Representations in the correspondence of women to Franciscans friars in the mid-19th century

Abstract

The correspondence written for women from different social strata in the 19th century to Franciscans friars of the College of Guadalupe, Zacatecas, opens the possibility of approaching the world of female written culture, since the epistolary structure gives evidence of practices and knowledge about the writing. The courtesy formulas that make up the letters were both form and substance, because according to the words chosen by the authors, they defined how they were represented to them and their addressee. In this article we propose to analyze, the courtesy formulas as part of the writing culture (from Roger Chartier’s perspective) around the nineteenth-century feminine epistolary practice, as well as forms of representation of the friars and women, in addition to their use as rhetorical tools using discourse analysis as a methodological tool.