In
Search of La Conquistadora, One Woman’s Journey – Part 1
Conversations
with Prof. Amy Remensnyder, author of La
Conquistadora: The Virgin Mary and War and Peace in the Old and New Worlds,
Oxford University Press, New York, 2014.
By Jeffrey Richardson
Raised
by parents who loved history, Amy Remensnyder may have been destined for a
career absorbed in the past, but that doesn’t mean there haven’t been a few
surprises along the way. The first came just after graduation from high school
in 1978 when she went to England, traveling the country by rail. Stopping over
in Lincolnshire she went to visit the ancient Norman cathedral there and was
awestruck by the experience.
“It
was overwhelming,” Remensnyder recalls. “The cathedral was so imposing, so
majestic, so mysterious. I looked at this incredible architecture and I thought
to myself, ‘I do not understand the people who built this at all, how they did
this. Who were they?’ I’m still at
it, trying to understand medieval people.”
Remensnyder
plunged into her quest for understanding, earning a bachelor’s in history and
literature from Harvard, and completing advanced studies in Cambridge, England and
Paris, France. She added to her credentials in the field of medieval history
with a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley and is now an associate professor of history at
Brown University. She is the author of two books, including the history of La
Conquistadora traditions, as well as countless academic articles.
Yet
even as she settled into her life’s work, Remensnyder’s more personal
journey—and its attendant surprises—continued. Raised in the Episcopal faith,
she later embraced atheism, a striking contrast to her scholarly encounters
with early Christianity, including the traditions and underlying beliefs of
Marian veneration and its iconography. While the images spoke more to her mind
than her heart, the winding path of inquiry was taking her into new country.
“What
I found in studying medieval religious imagery is that things mean more than what
simply appears on the surface,” says Remensnyder. “I came to sense that
medieval people, unlike so many secular modern Westerners, believed that the
world had meaning beyond the surface of things. Through these images, including
Marian figures, they found pathways, channels to that deeper meaning.”
Remensnyder’s
interest in La Conquistadora grew out of a chance encounter during a road trip
to New Mexico in the summer of 1992. Visiting the venerated Santuario at Chimayó
north of Santa Fe, she strolled the grounds, turned a corner, and came
face-to-face with the diminutive figure of New Mexico’s patroness, set
discretely in a stone wall along a quiet walkway.
“
‘Wow, what is that?,’ she recalls thinking. ‘I’ve never heard of an image of
the Virgin Mary called La Conquistadora!’ It was a startling juxtaposition of
military violence with what I’d been trained to understand as the
compassionate, benevolent Mary balancing the stern judgment of Christ.”
When
she began investigating New Mexico’s conquistadora,
she discovered there have been other Marian figures that carry the same name.
She also discovered that notwithstanding the aggressive connotation of the
title, these figures carried deeper meaning to the protagonists in Spain’s
history in both the old world and the new.
“I
started off thinking the story was going to be all about war, a one-sided story
of war and subjugation of Native peoples by the Spanish, but it was more
complex than that. It was as much about cultural exchange in the long run. In New
Mexico, for example, it was common for Christianized tribes or groups to invoke
the name of Mary, La Conquistadora in conflicts with traditional indigenous foes,” Remensnyder says.
Remensnyder
explains that her academic research of La Conquistadora was significantly
augmented in another surprising way. In 2002 she accepted an opportunity to
travel to Katmandu for a one-month retreat. There, as a participant, not just a
detached observer, she found a religious tradition comprised in large measure of
visualizing, of imagining, the Buddha.
“And
it’s the religious imagery that you meditate on,” notes Remensnyder. “So I was
suddenly having a powerful, tangible experience that strongly mirrored the
essential practice of Marian veneration with its focus on beloved images. It
really informed my research and gave me a much clearer idea of what I was
dealing with in examining La Conquistadoras and their followers down through
the ages.”
Now
a practicing Buddhist, Remensnyder put the finishing touches on her new book
last summer after more than a decade of research.
Note: The title
of Dr. Remensnyder’s book was changed slightly after a previous post on this
blog. The title as given above is correct. In an upcoming blog post we’ll
continue our visit, looking at the long lineage of La Conquistadoras and the
ways in which this veneration resembles and differs from other Marian
devotions.
