicles, and ecclesiastical records, Alone at the Altar examines how laboring women forged complex alliances with Catholic priests and missionaries and how those alliances significantly shaped local religion, the spiritual economy, and late colonial reform efforts. It considers the local circumstances and global Catholic missionary movements that fueled official collaboration with poor single women and reinforce for diverse models of feminine piety. Extending its analysis past Guatemalan Independence to 1870, this book also illuminates how women’s alliances with the Catholic Church became politicized in the Independence era and influenced the upward thrust of popular conservatism in Guatemala.

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