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

From 1903 to 1905, Manuel Serrano y Sanz published the two-volume Apuntes para una biblioteca de escritoras españolas desde 1401 a 1833 (Notes Toward a Library of Spanish Women Writers from 1401–1833). It remained a little-known bibliographic curiosity until it became the primary source for the landmark anthologies and critical editions of the 1980s and 1990s. Since then, the recovery of texts written by early modern Spanish women and complementary analysis and contextualization has continued unabated. In 2004, Nieves Baranda launched BIESES (Bibliografía de Escritoras Españolas; www.bieses.net), a database that now includes over 11,000 entries related to Spanish women writers from the Middle Ages to 1800. The research companion reviewed here represents an indispensable tool for anyone committed to exploring this embarrassment of riches. The essays, organized around broad themes and genres rather than individual authors, are designed to trace women's writing—both literary and extra-literary—as a collective endeavor that alternately emulated and refocused men's literary models. Each chapter consists of a review of scholarship to date, followed by recommendations for future research and a bibliography.

Section I, "Women's Worlds," provides historical context for the subsequent essays. Grace E. Coolidge's essay on the aristocracy and the urban elites points out that for these women, class privilege often trumped gender restrictions. Royal women played important political roles as guardians and regents; elite women, whose property rights were legally protected to a greater degree than in the rest of Europe, also exercised considerable influence over marital strategies and wealth management. Anne Cruz's essay similarly reveals that women's education was more widespread in Spain than in other European countries. Girls might acquire basic literacy at home or in schools, but opportunities for enhancing skills continued beyond childhood, whether in the convent, at court, or in various professional milieus. Cruz recommends further research on convent libraries, family correspondence between women, and the question of women's participation in scientific and medical discourses. Emily Francomano explores the wide-ranging influence of the querelle des femmes debates, which ironically contributed to an awareness of gender as a historical construction.

Section II, "Conventual Spaces," attests to the enormous productivity in research on monastic women's writing. Isabelle Poutrin explores the various types of autobiographical texts written by "mandate": that is, in obeisance to a confessor or father superior. She notes that this mandate served not only to ascertain the authenticity of the nun's mystical experience but in some cases to advance her reputation for sanctity. She recommends further studies of conventual autobiographies as a source of social and cultural history, historical anthropology, and political history. Mercedes Marcos Sánchez argues that the genres of foundation chronicle, biography, and hagiography frequently overlapped and that their authors—many of whom wrote anonymously and collaboratively—were willing historians, eager to promote their order and to perpetuate the memories of their monastic sisters. María Leticia Sánchez Hernández and Nieves Baranda Leturio assess current scholarship on nuns' letters, identifying this corpus as a largely untapped source of information on the complexity of nuns' lives: their illnesses, political and intramural conflicts, economic activities, and identity formation, among other topics. María del Carmen Alarcón Román points out the wide variety of functions that convent plays served, signaling the need for more research on mise en scène, the role of humor, and the self-representation of nuns as actresses. Stacey Schlau urges future scholars to explore the relation between religious poetry and music, to expand the study of themes and techniques, and to pay due attention to a wider group of monastic women poets.

Section III turns to secular literature written by women. María Dolores Martos Pérez notes that women poets re-wrote classical myths from a female perspective, and subverted...