‘Divine nuptials’ of women in Goa in the Modern Age: eloquence and exemplarity on Santa Monica’s monastery pulpit (friar Diogo de Santa Anna, 1627)

Abstract

This paper offers a reflection about a sermon uttered on the occasion of the inauguration of Santa Monica’s Monastery Church in Goa, on 19 December 1627, by friar Diogo de Santa Anna, a religious man from the East India Congregation of the Portuguese order of the Hermits of Saint Augustine. It highlights a few specificities of the preaching that underline the creation of a western female model in the context of Post-Tridentine Catholicism in spaces of a variety of cultural flows at the heart of the Indian ocean.