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  • Sibling Relations and Gender in the Early Modern World: Sisters, Brothers and Others
  • Giovanna Benadusi
Naomi J. Miller and Naomi Yavneh, eds. Sibling Relations and Gender in the Early Modern World: Sisters, Brothers and Others. Women and Gender in the Early Modern World. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2006. xvi + 238 pp. index. illus. $99.95. ISBN: 0-7546-4010-8.

Naomi Miller and Naomi Yavneh, already well-known for their volume on Maternal Measures (Ashgate, 2000), have once again assembled an interesting and [End Page 1402] stimulating cluster of essays by scholars from various disciplines that include literature and Romance languages, musicology, history and art history, women's studies, and theater. In their introduction, the editors contend that while scholars of the family have conventionally focused on parental and filial ties, the bonds between brothers and sisters have been largely neglected. In attempting to relocate the connections between siblings in early modern Europe this interdisciplinary collaboration demonstrates that the relationships between brothers and sisters shaped family life, gender relations, women's roles, literary narrative, theater, and the dynastic strategies of European rulers, ultimately defining Renaissance society and culture. The book, comprised of seventeen essays in addition to the introduction and a few concluding pages by the editors, is arranged topically into four sections. The geographical range covered by the authors is broad and encom-passes England, Italy, Germany, France, and Spain; but the main emphasis is on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England and Italy — the countries of specialty of the two editors — covering, respectively, nine and four essays.

In the first section, "Divine Devotion," Susan Laningham, Kari Boyd McBride, Craig Monson, and Merry Wiesner-Hanks examine the sisterly bonds that formed both inside the cloister walls and through religious practices. In this way they offer microhistories of women, mostly from the upper classes, punctuated by devotion but also competition, by confinement but also celebration. At times, as Boyd McBride and Wiesner-Hanks show, religious and family interests overlapped as brothers and sisters enhanced the educational opportunities of English Catholic girls or backed the devotional feelings of their Catholic sisters in Germany. Contrary to these Protestant areas, in Catholic Spain and Italy, instead, the interaction between dynastic interests and monastic ideals often clashed. The multilayered interplay and ensuing conflicts between familial and personal ambitions, on one side, and communal sisterly interests, on the other, is illustrated by Laningham with the case of Maria Vela y Cueto, a Spanish aristocratic nun who had visions and experienced mysterious ailments. Maria's extreme asceticism and presumed holiness, although challenged by the convent's sisters, was successfully used by her more powerful brothers, who, in securing her canonization, brought eternal fame to the Vela's family. But, as Monson shows in his interesting essay on convent music, blood and devotional siblings often intersected with the formation inside the cloister walls of "intergenerational ties of sisterhood" (46), which not only supported monastic families of sisters, aunts, and great-aunts but also nurtured family tradition of musical talent along the female line.

Religion and power remain important themes also in the second section, "Ties That Bind," in particular in the essays by Jane Couchman and Carol Levin. By charting affection and self-determination in the letters that the Calvinist Catherine of Bourbon and the Anglican Elizabeth I exchanged with their brothers and sisters, respectively, Henry IV king of France, and Edward VI and in particular the staunch Catholic Mary Tudor, the two authors show how the love that brothers [End Page 1403] and sisters might have felt for each other was profoundly mediated by the constrains generated by the dynastic strategies of the European royalty, by religious differences, and by hierarchies of gender. Despite his deeply felt brotherly love, Henry IV constrained Catherine's marriage choices and insistently, albeit unsuccessfully, tried to force her conversion to Catholicism. It was in their poems and in their pastoral romances that less-celebrated sisters often refashioned their relationships with their siblings assuming more influential positions (Margaret Hannay and Sheila Cavanagh).

Competition and collaboration often coexisted in sibling bonds as the essays in section 3, "Drawing the Line," illustrate. Sometimes less powerful brothers successfully provided support to their more...

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