Immaculate Conceptions

Immaculate Conceptions investigates the religious imagination – sacred truth communicated through contingent and contextually determined theological propositions – as deployed in early modern Spanish textual and visual representations of the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception.

Rosilie Hernández is Professor in the Department of Hispanic and Italian Studies and Associate Dean for Student Academic Affairs at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

"Without questioning the sincerity of her subjects’ religious convictions, Hernández convincingly locates their religious imaginings within a larger political world and identifies their socio-political implications. In this way, she offers an account of the religious imagination which is not only productive for scholars of religious studies, but also for theologians and artists interested in self-reflexively examining the implications of their own work."

Dale Shuger, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Tulane University:

"Hernández’s multidisciplinary approach is innovative, coherent, and given the treatment of the immaculacy question in the period, such a study has been sorely lacking."

Darcy Donahue, Emeritus, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Miami University:

"Rosilie Hernández’s knowledge of scholarship and primary sources is impressive, and she communicates it with intellectual rigor and stylistic grace. I know of no other study which brings together art, literature, politics, religion, and cultural theory around the issue of immaculacy and religious imagination."