Guardianship, Gender, and the Nobility in Early Modern Spain (review)

In early modern Spain, disease, war, voyaging, and confrontations with the law often resulted in the death of the male head of noble families. A power vacuum was left when death occurred before children were old enough to inherit titles and estates. Understanding the threat this posed to the rights of their children, and the status and wealth of their families, fathers took care to name guardians for their children in their wills. From 1350 to 1750, more than 80 per cent of noblemen chose their wives to fulfil this role.

While appointing one’s wife to be the guardian of her own children may seem the natural choice, in early modern Spain this was at odds with the concept that wives should be enclosed within households under the protection and authority of men. Guardianship involved being active in the public sphere and this went against the ideal. Moreover, the Siete Partidas, the legal code, suggested that women were not up to the task, as not only were they ‘naturally greedy and avaricious’ and on a par with ‘the dumb, deaf and mentally deficient’ (p. 1), there was a likelihood they could neglect or harm their children. As women were considered to be naturally lustful, it was feared that if mothers remarried, their love for a new husband would overpower all other affections and responsibilities – to the detriment of the children under their guardianship.

In Guardianship, Gender, and the Nobility in Early Modern Spain, Grace Coolidge investigates this dichotomy between social practice and legal tradition. In doing so, she shows that noblemen chose wives as guardians for their children in the knowledge that they were able ‘emergency carriers of wealth, figures who could hold the family together until its future could be secured’ (p. 95). Her evidence is taken primarily from wills, dowry and marriage contracts, lawsuits, genealogies, and letters from the family archives of nine noble families in the Osuna, Frías, and Astorga collections in the National Historic Archives in Toledo. The cases include women who were tutores, guardians of girls under the age of twelve and boys under the age of fourteen, and curadores, guardians of children aged between twelve and twenty-five – the age of majority.

In the first chapter, the legal position of women and the legal aspects of guardianship are explained. While a widower automatically retained legal guardianship of his children, a widow did not. Yet, when women were appointed guardians, they were able to actively participate in business matters, which meant that they were held legally liable for their economic decisions. It was generally a failure to administer, maintain, or even increase assets that caused the court to remove the rights of guardianship, but as Coolidge states in Chapter 2, such women were ‘privileged and worked all their lives to retain and improve their status within the established system’ (p. 53). It was thus logical that their husbands should trust them with the task.

The ‘hard work, worry, and responsibility’ (p. 65) associated with guardianship, changed emphasis during the period covered by this book. In the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, guardians often had to fight small-scale wars over boundaries and jurisdictions. After the expulsion of the last Muslim ruler of Granada in 1492, such ‘battles’ were more likely to take place in the courtroom as the nobility consolidated their possessions and set about managing their estates. In Chapters 3 and 4, Coolidge shows that while guardianship, especially of an heir, had its advantages, women guardians faced myriad challenges, especially as estates under guardianship were vulnerable to legal challenges from relatives and rival families. One of their most important duties was to ensure that children made marriages that secured the future status and prosperity of their family – no easy task in a family without a male head. The fact that many women were successful suggests that they had the education...