your problems today are solved by golden age mongers

A woman is walking or better yet hurrying from one side of her home to the other. This is it. Damage to their jefes, damage to the incompetence of those at the top of the hierarchical pyramid. Centuries of hojas written in his book and literature god knows where they went astray because of his superiors, the same ones who commended the task of writing this incompetent text. But how did these people come, ahí? No longer. Siente, he says “great resistance” to repeat the project that inspired her so much.

And how many of them didn’t feel the “disgusting” thing today, going to that workshop a day longer than the one that warmed up the day before. Or not to bite your tongue so you don’t react badly to a rude and spiteful customer. But it turns out that the woman who is about to install anger in her home doesn’t even work like a monster in front of a computer. If the exchange is de María de San JoséAgustina Recoleta nun born in the middle of the 17th century that I had to endure being ordered by the ecclesiastical authorities of the region to which she was destined to be written in her biography only to be lost later.

Las Doctors en Literatura Hispánica y Estudios Culturales Ana Garriga (Salamanca, 1989) y Carmen Urbita (Madrid, 1989) recounts the desavenencias of María de San José with her superiors in Instructions for beginners (Blackie Books, 2026). She is not the only religious figure that appears: Teresa de Jesus, Catalina de Siena, Verónica Giuliani or Juana Inés de la Cruz, among others, appear on their pages. According to the authors, everyone has something in them: when it comes to the barroca monjas, whose lives and works can be used as lessons in our present.

It is no coincidence that one of your most repeated phrases at work practically on leitmotif, if “as it is in the case in which this is written,” which always follows the teaching held by the writers of other religious women.

For example, De María de San José writes: “In place of Augustine, who recalled several recursos a perfil bajo from the 17th century, María was now a corporate girl hired by a multinational company in our countrylevels of disgust have been met until the HR submits its resignation”.

They also shared the lives of Teresa de Jesús with one of their closest friends, Maria de San José—no, not the Augustine wife we ​​said was most credited with the madness of her superiors—. In criticizing that the saint of Avila appears above her friend for her natural beauty, Urbita and Garriga come as a reflection of the bittersweet but necessary and comforting experience of friendship how we live today

Thus, the obsession with these Golden Sign figures was what motivated the beginning of the friendship between the two authors when they were willing to embark on a doctoral project in the United States.

Una vida, la de doctorandas en Nueva Inglaterra, que pronto vieron que, en su precariedad y restricciones voluntarias, se asemejaba más de lo que en un primer momento pudieron imaginar a la de una monja de clausura. “Es cierto que el voto de pobreza que tomamos al convertirnos en estudiantes de doctorado en Estados Unidos debía parecerse bastante al que asume una austera carmelita descalza. La sumisión académica hacia profesores y directoras de tesis no era menos inflexible que la negación de la propia voluntad que siempre encierra el voto de obediencia”, cuentan en su libro.

Conforme pasaron los años, cada vez encontraron más semejanzas entre sus adoradas monjas barrocas y la vida moderna: “Muy pronto nos percatamos de que una camarilla de carmelitas descalzas españolas del siglo XVI podían analizar las complejidades del panorama amoroso contemporáneo con un nivel de fineza que ningún episodio de Sexo en Nueva York podría lograr jamás; que una clarisa capuchina ayunando en la Italia del siglo XVII puede ayudarte mucho más que cualquier gurú del body-positive; y que ninguna charla de Ana Botín sobre empoderamiento femenino estará nunca a la altura de las lecciones que una jerónima mexicana puede ofrecerte para aprender a manejar a tu jefe”.

En 2020, fruto de esta continua comparación entre ambas épocas y su devoción por el conocimiento que dejaron tras de sí varias de estas mujeres (además de, para qué negarlo el ansia creativa que trajo consigo la pandemia) nació su pódcast Las hijas de Felipe. En él, ensartaban en tono distendido la cultura religiosa con anécdotas personales.

Fue más tarde, en 2023, cuando se tuvo por primera vez noticia de lo que más tarde se titularía Instrucción de novicias. Garriga y Urbita presentaron en la Feria de Frankfurt—la primera escala de muchos proyectos literarios que todavía están en fase germinal para vendérselo a los sellos editoriales— lo que en aquel momento habían bautizado como Sabiduría de convento: cómo las monjas del siglo XVI pueden salvar tu vida del siglo. Fue un éxito total. Los días posteriores al evento, su agente recibió 25 ofertas de 8 países diferentes.

Instructions for beginners en appears moment of maximum popularity in the church world and specifically monastic life. Although the double doc’s work appears abundantly—on a podcast running in 2020, in full pandemic—she also recognized the same thing in her prelude, a passage that more often than not works like Rosalía’s last work or Alauda Ruiz de Azú’s film. Los Domingos They are cultural reflections and what they are predecessors.

For the authors, the origin of this trend is no mystery: “Everything that is happening now invites us to seek refuge in a safe space where food, food and routine are guaranteed and where community coexists, guided by a common goal. But are we desperate enough to abandon our 21st century youth and accept the restrictions that enter into the vote of chastity, poverty and obedience? The four walls of the monastery were not our trust, but the Monjo who had lived there for centuries were“, apostilled in the epilogue of the book.

ellas yes not if they are reduced to a mere phenomenon. They investigate the secrets of the monasteries with the greatest care, dealing with extensive testimonies (biographies, hagiographies, spiritual treatises and travel chronicles…) about which many of these women wrote. Overall, they knew how to extract a very valuable advantage that served them to survive a more unfavorable than it seems present. All this is the journey through the lives of these religious people of the Golden Age, which the authors knew how to make happy without losing the peak of their irreplaceable erudition along the way.