Crossen, John F.

English

University of New Mexico

Colonial Latin American Historical Review
Volume 8
Issue 3 Volume 8, Issue 3 (Summer 1999) Article 8
6-1-1999
Kathryn Joy McKnight, The Mystic of Tunja: The
Writings of Madre Castillo, 1671-1742
John F. Crossen
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Crossen, John F.. "Kathryn Joy McKnight, The Mystic of Tunja: The Writings of Madre Castillo, 1671-1742." Colonial Latin American
Historical Review 8, 3 (1999): 380. https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/clahr/vol8/iss3/8
380 COLONIAL LATIN AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW SUMMER 1999 
The Mystic of Tunja: The Writings of Madre Castillo, 1671-1742. By Kathryn 
Joy McKnight. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997. xviii + 
284 pp. Illustrations, chart, tables, notes, bibliography, index. $45.00 cloth.) 
With the publication of this study of the life and work of the 
Colombian nun, Francisca Josefa de la Concepcion, or Madre Castillo, as 
she is known, Kathryn Joy McKnight has provided English-reading audiences 
a fascinating introduction to a relatively neglected and misunderstood 
eighteenth-century writer. For this achievement alone, McKnight merited the 
Modern Language Association's prestigious Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize 
tor a book m bnglish in rhe fieid of Hispanic liLeram1es an<l wlture�. 
awarded to her at the 1998 convention in San Francisco. Prior to this book, 
readers would have had to depend on Spanish texts to learn about Madre 
Castillo's unique contributions to the genre of convent writing. Through 
McKnight's genuine love for this woman, a wider audience may now meet 
her and sample a selection of her words in translation. 
McKnight represents Madre Castillo as a "strong-voiced" and 
"strong-willed" woman who carefully negotiates the repressiveness of a 
male-dominated ecclesiastical culture and the security of an isolated convent 
in an attempt to express her own voice, her own experience. Madre Castillo 
is shown to have actively resisted prescribed roles for her writing and to have 
subverted the expectations of her confessors by inscribing a multiplicity of 
voices, each pretending submission (or struggling to submit) and each 
expressing a certain level of authority-whether in the role of God's amanu­
ensis (where she could then explore the revelations given to her, thus 
"teaching" without seeming to) or telling the story of her spiritual life (where 
she could articulate an individual identity, conflicted but knowable as 
distinctly feminine). As she "resists the unity of a submissive Counter­
Reformation subjectivity" (p. 129), Madre Castillo emerges in her writings a 
more complex individual, a Catholic woman writer (and a writer with a clear 
discernible Self) of South America who deserves equal attention in colonial 

382 COLONIAL LA TIN AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW SUMMER 1999 
and Christ and masculinizing language for Mary. In so doing, as McKnight 
argues, Madre Castillo "diminishes the distance between authority and 
women" (p. 195). This creativity and boldness with language are hallmarks 
of Madre Castillo's literary contributions. 
The Mystic of Tunja accomplishes its goal: to bring to life Madre 
Castillo as a complex person whose work is itself complex, and in which she 
has inscribed her multiple voices of conformity and conflict in Counter­
Reformation Colombia. Her literary legacy is one of submission and "subtle 
subversion" encoded in her pages; it is a legacy "in which can be seen the 
cautious and tortured resistance of a strong-willed woman" whose "voices" 
still speak to us with intriguing complexity (p. 221). 
John F. Crossen 
Department of Spanish & Portuguese 
Indiana University 


Kathryn Joy McKnight, The Mystic of Tunja:  The Writings of Madre Castillo, 1671-1742

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Kathryn Joy McKnight, The Mystic of Tunja: The Writings of Madre Castillo, 1671-1742

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