Rare first edition of the life and writings of Madre Mariana de San José (1568-1638), printed as a luxurious folio at the Imprenta Royal likely at the behest of the dedicatee, King Felipe IV. Inspired by her own meeting at the tender age of four with Teresa of Ávila, Mariana went on to reform the Augustinian Recollects, founding – in the manner of Teresa – a handful of new convents during her lifetime.
Perhaps setting a precedent for his son Felipe IV (who was famously addicted to the advice of Sor Maria de Ágreda), Felipe III (d. 1621) and his wife frequently consulted with Madre Mariana, lending her and her efforts a certain prestige. However, Mariana’s guiding light seems to have been the example set by Teresa of Ávila; she mentions reading the Libro de su Vida as well as the Camino de Perfeccíon – probably both still circulating only in manuscript at the time of Mariana’s profession as a nun in 1586. Like Teresa, Mariana sought reform from practices which she found too lax; both nuns tended towards austerity as well as expressly ordering their reformed sisters to embrace a ‘contemplative’ life. Finally, in a most intriguing parallel, the present work contains the first printed appearance of Mariana’s own vernacular commentary on the famously erotic Song of Songs – following in the footsteps of Teresa’s Conceptos del Amor de Dios escritos… sobre algunas palabras de los Cantares de Salomon. Mariana’s commentary ends at Chapter 3, verse 3, leading some to conjecture that she may have abandoned the project or destroyed the remainder for fear of reprisal; Teresa’s Conceptos del Amor de Dios was not included in her collected works printed in 1611, probably because the Spanish Inquisition had specifically forbidden vernacular exegeses of Scripture.
The present work was written, according to Luis Muñoz, for the use of Recollect nuns, and bears a dedication to Felipe IV by Prioress Aldonza del Santissimo Sacramento. Books I-III are drawn from Mariana’s autobiography, while Book IV presents anecdotes preserved by the nuns of the Convent of the Incarnation. Books V contains Mariana’s commentary on the Song of Songs. The engraved title-page by the Antwerp-born Juan de Noort (1587-1652) shows St. Augustine facing the Reformed foundress Mariana, who holds a copy of her Constitutions in her hand. The striking portrait depicts Mariana in the act of writing the same.
Augustinian Recollect Nuns became especially influential in Mexico beginning with the first convent founded there in 1688. According to Myers and Powell, for example, Mariana’s writings were one of the main influences on the 18th century Mexican nun Maria de San José (cf A Wild Country Out in the Garden).
OCLC shows US copies of this first edition at Harvard and Berkeley Law Library only. A second edition appeared in 1646 and is held at Indiana and Princeton.
Palau 363193; and cf María Leticia Sánchez Hernández “Mariana de San José. Una priora holística” in Atienza López (ed.), Mujeres entre el Claustro y el Siglo: Autoridad y Poder en el Mundo Religioso Femenino, Siglos XVI-XVIII (2018).
