This dissertation examines laywomen's religious practice and ideals of feminine piety in Central America's colonial capital, Guatemala City, and towns of El Salvador between 1750 and 1870. By 1750, Central America's booming indigo economy had created a vibrant network of local trade and regional devotions, and supported the rise of religious patronage in artwork, publications, and construction. Laywomen's religious activities shaped local religious culture through the period of economic boom and the tumultuous years of depression, independence, and nation building that followed. Laywomen's participation in devotions that crossed parish boundaries helped form local identities in Central America's colonial capital and connected parts of the city marked by social, racial, and ethnic differences. By understanding women's relationship to religion in the eighteenth century more fully, we get a better picture of the diverse interests at stake in nineteenth-century local and national politics.

This study rethinks scholarly approaches to religion that privilege belief over practice and separate religious experience from social, economic, and political trends. Rather, I explore religion as intimately connected to social history and daily life – particularly material culture, family, work, geographical location, illness, and death. Attention to gender in religious practice, the pursuit of salvation, and pious ideals reveals how men and women not only expressed their faith in different ways in the colonial period, but also responded differently to the shifts in religious life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Secularization was not a smooth linear process as men and women and urban and rural residents often responded differently to religious shifts. New ideals of feminine piety emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but frequently coexisted with older models. Focusing on the interplay between practice and ideals allows me to consider the relationship among gender, religion, and local identity formation in the Atlantic World, and how local practices and beliefs interacted with broader currents of thought reaching across the Atlantic, from the Council of Trent to Enlightenment and early Liberal thought.