Perfect Wives, Other Women: Adultery and Inquisition in Early Modern Spain (review)

Georgina Dopico Black's Perfect Wives, Other Women: Adultery and Inquisition in Early Modern Spain makes the provocative proposition that early modern Spaniards played out two of their major cultural anxieties, concerns over Eucharistic devotion and ethnic/religious blood purity, by projecting them onto a third source of major cultural anxiety, the bodies of adulterous wives. Black argues that in early modern Iberia, questions of transubstantiation, religious conversion, and marital chastity were intimately related by virtue of their "illegibility." Just as there were no exterior signs to prove to the faithful that the wafer had changed into the body of Christ (or not, as the heretics would have it), a Christian had no evidence of a converso's true or false conversion, and a husband had no bodily evidence of his wife's chastity or adultery. Far from giving up on these sources of anxiety as unknowable, early modern Iberian society was relentless in its pursuit of deciphering them, primarily through the Holy Office of the Spanish Inquisition and related means of cultural control, which Black categorizes together as "inquisitorial hermeneutics."

In early modern Iberian literature, Black has found sites of resistance to inquisitorial hermeneutics. But, she argues, rather than directly expressing reservations about sacramentality or the legitimacy of inquisitorial surveillance, early modern Iberian authors, intentionally or not, transferred their criticisms to the less politically charged domestic sphere. Black makes her argument through a formal analysis of three literary sources, Fray Luis de León's La perfecta casada, Calderón de la Barca's El médico de su honra, and Sor Juana's Los empeños de una casa. These sources, a manual for wives, an honor play, and a comedy, respectively, have traditionally belonged to the province of gender studies. Scholarly debates around them have mostly run in the "good for women or bad for women" vein. Black takes her readers in a radically different direction.

Black reconceptualizes La perfecta casada, a sixteenth-century manual for wives still popular as a wedding gift into the twentieth century, as a testament to Fray Luis de León's resistance against the Holy Office and his rejection of specific inquisitorial charges against him. For example, she finds that echoes of León's defense against the Inquisition's charges that he had reinterpreted Old Testament sources in inappropriate ways surfaced in La perfecta casada through his repeated stress on precise translations and original meanings of words. More boldly, she suggests that the convoluted series of metaphors León employed and his selection of Judith, the biblical widow who slew Holofernes, as the perfect wife position La perfecta casada as "a (most likely unconscious) resistance to the more repressive norms it prescribes for perfect wives."

Calderón's most famous honor play receives similar treatment. Black resists reading the protagonist's uxoricide on unfounded suspicions of adultery as a Calderonian endorsement of vendetta murder. Instead, she reads El médico de su honra as a disguised stance against inquisitorial surveillance as well as against a rigid sexual honor code. Just as the protagonist looked for and misread signs of adultery onto his wife's innocent body, so, too, in Black's analysis, did the Inquisition look for and misread signs of heresy on the innocent bodies of conversos and others. The illegibility of wrongdoing and of innocence connects the two.

Black reads Sor Juana's less well known play, Los empeños de una casa, in terms of illegibility as it relates to Sor Juana's much-discussed sexuality and gender identity. Black rejects the traditional analysis of this comedy, which ties Sor Juana to her female protagonist, and the traditional approaches to Sor Juana's gender identity, which run the gamut from good bride of Christ to lesbian...