Alone at the Altar

This book reframes our understanding of single women and religious culture in colonial and nineteenth-century Latin America. Most works on women and early modern religion examine nuns, holy women, or religious “deviants,” and emphasize rising hostility towards female autonomy as officials moved to enclose unmarried women and intensive female religiosity (e.g. mysticism, asceticism). This study takes a different approach and examines ordinary laywomen, particularly the broad population of non-elite women living outside of both marriage and convent. Much like other Spanish American cities, Guatemala’s colonial capital was a city of women due to labor and migration patterns with many single and widowed women heading households. Alone at the Altar argues that laboring single women forged complex alliances with the Church, which shaped local religion and the spiritual economy, late colonial reform efforts, and post-Independence politics in Guatemala. Through an analysis of approximately 550 wills, as well as a variety of other sources such as hagiographies, religious chronicles, and ecclesiastical records, this study moves beyond anecdotal evidence and exemplary case studies, to consider broader patterns and the ways in which gender, social, and marital status shaped early modern devotional networks. By extending its analysis to 1870, the book also illuminates how the alliances between laboring women and the Catholic Church became politicized in the Independence era and influenced the successful rise of popular conservatism in Guatemala.