Women in the early modern period assumed an active part in the global mobilization that took place during that time. Secular women traveled to and from the Iberian Peninsula for family and commercial reasons, to the Indies with their husbands, who often held political office in the colonies, and to the territories of the Spanish Monarchy in Europe, Italy, and the Netherlands, while, in the main, nuns from various orders ventured forth to found convents, traveling by both transnational and transoceanic routes.

This chapter examines the textual embodiments of this travel experience and their discursive keys. It focuses on the paradigmatic case of Sor Jerónima de la Asunción and a community of nuns of the Poor Clares, who voyaged from Toledo, Spain, through Mexico, on to Manila in order to establish the first female convent in the Philippine Islands, one of the most distant outposts of the Spanish Monarchy. The chapter's second aim is to compare the nuns’ experiences as they are recounted autobiographically and biographically alongside other travel narratives in order to highlight their reiterating discursive encoding, the images portrayed of these women travelers, and the communicative interests served by their representation— either by their self-representation or their representation by others outside their community.

Some of the questions raised include: What do these texts emphasize about the traveling conditions for women? What ideological and propagandistic purposes do these narratives serve?