Humility and Resistance in the Visions of an Enslaved Mystic

I get v. personal at The Lamp:

In the middle of the seventeenth century in the city of Lima, a living woman asked a dead one whether black women could go to heaven.

Ursula de Jesús, the living woman, had entered the Franciscan Convent of Santa Clara as a nun’s slave—or, technically, she was the slave of all the nuns and only served the woman who had owned her when her work for all the others was done, this being the method by which Peruvian Franciscans evaded the ban on personal property. She had to ask her guardian angel how old she was.

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