Religious Women in Golden Age Spain: The Permeable Cloister (review)

In her engaging study, Elizabeth Lehfeldt has systematically argued for the permeability of the early modern cloister. Even as she carefully charts change over time—in patronage, monastic rules, and the regulation of claustration—she persuasively demonstrates the persistence of interactions between cloistered nuns and the world outside the convent walls. She locates convents—and the cloistered nuns who inhabited them—in the fabric of civic life.

Charting medieval networks of patronage and models of reform, she provides a framework to assess change over time. Her study encompasses not only widely recognized periods of reform—those spurred by Ferdinand and Isabella and by the Council of Trent—but also the complicated political and religious landscape of the earlier fifteenth century. Thus, she remedies the frequent tendency to break such studies into excessively tidy categories. Moreover, she examines nuns as simultaneous actors in religious, political, civic, and economic spheres.

Still, Lehfeldt reassesses the lives of women religious with systematic organization and clear prose. Her chapter titles—among them "Habits of Reform: Religious Women before Trent"—are evidence of such careful structure. Not just employing a nice turn of phrase, she plays on the multiple valences of that language throughout the chapter. As she explores fifteenth-century templates for reform, she also treats the importance of monastic attire. Her analysis of one religious community's decisions about reform indicates her ability to connect such material to a wider assessment of monastic reform: "Their habits were a source of identity and gave them flexibility in choosing their direction in an era of tumultuous monastic reform" (p. 153).

In such fashion, her six chapters cohere internally and build upon each other, both thematically and chronologically. She analyzes convent patronage, economic management, litigation of numerous kinds, and religious reform, focusing on the mid-fifteenth through the mid-seventeenth centuries. She examines both the spiritual bounds of the convent and its physical spaces. Through numerous lenses, she argues for the permeability of the cloister, even in an era in which much religious reform centered on the cloistering of female religious communities: she carefully demonstrates that the business of life occurred inside the cloister and not simply around it.

She employs a wide array of sources, even as she centers her study on the important city of Valladolid, treating a range of religious communities in that city. She approaches her material with sophistication, attending to the constraints of rhetoric and form. She analyzes the writings of a host of reformers: male authorities and women who gained reputations for holiness among their contemporaries. She attends not only to print and the language of prescriptive treatises but also to deeds, lawsuits, and other records of economic activities that allow her to approach the "lived experience" of these religious women. She charts their negotiations of identities and regulations, their resistance to authorities, and their exercise of spiritual authority. Above all, she gives a palpable sense of the importance of convents to early modern communities.

Lehfeldt distills these arguments in her closing lines:" And just as they did in the late medieval and early modern eras, their lives continue to customarily and necessarily intersect with the temporal world, rendering the cloister quite permeable" (p. 220). Thus, she contends that any assessment of these religious women must be approached with broad chronological range and deep rooting in their economic, social, and cultural contexts. She consistently implies a dynamism in the relationship between civic order and religious foundation. Inherent in Lehfeldt's notion of permeability is an emphasis on living, vibrancy, and the potential for action even within the cloistered life.