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  • The Lives of Women: A New History of Inquisitional Spain
  • Allyson M. Poska
The Lives of Women: A New History of Inquisitional Spain. By Lisa Vollendorf. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2005. Pp. 256. $39.95 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).

Early modern Spain has become a vibrant canvas for the study of women. In addition to its active and influential literary world, its intensely bureaucratic and litigious culture and its Inquisitional tribunals offer an abundance of archival materials with which to explore the experiences of early modern women of many ethnicities, religions, and classes. In her new monograph Lisa Vollendorf both gives readers a glimpse into the current state of research on early modern Spanish women and offers suggestions for new research. The Lives of Women presents an overview of an exciting variety of texts, both archival and literary, each of which complicates the traditional view of rigid gender norms and female submissiveness in seventeenth-century Spanish society.

Vollendorf is a scholar of Spanish literature, and the central theme of her work is that literature scholars need to be more conversant with archival materials and historical context. Thus, although historians of early modern Spain will be quite familiar with many of the women whom Vollendorf has chosen to analyze, literature scholars and scholars working outside of the peninsula will find that this volume offers a strong introduction to the variety of texts by women and the type of questions that still require more investigation.

Vollendorf begins with the well-known Inquisition trial of Eleno/a de Céspedes, a person of unclear sex who lived as both a man and a woman at different points in his/her life. This complicated case reveals both Inquisitors and the defendant attempting to define the basic characteristics of sex and gender in a situation where neither is quite clear. She then juxtaposes this case with that of Bernarda Manuela, a conversa (a Christian woman of Jewish descent) accused of "judaizing" (lapsing into old beliefs or practices). In her remarkable twelve-page autobiographical statement to the Inquisition, Bernarda deftly employed traditional gender expectations in her own defense. Having married a violent man, she attempted to discredit her accuser (her husband) by presenting herself as a victimized woman who deserved sympathy, not further punishment. These two cases work well together, each introducing critical ideas about bodies, sexual relations, and gender norms. The Inquisition was the perfect forum for such conversations. With their intense interest in what people believed when they committed a heresy, Inquisitors purposely provoked such extensive and often remarkable responses from the accused. Later in the work Vollendorf returns to Inquisition trials to find similar conversations about sex and gender by single women. Juxtaposing a mystic, two prophetesses, and a purveyor of magic, here too she finds women strategically constructing their identities, picking and choosing among possible definitions of womanhood and femininity as they struggled to defend themselves against accusations of heresy.

Vollendorf only hints at the bigger picture; however, the outcomes of the trials that she has highlighted point toward other questions about gender [End Page 340] expectations in early modern Spain. Interestingly, the most problematic of her defendants, Eleno/a de Céspedes, was sentenced to ten years of hospital work. The conversa Bernarda Manuela received the harshest sentence of the women Vollendorf profiled: life imprisonment. Either male Inquisitors did not hold women to particularly high standards of responsibility for their actions or women's defenses were more successful than we might have expected.

Although historians will applaud her archival work, readers should be aware that the title of the volume is misleading. The Inquisition is not the central focus of the book. Moreover, recent research has significantly reconsidered the extent of cultural control exerted by the Inquisition. The many excellent studies of the various tribunals demonstrate that its effectiveness was highly variable and that most people never had any interaction with the institution. Inquisitional Spain, in other words, never existed.

Vollendorf then moves into the literary world, and here her expertise is evident. Using both familiar writers like María de Zayas and Ana Caro as well as less familiar nun-writers, Vollendorf provides an overview...

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