Juana of Castile: History and Myth of the Mad Queen (review)

In recent years the figure of Juana "la Loca", daughter of the Catholic Monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, has become the subject of much study. The legend of her madness, created by her husband Phillip "the Handsome", her father, and her son Charles V, was for nineteenth-century Romantics an attractive story of emotion and intrigue that shaped their understanding of Spanish history and identity. From the 1850s on, a fictionalized Juana has appeared in literary, dramatic, and visual arts throughout the world. Likewise, numerous biographies have been written, some more fictional than historical, in an attempt to understand Juana's life and condition. This book, "the first interdisciplinary book that looks at both sides of the story—history and myth, fact and fiction" (27), explores the Juana phenomenon from various angles, presenting her madness as a social and political construct and her victimization as the result of her gender.

In the first part of the book, "The Historical Context", Bethany Aram and Elena Gascón Vera present a partial history of Juana's life in order to clarify some of the misconceptions created by previous biographers. Aram clearly explains the court manipulations to which Juana fell victim, while Gascón describes the similarities between Juana's situation and that of her sister Catherine in the English court. Both authors rely on primary documentation, but their goal is to interpret those documents through the lens of modern feminism. There are, however, contradictions that create confusion for the reader. Aram claims that the deaths of three people allowed Juana to ascend to the Castilian throne (34), but the book's introduction says that the number was four (12). Gascón claims that Juana's formation was not political yet also claims that Isabella trained her to be a ruler (48). Such statements should be clarified.

The second part of the book, "Juana of Castile in Spanish Literature", analyzes Juana as a Spanish literary creation of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. David George explores necrophilia in Manuel Tamayo y Baus's play La locura de amor (1855). José Luis Mora García gives an excellent analysis of the religious and social theories of Benito Pérez Galdós seen in his 1918 drama Santa Juana de Castilla. Mercedes Tasende studies the use of humor as an alternative interpretation to Juana's tragic situation in Ramón Gómez de la Serna's superhistory Doña Juana la Loca (y otras). Federico García Lorca's "Elegía a Doña Juana la Loca", as well as other works in which victimized women appear, is the subject of Salvatore Poeta's study of Lorca's personal feelings for Juana and her situation of repression and sadness. Finally, Vilma Navarro-Daniels offers a very well written analysis of the use of Erasmus and Humanism in Manuel Martín Mediero's 1982 drama Juana del amor hermoso.

"Foreign Representations of the Mad Queen", part 3 of the book, centers on Juana in non-peninsular literature. Becky Boling explains Miguel Sabido's use of Juana's femininity in his drama Falsa crónica de Juana la Loca to represent Mexico as the "Other" during the Colonial Period. Tara Foster summarizes the works of several French authors, pointing out French Romanticists' view of Spain as a land of cruelty and backwardness and modern writers' use of Juana as alter-ego or as a means by which to explore one's own psyche. After a somewhat chaotic introduction, Phyllis Zatlin summarizes the lives and works of the dramatists Emmanuel Roblès, José Martín Elizondo, Christine Wystup, and Eduardo Manet, analyzing the character of Juana created by each.

Juana's appearance in painting, opera, and cinema comprise the fourth part of the book, "Juana of Castile in Opera and the Visual Arts". María Elena Soliño explains the role of historical paintings from the period of Isabella II to Alfonso XII...