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  • Disabled Bodies in Early Modern Spanish Literature. Prostitutes, Aging Women and Saints by Encarnación Juárez-Almendros
  • Madeline Sutherland-Meier
Encarnación Juárez-Almendros. Disabled Bodies in Early Modern Spanish Literature. Prostitutes, Aging Women and Saints. liverpool up, 2017. 201 pp.

one of the challenges facing scholars who work on disability in medieval, early modern, and eighteenth-century culture is that most work in disability studies has concentrated on modern and contemporary culture. For Hispanists, the fact that this scholarship has been predominately Anglophone in focus is an additional challenge. For these reasons, Encarnación Juárez-Almendros's book—which examines early modern Spanish texts from the vantage point of feminist disability studies while keeping in mind the historical and social context that gave rise to them—is welcome. In the very first sentence of her introduction, she sets out for her readers what she plans to accomplish: "to examine, from the perspective of feminist disability theories, the concepts and roles of women in selected Spanish discourses and literary texts from the late fifteenth to the seventeenth century" (1).

In chapter 1, "The Creation of Female Disability: Medical, Prescriptive and Moral Discourses," Juárez-Almendros briefly considers philosophical models that have predominated in Western thought that imagine the ideal body as male, young, and able. Against this view, the female body is "an insufficient and deficient version of this model" (19). She then looks at early modern vernacular medical texts and moral treatises in order to show how and why women's bodies have been negatively marked by society and culture. As Juárez-Almendros notes in her discussion of medical texts, notwithstanding notable advances in the sixteenth century, as treatises on anatomy advanced the study of the human body, outdated classical and medieval ideas persisted. These included the theory of the humors, according to which women were cold and moist, lacking in what Galen called "vital heat"; the idea that women had inverted interior genitals; and the Hippocratic notion that women have their own semen and ejaculate. Such abiding notions perpetuated the view of women as imperfect, defective, and corrupt. A representative example of this is the Spanish royal physician Bernardino Montaña de Monserrate's 1551 [End Page 291] Libro de la Anothomia del hombre. The information that medical manuals from this period offered on menstruation and sexuality also portrayed women as dangerous, infectious, destructive, and in need of the restraint marriage provided. These notions were reinforced by the moral prescriptions of figures like Juan Luis Vives (De Institutione Feminae Christianae, 1523), Fray Luis de León (La perfecta casada, 1583), and Juan de la Cerda (Libro intitulado vida política de todos los estados de mugeres, 1599). For all three of these writers, young women had to be protected, married women controlled by their husbands, and older women were not to be trusted. In short, women had to be contained and regulated to fulfill their expected social functions: marriage and procreation.

Syphilis appeared in Europe at the end of the fifteenth century. The illness spread rapidly, attaining pandemic proportions, and soon affected all levels of society in Spain and elsewhere in Europe. It is not surprising that as the sixteenth century wore on and the illness spread, syphilitic characters began to appear in literature. In chapter 2, "The Artifice of Syphilitic and Damaged Female Bodies in Literature," Juárez-Almendros considers three early modern texts featuring characters marked by the symptoms of the disease: Francisco Delicado's La Lozana andaluza (1528), Cervantes's El casamiento engañoso (1613), and another short novel attributed to Cervantes, La tía fingida. Syphilis was known to be transmitted sexually, so the illness carried a moral condemnation with it, at least with regard to women. What we see in these works is that, as the symptoms of syphilis are layered on top of the well-established view of women as imperfect, the disease becomes gendered and the female characters who suffer from it (prostitutes) are not only represented as physically and morally decayed, but are depicted as dangerous infectious agents as well. And men such as Cervantes's Campuzano, who has become ill as a result...

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