Hayley R. Bowman
Greenleaf Visiting Library Scholar
PhD Candidate
University of Michigan
Hayley R. Bowman received a Greenleaf Visiting Scholar award in 2019 to support research for her dissertation, provisionally entitled “Visualizing Physical and Spiritual Landscapes: A Seventeenth-Century Nun in the Spanish World.”
At the time of her award, Hayley was a Rackham Merit Fellow and Ph.D. candidate in History at the University of Michigan. She received her B.A. in History and Sociology and her M.A. in History from Purdue University. Hayley studies early modern Spain and colonial Latin America, and is broadly interested in the history of women and gender; art, image, and materiality; religious communities; and place and space studies.
Title of Research : Visualizing Physical and Spiritual Landscapes: A Seventeenth-Century Nun in the Spanish World
Bowman's project explores the early modern Spanish world through the eyes of Sor María de Jesús de Ágreda, a Franciscan nun who, while physically confined in a convent in the village of Ágreda, saw, and came to affect and influence peoples and places across a trans-oceanic, composite monarquía. Her determination to gain all manner of knowledge, and her abilities to manipulate, control, reproduce, collapse, and ultimately transcend space and time make Sor María a striking entry point on to this widening world— yearnings which, Bowman hypothesizes, develop in close relation to a burgeoning inner life within her cell and convent. Bowman proposes to approach her subject especially through an analysis of its visual components, including Sor María’s extraordinary capacities for sight and her methods of communicating and reproducing for others all that she saw and how she saw it. This visual focus promises to shed new light not only on an early modern Spanish Catholic Christian thoughtworld that she shared with a number of contemporary spiritual luminaries, but also on her (literal and figurative) position within an early modern Spanish society and religious imaginary, and on the development, spread, and influence of her ideas and writings. This project is not a biography; but rather, aims to investigate the person and legends of Sor María de Jesús de Ágreda as a revealing point of entry, traveling alongside her kinds of engagement, following, contextualizing, and analyzing her manner of seeing and moving through what prove to have been surprisingly porous barriers between sacred and earthly, convent and community, Old World and New.
