The Comedia of Virginity: Mary and the Politics of Seventeenth-Century Spanish Theater

3. Mapping Faith at the University of Salamanca

45 3 Mapping Faith at the University of Salamanca During the last week of October 1618, the faculty, administrators, and students of the University of Salamanca feasted in honor of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary. The festivities sealed the adoption of a statute requiring Salamanca’s students to pledge their belief in the Virgin’s exemption from sin. The ardently debated belief had not been confirmed as dogma, yet that confirmation would occur in 1854. However, already Salamanca’s clergy, religious orders, and the faithful were divided into those who supported the belief, such as the Franciscans , and those who, like the Dominicans, opposed Mary’s exception from original sin. Examination of the Relación de las fiestas que la Universidad de Salamanca celebró desde el 27 al 31 de Octubre del año de 1618, the festival book commissioned by the University of Salamanca for the occasion, illustrates how and where devotion to the Virgin Mary’s immaculacy was performed on the urban landscape of the seventeenth-century Spanish town.1 Indeed, the book, written a few months after the actual celebrations took place, functions as a map to guide readers in remembering, imagining, and recreating the important events. Community and student piety were cultivated and reinforced through the public display of faith in secular and academic spaces. 46 The Comedia of Virginity Facts gathered from the Relación referencing the position and the displacement of participants and events were also correlated with maps of Salamanca to establish the exact location of the multiday secular and devotional activities.2 To better compare past and present urban spaces, a sixteenth-century map of the academic town was superimposed with a modern rendition of present-day Salamanca.3 The hybrid map was then used to plot the location of the festivities and trace the displacement of the faithful as described in the festival book.4 This exercise had the immediate goal of recreating an ephemeral and temporal abstraction: a religious festivity in an academic setting held in the last week of October 1618. Surprisingly, a seldom-studied cartography emerged: a map of Salamanca’s ideological differences. The heated controversy favoring and opposing Mary’s purity, evidenced in the plethora of sermons, public debates, and petitions to the pope, was also evident in the use of public space. As locations and displacements were plotted on the Salamanca map, two distinct areas materialized on the page. The emergence of different spaces for performing and not performing faith signal the polarization in opinion. Theological dissent over the Virgin’s exemption from original sin had much deeper repercussions than previously assumed. Areas associated with support for the Virgin’s immaculacy were used to organize procession routes, stage comedias de santos, and erect altars, while entire sections of the city connected to those in dissent were ignored, avoided, and ostensibly shunned from participation and reference in the festival book. A Festival Book for Salamanca’s Celebrations The Relación is a text rich in detail that preserves the circumstances supporting the decision to adopt the statute obliging students to pledge their conviction in the doctrine. It discloses the organizational timeline that led to the weeklong festivities and helps understand the degree of institutional orchestration required of university authorities, religious orders, convents, and community leaders. The book succeeds in mirroring and preserving popular cultural and religious practices of the day. It is an invaluable tool to recuperate what, how, and where elusive events took place by providing thorough descriptions of all activities, artifacts, and places used. For instance, it narrates Mapping Faith at the University of Salamanca 47 in exquisite detail the aesthetic components of the academic feast, such as the decorations, the altars, and the costumes especially prepared for the event. It also supplies examples of the poetry read, the villancicos sung, the plots of the staged dramatic skits, and the streets and plazas chosen for the programmed activities.5 The wealth of information in the book also helps to determine the types of relationships existing between participants . The reader can easily decipher indicators of rank and influence through analysis of factual information such as order of procession, group size, and choice of apparel. These critical details shed light on alliances and rivalries, institutional anxieties, and the particular objectives of who commissioned the text/celebrations. In this way, the book establishes for posterity how the festival is interpreted and how the University...