Abstract
According to McKnight, family and confessorial relations, Madre Castillo's intellect, and her ability to marshal supporters in her role as mistress of novices, eventually enabled her to secure the office of abbess, albeit she never lacked for detractors in the convent, who accused her of hiding wealth, lying, and attempting to make herself "singular." Having described the traditions, conventions, and contexts in which Madre Castillo wrote, McKnight turns in Part Three to an examination of the distinct, yet sometimes overlapping, subjectivities manifested in her writings. Because of the contradictory demands of the autobiographical vida, in which nuns were made both to recount the details of the special visions granted them by God and to portray themselves as unworthy sinners and humble daughters before the male religious hierarchy, Madre Castillo's voice in the vida is most often "pained and conflicted." [...]McKnight suggests an alternative to the traditional portrait of Madre Castillo as the female mystic, who writes purely under influence of automatic script or divine inspiration: "I offer here an image of Madre Castillo at her desk, Breviary in one hand, pen in the other, Vulgate before her, her mind deeply engaged in discursive -- intellectual -- activity" (188). McKnight's study is already becoming a kind of "classic" in the field of Hispanic women's religious literature, a status it certainly deserves for its author's careful reconstruction of the religious milieu in which her subject lived and wrote. [...]her thoughtful feminist readings go a long way toward breaking the silences surrounding early Hispanic nuns or the passive, submissive images associated with them when they have been subjects of analysis.