¿Primera escritora colonial? Santa Rosa de Lima: Sus

Abstract

This dissertation is a cultural-historical reading of the text entitled Las Mercedes y La Escala Mistica written by Isabel Flores de Oliva, later canonized as Santa Rosa de Lima. The purpose of the present study is to analyze her iconolexic discourse as a unique type of mystic text within the realm of colonial Latin American feminine Literature. The first chapter describes, simultaneously, the discursive masculine tradition in the New World immediately following the Conquest, and the lack of discursive and written testimonies of women of the same era. Furthermore, we approach Santa Rosa's work with the help of Walter Mignolo's theory about colonial semiosis and its applicability to pictorical, oral and other cultural discourses. The second chapter centers its study on the socio-historical elements that surrounded Rosa at the time of her life and all those ideological and cultural variables that shaped her, allowing her to become the most venerated and beloved saint in the Americas. The third chapter focuses on the critical and analytical study of Santa Rosa's Mercedes and Escala Mistica. It shows the kind of strategies and conventions that the Saint employed in her texts. The dissertation concludes by desmitifying erroneous ideas about the saint, and demonstrating the fact that Santa Rosa was indeed the first mystic writer of colonial Peru and why she should be studied as such.