Asuncion Lavrin - Böcker

'This fascinating book presents the work of nine social historians who seek to reconstruct the elusive and highly personal private lives of colonial Latin Americans. The essays analyze a range of issues from sexuality marriage, divorce, and illegitimacy to sexual witch-craft, conceptions of sin, and confession...Uniformly engaging, provocative, and well-written, these essays represent some of the most interesting contemporary work on colonial Latin American society' - "Hispanic American Historical Review".'A very welcome contribution to the study of the hitherto little explored personal dimensions of the formation and reproduction of colonial society. The essays uncover a rich set of illuminating but until now largely neglected archival sources, throwing light not only on the shifting sexual politics of church and state, the evolution of sexual constraints, and the contradictions between institutional norms and individual practice but also on the private, personal aspects of relations between the sexes with special attention to the experience of women' - "Journal of the History of Sexuality".'"Sexuality and Marriage in Colonial Latin America" presents the best work on the subject so far' - "The Village Voice". Asuncion Lavrin is a professor of history at Arizona State University at Tempe. Her 1995 book, "Women, Feminism, and Social Change in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, 1890-1940", won the Arthur P. Whitaker Prize from the Middle Atlantic Council on Latin American Studies.

Feminists in the Southern Cone countries—Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay—between 1910 and 1930 obliged political leaders to consider gender in labor regulation, civil codes, public health programs, and politics. Feminism thus became a factor in the modernization of these geographically linked but diverse societies in Latin America. Although feminists did not present a unified front in the discussion of divorce, reproductive rights, and public-health schemes to regulate sex and marriage, this work identifies feminism as a trigger for such discussion, which generated public and political debate on gender roles and social change. Asunción Lavrin recounts changes in gender relations and the role of women in each of the three countries, thereby contributing an enormous amount of new information and incisive analysis to the histories of Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay.

Brides of Christ invites the modern reader to follow the histories of colonial Mexican nuns inside the cloisters where they pursued a religious vocation or sought shelter from the world. Lavrin provides a complete overview of conventual life, including the early signs of vocation, the decision to enter a convent, profession, spiritual guidelines and devotional practices, governance, ceremonials, relations with male authorities and confessors, living arrangements, servants, sickness, and death rituals. Individual chapters deal with issues such as sexuality and the challenges to chastity in the cloisters and the little-known subject of the nuns' own writings as expressions of their spirituality. The foundation of convents for indigenous women receives special attention, because such religious communities existed nowhere else in the Spanish empire.

A broadly researched cultural history, Men of God offers a path to understanding the concept of religious masculinity through an intimate approach to the study of friars and lay brothers in colonial Mexico. Though other scholars have focused on the missionary work of the Augustinian, Franciscan, and Dominican friars, few have addressed their everyday lives and how the internal discipline of their orders shaped them. In Men of God AsunciÓn Lavrin offers a sweeping yet intimate history of the mendicant friars in New Spain from the late sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries.Focusing on these individuals’ lives from childhood through death, Lavrin explores contemporaneous ideas, from how to raise a boy to the friars’ training as novices, and the similarities and differences in the life experiences of lay brothers and ordained members. She discusses their sexuality to reveal the challenges and failures of religious manhood, as well as the drive behind their missionary duties, especially in the late seventeenth through the eighteenth centuries. Men of God also explores the concepts and realities of martyrdom and death, significant elements in the spirituality of the mendicant friars of colonial Mexico.