Voluntary Enclosure: Shelter, Movement, and Devotion in Recogimientos de Mujeres

This paper examines the role that voluntary lay cloisters played in the survival strategies, marital choices, and religious lives of laywomen living in Mexico City in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Voluntary cloisters existed as a part of a continuum of institutions known collectively as recogimientos de mujeres; these included involuntary correctional institutions for wayward women, voluntary places of reform for repentant women, shelters for poor but virtuous women, and prestigious convent-like institutions for laywomen who met the requirements of blood purity and legitimate birth, along with beaterios and convents. The paper situates the female space of voluntary cloisters within the landscape of these other institutions and examines the connections, networks, and movement between them. Focusing on the records of three voluntary lay cloisters in Mexico City, it analyzes the ways that women of different class backgrounds and life circumstances engaged and utilized these varying institutions and how they moved between the space of the cloister and the urban world that surrounded them.