Far from the Margins: Non-elite Single Women and Spiritual Networking in Colonial Guatemala
Bibliographic record
Abstract
: This chapter examines the case of Anna Guerra de Jesus, a poor rural migrant and abandoned wife and mother, who became a celebrated local holy woman in early eighteenth-century Santiago de Guatemala, the colonial capital of Central America. Through an analysis of Anna's spiritual biography alongside wills and other archival sources, this chapter considers how non-elite single women in colonial Santiago actively cultivated devotional networks with women, priests, and lay religious brotherhoods. Through these networks, laboring single women positioned themselves at the forefront of a vibrant spiritual renaissance in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Santiago de Guatemala and actively participated in the global circulation of female mysticism, affective piety, and missionary movements. Keywords: Non-elite women, devotional networks, Catholic Church, Guatemala, hagiography On May 17, 1713, at age seventy-five, Anna Guerra de Jesús died in Santiago de Guatemala, the colonial capital of Central America. Within three years of Anna's death, Santiago's local printing press published a lengthy spiritual biography of her life, penned by her former confessor, Jesuit Padre Antonio Siria, and titled, Vida admirable y prodigiosas virtudes de la v. sierva de Dios D. Anna Guerra de Jesús (Admirable Life and Extraordinary Virtues of the Servant of God, Dona Anna Guerra de Jesus). Anna stands out as an unusual hagiographical subject. While the early modern Catholic ideal of feminine piety prized enclosure, obedience, and virginity, Anna was neither nun nor virgin, but rather a poor rural migrant and abandoned wife and mother who lived and died in the world rather than a cloistered community. How did Anna Guerra de Jesus become a celebrated holy woman and model of female piety in a context of official anxiety, ambivalence, and even outright hostility towards non-elite women living outside patriarchal authority? And what does her story reveal about the broader gendered religious context of Santiago de Guatemala? Through an analysis of Anna's spiritual biography alongside wills and other archival sources, this chapter examines how non-elite single women in colonial Santiago actively cultivated devotional networks with other lay women, mixed-sex religious brotherhoods, and priests. Through these networks, laboring single women positioned themselves at the forefront of a vibrant spiritual renaissance in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Santiago de Guatemala and actively participated in the global circulation of female mysticism, affective piety, and missionary movements.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.027 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".