The Ashgate Research Companion to Early Modern Spanish Women Writers covers the broad array of different kinds of writings that these women wrote, taking into consideration their subject positions and the cultural and historical contexts that influenced and were influenced by them.
In Spain, the two hundred years that elapsed between the beginning of the early modern period and the final years of the Habsburg Empire saw a profusion of works written by women. Whether secular or religious, noble or middle class, early modern Spanish women actively composed creative works such as poetry, prose narratives, and plays. The Routledge Research Companion to Early Modern Spanish Women Writers covers the broad array of different kinds of writings – literary as well as extra-literary – that these women wrote, taking into consideration their subject positions and the cultural and historical contexts that influenced and were influenced by them. Beyond merely recognizing the individual women authors who had influence in literary, religious, and intellectual circles, this Research Companion investigates their participation in these circles through their writings, as well as the ways in which their texts informed Spain’s cultural production during the early modern period. In order to contextualize women’s writings across the historical and cultural spectrum of early modern Spain, the Research Companion is divided into six sections of general thematic interest: Women’s Worlds; Conventual Spaces; Secular Literature; Women in the Public Sphere; Private Circles; Women Travelers. Each section is subdivided into chapters that focus on specific issues or topics.
Women and Community in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia draws on recent research to underscore the various ways Iberian women influenced and contributed to their communities, engaging with a broader academic discussion of women’s agency and cultural impact in the Iberian Peninsula. By focusing on women from across the socioeconomic and religious spectrum—elite, bourgeois, and peasant Christian women, Jewish, Muslim, converso, and Morisco women, and married, widowed, and single women—this volume highlights the diversity of women’s experiences, examining women’s social, economic, political, and religious ties to their families and communities in both urban and rural environments. Comprised of twelve essays from both established and new scholars, Women and Community in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia showcases groundbreaking work on premodern women, revealing the complex intersections between gender and community while highlighting not only relationships of support and inclusion but also the tensions that worked to marginalize and exclude women.
Economic Imperatives for Women’s Writing in Early Modern Europe addresses the central question of the professionalization of women’s writing before the eighteenth-century from a comparatist perspective, offering intriguing case studies on as yet an underdeveloped area in early modern studies.
This monograph explores the social constructs surrounding artistic production in early modern Iberia through the lenses of gender and class by examining the rarely considered contribution of creative women in Spain and Portugal between 1550 and 1700. Using the life-stage framework popular in texts of the period and drawing on a broad spectrum of materials including conduct guidebooks, treatises and conventual rules, this book examines the constraints imposed by gender-related social structures through microhistories of nuns, married, and unmarried women. The text spans class boundaries in its analysis of the work of painters, engravers, and sculptors, many of whom have until now eluded scholarly attention in English-language publications. An extensive bibliography promotes new avenues of inquiry into women’s contributions to the visual arts of the period. This book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, gender studies, women’s history, early modern Iberian studies, and Renaissance studies.
Written by an international group of scholars, this edited collection provides an overview of the Spanish picaresque from its origins in tales of lowborn adventurers to its importance for the modern novel, along with consideration of the debates that the picaresque has inspired.
Edited by art historian Noelia García Pérez, this first-ever collection of essays on Juana of Austria, the younger daughter of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and sister to Philip II of Spain, offers an interdisciplinary study of the Habsburg princess that addresses her political, religious, and artistic dimensions. The volume’s contextual framework shows her sharing agency with other women of her dynastic family who governed in the sixteenth century and developed an outstanding reputation for promoting artists and works of art. The Making of Juana of Austria demonstrates how Juana’s role as a leading patron of the arts offered her a means of creating her own image, which she then promulgated through the objects she collected and her crowning architectural endeavor, the Monastery-Palace of the Descalzas Reales. Drawing on early modern literature, archival documents, and artworks, the essays in this volume delineate a new portrait of Juana of Austria. Contributors not only highlight her multiple facets—princess of Portugal, regent of Castile, and the only female Jesuit in history—but also show her as a discerning art patron and collector who pursued an active role of patronage, through which she constructed her own art collection and used it to articulate a visual statement of her lineage, power, and religious convictions. Her role as an art promoter culminated with the foundation of the Descalzas Reales and the works of art she collected and displayed within its walls. The Making of Juana of Austria offers a new perspective on female rule and patronage, exploring the achievements of a crucial figure in the history of art, court, and gender in early modern Europe.
Called by her contemporaries the "Tenth Muse," Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648–1695) has continued to stir both popular and scholarly imaginations. While generations of Mexican schoolchildren have memorized her satirical verses, only since the 1970s has her writing received consistent scholarly attention., focused on complexities of female authorship in the political, religious, and intellectual context of colonial New Spain. This volume examines those areas of scholarship that illuminate her work, including her status as an iconic figure in Latin American and Baroque letters, popular culture in Mexico and the United States, and feminism. By addressing the multiple frameworks through which to read her work, this research guide serves as a useful resource for scholars and students of the Baroque in Europe and Latin America, colonial Novohispanic religious institutions, and women’s and gender studies. The chapters are distributed across four sections that deal broadly with different aspects of Sor Juana's life and work: institutional contexts (political, economic, religious, intellectual, and legal); reception history; literary genres; and directions for future research. Each section is designed to provide the reader with a clear understanding of the current state of the research on those topics and the academic debates within each field.
Although scholars often depict early modern Spanish women as victims, history and fiction of the period are filled with examples of women who defended their God-given right to make their own decisions and to define their own identities. The essays in Women Warriors in Early Modern Spain examine many such examples, demonstrating how women battled the status quo, defended certain causes, challenged authority, and broke barriers. Such women did not necessarily engage in masculine pursuits, but often used cultural production and engaged in social subversion to exercise resistance in the home, in the convent, on stage, or at their writing desks. Distributed for the University of Delaware Press
Are anxiety or dread negative stages before freedom, a confrontation with humans' own mortality and finitude? Joana Serrado inaugurates anxiousness as a category of mystical knowledge in this innovative historical and philosophical study. Based on the life and mystical writings of Joana de Jesus, a Cistercian nun, intellectual disciple of Teresa of Avila, this study shows the cultural embeddedness of anxiousness: a feeling akin to the Portuguese term »saudade« (yearning, Sehnsucht). A mystical project that reshapes feminist principles of autonomy, agency and desire.