Kathleen Myers brings together portraits and autobiographical texts of six seventeenth century Latin American women, drawing on primary sources that include Inquisition and canonisation records, confessional and mystic journals, and legal defenses and petitions. These sources illustrate how the development of institutions that examined individual merit according to a set of guidelines resulted in an "autobiographical boom" in which people began to dictate or write their life stories for confessors, bishops, lawyers, and judges. These writings provide a window through which we can see the interaction of women with religious and civic leaders and study the voices of early modern women, voices often absent from the more formal literary and historical genres of the period. In every case, Myers finds, the women's stories are intricately interwoven with the larger political and religious movements of the period. Myers shows that the ideal model for seventeenth th century Hispanic women was that of the woman religious - silent, obedient, cloistered, and virginal. This role, which was in reality for as much as a fourth of all white urban women, is the common ground for all six women studied.

Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo (1478-1557) wrote the first comprehensive history of Spanish America, the Historia general y natural de las Indias, a sprawling, constantly revised work in which Oviedo attempted nothing less than a complete account of the Spanish discovery, conquest, and colonization of the Americas from 1492 to 1547, along with descriptions of the land's flora, fauna, and indigenous peoples. His Historia, which grew to an astounding fifty volumes, includes numerous interviews with the Spanish and indigenous leaders who were literally making history, the first extensive field drawings of America rendered by a European, reports of exotic creatures, ethnographic descriptions of indigenous groups, and detailed reports about the conquest and colonization process.

Fernandez de Oviedo's Chronicle of America explores how, in writing his Historia, Oviedo created a new historiographical model that reflected the vastness of the Americas and Spain's enterprise there. Kathleen Myers uses a series of case studies--focusing on Oviedo's self-portraits, drawings of American phenomena, approaches to myth, process of revision, and depictions of Native Americans--to analyze Oviedo's narrative and rhetorical strategies and show how they relate to the politics, history, and discursive practices of his time. Accompanying the case studies are all of Oviedo's extant field drawings and a wide selection of his text in English translation.

The first study to examine the entire Historia and its evolving rhetorical and historical context, this book confirms Oviedo's assertion that "the New World required a different kind of history" as it helps modern readers understand how the discovery of the Americas became a catalyst for European historiographical change.

Madre Maria de San Jose (1656 - 1719) mystic, chronicler, and co-founder of an Augustinian convent inscribed her life story within the model of spiritual autobiography set by St. Augustine and Teresa of Avila, but at the same time included her individual story as a seventeenth-century woman of the landowning classes in New Spain. The resulting manuscript records in intimate detail her family life, convent surroundings, and social milieu; it introduces us to a combative and engaging person and gives us a rare and vivid glimpse of a complex society."