Baroque Men and Women: Preaching and Gender in Early Modern Spain and Mexico

Common among both Catholics and Protestants, preaching was ubiquitous in Early Modern Europe and its colonial domains.  In the Catholic context, the Council of Trent (1545-1563) proved highly influential, shaping a style of preaching that favored theatricality and, especially in Spain, the shaping of mental images. Though one goal of this strategy was to reconnect believers with the sacred, another important dimension included defending the Church’s power amidst a society in crisis. One way to do this was through gendered language, directed especially at women, and fashioned to uphold imperiled patriarchal power structures whose foundations rested on conformity to gendered social norms.

Trained in and familiar with Early Modern Spanish preaching, early preachers in Colonial Mexico brought with them their prior experiences. As new generations of creole preachers emerged, however, sermons in New Spain began to take on distinctive characteristics. Like other Baroque art forms, sermons in New Spain embodied an aesthetic of exuberance and artistic excess. For preachers this phenomenon manifested itself in the gendered language they frequently employed in their sermons. Unlike in Spain, what distinguished New Spanish sermons was language that appeared to defy or transcend normative gender expectations, celebrating female saints who took on masculine characteristics and vice versa.

This paper examines representative examples of sermons from Early Modern Spain and Colonial Mexico and proposes that the surprisingly flexible visions of gender present in Mexican sermons constitute an important, as yet largely unexplored source for understanding the development of the Baroque and of creole sensibilities in New Spain. The paper argues that sermons assumed a unique discursive power in New Spain as a means by which the Church could participate in the larger project of the Colonial Baroque aimed at asserting creole greatness even while also continuing to affirm its own position of social prominence.