During the fifty-three years she lived in a convent in the city of Tunja in what is now Colombia, author Madre Castillo stretched the accepted boundaries of female behavior by veiling her intellectual activities in the duties of a colonial nun. Her autobiographical writings reveal a deeply conflicted individual whose keen mind chafed against the restrictions of Counter-Reformation ideology. In this volume, Kathryn Joy McKnight offers an insightful analysis of Madre Castillo's life and writings.

McKnight draws on feminist and post-structural criticism, recent scholarship on nuns' writings, and extensive research in colonial archives to develop a framework for understanding Madre Castillo's life and the genre of the spiritual autobiography, so often required of mystic nuns by their confessors.