Sister Mariana’s Spyglass: The Unreliable Ghost of Female Desire in a Convent Archive

In 1731, Sister Mariana de Jesus, a young nun at the Augustinian Convent of Santa Monica in Portuguese Goa, was caught using a spyglass to ogle the monks at the convent’s brother monastery across the street.^[1] Under other circumstances, Sister Mariana’s spyglass might not have attracted much attention. Spyglasses were popular among the sisters of Santa Monica for the very simple reason that they offered the strictly cloistered nuns a glimpse of life beyond the convent walls. As a short verse entitled “the spyglass” (óculo), composed by an anonymous poetess sister in the 1720s or 30s, explains:

Desiring to see up close
what the eye cannot achieve
you can with great confidence
trust this instrument’s worth.^[2]

The problem in Sister Mariana’s case was what (or rather, who) she “desired to see up close.” According the visitation records of the then-Archbishop of Goa, Ignácio de Santa Theresa, Sister Mariana had been using the spyglass to “watch from a distance” the comings and goings of one Friar Manuel de Nossa Senhora, an Augustinian monk at the neighboring Monastery of Nossa Senhora da Graça. Under pressure, Sister Mariana confessed that she and Friar Manuel had been exchanging notes and small gifts for the past year; even more damning, one of the notes was recovered rolled up inside an appam (a type of fermented pancake, often made with rice flour). The contents of the note were deemed too scandalous to include in the record, but the implication was clear: Sister Mariana, a pristine and virginal bride of Christ, was lusting after a very mortal man.^[3]

No one doubts that early modern women, whether living in Goa or elsewhere, had sex drives. But it is often assumed that little evidence of female desire survives from early modern India. As historian of sexuality Anjali Arondekar points out, “a desire for lost bodies, subjects, and texts” has come to dominate the historiography of sexuality in South Asia, and not without reason.^[4] Evidence of women’s sexuality often went unrecorded or was purposely erased from the archive, while the sources that do survive – typically written by male authors either to exoticize or punish female desire – are rarely reliable. What historians dream of are sources that can tell us what happened and why, preferably from the perspective of women themselves.

The 1731 visitation containing the story of Sister Mariana’s spyglass does not, sadly, live up to this dream of reliability. At the time, the sisters of Santa Monica were embroiled in a pitched battle for control of the convent (and, perhaps more importantly, its finances) with the ambitious Archbishop Ignácio de Santa Theresa, who used evidence of female sexuality and desire as a cudgel against his opponents in the convent.^[5] There is nothing exceptional about the Archbishop’s machinations: early modern women religious (and indeed, women in general) were routinely monitored and punished for exhibiting sexual desire, and this scrutiny often says more about masculine anxieties than feminine libidos. What is exceptional, however, is the survival of several contemporary manuscript collections of songs written by the nuns of Santa Moncia themselves, songs that approach the same issues of romance and desire from a very different angle.^[6] As cultural productions, these songs are in their own way as unreliable as the Archbishop’s visitations; they may be written by and for women, but they do not offer the concrete evidence of historical events that historians usually rely on to understand the past. Caught between these unreliable sources, the ghost of Sister Mariana’s desire seems set to dissipate into fantasy.

Arondekar suggests a different approach. What if we were to “unmoor ourselves from the stakes of reliable ghosts” – to put aside questions of reliability, just for the moment, and allow ourselves to speculate about something we might otherwise never see: the everyday desires that early modern women like Mariana de Jesus may have felt and (in some cases) acted upon?^[7]

Perhaps, like the legendary Mariana Alcoforado, Sister Mariana’s desire for Friar Manuel de Nossa Senhora was sparked by a simple glance through the window when the Augustinian friars happened to be passing through their courtyard.^[8] Or perhaps it was the other way around: in the Archbishop’s visitations, nuns were reprimanded for standing at the convent windows or in the garden where the monks could see them “with kajal on the eyes, and betel on the mouth, and without any [covering] on the forehead” resembling, according to the Archbishop, painted women of ill-repute.^[9] It’s not a stretch to imagine Sister Mariana lining her eyes with kajal or rouging her lips with betel with a male admirer in mind, or simply because it made her feel beautiful, desirable, even sexy. Looking in the mirror (another forbidden activity that the Archbishop described as the “the mute demon [diabo mudo] of women religious”), she might have agreed with the anonymous sister who authored a verse entitled “the mirror,” that “nature boasts her among her [nature’s] beauties.”^[10]

Music and poetry written by the nuns themselves suggest that the sisters of Santa Monica were, like Mariana de Jesus, swayed by curiosity, romance, and simple physical attraction. A 1767 song authored by an anonymous sister and dedicated to the “handsome Graciano priests” (so named for their monastery’s patron) of the Convent of Nossa Senhora de Graça described them as “passionate lovers” (amantes extremosos) who “with so much discretion / with subtlety and artifice / know how to steal the heart” of a sister. While these lyrics do not necessarily refer to actual love affairs – highly emotional, even erotic language is typical of Baroque religious poetry – they illustrate the close relationship between the sisters of Santa Monica and their Augustinian neighbors.^[11] Sister Mariana’s supposed exchange of love notes, sweetmeats, and other favors mentioned in the Archbishop’s visitation seems a little less unlikely in light of such praise.

The sisters wrote numerous songs about the experience of love and desire, often personified in the form of Cupid, whom they described variously as an “impudent traitor” (traidor atrevido), a “rogue” (trapaceiro), and a “wicked man” (malvado). Cupid was accused of shooting his amorous victims with a “sharp arrow,” leading to madness, despair, and death.^[12] It is clear the sisters of Santa Monica saw desire as something dangerous, at times even criminal. In one 1767 song titled the “Song of Cupid” (Cantiga de Cupido), Cupid is arrested, “tied up / hand and foot with a cord” and whipped for his many crimes.^[13] In an earlier verse, Cupid is sentenced to hanging:

The notice has been heard
and the sentence given
and the gallows rigged
for Cupid to die.^[14]

Sister Mariana de Jesus was not hanged for her desires, but she was sentenced to six months of penitent silence and fasting in her cell.^[15] Spyglasses were banned from the convent, and new rattan grilles that “obscure sight, but allow the entrance of winds” were affixed to the windows and choir door, so that the nuns “could not stare…at the monks in the Monastery” next door.^[16] Unsurprisingly, these cautionary measures policed female bodies, desires, and gazes but largely ignored male behavior – a one-sided surveillance that still thrives today in school dress codes and a “boys will be boys” approach to sexual harassment. Yet, like many women both before and after them, the sisters of Santa Monica did not find their desires so easy to imprison; some may even have hoped, secretly, to set them free. The “Song of Cupid” acknowledges this, ending with a wink and a nudge: no matter what one does, Cupid – and desire – always escapes his punishment to torment and delight the sisters another day.

a stay [of execution] is granted
for such a vassal
who [is] known to the King
cannot be hanged.
He barely escapes from death
this King of fools
let justice be done to him
let his life be a burden.^[17]

Anna Weerasinghe

Anna Weerasinghe earned her PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 2022. Her dissertation, "Stuck Knowledge: Medicine and Immobility in Portuguese Goa, 1500–1750," investigates how the patterns through which colonial medical knowledge traveled – or did not travel – were structured by gender, ethnicity, social status, and religion. She currently works in healthcare communications in Washington, DC.

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