Rebellious Nuns: The Troubled History of a Mexican Convent, 1752-1863 - Hardcover

Margaret Chowning is Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Wealth and Power in Provincial Mexico: Michoacan from the Late Colony to the Revolution (1999).

"Historians of colonial and modern Mexico, as well as students, will delight at a book rich in descriptive detail. The care with which Chowning treats her subject and the complex and nuanced assessment of this convent's life offer a treatsure of issues and topics for futher discussion and debate."--Martin Nesvig, The Historian

"This book is a great resource for undergraduate students learning about historical research as well as for advanced scholars. Chowning brings the reader along in her interpretive process, explaining how sources such as letters, testimonies, and reports of nuns, bishops, and vicars were produced and paying attention to different perspectives and multiple possible interpretations of events. The result is a narrative of historical research that operates alongside the narrative about La Purísma. These arcs unite to present a fascinating picture of a group of women whose fortunes were intertwined with that of San Miguel and its region, and whose story illuminates the history of late colonial and early national Mexico for readers today."--Joan Bristoo, Journal of Social History

"This is a beautiful little piece of research. Chowning has done an excellent job." --Church Times

"This work offers a rare insight into the lives of cloistered nuns in late eighteenth century Mexico. Using conflict within the convent of La Purísima Concepción in San Miguel el Grande Chowning reveals the complex fabric of human relationships pulsating behind its walls. A debate on observance, carefully documented in hundreds of letters and private ecclesiastical sources, introduces the modern reader to the spectrum of interests, passions and machinations that plagued La Purísima for several years. An engaging narrative style, a judicious economic analysis and attention to detail recommends this study to historians of late colonial provincial society as well as historians of women and the church."--Asunción Lavrin, author of Women, Feminism, and Social Change in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, 1890-1940

"This superb book combines sophisticated scholarship with an entertaining story. Tracing the turbulent history of a Mexican convent from its foundation until the exclaustration of its nuns during the Reforma, Rebellious Nuns captures the texture of daily life inside the convent and the personalities of the strong-willed women who inhabited it. Chowning skillfully places her case study in the broader historical context to illuminate significant changes in women's roles, Catholic piety, and Church-State relations over a difficult century. This highly readable work will appeal to a wide audience of scholars as well as students in Latin American Studies and Women's Studies classes."--Silvia Marina Arrom, author of The Women of Mexico City, 1790-1857

"In this beautifully written book, a talented historian brings to life a memorable cast of characters: an Adam Smith-loving archbishop, a reform-minded abbess and her resistant charges, a provincial city in the throes of change. Her well-wrought narrative of a convent rebellion grounds sophisticated insights into key political, economic, and gender relations of the century she tackles. This extraordinary episode and its subsequent reverberations has found its rightful historian."--Pamela Voekel, author of Alone Before God: The Religious Origins of Modernity in Mexico

"Chowning's work is a fine regional study of a broader phenomenon, convent rebellion, which illuminates larger trends. It will be required reading for those interested in women's convents, the economic history of the late colony and early nation, and the processes by which so-called Enlightenment thought penetrated even remote reaches of Mexican society." --American Historical Review

"One of the most revealing glimpses inside a Mexican convent yet written. Just as impressively, the book situates the story of La Purisima within broad religious, political, and economic transformations, without blunting the nuance and historical idiosyncrasies of the convent and the nuns themselves." --Colonial Latin American Historical Review