Power and Gender in Renaissance Spain: Eight Women of the Mendoza Family, 1450-1650 (review)

Nader's incisive introduction constitutes the most valuable contribution to this volume. Placing herself in the vanguard of scholars studying power and gender, she shows that facile invocation of the overwhelming power of patriarchy, all too commonly alleged to have stifled women's agency in the early modern period, is badly mistaken. Much more than acknowledgment of a few exceptions that confirm the rule is at issue here. As Davis and many others over the last quarter-century have shown, ingenious women on all social levels managed to locate and penetrate a less than solid system of male dominance.¹ Religious women, by virtue of their claimed direct relationships with the divine, managed to invert power relationships between themselves and their confessors.² But Nader goes one giant step further, arguing in favor of "a dual system, one in which patriarchy coexisted with matriarchy. . . . Just as patriarchy privileges all men, whether they are fathers are not, matriarchy empowers all women to control the property they own and make decisions for themselves and their families, including decisions that require political action and economic management" (3–4). In this dual-system perspective, gender appears not as "the sole, or even the central, factor that determined opportunities for women," but as "one axis among several—wealth, marital status, age—that could signify hierarchy in a corporate society" (5).

Applied retrospectively, Nader's multifaceted theoretical lens can serve to sharpen the focus of excellent recent work on women as political and economic actors across modern Europe.³ All future studies in this area must take it into account. In this book, however, it is presented in a specifically Spanish context. Nader maintains that her insights are confirmed by the eight essays (three by historians, five by literary scholars) that follow—discussions of nine women belonging to the elite Mendoza family.⁴ Her much too generous assertion is inaccurate. Unfortunately, all but one of the contributors follow the retrograde "they also served" paradigm of doing the history of women. Inability to find evidence of "subversion" and "feminism," phenomena that Nader makes clear should not be expected in this era (5–6), seems to disappoint some of them.

Many careless errors slipped through the editing process. "Novitiate" ("probationary period"), for instance, twice substitutes for the correct term, "novice" (an aspiring religious preparing to take final vows). Relying on a genealogy published in England, Grace E. Coolidge implausibly suggests that a potential spouse of Magdalena de Bobadilla, "Eric, Duke of Brunswick-Lunenburgh," was probably an English nobleman; she mangles several other German place-names (140). Oddly, such experienced literary scholars as Ronald E. Surtz and María del Carmen Vaquero Serrano commit the elementary error of assuming that literary sources addressed or dedicated to their protagonists mirrored these women's views and influenced their actions. Only the last essay, Anne J. Cruz's "Willing Desire: Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza and Female Subjectivity," presents a nuanced account informed by feminist literary theory.

Like much scholarship on early modern Iberia, this volume seems to be aimed primarily at Hispanists. For readers outside this group, it is unnecessarily difficult. Genealogical tables provide some help, but inclusion of one or two maps of Spain and a list of Spanish and Portuguese monarchs during the two centuries covered would have been highly desirable.