The Lives of Women: A New History of Inquisitional Spain

8. Toward a History of Women’s Education

169 8 Toward a History of Women’s Education T he endeavor of recovering women’s textual history necessarily involves an investigation of literacy and education. To date, no research synthesizes the roles women played in the educational sphere, yet we know that they advised nuns, priests, kings, and queens, as well as educating their family members. Women’s roles as educators extended from the informal to the formal, from the domestic to the political. As we will see in this final chapter, women positioned themselves within the church and in the larger culture as educators and reformers. As the previous chapters suggest, literacy and education have particular importance for Spanish culture of the early modern period, when the book market took shape, literacy rates rose, and convent foundations gave more women access to education than ever before. Indeed, the explosion of women’s writing in Spain’s long seventeenth century leaves us wondering to what extent educated women had an awareness of others like them. Many scholars, including Electa Arenal, Amy Katz Kaminsky, Stephanie Merrim, Elizabeth Ordóñez, and Stacey Schlau, have speculated on the degree to which women forged such communities within convents or literary circles, yet we still do not know whether a community of women writers existed. On an even broader scale, we have yet to reconstruct the connections among the larger pool of literate women of this period. It is difficult to say whether each operated in a vacuum, reinventing responses to a culture that insisted on their inferiority. We have ample evidence to prove that convents provided continuity among generations of educated women. Formally and informally, these institutions gave women access to the activism and intellectualism of other nuns, saints, and martyrs. The women who gained an education outside convent walls did so in spite of the mandate to provide women with only enough 170 The Lives of Women education to make them good wives—certainly not good scholars, activists, or writers. Yet even within these parameters, the slave who was born Elena de Céspedes learned to read and learned a trade, even before her transformation to a male identity. The Portuguese native speaker Bernarda Manuel wrote well enough in Spanish to defend herself in writing to the Inquisition . Upper-class writers María de Zayas, Ana Caro, Angela de Azevedo, and others were steeped in knowledge about the literature of their time, although it remains unclear to what extent they were familiar with female authors from Spain and the rest of Europe. The diverse texts we have seen in The Lives of Women provide just a small sample of the many ways in which we might access past women’s experiences, thoughts, and words. The impressive amount of evidence for literacy and advanced education among women of varying class and ethnic backgrounds begs fundamental questions about women’s access to formal and informal education. Research in this area is often limited to guesswork, however, since traditionally we have had little access to primary texts that accurately document women’s educational levels. Furthermore, literacy is notoriously difficult to gauge and often is measured merely by whether women signed their own names to wills and other legal documents.1 Textual evidence suggests that women acted as advisors, consultants, and teachers in domestic, inquisitional, and political contexts. Inquisition records point to numerous ways in which women educated each other and established networks of support. Research on conversos has shown that women acted as educators at the familial level, as many defendants claimed that their mothers taught them to read and write. Moreover, it is common for religious women’s vidas to refer to their mothers as the family educators.2 Writing the history of women’s roles as advisors, educators, and leaders marks a crucial step toward a full understanding of gender and culture in the European past. By broadly defining education to include informal and formal mechanisms of women’s education of and support for each other, I argue here that women in the seventeenth century laid the groundwork for direct involvement in the public sphere, and that we can recuperate women’s educational history by turning to evidence of informal instruction and support found in advice and behavior manuals, religious instruction, fiction, and even Inquisition archives. This approach posits that women in the early modern period regularly engaged in a broad spectrum of educational activities and that they received education in more forms than has been previously acknowledged. The analysis also provides a...