Mary of Ágreda, a seventeenth-century nun and abbess in a provincial town in Spain, is considered one of a number of prominent visionaries associated with an intense period of Spanish mysticism. That this flowering of Spanish mysticism was concurrent with both the Counter-Reformation and the conquest of the American continents should not be viewed as a coincidence. Sor María, in fact, has several interdependent claims to fame: the reports of her spiritual bilocations to the mission fields on the northern border of the viceroyalty of New Spain (Mexico); the important treatise on the Virgin Mary, entitled Mystical City of God; her decades-long, frequent correspondence with Philip IV of Spain; and her origination of the Lady in Blue legend of the American Southwest. The disparate nature of her activities and influence renders her like an irregular prism: focusing on a single facet makes it extremely difficult to assimilate or encompass the others. It is some of these enormous gaps and blind spots in the scholarship on Mary of Ágreda that Dr. Nogar's book seeks to remedy.

Quill and Cross is organized chronologically, beginning with the first reports from New Spain of Sor María as what Nogar calls a “protomissionary,” and their apparent corroboration through interviews with the nun at her convent in Ágreda, Spain. The second chapter shifts to how the fame surrounding her bilocations was displaced by the excitement and controversy surrounding Mystical City of God, the fruit of her mystical conversations with the Virgin Mary and a work that aligned Sor María with the idea of the Immaculate Conception of Mary—a theological position extremely popular in Spain and its possessions, but not yet fully recognized as dogma at the time. Efforts to support Sor María's case for canonization by Conceptionist-leaning camps like the Franciscans and the Spanish royal family led to the widespread dissemination of her written works in New Spain. In the third chapter, we see how this literate group of admirers of Sor María expanded with the proliferation of visual art depicting her as both protomissionary and writer. Her works as well as commentaries by others reached the mission fields of the northern frontier itself, as the inventories of private and institutional libraries attest.

The fourth chapter explores how her experiences, writings, and fame influenced later missionaries and settlers in what is today the American Southwest. The final two chapters focus on Sor María as the legend of the Lady in Blue in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California. In folklore, this figure has been repeatedly reimagined as exotic other, cultural mediator, site of resistance, or image of the oppressor, depending on the context. Nogar analyzes a diverse corpus of songs, folktales, images, and literature not only to trace the evolution of this historical figure as folklore but also to point out how the complexity of Sor María as writer and theologian gradually disappeared in favor of the image of mystical traveler and missionary. Contemporary versions of Sor María in the Southwest tend toward New Age revisions of her bilocations, with few exceptions. Again, Nogar explores a surprising number of representations from popular fiction, poetry, murals, cooking shows, and puppet shows.

Despite the chronological organization of Quill and Cross, the rationale is rightly focused on the middle chapters. The efforts to widely disseminate Sor María's written works, especially Mystical City of God, in the viceroyalty of New Spain were meant to spread her fame and increase donations to her cause for canonization. However, Nogar explores how Sor María's writings, those of her commentators, the visual art they inspired, the reports of bilocations, and the donations made to her cause all heightened the stature of this Spanish nun in colonial Mexico during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. With abundant source materials, Nogar convincingly argues that Sor María was widely regarded as both a writer and protomissionary in colonial Mexico. Her bilocations, while sensational, were not the primary reason for her renown. Nogar's explorations of Sor María's modern and postmodern legacies in the American Southwest as the Lady in Blue underscore the assertion that her identity as a prolific mystical writer was lost not in a colonial repurposing of this figure but in the Southwest's transition from the northern frontier of colonial Mexico to a site of US expansion and dominion. Dr. Nogar covers a lot of ground and has painstakingly reconstructed the evolution of this important historical figure. Her reexamining of the colonial context should entice scholars to reflect on the possible reasons that Sor María's identity as an important female writer quickly waned in Southwestern folklore and popular culture.