Religion, Reproductive Knowledge, and Resistance in the Colonial Hispanic World

Harvard HDS

This seminar examines how religious doctrine shaped—and was shaped by—understandings of female reproduction in colonial Latin America and early Modern Iberia. Reading across colonial religious reforms, Inquisition records, confessional manuals, medical and obstetrical treatises, literary writings, and midwifery records and testimonies, we will study how the female body operated as a primary terrain where evangelization, biopower, and resistance converged. Students will explore the ways in…