Women, Texts and Authority in the Early Modern Spanish World (review)

An important contribution to understanding the early modern world, this collection of essays explores women's language through texts and contexts from the past. Women's language of the past presents two main problems: explaining why certain symbols and words belonged whereas others did not; and the 'owning' of the text itself.

Debra Blumenthal analyses paternity suits brought by female slaves in Valencia, based on the legal code Furs de Valencia,which ruled that a child from a master/slave union was born free and the mother was also entitled to freedom, whatever her ethnicity. To demand these rights, the woman could file a demanda de libertat but she had to prove a sexual relationship with her master and/or, a master's acknowledgment of his paternity through either word or action, such as baptismal costs.

Using chronicles, Elizabeth A. Lehfeldt shows how Isabella and Ferdinand negotiated shared sovereignty through their system of government and the political reality of joint rule. The texts paint an ambivalent picture rather than the ideal, raising questions of gender, authority and the specifics of power, escalating after Isabella claimed the throne of Castile. Representative of a discourse of gender politics in early modern Spain, the texts show Isabella managing to forge her own script without emasculating Ferdinand, or threatening the patriarchal order of Spain.

Gretchen D. Starr-LeBeau examines documents of Hispano-Jewish and Hispano-Jewish women converts to Christianity, providing textual evidence of a complex social dynamic initially showing a negative role of passive models of femininity provided by daughters of recently converted Jews. Initially appearing to blame their mothers to save their own lives, the subliminal protection efforts of the women emerge; they 'blame' those who are deceased or absent. Maintaining some agency of their own, while conforming to Inquisitorial demands, such implied coercion was accompanied by evidence of a broader community collective. Self defence was a communal project, conferring with each other in constructing trial documents, made easier in prison because they were all confined in one large room.

Bethany Aram conceptualises madness through legal and therapeutic texts in sixteenth-century Spain, pointing towards the malleability of both gender and madness. Madness could prove both useful and debilitating for the subject, a means of overcoming legal authorities which had declared her mad, but enabling a degree of personal authority over the body by refusing food, medicine or spiritual intervention. What constituted madness in the early modern period may perhaps be seen as a process of representing the potentially mad as well as the wilfully sane, more a dynamic construction rather than a modern objective condition.

Mary Elizabeth Perry examines the ethnic Morisco communities of early modern Spain. Arabic and Aljamiado texts were banned in the sixteenth century, forcing the hiding of such works. The texts offer an insight into Morisco culture, beliefs, traditions, resistance, survival, and gender ideology through narratives which endeavoured to preserve the essence of Morisco communities. The story of Job and his wife Rhama offered empowerment for Morisco wives and mothers whose husbands had 'disappeared'. Painting a traditional model of wifely duties, the empowerment presented in the texts enabled women to act as pivots of resistance and cohesion by retaining their Islamic traditions in communities constantly threatened with extinction by Christians.

Alison Weber explores convent autobiographies, the vidas or nuns' lives written by mandate in response to a confessor's command. The vida constituted an exposé of her spiritual life for his perusal, its creation a binary relationship which was either oppressive or cooperative, depending on the nature of the confessor. The genre was a 'social text' in which a woman's religious experience, now textualised, became a social event or series of events through which men and women negotiated their beliefs and goals within masculine dominated Catholicism. Sherry M. Velasco visualises gender on the page of convent literature, revealing a complex configuration of textual...