The book that has turned Baroque nuns into a global phenomenon

BarcelonaThere is only one essay that can bring together a handful of Baroque nuns, the Kardashians, the Me Too movement, the Holy Inquisition, TikTok, lesbian love, and academic life in Providence, Rhode Island, on the same pages. Instrucción de novicias (Blackie Books) is the first popular essay by Doctors in Hispanic Literature Ana Garriga and Carmen Urbita, the creators of the successful podcast Las Hijas de Felipe, and it has been an editorial phenomenon even before its publication.

If each podcast episode begins with a discussion of what they have eaten, the book also began to be slowly cooked in 2022. Blackie Books presented the unfinished project at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2023 and it was immediately a magnet: "We didn't expect a book by nuns from 500 years ago to be one of the great books of the fair –acknowledges editor Jan Martí–. It was sold to a dozen countries, there was even an auction with seven North American publishing houses. And in fact, it has been published in the United States and England before here, and in parallel in France, Holland, Italy, Germany, Brazil, and there are a few more to come," he told el ARA this Saturday, after the second presentation of the book in Barcelona, this time with Eudald Espluga at the Librería Finestres, which was overflowing.

Rereading the Golden Age

Although they define the podcast as "baroque gossip", deep down there is a clear political will to rewrite the canon of the Spanish Golden Age, "an era that has been appropriated by the darkest corners of the most stale and far-right Spanish ideologies," laments Garriga. Studying abroad gave them the freedom to dare to break an untouchable narrative. "We do as the French ursuline Jeanne des Anges did, who re-reads a doctrine that marginalizes her in a way that suits her to survive," observes Urbita. "If you don't find your genealogy, it's very difficult to want to participate in this world –they defend as women, literature specialists, and lesbians–. But there is another alternative literary archive, and that's why we arrived at the nuns, because they were the writers of the era. It turns out there were women authors before Carmen Laforet!", ironizes Garriga.

Las Hijas de Felipe anticipated the interest in spirituality that has since erupted in cultural debate with films like Los domingos or Rosalía's new album. Instead of seeking God, they argue that the meme of friends saying "I want to become a nun" connects with the need to find a refuge –and escape from speculation and gentrification–, to stop insisting on unsatisfactory relationships –turn off Tinder and embrace heteropessimism–, and above all with the desire to build community –and abandon LinkedIn, absurd jobs, and remote work, although even nuns pay self-employment taxes–. The convent today is seen as a "safe space where food, shelter, and routine are guaranteed and where a mobilized community with a common purpose lives together", although the essay also shows that not all nuns lived the same way, nor were convents exempt from the economic problems or the conquering ambitions of their time. "The fantasy of entering a convent is a collective survival strategy," defends Garriga, although today very few would be willing to accept the vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience, as evidenced by the lack of vocations.

Rigor and bling-bling

The key to the essay is a combination of historical scholarship with a modern, feminist, and queer perspective, and language full of references to popular and internet culture, adapted to the millennial generation. The book intertwines the personal history of the two friends, who met at Brown University, with the lives of the nuns they both read about for pleasure and to escape the coldness of their dissertations. The mortification they endured cloistered while studying, they compare to the renunciations of conventual life. To explain the passionate and not entirely smooth friendship between Saint Teresa of Jesus and her disciple María de San José, they are capable of finding parallels with the explosive relationship between Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton. The relationship of Agnès de Santa Cruz and Catalina de Ledesma is like a juicy chapter from the lesbian series The L world. In short, they argue that the lives of those women from five centuries ago "allow us to understand present-day thought structures" about love, finance, friendships, or fame.

This is the mantra that the authors defend: "We are convinced that anything you are going through has already happened to a nun from the 16th and 17th centuries." The wisdom that the Poor Clares, Carmelites, Dominicans, etc., had accumulated, and which they explained in autobiographies, letters, or collective texts – always written with just enough mischief to overcome the control of the confessor and the Inquisition – are like "a transhistorical book club." There is also science fiction worthy of Ursula K. Le Guin, they affirm, because there are those who explain the world without leaving the convent.

One of the life mottos they celebrate comes from a writing by the Mexican mystic María de San José, who complains because her superiors have misplaced some notebooks and she has to redo them: "I feel the greatest repugnance in having to do this work again," she writes, a defense of rest that serves as a counterpoint to the universe of entrepreneurship cryptogurus. After all, the book makes "a political defense of an ethic of care, community, and interdependent logics in an increasingly overwhelming world," says Garriga, and it does so through women who "did not flee the world but found a refuge from which to pull their strings."