Vidas espirituales y práctica de la confesión. La recepción y transmisión de la auto-biografía espiritual femenina en la Península Ibérica y el Nuevo Mundo

The Spiritual Lives constitute a literary genre whose main protagonist is the “religious woman” or “semi-religious” of the end of the Middle Ages and beginning of the Modern Age. This genre is characterised both by its moving in a literary hybrid field (hagiographic, biographical and autobiographical), and by its decided incorporation of the techniques of self-representation of confessional language as elaborated in the West from the 13th century onwards. This study tries to analyse from a historical perspective the diffusion of the Lives in the Iberian Peninsula and the New World, as a consequence and at the same time as a constructing element of a model of feminine religiosity.