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Relations Between the Sexes In Spain And Its Empire
- Journal of Women's History
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 4, Number 1, Spring 1992
- pp. 142-147
- 10.1353/jowh.2010.0062
- Review
- Additional Information
Relations Between the Sexes In Spain And Its Empire Alexandra Parma Cook and Noble David Cook. Good Faith and Truthful Ignorance: A Case of Transatlantic Bigamy. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. xvi + 206 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-8223-1086-1 (cl); $21.95. Carmen Martin Gaite. Lßve Customs in Eighteenth-Century Spain. Translated by Maria G. Tomsich. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991. xv + 204 pp. ISBN 0-520-07043-7 (cl); $34.95. Ramón A. Gutiérrez. Wien Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846. Stanford : Stanford University Press, 1991. xxxi + 424 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-8047-1816-4 (cl); 0-8047-1832-6 (pb); $49.50 (cl); $16.95 (pb). Muriel Nazzari Scholars generaUy agree that marriage changed everywhere in the Western world sometime between the seventeenth and the late nineteenth centuries. The transformation was mainly from a marriage arranged by parents to a love marriage in which a man and woman made their own choices. The three volumes reviewed here serve to document, iUuminate, or qualify these changes in the Spanish empire. Cook and Cook's book studies just one, or, rather, two marriages; but as it delves into the complexities of a transatlantic bigamy case, it ülusfrates many of the characteristics of marriage in the sixteenth-century Spanish empire. Having come upon documents in the General Archive of the Indies in SeviUe that related to a bigamy suit against Francisco Nogueral de UUoa brought in mid-sixteenth-century VaUadoUd and Salamanca, the authors searched through archives and parish registers in two continents to ful out the fascinating picture of one man with two wives who was finally aUowed by the Church to retain his second wife, despite the continued existence of his first wife. Francisco Noguerol's first marriage demonstrates the importance of the dowry and is an example of the arranged marriage, for, as a young man in Spain, Nogueral made a marriage arranged by his mother against his wül. After receiving a substantial dowry, Nogueral left for America, where he played a role in the Peruvian civü war and amassed a good-sized © 1992 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 4 No. ι (Spring) 1992 Book Review: Muriel Nazzari 143 fortune. Noguerol's second marriage was by his own choice and especiaUy his wife's choice, but it further demonstrates the importance of property for marriage. Noguerol married again in Peru several years after he received letters from his two sisters, who were nuns in Spain, informing him that his first wife had died. Though neither spouse was in any way coerced into this marriage, both were careful to choose a marriage partner with sufficient property to constitute an exceUent match. Noguerol's first wife was stiU ative and she soon learned that he had remarried. Doña Beatriz de ViUasur initiated the dramatic bigamy suit after Noguerol began concluding his affairs in Peru and had sent a substantial amount of money to be invested in Spain, thereby alerting her and her relatives to his present prosperity. The suit was first Utigated before the CouncU of the Indies prior to Noguerol's arrival in Spain. When he returned, he went to the ecclesiastical court to have his first marriage annulled. The suits and countersuits lasted several years and included a long period in which Noguerol was imprisoned and not permitted to live with his second wife. The CouncU of the Indies finaUy ruled in favor of Doña Beatriz, declaring Noguerol a bigamist. He was fined and exüed from several Spanish cities for several years, but he was not ordered to return to his first wife. In order to be reunited with Doña Catalina, his second wife, however, he needed a favorable ecclesiatical ruling. Noguerol and Doña Catalina appealed to the Papacy, receiving a Papal brief. The Pope and the Salamanca apostoUc judge ruled in favor of Noguerol and Doña Catalina, returning them to married life together. Regarding marriage, Church law was more powerful than civü law. The authors found documentation for money sent much later to a member of the Roman curia, which suggests that the favorable...