MARTYRDOMS FAR AND NEAR: THE JESUIT GLOBAL IMAGINARY IN THE LIFE OF QUITO’S LOCAL «SAINT», MARIANA DE JESÚS (1618-45)

Abstract

The first complete hagiographic life of Mariana de Paredes y Flores (d.1645), a work popularly known as La Azucena de Quito («Lily of Quito»), has rightly been interpreted in terms of the local significance of both the saint and the discourse surrounding her life and piety. And yet a close reading of Jacinto Morán de Butrón’s late seventeenth-century hagiography suggests that a uniquely Jesuit outlook —fostered by narratives of missionary travails, encounters with the pagan «other», and personal martyrdom, and deepened by the imaginative contemplative language of the Spiritual Exercises— informed the spiritual self-understanding of this urban laywoman who probably never traveled more than a few miles from her birthplace. This evidence points to how Early Modern Roman Catholic identities reflected both local relationships and global imaginations.