Latin American History

When the famous anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss arrived in Rio de Janeiro, he had one book in his pocket: Jean de Léry's History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil. Léry had undertaken his fascinating and arduous voyage in 1556, as a youthful member of the first Protestant mission to the New World.

Women's life writing in general has too often been ignored, dismissed, or relegated to a separate category in those few studies of the genre that include it. The present work addresses these issues and offers a countervailing argument that focuses on the contributions of women writers to the study of autobiography in Spanish during the early modern period, both in Spain and in Mexico.

Kristine Ibsen studies women's personal narrative in colonial Spanish America, focusing particularly on the spiritual autobiography of the 17th and 18th centuries and offering revealing insights into the social and political position of cloistered women.  In Spanish American literature, women's autobiography is rooted in the hagiographic tradition of vitae in which, at the request of a confessor, nuns wrote about their spiritual lives in an autobiographical form.