Body is a cultural experience. The social, political and religious transformations of the XVI and XVII centuries altered the relation of the body to mysticism. A narrative field in which this change was felt were the baroque biographies, in which corporeity enriched the spirituality: trances, maladies and mortifications appeared on the scene in a way different from that treated in medieval hagiographies. The narratives found in the exemplary lives of the colonial period of New Granada about people who died with a reputation of sanctity assumed this new experience of the body. In these texts, addressed to lay readers, one can observe the place held by mortification and penance in relation with this new experience in the colonial period.