Bulletin
How Women's History has Transformed the Study of Early Modern Spain
Allyson Poska, Mary Washington University
At this point, formulating an essay on the state of the study of women in early modern Spain is a daunting task.1 We are fortunate to have witnessed the spectacular growth and remarkable success of scholars in the field. For nearly two decades now, early modern women’s history has not only brought the opportunities for female agency and the constraints on women’s lives into clearer perspective, it has also expanded our understanding of early modern politics, society, and culture. There is a substantial quantity of literature to examine, and I agonized over the possibility of leaving out the critical work of one colleague or another. So, I decided that rather than compose a traditional literature review, I would offer a broader discussion of how the study of women has transformed scholarly work on early modern Spain and consider some possibilities for future research.
Unlike French women’s history, which emerged out of social and labor history, early modern Spanish women’s history has its roots in the study of religion and religious literature. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, a number of innovative literary scholars and historians looked beyond Spanish history’s focus on demographic and economic history and undertook examinations of the lives and writings of religious women, especially Teresa of Avila (1515-1582). By focusing on women and on the gendered nature of women’s experience, their work began to transform the study of the early modern period. They offered new perspectives on female piety and replaced the traditional vision of a virulently misogynist Catholic Reformation that forced pious women into convents and burned mystics at the stake with a much more refined picture of the interaction between the Church and its female believers.
Based on these pioneering studies of Teresa, the reformer/saint has come to epitomize the complex relationship between a religious woman and the Spanish Church. Their explorations of her texts and investigations of her life have revealed her public and private struggles as she negotiated the tumultuous religious landscape of the sixteenth century. Gendered analysis has at least refined, if not completely altered, many interpretations of her writings. She no longer exemplifies feminine submission to clerical authority. In fact, without losing sight of either her monastic vows or her femininity, she steadfastly resisted challenges to her spiritual endeavors. Working within a masculine tradition, her ideas about female spirituality combined a keen articulation of the feminine with an assertion of female centrality and independence. The implications of her Carmelite reform extended beyond the cloister, pressuring the Church to reconsider the role of women in the Catholic Reformation more broadly.
The studies of Teresa have encouraged a series of investigations of other nuns, mystics, and holy women. Even at the height of the Catholic Reformation, as some women retreated into a religious sphere carefully supervised by male clerics, plenty of others engaged in an array of very controversial acts including internal prayer, visions, raptures, and revelations in the pursuit and fulfillment of their spiritual perfection. At a time when such displays should have been increasingly dangerous, women’s religious enthusiasm flourished. Such experiences were both cathartic and painful. Driven by forces beyond their control, religious women often struggled with the conflicts generated by their intense spirituality. Their deep faith and mystical experiences often threatened their relationships with superiors, other religious, and family. More importantly, they had difficulty reconciling their often less than orthodox religious activities with the teachings of the Church to which they had dedicated themselves.
Many religious women felt compelled to record their spiritual experiences, but the relationship between religious women and their texts was complicated. Although some women viewed the creation of texts as integral to their spiritual development, others found it forced upon them by men eager to share and sometimes manipulate their pious expression. At its best, writing provided these women with an outlet for their religious messages and a sense of spiritual authority otherwise denied them. The formulation of written works gave them entry into the Church’s largely (but not exclusively) masculine tradition of textual authority, but also created new and complex relationships with confessors and amanuenses. At its worst, the use of the written word could also be dangerous, as authors suffered through painful interrogations from superiors and Inquisitors. However, religious women displayed remarkable independence in the face of ecclesiastical attempts to suppress their works. They composed powerful expositions of their spiritual reflections and often transgressed both social norms and the commands of ecclesiastical authorities in order to share their experiences with others.
The willingness of women to resist the constraints imposed upon them by the Church is most evident in recent works on the Inquisition. The Inquisition was, quite clearly, a masculine institution. Not only was it staffed exclusively by men, but by far and away the majority of those brought before its tribunals were men; however, because of the work of women’s historians, we know much more about the interactions between individual religious women and Inquisitors. The most important lesson of that research has been that the Inquisition did not successfully squelch heterodox female spirituality during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In fact, these studies have demonstrated that religious women were remarkably successful in their opposition to, manipulation of, and negotiations with Inquisitors over spiritual issues. Rather than confess to accusations of heresy and recant their beliefs, most women stoically defended their connections to the holy and the correctness of their faith and few were convicted of heresy. Indeed, ironically, the Inquisition served less as a mechanism to stifle female mystical activity than as a means to preserve their experiences and ideas for successive generations. Although it is impossible to know how many women’s search for faith was hindered or altered by the intervention of religious superiors, over the course of the early modern period, few women faced serious punishment for their actions or beliefs and Spanish society remained deeply connected to female religious and their spiritual endeavors.
The fact that some women were able to hold their own against charges of heresy did not mean that the Church was entirely unsuccessful in its attempts to control female spirituality. As the Catholic Reformation progressed and the Church worked to control the nature of and access to the sacred, women, much more than men, faced increased skepticism about the sources and veracity of their spiritual experiences. Accusations of false sanctity proved to be particularly dangerous for women. Such charges generated tremendous anxiety on the part of believers. Playing on fears of female susceptibility, authorities systematically redefined some women’s experiences as charlatanism. Similarly, charges of demonic possession could transform a woman’s mystical relationship with the divine into a profane accommodation of the devil.
This intense interest in the lives of female religious has led to one of the most important contributions of the scholarship on Spanish women: the publication of editions and translations of women’s writings (religious and otherwise). By bringing women’s writings to a broader audience, these works have revived interest in religious history and influenced new investigations into the role Spanish women played as creators of culture. Not long ago, women were almost invisible in the study of Spain’s Golden Age. However, that situation has changed dramatically. Due to the hard work of a number of scholars, Spanish women’s writings are well represented in the University of Chicago Press series, The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe. Moreover, such work has yielded even more texts. The search for the writings of religious women led to the rediscovery of a significant number of works by lay women. Beginning with María de Zayas, women writers became a part of the scholarly discourse and literature scholars are now working on texts by dozens of Spanish women.2 Moreover, by making the writings of early modern Spanish women accessible to undergraduates, they have generated interest from a whole new generation of potential scholars.
Another outgrowth of the study of women’s interaction with the Church has been a reassessment of convent life. The experiences of particular women revealed that convents might encourage enclosure, asceticism, and submission, but just as often female religious found opportunities for autonomy, empowerment, and resistance within those same walls. Conventual reform in Spain predated the Tridentine decrees by more than 50 years, yet even with that lead time attempts to impose claustration and the enforcement of stricter rules met with only a modicum of success. Although some convents readily adopted a more reclusive life, ecclesiastical reformers could not overcome the reality that convents were more than housing for unattached women, pious or not. Convents were intricately linked to the outside world as landlords, administrators, and producers of agricultural goods. Their familial connections regularly engaged them in local and national politics, as well as more mundane family affairs. Moreover, many women saw no contradiction between their spiritual responsibilities within the convent and their obligations beyond the convent walls. In fact, rather than submit to strict claustration, many convents stonewalled authorities’ attempts to restrict interactions with the outside world. Although they may have frustrated ecclesiastical officials, through both their collusion and their resistance, female religious became key participants in the process of Catholic renewal.
The interest in women’s religious activity has also encouraged investigation into the experiences of New Christian women. Like their Old Christian counterparts, the spiritual lives of Conversas and Moriscas were the products of ongoing negotiation. Certainly, they were often subjected to intense repression; yet, the research indicates that Conversas and Moriscas were far from passive victims of Spanish anti-Semitism. Depending on their situations, women were central either to the perpetuation of their religious and cultural traditions or to the assimilation of their families. For those who attempted to maintain their cultural identities, long after Christian authorities prohibited the formal mechanisms for transmitting Judaism and Islam, such as schools and houses of worship, wives and mothers taught children prayers, enforced dietary laws, and kept Judaic and Arabic culture alive in the home. For families who chose or were forced to assimilate, women undertook the creation of Christian households, replete with new foods, holidays, and daily routines. Women’s domestic activities provided the verifiable evidence of their families’ integration into Christian society and, conversely, the failure to provide such evidence frequently served as the basis for charges of heresy.
The impact of these studies of women and religion has extended well beyond issues of sex and gender. Without a doubt, this research has forced scholars to rethink their evaluations of the Catholic Reformation in Spain and the push for religious homogeneity. Individual women’s willingness to pursue their own spiritual priorities despite clerical prohibitions indicates significant weaknesses in the Church’s mechanisms for social control. Moreover, these studies reveal the continued or renewed vigor of personal piety at a time when scholars had argued that Catholic Reform effectively suppressed even slightly suspicious spiritual activity. In the broadest terms, the study of female piety has helped to reinvigorate Spanish religious, cultural, and intellectual history.
The study of women and religion also led to a reconsideration of the meanings of sex and gender in early modern Spain. The Catholic Reformation Church dedicated much energy to redefining (or more clearly defining) gender expectations, and in the process it reemphasized female chastity and submission as the key characteristics of a good Christian woman. Yet, the degree to which those expectations permeated Spanish society has been called into question. If, as the research has indicated, religious women frequently challenged male authority, then what were the gendered parameters that guided the lives of other Spanish women? For decades, the paradigm of the Mediterranean honor code, in which women derived their honor from their sexual chastity and men derived theirs from the protection of women in their care, was the scholarly consensus. However, examinations of women’s lives, especially through Inquisitional documentation and legal sources, have revealed the flexibility of Spanish gender expectations. The prescriptive literature of the period has been relegated to merely that – prescriptions for – not descriptions of – early modern realities. At least in terms of their sexual choices, Spaniards did not cower before the Church or the Inquisition. Even at the height of the Catholic Reformation in Spain, non-marital sex flourished. Prostitutes walked the streets, aristocrats had mistresses, adulterers had secret rendezvous, and men had sex with men. As in all times and places, some people got into trouble with ecclesiastical and secular authorities, while others flaunted their relationships to the chagrin of those same powers.
Far from being constrained by any expectations about sexual honor, women, particularly non-aristocratic women, and their families understood the malleability of sexual norms. Despite both civil and ecclesiastical injunctions against such behavior, non-aristocratic women engaged in sexual intercourse, sometimes as a guarantor of the marriage promise and sometimes just for the fun of it. When their fiancés failed to follow through with weddings or when the relationships did not work out, women sued for monetary compensation for their lost virginities and for dowries that would allow them to marry someone else. Neither public knowledge of premarital intercourse nor the presence of illegitimate children seems to have impeded women’s ability to marry. This ability to move on to other relationships was, in part, due to the fact that women and their communities defined female honor in other, nonsexual, ways, including hard work, economic viability, and creditworthiness. While some aristocratic women may have aspired to the purity described by Fray Luis de León (1527-1591) and Juan Luis Vives (1494-1540), it seems clear that most women (and men) followed the urgings of their hearts and loins instead.
The instability of Spanish gender norms and of the relationship between sex and gender played out dramatically in the cases of sex/gender transgressors like Catalina de Erauso and Eleno/Elena de Céspedes. Their stories are fascinating, and have intrigued a generation of scholars. Working from a paradigm that asserted rigid gender expectations, it seemed unfathomable that Catalina de Erauso could dress and pass as a man, fight in the Americas, and then obtain a pension from Philip IV. However, now we realize that both individuals and Church authorities were less resolved about such issues than we had previously understood. Even in the halls of the Inquisition, there was room for debate and negotiation about the nature of the female body and sexuality. Challenging the authority of the Inquisitors to define his/her sexuality, Eleno/a carefully explicated the state and meaning of his/her genitalia and sexual activity. In the end, he/she received a relatively light sentence and became quite a celebrity.
As has been true in other fields of European history, early modern Spanish women’s history has influenced the growing number of studies of male sexuality.3 Although this field is still in its infancy, it seems clear that definitions of masculinity were every bit as pliable as those of femininity and the opportunities for and constraints on male homosexual relations were just as varied as those for heterosexual sex. As was true with female sexual activity, the community, rather than officials and their directives, often determined prosecutions for homosexuality. Even Inquisitors assessed sodomy through the lens of social norms; homosexual sex was judged as more or less serious depending on whether participants reinforced or challenged racial, religious, and class hierarchies.
The most important contribution of these studies of sex and gender has been to repopulate the streets of early modern Spain with women. The image of the secluded Spanish woman whose public presence was limited to weekly visits to the church and an occasional outing for some socially acceptable and well chaperoned event dominated the literature for decades. Yet, the research on women clearly demonstrates that while a few women may have opted for or been forced into chaste seclusion, they were in the minority. Rather, and it seems almost ridiculous to say at this point, the public spaces of early modern Spain were filled with women. Spanish women’s legal rights were critical to their visibility in early modern society. The fact that women, even married women, could own property, transact business, work in a wide variety of occupations, and take legal action meant that they were constant presences in nearly all public forums.
The work of social and family historians laid the foundation for this new vision of women’s place in Spanish society. Their willingness to mine Spain’s notarial records carefully has been particularly valuable to women’s historians. Although it can be tiresome work, Spain’s notarial archives are filled with wills, dowry contracts, contracts, and legal settlements that involved women and that bring women’s daily lives and relationships to life.
Through the study of women’s wills, scholars have demonstrated that through partible inheritance, most non-aristocratic women came into some real or moveable property that was theirs alone, giving women some independence through the life-cycle. In parts of the country where late marriage was common, as in Galicia and the Basque lands, access to property allowed single women to live independently until they married (if they ever did). When they married, dowry contracts reveal the degree to which women’s families provided the bulk of the new couple’s property. Dowries often included the house that the couple lived in, the bed they slept in, the animals they raised, and the utensils they cooked with, a fact that no doubt gave wives some increased authority in the relationship. Once married, although technically husbands controlled their wives’ dowries, women did not necessarily relinquish all access to that wealth. Not all husbands asserted their rights over their wives’ wealth and contracts show married women using their own property and transacting business with the permission of (or sometimes in the absence of) their husbands. For widows, their access to property from their natal families and from their marriages offered enough economic security that few ever decided to remarry. In addition, across most of the peninsula, women’s ability to inherit and bequeath property allowed them to create and nourish networks with family and friends, exert some authority within the household, and pursue strategies for family advancement. In particular, wealthy women, like those of the Mendoza family, clearly understood that their inheritance was essential to both their own status and that of their children.
One of the most fruitful sources for the study of Spanish women’s relationships has been court records. Early modern Spanish women had a remarkable knowledge of their legal rights and judicial processes and did not shy away from the public pursuit of their rights and the defense of their persons. Indeed, the desire for justice seems to have overcome many women’s anxiety about airing their sexual encounters in public. Women regularly sued for compensation for broken marriage promises, demanding not only a dowry but support for any children that had resulted from the relationship. In fact, far from embarrassing the woman and her family, the judicial process gave them the opportunity to tell a new story about a love gone wrong. Women could take the opportunity to turn the account of a long-standing consensual relationship into a tale of seduction and betrayal or vice versa. Even those who seemed most vulnerable found support in the judicial system. Widows used the courts to ensure the guardianship of their children and protect their property from unscrupulous and greedy children and relations, while female slaves willingly filed paternity suits against their masters.
These studies have yet to be as transformative as many of us would like. Beyond those of us specifically interested in gender, scholars have been slow to discard antiquated notions of female chastity, timidity, and seclusion. For too long, assertions of a rigid honor code provided a convenient opportunity to ignore the complications of gender in many historical settings. In fact, outside of social history, many scholars continue to skirt the complications that newer understandings of sex and gender in early modern Spain might bring to their analyses. While it is true that not everyone is interested in such issues as the focus of their inquiry, it is important for all scholars to begin their investigations with an image of early modern Spain in which ideas about sex and gender are in flux and women are present as either observers or participants or both. This new baseline of analysis will, almost inevitably, alter the trajectory, if not the outcome, of most historical study.
The field in which this lack of scholarly attention to issues of sex and gender is most evident is political history. Scholars, preoccupied with the ongoing debates over the construction of the Spanish empire, the extent of Habsburg absolutism, and the seventeenth-century decline, have devoted little energy to the place of women. However, those priorities have slowly begun to change, and recent research has begun to complicate our interpretations of the Spanish monarchy and the ways that women exerted authority in the political sphere.
The most extensive work has focused on the reign of Isabel I (r. 1474-1504), and gendered analyses of her reign have changed the traditional vision of the Catholic Kings and their consolidation of power. It is clear now that Isabel did not operate outside of traditional gender expectations, although her femininity was often obscured in both contemporary accounts and modern analyses. During the civil wars that brought her to the throne, Isabel effectively avoided challenges to authority based on her gender, in part because her main rival was also a woman. Even after she became queen, the monarchy’s propaganda about her royal and personal partnership with Ferdinand belied the complexity of their relationship and uniqueness of her reign. Over the centuries, scholars followed suit, subsuming her femininity under the overtly masculine title of The Catholic Kings. However, by looking beyond this often genderless rhetoric, women’s historians have uncovered a very different Isabel. Rather than the compliant partner in a dual monarchy, scholars now understand her as a much more dominant and assertive ruler in her own right. Her ascent to power and her control of Castile happened largely independent of her relationship with Ferdinand (1452-1516). Moreover, despite her consolidation of power, neither her supporters nor her enemies ignored her sex and she constantly battled the gender expectations of her time. After her death, Ferdinand and son-in-law Philip the Fair’s (1478-1506) attempts to discredit Juana (1479-1555), the presumptive heir to the throne, also served to defeminize Isabel. In order to assure Charles’s inheritance (as Charles I, r. 1516-1556), they carefully sidestepped the issue of Isabel’s gender while arguing that Juana, as a woman, was unfit to rule. In fact, Ferdinand and Philip’s machinations to degender Isabel and prevent Juana from taking the throne constituted not merely the Machiavellian manipulation of political structures, but also the strategic employment of early modern gender expectations for their own political ends.
Isabel may have been the only early modern queen to rule in her own right, but she was not the only woman to exert authority at court. However, we know far too little about queen consorts and queens regent during the early modern period. In part, this dearth of research is due to the fact that for over nearly two hundred years, Spain was fortunate that only Queen Mariana of Austria (1634-1696), who ruled on behalf of the young and invalid Charles II (r. 1665-1700), was called upon to accomplish the transition from father to son. Yet, the use of female relations as proxy rulers was of great importance during the reign of Charles I, who was not in the least reluctant to leave his Spanish territories (or his possessions in the Low Countries for that matter) in the hands of women. During the early years of his reign, he left his wife Isabel of Portugal (1503-1539) as regent (along with Cardinal Tavera) on three different occasions: 1529-1532, 1535-37, and in 1539 until her death. In addition, his daughter Juana (1535-1573) acted as regent for her brother Philip (who was himself regent for his father at the time) when Philip went to England to marry Mary Tudor in 1554. The seventeenth-century Habsburgs stayed close to home, but the Bourbon Philip V revived the practice, leaving his young wife Maria Luisa of Savoy (1688-1714) as regent soon after their wedding in order to tour his Italian territories. She proceeded first to Zaragoza where she presided over the Cortes and then to Madrid where she attended meetings of the Royal Council.
Scholars have devoted little energy to analyses of these women as political actors. Rather, they have naively accepted the negative assessments of the men involved in those regencies, particularly in the case of Empress Isabel. Contemporaries’ comments on her participation have not been contextualized in terms of the gender expectations of the period. A gendered analysis of the discourse in the correspondence between Charles, Isabel, and others about the regency might help scholars get beyond the discomfort of ministers with women in authority and move towards a better appreciation of the experience of regency and female political authority. The recent research on medieval queen consorts also provides some potential paradigms for future investigations into the political activity of other royal women. Married to Iberian kings in order to cement alliances and to bear royal children, these women did not necessarily retire to the reclusive life of the palace nursery. Once they arrived at court, they were much more extensively engaged in politics and exerted much more political authority than we had previously understood. Through both formal mechanisms, like that of the queen lieutenant in Aragon, and informal influence, medieval queens were more than just childbearers, they were often “partners in politics,” as Theresa Earenfight has so intriguingly suggested.4 Could the same be said of their early modern counterparts? Finally, significant work has been accomplished outside of Spain on the issue of early modern regency, and that research might provide some insight into how these women conceptualized their political experience and how those around them understood their political activity.
Many royal relatives never held any official political authority, but exerted political influence nonetheless. One of the most important contributions of women’s history is the expansion of what scholars interpret as political activity and political spaces. Political debates, conflicts, and decisions took place not only at court, but also in convents, in carriages, and in aristocratic salons and bedrooms. The relationships between husbands and wives, mothers and sons, sisters and brothers, and lovers were not free from political intrigue and influence. Research into those relationships could provide insight into the exercise of political influence outside of council chambers and bring women into the conversation about the formulation of monarchical policy.
Although sparse, the research on women in politics has provided a deeper understanding of monarchical rule in Spain. As assertions of absolutism have given way to a more decentralized definition of political authority, the monarchy has expanded beyond the king and his ministers to include a wide variety of men and women. Many of these women asserted their authority through formal mechanisms, while others influenced policy from behind the scenes. Men were not always comfortable with women’s influence, but persistent factionalism meant that those same men were also uncomfortable with the power exerted by their male opponents at court. Moreover, women at court were not working outside of traditional gender norms, but within a system that assumed that women with access to authority would employ it on behalf of friends and relations just like their male counterparts.
Finally, in the past decade, scholars have made important inroads into study of women in the eighteenth century. Until recently, literature scholars have much more actively pursued work in this transitional century than historians, focusing on the increased number of publications by women and the visibility of women like Josefa Amar y Bourbón (1749-1833). However, the sources for studying women during this period are abundant and even the small amount of research that has been completed has not only provided both breadth and depth to more traditional histories of the Enlightenment but has also changed our perspective on the topic. The conservative nature of the Enlightenment in Spain looks less so when women enter the picture. Much as in France, women were critical subjects and participants in the social, economic, and political debates of the period. Female intellectuals eagerly joined the growing number of economic societies and led tertulias in which they discussed issues including economic progress, citizenship, and the role of women.
In reading these works and talking with their authors, it is clear to me that as study of this century expands, scholars will have to deal with a key dilemma in their work: should it be framed as the culmination of the early modern period or as the beginning of the modern era? At this point, it is difficult to know the answer to this question in part because we know so little about Spanish women during the nineteenth century. Although one answer is not necessarily more correct than the other, the decision has important historiographic implications and is central to the debates over periodization in women’s history and in Spanish history as well.
These are only some of what I see as the most important contributions by scholars of women to early modern Spanish studies. However, as should be evident, there are still many topics, particularly in political and economic history, that have received little or no attention. As I mentioned above, there is much more to be learned about the Habsburg women. We are lacking basic biographies of most Habsburg queens, and most certainly we are lacking them from a feminist perspective. We know almost nothing about women’s political activity at the local level. There is also considerable work to be done on urban and artisan women and commerce. In fact, in general we know very little about women’s economic participation at either the local, national, or transnational level.
The study of women in science and medicine is a promising new field. Both historians of medicine and philosophers have demonstrated interest in the scientific texts of Oliva Sabuco (b.1562). In addition to clarifying the authorship of some key texts which were long ascribed to her father, new translations of her work will, no doubt, promote even more extensive study. Maternity, childbirth, and midwifery, topics central to the study of women in other parts of Europe, have been seriously neglected in early modern Spain. However, I am sure that ongoing research will yield some important insights into some of the most common experiences of early modern women.
Social historians still have considerable work to do. We have only the vaguest understanding of women’s interactions across race/class/ethnic lines. Key moments in the life cycle still require extensive investigation, including adolescence, schooling, and aging. Certainly, cultural history, which has brought women so clearly into the forefront in French and Italian history, needs much more work. A more complex conceptualization of gender in early modern Spain is also necessary. As we learn more about the experiences of women, we also should learn more about the experience of men as gendered beings and about the intersections of those experiences; however, as Alice Kessler-Harris noted in a recent essay entitled “Do We Still Need Women’s History,”in the Chronicle of Higher Education (December 7, 2007), gender history addresses very different issues than women’s history. It is not the successor to women’s history, and although these issues are also important, we should not have the sense of having moved beyond the study of women.
The next wave of studies of early modern Spanish women will face some serious challenges. As has always been true, the questions are difficult and the information is hard to tease out of extant sources. Yet the payoff is great and it is clear that the study of women has not only brought new information to our understanding of early modern Spain, but also made it richer by complicating topics that had thought we thoroughly understood. Most importantly, by bringing women into the forefront, women’s history has raised new exciting new questions about the nature of early modern Spanish society, culture, and politics.
1 I want to thank Aurelio Espinosa and Jodi Bilinkoff for their help on this essay.
2 The existence of GEMELA (Grupo de Estudios sobre la Mujer en España y las Américas, pre-1800), formerly known as the Asociación de Escritoras de España y las Américas (1300-1800), and the enthusiastic attendance at its biennial meetings attest to the dynamism of this field. For more information, see their website: www.gemela.org
3 Judith Bennett has recently described women’s history as “a sort of mother – not a single parent, but a co-parenting mother -- of gender history, the history of masculinities, and
the history of sexualities,” History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 19.4 See the preface to her collection of essays, Queenship and Political Power in Medieval and Early Modern Spain (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005).
Select Bibliography
I have attempted to collect an extensive and varied bibliography of historical works that I hope will be useful for a wide range of teaching and scholarship. In addition to this selection of historical works, I have included some works by literature scholars that I believe complement the historical studies. Of course, there are many more excellent studies available than can be mentioned in the space of this article, and more are appearing every day.
General Works
Bel Bravo, María Antonia. Mujeres españolas en la Historia Moderna. Madrid: Sílez, 2002.
Garrido, Elisa, ed. Historia de las mujeres en España. Madrid: Síntesis, 1997.
Morant, Isabel, coord. Historia de las mujeres en España y América Latina vol.2: El mundo moderno. Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra, 2005.
Vigil, M., La vida de las mujeres en los siglos XVI y XVII. 2nd ed. Madrid: Siglo XXI, 1994.
Works on Women and Religion
Ahlgren, Gillian. Teresa of Avila and the Politics of Sanctity. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998.
Atienza López, Angela. “De beaterios a conventos: nuevas perspectivas sobre el mundo de las beatas en la España Moderna.” Historia social 57 (2007): 145-168.
Bilinkoff, Jodi. The Avila of Saint Teresa: Religious Reform in a Sixteenth-Century City. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989.
_______. “A Spanish Prophetess and her Patrons: The Case of María de Santo Domingo.” Sixteenth Century Journal 23 (1992): 21-34.
______. Related Lives: Confessors and their Female Penitents, 1450-1750. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005.
Colahan, Clark. The Visions of Sor María de Agreda: Writing, Power and Knowledge. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1994.
Fink DeBacker, Stephanie, “Constructing Convents in Sixteenth-Century Castile: Toledan Widows and Patterns of Patronage.” In Widowhood and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe, edited by Allison Levy, 177-196. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2003.
Giles, Mary E. ed. Women in the Inquisition: Spain and the New World. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.
Guilhem, Claire. “La inquisición y la devaluación del verbo feminine.” In Inquisición española: poder político y control social, edited by Bartolomé Bennassar, 171-207. Barcelona: Crítica, 1981.
Haliczer, Stephen. Between Exaltation and Infamy: Female Mystics in the Golden Age of Spain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Keitt, Andrew. Inventing the Sacred: Imposture, Inquisition, and the Boundaries of the Supernatural in Golden Age Spain. http://brill.nl/default.aspx?partid=18&pid=24247 Leiden: Brill, 2005.
Lehfeldt, Elizabeth A. “Discipline, Vocation, and Patronage: Spanish Religious Women in a Tridentine Microclimate.” Sixteenth Century Journal 30 (1999): 1009-1030.
_______. Religious Women in Golden Age Spain: The Permeable Cloister. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005.
Melammed, Renée Levine. Heretics or Daughters of Israel? The Crypto-Jewish Women of Castile. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Moncó Rebollo, Beatriz. Mujer y demonio: Una pareja barroca. Madrid: Instituto de Sociología Aplicada, 1989.
_______. “Demonio y mujeres: historia de una transgresíon.” In El Diablo en la Edad Moderna, edited by María Tausiet and James S. Amelang, 187-210. Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2004.
Morgado García, Arturo. Demonios, magos y brujas en la España moderna. Cádiz: Universidad de Cádiz, 1999.
Muñoz Fernández, Angela. Mujer y experiencia religiosa en el marco de la santidad medieval. Madrid: Asociación Cultural Al-Mudayna, 1988.
_______. Beatas y santas neocastellanas: ambivalencia de la religion y políticas correctoras del poder (ss. XIV-XVII). Madrid: Universidad Complutense/Consejería de Presidencia-Directión General de la Mujer, 1994.
_______ and Maria del Mar Graña eds. Religiosidad feminina: expectativas e realidades (secs. VIII-XVIII). Madrid: Asociación Cultural Al-Mudayna, 1991.
Perry, Mary Elizabeth. Gender and Disorder in Early Modern Seville. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.
_______. “Behind the Veil: Moriscas and the Politics of Resistance and Survival.” In Spanish Women in the Golden Age: Images and Realities, edited by Magdalena S. Sánchez and Alain Saint-Saëns, 37-53. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996.
_______. “Moriscas and the Limits of Assimilation.” In Christians, Muslims, and Jews in Medieval and Early Modern Spain: Interaction and Cultural Change, edited by Mark Meyerson and Edward D. English, 274-289. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000.
_______. The Handless Maiden: Moriscos and the Politics of Religion in Early Modern Spain. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.
Poska, Allyson and Elizabeth A. Lehfeldt. “Redefining Expectations: Women and the Church in Early Modern Spain.” In Gender and Religion in the Old and New Worlds: A Transatlantic Perspective, edited by Susan E. Dinan and Debra A. Meyers, 21-42. New York: Routledge, 2001.
Poutrin, Isabelle. Le voile et la plume: autobiographie et sainteté féminine dans l’Espagne moderne. Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 1995.
Puyol y Buil, Carlos. Inquisición y política en el reinado de Felipe IV: Los procesos de Jerónimo de Villanueva y las monjas de San Plácido, 1628-1660. Madrid: CSIC, 1993.
Rhodes, Elizabeth. “Luisa de Carvajal’s Counter-Reformation Journey to Selfhood (1566-1614).” Renaissance Quarterly 51 (1998): 887-911.
Sánchez Lora, José Luis. Mujeres, conventos y formas de la religiosidad barroca. Madrid: FUE, 1988.
Sánchez Ortega, María-Helena. Ese viejo diablo llamado amor: La magia amorosa en la España moderna. Madrid: UNED, 2004.
Sarrión Mora, Adelina. Sexualidad y Confesión: La solicitación ante el Tribunal del Santo Oficio (Siglos XVI-XIX). Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1994.
_______. “Religiosidad de la mujer e inquisición.” Historia social 32 (1998): 97-116.
_______. Beatas y endemoniadas: Mujeres heterodoxas ante la Inquisición, siglos XVI a XIX. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2003.
Schlau, Stacey. “Following Saint Teresa: Early Modern Women and Religious Authorityity.” MLN 117, No. 2, Hispanic Issue (March, 2002): 286-309.
Slade, Carole. Saint Teresa of Avila: Author of a Heroic Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
Surtz, Ronald. The Guitar of God: Gender, Power, and Authority in the Visionary World of Mother Juana de la Cruz (1481-1534). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990.
_______.Writing Women in Late Medieval and Early Modern Spain: The Mothers of Saint Teresa of Avila. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995.
Tausiet, María. Ponzoña en los ojos: Brujería y superstición en Aragón en el siglo XVI. Zaragoza: Ediciones Turner, 2000.
_______.“Witchcraft as Metaphor: Infanticide and its Translations in Aragon in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.” In Languages of Witchcraft: Narrative, Ideology, and Meaning in Early Modern Culture, edited by Stuart Clark, 179-195. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001.
Weber, Alison. “Saint Teresa, Demonologist.” In Culture and Control in Counter-Reformation Spain, edited by Anne Cruz and Mary Elizabeth Perry, 171-195. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992.
_______. Teresa of Avila and the Rhetoric of Femininity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.
_______. “Spiritual Administration: Gender and Discernment in the Carmelite Reform.” Sixteenth Century Journal 31, special issue on Gender in Early Modern Europe (Spring, 2000): 123-146.
Velasco, Sherry. Demons, Nausea, and Resistance in the Autobiography of Isabel de Jesús, 1611-1682. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996.
Villaseñor-Black, Charlene. Creating the Cult of St. Joseph: Art and Gender in the Spanish Empire. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.
Edited and Translated
Texts by Women
Although the number of edited and translated texts is far too large to include in this bibliography, I want to offer a few examples of what is available.
Aguado, A. M. et al., eds., Textos para la historia de las mujeres de España. Madrid: Cátedra, 1994.
Arenal, Electa, Stacy Schlau, and Amanda Powell, eds. Untold Sisters: Hispanic Nuns in Their Own Words. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989.
Bartolomé, Ana. Autobiography and Other Writings, edited and translated by Darcy Donahue. The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.
Francisca de los Apóstoles. The Inquisition of Francisca: A Sixteenth-Century Visionary on Trial, edited and translated by Gillian T. W. Ahlgren. The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
Guevara, María de. Warnings to the Kings and Advice on Restoring Spain: A Bilingual Edition, edited and translated by Nieves Romero-Díaz. The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
Howe, Elizabeth Teresa. The Visionary Life of Madre Ana de San Agustín. Rochester, New York: Tamesis, 2004.
Kaminsky, Amy Katz, ed. Water Lilies/Flores del agua: An Anthology of Spanish Women Writers from the Fifteenth through the Nineteenth Century. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
Mujica, Barbara. Women Writers of Early Modern Spain: Sophia’s Daughters. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.
Olivares, Julián and Elizabeth S. Boyce. Tras el espejo la musa escribe: Lírica femenina de los Siglos de Oro. Madrid: Siglo Veintiuno, 1993.
Rhodes, Elizabeth, ed. and trans. This Tight Embrace: Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza (1566-1614). Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2000.
Sabuco de Nantes Barrera, Oliva. The True Medicine, introduction and annotated translation by Gianna Pomata. The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe. Forthcoming from University of Chicago Press.
_______. New Philosophy of Human Nature: Neither Known to nor Attained by the Great Ancient Philosophers, which Will Improve Human Life and Health, translated by Mary Ellen Waithe, Maria Colomer Vintró, and C. Angel Zorita. Urbana-Champagne: University of Illinois Press, 2007.
Salazar, María de San José. Book for the Hour of Recreation, edited and translated by Alison Weber and Amanda Powell. The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.
Soufas, Teresa Scott. Women’s Acts: Plays by Golden Age Women. Lexington: University of Kentucky, 1997.
Teresa of Avila. The Book of Her Life, translated with notes, by Kieran Kavanaugh, OCD and Otilio Rodriguez, OCD. Introduction by Jodi Bilinkoff. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2008.
Sex, Gender, and Honor
Barahona, Renato. Sex Crimes, Honour, and the Law in Early Modern Spain: Vizcaya, 1528-1735. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003.
Behrend-Martínez, Edward J. Unfit for Marriage: Impotent Spouses on Trial in the Basque Region of Spain, 1650-1750. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2007.
Berco, Christian. Sexual Hierarchies, Public Status: Men, Sodomy, and Society in Spain’s Golden Age. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007.
Dopico Black, Georgina. Perfect Wives, Other Women: Adultery and Inquisition in Early Modern Spain. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001.
Dyer, Abigail. “Seduction by Promise of Marriage: Law, Sex, and Culture in Seventeenth-Century Spain.” Sixteenth Century Journal 34 (2003): 439-455
Erauso, Catalina de. Lieutenant Nun: Memoir of a Basque Transvestite in the New World,. translated by Michele and Gabriel Stepto. Boston: Beacon Press, 1996.
Kagan, Richard L. and Abigail Dyer, eds. Inquisitorial Inquiries: Brief Lives of Secret Jews and Other Heretics. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004.
Morant, Isabel. Discursos de la vida buena: Matrimonio, mujer y sexualidad en la literatura Humanista. Madrid: Cátedra, 2002.
Perry, Mary Elizabeth. “Magdalens and Jezebels in Counter-Reformation Spain,” In Culture and Control in Counter-Reformation Spain, edited by Anne J. Cruz and Mary Elizabeth Perry, 124-144. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992.
Poska, Allyson M. Women and Authority in Early Modern Spain: The Peasants of Galicia. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
_______. “Elusive Virtue: Rethinking the Role of Female Chastity in Early Modern Spain.” Journal of Early Modern History 8:1-2 (2004): 135-146.
Sánchez Ortega, María Helena. La mujer y la sexualidad en el antiguo régimen: La perspectiva inquisitorial. Madrid: Akal, 1992.
Taylor, Scott K. “Women, Honor, and Violence in a Castilian Town, 1600-1650.” Sixteenth Century Journal 35 (2004): 1079-1097.
Tenorio Gómez, Pilar. Las madrileñas de mil seiscientos: Imagen y realidad. Madrid: Horas y Horas, 1993.
Vázquez García, Francisco y Andres Moreno Mengibar. Poder y prostitución en Sevilla (siglos XIV al XX). Sevilla: Universidad de Sevilla, 1998.
Velasco, Sherry. The Lieutenant Nun: Transgenderism, Lesbian Desire, and Catalina de Erauso. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001.
_______. Male Delivery: Reproduction, Effeminacy, and Pregnant Men in Early Modern Spain. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2006.
Vollendorf, Lisa. The Lives of Women: A New History of Inquisitional Spain. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2005.
Legal and Property Rights
Bartolomé Bartolomé, Juan Manuel. “Prácticas hereditarias y transmisión de la propiedad en Tierra de Campos leonesa: La comarca de Sahagún en el siglo XVIII.” Revista de Demografía Histórica 20: 1 (2002):179-212.
Blumenthal, Debra. “Sclaves molt fortes, senyors invalts: Sex, Lies, and Paternity Suits in Late Medieval Spain.” In Women, Texts and Authority in the Early Modern Spanish World, edited by Marta Vicente and Luis Corteguera, 17-36. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate 2003.
Coolidge, Grace E. “A Vile and Abject Woman”: Noble Mistresses, Legal Power, and the Family in Early Modern Spain.” Journal of Family History 32: 3 (2007): 195-214.
_______.”'Neither Dumb, Deaf, nor Destitute of Understanding:' Women as Guardians in Early Modern Spain.” Sixteenth Century Journal 36 (2005): 673-693.
Chacón Francisco, ed., Familia y sociedad en el Mediterráneo occidental (siglos xv-xix). Murcia: Universidad de Murcia, 1987.
Dubert García, Isidro. Historia de la familia en Galicia durante la época moderna, 1550-1830: (estructura, modelos hereditarios y conflictividad). A Coruña: Ediciós do Castro, 1992.
García González, Francisco. “Mujer, hogar y economía familiar: desigualdad y adaptación en la sierra de Alcaraz a mediados del siglo XVIII.” Hispania: Revista española de historia 57: 195 (1997): 115-145.
García Nieto Paris, María Carmen, ed. Ordenamiento jurídico y realidad social de las mujeres: siglos XVI a XX: actas de las IV Jornadas de Investigación Interdisciplinaria. Madrid: Seminario de Estudios de la Mujer, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 1986.
Oliveri Korta, Oihane. Mujer y herencia en el estamento hidalgo guipuzcoano durante el antiguo régimen (siglos XVI-XVIII). San Sebastián: Diputación Foral de Gipuzkoa, 2001.
Ortega López, Margarita. “Protestas de las mujeres castellanas contra el orden patriarcal privado durante el siglo XVIII.” Cuadernos de historia moderna (special issue entitled, "Sobre la mujer en el Antiguo Régimen: de la cocina a los tribunales") 19 (1997): 65-90.
Peytavi Deixona, Joan. La família nord-catalana: matrimonis i patrimonis (segles XVI-XVIII). Perpinyà : Editorial Trabucaire, 1996.
Rey Castelao, Ofelia. “Les femmes ‘Seules’ du Nord-Ouest de l’Espagne: trajectoires féminines dans un territoire d’emigration 1700-1860.”Annales de démographie historique 2 (2006): 105-134.
Rial García, Serrana M. Las mujeres en la economía urbana del antiguo régimen: Santiago durante el siglo XVIII. A Coruña: Ediciós do Castro, 1995.
Testón Núñez, Isabel. Amor, sexo y matrimonio en Extremadura. Badajoz: Universitas, 1985.
Wessell, Dana. “Family Interests? Women’s Power: The Absence of Family in Dowry Restitution Cases in Fifteenth-Century Valencia.” Women’s History Review 15 (2006): 511–520.
Works on Women and Politics
Aram, Bethany. “Juana ‘the Mad’s’ Signature: The Problem of Invoking Royal Authority, 1505-1507.”Sixteenth Century Journal 29 (1998): 331-358.
_______. Juana the Mad: Sovereignty and Dynasty in Renaissance Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005.
Boruchoff, David. Isabel La Católica, Queen of Castile: Critical Essays. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
Campbell, Jodi. “Women and Factionalism in the Court of Charles II of Spain.” In Spanish Women in the Golden Age: Images and Realities, edited by Magdalena S. Sánchez and Alain Saint-Saëns, 109-124. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996.
Earenfight, Theresa, ed. Queenship and Political Power in Medieval and Early Modern Spain. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005.
_______. “Without the Persona of the Prince: Kings, Queens, and the Idea of Monarchy in Late Medieval Europe.” Gender and History 19 (2007): 1-21
Kagan, Richard L. Lucrecia´s Dreams: Politics and Prophecy in Sixteenth-Century Spain. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.
Lehfeldt, Elizabeth A. “Ruling Sexuality: The Political Legitimacy of Isabel of Castile.” Renaissance Quarterly 53 (2000): 31-56.
Liss, Peggy K. Isabel the Queen: Life and Times. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.
Nader, Helen, ed. Power and Gender in Renaissance Spain: Eight Women of the Mendoza Family, 1450-1650. Urbana-Champagne: University of Illinois Press, 2004.
Sánchez, Magdalena S. The Empress, the Queen, and the Nun: Women and Power at the Court of Philip III of Spain. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.
Weissberger, Barbara F. Isabel Rules: Constructing Queenship, Wielding Power. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
The Eighteenth Century
Bolufer Peruga, Mónica. “Actitudes y discursos sobre la maternidad en la España del siglo XVIII: La cuestión de la lactancia.” Historia social 14 (1992): 3-24.
_______. Mujeres e ilustración: la construcción de la feminidad en la España del siglo XVIII. Valencia: Diputació de Valencia, 1998.
_______. “Representaciones y prácticas de vida: las mujeres en España a finales del siglo XVIII.” Cuadernos de Ilustración y Romanticismo: Revista del Grupo de Estudios del siglo XVIII 11(2003): 3-34.
Haidt, Rebecca. Embodying Enlightenment: Knowing the Body in Eighteenth-Century Spanish Literature and Culture. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998.
Lewis, Elizabeth Franklin. Women Writers in the Spanish Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004.
Sarasúa, Carmen. Criados, nodrizas, y amos: El servicio doméstico en la formación del mercado del trabajo madrileño, 1758-1868. Madrid: Siglo veintiuno, 1994.
Sherwood, Joan. Poverty in Eighteenth-Century Spain: The Women and Children of the Inclusa. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988.
Smith, Theresa Ann. The Emerging Female Citizen: Gender and Enlightenment in Spain. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.
Vicente, Marta. Clothing the Spanish Empire: Families and the Calico Trade in the Atlantic World 1700-1815. New York: Palgrave, 2006.
_______. “Textual Uncertainties: The Legacy of Women Entrepreneurs in Eighteenth-Century Barcelona.” In Women, Texts and Authority in the Early Modern Spanish World, edited by Marta V. Vicente and Luis R. Corteguera, 185-198. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2003.