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129 2 Two Sisters Among the Sisters: The Flowering of Intellectual Convent Culture On January 17, 1588, two sisters from a university family, María (1568–1640) and Cecilia (1570–1646) Sobrino Morillas, took the veil together in Valladolid, where they entered the Discalced Carmelite Convento de la Concepción, Saint Teresa’s fourth foundation (1568). Their family background and the somewhat unconventional choice of convent offered María, who took the name María de San Alberto, and Cecilia, who became Cecilia del Nacimiento, far greater opportunities for learning and creativity than those generally afforded their contemporaries. The location of their Carmelite convent in the mercantile city of Valladolid, which was the seat of the royal court from 1600 to 1606, would maintain their access to the predominant secular trends of the epoch.1 Valladolid was also a religious center: “There are enough monasteries to comprise a famous [principal] city in themselves , and it is a wonder that there can be so many convents in Valladolid,” marveled a late sixteenth-century Portuguese traveler.2 The lives and writings of these two sisters exemplify humanistic culture as it was transplanted to the monasteries of seventeenth-century Spain and its colonies. María de San Alberto and Cecilia del Nacimiento were most fortunate in having the model of their natural mother’s humanistic intellect as a foundation for their work in the convent. Although she died when they were young, Cecilia Morillas (1539–81) had sufficient time to form her daughters’ minds and characters .3 María de San Alberto gave her mother full credit for guiding her intellectual and religious growth. Although in doing so she was following a convention of the Vida, in Cecilia Morillas’s case the praise evidently was not exaggerated. Cecilia Morillas was a learned woman whose life story offers readers a glimpse of the restrictions, as well as the opportunities, afforded elite servants of the aristocracy . With no direct access to formal schooling, she studied alongside her older children. Meanwhile, it was assumed she would manage a household staffed with servants, and display her skill and productivity with the needle. One of her seven sons, Diego de San José, the family chronicler, recounts their mother’s story in a prose that betrays strong affection despite its religious formulas. His chronicle, 130 cHapTer TwO the basis for all subsequent histories of the Sobrinos, is especially valuable for the biography of Cecilia Morillas. Diego captures his mother’s talents in a phrase that juxtaposes verbal composition with the stereotypical emblem of womanhood— sewing—and harmonizes them. She was accustomed to “dar manos, tanto con la pluma cuanto con la aguja” [MS 93, fol. 8] (applying her hands to the pen as readily as to the needle).4 Although his intention is to portray the requisite sacrificing mother of a saintly son in a spiritual biography of his brother Francisco, Fray Diego’s admiring portrait sketches Cecilia Morillas as a multifaceted Renaissance woman. While her eldest son studied, his mother learned along with him. Cecilia Morillas put her hard-won learning to two immediate uses for the family: she instructed the rest of her children and she wrote her husband’s official correspondence in French and Latin. Her sons and daughters all became gifted painters, musicians, and writers. She was largely responsible for their education in the arts and humanities of the period. Cecilia Morillas had met and married the Portuguese Antonio Sobrino (1518?–88) in Salamanca, where he was studying law. Cecilia Morillas’s brother was an influential attorney in Valladolid. It was to that city that the family moved after Antonio Sobrino completed his law studies. By 1556 he was secretary of the university . Gradually he obtained numerous other positions of confidence, both secular and ecclesiastic. According to his son Diego’s Relación (Account) about the family, Antonio Sobrino undertook these tasks from economic necessity, to supplement his paltry inheritance. Cecilia Morillas was even more active than her husband. Many luminaries of the time, including King Philip II, recognized doña Cecilia as an intellectual, artist, inventor, and illuminator. Her home was open to intellectuals and artists; the king’s cosmographer and mathematician was a regular visitor. Among the examples of her extraordinary talent, Diego de San José cites the following three. After a family friend, a Churchman at court, showed Philip II the illuminated manuscripts that Cecilia Morillas had executed, the king commissioned her to do several for the monumental religious edifice outside of...

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