Gender And Exemplarity In Medieval And Early Modern Spain

Gender and Exemplarity in Medieval and Early Modern Spain gathers a series of studies on the interplay between gender, sanctity and exemplarity in regard to literary production in the Iberian peninsula. The first section examines how women were con¬strued as saintly examples through narratives, mostly composed by male writers; the second focuses on the use made of exemplary life-accounts by women writers in order to fashion their own social identity and their role as authors. The volume includes studies on relevant models (Mary Magdalen, Virgin Mary, living saints), means of transmission, sponsorship and agency (reading circles, print, patronage), and female writers (Leonor López de Córdoba, Isabel de Villena, Teresa of Ávila) involved in creating textual exemplars for women. Contributors are: Pablo Acosta-García, Andrew M. Beresford, Jimena Gamba Corradine, Ryan D. Giles, María Morrás, Lesley K. Twomey, Roa Vidal Doval, and Christopher van Ginhoven Rey.

Women and Community in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia draws on recent research to underscore the various ways Iberian women influenced and contributed to their communities, engaging with a broader academic discussion of women's agency and cultural impact in the Iberian Peninsula. By focusing on women from across the socioeconomic and religious spectrum--elite, bourgeois, and peasant Christian women, Jewish, Muslim, converso, and Morisco women, and married, widowed, and single women--this volume highlights the diversity of women's experiences, examining women's social, economic, political, and religious ties to their families and communities in both urban and rural environments. Comprised of twelve essays from both established and new scholars, Women and Community in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia showcases groundbreaking work on premodern women, revealing the complex intersections between gender and community while highlighting not only relationships of support and inclusion but also the tensions that worked to marginalize and exclude women.

This volume presents writings pertaining to women's rich and diverse participation--despite male cultural domination--in the realms of both reading and writing. Arrangement is in sections on the practices of women's literacy, the role of women in convents, and exemplary women and their works--Lope de Vega, Ana Caro, and Maria de Zayas, among others.

Masculine Virtue in Early Modern Spain extricates the history of masculinity in early modern Spain from the narrative of Spain’s fall from imperial power after 1640. This book culls genres as diverse as emblem books, poetry, drama, courtesy treatises and prose fiction, to restore the inception of courtiership at the Spanish Hapsburg court to the history of masculinity. Refuting the current conception that Spain’s political decline precipitated a ’crisis of masculinity’, Masculine Virtue maps changes in figurations of normative masculine conduct from 1500 to 1700. As Spain assumed the role of Europe’s first modern centralized empire, codes of masculine conduct changed to meet the demands of global rule. Viewed chronologically, Shifra Armon shows Spanish conduct literature to reveal three axes of transformation. The ideal subject (gendered male in both practice and law) became progressively more adaptable to changing circumstances, more intensely involved in currying his own public image, and more desirous of achieving renown. By bringing recent advances in gender theory to bear on normative rather than non-normative masculinities of early modern Spain, Armon is able to foreground the emergence of energizing new models of masculine virtue that continue to resonate today.

The Politics of Emotion explores the intersection of powerful emotional states—love, melancholy, grief, and madness—with gender and political power on the Iberian Peninsula from the Middle Ages to the early modern period. Using an array of sources—literary texts, medical treatises, and archival documents—Nuria Silleras-Fernandez focuses on three royal women: Isabel of Portugal (1428–1496), queen-consort of Castile; Isabel of Aragon (1470–1498), queen-consort of Portugal; and Juana of Castile (1479–1555), queen of Castile and its empire. Each of these women was perceived by their contemporaries as having gone "mad" as a result of excessive grief, and all three were related to Isabel the Catholic (1451–1504), queen of Castile and a woman lauded in her time as a paragon of reason. Through the lives and experiences of these royal women and the observations, judgments, and machinations of their families, entourages, and circles of writers, chronicles, courtiers, moralists, and physicians in their orbits, Silleras-Fernandez addresses critical questions about how royal women in Iberia were expected to behave, the affective standards to which they were held, and how perceptions about their emotional states influenced the way they were able to exercise power. More broadly, The Politics of Emotion details how the court cultures in medieval and early modern Castile and Portugal contributed to the development of new notions of emotional excess and mental illness.

Contrary to early modern patriarchal assumptions, this study argues that rather trying to impose obedience or enclosure on women of their own rank and status, noblemen in early modern Spain depended on the active collaboration of noblewomen to maintain and expand their authority, wealth, and influence. While the image of virtuous, secluded, silent, and chaste women did bolster male authority in general and help to assure individual noblemen that their children were their own, the presence of active, vocal, and political women helped these same men move up the social ladder, guard their property and wealth, gain political influence, win legal battles, and protect their minor heirs. Drawing on a variety of documents-guardianships, wills, dowry and marriage contracts, lawsuits, genealogies, and a few letters-from the family archives of the nine noble families housed in the Osuna and Frías collections in Toledo, Guardianship, Gender and the Nobility in Early Modern Spain explores the lives and roles of female guardians. Grace Coolidge examines in detail the legal status of these women, their role within their families, and their responsibilities for the children and property in their care. To Spanish noblemen, Coolidge argues, the preservation of family, power, and lineage was more important than the prescriptive gender roles of their time, and faced with the emergency generated by the premature death of the male title holder, they consistently turned to the adult women in their families for help. Their need for support and for allies against their own mortality meant, in turn, that they expected and trained their female relatives to take an active part in the economic and political affairs of the family.

This is the first essay collection to examine the relation between text and gender in Spain from a broad geographical, social and cultural perspective covering more than 300 years. The contributors examine women and the construction of gender thematically, dealing with the areas of politics, law, religion, sexuality, literature and economics, and in a variety of social categories, from Christians and Moriscas, queens and merchants, peasants and visionaries, heretics and madwomen. The essays cover different regions in the Spanish monarchy, including Andalusia, Aragon, Castile, Catalonia, Valencia and Spanish America, from the fifteenth century through to the eighteenth century. Women, Texts and Authority in Early Modern Spain focuses on two central themes: gender relations in the shaping of family and community life, and women's authority in spheres of power. The representation of women in a variety of texts such as poetry, court cases, or even account books illustrate the multifaceted world in which women lived, constantly choosing and negotiating their identities. The appeal of this collection is not limited to scholars of Spanish history and literature; it is deliberately designed to address the issue of how gender relations were constructed in the formation of modern society, and therefore will be of interest to scholars of women's and gender history generally. Because of the emphasis on how this construction occurs in texts, the collection will also be attractive to scholars interested in literary studies and/or print culture.