The Routledge Research Companion to Early Modern Spanish Women Writers ed. by Nieves Baranda Leturio, Anne J. Cruz (review)

Introducing this very useful volume, concurrently published in English and in Spanish, editors Baranda Leturio and Cruz highlight their objective: giving an overview of women’s writing focused not primarily on their individual works but rather the collective endeavor in which women forged their own discursive space. They aim thereby to help correct the lack of attention to women’s writings in literary histories and to provide greater understanding of how women could raise their voices and wield significant social and even political power, developing a parallel women’s history within a patriarchal society.

The twenty-two articles that follow are divided in six sections: The first, “Women’s Worlds,” is opened by historian Grace E. Coolidge, who outlines the Spanish social hierarchy in “Aristocracy and the Urban Elite,” paying attention to the inheritance and marriage laws that gave elite women more power than in many European countries. Anne Cruz’s richly informative article, “Women’s Education in Early Modern Spain,” describes the role of class, geographic location, family libraries, and religious and political policy in encouraging varying degrees of female literacy despite patriarchal restrictions. Emily C. Francomano, in “The Foundations of the querella de las mujeres” traces its history in Spain.

The second section, “Conventual Spaces,” begins with Isabelle Poutrin’s “Autobiographies,” in which she notes that while women’s writing was discouraged unless mandated and guided by a nun’s confessor, its varieties can enrich social, cultural, religious, and even political history. Mercedes Marcos Sánchez concisely illustrates how this enrichment occurs in “Chronicles, Biographies, Hagiographies,” noting St. Teresa’s importance as model writer. In “Conventual Correspondence,” María Leticia Sánchez Hernández and Nieves Baranda Leturio sketch the importance and complexity of nuns’ letter-writing, whether for spiritual, business, political, or personal reasons. María Carmen Alarcón Román treats nuns as dramatists, actresses, and audience, and connects their work to secular models in “Convent Theater.” Stacy L. Schlau highlights St. Teresa as a model for other convent poets and notes important collections of and on their works in “Body, Spirit, and Verse: Reading Early Modern Women’s Religious Poetry.”

Leading off the third section, “Secular Literature,” María Dolores Martos Pérez, in “The Poetic Voice,” considers the challenges for female poets in inserting themselves as subject voice in the masculine Petrarchan lyric tradition. Demonstrating this in gender-silencing English translation is problematic, but the Spanish originals appear in footnotes in this as in other articles. Inmaculada Osuna Rodríguez, in “Literary Academies and Poetic Tournaments,” reviews the general exclusion of women from the former and the need for documenting their occasional participation in the latter. Shifra Armon’s own gynocritism contributes a good survey of women’s novels and narratives, in a chapter of the same name, from Beatriz Bernal’s chivalric novel through the novellas of Zayas, Meneses, and Carvajal to the pastoral novel of the nun Abarca de Bolea. And in “Women Playwrights,” Amy R. Williamsen asserts persuasively that focus on women playwrights the last twenty years has revealed how they dramatized the complex dynamics of female friendship, hints of homoeroticism, subversion of generic conventions, the artificiality of dividing convent from secular theater, inversions of male privilege by men’s objectification, and the changing afterlife of women’s plays.

In the fourth section, “Women in the Public Sphere,” María Carmen Marín Pina writes about “Public Poetry,” which allowed a few women a public voice, usually in the mode of occasional poetry, often published in pamphlets ranging from two to sixteen pages. Ana Caro and others wrote verse relaciones of festivities, poetry celebrating historical events, religious verse, and even the occasional female-authored ballad or dramatic loa. Emilie L. Bergmann contributes a superb article on “Spain’s Women Humanists,” opening with the erudite Beatriz Galindo, who taught Queen Isabel and Catherine of...