Abstract

The life of Catalina de Iturgoyen (1685-1732) falls within the sphere of Hispano-American baroque culture. As the wife of a crown official, and despite the demands of her aristocratic rank, this Chilean heroine belongs to the genre of American women who sought Christian perfection from the vicissitudes posed by secular life, and in her case, a married one. In the context of the baroque religiosity of her time, she assumed a model of holiness in which spiritual «health» predominates, as the fundamental good desired by the soul, and mortification of the body, as the main «remedy» to purge her sins and purify her spirit in order to achieve the union with God. Her life, written eighty years after her death by the dean of the cathedral of Lima José Manuel Bermúdez at the time of Peruvian independence, demonstrates the survival of a model of baroque spirituality despite the new ideas that permeated the latter revolutionary process. In the following study, we analyze the history of the manuscript, the time and context when it was composed, and Catalina’s religious remedies to achieve physical and spiritual health.