https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7144-1335
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Ascensión Mazuela-Anguita, Immaculate Sounds: The Musical Lives of Nuns in New Spain. By Cesar D Favila, Music and Letters, 2025;, gcaf031, https://doi.org/10.1093/ml/gcaf031
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Extract
In the early modern Catholic world, a variety of source material shows the frequent celebration of Masses and Offices with polyphonic music in convents, endowed by a broad cross-section of citizens in their wills, including the nuns themselves, and also by confraternities and guilds. Cloistered nuns’ prayers and singing were considered an especially efficacious way to relieve the suffering of souls in Purgatory. Convents were consequently used as performative spaces where it was possible to establish, through nuns’ voices, a connection between the earthly and the celestial worlds. By focusing on colonial New Spanish convents, in this book Cesar Favila explains why nuns’ voices were essential for salvation on the basis of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, according to which the Virgin Mary, considered the eternal voice of God, was imitated by nuns through their disciplined lives. In this way, ‘the invisible sonorous quality attributed to the Virgin Mary as the voice of God reverberated through the vocal intercessions of invisible cloistered nuns’ (p. 24). Therefore, nuns were considered—and considered themselves—to be ‘co-redeemers’.
