1The Augustinian Real Convento de Santa Mónica (f. 1606), located at the heart of the Portuguese Asian Empire, was one of three Goan religious institutions for women founded by Aleixo de Menezes in the early seventeenth century (Alonso 1992, 207-215). It stood above the other two institutions — the Recolhimento de Santa Maria de Magdalena meant for “fallen” women and the Nossa Senhora de Serra meant for orphans — both in status and in geographical location: it was a cloister for professed nuns built upon a hill overlooking these sister houses and, in fact, overlooking the entire city. It was one of only two Portuguese nunneries in all of Asia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the second being the much smaller and less prestigious Poor Clare’s’ Convento de Santa Clara (f. 1633) located in Macau.

2Colonial period histories of the Real Convento de Santa Mónica are decidedly hagiographical in nature. Frei Agostinho de Santa Maria’s turn of the eighteenth-century work, História da Fundação do Real Convento de Santa Mónica da Cidade de Goa (1699), constructs an image of a harmonious community engaged in prayer and praise, working together in common purpose to serve as models of Catholic purity and virginity in a pagan land. Miguel Vincente de Abreu’s nineteenth century account (1882), Real Mosteiro de Santa Monica de Goa: Memoria Histórica, follows in the same tone and style as Santa Maria’s work as he updates the hagiographical details of the nuns’ lives, once again presenting the community as united in its mission to serve the Catholic Church in Asia. The next sustained treatment of the convent is found in F. X. Gomes Catão’s series of articles in the Boletim Eclesiástico da Arquidiocese de Goa, published between 1952 and 1961, where he focuses on the miraculous crucifix located in the convent’s church and the miracle of the early seventeenth-century nun Soror Maria de Jesus’s stigmata.

3For much of the postcolonial period, scholars relied on these history-hagiographies’ visions of a harmonious and peaceful community to understand the convent and its inhabitants, even though it was well known that tensions between bishops and the religious orders were ubiquitous in both Portugal and throughout their Asian Empire. This image of a harmonious female religious community in Goa, blessed by miracles and working in unison, was first challenged by Leopoldo da Rocha (1992, 1999) with his discovery of an early eighteenth-century manuscript that detailed a conflict between a large group of nuns, led by the prioress Soror Magdalena de Agostinho, and the Archbishop of Goa, Dom Ignácio de Santa Teresa. Rocha’s article focuses most intently on the improper relationship between the archbishop and his beloved Soror Ignaçia de Anuçiação, but he also attends to various ecclesiastical and social shifts occurring at this time. By the early eighteenth century, Rocha (1999, 232) observes, the native Goan population was growing rapidly, and “the Archbishop of Goa was strengthening his jurisdictional position, removing the European religious parish priests who, under the norm of canon law, enjoyed the privilege of exemption, replacing them with native priests who were abundant and entirely subject to him”. The Real Mosteiro de Santa Mónica, inevitably, was caught up in these power plays.

4A strategy archbishop Ignácio de Santa Teresa employed to diminish the influence of the Orders was to mandate that only local clergy could serve as confessors and conservators for the Real Mosteiro de Santa Mónica (Rocha 1992). This effectively removed the Augustinians and Jesuits from positions of power within the convent. Previously, the Augustinians were assigned the role of confessors according to the convent’s Constitutions, and in 1732 the Augustinian Joseph de Santo António served as Confessor General. The Jesuits also lost influence, specifically Manuel de Santo António, who was the convent’s conservator during the late 1720s and early 1730s, and came under attack from the archbishop. Both of these Orders were thereby denied the privilege and authority associated with supervising the affluent and esteemed convent. The archbishop’s mandates had ripple effects that went far beyond the conflict between himself and the Orders, and they had a profound effect on how the Mónicas themselves understood their relationship to the Orders, the secular authorities, and the archbishop.

1. The Production of Space and Narratives of Harmony

9A first articulation of space is the conceptualized space produced by cartographers, urban planners, and architects, what Lefebvre calls “conceived space”. These representations of space are the dominant mode of the production of space in society and are tied to the “order” that is imposed upon all who enter that space. To produce such conceived space, an urban planner or architect must have access to both power, in the form of political connections and financial resources, and knowledge, in the form of education and the technical skills necessary to enact such plans. This power and knowledge, furthermore, reflects and reproduces a consensus among those in and with authority. The analysis of conceived space, that is, the analysis of urban designs and architectural forms, is a familiar mode of analysis.

10A second articulation of space is the spatial practice of those subjects who interact in and with a particular conceived space. Lefebvre calls this spatial product “perceived space”. This is the everyday social life and commonsensical perception that occur within a space. There is a certain cohesion to this articulation of space which implies a level of competence and common performance, and spatial practice encompasses the actions of both individual and collective subjects. That is, individuals develop routines as they move through conceived space, but the collective also develops a consensus around routines such as ritualized processions and other sanctioned group actions. These group practices tend to be more powerful than individual practices, as Lefebvre (1991, 50) argues, “[i]n spatial practice, the reproduction of social relations is predominant”. This consensus can have both formal and informal rules and regulations.

11A third articulation of space is the representational space of the individual subject. Lefebvre calls this “lived space”, and it is the symbolic overlay on the physical (conceived) and routinized, social (perceived) space. Here, the individual subject uses her imagination to support, change, or appropriate both the conceived and perceived space and in doing so produces a peculiar, idiosyncratic space. Lefebvre notes that lived space has the potential to be the most independent of the three productions of space. That is, Lefebvre distinguishes between lived space, on the one hand, and the perceived and conceived spaces, on the other hand. In analyzing space, it is the lived space that alerts us to the intricate interrelationships between the spaces and to what their oppositions and dispositions reveal and conceal.

12The realms of conceived, perceived, and lived space are interconnected, and they all work with and against each other to varying degrees to produce a social space (Figure 1). Lefebvre warns us, however, that these three produced social spaces are not equally available for historical inquiry. He argues that the representation of space [perceived space] “in thrall to both power and knowledge [the generators of conceived space], leaves only the narrowest leeway to representational spaces [lived spaces]”, which are limited to “works, images, and memories whose content … is so far displaced that it barely achieves symbolic force” (Lefebvre 1991, 50). That is, in the architectural and historical records available to the scholar, the conceived space (the physical) is the easiest to discern, and the lived space (the mental) is the most elusive. The perceived space (the social), as it is “in thrall to knowledge and power”, often replicates the production of conceived space and tends to illuminate the spatial practice of the group rather than that of the individual.

13Lefebvre (1991, 40) further suggests that a produced social space is stable when a subject, an individual member of a given social group, can move from one articulation to another without any confusion or conflict. This happens “only in favorable circumstances, when a common language, a consensus, and a code can be established”. In other words, social stability is achieved when despite the differences between the sources of production (architect, agreed upon group practice, individual imagination), the products (the meanings attached to that space from all three sources) are harmonious. The architectural and historical record of the Real Convento de Santa Mónica suggests that the inhabitants of the convent did experience these three realms as a coherent whole, that Santa Mónica saw such favorable circumstances where a consensus regarding space was the norm, where codes were well-known and readily accepted, and where individual imaginings of lived space co-existed harmoniously with conceived and perceived space. In other words, more often than not, the space of the Real Convento de Santa Mónica was a stable space. However, in the 1720s and 1730s, the intersections between these three conceptualizations of space became disharmonious.

2. Conceived Space at the Convent of Santa Mónica

14The conceived space of the Real Convento de Santa Mónica includes the physical building and its environs, as well as the ideologies that support that design and placement. Although Santa Mónica is located in Goa, India, its style and layout manifest the Catholic Church’s ideology of cloistering, which was dominant throughout Europe. As is well known and well documented for convents built throughout the Catholic world in the late-sixteenth and seventeenth century, the Council of Trent’s (1545-1563) emphasis on the absolute necessity to protect the virginity of nuns was mirrored in the architecture of female convents (Urbano 2007). Whereas in a pre-Tridentine world, nuns had much more freedom to move in and out of the convent, after Trent enclosure, or more properly, “strict enclosure”, became an “unavoidable requirement for female religious life” (Evangelisti 2007, 45). In fact, under the Philippine unity of the Iberian Peninsula, Trent was made the law of the land, and this ideology of strict enclosure was uniformly enforced throughout the greater Iberian world. As Luís Urbano (2007, 39) argues in his analysis of seven early modern female convents located within the city walls of Évora, Portugal, “virginity had long been conceived in spatial terms”, and, naturally, the paradigmatic space of virginity was the female convent itself.

15But as Paulo Varela Gomes (2007, 249) has argued, guarding virginity was not the only principle that guided early modern Portuguese female convent architecture. Rather, the exterior façades of female convents were meant to “project an image of power and self-sufficiency to the outside world”. In particular, he points to the Real Convento de Santa Mónica as a prime example of a structure that “used architecture and the urban and geographical symbolism of the ‘sacred hill’ to establish [the Augustinians] as … the most important religious order in India” (Gomes 2007, 259). That is, the hill upon which the Real Convento de Santa Mónica was built was situated in a neighborhood that was densely populated by both religious structures and secular residences (Figure 2). To make room for the convent, this urban fabric needed to be reconceived and refigured. The very removal of a significant portion of this dense housing (the shaded blue area in Figure 2) to make way for a new building would reinforce the importance and power of the new structure through increased visibility, symbolic representation, enhanced spatial hierarchy, and aesthetic contrast. That is, along with the imposing towers of the Augustinian convent right next door, the convent dominated the local landscape.

Note: the figure shows the area in which the convent was presumably built, following Linschoten’s map of Goa Island ten years before construction on the convent began.

18Santa Ana’s description of the architectural features and layout of the convent in the Regimento reinforces the elite production of the conceived space mentioned above. After a few introductory lines suggesting that the location of the convent was chosen for its healthy breezes and views of the Mandovi River, both of which create happiness in the soul, he tells us the purpose of this description is “to avoid the confusion that can occur in the governing of such a large community, as is the one that is gathered in the cloister of the large building of this distinguished monastery” (f. 200r.). He continues that this description should be clear and distinct, and that “all people who reside here and those who come to visit must conform to what we have called this monastery and its parts, chambers, chapels, rooms, offices, and fences the same names that we put forth here” (f. 200r.). Here, Santa Ana recognizes that the space that the architect produced is not neutral, but rather has particular meanings and purposes. He wants to make sure that these meanings and purposes are clear to all, and he emphasizes that both insiders and outsiders “must conform” to them. Santa Ana is most concerned with the regulation of spaces in which nuns might come into contact with the outside (masculine) world, spaces that are fraught with the danger of corrupting the women within (Gomes 2007). In naming the spaces, Santa Ana seeks to reinforce the ideology embedded in the conceived space, an ideology that closely adheres to the early modern Catholic Church’s notion of enclosure. The most obvious of these spaces is the entrance to the convent, and Santa Ana gives a detailed description of how this area should be understood (Figure 3):

• 12 BE, ARM III and IV, no. 24, ff. 220r.-220v.

And all the rooms that are from the entrance [door] of the Cloister to the [door to the] outside will be called the initial reception. The outside entrance and its door [will be called] the Outer Door, and the residence of the Outer Gatekeeper [will be called] the Gatekeeper’s Chambers. And the place where people talk, the Outer Locutorium … And the door between the outside entrance and the inside entrance will be called the Cloister Gate, and the first room at the entrance will be called the Wheel Room and the Mother who has these keys will be called the Wheel Mother, and whoever is with her will be called the Companions of the Wheel Mother. And the corridor that goes [from there] to the room in which people [meet to] talk, will be called Locutorium Corridor, and that room, the inner Locutorium. And the door that is between the cloister and the Wheel Room will be called the Door of Prohibition, to signify that it is forbidden for anyone but the Wheel Mother and those who accompany her to enter from there to the inside [of the cloister]. And items with the proper licenses will be passed from that room into the cloister.12

19However, it is not just the “initial reception” that produces a conceived space reflecting early modern ideas of enclosure. The design of the entire convent is meant to make the possibility that a nun might have contact with the outside world as difficult as possible. The building abuts a main thoroughfare on its south side, and thus the southern wing of the building is occupied by (1) the initial reception area, which, as shown above, was constructed to limit any contact with the street; (2) the convent church, in which public access was strictly controlled; and (3) the lower choir, which had no doors or passages to any area other than the cloister proper, except for two small grilles that communicated with the back of the church. Further, nuns were not allowed to be in the lower choir alone, but only as a group. As for the other three sides of the convent, due to the slope of the hill, the first floor that communicated directly with the initial reception was in fact elevated on these sides and not a “ground” floor at all. Rather, there was a “downstairs” level below the first floor. These downstairs areas were places in which a nun could most easily communicate with the outside, and thus they were all inhabited by nonprofessed members of the community: the east wing of the downstairs floor contained the servants’ infirmary, the kitchen dispensary, and rooms to punish the servants; the north wing contained the slaves’ quarters and a dormitory for lay sisters, that is, those sisters of the white veil who had not fully professed; and the west wing contained a dormitory for the Indian servants and the church depository (Figure 4). Thus, between the southern façade, which was tightly controlled, and the first floor, which was buffered by the downstairs areas, the nuns were effectively protected from contact with the outside world.

3. Perceived Space at the Convent of Santa Mónica

22The regulation of the spatial practice within the refectory can be found in part three of the Constitutions which is dedicated to how the convent should be governed. There are three chapters describing the movements in and around this space: chapter 9: How [the nuns] should enter the refectory and how they should act in it (ff. 99v.-104r.); chapter 10: How the nuns should enter for the Collation Meal and the penances that should be done in the refectory (ff. 104r.-106r.); and chapter 11: On the Second Meal and on the alms that should be given to the poor that take place in the refectory (ff. 106r.-107r.). In these eighteen folio pages, an elaborate choreography for arriving at, entering into, and moving about the refectory is set forth. For example, in chapter 9 (the longest of these three chapters which serves as a template, which the other two chapters then modify according to differing needs), after gathering at the appointed time outside the refectory, the nuns are instructed in the manner in which they should wash and dry their hands. Even here, the smallest spatial details are attended to as the location of and manner in which the towels are to be hung is prescribed. The prioress then rings the convent bell, the community sings a Psalm in a call and response, and then, “[t]he nuns from both choirs are to enter two by two in procession and stand across from each other at the table, with the youngest girls at the end” (f. 99v.). But even before they can sit down, as “the Prioress passes by each nun, standing in her place, bows her head with reverence and courtesy” (ff. 99v.-100r). There is even a spatial choreography for late arrivals, “[a]nd those who enter and arrive [later] … will then bow to the refectory image [of Christ] and then turning so that they are face to face, they begin the blessing” (ff. 99v.-100r.).

23This description of how to move about the refectory, where to sit, which way to face, and how to move one’s body, continues throughout these pages. Each moment is accompanied by specific Psalms and other hymns to be sung. The meal, then, is choreographed, from beginning to end, in great detail. The detailed prescriptions for moving throughout each space of the convent inscribe certain values on the very bodies of the nuns. Central to Lefebvre’s analysis of space is the idea that urban planners, architects, and authorities who serve the state, or in this case both the State and the Church as they are intimately intertwined, shape a collective habitus. As Verena Conley (2012, 13) argues, “Lefebvre examines how bodies incorporate, unbeknownst to themselves, ‘official’ ideas and concepts of space in their ‘most concrete form’”. Indeed, the conceived and perceived productions of space reinforce both the external hierarchies imposed by the State and Church, as well as the internal hierarchies established amongst the nuns themselves.

4. Lived Space at the Convent of Santa Mónica in the Early Eighteenth Century

24The historical evidence for the production of lived space is the most difficult part of Lefebvre’s conceptual triad to access. Lefebvre (1991, 41) himself recognizes this difficulty, as he writes, “[r]epresentational spaces [lived spaces] … need obey no rules of consistency or cohesiveness”. That is, rather than public urban and architectural plans or published rules and regulations, how space comes to have particular meanings for an individual can only be expressed by that individual herself, and there will be just as many idiosyncratic, individual understandings of a certain space as there are people who inhabit it. The potential sources in which one might look for such individual understandings of the lived space at the Real Convento de Santa Mónica are very few, as the nuns themselves did not leave a robust historical record.

29It was not just the conceived space that was transformed, but the archbishop’s actions caused disruptions in the normative perceived space as well. While Soror Magdalena and her followers sought to adhere to the spatial dynamics as laid out in the Constitutions, rules, and statutes, the small faction of nuns who supported the archbishop began to alter this normative spatial practice. This disruption is most obvious in the use of the choirs and the refectory, two spaces that are particularly marked as important for their role in shaping the normative actions of the community. In regard to the refectory, Soror Magdalena tells us that the nuns who supported the archbishop “did not pray the Divine Office nor attend the refectory because these are communal events” (Relação, §13).

30As for the space of the choirs, the partisans of the archbishop demanded that they sing the Divine Office in separation from the rest of the community, and thus the nuns were divided between the upper and lower choirs. This not only created a physical dislocation, but it also created a very real harmonic “dissonance” in their singing. Soror Magdalena relates one such incident when the archbishop’s followers rushed to the upper choir in a disorderly fashion to sing on their own. Those in the upper choir chanted one hymn, the Tantum Ergo, while at the same time those in the lower choir were singing a different hymn, the Benediction of Our Lady, “resulting in notable confusion and disorder, which scandalized the people who entered the church and heard the dissonance and confusion of such different songs being sung at the same time” (Relação, §52a). The convent, the perceived space of which was organized to serve as an example of order and harmony for the whole of Goa, was now the source of chaos, confusion, and scandal in the city.

32Finally, we know that Soror Magdalena de Agostinho and her followers found the way in which the archbishop transformed the conceived and perceived space of the convent to be wholly incompatible with their lived space because they took the bold step of abandoning the convent altogether. On 12 May 1732, sixty-three nuns, accompanied by lay sisters and servants, left the Real Convento de Santa Mónica and took up residence in the former palace of the viceroy of the Estado da Índia which now stood abandoned and in a state of ruin. We do not know the exact route the nuns took on that day, but they most likely traveled down the hill upon which their convent was built, marched past the Church of Bom Jesus, which held the holy remains of Saint Francis Xavier, proceeded through the city streets —past the docks, the gunpowder mill, the hospital, and the cathedral of the See— and arrived at the dilapidated fortress. By this time, the whole city would have been aware of the situation, and it would be the first time that many of the city dwellers had laid eyes on these women. It must have been quite the spectacle.

5. Conclusion

33Rather than refuting previous analyses of the Real Convento de Santa Mónica, this paper ultimately seeks to add a new layer to the historiography of the convent by demonstrating how the physical environment shaped the experiences of nuns living there in the early eighteenth century. It employs Henri Lefebvre’s concept of “the production of space”, recognizing the difficulty of reconstructing these historical spaces due to the inconsistency and individuality of such lived experiences. It draws upon three main sources for insight into the nuns’ experience of this physical environment: (1) Diogo de Santa Ana’s ordering of the conceived space; (2) the convent’s founding Constitutions’ ordering of the perceived space; and finally (3) Soror Magdalena de Agostinho’s re-ordering of those spaces in her Relação. The latter, a detailed complaint about the conduct of the archbishop of Goa, Dom Ignácio de Santa Teresa, and his allies, paints a vivid picture of the convent’s day-to-day operations and the nuns’ experiences.

34Soror Magdalena’s detailed accounts reveal how the nuns perceived the space as their own, not as simply a structure under the Church’s control. When the archbishop claims the convent as his own, he is rebuked by a significant faction of nuns, led by Soror Magdalena herself, asserting that the convent is their home, not his. In fact, Soror Magdalena and other nuns eventually began to perceive their home as a prison. The culmination of these tensions led Soror Magdalena and her followers to take a drastic step: they abandoned the convent and took residence in the former palace of the viceroy of the Estado da Índia. This action underlines their assertion of agency and defiance in the face of an encroaching, oppressive power that sought to redefine their lived space.

35Remarkably, Soror Magdalena and her followers stayed at the ruined fortress for six months. During those months, while the conceived space of the fortress was clearly not intended for enclosure, the nuns transformed that space into a cloister. Soror Magdalena writes, “as we had taken an absolute vow to be cloistered and we did not want to be without the exercises of religious life, none of us wanted to go anywhere [else]” (Relação, §20). Rather, she continues, “we wanted to remain together as a community, cloistered in the Fortress and attending to the Divine Worship in whatever way was possible”. Under a leaky roof and walls that were in danger of “buckl[ing] under great gusts of wind”, the nuns, in Lefebvre’s (1991, 40) words, used their “imagination … to change and appropriate” this secular space into a holy space. That is, they imaginatively transformed this new space into a cloister as powerful and life-giving as the structure they left behind. In doing so, they sought to regain the freedom they had experienced before the archbishop intervened in their lives. At the end of her complaint, Soror Magdalena de Agostinho makes it clear that the nuns only want to live with and under the freedom that the original conceived and perceived space of the convent gave them. Or as Soror Magdalena tells us, “[i]t is not our intention to flee from obedience to prelates, but to be ruled by a prelate who compels us to observe the laws upon which the convent was founded and in which we were brought up (Relação, §67b).