Immaculate Conceptions examines devotional writings, religious and literary texts, and visual art that feature the mystery of the immaculacy of the Virgin Mary in the culture of early modern Spain. The author’s analysis is motivated by the complexity and multivalent capacity of the doctrine and its icon at a time when the debates around Mary’s conception imbued all levels of religious and social life. She considers the many interests – political, doctrinal, artistic, and gender-driven – that intersect and compete in the exegesis and textual and visual representations of the Immaculate Conception. She argues that the Immaculate Conception of Mary proved to be a fertile conceptual and ideological field wherein the identities of the Spanish state, local communities, and individuals were negotiated, variously defined, and contested. The study’s broader aim is to delineate a speculative category, the religious imagination, defined as a spiritual, intellectual, or artistic pursuit in which the individual is committed to sacred truth yet articulates this truth through contingent, partial, and contextually determined theological propositions. The representational status of the image and its relationship to theories of physical sight and spiritual vision are central to the author’s formulation of this category.

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.

Teddy Robicheaux is Hopeful1, a 29-year-old teacher in Little Rock, Arkansas. Liv Jensen is Mommy1moretime, a 38-year-old stay-at-home mom living in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Kelly Dawson is Texasmom, a 41-year-old wise-cracking hairstylist from Dallas, Texas. Maggie Nash is Want2BaMom, the 34-year-old wife of a college professor, and living in Nashville, Tennessee. What do these four women have in common? The heartache of infertility and the saving grace of friendship after they meet on Fruitful Musings, a website dedicated to infertility issues. Join Teddy, Liv, Kelly and Maggie as they help each other cope with the ups and downs of the infertility roller coaster.