The Archive of the Dominican Monastery of Santa Rosa is one of the four oldest archives of female writing in Chile. With few exceptions, women's testimonies have not been preserved in Chile. The documents in the archive are crucial to the study of female education in these centuries.
The Dominican Monastery of Santa Rosa was instituted as a Beguine convent in 1680, and became a monastery in 1754. The Dominican sisters who resided in the institution were characterised by their cultural and intellectual life, reflected in the documents of the institution’s archives. The archives cover the period between 1700 and 1900, and contain valuable diaries and autobiographies, such as that of Dolores Peña y Lillo. The documents will be a contribution as material for research, study and dissemination of the model of female education at that time, based on the intellectual culture, crafts and arts.
