Saint Rosalía of Palermo in New Spain and New Mexico:

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Society of Jesus circulated images and texts promoting the cult of Saint Rosalía of Palermo throughout Spain’s American viceroyalties. They thus introduced European models of femininity to the New World, adapting them to the local needs. This presentation will consider the visual and literary transformation of Saint Rosalia, patroness of Palermo, from medieval anchorite to Baroque protectress from plagues and earthquakes, to gender model in New Spain during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Even after the expulsion of the Jesuits from Spanish territories in 1767, Saint Rosalía’s cult circulated in the viceroyalty via visual art and in texts such as sermons, hagiographies, and popular romances, as far north as New Mexico and into the first decades of the nineteenth century. The Rosalía cult reflects gendered expectations of religious faith, indigenous influences, and models for women’s conduct in contrast to Enlightenment principles of secularization, reason, and modernity gendered as masculine. Independence-era writer José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi drew on Baroque and Enlightenment texts about Saint Rosalía when he satirized the hagiography as a model for modern female conduct in his novel, La Quijotita y su prima (vols. 1-2, 1818-1819; vols. 1-4, 1832). The Rosalía cult in New Spain is an example of the wider political, social, and religion contexts of the transformation of saints from Europe to New Spain, studied by art historian Charlene Villaseñor Black, and their persistence in the popular imaginary.

Catherine M. Jaffe, University Distinguished Professor, is a specialist in modern Spanish and comparative literature with a focus on 18th-century women writers and the Enlightenment. Her most recent book, published by Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, is a collection of essays on the Black Legend of Spain and its Atlantic Empire in the eighteenth century. Her research has been supported by the Madrid Institute for Advanced Study and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She collaborates closely with Spanish historians and is a member of the Spanish research projects BIESES, Bibliografía de Escritoras Españolas; MEMSTORIA, Las barricadas del recuerdo. Historia y memoria de la era de las revoluciones en España e Hispanoamérica (1776-1848); and TRAMOS, Gender, Politics, and Emotions in the Long Nineteenth Century. Today’s presentation is part of a larger project on transatlantic female quixotic works.