Women Warriors in Early Modern Spain: A Tribute to Bárbara Mujica ed. by Susan L. Fischer and Frederick A. De Armas (review)

Women Warriors in Early Modern Spain gathers fourteen essays to honor Dr. Bárbara Mujica, Emeritus Professor of Spanish at Georgetown University, whose work has centered on early modern Spanish theater and early modern women. Mujica's extensive scholarly work includes the books A New Anthology of Early Modern Spanish Theater (2014), Shakespeare and the Spanish Comedia (2013), Teresa de Avila, Lettered Woman (2009), and Women Writers of Early Modern Spain (2004). Professor Mujica also has published original creative work (novels and short fiction), most notable in the context of this volume is her novel Sister Teresa (2007). Given the scope of Mujica's scholarly and creative publications, it is fitting that a volume in her honor should encompass a similarly varied and yet focused collection of essays by scholars representing the disciplines and topics of her work: early modern Spanish theater, early modern women's history and literature, Teresa of Ávila as historical and literary subject, and theology.

The volume's introduction by Fischer and De Armas identifies the focus of this collection—that of early modern women not as victims but rather as warriors: "women who battled the status quo, defended causes, challenged authority, and broke barriers" (21). The introduction situates these essays in light of scholarship that has revealed the complexity and richness of women as active participants in early modern society. While "[e]arly feminists tended to focus on the idealization or victimization of women in literature" (7), more recent scholarship has found that "[e]arly modern Spain was replete with mujeres varoniles, manly women, who challenged the notion that women could have no agency" (15).

Women Warriors is divided into four parts. Part 1: "Women as Dramatic Subjects" looks at strong women characters in early modern Spanish drama. The first essay, "Self-Fashion Show: Women in the Plays of Cervantes and Significant Others" by Edward H. Friedman, studies the female characters of Cervantes's plays La Numancia, Los tratos de Argel, El rufián dichoso, El Gallardo español, La gran sultana, El laberinto de amor, La entretenida, and La casa de los celos y selvas de Ardenia, and Pedro de Urdemalas. Friedman finds that these characters represent the "breadth of women's roles in drama and society" (46). The second article, "Chained by Her Words: Calderón's La gran Cenobia and the Perils of the Sublime" by Frederick de Armas, analyzes the historical character Zenobia Queen of Palmyra. De Armas finds that the classical concept of the sublime in the 1625 play by Calderón de la Barca "impels the action of La gran Cenobia and drives the queen to greatness" (53). Emilie L. Bergmann's essay "Folklore as Queer: Vélez de Guevara's La serrana de la Vera" studies the legendary mountain-girl (serrana), comparing Vélez's serrana to depictions found in historical ballads of the romancero as well as to Lope de Vega's earlier La Serrana de la Vera o de Plasencia. Bergmann finds in this dramatization of the mujer varonil contradictions and ambiguities such that "the conundrum of the serrana's sexuality and her gender identity continues to trouble the readers of Vélez's play" (85). Teresa Scott Soufas in her essay "Mujer vestida de hombre to the Extreme: Catalina de Erauso in Montalbán's La monja alférez" also examines ambiguities and contradictions in the representation of gender identity, as well as in the conflation of the fictitious and real Erauso and in the idea of a "lieutenant nun" in this 1626 play.

The essays of part 2: "Women in the Theater: Actors, Producers, Constructed Subjectivity" begins with Elizabeth Cruz Petersen's essay "Career-Oriented Women in the Theater: María Álvarez, Bárbara Coronel, Fabiana Laura." Cruz Petersen finds that these seventeenth-century managers (autoras) were not only "strong minded...