A Wild Country Out in the Garden: The Spiritual Journals of a Colonial Mexican Nun

Madre Maria de San Jose (1656 - 1719) -- mystic, chronicler, and co-founder of an Augustinian convent -- inscribed her life story within the model of spiritual autobiography set by St. Augustine and Teresa of Avila, but at the same time included her individual story as a seventeenth-century woman of the landowning classes in New Spain. The resulting manuscript records in intimate detail her family life, convent surroundings, and social milieu; it introduces us to a combative and engaging person and gives us a rare and vivid glimpse of a complex society.

Kathleen A. Myers is a professor of Spanish and adjunct professor of History at Indiana University. Her publications include Word from New Spain: The Spiritual Autobiography of Madre Maria de San Jose (Liverpool University Press, 1993) and numerous articles on a variety of religious women and writers in colonial Spanish America. She has received a grant from the Spanish Ministry for Education and Culture for her work on autobiography and sixteenth-century chronicles of America.

Amanda Powell, poet and translator, teaches Spanish/Latin American literature and literary translation at the University of Oregon. Her translations of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poetry and prose appear in Untold Sisters: Hispanic Nuns in Their Own Works (University of New Mexico Press, 1989). With Electa Arenal, she edited and translated The Answer/La Respuesta by colonial Mexican poet Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz (The Feminist Press, 1994). Her scholarly essays, translations, and poems appear in a variety of anthologies and journals.

Myers and Powell were awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support research and translation for A Wild Country Out in the Garden.