Francisca Josefa de la Concepción
Colombia
Francisca Josefa de la Concepción Tunja (1671–1742) was a Spanish Neogranadine nun and mystic in the region of New Kingdom of Granada which later became Colombia. The first recorded woman writer of what now is Colombia, her devotional and autobiographical writings were published posthumously.
Her work has been studied by Dario Achury Valenzuela, Constanza Toquica, Ángela Inés Robledo, Antonio Gómez Restrepo, Elisa Mújica, José María Vergara y Vergara, and Daniel Alejandro Montes, among others, who recognize her as one of the most prominent writers of Neogranadine literature.
Origins
Francisca Josefa de Castillo y Guevara was born into a wealthy family on October 6, 1671, in Tunja, which at the time was part of the New Kingdom of Granada. Her father, Francisco Ventura de CastiIlo y Toledo, an hidalgo colonist originally from Illescas in Spain, was initially appointed General lieutenant of the city and then Mayor. Her mother, María Guevara Niño y Rojas, was a native criolla of Tunja of Basque descent. Francisca Josefa had three siblings whose names were Catalina and Pedro Antonio Diego. Her other sister's name remains unknown.
As a young woman she became a Poor Clare nun at the Royal Monastery of St. Clare, located in her town, where she spent the rest of her life within its walls.
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This entry incorporates text from “Francisca Josefa de la Concepción” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.