Devout Laywomen in the Early Modern World [First Edition] 9781317151623, 9781472424914, 9781315576909

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DEVOUT LAYWOMEN IN THE EARLY MODERN WORLD

Devout laywomen raise a number of provocative questions about gender and religion in the early modern world. How did some groups or individuals evade the Tridentine legislation that required third order women to take solemn vows and observe active and passive enclosure? How did their attempts to exercise a female apostolate (albeit with varying degrees of success and assertiveness) destabilize hierarchies of class and gender? To the extent that their beliefs and practices diverged from approved doctrine and rituals, what insights can they provide into the tensions between official religion and lay religiosity? Addressing these and many other questions, Devout Laywomen in the Early Modern World reflects new directions in gender history, offering a more nuanced approach to the paradigm of woman as the prototypical “disciplined” subject of church-state power. Alison Weber is Professor of Spanish with a joint appointment in the Corcoran Department of History at the University of Virginia, USA.

Women and Gender in the Early Modern World Series Editors:

Allyson Poska, The University of Mary Washington, USA and Abby Zanger

The study of women and gender offers some of the most vital and innovative challenges to current scholarship on the early modern period. For more than a decade now, Women and Gender in the Early Modern World has served as a forum for presenting fresh ideas and original approaches to the field. Interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary in scope, this series strives to reach beyond geographical limitations to explore the experiences of early modern women and the nature of gender in Europe, the Americas, Asia and Africa. Titles in the series include: Female Intimacies in SeventeenthCentury French Literature Marianne Legault

Early Modern Habsburg Women Edited by Anne J. Cruz and Maria Galli Stampino

The Senses in Religious Communities, 1600–1800 Nicky Hallett

Picturing the ‘Pregnant’ Magdalene in Northern Art, 1430–1550 Penny Howell Jolly

Romancing the Self in Early Modern Englishwomen’s Life Writing Julie A. Eckerle

Art, Gender and Religious Devotion in Grand Ducal Tuscany Alice E. Sanger

Learning and Literacy in Female Hands, 1520–1698 Elizabeth Mazzola

Staging Women and the Soul–Body Dynamic in Early Modern England Sarah E. Johnson

Medieval and Renaissance Lactations Edited by Jutta Gisela Sperling

A Ruler’s Consort in Early Modern Germany Judith P. Aikin

Isabella d’Este and Francesco Gonzaga Sarah D.P. Cockram

The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France Domna C. Stanton

Representing Judith in Early Modern French Literature Kathleen M. Llewellyn Gender and Song in Early Modern England Edited by Leslie C. Dunn and Katherine R. Larson Autobiographical Writing by Early Modern Hispanic Women Elizabeth Teresa Howe

Men and Women Making Friends in Early Modern France Edited by Lewis Seifert and Rebecca Wilkin Rethinking Gaspara Stampa in the Canon of Renaissance Poetry Edited by Unn Falkeid and Aileen A. Feng

Menstruation and Procreation in Early Modern France Cathy McClive

Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England Edited by Karen Bamford and Naomi J. Miller

Baptist Women’s Writings in Revolutionary Culture, 1640–1680 Rachel Adcock

Devout Laywomen in the Early Modern World Edited by Alison Weber

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Devout Laywomen in the Early Modern World

EDITED BY ALISON WEBER

First published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2016 selection and editorial matter, Alison Weber; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Alison Weber to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-472-42491-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-57690-9 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of Figures List of Contributors Acknowledgments A Note on Texts and Translations Introduction Devout Laywomen in the Early Modern World: The Historiographic Challenge Alison Weber PART I

x xi xiv xv 1

Service

29

 1 Community, Conflict, and Local Authority: The Basque Seroras Amanda L. Scott

31

 2 The Company of St. Ursula in Counter-Reformation Italy Querciolo Mazzonis

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 3 Nursing as a Vocation or a Profession? Women’s Status and the Meaning of Healing in Early Modern France and England Susan Dinan PART II

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Perceptions of Holiness

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 4 Historicizing the Beatas: The Figures behind Reformation and Counter-Reformation Conflicts Maria Laura Giordano

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 5 Ecco la santa! Printed Italian Biographies of Devout Laywomen, Seventeenth-Eighteenth Centuries Anne Jacobson Schutte

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 6 Flying in Formation: Subjectivity and Collectivity in Luisa Melgarejo de Soto’s Mystical Practices Stacey Schlau

133

 7 Illuminated Islands: Luisa de los Reyes and the Inquisition in Manila Jessica Fowler

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PART III

Confessional Crossings

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 8 Elastic Institutions: Beguine Communities in Early Modern Germany Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane

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 9 Neither Nun nor Laywoman: Entering Lutheran Convents during the Reformation of Female Religious Communities in the Duchy of Braunschweig, 1542–1655 Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer

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10 Marina de Saavedra: A Devout Laywoman on a Confessional Frontier (Zamora, 1558–1559) Doris Moreno Martínez

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11 Devout Recusant Women, Advice Manuals, and the Creation of Holy Households “Under Siege” Ellen A. Macek

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PART IV

Alliances 12 Convent Alternatives for Rich and Poor Girls in Seventeenth-Century Florence: The Lay Conservatories of Eleonora Ramirez di Montalvo (1602–1659) Jennifer Haraguchi 13 The Lives of Anne Line: Vowed Laywoman, Recusant Martyr, and Elizabethan Saint Robert E. Scully, S.J. 14 Letters, Books, and Relics: Material and Spiritual Networks in the Life of Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza (1564–1614) María J. Pando-Canteli

253

255

276

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Contents

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15 Women Apostles in Early Modern Japan, 1549–1650 Haruko Nawata Ward

312

16 Jesuit Apologias for Laywomen’s Spirituality Alison Weber

331

Glossary Index

353 361

Figures

5.1 [Vincenzo Cattelani, C.O.] Vita della Serva di Dio Rosa Maria Martini fanciulla secolare fiorentina composta da un sacerdote di Reggio di Lombardia. Florence: Domenico Marzi, 1773. Engraving by Gaspero Pecchioni. Rare Book Collections, Georgetown University Library, Booth Family Center for Special Collections, Washington, DC. 5.2 Ercole Maria Giuseppe Isolani, C.O. Vita di Anna Maria Calegari Zucchini Bolognese detta volgarmente Madonna Anna Zucchini. Bologna: Stamperia di S. Tommaso d’Aquino, 1743. Engraving by Giovanni Fabbri. Rare Book Collections, Georgetown University Library, Booth Family Center for Special Collections, Washington, DC. 8.1 Beguine of the Auf dem Werder community. Anton Beck (1753). Stadtarchiv Braunschweig H III 1: 15, 195. Courtesy of the Stadtarchiv Braunschweig.

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Contributors

Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane is Associate Professor of History at the University of Minnesota, Morris. She is the author of A History of Medieval Heresy and Inquisition (Rowman & Littlefield, 2011) and co-editor of Labels and Libels: Naming Beguines in Northern Medieval Europe (Brepols, 2014). She has published numerous essays on lay religious women, heresy, and religious culture in the Middle Ages, and is currently completing a monograph on beguine communities in medieval and early modern Germany. Susan Dinan is Professor of History and Dean of the Pforzheimer Honors College at Pace University. She is the author of Women and Poor Relief in SeventeenthCentury France: The Early History of the Daughters of Charity (Ashgate, 2006) and co-editor with Debra Meyers of Women and Religion in Old and New Worlds (Routledge, 2001). Jessica Fowler completed her Ph.D. in 2015 at the University of California, Davis, under the direction of Andrés Resendez. Her dissertation is entitled “Illuminating the Empire: The Dissemination of the Spanish Inquisition and the Heresy of Alumbradismo, 1525–1600.” She is currently working at the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas in Madrid with the European Research Council– funded project Conversion, Overlapping Religiosities, Polemics and Interaction: Iberia and Beyond (CORPI). Maria Laura Giordano is Professor of Modern History at the Universitat Abat Olib-CEU of Barcelona. Her publications include Apologetas de la fe. Elites conversas entre Inquisición y patronazgo en España (ss. XV–XVI) (Fundación Universitaria Española, 2004), Donne e Bibbia nella crisi dell’Europa Cattolica (secoli XVI–XVII), ed. Maria Laura Giordano and Adriana Valerio (Il pozzo di Giacobbe, 2014), and numerous articles on devout laywomen, feminine religiosity, and Converso spirituality. Jennifer Haraguchi is Assistant Professor of Italian at Brigham Young University. She received her Ph.D. in Italian Language and Literature from the University of

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Chicago. She has published articles on convent theater and women’s education in the early modern period. She is currently at work on a critical edition and English translation of the creative works of the seventeenth-century Florentine writer and educator Eleonora Ramirez di Montalvo for the series The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe. Ellen A. Macek taught History at the University of Tennessee. She is the author of The Loyal Opposition: Tudor Traditionalist Polemics, 1535–1558 (Lang, 1996) and has published articles in Sixteenth Century Journal and Catholic Historical Review. Her current project is a book-length study of early modern English “selfhelp” manuals. Querciolo Mazzonis is Assistant Professor of Church History at the University of Teramo, Italy. He is the author of Spirituality, Gender and the Self in Renaissance Italy: Angela Merici and the Company of St. Ursula (1474–1540) (Catholic University of America Press, 2007). He has published numerous essays on devout laywomen in early modern Italy. Doris Moreno Martínez is a Research Associate at the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona. She is the author of La invención de la Inquisición (Fundación Carolina, 2004) and co-author, with Ricardo García Cárcel, of Inquisición: historia crtítica (Temas de hoy, 2000). She has published numerous essays on the Spanish Inquisition, Protestantism in Spain, and the Spanish Jesuits. María J. Pando-Canteli is Associate Professor at the University of Deusto, Bilbao, Spain, where she teaches English, comparative literature, and gender studies. She has published studies on the poetry of John Donne and Francisco de Quevedo, on women and drama in the early modern period, and, most recently, on women’s networks and Anglo-Spanish relations in the seventeenth century. Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer is Professor of History at Western Kentucky University. She is the author of From Priest’s Whore to Pastor’s Wife: Clerical Marriage and the Process of Reform in the Early German Reformation (Ashgate, 2012). With Robin Barnes she edited Ideas and Cultural Margins in Early Modern Germany: Essays in Honor of H.C. Erik Midelfort (Ashgate, 2009). Stacey Schlau is Professor of Spanish and Women’s and Gender Studies at West Chester University of Pennsylvania. She is the author and co-author of several volumes and numerous essays on Hispanic women’s writings from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries. Her most recent book is Gendered Crime and Punishment: Women and/in the Hispanic Inquisitions (Brill, 2013). Anne Jacobson Schutte holds the position of Professor, Emerita, of History at the University of Virginia. She has published widely on religion and society in early

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modern Europe. Notable publications include Aspiring Saints (Johns Hopkins, 2001) and By Force and Fear: Taking and Breaking Monastic Vows in Early Modern Europe (Cornell, 2011). Amanda L. Scott is a Ph.D. candidate at Washington University in Saint Louis. Her research and publications focus on women, local religion, and reform in early modern Spain and the Basque Country. She has received support in the form of the John Tracy Ellis Award from the American Catholic Historical Association and most recently through a CLIR-Mellon Dissertation Fellowship in Original Sources in the Humanities. Robert E. Scully, S.J., is Professor of History and Law at Le Moyne College, Syracuse, New York. He is the author of Into the Lion’s Den: The Jesuit Mission in Elizabethan England and Wales: 1580–1603 (The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 2011) and numerous articles on Catholicism in early modern England. Currently he is co-editing a forthcoming volume on recusancy in the Brill Companions to the Christian Tradition. Haruko Nawata Ward is Associate Professor of Church History at Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, Georgia. She is the author of Women Religious Leaders in Japan’s Christian Century, 1549–1650 (Ashgate, 2009) and numerous essays for journals and book chapters on the intersections of gender, religions, and cultures in the early modern European missions in Asia. Alison Weber is Professor of Spanish with a joint appointment in the Corcoran Department of History at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Teresa of Ávila and the Rhetoric of Femininity (Princeton University Press, 1990) and editor of Approaches to Teaching Teresa of Ávila and the Spanish Mystics (Modern Language Association, 2009). She has published numerous essays on female monasticism and early modern Catholicism in Spain.

Acknowledgments

The idea for this volume arose from two sessions, “Semi-Religious Women before and after Trent: Continuities and Change,” which I organized for the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference Meeting in Forth Worth, Texas, in 2011. Most of the papers for these panels centered on Spain and Italy. In the discussions that followed, it became clear that the topic was in need of a wider geographic range and comparative focus. I am grateful for the patience of the original conference presenters that allowed me to solicit essays on England, Germany, Japan, and the New World. I am also grateful for generous comments and suggestions from Anne J. Schutte, Jodi Bilinkoff, and Elizabeth Rhodes and for the support and encouragement of Erika Gaffney.

A Note on Texts and Translations

One of the goals of this volume has been to promote scholarship on devout laywomen in a transnational and translinguistic context. Ideally, the essays would have provided full transcriptions of sources in the original language. However, the authors were sometimes obliged to make difficult choices between citing the original language in toto and developing their arguments fully. In these cases, selected passages in the original language, which the authors deem particularly important to highlight the style, the ambiguities, or the multivalence of the source material, have been provided.

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Introduction Devout Laywomen in the Early Modern World The Historiographic Challenge Alison Weber

“Aut maritus aut murus.” Until relatively recently, historians of the postTridentine Catholic world were inclined to take this maxim at face value, accepting that women were obliged to choose between marriage or the convent. The minority of women who did in fact persist in leading an uncloistered life of charitable service, it was assumed, were remnants of a late medieval lifestyle that was largely suppressed after Trent. In approximately the last twenty-five years, however, a body of scholarship has demonstrated that significant numbers of women continued to choose an unofficial third vocation—living out their lives in the spaces between marriage and the convent. These women’s lifestyles were as diverse as their names: beatas, recogidas, beguines, bizzoche, emparedadas, mantelle, pinzochere, spiritual virgins, and tertiaries. Most, but not all, took non-binding vows of chastity and poverty, supplemented in some cases by a similarly non-binding vow of obedience to a confessor or female superior. Some lived with relatives or in communities and still others lived in hermitages. Some performed care work, while others acted as spiritual intermediaries, teachers, and missionaries. There were those who wore special habits to indicate their affiliation with a mendicant order; others eschewed distinguishing dress.1 In the following remarks, I draw extensively on examples from Spain—a reflection of my own area of expertise as well as the comparatively mature state of scholarship on pious laywomen in the Hispanic world. This is not to claim that Catholic Spain should be considered the baseline for laywomen’s religious experience or the choices they faced. Rather, my hope is that my introduction and the essays that treat Spain and its empire in this volume will promote future comparative analyses.2 It is difficult to find a satisfactory inclusive term for a group of women whose lifestyles varied so widely.3 From the thirteenth century, “penitents” was one term among many regional variants used to refer to men or women who engaged in various kinds of Christian service but without separation from the secular world.4 By the seventeenth century in Spain and France, however, “penitent” referred to someone who did penance, whether of his own will or because of an imposed punishment.5 Gabriella Zarri suggests “the third status” (il terzo stato) to describe the “institutions developed in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that allowed women who did not wish to or could not marry or enter a convent to

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live unmarried with their families or in a community.”6 After much reflection, I have settled on “devout laywomen” to designate those who saw their lives in terms of a secular vocation to serve God in the world—whether collectively or individually. This is admittedly an imprecise term that seems to be the best of less than satisfactory options. The semantic challenge of finding a label that is sufficiently broad and sufficiently restrictive is in itself instructive. It suggests that devout laywomen conform to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notion of “family resemblances”—a class based on overlapping similarities rather than a set of necessary and sufficient characteristics. I offer the following composite picture, with the caveat that one or more of these features may not be represented in each case: 1) Devout laywomen self-identified with a vocation distinct from that of married laywomen or nuns. 2) This vocation implied a call to sacralized service. 3) Their extra-official status, depending on local circumstances, might lead to structural adaptation or conflict with church or state authorities. 4) Their lifestyle frequently embraced extreme penitential practices. 5) Communities sometimes attributed thaumaturgical and/ or prophetic powers to heroically penitential women. 6) Alleged charismata, on the other hand, could be a source of conflict between these women and their communities, or between these women and the church. Is such a composite category too broad to be useful? Was the piety of a noblewoman who eschewed marriage and devoted herself to poor relief equivalent to that of a woman who sought escape from poverty through a career as a hospital worker? Were the choices of young women who lived in open congregations equivalent to those of women who defied their families to perform spectacular penances in a hermitage? If the spectrum of motives of pious women (largely inaccessible to historians) was wide, so, too, was the range of reactions to them. The archives of the Inquisitions (Roman, Spanish, Venetian, and Portuguese) house hundreds of documents related to trials of laywomen suspected of religious fraud or heresy; libraries and convent archives also hold scores of biographies extolling the piety of aspiring saints.7 I propose, however, the following counter-argument: the diverse lifestyles of these laywomen (and their equally diverse reception) invite us to reexamine crucial questions in early modern religious history: With what means did the Counter-Reformation Church control or direct lay piety in general and women’s piety in particular? Were women targeted preferentially for social and religious discipline? What were the consequences—intended and unintended—of the Catholic Church’s insistence on the spiritual superiority of virginity? These questions fall under the rubric of the confessionalization thesis. Originally formulated independently by Reformation scholars Wolfgang Reinhard and Heinz Schilling, confessionalization posits that the church and state in early modern Europe collaborated in efforts to transform the laity, through religious instruction and moral reform, into pious and obedient Christians.8 Dissatisfied with the laity’s ignorance of their faith and erratic compliance with its obligations, it is argued, sixteenth-century churchmen increasingly turned to the state for aid in enforcing the piety and morality of their flocks. The state, in turn, proved a willing

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ally in a project that promised to create more tractable and peaceable subjects. Thus, despite their irresolvable theological differences, “both reformations helped bring about an indispensable prerequisite of absolutism: the transformation of subjects into the willing objects of state domination.”9 The confessionalization thesis is closely associated with the concept of social discipline—the recognition that state and church had at their disposal an array of techniques for shaping a pliant, disciplined subject, whether through coercion (incarceration, corporal punishment, or threats of coercion) or through indoctrination (education, preaching, public spectacles, and so forth).10 Both Catholic and Protestant authorities sought to control social behavior, although they had different sets of institutional structures to implement their agenda. As scholars of early modern Catholicism have addressed the question of gender in the context of this paradigm, they have come to different conclusions. Broadly speaking, we can point to a body of scholarship that stresses a dynamic of men’s oppression of women and women’s submission to men or their efforts to subvert male oppression. According to this line of argument, as the Catholic Church prepared to meet the threat of Protestantism, it sought to reaffirm the exclusive sacramental and apostolic prerogatives of the clergy, and thus drastically curtailed late medieval traditions that had accorded significant power to women as monastic leaders, prophets, and living saints. Similarly, the diffusion of medical and religious discourses emphasizing women’s susceptibility to delusions and demonic influence undermined women’s charismatic authority. Women, lay and religious, were also subjected to sexual and spatial discipline, that is, they were excluded from activity in public either through monastic enclosure or the imposition of social norms that defined women’s public presence as wanton. As Elizabeth Rapley remarked, “Reform in the Catholic church tended to be accompanied by a hardening of its attitude toward sexuality. . . . The discrediting of sexuality meant, in general, the discrediting of women.”11 Although research continues to confirm and extend aspects of this overall framework, recent studies have tended to move away from a unidirectional model of power in gender relations. This attenuated disciplinary model recognizes negotiation and collaboration between men and women despite marked efforts to restrict women’s apostolic authority.12 Pious laywomen, whose relative freedom from ecclesiastical or familial authority destabilized hierarchies of class and gender, can therefore serve as particularly appropriate test cases for exploring the extent and limitations of Counter-Reformation gender discipline. The ambivalence toward devout laywomen can also serve as a lens through which to examine the fault lines in a religious ideology that simultaneously denied the significance of gender for spiritual perfection and insisted on the intellectual and moral imperfection of women. Although the essays in this volume attend particularly to the experiences of women, the authors are very much aware that these women lived in a world with men. Whether objects of praise or blame, devout laywomen inevitably interacted with ecclesiastics. As a number of the essays show, some churchmen saw them

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as partners in reform or, under their guidance, potential saints. Furthermore, laywomen, qua women, were “doubly lay.” Consequently, their interactions with clergy provide opportunities—to the power of two—for considering important questions about lay spirituality during the Counter Reformation: How successful was Rome in emphasizing the separation of clergy from laity? How determined was the church to control local religious enthusiasm? Did the Counter Reformation reshape women’s spirituality—and lay spirituality generally—in significant ways or did the laity continue to inhabit a spiritual universe that would have been familiar to the laity of the previous two centuries?13 It is to be hoped that these essays will stimulate not only further research on the interactions between Catholic men and women but on the dynamics of gender as a relational concept. The Question of Authority From the origins of the Frauenbewegung or “women’s movement” in the thirteenth century to the resurgent waves of female piety in the eighteenth century, some laywomen felt called to Christian service. The concept of service was extraordinarily broad: it encompassed prayers of suffrage, spiritual guidance, teaching, and concrete aid to the poor and infirm. In some cases (such as accompanying the dying) there was no clear distinction between material and spiritual service. Some women and their supporters believed that their exercise of Christian caritas was divinely authorized, if not socially legitimated. As one Jesuit argued, devout laywomen were the heirs of the first religious “of the ancient law,” that is, Christ’s first female apostles and the Virgin Mary herself, who wore a lay habit and lived in the secular world.14 Despite support from some ecclesiastics, the indeterminacy of these women’s relation to male authority troubled secular and ecclesiastical forces alike. Open communities of women were often organized, at least initially, around female leadership, although collaborations with clerics were not uncommon. Pious laywomen were encouraged to seek guidance from clerics and they often did so, but they were free to choose—and dismiss—their spiritual directors. Although these alliances conformed to the ideal of female subordination to clerics, an especially strong bond between confessor and penitent challenged the authority of husbands and fathers. As one inquisitorial examiner complained in a letter to Philip II, “[Spiritual directors] take as their own those whom they deal with and confess, separating maidens from the service of their parents, married women from the service of their husbands, and female slaves from obedience to their masters; thus they disrupt all estates and are pernicious to the life of the Christian community.”15 Furthermore, the physical freedom of pious laywomen unsettled gendered norms of decorum, as a letter from the Seville tribunal to the Supreme Council of the Inquisition in Madrid makes clear: “[I]t is very inappropriate for such women to live without enclosure, because we know from experience that they wander about the villages where they live, with more ease than other women

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of their quality, and because they wear a habit they dare to go in and out wherever they please.”16 When active charity was combined with some version of religious instruction, blessing, or spiritual exhortation, pious laywomen appeared to trespass on the apostolic privileges of the priesthood. For these reasons, from the time of the rise of the first open female communities in the late Middle Ages to the Council of Trent and beyond, the third status had the real or imagined potential to subvert male authority. The twenty-fifth session of the Council of Trent has long been interpreted as a watershed moment in the history of female monasticism, and not without reason. As is well known, in 1563 the Tridentine fathers mandated that all nuns observe strict active and passive enclosure: henceforth, no nun was to leave the convent without the permission of the bishop, and likewise no visitors were allowed to enter the convent. Research, however, has shown that enforcement varied widely.17 In France, regal privilege over Rome delayed the promulgation of Tridentine decrees until 1615. We know, too, that throughout Europe the papal constitution Circa pastoralis (1566), which compelled tertiaries to make solemn vows and observe enclosure, was enforced irregularly at best. The norms adopted by the provincial council of Toledo in 1582 provide an example of local ambivalence toward Circa pastoralis: beatas who had not made solemn vows were be encouraged to do so; those who refused were permitted to continue living in their communities, but the communities could not accept new members.18 In sum, the repressive impact of Circa pastoralis has probably been exaggerated. On the one hand, some women were forced make solemn vows or abandon their association with religious orders; but on the other hand, it was not unusual, long before Trent, for communities of pious laywomen to seek to become cloistered nuns.19 Given the church’s commitment to defending the holiness of the monastic state and establishing clear boundaries between the laity and religious, what explains the irregular enforcement of the Tridentine decrees at the local level? We might look to the demographic situation in Spain for one answer. In the sixteenth century certain regions of the peninsula, especially Andalusia and Extremadura, lost a significant proportion of their male populations to imperial wars and emigration to the New World, leaving behind large numbers of women with few prospects for marriage. Many of these women became beatas (the most common term in Spanish for devout laywomen), whose economic survival depended on performing a variety of social and spiritual services in their communities. In the city of Baeza, in upper Andalusia, there were reportedly one thousand beatas out of a total population of twenty-five thousand in the 1570s; twice that number lived in Jaén, Andalusia.20 Whatever services they performed, because of their numbers and their relative freedom from supervision, beatas alarmed ecclesiastic and secular authorities. Diego Pérez de Valdivia, a professor of theology at the University of Baeza, voiced common complaints about beatas in Aviso de gente recogida (Advice for the Recollected; 1585): “They are women and most of them are young; they have as much freedom as they want; they have no superior; they do not observe enclosure; they do not have a fixed rule; . . . each one is a law unto herself.”21 Yet

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he also recognized that the problem of these surplus women could not be easily solved: They cannot all become nuns, nor according to Saint Paul [1 Cor. 7:20–24] can one with good conscience force marriage on those who are called to chastity; nor can all marry well, even if they wanted to; nor do all of them have a calling or talent to be nuns or wives. For this reason it is necessary to find a means through which those whom Our Lord calls to this estate may live in a secluded and safe fashion.22

Pérez’s statement points to a relation between a demographic dilemma and an economic one. First, there simply were not enough convents to absorb all the beatas; nor were communities willing or able to support new convents.23 Second, there was the issue of the monastic dowry. Although monastic dowries were not as high as marriage dowries, they nevertheless were often beyond the reach of women from the lower and middle social orders. Third, as Pérez states, even if they wanted to, not all beatas could “marry well,” that is, marry men of suitable social status. He may have been alluding to another problem facing unmarried women—the inflation in dowries, which, by the end of the sixteenth century, outstripped inflation in the rest of the economy, a factor that contributed to a dramatic decline in marriage rates during this period.24 These examples come from Spain, where male emigration is well documented, but similar factors were at work elsewhere in Catholic Europe. A shift toward primogeniture in the latter half of the sixteenth century in Italy, for example, increased the number of young women who could neither “marry well” nor become nuns. As an anonymous author argued in support of the Ursulines, a female lay congregation, “And to tell the truth, should not every father of a family nobly born, with few resources or many daughters (being unable to marry them all or even make them nuns), welcome the fact that there is a praiseworthy third status, in which those who feel themselves disposed to it can quietly stay in their own homes serving God in virginity . . .?”25 It would be reductive, however, to attribute the survival of devout laywomen solely to a demographic crisis. They were tolerated not only because enclosure was often economically unfeasible (whether for individual women or their communities) but also because they performed valued material and spiritual services. Their vows of virginity, especially combined with penitential practices, further enhanced their esteem in the eyes of their contemporaries. Perhaps most important, churchmen at all levels saw in devout laywomen potential allies in inspiring religious fervor in the laity. Reforming bishops like François de Sales, Juan de Ribera, and Carlo Borromeo, missionary reformers like Juan de Ávila and Vincent de Paul, and countless parish priests were willing to see laywoman as agents for Catholic reform.26 Devout Laywomen as Agents of Religious Renewal In important ways, pious laywomen exposed a critical fault line between two imperatives of the Catholic Reform: on the one hand the desire to bring lay

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religiosity under the purview of an educated clergy, and on the other hand the need to shape a charitable, devout, and hardworking laity. In some cases, the latter objective trumped the former. The awareness that third status women could not only support themselves but also contribute to the health of the parish allowed some open communities to thrive. The Daughters of Charity, women of modest social origins, performed the onerous labor of tending the sick in hospitals; they also served the poor and brought food and comfort to prisoners.27 Parish priests and the French government recognized the value of their professional skills, and this recognition afforded them the space they needed to develop and expand their organizations. The Company of Saint Ursula, founded in Brescia in 1535 by Angela Merici, offers another example of the way churchmen channeled women’s piety to the goals of Christian service. Merici’s original charism was closer to a spiritual apostolate than to a charitable organization—she imagined a lifestyle for women who, through prayer and penance in their own homes, might intercede with God to obtain forgiveness for the living and the dead.28 Despite early opposition, by the beginning of the seventeenth century the Ursulines were established in almost every important Italian city. As the Company came under the direction of post-Tridentine bishops, Merici’s charism was transformed: the spiritual apostolate was curtailed as the Ursulines increasingly were assigned the mission of educating young girls. Ironically, the archetypal Counter-Reformation bishop Carlo Borromeo established the Milanese Company in 1567—just one year after the publication of Circa pastoralis. However, it is significant that Borromeo removed a key sentence from Merici’s original Rule: “[W]herever they are, [the Ursulines] should give to all a good odour of virtue. . . . and seek to spread peace and concord where they are.”29 Devout laywomen also staffed or founded many of the institutions that arose to regulate female sexuality: houses for girls at risk, homes for repentant prostitutes, and refuges for married women fleeing abusive husbands.30 In short, as Querciolo Mazzonis argues in his essay in this volume, the willingness of reformers like Borromeo and others to support foundations for women who were neither nuns nor tertiaries may have been motivated in part by the conviction that women, when properly supervised, could be excellent agents for social discipline. Members of congregations like the Ursulines and the Daughters of Charity resisted enclosure for a variety of economic and spiritual reasons, but other women longed for the cloister, and this is also part of the history of lay female piety. The path to regularization was not always smooth, however. The life of Marina de Escobar (1554–1643) provides a case in point. In 1568 Marina approached Teresa of Ávila with a request to join a newly founded Discalced Carmelite convent in Valladolid. But Teresa persuaded her that her true vocation was in the world. Marina went on to become a renowned holy woman and the leader of a community of eighteen beatas who dedicated themselves to making clothes for the poor. In 1615, at the age of sixty-one, Marina once again longed for a cloistered life. Inspired by a divine vision, she wrote the rules and constitutions for an austere, strictly enclosed Brigettine convent, which won the approval of Pope Urban VIII in 1628. She died, however, before she was able to profess.31

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Francisca de los Apóstoles (1539–?) provides a more salient example of the obstacles to regularization. In the 1570s Francisca and her sister, Isabel Bautista, lived in a small community of beatas in Toledo, where they enjoyed a measure of renown as pious laywomen. In 1573 Isabel journeyed to Rome to secure a patent to incorporate the beaterio (community of beatas) as a convent. Meanwhile, Francisca, having remained in Toledo, devoted herself to a variety of penitential exercises in support of the foundation. Francisca’s devotion was soon manifested in public visions, raptures, and demonic torments. Despite the support of one cathedral canon, Francisca was denounced to the Inquisition in 1574. Unable to convince the inquisitors that her visions were authentic, Francisca was declared a heretic, blasphemer, and perjurer. In a public auto de fe held on April 14, 1578, she received 100 lashes and was banished from the city for three years. Many factors can be said to have contributed to the failure of her project—her relatively humble origins, the incompetence of her spiritual advisors, and her explicit criticism of local ecclesiastical corruption.32 But perhaps her failure was to be expected: a monastic foundation required a good reputation at the local level, endowments from trustworthy patrons, skilled clerical advisors, and often support from an established religious order. Marina’s long delayed foundation—and Francisca’s dramatic failure—underscore the point that although post-Tridentine legislation increased pressure for enclosure, at the local level there were significant counterpressures, even when women actively sought claustration. The question of what defines laywomen’s role in religious renewal becomes even more problematic when we turn to Protestant Europe. It is well known that in the Holy Roman Empire, Protestant magistrates and princes mandated the dissolution of monasteries and convents or, in some cases, allowed convents to remain open until the last nun died. It is less well known that this policy was far from universally successful—an estimated fifty percent of convents survived in some areas. Many nuns did convert to Protestantism and marry (Katharina von Bora, Martin Luther’s future wife, is the most famous example), others converted to Protestantism but continued to live communally as canonesses, and still others refused to leave their convents and resisted Protestantism in word and deed. In cities like Strasbourg, as Amy Leonard has shown, Protestant magistrates not only left convents open, they respected the wishes of some women to remain in the “chaste estate.” In the eyes of councilmen the services of the nuns (nurturing and protecting young girls, providing a place for old and infirm women to live) were temporal and utilitarian; in the eyes of some families and the nuns themselves, the distinction between spiritual and secular service was irrelevant. As Leonard concludes her study of three Dominican convents that survived in Strasbourg: “In the end, the main reasons that these Catholic houses did not die out was that neither the nuns nor the people of Strasbourg wanted them to.”33 Clearly, magistrates and the people of Strasbourg had divergent ideas about the role of women in a reformed church. The Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary represents another example of divergent ideas about laywomen’s potential role in religious renewal. In 1611

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Mary Ward (1585–1645), an English Catholic and former Poor Clare nun, founded a women’s congregation modeled on the Society of Jesus. The English Ladies, as they came to be known, wore distinguishing attire and took vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience, but did not observe enclosure. In addition to catechizing and educating girls in day and boarding schools, they prepared laypeople for the sacraments and, especially in Protestant England, provided spiritual assistance in the absence of priests. Their semi-sacerdotal activities and apostolic assertiveness confused their contemporaries, alienated secular clergy, and alarmed the Jesuits. After years of controversy, in 1631 Pope Urban VIII pronounced Ward a heretic and disbanded the English Ladies, declaring that “under the pretext of promoting the salvation of souls [they] carried out many works that were least suitable to their sex, its mental weakness as well as womanly modesty. . . .34 Ironically, Ward’s English Ladies met with as much hostility from the church they sought to serve as from Protestants. After Ward’s death in 1645, the English Ladies continued to run unofficial colleges and Catholic centers in England, but they had failed in their attempt to be female Jesuits, apostles for the “salvation of souls.”35 Devout Laywomen and the Question of Charismatic Authority Some pious laywomen were not only esteemed as Christian exemplars but also revered as potential saints. In the eyes of their fellow parishioners, their chastity, charity, and penitential suffering enhanced the power of their prayers. The greater a pious woman’s reputation for holiness, in fact, the more her spiritual services— prayers for the living and the dead or her presence at childbed and deathbed—were valued. In return, she could expect to receive food, gifts, or alms. However, the question of compensation could be contentious. As Fray Juan de los Ángeles, a Franciscan friar and court preacher, wrote in 1595, “Whenever a silly little woman pretends to faint, she is celebrated as a saint and thereafter she can be sure of getting free meals and whatever she wants.”36 Despite such suspicions, some laywomen did achieve renown—for a time. One of the most celebrated beatas of early modern Spain, Catalina de Jesús, according to Inquisition records, attracted nearly 700 devotees in Seville and from surrounding villages. Her followers attributed miraculous powers to her—healing the sick, converting the wicked, prophesying the future, and saving souls. Catalina de Jesús and her confessor and collaborator Juan de Villalpando, according to one inquisitorial report, exerted extraordinary influence over poor, unmarried women: Villalpando taught maidens that in order to fulfill the demands of spiritual exercises he taught [i.e., mental prayer] they should refuse to do what their fathers ordered, saying they were not their fathers, that they had another father who governed them, who was Villalpando. He recommended mental prayer to one maiden, and when she answered that she did not have time, because she needed to serve her poor parents, and she couldn’t do so without their permission,

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In 1627 Catalina de Jesús and Villalpando appeared in an auto de fe, where they publicly abjured various alumbrado heresies. The cleric was sentenced to imprisonment in a monastery for four years and forbidden forever to preach, hear confessions, and celebrate the sacraments. Catalina de Jesús was sentenced to six years’ reclusion in a convent.38 Whether or not the report cited above accurately reflects the teachings of the beata and Villalpando, it nevertheless underscores how the intimate relations between beatas and charismatic leaders and their influence over unmarried women challenged traditional familial and church hierarchies. The alleged spiritual gifts of pious laywomen posed other unsettling questions: Were their spiritual sacrifices sufficient to warrant the status and gifts they received in return? And were their spiritual services authentic or feigned? By the end of the sixteenth century devout laywomen in Spain, Portugal, and Italy were appearing more frequently in inquisitorial tribunals, charged with the offense of pretense of sanctity.39 Others avoided censure in part because they could count on support from their communities or from powerful ecclesiastics.40 But as in the case of open congregations, devout laywomen with a reputation for holiness confronted churchmen with difficult questions. Could women’s piety (and the people’s devotion) be safely controlled and directed toward the goals of Christianization? Would the feminization of certain practices—such as taking daily communion— devalue the sacred? Would the popularity of local holy women help promote the doctrine that the age of miracles, despite Protestant claims to the contrary, had not ended? If they were shown to be clever frauds, would this promote incredulity or support the Protestant doctrine of the cessation of miracles? As churchmen grappled with these questions, they arrived at different answers.41 It is important, however, to note that not all laywomen investigated for pretense of sanctity were penanced. Indeed, as Anne Schutte’s essay in this volume shows, sometimes a brush with the Inquisition was considered a routine trial for a potential saint. Devout Laywomen and the Apostolic Mission As we have seen, according to post-Tridentine ideals, laywomen were expected to be reclusive but also charitable to their fellow parishioners and exemplary in public, ritual observance. The church communicated an even more contradictory gender message: although men were its legitimate leaders and defenders, Catholicism was in such great peril from Protestantism that it needed the help of all Christians, even women. Counter-Reformation ecclesiastics were not the first to argue for a suspension of ordinary gender roles during a state of siege. Raymond of Capua had justified the public role played by Catherine of Siena (1347–1380) by declaring that in troubled times, God conferred divine grace on “the weaker sex” in order to humble proud men.42 The twin challenges of combating Protestantism

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and propagating Catholicism in the New World and Asia gave new life to a prowoman exceptionalism, which granted some women roles as missionaries and evangelists. Pious laywomen were more than eager to respond to the call, despite opposition from their families. The Spanish noblewoman Luisa de Carvajal (1566–1614) provides a case in point. Carvajal was born into one of the richest and most powerful families in sixteenth-century Spain. Refusing to marry or take the veil, at the age of thirty-nine she traveled to London, where, with the support of the Jesuits, she proselytized and ministered to recusant Catholics. Carvajal was a prodigious author of numerous letters, memoirs, a corpus of fifty poems, and a rule for the group of semi-religious women who lived with her in London.43 Barbe Acarie (1566–1618), a member of a prominent Parisian family, and her circle of dévotes in seventeenth-century France represent a similar dynamic of elite women who fashioned an unenclosed life of apostolic piety.44 These women clearly were responding to the conviction that the church needed their public efforts. As Luisa de Carvajal wrote in her letters to Rodrigo de Calderón (one of the favorites of King Philip III), the threat posed by Protestantism required the “strong piety” of active female congregations, not the “soft piety” of cloistered nuns.45 In the missionary context churchmen sometimes viewed devout laywomen as powerful agents of conversion. Pious laywomen in New France like Marie Madeleine Chauvigny de la Peltrie (1603–1672), Jeanne Mance (1606–1673), and Marguerite Bourgeoys (1620–1700) followed diverse spiritual paths, devoting themselves to education, medical and social care, and the promotion of devotions and prayers. These women and others like them became subjects of biographies intended to serve their causes for canonization. As Dominique Deslandres remarks, “[I]f the settlers of New France applauded the projects and exploits of these saintly women, it was because they needed them, practically and spiritually.”46 Their extraordinary piety could also have an important propagandistic function: it confirmed that the colonies were lands where transplanted Catholicism could thrive. Indeed, America’s first saint, Rosa de Santa María (1586–1617), was a criolla (a Spanish woman born in the New World) of modest origins who took simple religious vows but did not observe enclosure. In sum, distance from the centers of ecclesiastical power, local chauvinism, the urgent need for care workers, and missionary zeal in colonial lands interacted to produce an unusual if perilous degree of freedom for charismatic laywomen.47 Women “in Between” A recurrent theme in the following essays is the realization that pious laywomen moved “in between,” and not only between the two officially sanctioned vocations of wife and nun. Many inhabited the borders between material and spiritual service, veneration and suspicion, Catholicism and Protestantism, authority and submission. The essays are arranged according to clusters that challenge these binaries. The first section, “Service,” examines how pious laywomen attempted to negotiate the

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conflicts generated by their participation in local material and spiritual economies. As stated earlier, after Trent women continued to perform valued community services. However, disputes over compensation for these services could bring care workers into conflict, not only with the institutional church but also with their neighbors. Amanda L. Scott’s contribution, “Community, Conflict, and Local Authority: The Basque Seroras,” centers on the seroras of Navarre in northeastern Spain, whose services ranged from cleaning religious shrines to tending to the diseased and indigent. In compensation for their labors, they received gifts, salaries, or living quarters. However, their position—at once highly visible and poorly defined—frequently brought them into conflict with parish priests, other seroras, and the parish community itself. Querciolo Mazzonis, in “The Company of St. Ursula in Counter-Reformation Italy,” analyzes the changes imposed on the Ursuline organization after Trent, including the implementation of teaching in the Schools of Christian Doctrine, a more hierarchical structure supervised by men, and a less mystical and penitential spirituality. Nevertheless, he finds that the Ursulines enjoyed support from bishops and succeeded in maintaining key aspects of their pre-Tridentine religiosity. Mazzonis suggests that these churchmen were aware that women could be agents of conversion and, if properly controlled and directed, could serve the goals of orthodox Christianization. Susan Dinan’s essay, “Nursing as a Vocation or a Profession? Women’s Status and the Meaning of Healing in Early Modern France and England,” contrasts the nursing care systems developed by the Daughters of Charity in sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury France and the female parish-based nursing structure of England after the suppression of religious houses. In France, the Daughters of Charity and some similar groups avoided enclosure and established themselves as nurses, teachers, social workers, and hospital directors. In England, parishes responded to the loss of semi-religious nurses by paying local women to provide care. In comparing the two systems, Dinan shows how, despite legal and religious obstacles, women built organizations of care that their cities and towns could not live without. Both Dinan and Mazzonis instructively remind us that the agendas of pious laywomen, their families, local communities, and the church hierarchy interacted in complex ways: power ebbed and flowed in more than one direction. The essays in the second section, “Perceptions of Holiness,” look at devout laywomen within the context of the construction of sanctity. In “Historicizing the Beatas: The Figures behind Reformation and Counter-Reformation Conflicts,” Maria Laura Giordano argues for the need to consider the history of beatas in Spain over the longue durée, not only to appreciate the variations in their beliefs and behavior but also to recognize the church’s ambivalence toward the third status. The diverse fortunes of beatas—some were embraced as allies of the institutional church, others punished for their alleged heterodoxy—call into question the notion of a monolithic Counter-Reformation Church intent on repressing beatas. In fact, as Giordano demonstrates, the long-term trajectory of the claustration campaign ends in acceptance of the third status. Anne Schutte’s essay, “Ecco la santa!,” similarly challenges the idea that devout laywomen were invariably at odds with the

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institutional church. Schutte examines the cases of five laywomen who, between 1625 and the end of the Old Regime, were the subjects of vernacular vite written, in many cases, to pave the way for their official recognition by the Congregation of Rites.48 She notes that extreme penitential practices figure prominently in the vite as do reported thaumaturgical powers. Overshadowed by scholarship on hagiographies of nuns, these biographies constitute a largely untapped source of information about the perception of laywomen’s piety. In “Flying in Formation: Subjectivity and Collectivity in Luisa de Melgarejo de Soto’s Mystical Practices,” Stacey Schlau explores the case of one of the most notable disciples of Rosa de Santa María, more commonly known as Rose of Lima (1586–1617). Unlike Rosa, who was beatified in 1668 and canonized in 1671, Melgarejo was caught up in the web of inquisitional trials and was incarcerated for many years before her trial was suspended. Although Melgarejo enjoyed privileged social status and the protection of the Jesuits, the citizens of Lima questioned the authenticity of her reported favors—visions, ecstasies, and knowledge of souls in purgatory. Unlike Rosa, Melgarejo did not engage in extreme penitential practices. Schlau concludes that Melgarejo’s failure to imitate Rosa’s ascetic behavior, along with divisions among the Jesuits, were important factors that undermined her credibility as a visionary. Despite being tried by the Inquisition, however, Melgarejo continued to enjoy a reputation as a holy woman in some sectors—a fact that suggests that there was more than one viable model of female sanctity in colonial Peru. An indigenous beata from the seventeenth-century Philippines is the subject of Jessica Fowler’s “Illuminated Islands: Luisa de los Reyes and the Inquisition in Manila.” The question of Reyes’s alleged holiness split members of the Jesuit community in the Philippines: some declared that she was a new St. Catherine of Siena; others denounced her and her devotees as alumbrados. Although the model of holiness represented by the beata was clearly convincing for a small group of Jesuits, her unenclosed lifestyle (and the opportunities it provided for male-female interaction) eventually brought her and her devotees before the Holy Office. Together, Schlau’s and Fowler’s essays indicate that despite great distances and delays, the Inquisition sought to maintain control over local cults. Still, the relative restraint shown toward the accused (Reyes, as an indigenous woman, was declared exempt from prosecution; Melgarejo’s cases ended in dismissal) suggests that neither the Suprema (the Inquisition’s high court located in Madrid) nor the colonial tribunals were eager to call too much attention to these failed saints. Part III, “Confessional Crossings,” turns to the question of women who, in different ways, put into question the divide between Catholicism and Protestantism. In “Elastic Institutions: Beguine Communities in Early Modern Germany,” Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane finds substantial evidence that béguinages (uncloistered group homes), assumed to have been dismantled during the Reformation, continued to thrive throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in post-Reformation Germany. From Lübeck to Lake Constance and Cologne to Leipzig, gatherings of devout women continued to fill the longstanding, locally embedded needs for prayer,

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social service, and social belonging for single women. While some communities survived by forming closer affiliations with mendicant or monastic orders, others persisted as mixed-confession béguinages. Examples of confessionally mixed houses abound in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Germany—and so do cases of fully reformed evangelical houses. In “Neither Nun nor Laywoman: Entering Lutheran Convents during the Reformation of Female Religious Communities in the Duchy of Braunschweig, 1542–1655,” Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer finds that the political situation in Lower Saxony (1542–1634) also produced a complex mix of old and new customs and doctrines. Although the female religious houses in these regions officially accepted the Augsburg Confession and Lutheran church regulations by the late sixteenth century, the character of each community reflected the outcome of negotiations between rulers and local communities, with the result that in some cases, the inhabitants of the reformed houses were neither recognizably nuns nor laywomen, Lutheran or Catholic. Doris Moreno Martínez’s essay, “Marina de Saavedra: A Devout Laywomen on a Confessional Frontier (Zamora, 1558–1559),” similarly documents the history of a woman “on a confessional frontier.” Moreno Martínez traces the spiritual itinerary of Marina de Saavedra, a well-connected married woman who embraced Protestant (sensu lato) ideas that were circulating in mid-sixteenth-century Castile. The new ideas, Moreno Martínez shows, did not represent a complete break with Saavedra’s Catholic piety. Indeed, she used traditional parish institutions and charitable networks to disseminate the new ideas before she was denounced to the Inquisition as a Lutheran. Ellen Macek’s essay, “Devout Recusant Women, Advice Manuals, and the Creation of Holy Households ‘under Siege’,” focuses on married women caught between two confessions: Catholics in Protestant England who, in defiance of legal restrictions on their faith and often in the absence of male heads of household, formed “holy households.” These households functioned as sacralized spaces for catechizing children, servants, and neighbors and for performing the corporal works of mercy. Rather than seek refuge in convents on the Continent, as many did, these recusant women creatively adapted traditional forms of female piety to create an active, semi-covert evangelical vocation. They worked closely with spiritual directors, but when this was not possible they assumed roles of spiritual leadership themselves. In ways unimagined by the Tridentine fathers, they devised a new, temporary vocation for pious women living “under siege.” Whether they lived alone, with families, or in communities, pious laywomen were closely connected to their communities. The collaborations they formed with ecclesiastics and laypersons of various social strata are the focus of the final section, “Alliances.” Although these collaborations could sometimes result in conflict, they also show that devout women did not always have to confront the Church, subvert male authority, or alienate their kin and neighbors in order to make room for a spiritual vocation, in deed if not in name. In fact, the spirit of the Catholic Reformation in some cases expanded the opportunities available to women of different social backgrounds.

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Robert E. Scully, for example, shows how, in the anti-Catholic environment of late Elizabethan England, where convents were banned, recusant women and priests collaborated in devising an unofficial but crucial vocation for women between the cloister and marriage. Scully’s essay, “The Lives of Anne Line: Vowed Laywoman, Recusant Martyr, and Elizabethan Saint,” centers on the relationship between Anne Line (?–1601), a widowed convert to Catholicism, and John Gerard, a Jesuit priest with whom she operated a safe house. In 1601 Anne was found guilty of harboring priests and sentenced to death. Although theirs was in many ways a traditional confessor-penitent relationship, Anne’s heroic service to the recusant cause and willingness to suffer martyrdom resulted in a spiritual reversal of roles: in Gerard’s mind, Anne became his saintly model and protector. Jennifer Haraguchi’s essay, “Convent Alternatives for Rich and Poor Girls in Seventeenth-Century Florence: The Lay Conservatories of Eleonora Ramirez di Montalvo (1602–59),” recounts how a married Florentine noblewoman, Eleonora Ramirez di Montalvo (1602–1659), founded two conservatories in which ancille (handmaidens) took non-binding vows and observed a modified form of enclosure. Montalvo’s conservatories were unconventional in several respects: ancille lived in eremi or microcomunities within the larger institution, they had a closely protected degree of freedom to choose a religious vocation—or not—at the age of fifteen, and servants were incorporated into the devotional and educational life of the community. Crucial to Montalvo’s success in resisting pressure to conform to strict enclosure was her alliance with the Grand Duchess Vittoria della Rovere. Montalvo’s piety thus challenged class divisions from above and below—she attempted to break down barriers between servants and ancille and enlisted a powerful aristocrat in her cause. María J. Pando-Canteli describes a different but similarly broad range of alliances in her essay, “Letters, Books, and Relics: Material and Spiritual Networks in the Life of Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza (1564–1614).” By circulating letters and books, sponsoring translations, and collecting and gifting the relics of recusant martyrs, Carvajal developed a female apostolate sui generis—one that helped consolidate a Catholic community that transcended class and national barriers. As this essay shows, “letter writing” encompassed a range of politically and religiously charged exchanges and illustrates how a pious woman might “make things happen” despite a relatively limited presence in so-called public spaces. In “Women Apostles in Early Modern Japan, 1549–1650,” Haruko Nawata Ward examines the alliances formed between Catholic missionaries and Japanese women during Japan’s “Christian century” (1549–1650). Although the Society of Jesus discouraged its members from forming close ties with women, the cultural circumstances in Japan made it necessary for Jesuits to collaborate with female converts, entrusting them with important roles as catechists, proselytizers, leaders of confraternities, baptizers, and underground missionaries during times of religious persecution. Comparing a wide variety of documents by Spanish and Portuguese missionaries, Ward concludes that these churchmen not only accepted

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Japanese women’s help as expedient, they also revered them as partners in evangelization, as spiritual mothers, and as holy martyrs. My essay, “Jesuit Apologias for Laywomen’s Spirituality,” considers the ambivalence within the Society of Jesus regarding the wisdom of pursuing an apostolate to laywomen. I analyze three works by Jesuits that ponder this issue: two are cautionary and one enthusiastically apologetic. My conclusions complement those of Ward and Schlau: despite awareness that close relations with laywomen, especially ecstatic laywomen, were perilous to their mission, many Jesuits were reluctant to exclude women from their original charism of conversion, that is, inspiring individuals to live a life of greater Christian devotion. In an important sense, the Jesuits’ ambivalence toward beatas was a symptom of the larger tension between their non-discriminatory Pauline spirituality and their determination to “think with” and serve the church militant. Conclusion and Directions for Future Research Lay/religious, medieval/early modern, Catholic/Protestant, secular/sacred: the lives of the women described in these essays encourage us to question these traditional binaries. As Deane observes in her essay, devout laywomen and the communities they formed transcend traditional divisions of time, purpose, and confession. The history of devout laywomen also underscores the need to refine the paradigm of woman as the prototypical subject of church-state discipline. By emphasizing the interplay between institutional imperatives and individual agency—and the gaps between ecclesiastic prescriptions and lived religious experience in the context of local circumstances—the contributors provide further evidence that the dynamics of power between women and men in the early modern world were not always predictable or unambiguously oppressive for women. As we have seen, if some ecclesiastics saw third status women as threats to social order and divine hierarchies, others recognized the value of laywomen as potential vessels of the Spirit, model parishioners, and partners in the Catholic reform. Many women enthusiastically embraced this mission, and some found men to be willing collaborators and devotees. This volume similarly questions the notion that pious laywomen were primarily viewed as social parasites or religious hypocrites. To be sure, disputes over these women’s role in the material and spiritual economies of their communities are not lacking, but the studies presented here offer abundant evidence that the model of the chaste single woman in prayerful and caritative service to her community had enduring power—in Protestant and Catholic lands. Rather than viewing the persistence of a third status simply in terms of strategic concessions on the part of the church or the triumph of the periphery over Rome, we might also think in terms of the unintended consequences of an ideology that, though developed in late medieval Christianity, found new urgency in the Counter-Reformation Church. The spiritual superiority of virginity over marriage, insistently reaffirmed as a fundamental doctrinal difference from Protestantism,

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conceded perhaps an unexpected degree of status to laywomen who made vows of virginity. A state-of-emergency consciousness, which fueled women’s desires to serve and suffer for their fellow Catholics, justified a female apostolate in missionary and colonial contexts—contexts in which it was often difficult to constrain this authority once granted. Finally, the Counter-Reformation defense of the persistence of miracles, Protestant claims to the contrary, assured the continuity of female exceptionalism—the possibility that a laywoman who sacrificed herself for her brethren or martyred her own flesh might indeed be a living saint. These were not new doctrines, but their reaffirmation in the context of Catholic Reform worked against assumptions about the moral and intellectual inferiority of laywomen and, in some cases, undermined the imperatives of sexual discipline. Most of the essays in this volume focus on single language areas; the HispanoItalian axis is prominent. Nevertheless, my hope is that the thematic organization will suggest avenues for analysis across geographic and linguistic borders. For example, the connection between devout laywomen and heterodoxy in Spain and Italy is well established; were there parallels further north? Did an unfavorable marriage market have a similar impact on women’s vocational choices outside Spain and Italy? What local or regional factors determined bishops’ willingness to accommodate unenclosed congregations of women? What was the role of third status women in episcopal campaigns against concubinage and prostitution beyond Spain and Italy? To what extent did virginity maintain its value as spiritual capital in Protestant lands? We have seen that the model of sanctity based on Catherine of Siena’s extreme asceticism was powerful in Italy, Spain, and the Spanish colonies; a comparative study of the geographic and confessional reach of this model is much to be desired. The split among the Jesuits over close associations with devout laywomen also lends itself to transnational analysis. In sum, the opportunities for further exploration of the circumstances surrounding the lives of devout laywomen and their relations with church and society are manifold. Notes  1. For a guide to the wide-ranging terminology, with an emphasis on movements in pre-Tridentine Italy, see entries for “pinzochere” and “terz’Ordine secolare” in Guerrino Pelliccia and Giancarlo Rocca, eds, Dizionario degli Istituti di Perfezione, 10 vols (Rome: Edizioni Paoline, 1975–2003). For analogous late medieval movements, see Elizabeth M. Makowski, A Pernicious Sort of Woman: Quasi-Religious Women and Canon Lawyers in the Later Middle Ages (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2005); Alison More, “Institutionalizing Penitential Life in Later Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Third Orders, Rules, and Canonical Legitimacy,” Church History 83.2 (2014): 297–323; Walter Simons, City of Ladies: Beguine Communities in the Medieval Low Countries, 1200–1565 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001). See also the following entries in Adriano Prosperi, Vincenzo Lavenia, and John Tedeschi, eds, Dizionario storico dell’Inquisizione (Rome: Edizioni della Normale, 2010): Maria Laura Giordano, “Beatas, Spagna,” 1: 161–65; P. Vilas Boas Tavares, “Beatas, Portogallo,” 1: 158–61.

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 2. Representative studies on early modern Spain include Ángela Muñoz Fernández, Beatas y santas neocastellanas: ambivalencias de la religión correctoras del poder (ss XIV–XVII) (Madrid: Comunidad de Madrid, 1994); Jodi Bilinkoff, “A Saint for a City: Mariana de Jesús and Madrid, 1565–1624,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 88 (1997): 323–37; Mary Elizabeth Perry, Gender and Disorder in Early Modern Seville (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); Adelina Sarrión, Beatas y endemoniadas: Mujeres heterodoxas ante la inquisición (Madrid: Akal, 2003); Ángela Atienza López, “De beaterios a conventos. Nuevas perspectivas sobre el mundo de las beatas en la España Moderna,” Historia social 57 (2007): 145–68; Francisco Pons Fuster, Místicos, beatas y alumbrados (Valencia: Ediciones Alfons el Magnànim, 1991). For Italy see Gabriella Zarri, “The Third Status,” in Time, Space, and Women’s Lives in Early Modern Europe, ed. Anne Jacobson Schutte, Thomas Kuehn, and Silvana Seidel Menchi (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2001), 181–99; Mario Sensi, Mulieres in ecclesia: Storie di monache e bizzocche, 2 vols (Spoleto: CISAM, 2010). For France, see Thomas Worcester, “Neither Married Nor Cloistered: Blessed Isabelle in Catholic Reformation,” Sixteenth Century Journal 30.2 (1999): 457–72; Barbara B. Diefendorf, From Penitence to Charity: Pious Women and the Catholic Reformation in Paris (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Elizabeth Rapley, The Dévotes: Women and Church in Seventeenth-Century France (Kingston, Ontario: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990). On the Netherlands, see Marit Monteiro, “Power in Piety: Inspiration, Ambitions and Strategies of Spiritual Virgins in the Northern Netherlands during the Seventeenth Century,” in Gender, Catholicism and Spirituality: Women and the Roman Catholic Church in Britain and Europe, 1200–1900, ed. Laurence Lux-Sterritt and Carmen Mangion (Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave, 2011), 115–30; Silvia Mostaccio, Genre et identites aux Pays-Bas meridionaux: L’education religieuse des femmes apres le Concile di Trente (Louvaine-le-Neuve: Editions Academia, 2010). For an overview and selected bibliography on open communities and teaching orders in England, France, and Italy, see Silvia Evangelisti, Nuns: A History of Convent Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). See also Marina Caffiero, “From the Late Baroque Mystical Explosion to the Social Apostolate, 1650–1850,” in Women and Faith: Catholic Religious Life in Italy from Late Antiquity to the Present, ed. Gabriella Zarri and Lucetta Scaraffia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 176–204; Laurence Lux-Sterritt, Redefining Female Religious Life: French Ursulines and English Ladies in Seventeenth-Century Catholicism (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005).  3. Some scholars have used “semi-religious” to indicate “persons who are nominally not religious [that is, members of monastic orders] but consider themselves as such”; Laurence Lux-Sterritt and Carmen Mangion, eds. Gender, Catholicism and Spirituality: Women and the Roman Catholic Church 1200–1900 (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2011), 190.  4. More, “Institutionalizing Penitential Life.” More uses “penitents” as the collective term but adds, “This way of life can also be called ‘quasi-religious,’ since their way of life met some, but not all of the requirements for canonical religious life”; 299.  5. Sebastián Covarrubias Orozco, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, ed. Felipe Maldonado and Manuel Camarero (Madrid: Castalia, 1995), s.v. penitente. Similarly, the Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française (lst edition 1694) defines penitent as one doing penance for an offense against God.  6. Zarri, “The Third Status,” 181.  7. Atienza López instructively observes that the abundance of studies that rely on inquisition sources may have led to an overemphasis on the autonomy and the heterodox tendencies of the Spanish beatas; “De beaterios a conventos,” esp. 146.

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 8. See Wolfgang Reinhard, “Reformation, Counter-Reformation, and the Early Modern State: A Reassessment,” in The Counter-Reformation, ed. David M. Luebke (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 107–28; Wolfgang Reinhard, “Pressures towards Confessionalization? Prolegomena to a Theory of the Confessional Age,” in The German Reformation: The Essential Readings, ed. Scott C. Dixon (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 177–82. For an excellent overview of the thesis see David M. Luebke, “Editor’s Introduction,” in The Counter-Reformation, ed. David M. Luebke, Blackwell Essential Readings in History (Malden: Blackwell, 1999), 1–16. See also Ute Lotz-Heumann, “Confessionalization,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to the Counter-Reformation, ed. Alexandra Bamji, Geert H. Janssen, and Mary Laven (Farmham, UK: Ashgate, 2013), 33–53. The thesis was originally formulated in the context of the Protestant Reformation and subsequently adopted by historians of Catholic Europe.  9. Luebke, “Editor’s Introduction,” 11. 10. Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, Christianity and Sexuality in the Early Modern World. Regulating Desire, Reforming Practice (New York: Routledge, 2000); Paolo Prodi, ed. Disciplina dell’anima, disciplina del corpo e disciplina della società tramedioevo ed età moderna (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1994). 11. Rapley, The Dévotes, 4–5. Representative examples of what might be called the “hard discipline paradigm” from an extensive bibliography include Perry, Gender and Disorder; R. Po-chia Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal 1540–1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Moshe Sluhovsky, Believe Not Every Spirit: Possession, Mysticism and Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007). For an overview of these issues, see Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, “Society and the Sexes Revisted,” in Reformation and Early Modern Europe: A Guide to Research, ed. David M. Whitford (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2008), 396–414. On spatial discipline and early modern convents, see Amy E. Leonard, Nails in the Wall: Catholic Nuns in Reformation Germany (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), esp. 153–54. For a review and critique of the paradigm with an emphasis on Spain, see Alison Weber, “Locating Holiness in Early Modern Spain: Convents, Caves, and Houses,” in Attending to Early Modern Women: Structures and Subjectivities, ed. Joan Hartman and Adele Seeff (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007), 50–74. 12. Representative examples of what might be called a negotiation paradigm include Keith P. Luria, “ ‘Popular Catholicism’ and the Catholic Reformation,” in Early Modern Catholicism. Essays in Honour of John W. O’Malley, S.J., ed. Kathleen M. Comerford and Hilmar M. Pabel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 114–30; Jodi Bilinkoff, Related Lives: Confessors, Female Penitents, and Catholic Culture, 1450–1759 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005); Barbara B. Diefendorf, “Rethinking the Catholic Reformation: The Role of Women,” in Women, Religion, and the Atlantic World (1600– 1800), ed. Daniella Kostroun and Lisa Vollendorf (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 31–59; Ulrike Strasser, “Embodying the Middle Ages, Advancing Modernity: Religious Women in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe and Beyond,” in Between the Middle Ages and Modernity: Individual and Community in the Early Modern World, ed. Charles H. Parker and Jerry H. Bentley (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), 231–51. See also the essays in Part I, “Religion,” of Allyson Poska, Jane Couchman, and Katherine A. McIver, eds, The Ashgate Research Companion to Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe (Hants, UK: Ashgate, 2013). By the same token, recent studies have paid attention to the ways subordinate men were subjected to patriarchal power. See, for example, Anne

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Jacobson Schutte, By Force and Fear: Taking and Breaking Monastic Vows in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011). 13. For a defense of the latter position, see Nicholas Terpstra, “Lay Spirituality,” in The Ashgate Research Companion, ed. Bamji, Janssen, and Laven, 261–80, esp. 278. 14. Alonso de Andrade, Libro de la guía de la virtud y de la imitación de Nuestra Señora. Segundo Libro: para religiosas, beatas, terceros, religiosos y religiosas (Madrid: Francisco Maroto, 1644), 139. 15. “[T]oman por suyas las personas que tratan y comunican, . . . apartando las doncellas del servicio de sus padres y las casadas del servicio de sus maridos, y las esclavas de la obediencia de sus señores: con lo cual desconciertan todos los estados y son perniciosos a la vida política cristiana”; cited in Álvaro Huerga, Historia de los Alumbrados (1570–1630), 5 vols (Madrid: FUE, 1978–1994), 1: 374. The letter is from 1575. 16. “[E]s de mucho inconveniente vivir fuera de clausura y comunidad, porque por experiencia se ve que de ordinario andan vagando por los pueblos donde moran, con más soltura que las otras mujeres de su cualidad, y por traer aquel hábito se atreven a entrar y salir donde les parece”; ibid., 4: 100. Jaffary cites legislation from late eighteenth-century Colonial Mexico that attempted to restrict the physical freedom of beatas who “are found roaming from church to church and from house to house”; Nora E. Jaffary, False Mystics: Deviant Orthodoxy in Colonial Mexico (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), qtd. at 92. 17. Francesca Medioli, “The Dimensions of the Cloister. Enclosure, Constraint, and Protection in Seventeenth-Century Italy,” in Schutte, Kuehn, and Menchi, eds, Time, Space, and Women’s Lives, 165–80; Susan E. Dinan, “Spheres of Female Religious Expression in Early Modern France,” in Women and Religion in Old and New Worlds, ed. Susan E. Dinan and Debra Meyers (New York: Routledge, 2001), 71–92; Mary Laven, Virgins of Venice: Enclosed Lives and Broken Vows in the Renaissance Convent (London: Viking, 2002); Concha Torres Sánchez, La clausura imposible: Conventualismo femenino y expansión contrarreformista (Madrid: Al-Mudayna, 2001). See also the essay by Jennifer Haraguchi in this volume. For an example of local response to the Tridentine decrees, see Elizabeth Lehfeldt, “Discipine, Vocation, and Patronage: Spanish Religious Women in a Tridentine Microclimate,” Sixteenth Century Journal 30.4 (1999): 1009–36. 18. Muñoz Fernández, Beatas y santas, 82. 19. Gabriella Zarri, “From Prophecy to Discipline, 1450–1650,” in Women and Faith, ed. Scaraffia and Zarri, 83–112. See also Atienza López, “De beaterios a conventos.” 20. Andalusian cities were severely affected by male emigration, but this problem beset wide areas of Spain. For numbers in the Castilian city of Zamora, see the essay by Doris Moreno in this volume. 21. Diego Pérez de Valdivia, Aviso de gente recogida, ed. Álvaro Huerga (Madrid: FUE, 1977), 146. Pérez, nevertheless, defends the viability of the third status. With remarkable subtlety, he analyzes a variety of social and economic factors contributing to the bad reputation of beatas. See Alison Weber, “Between Ecstasy and Exorcism: Religious Negotiation in Sixteenth-Century Spain,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 23.2 (1993): 221–34. 22. “Y no pueden ser todas monjas, ni, conforme se colige de san Pablo [1 Cor. 7:20– 24], se puede con buena conciencia hacer que se casen por fuerza las personas a quien Dios llama a la castidad; ni todas, aunque quisieren, se pueden bien casar; ni tampoco todas tienen llamamiento o talento para monjas o para casadas. Por lo cual es necesario

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dar medio con el cual las que nuestro Señor llama para este estado pueda vivir recogida y seguramente”; Pérez de Valdivia, Aviso de gente recogida, 146. 23. For example, Teresa of Ávila, the Carmelite foundress and reformer, encountered strong local resistance to new monastic foundations. See Jodi Bilinkoff, The Ávila of Saint Teresa: Religious Reform in a Sixteenth-Century City (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), esp. 137–51. Teresa was also reluctant to accept beatas as postulants in the convents she founded. 24. The first half of the seventeenth century saw a 20 percent decline in marriage rates in New Castile. See Sara T. Nalle, “Women’s Status, Family Systems, and Marriage in a Time of Economic Crisis: Cuenca, 1500–1650,” in Perspectives on Early Modern Women in Iberia and the Americas: Studies in Law, Society in Art and Literature in Honor of Anne J. Cruz, ed. Adrienne L. Martín and María Cristina Quintero (New York: Escribana Books, 2015), 167–76. In 1584, the diocese of Vizcaya used similar socioeconomic arguments— the inability of poor noble maidens to marry in conformity to their rank—to object to the implementation of Circa pastoralis; Atienza López, “De beaterios a conventos,” 168. 25. Zarri, “The Third Status,” qtd. at 189. See also her discussion on the Dimesse, an open congregation of widows; 192–94. Dimesse did not take vows; they could leave the houses to become nuns or to remarry. 26. On the alliances between these men and pious laywomen: for Juan de Ávila see Rady Roldán-Figueroa, The Ascetic Spirituality of John of Ávila (1499–1569) (Leiden: Brill, 2010). For Juan de Ribera, see Benjamin A. Ehlers, Between Christians and Moriscos: Juan de Ribera and Religious Reform in Valencia, 1568–1614 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), esp. 67–72. For Borromeo, see the essay by Mazzonis in this volume; for François de Sales, see Elizabeth Rapley, “ ‘Un trésor enfoui, une lampe sous un boisseau’: Seventeenth-Century Visitandines Describe Their Vocation,” in The Cloister and the World: Early Modern Convent Voices, ed. Thomas M. Carr (Charlottesville: Rookwood, 2007), 155–66. 27. Susan E. Dinan, Women and Poor Relief in Seventeenth-Century France: The Early History of the Daughters of Charity (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006). 28. Querciolo Mazzonis, Spirituality, Gender and the Self in Renaissance Italy: Angela Merici and the Company of St. Ursula (1474–1540) (Washington, DC: Catholic University Press, 2007), 110. 29. Cited in Querciolo Mazzonis, “The Italian Ursulines after the Council of Trent,” Paper read at Sixteenth Century Society and Conference Meeting, Forth Worth, Texas, 2011. 30. Such services did not necessarily protect these women from inquisitorial scrutiny. See, for example, Anne Jacobson Schutte, ed., Cecilia Ferrazzi: Autobiography of an Aspiring Saint (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996). 31. Elizabeth Lehfeldt, Religious Women in Golden Age Spain: The Permeable Cloister (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005), 174–208; Luis de la Puente, Vida maravillosa de la venerable virgen doña Marina de Escobar, natural de Valladolid (Madrid: Francisco Nieto, 1665). 32. Gillian T.W. Ahlgren, ed., The Inquisition of Francisca: A Sixteenth-Century Visionary on Trial (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), 1–36, esp. 35. 33. Leonard, Nails in the Wall, esp. Chapter 4, 149–51, qtd. at 155. On Damenstifate, the free imperial abbeys where former nuns lived communally, see Merry E. WiesnerHanks, “Ideology Meets Empire: Reformed Convents and the Reformation,” in Germania Illustrata: Essays on Early Modern Germany Presented to Gerald Strauss, ed. Andrew C.

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Fix and Susan C. Karant-Nunn (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies, 1992), 181–96. See also the essay by Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer in this volume. 34. Evangelisti, Nuns: A History of Convent Life, qtd. at 216. Mary Ward established her first house in the Spanish Netherlands; within a few years houses opened across the continent. In England, they operated in a semi-clandestine manner. 35. Lux-Sterritt, Redefining Female Religious Life, esp. 4–6, 160–70. 36. “En fingiendo una mujercilla cuatro desmayos, la celebran por santa y tiene segura la comida y cuanto ha de menester”; Juan de los Ángeles, Diálogos de la conquista de los reinos de Dios (1595), ed. Angel González Palencia (Madrid: Aguirre, 1946), 216. 37. “Villalpando enseñaba a las doncellas que, por acudir a los sobredichos ejercicios, dejasen de hacer lo que sus padres les mandasen, y dijesen que en cuanto a aquello no eran sus padres, que otro padre tenían que las gobernaba, que era el dicho Villalpando. A una doncella aconsejó la oración mental, y respondiendo ella que no tenía lugar, por servir a sus padres pobres, y sin su licencia no podía, le dijo: No les obedezca ni haga cuenta que lo son, sino demonios; que para tener oración no tiene obligación a obedecerlos, sino pisarles la boca”; “Memorial de la secta de los alumbrados de Sevilla” (1624), in Huerga, Historia de los alumbrados, 4: 455–75, qtd. at 67. 38. Alumbradismo (Illuminism) refers to a loosely defined complex of philo-Protestant beliefs condemned as heretical by the Spanish Inquisition in 1525. The early adherents emphasized interior spirituality and disdained the rituals and ceremonies of the church. By the late sixteenth century, alumbradismo was increasingly identified with antinomian sexual license and pretense of sanctity. See Alastair Hamilton, Heresy and Mysticism in SixteenthCentury Spain: The Alumbrados (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992). Catalina and her spiritual director were also charged with claiming that the estate of beatas was superior not only to that of married women but to that of nuns, because of the imperfections of monastic life; Huerga, Historia de los alumbrados, 4: 200–237, esp. 206–8. See also Perry, Gender and Disorder, 107–17. 39. Representative studies on women charged with pretense of sanctity include Stacey Schlau, Gendered Crime and Punishment: Women and/in the Hispanic Inquisitions (Leiden: Brill, 2012); Andrew Keitt, Inventing the Sacred: Imposture, Inquisition, and the Boundaries of the Supernatural in Golden Age Spain (Leiden: Brill, 2005); Anne Jacobson Schutte, Aspiring Saints: Pretense of Holiness, Inquisition, and Gender in the Republic of Venice, 1618–1750 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); Jaffary, False Mystics; Bryan Givens, Judging Maria de Macedo: A Female Visionary and the Inquisition in Early Modern Portugal (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011). Although some nuns were charged with this offense, inquisitors preferred to leave the correction of aberrant nuns in the hands of their religious orders. 40. A signal example is that of a visionary beata from New Spain who claimed the carisma of bilocation; she enjoyed consistent support from the people of Queretero during two inquisitorial trials. See Ellen Gunnarsdóttir, Mexican Karismata: The Baroque Vocation of Francisca de los Angeles, 1674–1744 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004). 41. For an excellent analysis of the issues related to the spirituality of beatas in seventeenth-century Madrid, see Keitt, Inventing the Sacred, esp. 87–113. By the seventeenth century in Italy and in Spain, the inquisitors meted out harsher sentences to spiritual directors than to their spiritual daughters; Sarrión, Beatas y endemoniadas, 242– 48; Schutte, Aspiring Saints, esp. 201–2 and 223–24. 42. Raymond of Capua, The Life of Catherine of Siena, trans. Conleth Kearns (Dublin: Dominican Publications, 1980), 3 and 311. I am grateful to Daniel Bornstein for calling my attention to this text.

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43. Anne J. Cruz, ed., The Life and Writings of Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza (Toronto: ITER and Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2014). See also the essay by María J. Pando-Canteli in this volume. 44. Barbara B. Diefendorf, “Barbe Acarie and her Spiritual Daughters: Women’s Spiritual Authority in Seventeenth-Century France,” in Female Monasticism in Early Modern Europe: An Interdisciplinary View, ed. Cordula van Wyhe (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008), 155–71. 45. Elena Levy-Navarro, “The Religious Warrior: Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza’s Correspondence with Rodrigo de Calderón,” in Women’s Letters Across Europe, 1400– 1700, ed. Jane Couchman and Ann Crabb (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005), 263–73, qtd. at 272. 46. Dominique Deslandres, “In the Shadow of the Cloister: Representations of Female Holiness in New France,” in Colonial Saints: Discovering the Holy in the Americas, ed. Allan Greer and Jodi Bilinkoff (New York: Routledge, 2003), 129–47. 47. Relatively little work has been done on the role of laywomen in Asia. Two notable exceptions are Eugenio Menegon, Ancestors, Virgins, and Friars: Christianity as a Local Religion in Late Imperial China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), and Haruko Nawata Ward, Women Religious Leaders in Japan’s Christian Century, 1549–1650 (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009). 48. The Congregation of Rites, established in 1588, was the branch of the Roman Curia charged with authorizing the canonization of saints.

Works Cited Ahlgren, Gillian T.W., ed. The Inquisition of Francisca: A Sixteenth-Century Visionary on Trial. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005. Andrade, Alonso de. Libro de la guía de la virtud y de la imitación de Nuestra Señora. Segundo Libro: para religiosas, beatas, terceros, religiosos y religiosas. Madrid: Francisco Maroto, 1644. Atienza López, Ángela. “De beaterios a conventos. Nuevas perspectivas sobre el mundo de las beatas en la España Moderna.” Historia Social 57 (2007): 145–68. Bilinkoff, Jodi. The Ávila of Saint Teresa: Religious Reform in a Sixteenth-Century City. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989. ———. Related Lives: Confessors, Female Penitents, and Catholic Culture, 1450–1759. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005. ———. “A Saint for a City: Mariana de Jesús and Madrid, 1565–1624.” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 88 (1997): 323–37. Caffiero, Marina. “From the Late Baroque Mystical Explosion to the Social Apostolate, 1650–1850.” In Women and Faith: Catholic Religious Life in Italy from Late Antiquity to the Present, edited by Gabriella Zarri and Lucetta Scaraffia, 176–204. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Covarrubias Orozco, Sebastián. Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española. 1611. Edited by Felipe Maldonado and Manuel Camarero. Madrid: Castalia, 1995. Cruz, Anne J., ed. The Life and Writings of Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza. Toronto: ITER and Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2014.

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Deslandres, Dominique. “In the Shadow of the Cloister: Representations of Female Holiness in New France.” In Colonial Saints: Discovering the Holy in the Americas, edited by Allan Greer and Jodi Bilinkoff, 129–47. New York: Routledge, 2003. Diefendorf, Barbara B. “Barbe Acarie and her Spiritual Daughters: Women’s Spiritual Authority in Seventeenth-Century France.” In Female Monasticism in Early Modern Europe: An Interdisciplinary View, edited by Cordula van Wyhe, 155–71. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008. ———. From Penitence to Charity: Pious Women and the Catholic Reformation in Paris. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. ———. “Rethinking the Catholic Reformation: The Role of Women.” In Women, Religion, and the Atlantic World (1600–1800), edited by Daniella Kostroun and Lisa Vollendorf, 31–59. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009. Dinan, Susan E. “Spheres of Female Religious Expression in Early Modern France.” In Women and Religion in Old and New Worlds, edited by Susan E. Dinan and Debra Meyers, 71–92. New York: Routledge, 2001. ———. Women and Poor Relief in Seventeenth-Century France: The Early History of the Daughters of Charity. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006. Ehlers, Benjamin A. Between Christians and Moriscos: Juan de Ribera and Religious Reform in Valencia, 1568–1614. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Evangelisti, Silvia. Nuns: A History of Convent Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Givens, Bryan. Judging Maria de Macedo: A Female Visionary and the Inquisition in Early Modern Portugal. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011. Gunnarsdóttir, Ellen. Mexican Karismata: The Baroque Vocation of Francisca de los Angeles, 1674–1744. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. Hamilton, Alastair. Heresy and Mysticism in Sixteenth-Century Spain: The Alumbrados. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992. Hsia, R. Po-chia. The World of Catholic Renewal 1540–1770. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Huerga, Álvaro. Historia de los Alumbrados (1570–1630). 5 vols. Madrid: FUE, 1978–1994. Jaffary, Nora E. False Mystics: Deviant Orthodoxy in Colonial Mexico. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. Juan de los Ángeles. Diálogos de la conquista de los reinos de Dios (1595). Edited by Ángel González Palencia. Madrid: Aguirre, 1946. Keitt, Andrew. Inventing the Sacred: Imposture, Inquisition, and the Boundaries of the Supernatural in Golden Age Spain. Leiden: Brill, 2005. Laven, Mary. Virgins of Venice: Enclosed Lives and Broken Vows in the Renaissance Convent. London: Viking, 2002. Lehfeldt, Elizabeth. “Discipine, Vocation, and Patronage: Spanish Religious Women in a Tridentine Microclimate.” Sixteenth Century Journal 30, no. 4 (1999): 1009–36.

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———. Religious Women in Golden Age Spain: The Permeable Cloister. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005. Leonard, Amy E. Nails in the Wall: Catholic Nuns in Reformation Germany. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005. Levy-Navarro, Elena. “The Religious Warrior: Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza’s Correspondence with Rodrigo de Calderón.” In Women’s Letters Across Europe, 1400–1700, edited by Jane Couchman and Ann Crabb, 263–73. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005. Lotz-Heumann, Ute. “Confessionalization.” In The Ashgate Research Companion to the Counter-Reformation, edited by Alexandra Bamji, Geert H. Janssen, and Mary Laven, 33–53. Farmham, UK: Ashgate, 2013. Luebke, David M. “Editor’s Introduction.” In The Counter-Reformation, edited by David M. Luebke, Blackwell Essential Readings in History, 1–16. Malden: Blackwell, 1999. Luria, Keith P. “ ‘Popular Catholicism’ and the Catholic Reformation.” In Early Modern Catholicism. Essays in Honour of John W. O’Malley, S.J., edited by Kathleen M. Comerford and Hilmar M. Pabel, 114–30. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001. Lux-Sterritt, Laurence. Redefining Female Religious Life: French Ursulines and English Ladies in Seventeenth-Century Catholicism. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005. Lux-Sterritt, Laurence, and Carmen Mangion, eds. Gender, Catholicism and Spirituality: Women and the Roman Catholic Church 1200–1900. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2011. Makowski, Elizabeth M. A Pernicious Sort of Woman: Quasi-Religious Women and Canon Lawyers in the Later Middle Ages. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2005. Mazzonis, Querciolo. “The Italian Ursulines after the Council of Trent.” Paper read at the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference Meeting. Forth Worth, Texas, 2011. ———. Spirituality, Gender and the Self in Renaissance Italy: Angela Merici and the Company of St. Ursula (1474–1540). Washington, DC: Catholic University Press, 2007. Medioli, Francesca. “The Dimensions of the Cloister. Enclosure, Constraint, and Protection in Seventeenth-Century Italy.” In Time, Space, and Women’s Lives in Early Modern Europe, edited by Ann Jacobson Schutte, Thomas Kuehn, and Silvana Seidel Menchi, 165–80. Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2001. Menegon, Eugenio. Ancestors, Virgins, and Friars: Christianity as a Local Religion in Late Imperial China. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010. Monteiro, Marit. “Power in Piety: Inspiration, Ambitions and Strategies of Spiritual Virgins in the Northern Netherlands during the Seventeenth Century.” In Gender, Catholicism and Spirituality: Women and the Roman Catholic Church in Britain and Europe, 1200–1900, edited by Laurence Lux-Sterritt and Carmen Mangion, 115–30. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2011.

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More, Alison. “Institutionalizing Penitential Life in Later Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Third Orders, Rules, and Canonical Legitimacy.” Church History 83, no. 2 (2014): 297–323. Mostaccio, Silvia. Genre et identites aux Pays-Bas meridionaux: L’education religieuse des femmes aprés le Concile di Trente. Louvaine-le-Neuve: Editions Academia, 2010. Muñoz Fernández, Ángela. Beatas y santas neocastellanas: ambivalencias de la religión correctoras del poder (ss XIV–XVII). Madrid: Comunidad de Madrid, 1994. Nalle, Sara T. “Women’s Status, Family Systems, and Marriage in a Time of Economic Crisis: Cuenca, 1500–1650.” In Perspectives on Early Modern Women in Iberia and the Americas: Studies in Law, Society in Art and Literature in Honor of Anne J. Cruz, edited by Adrienne L. Martín and María Cristina Quintero, 167–76. New York: Escribana Books, 2015. Pelliccia, Giancarlo, and Guerrino Rocca, eds. Dizionario degli Istituti di Perfezione. 10 vols. Rome: Edizioni Paoline, 1975–2003. Pérez de Valdivia, Diego. Aviso de gente recogida (1585). Edited by Álvaro Huerga Madrid: FUE, 1977. Perry, Mary Elizabeth. Gender and Disorder in Early Modern Seville. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. Pons Fuster, Francisco. Místicos, beatas y alumbrados. Valencia: Ediciones Alfons el Magnànim, 1991. Poska, Allyson, Jane Couchman, and Katherine A. McIver, eds. The Ashgate Research Companion to Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe. Hants, UK: Ashgate, 2013. Prodi, Paolo, ed. Disciplina dell’anima, disciplina del corpo e disciplina della società tramedioevo ed età moderna. Bologna: Il Mulino, 1994. Prosperi, Adriano, Vincenzo Lavenia, and John Tedeschi, eds. Dizionario storico dell’Inquisizione. Rome: Edizioni della Normale, 2010. Puente, Luis de la. Vida maravillosa de la venerable virgen doña Marina de Escobar, natural de Valladolid. Madrid: Francisco Nieto, 1665. Rapley, Elizabeth. The Dévotes: Women and Church in Seventeenth-Century France. Kingston, Ontario: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990. ———. “ ‘Un trésor enfoui, une lampe sous un boisseau’: Seventeenth-Century Visitandines Describe Their Vocation.” In The Cloister and the World: Early Modern Convent Voices, edited by Thomas M. Carr, 155–66. Charlottesville: Rookwood, 2007. Raymond of Capua. The Life of Catherine of Siena. Translated by Conleth Kearns. Dublin: Dominican Publications, 1980. Reinhard, Wolfgang. “Pressures towards Confessionalization? Prolegomena to a Theory of the Confessional Age.” In The German Reformation: The Essential Readings, edited by Scott C. Dixon, 177–82. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999. ———. “Reformation, Counter-Reformation, and the Early Modern State: A Reassessment.” In The Counter-Reformation, edited by David M. Luebke, 107–28. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999.

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Roldán-Figueroa, Rady. The Ascetic Spirituality of John of Ávila (1499–1569). Leiden: Brill, 2010. Sarrión, Adelina. Beatas y endemoniadas: Mujeres heterodoxas ante la inquisición. Madrid: Akal, 2003. Schlau, Stacey. Gendered Crime and Punishment: Women and/in the Hispanic Inquisitions. Leiden: Brill, 2012. Schutte, Anne Jacobson. Aspiring Saints: Pretense of Holiness, Inquisition, and Gender in the Republic of Venice, 1618–1750. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. ———. By Force and Fear: Taking and Breaking Monastic Vows in Early Modern Europe. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011. ———, ed. Cecilia Ferrazzi: Autobiography of an Aspiring Saint. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996. Sensi, Mario. Mulieres in ecclesia: Storie di monache e bizzocche. 2 vols. Spoleto: CISAM, 2010. Simons, Walter. City of Ladies: Beguine Communities in the Medieval Low Countries, 1200–1565. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001. Sluhovsky, Moshe. Believe Not Every Spirit: Possession, Mysticism and Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007. Strasser, Ulrike. “Embodying the Middle Ages, Advancing Modernity: Religious Women in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe and Beyond.” In Between the Middle Ages and Modernity: Individual and Community in the Early Modern World, edited by Charles H. Parker and Jerry H. Bentley, 231– 51. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007. Terpstra, Nicholas. “Lay Spirituality.” In The Ashgate Research Companion to the Counter-Reformation, edited by Alexandra Bamji, Geert H. Janssen, and Mary Laven, 261–80. Farmham, UK: Ashgate, 2013. Torres Sánchez, Concha. La clausura imposible: Conventualismo femenino y expansión contrarreformista. Madrid: Al-Mudayna, 2001. Ward, Haruko Nawata. Women Religious Leaders in Japan’s Christian Century, 1549–1650. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009. Weber, Alison. “Between Ecstasy and Exorcism: Religious Negotiation in Sixteenth-Century Spain.” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 23, no. 2 (1993): 221–34. ———. “Locating Holiness in Early Modern Spain: Convents, Caves, and Houses.” In Attending to Early Modern Women: Structures and Subjectivities, edited by Joan Hartman and Adele Seeff, 50–74. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007. Wiesner-Hanks, Merry E. Christianity and Sexuality in the Early Modern World. Regulating Desire, Reforming Practice. New York: Routledge, 2000. ———. “Ideology Meets Empire: Reformed Convents and the Reformation.” In Germania Illustrata: Essays on Early Modern Germany Presented to

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Gerald Strauss, edited by Andrew C. Fix and Susan C. Karant-Nunn, 181–96. Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies, 1992. ———. “Society and the Sexes Revisted.” In Reformation and Early Modern Europe: A Guide to Research, edited by David M. Whitford, 396–414. Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2008. Worcester, Thomas. “Neither Married Nor Cloistered: Blessed Isabelle in Catholic Reformation.” Sixteenth Century Journal 30, no. 2 (1999): 457–72. Zarri, Gabriella. “From Prophecy to Discipline, 1450–1650.” In Women and Faith: Catholic Religious Life in Italy from Late Antiquity to the Present, edited by Lucetta Scaraffia and Gabriella Zarri, 83–112. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. ———. “The Third Status.” In Time, Space, and Women’s Lives in Early Modern Europe, edited by Anne Jacobson Schutte, Thomas Kuehn, and Silvana Seidel Menchi, 181–99. Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2001.

Part I

Service

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1 Community, Conflict, and Local Authority The Basque Seroras Amanda L. Scott

After quietly biding his time for years, in 1611 Don Sebastián de Ruiz de Orellana decided the time for action was finally ripe. As prior of Velate in northern Navarre, Don Sebastián was intimately familiar with the small world of religious men and women among whom he lived and worked.1 Most of these individuals moved about their daily routines without incident and, more important, without drawing the attention of Don Sebastián. However, the five seroras of Velate had long rankled Don Sebastián’s conscience. “Underfed and failing to maintain clausura,” in Don Sebastián’s mind, these lay religious women “offended God our Lord” and posed a constant threat to the religious well-being of Velate.2 Thus, in 1611 Don Sebastián launched the first stages of his attack. He carefully gathered together a list of complaints concerning the seroras and travelled to the diocesan seat of Pamplona to make his objections known. He stated his first goals clearly—that “their titles be revoked” and that the women be “immediately removed from their house” and hospital—but was slightly more reticent about his other motivations, which included diverting the women’s incomes toward his own church.3 Of course, as is usually the case, there are two sides to this story. Eager to prove their respectability and demonstrate their contributions to society, the seroras María de Sarrate, María Martín de Elso, Catalina de Urrasun, Graciana de Berrueta, and Catalina de Alcoz hired a lawyer, crafted their own defense, and prepared to meet Don Sebastián in court.4 Though the scenario of a prior suing five humble religious women from his parish with the intention of dislodging them and appropriating their income may seem callous at best and venal at worst, Don Sebastián’s actions and motives in fact mirrored a number of similar incidents that occurred throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Navarre and the Basque Country. During the early modern period, rural shrines and urban parishes alike were served by seroras, or devout laywomen, hired by their communities to assist with the day-to-day demands of parish life. Nominated at the local level and confirmed by the bishop, the serora was well respected, and this could be a highly desirable vocation for an unmarried woman seeking to lead a religious life while also maintaining a degree of social and economic independence.5 However, as prominent religious figures within their communities, the seroras could also provoke envy from other

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parishioners or attract negative attention from the local clergy. Moreover, seroras sometimes vied among themselves for parish appointments, preeminence, or the distribution of seroral duties. All told, the role of serora was at the same time a well respected female religious vocation and a position enmeshed in local conflict and community rivalries. Vocation and Service Very little is known about the early lives or circumstances that led the five women of Velate to choose a vocation that was, officially speaking, neither lay nor religious. Nor can we tell exactly how and why they ran afoul of Don Sebastián. However, seroras were commonplace across Navarre and the Basque Country during the early modern period, and if the specific causes of friction in this case cannot be known for certain, general patterns can be surmised from the numerous records that survive.6 Eighteenth-century reports from Navarre and the Basque Country claim that every parish and shrine had a serora; meanwhile, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century records show that there were frequently as many as two or three serving in a single location.7 Serving alone or in groups, as did the seroras of Velate, these women had generations of experience and tradition to draw upon in order to know what was expected of them while in service. Though the origins of their lifestyle are obscure, by the early modern period the vocation and the process of nomination had achieved a remarkable degree of consistency across the region.8 Many settlements in early modern Navarre and the Basque Country were small and agricultural, and seroras provided valuable assistance in caring for chapels and shrines in areas with less-frequent traffic.9 Others, stationed in more densely populated areas, aided overwhelmed urban priests in maintaining order and stability in their parish churches. Most seroras were responsible for caring for and washing church vestments, looking after church ornaments, and lighting candles. Additional duties included refilling containers of holy water, locking and unlocking church doors, and welcoming worshipers to services.10 Many seroras, even despite advanced age, rang the church bells to call parishioners to mass, a duty in which many took great pride.11 To facilitate their work, most seroras chose the prestige and convenience of living at the seroría, the designated house for local seroras. Though parishioners praised seroras for their reclusion and contemplative lifestyles, the location of the seroría belies the notion that seroras (or their work) were at all separated from the community or local religious life. Most serorías were located nearby or adjoined the parish church or shrine, enabling seroras to attend to their duties promptly, as well as to keep a close eye on parishioners and visitors, and vice versa. Regardless of where seroras might live, there were always slight variations in the type of services they rendered, depending on geographic pressures and existing local institutions. Seroras in Mendexa, Bizkaia, for example, operated a hospital; meanwhile, seroras in Hernani, Gipuzkoa, watched for incoming

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storms.12 Likewise, the five seroras of Velate traced their roots to a pious establishment founded to serve the poor. Their seroría and church were located at an important crossroads midway between Pamplona and the French border, and as they explained as part of their defense, seroras had served the town of Velate “from time immemorial as part of a house established to offer hospitality and aid to the many simple poor who arrive in town.” Moreover, as they expanded, their labor was “an example of service to God and to the poor, and without their work, the church would lose these services.”13 Selecting a serora was a local decision that usually rested either in the hands of the town council or with the patrons of a given chapel or shrine. When all went according to plan, seroras were nominated from a pool of eligible local women. Having once secured a nomination at the local level and the support of her community, the serora was required to formally petition the bishopric for permission to begin her duties. Seroras could travel to the bishop’s audiencia to do this in person; however, most found it easier to hire lawyers to act on their behalf and present the diocese with information attesting to their honorable reputations, personal habits, age, and marital status. Seroras could be and often were widows, yet they could not be married at the time they began service. Though it was frowned upon, if a serora wished to later leave the service and marry, she was free to do so: seroras took no formal vows but rather made informal promises to remain chaste during their service.14 After confirming that all was in order and that the town had not inadvertently or intentionally nominated a woman of lax morals or unsuitable character, the diocesan authorities issued the candidate a license and formally invited her to begin serving the church.15 However, by this time most seroras had already begun their service informally. Two to three days following her nomination, the newly minted serora, a notary, and an assortment of local officials met at the front doors of the shrine or parish church. In a series of acts heavily imbued with ritual significance, the serora proceeded alone into the building and gently led anyone who might still be inside out. After this, she moved about the church, carefully touching and checking the ornamentation and vestments, while also opening and closing all doors and windows. Touching each of the objects and testing each of the doors signified a symbolic property transfer and voluntary assumption of the church’s care, and in going through each of these steps the serora signaled to the community and to God that she was the new caretaker of the church and its goods. Likewise, in an act analogous to a conventional land transaction, the serora moved through similar steps to take possession of any adjoining church lands. In many cases, the serora’s labors were supported in part by the fruits of nearby orchards or gardens, and just as she had examined the movable church property, she also assessed the lands that would allow her to devote herself wholly to her new vocation. Walking around the property with a notary in tow, the serora broke branches from the trees and crumbled a handful of earth through her fingers.16 Though many seroras were at least partially supported by benefices belonging to their shrines or chapels, most supplemented their incomes with additional gifts

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of money, agricultural products, wine, or wax from their parishioners.17 In many cases, these payments were ad hoc and unpredictable. To forestall the possibility that seroras would become destitute burdens on their communities, most patrons demanded that seroras offer a dowry upon profession. Ranging from a few reales to several hundred ducats, these dowries were intended to help support the seroras throughout their tenure. Often viewed as gifts to the church (a serora who chose to leave her vocation forfeited her dowry to the church), these dowries could also serve as tools to make certain candidates more attractive in the face of competition.18 After the ritual acts were complete and the dowry was posted, the new serora moved officially into her new role as local religious woman. For the rest of her life she was guaranteed income and stability; in return, the community had several expectations of its own. All seroras were to remain chaste and single and, barring exceptional circumstances, they were expected to devote the rest of their lives to the service of the church and their communities. Moreover, seroras were meant to be accessible role models to other members of their communities, available to counsel other women, especially younger girls. Their prominence as religious figures in the parish was supposed to be reflected in their comportment and reputation. Finally, despite Don Sebastián’s objections, there was no consistent practice about the degree to which seroras ought to remain withdrawn from the community: on the whole, parishioners lauded seroras who mingled with them and did good works among their neighbors. Seroras took these expectations to heart and many made it a priority to become deeply involved with their communities. One serora from the Valley of Baztan in northern Navarre put it succinctly: “[I live] in a town with more than twenty houses,” she declared in 1629, “and [I live] in one of these houses too, not as if [I] were in the desert, but rather as a neighbor, along with the responsibilities and obligations [that being a neighbor entails].”19 The Benefits of Age and the Dangers of Parish Life Parishioners and seroras alike judged the presence of a serora as a good for the community, for spiritual as well as practical reasons. The vocation enabled necessary caretaking services for the parish church, while affording local unmarried women a stable, respectable, and economical way to live and work independently. As a sanctioned religious occupation specifically reserved for local women, it allowed for a degree of cooperation between the clergy and the parish regarding the control and supervision of local religious affairs. Additionally, the vocation created a normalized arrangement in which women were afforded a special role in parish administration and were valued for their unique contributions. Given the choice to replace their seroras with male sacristans, or pressured to restrict some of the seroras’ privileges and duties, many parishes resisted, citing their belief that the serora’s contributions to parish life could not be fulfilled by a sacristan. Indeed,

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seroras and sacristans frequently served side by side, and neither vocation took precedence over the other.20 The importance parishioners placed on having an active serora serving their church or shrine translated into the effort that certain interested parties put into trying to manipulate the selection process. The position was technically reserved for local women over the age of forty, a requirement that was reiterated by synodal degrees in the later sixteenth century.21 However, there were frequently more candidates than positions available, including many young candidates in their twenties and thirties. Generally speaking, patrons as well as eligible candidates anticipated vacancies well in advance of their becoming available. It was not uncommon for tenured seroras to be plagued by a host of aspiring candidates waiting in the wings for their deaths; older women in particular saw younger wouldbe seroras gradually encroaching on their duties or trying to establish themselves as the next serora in line.22 In 1563, for example, Ana de Ezaguierre was thrilled to be named serora at the basilica of Errexil in Gipuzkoa. She was so excited, in fact, that she failed to adhere to the qualifications of her selection, namely that she wait until the deaths of the two current seroras. Instead, she scandalized the town by moving her bed directly into the church, at which point the two elderly (but still quite alive) seroras began harassing her, and the rector sought legal intervention from the diocese. Eventually, Ana was reprimanded and reminded to wait patiently until her duties were actually required.23 Similarly, in the mid-sixteenth century, Juana de Zelarain, serora at the shrine of Mary Magdalene on the outskirts of Tolosa, brought suit against her fellow serora, María de Eldua. Both were recognized as seroras by their neighbors and the patrons of the chapel; however, this did not guarantee smooth or amicable relations between the two women. Above all, Juana felt that María’s presence impeded her ability to complete her duties, which involved “caring for the keys, chalice, missal book, and ornamentation” of her shrine and undertaking this “service and administration in a way comparable to the vicar of [Tolosa].”24 Whether or not María was actually interfering with these activities soon became secondary as the main problem presented itself: claiming to be the more senior of the two seroras, Juana believed that she was entitled to increased privileges and authority over María, as well as a greater portion of the benefice. María understandably objected, and insisted that it was she who had served the longest. Desiring to settle the dispute and reinstate peace between their two seroras, the parishioners of Tolosa testified on behalf of both Juana and María, citing their “honesty, reputation, and good service”; however, no one was able to offer definitive proof regarding which serora was older nor which had served the longest.25 All told, the townspeople and the two seroras devoted over sixteen years to trying to resolve the dispute, only to see it ultimately left hanging with neither serora declared more senior than the other. At other times, presumably in cases where it was self-evident which serora was older and more experienced, living seroras welcomed the help or companionship of younger novices. Some seroras tried to ensure a smooth transition by inviting

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young nieces or cousins to join them in the seroría in semi-formal apprenticeships.26 As well-intentioned and benign as these efforts might have been, they were not necessarily devoid of conflict: localities jealously guarded their right to name seroras, and legally and traditionally the vocation was reserved for local women first. Juana Chacón found as much in 1596 when she tried to continue the work of her deceased aunt Doña Ana de Alzate in Ochagavía, Navarre. Though familiar with Juana and having deep respect for her venerable aunt, the townspeople refused to let her become the new serora on the grounds that she was not a native resident. Instead, they nominated María de Labari, who, though less experienced than Juana, was born and bred in Ochagavía.27 Such practices ensured not only that the serora’s character and history would be known to the parish, but also that a highly desirable and potentially lucrative post would not be disassociated from local control. All told, the vocation provided enough immediate and tangible benefits for numerous parties to attempt to control and influence selection. However, just as Basque communities valued their seroras and sought to reserve the position for local women, they also endeavored to regulate their behavior and mold the vocation to respond to specific parochial concerns. The demands of the occupation placed women at the forefront of community affairs and religious activities, and it was not just calculating priors like Don Sebastián who saw the seroras’ social prominence as a potential problem. The local conflict that often arose around seroras reflected the importance of their work and spoke to a general consensus that the seroras belonged to and must answer to the communities that had elected them. Regardless of where they were stationed, seroras were visible. Whether living at a rural shrine or busy urban parish church, the nature of the vocation placed women at the center of religious life. Though synods in the seventeenth century voiced concerns about the propriety of giving women access to the innermost sanctum of the church, most parish communities saw few problems in allowing seroras to carry out these caretaking duties.28 It was, after all, a practical vocation, and the serora’s duties were necessary to the smooth functioning of parish life. However, not all seroras contented themselves with religious prominence in their communities, and some saw little reason to separate town social ritual from religious ritual. Specifically, there were no formal prescriptions about a serora’s duties, nor were there any regarding the separation of her duties as serora from her normal participation in community life as a local resident. In the seventeenth century, for example, the tiny mountainous community of Etxalar found itself questioning the extent to which religious prestige ought to translate into social preeminence. Their serora, Catalina de Montes, dutifully served the parish church and frequently took part in the social and religious life of the town. However, Catalina also had a strong personality, to which was added a penchant for the dramatic. None of this ought to have been a problem, except for the fact that some time during her tenure, Catalina decided that as serora she deserved additional privileges, specifically, a more prominent role in the local religious festivals. Despite the esteem parishes accorded their seroras, these

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demands threatened traditional social hierarchies in Etxalar, namely that the wife of the manorial lord take the leading role in the Corpus Christi procession. As scandalized residents reported, “just as [the lady of Etxalar] Doña Jacinta was leading the procession of women toward the church, just as she always has done, Catalina de Montes pushed her way to the front, on the pretext that because she was a serora, she deserved that position.”29 Significantly, as bystanders further confided, Catalina had done so dressed not in the demure habit of serora but rather in the “profane outfit of a laywoman,” or possibly even in some sort of costume.30 For generations, a host of septuagenarian witnesses explained, the castellans of Etxalar had been patrons of the parish church; with these responsibilities came certain privileges, including naming rights of the rector and the serora, as well as the heretofore unchallenged preeminence and right to always be first in entrances, offerings, and other ceremonies. These privileges were taken for granted by the parishioners of Etxalar, who saw no reason to question rights that had existed “from time immemorial” nor the role and station that custom had assigned their serora in relation to her patrons. Catalina occupied a crucial role in the parish infrastructure and it raised no eyebrows when she wanted to participate in the social religious activity of the parish; such involvement was expected. She crossed the line, however, when she tried to blend the roles of serora and parish woman, and more important, when she tried to claim precedence over the church’s patron and her own. Simple envy was at the root of many such conflicts. Saints’ days and religious processions marked important points in the calendar year, and the entire community helped prepare for these festivals and eagerly anticipated their arrival. Women in particular had a special role in the organization and execution of these communal acts of veneration. For those allotted prominent roles during the procession it was a particularly exciting event, but also one that could provoke feelings of resentment from those with lesser roles. Meanwhile, as seroras navigated spheres of religious responsibility usually reserved for men alone, they too incurred jealousy from other women in their communities. Nomination and appointment was competitive, and individuals and family groups who had failed to secure the position might harbor long-lasting resentment toward chosen seroras. Once seroras were confirmed, they moved into their positions for life, meaning that any bitterness or ill feeling between them and other women might simmer for decades. Moreover, as central figures within local religious life, seroras could not be avoided easily. The parish church or shrine was above all the domain of the serora, and it was there, perhaps more than anywhere else, that seroras and their parishioners reported incidents of misconduct, confrontation, and even physical attack. Often, these altercations were simply verbal sparring that caused harm only in that it scandalized onlookers. Occasionally, however, tensions rose to such a point that seroras and their parishioners came to blows or actively sought to inflict painful and lasting injury. In 1610, for example, the serora Mariana de Erausti reported that she had been “savaged with a plank of wood” by her sister-in-law María while the two had been visiting her shrine.31 Similarly, in the town of Deba in Gipuzkoa,

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witnesses reported seeing their serora, Mariana de Udabe, calmly processing to church one Easter Monday morning. Upon arriving at church, Mariana entered only to find the parishioner San Juan de Zubelzu lying in wait, his hands suspiciously placed upon a “white standard” located prominently at the front altar. Worried that San Juan might damage the standard or that “it might occur to him to lose” it, and also calling attention to San Juan’s apparent lack of sobriety, Mariana admonished him to “pull himself together.” Rather than standing down, however, San Juan began shouting at Mariana and making a scene. Then, armed with “the cross from the white standard,” San Juan set upon Mariana, “beating her across the face and throwing her bodily against the wall.” Slumped in a corner and crying, Mariana then called out piteously to all those present “to be her witnesses, as they know and have seen what just happened.”32 Eager to be of service and tell their versions of the story, many onlookers came forward to testify against San Juan. On the whole, their accounts differed only in minor detail. One witness described the bruises on Mariana’s face; another somewhat dubiously claimed that Mariana had actually fought back, and the “two of them had exchanged punches, first one at the other and then the other one back again.”33 More important, witnesses thought San Juan’s choice of the white Easter standard was significant. Mariana, they explained, “had made the standard with her own money and out of her devotion with the help of her own sister, which is publicly known.”34 Thus, when San Juan made the standard his weapon of choice, he inverted Mariana’s act of piety and turned a symbolic element of her vocation of serora against her, perhaps in the hope of driving her away from her vocation, or at the very least making his disapproval publicly known. Unfortunately, witnesses were unable to provide any rationale for the attacks. San Juan was not described as a habitual drunkard, nor was he labeled as a madman, wantonly carrying out attacks and choosing victims at random. Instead, his Easter attack on Mariana was presented as a matter of fact. Witnesses were understandably scandalized that he had beaten Mariana so brutally and in church, yet they refrained from characterizing the attack as “without reason” or “without any provocation,” as witnesses often did.35 All said and done, these omissions suggest that there were longstanding tensions between Mariana and San Juan. They even raise the possibility that Mariana had somehow aggrieved San Juan, perhaps supplanting one of his female relatives in the vocation of serora. Physical attacks against seroras were extreme reactions and, fortunately, fairly rare. More commonly, when parishioners sought retaliation against their seroras, they did so through gossip or oral public shaming. Social standing and reputation in early modern Spain drew upon complicated notions of personal and familial honor, which could be lost, challenged, or damaged merely by questioning someone’s honor.36 As single women, albeit with ecclesiastical backing and established social prestige, seroras had to be constantly on guard. The security of their vocation depended upon impeccable reputation, which could make them easy targets for insult and injury at the hands (or mouths) of women who were jealous of their position.

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Like other men and women in Golden Age Spain, seroras could draw upon one of two options in order to recuperate lost honor. They could retaliate physically, thus demonstrating to the rest of their community that they believed they had been insulted unfairly, or they could seek retribution through legal channels. The latter option was often considered preferable, since legal recourse could guarantee monetary retribution and halt cyclical community violence. For single or elderly seroras who were not willing or able to exact physical punishment for affronts to their honor, the court system was usually the method of choice. In 1614, for example, the serora Catalina de Calahorra sought legal help after being insulted and publicly shamed by María de Mendiorroz. Catalina felt that María had done lasting and intentional damage to her honor and reputation by “calling her a ‘whorish woman,’ and other injurious and indecent words.” Moreover, she had done so not once but “repeatedly [and] many and diverse times with particular ire and anger.”37 In her own defense, María claimed that these charges had been fabricated by Catalina, who had her own motivations to “color” María’s reputation. Ultimately, the two women failed to produce any corroborating evidence, and the secular court dismissed the charges on the grounds that there “was no proof whatsoever of the words that Catalina de Calahorra had complained about.” Both Catalina and María were ordered to attend to pious works and also admonished to “refrain from speaking to one another for two years.”38 Wealth and Conflict Social tensions, grudges, and personality clashes all propelled seroras and parishioners into conflict and sometimes into court as well. A serora’s religious duties and prominent role within the community could easily provoke the discontent of other parishioners who felt they had been socially snubbed by her election or who suffered from some other unresolved dispute. Reacting emotionally, parishioners expressed their dissatisfaction through public confrontation, shaming, and occasionally through physical altercation. However, just as a serora’s social autonomy could incite envy or elicit personal rivalries, friction over the serora’s economic independence could lead to equally vicious conflict. Part of the attraction of the serora’s vocation for many women was certainly the social independence it offered. For women who did not marry and for whatever reason also felt they were not suited for monastic life, the role of serora was a viable and practical option. It allowed widows to support themselves respectably, without needing to rely on the goodwill of neighbors and relatives. As seroras, they could continue to live amongst their friends and family, either alone or with other women, all the while maintaining a degree of social and economic autonomy unusual for single women. To support this lifestyle, seroras relied, at least in part, on alms or income from benefices granted by their communities. Though the vocation did not require applicants to renounce worldly goods, in reality many seroras were poor, whether

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voluntarily or involuntarily. Indeed, in visitations and account books, seroras frequently related stories of personal frugality and hardship. For example, in 1626 in the Valley of Baztan, María de Yndatea claimed to be receiving no more than thirteen reales annually, while Cathalina de Ystilart was being paid six reales plus two robos of wheat.39 Similarly, Catalina de Jasso, serora of the cathedral church in Tudela, was receiving an annual payment of two measures of wine from the cathedral chapter; like other dependents of the cathedral who were paid in kind (the ministro mayor, for example, was paid in onions), she presumably was allowed to sell the wine she did not drink.40 Additionally, Catalina received a license at least once to sell certain church items, perhaps splitting the profits with one of the cathedral’s charitable funds.41 However, either because they had been independently wealthy before profession or because they enjoyed a rich benefice or received gifts from generous parishioners, some seroras managed to amass substantial wealth during their tenure. Because poverty was not mandated, this was usually not a problem in life. After death, on the other hand, a serora’s legacy could lead to community tensions, as priests, parishioners, and patrons sought to find the fairest way to divide her property. Many seroras, whether wealthy or poor, chose to leave their worldly goods to their shrines upon their deaths. At the end of her life, the serora Doña Ana de Alzate of Ochagavía, for example, found herself a wealthy woman, but also hoped to devote herself to Our Lady of Muskilda in death, just as she had in life. As she stated in her will, once it was known that death was near, “she wanted to be picked up and brought into [her shrine], where she would end her days in the service of God our Lord and his blessed mother.”42 Once she had died there, she specified she was never to leave the shrine again, and ordered her body be interred where she died. Moreover, she would continue to care for her community in death: she arranged for seventy-five masses for her soul and for the souls of those in her care, and left an endowment to her shrine consisting of “sixty years of rent [totaling] one hundred ducats.”43 However, contrary to her vision of peacefully carrying on her duties as serora in death, her bequests were waylaid by the manorial lord, vicar, mayor, and town council, all of whom hoped to benefit personally from the way in which her testament was executed. Ultimately, Doña Ana’s wealth obstructed her pious intentions, and instead led to an ugly legal squabble that involved the better part of her town. Though testamentary bequests offered a convenient means to contest a serora’s financial autonomy, grasping priests and village authorities did not always wait until a serora was dead to try to appropriate her income. For example, María de Larragueta, serora at the shrine of Nuestra Señora de Viloria, was violently expelled from her shrine by none other than her parish priest and his associates.44 Over the course of several days, the mayor, parish priest, and various other town officials entered her house, helped themselves to her belongings as well as items belonging to her shrine, and finally even tried to carry María away bodily, an affront which was only prevented by the intercession of some parishioners.45 No motivations for

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these aggressions ever materialized, and it is unclear whether María had perhaps misunderstood a plan to move or close her seroría. However, according to María and her witnesses, her modest benefice and goods had presented altogether too great a temptation for town authorities. In the end, the case was deferred and became a jurisdictional dispute between the royal fiscal and the ecclesiastical courts. Goats, Greed, and the Spiritual Care of Velate For the five seroras of Velate, however, the order of their imminent eviction by the hand of Don Sebastián left no room for doubt. Shortly after Don Sebastián initiated the first stages of his plan to remove them from their house and hospital, the five seroras received a notice from the vicar, nullifying their licenses and informing them that they must vacate their post within ten days. Believing that Don Sebastián had no right to throw them from their seroría or to separate them from their religious vocation, the five women reacted quickly. Proud of their roles as seroras, they began by stating the importance of their work: “[F]rom time immemorial,” they explained, “there have been seroras and currently are seroras in the house next to the hospital [for the purpose] of caring for the poor that arrive in town.” Moreover, they were also responsible for “the care and service of the church and cleaning the church, of which there is much need.” In order to perform these services, they had been given a license by none other than Don Sebastián himself. Sensing that their success largely rested upon proving that these services did not create a financial burden for their community and that they were regarded as important religious figures in the community, the seroras called upon a series of witnesses. Juan de Reparoz, a stocking-maker from Velate, testified that the seroras “have lived and do live in a withdrawn manner and honestly and nothing contrary to this has he heard.” The carder Joanes de Yrigoyen agreed, noting that the seroras had the important job of “washing the various poor people that arrive in town,” and also that he had “heard his parents and other old folks say that [during their lives] there have always been [seroras] in the said house and hospital.”46 Witnesses also affirmed that there had never been difficulty in supporting or feeding such a community of seroras. In fact, “by custom and assent, the priors of Velate [had] always had the obligation to attend to them and provide a certain salary and ration.”47 Thus, when Don Sebastián claimed that the seroras “were underfed,” it was by his doing alone. “And they would like to remind their prior,” the senior serora María de Sarrate added, “that at present it is his obligation [to feed them].”48 Though the rents and donations were coming into the church and hospital as they always had, Don Sebastián was failing to remit a due portion of the income to the seroras. This additional information suddenly changed the nature of the case. No longer was it a question of whether or not the parish of Velate was hosting a

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number of impoverished and unruly religious women: now, the crux of the matter became Don Sebastián’s apparent neglect of a valuable religious community under his care. Realizing that he was losing ground, Don Sebastián changed tack. It was ridiculous, he claimed, to suggest that he would have given the seroras licenses, and anyway, these were not meant to be perpetual titles. More important, anything he had ever given had been “not out of obligation, but rather voluntarily.” Thus the seroras “were usurping his goods and responsibilities,” and anything they had ever taken from the hospital they had stolen from him, the rightful beneficiary.49 Confronted with two drastically competing narratives, the bishop’s fiscal (attorney) decided that the resolution lay in establishing the ability of the prior and parish of Velate to support the seroras rather than in any inherent or “immemorial” right the seroras held to their vocation. He ordered a complete financial survey of church property and, since both parties agreed that the seroras had in the past been at least partially supported by the prior, an inventory of Don Sebastián’s personal property. What they found quickly sealed the case. Among ordinary household implements and an exceptionally large store of agricultural produce, Don Sebastián had for his own personal use some “124 head of lamb, 67 assorted goats, one billy goat, 42 nanny goats (good for milking), and 27 pigs,” as well as a number of birds and two “good mastiffs.”50 As he possessed more livestock than any one person could ever need, there was absolutely no basis for Don Sebastián’s claims that he could not support the seroras; in fact, he was more than able to do so. Instead, the fiscal ruled, Don Sebastián had been neglecting his duties as prior, which included sharing the fruits of the parish with his dependents, and had falsely accused the seroras out of greed. The seroras posed no spiritual danger to Velate; instead, they were “good Christians, fearful of God and of their consciences.”51 The court reprimanded Don Sebastián, ordered him to pay court costs and to leave the seroras alone, and informed him that “he had no authority to try to remove the seroras,” either at present or at any time in the future.52 Conclusion There is good reason to be wary of exaggerating the degree of conflict that swirled around the seroras. As scholars who work with civil and criminal court records are well aware, courts generate piles of paperwork, while amicable relationships and smoothly functioning communities go undocumented. Still, the very nature of the seroras’ vocation put them at the forefront of community conflict. Though many parishes considered the vocation to be established “from time immemorial” and valued the practical nature of their labors, the exact parameters of the seroras’ local power and influence were open to dispute and negotiation. When an opportunity presented itself, parishioners, clergy, and even other seroras did not hesitate to attempt a renegotiation of parochial duties, preeminence, and economic distribution. Of course, none of this was unusual: seroras were simultaneously local

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religious women and parish neighbors. They had grown up among the people who nominated them, and they served their friends and family members as well as God. However, upon entering the vocation, seroras also passed across an undefined barrier that permanently, if somewhat ambiguously, distinguished them from other men and women in their communities. Often these differences offered parishioners and clergy the opportunity to challenge the power and roles of the seroras. Unmarried and autonomous, seroras were exposed to verbal and physical attack and particularly subject to accusations of social transgression and dishonorable living. Greedy and grasping as he was, in the end even Don Sebastián framed his complaints within these simple terms. Though his accusations went unproven and his primary objective to appropriate for himself a larger portion of the parish wealth quickly became apparent, he crafted his attack by drawing from common questions about the ambiguity of the seroras’ role. Ultimately, the peaceful coexistence of parishioners with their seroras rested upon a careful balance: allowing single women to hold local religious power could only be justified by their practical contributions to parish life, and when those contributions were called into question, the seroras were thrust into the center of village conflict. Notes  1. For additional information on the history of the religious community at Velate, see Miren Koro Campos Santacana, “Monasterio Hospital de Santa María de Velate,” in Revisión del Arte Medieval en Euskal Herria 15 (1996): 265–71.  2. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are those of the author. Archivo Diocesano de Pamplona, Tribunal Eclesiástico (ADP), C/244 N. 24, fol. 1r.  3. Ibid.  4. Ibid., fol. 3r.  5. Throughout this essay I use the term “vocation” to mean not a form of religious life formally sanctioned by the church, but rather a lifestyle that was recognized at the local level as a sanctified calling.  6. Seroras appear in a variety of documents from the early modern Basque Country and Navarre, including notarial documentation, diocesan court records, secular court records, and diocesan correspondence. Most early modern Basque women were not literate, and seroras were no exception; their appearances in the extant documentation were mediated through parish priests, notaries, translators, and lawyers.  7. Wentworth Webster, “Seroras, freyras, benoˆıtes, benedictae parmi les basques,” Revue du Béarn et du Pays Basque 2.4 (1905): 146.  8. See Juan Garmendia Larrañaga, Costumbres y ritos funerarios en el País Vasco (Donostia-San Sebastián: Editorial Txertoa, 1991), 7–11, and Pilar Peñaranda García, “Un desconocido grupo social: Las seroras navarras,” in Grupos sociales en Navarra. Relaciones y derechos a lo largo de la historia. Actas del V Congreso de Historia de Navarra, Volumen 1, ed. Carmen Erro Gasca and Iñigo Moreno Mugueta (Pamplona: Ediciones Eunate, 2002), 297–310, esp. 297.  9. On the seroras as part of Basque society, see Ana Zabalza Seguin, “Casa e identidad social. La casa en la sociedad campesina: Navarra, 1550–1700,” in Casa, Familia, y

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Sociedad (País Vasco, España y América, siglos XV–XIX), ed. José María Imízcoz Beunza (Bilbao: Universidad del País Vasco, 2004), 79–85. For data on the location of individual seroras from the medieval to modern periods, see Antxon Aguirre Sorondo and Koldo Lizarralde Elberdin, Ermitas de Gipuzkoa (Antuan, Gipuzkoa: Fundación José Miguel de Barandiarán Fundazioa, 2000). For general studies on Basque and Navarrese society and local community, Julio Caro Baroja, De la vida rural vasca, 3rd edition (San Sebastián: Editorial Txertoa, 1986); Pedro Esarte Muniain, Como vivían los baztaneses en el siglo XVI (Baztan: Baztan Udala, 2006); José María Imízcoz Beunza and Oihane Oliveri Korta, eds, Economía doméstica y redes sociales en el Antiguo Régimen (Madrid: Sílex, 2010); Oihane Oliveri Korta, Mujer, casa, y estamento en la Gipuzkoa del siglo XVI (San Sebastián: Diputación Foral de Gipuzkoa, 2009); and Juan Javier Pescador, The New World inside a Basque Village: Oiartzun and Atlantic Emigrants, 1550–1800 (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2004). 10. Archivo Histórico Diocesano de San Sebastián (AHDSS), sig. 2352/008–01. 11. ADP, C/690 N. 16, fols 35v and 37r. 12. Archivo Histórico Eclesiástico de Bizkaia (AHEB), F006.246 2647/004, fol. 24r, and AHDSS, sig. 2352/008–01. 13. ADP, C/244 N. 24, fol. 14r. 14. Juan Garmendia Larrañaga, Seroras y sacristanes: Etnografía e historia (DonostiaSan Sebastián: Eusko Ikaskuntza, 2009), 5. 15. Some patrons made chronically bad choices in choosing seroras. Archivo Real y General de Navarra, Tribunales Reales, Procesos (AGN), 041900 and ADP, C/182 N. 11. 16. Antxon Aguirre Sorondo, “La mujer en la religiosidad popular: Las seroras,” in Sukil, Cuadernos de Cultura Tradicional, No. 1 (Iruñea: Ortzadar Euskal Folklore Taldea, 1995), 105–12, esp. 110. 17. Seroras themselves did not hold benefices, but via custom “from time immemorial,” many seroras held stipends paid by beneficed male clergy. ADP, C/838 N. 16, fol. 1r; ADP, C/690 N. 16, fol. 35v; Archivos Eclesiásticos de Tudela (AET), Archivo Catedralicio, Estatutos, fols 46r–48r; and AHEB, 2589/001–00, fol. 38r. 18. ADP, C/690 N. 16, fol. 10r. 19. Ibid., fol. 72r. 20. Garmendia Larrañaga, Seroras y sacristanes, esp. 27–53. 21. In the late sixteenth and into the seventeenth century, diocesan officials focused on restricting the vocation to women over the age of forty. Older women had years of interaction with their communities to support their vetting for the position and confirm their reputations. Moreover, they were perceived as less likely to wish to leave their occupation for marriage. Following the Council of Trent, synodal meetings repeatedly ordered that seroras be at least forty years of age, yet the ages of seroras confirmed for years later indicate that these decrees had little effect. William and Mary Special Collections, Constituciones sinodales del obispado de Pamplona, Compiladas, hechas, y ordenadas por Don Bernardo de Rojas, y Sandoval, Obispo de Pamplona, del Consejo de su Magestad, & c. En la Sínodo, que celebraron en su Iglesia Catedral, de la dicha ciudad, en el mes de Agosto, 1591 (Pamplona, Spain), Libro 4, Capitulo 5, fol. 93r. 22. ADP, C/58 N. 2. 23. ADP, C/54 N. 16. 24. ADP, C/46 N. 6, fol. 3r. 25. Ibid., fols 17r and 31r.

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26. The term seroría was used by contemporary sources to refer to the physical building in which the serora lived, and less commonly in abstract reference to the vocation of being a serora. ADP, C/134 N. 17. 27. ADP, C/148 N. 3. 28. A synod held in Logroño in 1698 referred back to decrees issued in 1620, concerning the presence of Basque seroras, that complained about the seroras’ propensity “to walk through the sacristy alongside priests, even to the altars where they light candles, finger the ornaments and sacred vessels, and [do] other inappropriate things.” AHEB, Constituciones Synodales Antiguos y Modernas del Obispado de Calahorra y La Calzada (Madrid: Antonio González de Reyes, 1700), 496–97. 29. AGN, 258273, fol. 1r. 30. Ibid., fols 4r–5v and 17r. 31. ADP, C/434 N. 25, fol. 1r. 32. Archivo General de Gipuzkoa (AGG), CO.CRI 66.10, fols 4r–4v. 33. Ibid., fol. 4r. 34. Ibid., fol. 4v. 35. See José Luis Sales Tirapu and Isidoro Ursua Irigoyen, Catálogo del Archivo Diocesano de Pamplona (Pamplona: Gobierno de Navarra, 1988–). 36. For a study of how a “rhetoric of honor” served as a strategy for solving community conflict between individuals who were neither noble nor royal, see Scott Taylor, Honor and Violence in Golden Age Spain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). 37. AGG, CO.CRI 17.7, fol. 3r. 38. Ibid., fol. 85r. 39. ADP, C/690 N. 16, fol. 10r. and fol. 35v. 40. AET, Archivo Catedralicio, Estatutos, fols 46r–48r. 41. AET, Archivo Catedralicio, Actos Capitulares, Libro 4, fol. 260v. 42. ADP, C/183 N. 1, fol. 9r. 43. Ibid., fol. 10v. 44. AGN, 091023, fol. 1r. 45. Ibid., fol. 1v. 46. ADP, C/244 N. 24, fol. 38v. 47. Ibid., fol. 14r. 48. Emphasis added. Ibid., fol. 14v. 49. Ibid., fols 21r–v. 50. Ibid., fols 90r–v. 51. Ibid., fol. 39r. 52. Ibid., fol. 114v.

Works Cited Archival Sources Archivo Diocesano de Pamplona (ADP) Archivos Eclesiásticos de Tudela (AET) Archivo General de Gipuzkoa (AGG) Archivo Real y General de Navarra (AGN)

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Archivo Histórico Diocesano de San Sebastián (AHDSS) Archivo Histórico Eclesiástico de Bizkaia (AHEB) William and Mary Special Collections Printed Sources Aguirre Sorondo, Antxon. “Las ermitas de Hernani.” Cuadernos de Sección. Antropología-Etnografía 11 (1994): 9–70. ———. “La mujer en la religiosidad popular: Las seroras.” In Sukil, Cuadernos de Cultura Tradicional, No. 1. Iruñea: Ortzadar Euskal Folklore Taldea (1995): 105–12. Aguirre Sorondo, Antxon, and Koldo Lizarralde Elberdin. Ermitas de Gipuzkoa. Antuan, Gipuzkoa: Fundación José Miguel de Barandiarán Fundazioa, 2000. Azpiazu, José Antonio. “Las seroras en Gipuzkoa (1550–1630).” Cuadernos de Sección. Antropología-Etnografía 13 (1995): 41–66. Brunet, Serge. Les prêtes des montagnes: la vie, la mort, la foi dans les Pyrénées centrales sous l’Ancien Régime: (Val d’Aran et diocèse de Comminges). Aspet, France: PyréGraph, 2001. Caro Baroja, Julio. De la vida rural vasca. 3rd edition. San Sebastián: Editorial Txertoa, 1986. Campos Santacana, Miren Koro. “Monasterio Hospital de Santa María de Velate.” Revisión del Arte Medieval en Euskal Herria 15 (1996): 265–71. Christian, William A. Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981. Diez de Salazar, Luis Miguel. “La mujer vasco-navarra en la normativa jurídica (s. XII–XIV).” In Las mujeres medievales y su ámbito jurídico. Actas de las segundas jornadas de investigación interdisciplinaria, edited by Cristina Segura, 95–114. Madrid: Seminario de Estudios de la Mujer de la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 1983. Esarte Muniain, Pedro. Como vivían los baztaneses en el siglo XVI. Baztan: Baztan Udala, 2006. Garmendia Larrañaga, Juan. Costumbres y ritos funerarios en el País Vasco. Donostia-San Sebastián: Editorial Txertoa, 1991. ———. “El Señor de Loyola, patrono de la iglesia de San Sebastían de Soreasu y sus filiales. Las seroras (S. XVI).” Boletín del Real Sociedad Bascongada de los Amigos del País 63, no. 2 (2007): 471–81. ———. Seroras y sacristanes: Etnografía e historia. Donostia-San Sebastián: Eusko Ikaskuntza, 2009. Goñi Gaztambide, José. Los navarros en el Concilio de Trento y la reforma tridentina en la diócesis de Pamplona. Pamplona: Imprenta Diocesana, 1947. Imízcoz Beunza, José María, ed. Elites, Poder y Red Social. Las élites del País Vasco y Navarra ———. Redes Familiares y Patronazgo: Aproximación al entramado social del País Vasco y Navarra en el Antiguo Régimen (siglos XV–XIX). Bilbao: Universidad del País Vasco, 2001.

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Imízcoz Beunza, José María, and Oihane Oliveri Korta, eds. Economía doméstica y redes sociales en el Antiguo Régimen. Madrid: Sílex, 2010. Jaka Legoruru, Ángel Cruz. La Antigua: Santa María de Zumarraga, catedral de las ermitas. Donostia-San Sebastián: Kutxa Fundación, 1996. Larramendi, Manuel de. Corografía de la muy noble y muy leal Provincia de Guipúzcoa. Reprint of the 1756 edition. Bilbao: Editorial del Libro Vasco, 1985. Madariaga, Juan. “Espacio doméstico y espacio seputural en Euskal Herria. Siglos XVI–XIX.” In Casa, familia, y sociedad (País Vasco, España y América, siglos XV–XIX), edited by José María Imizcoz Beunza, 429–85. Bilbao: Universidad del País Vasco, 2004. Oliveri Korta, Oihane. Mujer, casa, y estamento en la Gipuzkoa del siglo XVI. Donostia-San Sebastián: Diputación Foral de Gipuzkoa, 2009. Peñaranda García, Pilar. “Un desconocido grupo social: Las seroras navarras.” In Grupos sociales en Navarra. Relaciones y derechos a lo largo de la historia. Actas del V Congreso de Historia de Navarra, vol. 1, edited by Carmen Erro Gasca and Iñigo Moreno Mugueta, 297–310. Pamplona: Ediciones Eunate, 2002. Pérez Ollo, Fernando. Ermitas de Navarra. Pamplona: Caja Ahorros de Navarra, 1983. Pescador, Juan Javier. The New World inside a Basque Village: Oiartzun and Atlantic Emigrants, 1550–1800. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2004. Sales Tirapu, José Luis, and Isidoro Ursua Irigoyen, Catálogo del Archivo Diocesano de Pamplona. Pamplona: Gobierno de Navarra, 1988–. Taylor, Scott. Honor and Violence in Golden Age Spain. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. Webster, Wentworth. “Seroras, freyras, benoîtes, benedictae parmi les basques.” Revue du Béarn et du Pays Basque 2, no. 4 (1905): 139–51. Zabalza Seguin, Ana. “Casa e identidad social. La casa en la sociedad campesina: Navarra, 1550–1700.” In Casa, Familia, y Sociedad (País Vasco, España y América, siglos XV–XIX), edited by José María Imízcoz Beunza, 79–85. Bilbao: Universidad del País Vasco, 2004. Zudaire, Claudio. “Seroras del Báztan en el siglo XVII.” Cuadernos de etnología y etnografía de Navarra 10, no. 28 (1978): 435–39.

2 The Company of St. Ursula in Counter-Reformation Italy Querciolo Mazzonis

Introduction Founded by Angela Merici in Brescia in 1535, the Company of St. Ursula is well known for having provided laywomen a devout life in the midst of the world, as an innovative alternative to monasticism. Throughout its history the Company of St. Ursula has taken a variety of institutional forms and offered new religious and social opportunities to women. At the close of the Council of Trent, the Company expanded in northern Italy under the direction of reforming bishops, assuming new educational and charitable aims and a variety of unenclosed living arrangements. Subsequently, it spread to France, where it became a conventual religious order, combining contemplative life, teaching commitment, and missionary spirit. Thereafter, it expanded to the rest of Europe and the New World.1 This essay discusses the evolution of the companies of St. Ursula in Italy during the century after Merici’s death in 1540. While building on existing studies, I examine new sources to provide a more complex picture of how the Ursuline companies adapted to the post-Tridentine environment and the role they played in episcopal reform movements. The case of the Italian Ursulines challenges the view that after Trent the church adopted a monolithic or repressive policy toward devout laywomen, forcing them to accept enclosure or otherwise restricting their ability to live a consecrated life. Indeed, as recent studies on other female orders and institutes have shown, the relationship between the post-Tridentine church and women in general was more complex than is often assumed.2 Although Ursulines were more subjected to the church’s control after Trent, they nevertheless retained the freedom to remain in the world and keep significant aspects of Merici’s original spiritual model. As I will argue, the Company of St. Ursula survived because it fit the projects of diocesan reform of the post-Tridentine bishops and because devout laywomen were determined to defend their own forma vitae. The Development of the Company of St. Ursula (1540–1640) Angela Merici (ca. 1474–1540), a Franciscan tertiary and a woman reputed to be a “living saint,” founded the Company of St. Ursula in Brescia in 1535. The original

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Company was composed of laywomen who lived a life of prayer and penance in their own homes, without vows or common habit. The Company has often been characterized as a charitable and teaching institute for poor women. Recent studies, however, have argued that this interpretation obscures the historical significance and complexity of Merici’s thought and work.3 According to these studies, the Company proposed a form of consecration for women (an identity as a “bride of Christ”) outside the convent, in the midst of the secular world, as an alternative to monasticism. Merici’s Company was innovative in its resemblance to the practices of the beguines, the tertiaries, the beatas, and the bizzoche (devout women who pursued a life of prayer, charity, and penance in their own houses or in small communities), and because it required inner detachment from the world and offered a personal, interior, anti-institutional, penitential, and even mystic experience of the sacred. In a period open to daring ideals of perfection and modes of devotion, the Brescian saint synthesized and gave institutional form to a variety of medieval and renaissance ideals of female spirituality and of the devotio moderna.4 During Merici’s life, the number of Ursulines increased considerably; starting with twenty-eight in 1535, by 1540 the Company had 150 members. Having survived initial opposition, the Brescian Company obtained papal approbation in 1546. In the 1560s, it spread to Northern Italy with the support of the new religious orders and, above all, the local bishops who approved the companies in their worldly outfit and provided the new founding rules. By the early years of the seventeenth century, the Company was present in almost every important city and surrounding territory in the areas of Lombardy, Veneto, and Emilia Romagna, and in some cities of central and southern Italy:5 Brescia (1535/1536), Cremona (1565/1616), Bologna (1565?/1603), Milan (?/1567), Venice (1571/1593–1642), Como (1570/1576), Lodi (?/1575), Bergamo (1575/1575), Ferrara (1584/1587), Verona (1586/1594), Parma (1590/by 1623), Novara (by 1593/1625?), Foligno (1570?/1600), Treviso (1590–1600/1603), Modena (?/1603), Naples (?/1609), Reggio (?/1611), Pergola (?/1623), Feltre (ca. 1600/by 1637). The companies attracted a significant number of women: at the beginning of the seventeenth century in the diocese of Milan there were about 800 Ursulines; in Brescia, 400; in most of the other cities the number ranged from 20 to 150. One misconception is that the secular companies of St. Ursula were staffed by poor women. On the contrary, their members came from a variety of social backgrounds.6 After the Company received church approbation, the ranks of aristocratic women increased in several cities. At the same time, companies increasingly denied admission to indigent women.7 This widespread diffusion of the Company of St. Ursula epitomizes the vitality of the secular female religious movement after the Council of Trent. In fact, Merici’s organization, albeit the most significant, was not the only female secular institute (congregation without clausura) supported by the church in Italy in the early modern period. Similar institutes were the Zitelle (1558), the Dimesse (1579), the female oratories (established at the beginning of the seventeenth

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century) in the Veneto area, the female Theatines (1583) in the South, and the Medee (1594) in Genoa.8 The newly founded companies of St. Ursula were quite fluid and often changed shape. Some Ursulines continued to live in their own homes; others lived without clausura in common houses or, during the seventeenth century, in conventcolleges. In fact, the history of the individual companies shows that, contrary to what it is usually assumed, the fate of the institute was not one of progressive claustration. While several groups of Ursulines decided to live together in common houses and several secular companies subsequently developed into colleges, in the eighteenth century there were still groups of Ursulines living in their own houses, at least in eleven cities, including Brescia, Milan, Venice, Treviso, and Bologna. Furthermore, it should be emphasized that neither the Ursulines in the common houses nor those in the convent-colleges had to take solemn vows or were submitted to a regime of clausura; Ursulines could continue to move freely, teach, attend mass, make confessions, and receive communion in their parish churches. Although the new companies kept some basic aspects of Merici’s original organization, the rules provided by the bishops introduced significant changes and gave the Ursulines the duty to carry out charitable works and to teach catechism to girls in the schools of Christian Doctrine.9 Congregated Ursulines often taught the novices and educande (young girls who lived with the congregation temporarily and paid an annual fee for their board and education). They also taught girls who lived at home while attending school in the convent-college or in a house situated next to it. Women as Key Actors in the Company’s Expansion Women played an active role in shaping the new Ursuline groups. They founded the companies, at least in Milan, Bologna, Venice, Ferrara, Verona, Treviso, and Foligno—and, of course, in Brescia.10 In some cases, women were inspired either by charismatic women or by the members of religious orders who backed their initiative and exercised some spiritual direction. Women were also key agents in the establishment of some of the congregated groups (in Brescia, Milan, Cremona, Parma, and Verona) and colleges (in Treviso and Ferrara). Although some groups abandoned or attenuated their active apostolate due to social pressure (the active life was considered less prestigious than convent life), others did so voluntarily, for spiritual reasons. And whenever the families of the girls (especially aristocratic families in Treviso and Ferrara) or the state’s interests (as was the case in Parma and Piacenza) supported the development of the companies, the Ursulines played an active role in these developments.11 Women’s involvement in the new companies of St. Ursula can be explained by a combination of spiritual and socioeconomic factors. In a 1584 letter dedicated to the Venetian Ursulines, the printer Giovanni Giolito specified some of these factors: “There are many young women who want to observe virginity, but cannot enter the convents, either for lack of sufficient dowry, or because they don’t want

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to be submitted to clausura or, because they think they cannot get the necessary spiritual help.”12 In the second half of the sixteenth century, new inheritance laws that favored primogeniture contributed to a growth in the number of women who were unable to afford the necessary dowry for marriage or monastic profession.13 Therefore, the Company, which did not require a dowry, appealed to women who found themselves in a difficult socioeconomic situation. At the same time, the Company’s prestige was enhanced by the fact that it enjoyed the church’s approval and counted aristocrats among its Matrone (lady-governors).14 Furthermore, the Company catalyzed women’s aspirations for a devout life that did not require separation from families, friends, or the renunciation of personal property, and that offered them responsibilities as administrators and teachers.15 Like many beguines, tertiaries, and bizzoche before them, the women who were attracted to the new companies also sought an institutional structure that would allow them more spiritual autonomy—a more personal, penitential, and interior experience of the sacred.16 In pursuing their spiritual aspirations, Ursulines sometimes clashed with ecclesiastical authority: in Brescia several adherents established a separate faction because they opposed Paul III’s decision to back the request made by some leaders of the Company to wear a leather belt (as a sign of membership); in Milan Giovanna Anguillara and in Cremona Maddalena Guerrini came into conflict with religious authorities over their attempt to create groups of congregated virgins;17 Paola of Foligno overcame the bishop’s opposition to the Company by creating a network of relations with known ecclesiastics, including the Oratorian Cesare Baronio; in Verona and Ferrara, some Ursulines left the Company when it became congregated.18 In some cities, the Ursulines negotiated aspects of the new rules or defended their spirituality before ecclesiastical authorities. Around 1558 in Brescia, for example, where the tradition of Merici’s spirituality was strong, the Ursulines’ lady-governors composed a manual for the confessors in which they instructed the Fathers of Peace (a congregation of reformed priests that took charge of the Ursulines) on the aims and the form of the Company.19 When in 1581 Archbishop of Milan Carlo Borromeo (1538–1584) made a pastoral visitation to the city, the lady-governors of the Company, in order to enhance their position vis-à-vis Brescian society, presented Borromeo with their rule (almost identical to Merici’s) for his revision and approbation. Although Borromeo did eventually alter their rule, he approved a version that was much closer to Merici’s than the text he had composed for the Company of Milan fifteen years earlier. The Brescian case set the precedent. Subsequently, in all cities women obtained the rules from the bishops that followed the Brescian new version rather than that of Milan. The Counter Reformation and the Company of St. Ursula The Counter-Reformation Church played a vital role in the establishment of the new companies of St. Ursula in Italy. It is important to emphasize that the

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companies survived as a secular form of consecration, not despite the reformist activity of Tridentine bishops and of religious congregations but thanks to it. Indeed, members of the clerks regular (such as the Jesuits, the Somaschans, and the Oratorians), Lateran Canons, Franciscan Observants, and congregations of reformed priests (such as the Fathers of Peace and the Priests of St. Corona) were all involved in the new companies, either in their foundation or as confessors, governors, or protectors. Committed to the conversion of the laity by exercising spiritual direction and by writing spiritual treatises, they promoted interior spirituality and charitable works and were open to new models of devout life for women.20 The bishops of the cities in which the companies were founded played a fundamental role in the promotion of the Ursulines: they approved the companies, gave them new rules, and became their leaders.21 Particularly important was Carlo Borromeo, the prototype of the Counter-Reformation bishop. He was not only the first to found a new Ursuline Company in 1567 but also the first to promote its establishment in other dioceses in the fourth Provincial Council in 1576. The majority of the bishops who were involved in the foundations belonged to his generation, maintained contact with him, and followed his instructions. A good number of them (Bollani, Gabriele and Alfonso Paleotti, Sfondrati, Cornaro, Valier, and Scarampo) also participated in the Council of Trent and shared Borromeo’s determination to apply the decrees that emerged from the Council in their own diocese, including the Decretum de regularibus et monialibus of 1563, which imposed enclosure on female religious, and Pius V’s constitution Circa pastoralis of 1566, which extended it to the informal communities of tertiaries. The Tridentine decree and Pious V’s constitution, therefore, were not insurmountable obstacles for pious women in Italy who wished to live in the world. It is significant that Borromeo established the Company in Milan the year after he participated in drawing up Circa Pastoralis. The reforming bishops considered the foundation of the secular companies to be an issue distinct from the reform of female monastics. Indeed, at the juridical level, the bishops were careful to keep the legal status of Ursuline companies as local lay associations that did not require solemn vows. The lay status was also extended to the congregated Ursulines, who neither adopted solemn vows nor were submitted to enclosure.22 In some rules’ introductions, the Ursuline condition was presented as a female “third status” (after those of wife and nun).23 Thus, it seems that while the postTridentine bishops were concerned with regulating female monasticism, they also wished to offer devout women a legitimate alternative to enclosure. Conversely, it is ironic that the Company was not approved in those cities where bishops were not committed to reform and where religious power was controlled by aristocratic families, who upheld a rigid notion of women’s role in society. The aristocratic concept of female honor was hardly compatible with Merici’s Company, which left virgins in the world with little or no male supervision. In the cities where the bishops actively implemented Tridentine decrees and approved the companies of St. Ursula, some aristocratic families accepted the Ursulines

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because they were reassured that the bishops would protect their daughters’ honor and they recognized the economic advantages offered by a Company that did not require the dowry. Thus, contrary to what often has been assumed, Italian Tridentine bishops were not trying to enclose devout women pursuing active life. Rather, they showed a significant degree of flexibility toward female forms of religious life. Often in collaboration with members of the new religious orders, they had a crucial role in establishing the new companies. Nor did bishops force the Ursulines to form semi-enclosed congregations. It seems that in many cases it was the choice of women themselves, although at times they were responding to external pressure. After all, the Tridentine church had appeared divided on the issue of women’s active life. First, the Council of Trent approved an ambiguous decree on enclosure for convents, which left the issue of the communities of tertiaries unsolved. Then, in 1616, the Congregation of the bishops and of the regulars defused Pius V’s bull by affirming that (open) convents of tertiaries were “to be tolerated (albeit not approved).”24 Furthermore, ecclesiastics often protected and sometimes even venerated secular bizzoche and tertiaries, who continued to populate Italian cities throughout the seventeenth century and beyond.25 What were the reasons for bishops’ approbation of the companies of St. Ursula? First, they had to confront the fact that there were a significant number of women who wished to pursue devout lives in their own houses and who could not be forced to accept enclosure. Second, reforming bishops took into consideration the fact that many families had difficulty arranging appropriate marriages for their daughters. Third, by approving the companies, they could introduce changes that reinforced male control over women’s agency and virginity. Moreover, the bishops were able to incorporate the Company within a wider project of reform of the laity, which included measures aimed at disciplining behavior, controlling consciences, converting hearts and minds, and sanctifying everyday life.26 In Milan, for example, Borromeo invested great effort in fostering lay devotion through preaching that emphasized sacramental observance, Christian ethics, and confession. He established the schools of Christian Doctrine and pious sodalities (such as the confraternities of the Holy Sacrament) and promoted spiritual literature. The Ursulines came under the umbrella of this wider reform project. The bishops and the members of the religious orders shared and promoted a model of spiritual conversion of the laity (rooted in late medieval spirituality and in particular in the devotio moderna) that was compatible with Merici’s ideal of an interior spirituality that was at once active and contemplative.27 To be sure, bishops purged Merici’s rule of those aspects that diverged from their attempt to obtain devotional uniformity. Finally, the bishops approved the companies because they saw in the Ursulines an ally for the diffusion of their spiritual ideals and gender notions in the dioceses—in schools, families, hospitals, and institutes for women in danger.28 Bishops’ gender notions did not prevent women from assuming active social roles or from aspiring to models of spiritual perfection to be lived in the world. Besides,

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different sectors of society supported educating women of all classes because women’s role within the family was deemed more important than in the past.29 Some of these considerations are explicitly stated in a document composed for Borromeo by the bishop of Bologna, Gabriele Paleotti, and reiterated in several introductions of the new rules: “Since there are many virgins who want to serve God in this state . . . , we can establish a congregation of virgins and give them some rules . . . ; they could serve in several pious works . . . ; they could teach Christian doctrine to girls”; the virgins could “bring families to live a Christian life . . . , exhort them frequently, together with good odor of virtue and sanctity . . . [they can move their relatives and masters] to acquire affection for pious works and the reform of customs according to the law and doctrine of Christ.”30 Therefore, although each congregation was founded independently and there was no motherhouse, the companies responded to similar circumstances and shared similar aims. Such uniformity is reflected in the way the bishops altered Merici’s rule. The New Rules of the Companies: Organization and Government Through the analysis of the new companies’ rules it is possible to examine the bishops’ conditions for approving female devout life in the world more carefully. The rules examined in relation to Merici’s are those proposed by Borromeo for Milan (1567) and Brescia (1582), as well as those of Ferrara (1587), Verona (1594), and Treviso (1603), composed by the entourages of the respective bishops.31 The closeness to the original rule varied as subsequent bishops considered previous rules and adapted spiritual principles to their own milieu. The bishops’ rules for the Ursulines modified Merici original solutions to the questions of organization, authority, and association with the church. In these respects the bishops followed Trent’s requirements regarding lay associations and Borromeo’s views on the clergy’s role in directing lay piety and promoting social order. In Merici’s Company, the government was entirely managed by women: by the General Mother, the Matrone (aristocratic widows who dealt with practical issues), and by the Colonelle (wise virgins who acted as spiritual guides). In contrast, the new companies were managed by the bishop (who led them) and the General Father (who acted as the bishop’s vicar). Furthermore, male Protectors (laymen and ecclesiastics) took charge of economic matters while the private confessor became a central figure in directing the spiritual life of the community’s members.32 Although women maintained an important role in managing the virgins, their governing roles changed as the companies’ structure became more hierarchical and decentralized. Whereas in Merici’s Company the virgins’ problems were discussed collegially by all members of the government, the new rules introduced a central authority—consisting of the General Father, the General Mother, and four Assistants—while decentralizing the rest of the Company, creating sub-companies

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in each area of the city, composed of a lady-governor, a spiritual guide (called Maestra), a supervisor (called Avvisatrice), and a group of virgins. The rules stressed hierarchical authority in various situations. The virgins were no longer permitted to dismiss a lady-governor who had not acted properly. They could exercise their right to elect their leaders only after the death of the General Mother. The bishops, in order to increase control over the Company, came to prefer to choose lady-governors among the virgins rather than from the widows of the civic society, as instructed by Merici. However, Merici’s set of pedagogic advice, directed to the Matrone and the Colonelle, on how to govern the daughters, which stressed respect for the individual and reciprocal love, survived in several rules (at least in Brescia, Ferrara, Treviso, Foligno, and Bologna), and probably influenced the relations of power within the Company. This advice, however, lost part of its significance, since men, rather than women, headed the governments of the new companies. Spirituality The new rules endorsed an ideal of perfection that, like Merici’s, focused on interior conversion: the heart, the mind, the conscience, the will, and thoughts were the center of self-transformation and encounter with God. The new rules proposed a spiritual path based on the annihilation of self-will, examination of conscience, mental prayer, and meditation. Compared to Merici’s writings, however, the bishops’ rules put less emphasis on the interior encounter with God and subjected the Ursulines’ spiritual choices to greater control. As leaders of the church in charge of their diocese, the bishops stressed the institutional and liturgical aspects of religious life and sought to channel the Ursulines’ active roles within their plans for diocesan reform. Although the bishops placed the Ursulines more directly under the direction of the confessor, they did not close off opportunities for interior spirituality. The new rules encouraged the virgins to practice both vocal and mental prayer, examine their conscience, and meditate, especially on the Passion. Furthermore, the Ursulines were directed to read spiritual books that would help them eliminate their “inordinate passions” and to be open to God’s will. The recommended readings consisted primarily of spiritual guides for lay beginners, but they also included more ascetic and mystical works. The Milanese rule recommended L’essercitio della vita christiana (1557) by the Jesuit Gaspare Loarte (a text that Borromeo used to recommend to the laity), together with other texts, such as the Prattica dell’oratione mentale by the Capuchin friar (and first biographer of Merici) Mattia Bellintani, The Imitation of Christ, and the works by Luis de Granada.33 The bishop of Verona, Agostino Valier, writing to the Venetian Ursulines, recommended Specchio di Croce by Cavalca, the works by Granada, and the lives of saints such as Catherine of Siena.34 The rule of the Dimesse, approved by both Valier and Priuli and composed by the ex-Barnabite and follower of Battista da Crema, Antonio

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Pagani, suggested reading Tauler and Antonia Negri, a controversial mystic incarcerated by the Inquisition. Furthermore, in the rules of Ferrara and Treviso we find references to radical ascetic spirituality (typical of Battista da Crema and of the Theatine Lorenzo Scupoli, whose Il combattimento spirituale was published in 1589), which located perfection in spiritual combat and the annihilation of selfwill: “We wish that they might report a glorious victory in the continuous war they will engage in the world and with their own sensuality: therefore they should observe exact obedience with true denial of their own will.”35 The new rules introduced ex novo or gave new emphasis to institutional and liturgical aspects of the Ursulines’ spiritual life, thus promoting the goal of uniform devotional practice. Sacramental observance became more central and liturgical references more frequent.36 Above all, the new rules required Ursulines to wear a common habit, make a simple (non-binding) vow of chastity, and participate in a ceremony of acceptance. In contrast, Merici’s rules emphasized inner conversion: “Each one should also preserve sacred virginity, not making a vow on account of any human persuasion, but voluntarily making to God the sacrifice of her own heart.”37 One of the most meaningful changes introduced by the new rules concerns the mediation between the Ursuline and God. In the chapter on obedience, Merici, following a medieval female spiritual tradition, placed the Ursulines in direct contact with the divine and encouraged her followers “to obey the counsels and inspirations that the Holy Spirit unceasingly sends into our hearts.”38 In Borromeo’s rule of 1582, by contrast, the counsels of the Holy Spirit were to be evaluated by the confessor: “And [the Ursulines are advised] also to obey the inner inspiration, which, with the judgment and approbation of the confessor, will be recognized to be coming from the Holy Spirit.”39 The other rules followed Borromeo’s version or further mitigated the connection between the Ursuline and God. In addition, the new rules sought to impose restraints on penance and fasting permitted by Merici’s rule. In accordance with medieval penitential culture, Merici encouraged women to fast in order to save souls and to mediate God’s pardon: “They should fast . . . to subdue the senses and the appetites and sensual desires that . . . rule over the world, and to implore mercy before the throne of His Divine Highness for many dissolute actions.”40 Passages like this disappeared in the new rules, which also decreased the number of days the Ursulines were permitted to fast. The new rules reveal a different understanding of salvation and charity, one that was no longer associated with penance but with almsgiving, assistance, and teaching.41 In the rule of Verona, for example, women’s fasting is associated with, though subordinated to, almsgiving: while the former is described as a means of purification, the latter is represented as an imitation of Christ’s salvific act: “As physical fasting cleanses the virgin’s soul of vice, almsgiving to the poor for the love of God makes it virtuous, and in this way it makes it similar to our Lord, who is merciful with everybody.”42 The Ursulines’ teaching duty in the schools of Christian Doctrine is conceptualized in a similar way: “Give alms spiritually by going to the schools of Christian Doctrine to teach.”

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Thus, the Ursulines’ involvement in active life ought not to be viewed in opposition but in continuity with contemplative life. Charity and teaching preserved aspects of monastic spirituality as self-sacrifice for the salvation of souls in imitation of Christ. Consequently, the Ursulines’ not infrequent choice to move from secular to congregated lifestyles does not represent a profound spiritual change but rather the will to pursue the same spirituality in the quiet of the cloister. The life of one of the founders of the female congregation of the Medee, Maria Vittoria de Fornari Strata, illustrates this choice. After years of active life, Fornari Strata decided to leave her secular sisters in order to found a congregated group. Her biographer and sister in religion Gertrude Centurioni wrote that Maria Vittoria “taught Christian doctrine for many years . . . with commitment, diligence, and fatigue . . . Although such exercise was repugnant to her nature, which was inclined to be retired and alone . . . , nevertheless she held in great esteem and was always struck by the value of a soul redeemed with the blood of Christ.”43 Perceptions of Female Nature Free from stereotypical ideas about “female nature,” Merici’s writings present women as both mystical and rational beings capable of taking responsibilities for their own lives. The bishops’ rules, by contrast, showed a double attitude: on the one hand, they reiterated traditional ideas about women’s irrationality and sensuality, which required their subordination to men; on the other hand, they alluded to women’s spiritual superiority. Thus, in the new rules we find that the Ursulines were sometimes depicted with derogatory terms such as “disobedient and stubborn,” “incorrigible,” “greedy,” “lazy,” “insolent,” “unfocused,” “cold,” and inclined to temptations and to frivolous things.44 Furthermore, the new rules introduce restrictions on the everyday life of the Ursulines: “It is not proper for the virgins to be seen outside their homes. . . . They should not go around the city, unless they need to do so or they are called by the Avvisatrice.”45 The Ursulines were advised to refrain from talking “indifferently with all sorts of people; [rather, they should speak] only with those who share the same life . . . , never talk alone to men, but always be with someone else, and only when it is absolutely necessary.”46 Merici—who had lived for thirteen years in the house of an unmarried merchant— only prohibited receiving secret messages from men, meeting women of bad reputation, wasting time on balconies and streets, and attending public events such as weddings, dances, and games. Not surprisingly, the public role that Merici gave the Ursulines (to be an example of virtue and to spread peace) was cut out from the new rules.47 The new restrictions were a consequence of a greater emphasis on virginity. Indeed, if Merici referred to the Ursuline three times with the term “virgin” and twelve with “bride,” Borromeo’s rule for Brescia (which is half again as long) mentions these terms forty-nine and sixteen times, respectively.48 This is not to say

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that Merici did not esteem virginity. Indeed, she described it as a source of power, virility, and independence, and she did not place it under male supervision. Her idea of virginity was part of a Christian tradition that identified it with a powerful status, one that—in a society that associated women with reproduction and sexuality— could free women from male dominance and social ties.49 In contrast, in the new rules virginity was no longer described as a virile condition that allowed Ursulines to face and act in the world but rather a gem to be safeguarded, forcing women to passively withdraw from a world that was seen as a potential threat: “Remember that they have a precious treasure in a fragile vase of glass, and a precious gem desired by many people, and that they carry a lamp exposed to the wind of many and various temptations.”50 The differences in the two conceptions of virginity are subtle but significant. Merici identifies the Ursuline with the Biblical figure of Judith, described as a virile virgin: “Come on, valiant daughters, let us all embrace this holy Rule. . . . And armed with its sacred precepts, let us behave in a virile way, that we too, like holy Judith, having courageously cut off the head of Holofernes, that is of the devil, may return gloriously to our heavenly home.”51 In the new rules the Ursulines lose much of their virile and heroic identity: “Now, wise sisters, let us all embrace this holy Rule. . . . And armed with its sacred precepts, let us behave like that, so that we too (like Judith, who courageously cut off the head of Holofernes), by cutting off the deceits of the devil, may we return gloriously to our heavenly home.”52 In sum, while Merici’s Ursuline emphasize women’s victory over the devil, the new rules reinforce the idea that woman is weak and subject to the devil’s deceits. Indeed, in the new rules we find a preoccupation with the need to protect the Ursulines’ virginity from the assaults of the devil: “They should always be busy, whether in serving, in reading, or in praying, so that the Devil will find them busy and will not be able to tempt them.”53 The bishops’ perception of femininity would appear to be incompatible with the important active social roles they assigned to the Ursulines—teaching in the schools, working in pious institutes, and acting as a watchdog of the Christian family. However, an alternative and contrasting attitude emerges in the milieus closely linked to the companies. In Valier’s treatise for the Venetian Ursulines we read: “It is true that the weakness of your sex is great; thus God, out of compassion, for your consolation and our embarrassment, wishes to grant women a greater humility and more fervent devotion on many occasions.”54 The idea that women were inferior to men at a biological and social level but spiritually equal or superior found its model in the binary opposition of Eve and Mary. It went back to St. Paul’s idea that woman’s subordination to man, typical of this world, would disappear with the advent of God’s kingdom.55 At the same time, the recognition of woman’s spiritual capacities in the early modern period can be considered in association with the ideology surrounding female nature, which was considered less stable, less defined, and more penetrable to the supernatural—an ideology that led some to believe that women were more receptive to mystical experience.56 In continuity with this perception of femininity, in the early modern period women’s exceptional devotional capacities were described as resulting

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from God’s intervention. The examples of hundreds of medieval and Renaissance saintly women had probably reinforced such ideology. In the same way we can understand how the bishops could justify women’s teaching, despite St. Paul’s well-known prohibition. In his treatise, Valier solves the problem by affirming that women’s teaching is informal and that women are not authors of what they teach. According to the Veronese bishop, the Ursulines should listen to sermons so that when they return home they can repeat some sentences: “They will act as a repeater of the Holy Spirit, who has just spoken through the mouth of the preacher.”57 In a similar manner, in the introduction to the rule of the female oratory in Padua, the author distinguishes between official and informal teaching, affirming that St. Paul did not forbid women to contribute to the reform of society and that they can do so by encouraging people to follow Christian values once they have been properly instructed.58 Thus, the acceptance of women’s teaching in the post-Tridentine period can be seen as representing continuity with the gender ideology of the medieval church, which accorded women roles as mediators rather than authors and official administrators of the sacred word. Final Considerations: The Post-Tridentine Church and Devout Women Recent historiography has questioned the paradigm according to which the Council of Trent forced laywomen to enter convents or abandon lives of active Christian service. Several studies have shown that convents were not entirely successful at separating nuns from the outside world, that many laywomen did manage to lead lives of both contemplation and active service, and that women were not inevitably subjected to the will of ecclesiastics.59 The case of the Company of St. Ursula provides a compelling example of the complexity of the relationship between the Tridentine church and devout laywomen—in which authority flowed in more than one direction. Rather than being progressively enclosed, women in post-Tridentine Italy could continue to live a devout life in the world in affiliation with the Company and similar congregations—or as bizzoche and tertiaries. Furthermore, women in post-Tridentine Italy did not always follow the church’s decisions passively: the Ursulines continued to found companies and negotiate their spirituality with ecclesiastics. Even the development of some of the secular Ursuline groups into (uncloistered) congregated forms was often selfdetermined or the result of a negotiation between laywomen, their families, and the bishops. Indeed, the claim that women perceived a conflict between an active and contemplative life, preferring the former to the latter, must be questioned, for many women found the two styles of religious life compatible. There is no doubt that compared to Merici’s original document, the rules of the new companies of St. Ursula restricted women’s spiritual and material freedom and circumscribed their responsibilities. However, it is also true that life in the Company still offered women of different social backgrounds an opportunity to realize their

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organizational and intellectual skills and spiritual aspirations. Women continued to live in the world, were encouraged to establish a personal relationship with the divine, and could promote conversion through teaching, assistance, and virtuous example. Although these roles offered them less prestige and power than that enjoyed by earlier female prophets and “living saints,” they represented the new ways through which women could re-enact Christ’s charity and redemptive role. Finally, the Ursulines forged their identity from a religious model that was rooted in a female tradition and in Merici’s innovative ideas on human relationships and personal growth. These ideas were not suffocated entirely by the new rules but rather were transmitted within and beyond the Company. The Company’s case also shows that the Italian post-Tridentine church was not uniformly repressive. The Ursuline’s concept of the bride of Christ in the world was legitimated by the same bishops who were active in the implementation of the Tridentine decrees and subsequent legislation. Their attitudes toward the Company were not guided by the will to enclose women but by an attempt to reform the laity in their diocese. Conceived in tandem with the program of disciplining conventual life, the new companies of St. Ursula (like other female secular congregations) were established as a secular alternative for devout women who did not wish to or could not enter monastic life. Although bishops may have preferred that women of the third status become nuns, for a number of pragmatic socioeconomic and spiritual reasons they, together with members of the new religious congregations, included devout laywomen in their project of reform, as both objects and subjects of conversion. They reformed the Company according to their spiritual ideas, gender notions, and role as ecclesiastical leaders. Having realized that the Ursulines could be useful allies, they conceded to them an important, active role in the confessionalization and conversion of society. Recognizing that Tridentine “discipline” had a behavioral and spiritual component provides a more nuanced picture of the complex motivation of ecclesiastics than the paradigm of unalloyed Counter-Reformation misogyny. The analysis of the new bishops’ rules evinces a mixture of repressive and unrestrictive measures. It also allows us to appreciate the Counter Reformation’s continuities and discontinuities with the pre-Tridentine era and even with the late Middle Ages in relation to the bishops’ attitudes toward devout laywomen and to the religious models for the laity. As post-Tridentine diocesan organizers, bishops introduced new institutional aspects, reinforced hierarchies, and emphasized liturgy in order to obtain devotional uniformity and submission to the church. They domesticated the figure of the Ursuline by mitigating the mystical and penitential aspects of Merici’s rule and by placing women’s devotion under the control of the confessor. At the same time, however, bishops took into consideration the Ursulines’ spiritual aspirations and kept important aspects of Merici’s forma vitae, including a model of devout life that was both active and contemplative and that allowed personal contact with the divine through inner conversion. This in turn suggests that the churchmen who backed the companies wished to reform the laity through models

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of perfection rooted in late medieval spirituality (and particularly in the devotio moderna), which granted the individual a certain degree of responsibility and freedom in the relationship with the sacred. The bishops’ attitude toward women was also multifaceted: whereas they identified femininity with sexuality and viewed the defense of virginity as the ultimate goal of the Ursulines’ status, considering it necessary to supervise women’s supposed natural weaknesses, they also accepted that women could be spiritually equal—or even superior—to men. This double view of women can be seen in continuity with the medieval perception of female identity as both unstable and permeable to the supernatural. This provides yet another compelling example of the multiplicity of the reform agenda of the Italian Counter-Reformation Church. Notes  1. Even today the Ursulines live in a variety of forms and denominations. For a bibliographical and historical overview, see Querciolo Mazzonis, “Ursulines,” in Oxford Bibliographies Online: Renaissance and Reformation, http://www.oxfordbibliographies. com/view/document/obo-9780195399301/obo-9780195399301–0040.xml?rskey= IWFgJA&result=222 (accessed October 23, 2015). There is a long historio­graphic tradition concentrating on the French Ursulines; scholarship on Italy has focused on specific cases or aspects. Representative studies on France are: Marie de Chantal Guedré, Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines en France, 3 vols (Paris: St. Paul, 1958–1963) and Laurence Lux-Sterritt, Redefining Female Religious Life: French Ursulines and English Ladies in SeventeenthCentury Catholicism (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005). For Italy see Gianpietro Belotti and Xenio Toscani, eds, La sponsalità dai monasteri al secolo. La diffusione del carisma di Sant’Angela Merici nel mondo (Brescia: Centro Mericiano, 2009); Gabriella Zarri, Recinti. Donna, clausura e matrimonio nella prima età moderna (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2000), 145–200, 417–51, and 453–80.  2. See Barbara Diefendorf, “Rethinking the Catholic Reformation: The Role of Women,” in Women, Religion and the Atlantic World (1600–1800), ed. Lisa Vollendorf and Daniella Kostroun (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 31–59.  3. Luciana Mariani, Elisa Tarolli, and Marie Seynaeve, Angela Merici. Contribution Towards a Biography (Milan: Ancora, 1987), 169–88, and Querciolo Mazzonis, Spirituality, Gender and the Self in Renaissance Italy. Angela Merici and the Company of St. Ursula (1474–1540) (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2007), 45–51.  4. In the last years of her life, Merici was close to the Lateran Canons, who promoted the ideas of the devotio moderna (a spiritual movement emphasizing inner and ethical piety and personal contact with God), and to the Dominican friar Battista da Crema (the author of popular ascetic treatises). She was probably familiar with the literature that characterized their spirituality (i.e., Cavalca’s Specchio di Croce, Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ, and Erasmus’s Enchiridion Militis Christiani). Merici, furthermore, was a devotee of several women mystics, including Osanna Andreasi, Stefana Quinzani, and Laura Mignani.  5. The dates in brackets refer respectively to the year of foundation and of bishops’ approbation. It is likely that the company was established in other cities not included in this

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list. Ursuline convents were founded in Mantua (1599), Piacenza (1643), Rome (1685), and Calvi (1718).  6. For Ferrara, see Miriam Turrini, “La Compagnia e il Collegio di Sant’Orsola a Ferrara tra Cinque e Settecento,” in Belotti and Toscani, La sponsalità, 513–27. For Brescia, see Mazzonis, Spirituality, 70–76 and 204–6. In Venice and Treviso the coexistence of rich and poor is testified respectively by the books of the company (Archivio di Stato di Venezia, Orsoline, b.1) and by the introduction of the rule (p. 19). For Milan, the majority of the Ursulines apparently came from the lower strata of society; see Claudia Di Filippo Bareggi, “La Compagnia di sant’Orsola nell’area ‘lombarda,’ ” in Belotti and Toscani, La sponsalità, 459–90.  7. This was specified in the rules of Milan, Ferrara, Verona, Bologna, and Modena. In Brescia, as it emerges from a letter written by the secretary of the company, aristocratic women were initially hesitant to enter the company precisely because of the presence of poor women (see Mariani et al., Angela Merici, 569).  8. See “Congregazioni laicali femminili,” special issue of Quaderni Franzoniani 8.2 (1995).  9. On the spread of these schools in Northern Italy, see Miriam Turrini, “Riformare il mondo a vera vita christiana: le scuole di catechismo nell’Italia del Cinquecento,” Annali dell’Istituto storico italo-germanico in Trento 8 (1982): 407–89. 10. In Bologna the presence of devout women is certified by a letter sent by Paleotti to Borromeo (see note 31 below); in Milan several sources testify to the presence of a “company of virgins” from 1560; for the other cities it is stated in the introductions of the rules. 11. For Treviso and Ferrara see Turrini, “La Compagnia;” for Parma and Piacenza, Danielle Culpepper, “ ‘Our Particular Cloister.’ Ursulines and Female Education in Seventeenth-Century Parma and Piacenza,” Sixteenth Century Journal 34.4 (2003): 1017– 37. 12. Premessa al Trattato del D. Dionisio Certosino della lodevol Vita delle Vergini, pubblicato dallo stesso Giolito in Venezia nel 1584 in 12. e da lui indirizzato alla Congregazione di Sant’Orsola (xxii–xxiii, edition published by Comino in Padua in 1744). 13. Zarri, “Il «terzo stato»,” in Recinti, 473–74. 14. Also known as Governatrici, the Matrone had the duty to manage the Company and to provide for the material needs of the virgins. 15. In Venice the Ursulines taught in thirty schools and the lady-governor Cecilia Sagredo (not an aristocrat) was “Cancelliera Generale” in the Company of Christian Doctrine (ASV, Orsoline, b.2). The rule of Ferrara instructed the lady-governors of the company to supervise the Schools of Christian Doctrine. 16. There is a vast literature expounding the characteristics of medieval women’s spirituality. See for example Caroline Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991); and Catherine Mooney, ed., Gendered Voices. Medieval Saints and Their Interpreters (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999). Bynum defined medieval female religiosity as “a-institutional” (Fragmentation, 64). 17. All the Ursulines’ rules refer to their members as virgins—a term that was used for never-married women. 18. For Brescia see Gianpietro Belotti, “La Compagnia di sant’Orsola dalla crisi al consolidamento,” in Belotti and Toscani, La sponsalità, 399–458; for Milan, Lucia Aiello,

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“Laici nella Milano borromaica: Giovanna Anguillara e la fondazione del monastero di Santa Barbara,” Archivio Storico Lombardo 119.10 (1993): 459–74; for Cremona, Andrea Foglia, “Genesi e sviluppo di compagnie ispirate al modello mericiano in diocesi di Cremona tra il XVI e i primi decenni del XVII secolo,” in Belotti and Toscani, La sponsalità, 491–512; for Foligno, Michelangelo Marcelli, Vita della venerabile Paola da Foligno: fondatrice della Compagnia, e dell’Oratorio di S. Orsola in detta città, per il Mascardi, 1659, 35– 39; for Ferrara, Turrini, “La Compagnia,” 521–23; for Verona the contrasts emerge from Chapter 20 of the 1670 rule. 19. Gianpietro Belotti, “Il ‘governo delle coscienze’ al femminile i capitoli per i confessori della Compagnia di Sant’Orsola fra ascesi, comprensione e controllo,” Claretianum 50.1 (2010): 123–51. 20. Zarri, “Il «terzo stato»,” 457. 21. In Brescia, Domenico Bollani (bishop from 1559 to 1579) and Giovanni Dolfin (1579–1584), in Bologna, Gabriele Paleotti (1566–1597) and Alfonso Paleotti (1597– 1610), in Cremona, Nicolò Sfondrati (1560–1590) and Cesare Speciano (1591–1607), in Bergamo, Federico Cornaro (1561–1577), in Verona, Agostino Valier (1565–1599), in Ferrara, Paolo Leoni (1578–1590) and Giovanni Fontana (1590–1611), in Treviso, Ludovico Molin (1595–1604), in Mantua, Francesco Gonzaga (1593–1620), in Novara, Carlo Bascapè (1593–1615), in Modena, Gasparo Sillingardi (1537–1605), and in Lodi, Antonio Scarampo (1569–1576). In addition, Michele Priuli (1579–1603), Agostino Gradenigo (1610–1629), and Francesco Barbaro (1593–1616) approved respectively the Dimesse of Vicenza and of Feltre and the Zitelle of Udine. 22. The other secular female congregations also remained uncloistered. 23. This is the term used in the rules of Ferrara and Verona (Zarri, “Il «terzo stato»,” 464–65). Bishops nevertheless considered monastic status superior to that of the secular Bride of Christ. 24. See Raymond Creytens, “La riforma dei monasteri femminili dopo i Decreti Tridentini,” in Il concilio di Trento e la riforma tridentina. Atti del Convegno storico internazionale, Trento, 2–6 settembre 1963 (Rome: Herder, 1965), 1: 45–83; Francesca Medioli, “La clausura delle monache nell’amministrazione della Congregazione romana sopra i Regolari,” in Il monachesimo femminile in Italia dall’alto medioevo al secolo XVII a confronto con l’oggi, ed. Gabriella Zarri (San Pietro in Cariano: Gabrielli, 1997), 249–301. 25. Emanuele Boaga, “Terz’Ordine secolare,” in Dizionario degli Istituti di Perfezione, ed. Guerrino Pelliccia and Giancarlo Rocca (Rome: Edizioni Paoline, 1997), 9: 1098–1106. 26. See Adriano Prosperi, “Chierici e laici nell’opera di Carlo Borromeo,” in Eresie e devozioni. La religione in età moderna, Devozioni e conversioni (Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2010), 3: 117–45, and Wietse De Boer, The Conquest of the Soul. Confession, Discipline and Public Order in Counter-Reformation Milan (Leiden: Brill, 2001). 27. For an overview of the concept of conversion in Early Modern Italy, see Adriano Prosperi, “Convertirsi e convertire. Itinerari del messaggio religioso in età moderna. Tavola rotonda,” Ricerche per la storia religiosa di Roma 10 (1998): 17–30. On Borromeo’s spirituality, Franco Buzzi, “ ‘Ante orationem praepare l’animam tuam’. Il De Oratione di Carlo Borromeo e la spiritualità del suo tempo,” Studia Borromaica 20 (2006): 43–90. Some members of those religious orders involved with the companies were even open and often expressed daring forms of spirituality, such as the radical asceticism of Battista da Crema and pre-quietist mysticism: see Gianvittorio Signorotto, “Gesuiti, carismatici e beate nella Milano del primo Seicento,” in Gabriella Zarri, ed., Finzione e santità tra medioevo ed

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età moderna (Torino: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1991), 177–201; and Moshe Sluhovsky, Believe not Every Spirit. Possession, Mysticism, and Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008), 97–136. 28. These included refuges for repentant prostitutes, orphans, and battered wives. 29. Zarri, “Il «terzo stato»,” 473–75. 30. Paleotti’s document, Regolamento di vita spirituale per un vescovo, and the anonymous introductions to the new rules, Compendio de gli Istituti . . . (Bologna, 1603), are quoted in Zarri, “Il terzo stato,” 462. 31. Merici’s rule for the Company (Regula della Compagnia de Santa Orsola) and two documents for the government of the company (Arricordi que vanno alli Colonelli and Testamento della Madre sour Angela lassato alle Matrone) are published in Mariani, et al, 436–58, 507–12, and 512–17, respectively. All italics in the quotations are mine. 32. The rule of Ferrara had no General Father. The company of Milan, by contrast, included other male figures. Like Merici, Borromeo and the other bishops gave more importance to the private rather than the common confessor, possibly to avoid having the latter take too much control over the companies. 33. On Borromeo’s approach to mental prayer, see Giorgio Caravale, Forbidden Prayer. Church Censorship and Devotional Literature in Renaissance Italy (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011), 79–81, 130. 34. Modo di Vivere proposto alle Vergini che si chiaman Dimesse (Padua: Comino, 1744), Chapter 16. On the spirituality of Valier and Filippo Neri’s original group of Oratorians see Gennaro Cassiani, Il Socrate Cristiano. Saggio su Filippo Neri (1515–1595) (Pisa: Il Campano, 2010). 35. Treviso, Regole, 66. Giacomo Tribesco, a Lateran Canon friar who had known Merici in the 1530s, also recommends this form of spirituality in a treatise directed to the Brescian Ursulines, Trattato breve del modo del santo vivere che tener debbe una vergine posta nello stato delle Demesse (Lor. Pasquati, 1589). 36. Notably, the new rules added reciting the rosary, and emphasized prayers to Mary and other saints. Like Merici’s, the new rules prescribed daily mass and confession and communion twice a month. The new texts, however, presented these practices with less spiritual explanations and more peremptorily. 37. Merici, Regula, Chapter IX. 38. Merici, Regula, Chapter VIII. 39. Regola, Brescia, Chapter 8. 40. Merici, Regula, Chapter IIII. 41. Obviously assistance and almsgiving have always carried redemptive value in the history of Christianity. However, here we find them in connection with women’s salvific role. Barbara Diefendorf has discussed an analogous change in spirituality for French religious women in From Penitence to Charity. Pious Women and the Catholic Reformation in Paris (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 42. Regola, Verona, Chapter 9. 43. Quoted in Congregazioni laicali femminili, 168–69. 44. For example in Regola, Brescia, Chapters 18 and 20, and Regola, Milan, Chapters7 and10. 45. Regola, Brescia, Chapter 19; Regola, Treviso, 39. The Avvisatrice was the lowest figure in the company’s government and acted as a link between the lady-governors and the Ursulines. 46. Regola, Milan, Chapter 5.

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47. “Wherever they are, they should give good example. And be to all good odor of virtue . . . And seek to spread peace and concord where they are”; Merici, Arricordi, Chapter 5. 48. It is likely that also the new importance given to Mary emphasized virginity. 49. See Barbara Newman, From Virile Woman to WomanChrist. Studies on Medieval Religion and Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 31–34. 50. Regola, Verona, Chapter IIII. 51. Merici, Regula, Prologo. The original Italian reads like this: “Horsù valente, adonque, tutte abbraciamo questa santa Regola . . . Et, armate de gli suoi sacri precetti, vogliamosi così virilmente diportare, che ancor noi, a modo dela santa Judith, tronchata animosamente la testa d’Oloferne, cioè del diavolo, gloriosamente nella patria ritornar possiamo.” 52. Regola, Brescia, Prologo: “Hor adonque, saggie sorelle, tutte di un pari volere abbrazziamo questa santa Regola . . . Et anche, armate di suoi sacri precetti, deportiamosi si fattamente, che anco noi (come Judith troncò animosamente il capo ad Oloferne), troncando gli inganni del demonio, possiamo gloriosamente andar nella celeste patria.” 53. Regola, Brescia, Chapter 19. 54. Modo di vivere, Chapter 2. The trope that women were more pious than men was not uncommon. For an example from Francis of Sales, see Ruth Manning, “A Confessor and His Spiritual Child: Francois de Sales, Jeanne de Chantal, and the foundation of the Order of the Visitation,” Past & Present 2006 Supplement (vol. 1): 102–3. For an example from the Protestant context, see Christine Peters, Patterns of Piety: Women, Gender and Religion in Late Medieval and Reformation England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 55. 1 Cor. 11:3 and Gal. 3:28. 56. Sluhovsky, Believe not Every Spirit (16 and n.). 57. Modo di vivere, Chapter 24: “[The Ursulines] esser quasi ripetitrice dello Spirito Santo, che ha parlato poco prima per la bocca di quel predicatore.” 58. Modo facile per gli Essercitii Spirituali. Per L’Oratorio di Donne . . ., 6. 59. Diefendorf, From Penitence to Charity; Diefendorf, “Rethinking the Catholic Reformation”; Elizabeth A. Lehfeldt, Women in Golden Age Spain: The Permeable Cloister (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005); Amy Leonard, Nails in the Wall: Catholic Nuns in Reformation Germany (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005); Susan Dinan, Women and Poor Relief in Seventeenth-Century France: The Early History of the Daughters of Charity (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006); Lux-Sterritt, Redefining Female; Maria Laura Giordano, “Beatas, Spagna,” in Dizionario Storico dell’Inquisizione, ed. Adriano Prosperi with Vincenzo Lavenia and John Tedeschi (Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, 2010), 1: 161–65.

Works Cited Aiello, Lucia. “Laici nella Milano borromaica: Giovanna Anguillara e la fondazione del monastero di Santa Barbara.” Archivio Storico Lombardo 119, no. 10 (1993): 459–74. Belotti, Gianpietro. “Il ‘governo delle coscienze’ al femminile i capitoli per i confessori della Compagnia di Sant’Orsola fra ascesi, comprensione e controllo.” Claretianum 50, no. 1 (2010): 123–51.

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Belotti, Gianpietro, and Xenio Toscani, eds. La sponsalità dai monasteri al secolo. La diffusione del carisma di Sant’Angela Merici nel mondo. Brescia: Centro Mericiano, 2009. Boaga, Emanuele. “Terz’Ordine secolare.” In Dizionario degli Istituti di Perfezione, edited by Guerrino Pelliccia and Giancarlo Rocca, 9: 1098–1106. Rome: Edizioni Paoline, 1997. Buzzi, Franco. “ ‘Ante orationem praepare l’animam tuam.’ Il De Oratione di Carlo Borromeo e la spiritualità del suo tempo.” Studia Borromaica 20 (2006): 43–90. Bynum, Caroline Walker. Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion. New York: Zone Books, 1991. Caravale, Giorgio. Forbidden Prayer. Church Censorship and Devotional Literature in Renaissance Italy. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011. Cassiani, Gennaro. Il Socrate Cristiano. Saggio su Filippo Neri (1515–1595). Pisa: Il Campano, 2010. Compendio de gli Istituti della Compagnia di S.Orsola,. . . In Bologna. Per Vittorio Benaci, 1603. Congregazioni laicali femminili, special issue of Quaderni Franzoniani 8, no. 2 (1995). Creytens, Raymond. “La riforma dei monasteri femminili dopo i Decreti Tridentini.” In Il concilio di Trento e la riforma tridentina. Atti del Convegno storico internazionale, Trento, 2–6 settembre 1963, 1: 45–83. Rome: Herder, 1965. Culpepper, Danielle. “ ‘Our Particular Cloister.’ Ursulines and Female Education in Seventeenth-Century Parma and Piacenza.” Sixteenth Century Journal 36, no. 4 (2003): 1017–37. De Boer, Wietse. The Conquest of the Soul. Confession, Discipline and Public Order in Counter-Reformation Milan. Leiden: Brill, 2001. Diefendorf, Barbara. From Penitence to Charity. Pious Women and the Catholic Reformation in Paris. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. ———. “Rethinking the Catholic Reformation: the Role of Women.” In Women, Religion and the Atlantic World (1600–1800), edited by Lisa Vollendorf and Daniella Kostroun, 31–59. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009. Dinan, Susan. Women and Poor Relief in Seventeenth-Century France: The Early History of the Daughters of Charity. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006. Foglia, Andrea. “Genesi e sviluppo di compagnie ispirate al modello mericiano in diocesi di Cremona tra il XVI e i primi decenni del XVII secolo.” In Belotti and Toscani, La sponsalità dai monasteri al secolo. La diffusione del carisma di Sant’Angela Merici nel mondo. Brescia: Centro Mericiano, 2009. Giolito, Giovanni. Premessa al Trattato del D. Dionisio Certosino della lodevol Vita delle Vergini, pubblicato dallo stesso Giolito in Venezia nel 1584 in 12. e da lui indirizzato alla Congregazione di Sant’ Orsola. Comino in Padova, 1744. Giordano, Maria Laura. “Beatas, Spagna.” In Dizionario Storico dell’Inquisizione, edited by Adriano Prosperi with Vincenzo Lavenia and John Tedeschi, 1: 161– 65. Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, 2010.

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Guedré, Marie de Chantal. Histoire de l’ordre des Ursulines en France. 3 vols. Paris: St. Paul, 1958–1963. Lehfeldt, Elizabeth A. Women in Golden Age Spain: The Permeable Cloister. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005. Leonard, Amy. Nails in the Wall: Catholic Nuns in Reformation Germany. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005. Lux-Sterritt, Laurence. Redefining Female Religious Life: French Ursulines and English Ladies in Seventeenth-Century Catholicism. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005. Manning, Ruth. “A Confessor and His Spiritual Child: Francois de Sales, Jeanne de Chantal, and the Foundation of the Order of the Visitation.” Past & Present 2006, Supplement (vol. 1): 101–17. Marcelli, Michelangelo. Vita della venerabile Paola da Foligno: fondatrice della Compagnia, e dell’Oratorio di S. Orsola in detta città, per il Mascardi, 1659. Mariani, Luciana, Elisa Tarolli, and Marie Seynaeve. Angela Merici. Contribution Toward a Biography. Milan: Ancora, 1989. Mazzonis, Querciolo. “Ursulines.” In Oxford Bibliographies Online: Renaissance and Reformation http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo9780195399301/obo-9780195399301–0040.xml?rskey=IWFgJA&result=222 (accessed October 23, 2015). ———. Spirituality, Gender and the Self in Renaissance Italy. Angela Merici and the Company of St. Ursula (1474–1540). Washington DC: Catholic University of American Press, 2007. Medioli, Francesca. “La clausura delle monache nell’amministrazione della Congregazione romana sopra i Regolari.” In Il monachesimo femminile in Italia dall’alto medioevo al secolo XVII a confronto con l’oggi, edited by Gabriella Zarri, 249–301. San Pietro in Cariano: Gabrielli, 1997. Modo facile per gli Essercitii Spirituali. Per L’Oratorio di Donne di S. Girolamo & S. Filippo Nerio, instituito in Padova, & altri luoghi, per aiuto dell’Opera della Dottrina Christiana. Composto da Pre Antonio Maria Cortivo de i Santi. In Padova, Per Gasparo Crivellari, 1625. Mooney, Catherine, ed. Gendered Voices. Medieval Saints and Their Interpreters. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. Newman, Barbara. From Virile Woman to WomanChrist. Studies on Medieval Religion and Literature. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995. Peters, Christine. Patterns of Piety: Women, Gender and Religion in Late Medieval and Reformation England. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Prosperi, Adriano. “Chierici e laici nell’opera di Carlo Borromeo.” In Eresie e devozioni. La religione in età moderna. Devozioni e conversioni, edited by Adriano Prosperi, vol. 3, 117–45. Rome, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2010. ———. “Convertirsi e convertire. Itinerari del messaggio religioso in età moderna. Tavola rotonda.” Ricerche per la storia religiosa di Roma 10 (1998): 17–30.

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Regola della nova Compagnia di Santa Orsola . . . In Brescia per Damiano Turlino, 1569. Regola della Compagnia di S.Orsola . . . In Brescia (appresso Pietro Maria Marchetti), 1582. Regola della Compagnia di Santa Orsola . . . In Milano (appresso di Giovan Battista et fratelli da Ponte alla Dovana) 1567. Regola della Compagnia delle Vergini di Santa Orsola. . . . In Ferrara (per Vittorio Baldini), 1587. Regola della Compagnia delle vergini di sant’Orsola . . . In Verona. Presso Girolamo Discepolo Stampatore, 1594. Regole della Compagnia di Santa Orsola . . . [Treviso] In Venetia, 1643. Presso Pietro Miloco. Signorotto, Gianvittorio. “Gesuiti, carismatici e beate nella Milano del primo Seicento.” In Finzione e santità tra medioevo ed età moderna, edited by Gabriella Zarri, 177–201. Torino: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1991. Sluhovsky, Moshe. Believe not Every Spirit. Possession, Mysticism, and Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008. Tribesco, Giacomo. Trattato breve del modo del santo vivere che tener debbe una vergine posta nello stato delle Demesse, Lor. Pasquati, 1589. Turrini, Miriam. “La Compagnia e il Collegio di Sant’Orsola a Ferrara tra Cinque e Settecento.” In La sponsalità dai monasteri al secolo. La diffusione del carisma di Sant’Angela Merici nel mondo, edited by Gianpietro Belotti and Xenio Toscani, 513–27. Brescia: Centro Mericiano, 2009. ———. “Riformare il mondo a vera vita christiana: le scuole di catechismo nell’Italia del Cinquecento.” Annali dell’Istituto storico italo-germanico in Trento 8 (1982): 407–89. Valier, Agostino. Modo di Vivere proposto alle Vergini che si chiaman Dimesse. Padua: Comino, 1744. Zarri, Gabriella, Recinti. Donna, clausura e matrimonio nella prima età moderna. Bologna: Il Mulino, 2000.

3 Nursing as a Vocation or a Profession? Women’s Status and the Meaning of Healing in Early Modern France and England Susan Dinan

In the Middle Ages, European Christian women could marry or enter into religious life. Women from prosperous families who could afford convent dowries most frequently joined contemplative orders as choir, or veiled, nuns, and dedicated themselves to lives of prayer.1 Convents populated by women from elite families were devoted to contemplative prayer, but they also functioned within larger surrounding communities. Medieval convents managed land and money, handed out surplus food after meals, and some gave small sums of alms to the poor.2 They were integrated into their communities as providers of assistance, if only on a very limited level. Women from more modest families might join contemplative orders as lay sisters or servant nuns. Servant nuns paid a smaller dowry to join the community, did not take solemn vows, and worked in the convent doing domestic labor.3 It was possible, however, for women to choose a different path than that of contemplation. Communities like the Augustinians and Beguines existed for women who wanted a religious vocation that existed beyond the convent. The former and older order, the Augustinians, frequently encouraged members to serve as nurses. The Augustinian nuns staffed numerous hospitals, including the HotelDieu of Paris. Later, the Beguines, a lay order of believers who aided the sick in the Low Countries, joined the Augustinian nuns as nurses during the Middle Ages.4 These two orders were especially attractive to women religious from more modest backgrounds, as they often had reduced dowry obligations or dispensed with them entirely. These women often came to communities with housekeeping, caregiving, and agricultural experience that the community could utilize. In turn, these religious communities gave women more independence than they would have enjoyed in married life. The liminal status of women between professed nuns and wives gave these very devout laywomen the space to develop as individuals or in communities that focused on doing good works. This state of affairs was significantly altered by the religious upheavals of the sixteenth century. The medieval church had provided almost all Europeans with a set of beliefs and structures of worship. This changed when Martin Luther and other reformers challenged Catholic teachings about salvation and the sacraments early in the century. Although the Catholic Church responded to the challenge in

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many ways, its formal response was articulated at the Council of Trent, which sought to define Catholic positions on theological and practical issues. This formal institutional response had significant implications for Catholic women. This essay will examine how these changes affected the lives of women in France and England, with a particular focus on the ways in which these reforms constrained or enabled women to pursue lives outside the rubric of marriage or spinsterhood. I explain that French devout Catholic laywomen responded to the religious reforms of Trent in ways that enabled them to continue to publicly pursue careers of charitable works, whereas Protestant women in England found that the Reformation curtailed their ability to pursue similar vocations. As an indirect product of these gender constructions, Protestant and Catholic countries developed distinct systems of poor relief and afforded the sick and poor different systems of care. In Catholic Europe, the Protestant Reformation had the most immediate effect of forcing Catholics to acknowledge the weaknesses of their institutional church, including a murky understanding of theology on the part of many followers and behavioral problems among the religious and laity. In 1545 Pope Paul III and leaders of the church called the Council of Trent, which sought to clarify orthodox Catholic theological principles and reform the behavior of members of the church. The Council ultimately ruled on a number of theological issues, but one of its main projects was to address what was understood to be a fundamental problem of the church: poorly disciplined sexual conduct. Although the problem was plainly one that affected both men and women, the Council attempted to solve the problem by regulating the behavior of women. The Council‘s disciplinary measures were distinct from those handed out to men because the church considered communities of women potential centers of corruption. The Council‘s decree “Provision is made for the enclosure of nuns, especially those who reside outside the cities,” issued in the twenty-fifth and last session (December, 1563), sought to cloister all female religious. The councilors stated, “The holy council . . . commands all bishops . . . make it their special care that in all monasteries subject to them . . . the enclosure of nuns be restored wherever it has been violated and that it be preserved where it has not been violated.”5 With this statement the Council resurrected Pope Boniface VIII’s 1298 bull Periculoso, which required all members of female religious orders to live within convent walls; like the Tridentine accords, it did not require the same of men’s orders.6 The assumption apparently was that if women were constrained, men would find it harder to misbehave. It is significant, however, that this was not a new initiative. As noted above, the institutional church had previously attempted to cloister nuns. As the provisions of Trent make clear, this older effort had failed. If medieval nuns had obeyed Periculoso there would have been no need for Trent’s provisions on enclosure; however, many nuns ventured beyond the walls of their medieval and Renaissance convents. In the late Middle Ages some religious orders obeyed Periculoso and communities assumed clausura, but enclosure was not strictly enforced in Benedictine or Augustinian communities, and in them women left the convent and visitors entered. Some women religious pursued active vocations doing good works

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while living in small houses within cities that needed their services.7 According to Elizabeth Rapley, “Periculoso tried to confine the devotion of nuns within safe though uninspiring channels. It had only limited success among monastic women, while a flood of semi-religious women—beguines and tertiaries—simply overflowed the banks and went their own way.”8 Ultimately the decrees of Trent concerning women religious would share a similar fate. The reformers at Trent did not have the authority or power to create an enforcement mechanism for these regulations, and hence the decrees of Trent were potentially toothless. Unable to impose fully the dictates itself, the Council requested that Europe’s Catholic monarchs accept and publish the decrees. European states inconsistently honored the church’s requests, and in some instances they did not implement them at all. In France, a nation that suffered through fierce religious wars from 1562 to 1589, there was a great deal of opposition to recognizing the decrees, in part due to fear of increased antagonism with the French Protestant Church.9 The French monarch did not ratify the mandates of Trent, but this did not discourage the clergy from advocating the publication of the decrees at the Assembly of Melun in 1579 and the Estates-General in 1614, when the cahiers of the clergy demanded their publication.10 However, the Estates-General refused to accept Tridentine reforms. In the following year, the Assembly of the Clergy voted to accept and enforce the reforms within the French Church.11 Ultimately, it only ratified the promulgations of Trent in 1615, and they were never successful in getting the king’s approval for publication.12 Communities of Ursulines and Visitandines began with a commitment to teach girls, but both orders were cloistered in France, which restricted the work the women could undertake.13 However, not all women religious came to live within the walls of convents. In 1633, seventy years after Trent, Louise de Marillac and Vincent de Paul founded the Daughters of Charity, a community for pious laywomen with a two-tiered structure. Elite Ladies, who were commonly married, funded the enterprise and used it as a venue to perform good works. Daughters of Charity came from more modest families and did the more strenuous work of the community—running hospitals, opening schools, and providing the sick and poor with relief in the parishes. Dressed in attire that often resembled nuns’ habits, but carefully identified as a confraternity of laywomen, the Daughters resurrected the pre-Tridentine tradition of women’s active service. The community thrived and grew exponentially in the seventeenth century, with the approval of the institutional church. This was not an isolated instance. The Daughters of Charity was but one of several small religious communities in France that eluded cloister. For example, the Filles de Sainte-Geneviève, founded in 1636, worked to reform life in the parish of Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet in Paris. In Rouen the Soeurs du SaintEnfant Jésus educated daughters of the working poor by teaching catechism. In addition, in 1685 Louis XIV employed the Dames de Saint-Maur in the Midi to educate former Protestants and established communities of the Dames de SaintMaur in Montpellier and Montauban.14 Over time they taught girls across France.

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In Paris the Filles de la Croix offered poor women the education that made it possible for them to obtain salvation; domestic servants, during their free time, often went to study with the Filles de la Croix.15 All of these communities shared the active vocation and non-cloistered status of the Daughters of Charity. The first half of the seventeenth century also witnessed a tremendous expansion in cloistered teaching orders in France, where nuns taught boarders and often less wealthy day students as well.16 What distinguished the Daughters of Charity from these other communities was their ability to grow very large, expand beyond Paris, and serve as a model for subsequent communities of non-cloistered women religious, many of whom devoted themselves to teaching or other social services. The creation of a new identity of active religious in the wake of Trent can be seen in some of the specific rules instructing the Daughters on how to present themselves in public. For instance, when traveling to or from a foundation, the Daughters were to sit together in a coach and, the rule advised, “Their veil shall be modesty in their glances, words and actions.”17 De Paul wrote about the Daughters, They should consider that although they do not belong to a religious order, that state not being compatible with the duties of their vocation, yet as they are much more exposed to the world than nuns; their monastery being generally no other than the abode of the sick; their cell, a hired room; their chapel, the parish church; their cloister, the streets or wards of hospitals; their enclosure, obedience; their grate, the fear of God; and their veil, holy modesty—they are obliged on this account to lead as virtuous a life as if they were professed in a religious order; to conduct themselves wherever they mingle with the world with as much recollection, purity of heart and body, detachment from creatures; and to give as much edification as nuns in the seclusion of their monasteries.18

De Paul lets on more here than he might have liked to admit—that the analogy between the Daughters and nuns was simply too close to avoid making. This parallelism would crop up repeatedly, despite the best efforts of the founders to deny it. These new active religious communities carefully navigated the strictures of Trent. Regarding the avoidance of enclosure, though, they were aware of what they were doing, and evidence does support the conclusion that they sought, quite deliberately, to deceive certain members of the church hierarchy to further their goals. In a letter from 1641, Monsieur Lambert, a priest of the Congregation of the Mission, Vincent de Paul’s male religious community, wrote to Barbe Angiboust, a Daughter of Charity serving a parish in Richelieu, inquiring if the Daughters were still passing for a secular community.19 The letter demonstrates that, at least among the ranks of the Congregation of the Mission, it was an open secret that the Daughters of Charity were misrepresenting themselves. It is unlikely that the founders were the only people in the community to be aware of this misrepresentation. They were able to get away with disguising the true nature of their confraternity, in part, because the services provided by the Daughters were desperately needed in seventeenth-century France.

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The Daughters did not directly confront the church with their non-cloistered status; instead, they rallied allies and built systems of care that their cities and towns could not function without. Church, hospital, and town officials occasionally challenged the Daughters on the basis of faith (as was in the case in one parish, where they were funded by a Jansenist family) or their work ethic (as they were at the hospital in Angers, when the male administrative hierarchy did not want to pay to hire additional nurses when the patient load grew), but no one ever demanded that they live within convent walls. The Daughters were called to work in the world as teachers, nurses, and servants to the sick and poor. Over the course of the seventeenth century, they became an important presence in many parishes, schools, and hospitals across northern France. Their non-cloistered status made their work possible, and they shaped the way nursing evolved as a vocation and a profession. Unenclosed women religious in France were central to early modern poor relief efforts. The Daughters demonstrated the flexibility of their mission when they worked with poor girls in schools, entered into hospitals, and aided the needy in parishes, be it the 50 to 100 they might typically care for or the thousands who might need emergency assistance, as was the case in 1652, when Paris was flooded with refugees from Picardy and Champagne, where war was raging between France and Spain.20 However, it was in the hospitals that the Daughters of Charity made their mark: they became the largest nursing community of women religious in early modern France and a model of nursing practice in Europe. There were three primary categories of hospital in ancien régime France, differing in their clientele and the types of illness they treated, and Daughters of Charity served in all three. Local hospitals were usually parish-based institutions that served the welfare needs of parishioners by caring for invalids, incurables, orphans, and the old and the sick. Hôtels-Dieu ministered to the sick and were generally open to all persons, regardless of place of origin, although some did exclude people with certain medical conditions.21 The Hôpitaux-Généraux were centers for the care, and later the confinement, of the poor during the seventeenth century.22 In practical terms, Hôpitaux-Généraux absorbed some of the population displaced by the wars, famines, and plagues that beset France in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Although the Daughters of Charity would eventually expand to staff all three types of institution, they primarily staffed local hospitals and Hôtels-Dieu, where they nursed the sick, excluding those who were pregnant or had venereal disease. The first hospital staffed by the Daughters of Charity was the Hôtel-Dieu in Angers, one of France’s oldest hospitals. The Hôtel-Dieu evolved over the centuries as its directors sought a qualified and affordable staff of nurses and administrators. In 1548 and 1559 the Parlement of Paris had handed down a decree placing the hospital under the direction of four laymen, the Fathers of the Poor, who were responsible for ensuring that the patients received appropriate treatment. The choice of laymen to be Fathers of the Poor did not instantly resolve the administrative problems at the hospital. While these men tended to be drawn

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from the elite of the community, they were not necessarily experienced in running hospitals or caring for the poor. Indeed, the very structure of the office meant that there was a substantial degree of administrative turnover: hospital administrators served one-year terms. In 1640 the Fathers of the Poor invited a group of Daughters of Charity to take over the daily management of the hospital and to provide nursing care.23 The entrance of the Daughters was part of an ongoing process of reorganization and restructuring that had characterized the hospital’s history. The Fathers of the Poor sought a nursing staff that would be affordable, reliable, and well trained; they found these attributes in the Daughters of Charity. To the Fathers of the Poor the Daughters of Charity must have appeared to be a minor miracle. Local religious communities had grown lax by the late sixteenth century and there was not a local organization capable of running the hospital.24 The Daughters possessed the traits necessary to make up for the deficiencies in the existing institutional arrangements in Angers. The hospital administrators recognized that during their novitiate, all Daughters received medical instruction at the Motherhouse, where they made medicinal teas and remedies and learned how to bleed and perform other minor surgical operations. Their education did not end when they left the Motherhouse. In the correspondence between de Marillac and the Daughters in communities across France, there is extensive discussion of healing practices. Daughters also trained one another at their local communities. In a letter from de Marillac to a Daughter at Chantilly, de Marillac writes, “I beg you . . . to teach our sister how to let blood. Especially teach her well the dangers involved with the arteries, nerves, and other areas. Remember, if you think you have opened an artery, to draw a great quantity of blood and to put a coin in the compress in order to make the ligature.”25 This continual teaching and training made the Daughters skilled in seventeenthcentury medical practices. Along with improving the patients’ physical health, the Daughters were also responsible for the condition of their souls. Indirectly, hospital directors benefited from the Daughters’ dual vocation because the Daughters not only nursed the sick, they also created a moral environment of renewal and made the hospital a place of sacred activity. De Marillac wrote to Cecile Angiboust, who was nursing at Angers: “Love [the patients] tenderly and respect them profoundly.”26 The Daughters were engaged in a work of mercy, and they were ultimately responsible to God. For example, those who died in the hospitals of the Daughters of Charity often did so after careful preparation for their salvation. According to their rules, the Daughters of Charity were to try to convince each patient to make a general confession and to receive communion, but they were not to be too insistent. The Daughters had to take into account the physical, mental, and spiritual state of each individual. On occasion, the Daughters also nursed Protestant patients with the goal of healing them corporally and spiritually by bringing them into the Catholic fold. De Marillac wrote, “How many heretics have been converted since the Daughters of Charity have been working in the hospitals? Recall that, in 1659, . . . [at] the hospital of Saint-Denis, five or six heretics were converted, including the son of a Protestant

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minister, without counting several previous conversions.”27 Proselytizing to the Huguenots was an especially vital duty in Angers, a city that had been a Protestant stronghold in the sixteenth century.28 Employing a staff of Daughters of Charity assured hospital directors in Angers that patients in their care were receiving competent medical service as well as intensive spiritual guidance. The directors were also eager to enlist the Daughters of Charity because of their administrative capacities and organizational discipline. Each Daughter lived according to a rule defined by her vocation. These rules specified how the Daughters should organize their days and accomplish their work. For example, the rule for the pharmacist states, “Her primary concern is to learn properly the method of compounding remedies. . . . She shall use only pure drugs, checking on them often. In the event that some remedy deteriorate, she shall make some up new immediately . . .”29 De Marillac cautions the pharmacist when treating her peers, “when the sisters tell her of their indisposition, she shall listen to them charitably without dispensing remedies too often . . .”30 Such definite guidelines encouraged consistent behavior throughout the community as well as professional accountability. It was clearly the pharmacist who chose the appropriate medicines for the sick and decided when it was necessary to summon a doctor.31 The Daughters also were responsible for keeping the records for the hospitals. In 1659 de Marillac wrote to the superior at a Hôtel-Dieu, assuring her that she would find the medical records in order because the Sister Servant “is very well aware of the order that must be maintained in hospitals. I would be very surprised if she had failed to record the names, places of origin and dates of admission and discharge or death of the patients or if she had not kept an exact account of receipts and expenditures.”32 Hospital directors entrusted the Daughters with extensive management tasks in the hospitals. The Daughters’ training, their careful division of labor, and the constant oversight from the Motherhouse made them well-qualified nurses and hospital administrators. In the records of hospital administrators there are no comments stating that the Daughters were negligent in their duties, so it seems that they were following de Marillac’s directives reasonably well. The Daughters of Charity was the largest and most respected nursing community in early modern France. France had thriving communities of active women religious and devout laywomen who felt called to help the sick and poor. The status of women as both secular and religious granted them a spiritual vocation, the ability to pursue a profession, and it provided cities and towns with cohorts of organized service providers in an era of great need. Devout laywomen were central to hospitals and parishes in France, and they formed cohorts of nurses, teachers, and social servants and determined the ways in which the sick and poor were succored. In England the Reformation posed challenges to nuns and women religious that proved destructive to their communities and vocations. King Henry VIII’s break from the Roman Catholic Church not only disrupted the lives of Catholic religious who were turned out of their professions but also interrupted the services these church members provided to English society. The Reformation broke out

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when Henry VIII dissolved monastic communities in the 1530s during the divorce crisis involving Katherine of Aragon. During the Reformation, the English throne dismantled monasteries of monks and nuns, destroying the communities they had forged. Some convents, like Sion, had the resources to allow women to continue to live collectively in England or flee to Catholic countries on the Continent, but few orders could afford such a vigorous response to the royal supremacy and simply ceased to exist.33 While ex-nuns on small pensions might have tried to continue to live together, they could not carry out the diverse works as they had done before. Along with closing monasteries, the king’s policies also called for the dissolution of many hospitals because they were affiliated with monastic communities. Nursing as a vocation for women religious ended in England in the 1530s, and nursing practice entered a period of decline. Education, and especially the education of women, was deeply affected by the end of the institutional Catholic Church in England. As across Continental Europe, elite English families had made use of convent schools for their daughters, as they were often the only option for elementary education for girls.34 Convents also served as respectable institutions in which to permanently keep their surplus or unmarriageable daughters, especially at times of dowry inflation.35 Local families often supported small houses and kept them afloat until the 1530s. Given the thin documentary record left by and about the English poor, it is not surprising that historiographical debate has emerged over the impact the dissolution had on the communities surrounding the convents. Mid-twentiethcentury scholarship tended to minimize the impact of these changes on the daily lives of the English people. In his The Dissolution of the Monasteries, G.W.O. Woodward explains that monasteries did good works, including offering hospitality to travelers, maintaining the poor, tending to the infirm, and running schools, but their main job was celebrating intercessory masses.36 Despite this evidence, he argues, “the lot of the poor cannot have been appreciably worsened by the dissolution of the monasteries.”37 Like Claire Cross, he believes that communities rarely remained together after dissolution.38 Moreover, Cross argues that female monasticism “withered away” in the sixteenth century as the English made the transition from Catholicism toward Protestantism.39 More recent work, however, has tended to see religious institutions as more active and more vital than earlier scholarship had allowed. Marilyn Oliva has challenged the conclusions of Woodward and Cross, arguing that alms-giving played a significant role in sustaining the poor. Nunneries distributed daily food scraps and occasionally money—services that were essential in many communities. The government’s decision to dissolve monasteries would have had a considerable effect on those in need.40 Oliva asserts, “The impact of these services can perhaps be better appreciated when considering what their disappearance must have meant to those who partook of them. Contemporary observers of the effects of the Dissolution complained that one of the biggest contributions female monasteries made to society was the education of children.”41 In England parish churches and chantries took over the responsibility of teaching boys and girls.42 Nevertheless,

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there was an impact on communities when convents closed, especially in education, because parishes did not educate as many children as monasteries and convents had. The English crown went well beyond simply dissolving monasteries, however. Henry VIII shuttered many hospitals as well. Here another historiographical debate has emerged regarding the social impact of hospital closure. Marjorie K. McIntosh has issued an important warning to any historian who assumes that medical care simply ceased when the hospitals closed. As McIntosh points out, most care was local and took place in the home of the sick or of the caregiver if this person was not a family member. While institutions afford historians troves of records, they were not the places where most of the sick were treated in Europe. McIntosh explains, “A contrast between formal and informal or between public and private care would . . . have puzzled Elizabethans: when an official body provided care, it expected that many recipients would be living in their own or other people’s houses, not in residential institutions, and it worked through employees who were themselves local people, often neighbours of much the same social standing as those being assisted.”43 The care most people received from their families or neighbors would not have changed during the Reformation. The dissolution of institutions would not have changed these local forms of aid, except to drive more people to request help within their parishes and from their neighbors. There is a danger, however, in minimizing the role of hospitals. It might be an over-correction to insist, as McIntosh has, that “the great medieval hospitals, scattered irregularly throughout the country, provided beds for a few of the infirm and elderly, but these were insufficient even before many of the hospitals were closed as a result of the religious changes of the 1530s to the 1550s. . . .”44 The danger here is in conflating insufficiency with ineffectiveness. There certainly were not enough hospital beds in France to cope with the trauma, disease, and dislocations of the early modern era, but this does not mean that hospitals were not important in the landscape of social services. They did help some people and were important centers of institutionalized care, especially for those without families to support them. Indeed, after dissolving many hospitals, Henry VIII and his successors reestablished some institutions and created some new hospitals. It is hard to reconcile the argument that hospitals were of minimal importance with the reality that the crown replaced those Catholic hospitals they closed with similar institutions, albeit controlled by Protestants. These new English hospitals were not simply substitutes for the institutions they replaced. Rather, they operated according to a distinct set of religious and cultural priorities that differed from those of their Catholic predecessors. These changes are easily seen in the new hospitals founded in London by Henry VIII. Although, like Catholic institutions, these hospitals were established to meet the demands of the poor, they framed poverty very differently. The directors of these institutions understood the poor to fall into three distinct types: children, sturdy beggars, and the impotent poor.45 For instance, Christ’s Hospital in London was founded by Edward VI for London’s orphaned street children (the youngest

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children were sent to live with wet nurses). At one time the facility housed 700 to 900 children.46 While medical services were provided by these hospitals, they were incidental to their new missions as orphanages, workhouses, and almshouses. Indeed, the general course of English history after the Reformation is one of the multiplication of institutions that framed poverty as problematic. Almshouses controlled by public and private authorities, but founded and maintained by private funding, offered relief to the aged and infirm.47 The century between 1550 and 1650 saw the foundation of new almshouses and hospitals for the elderly or impotent poor. The city established schools, training houses, and orphanages for children. Parents were required to apprentice their children and pay preliminary fees if they could; if they were unable to do so, the parish found masters for youth, but usually in less skilled trades.48 As in France, England had an array of hospitals with different functions; however, none of these varied institutions prioritized medical services and none were run by women. Similarly, the dissolution of communities of women and the closure of hospitals in which some of them worked as nurses had long-term consequences that belie the apparent continuity of caritative institutions in England. The English Reformation dissolved communities of women religious, some of whom had worked as nurses, and shuttered many hospitals. The conditions in English hospitals in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries remained poor and sometimes dangerous. According to Nick Black, a professor of health services research at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, “Although the affluent provided financial support for the hospitals that were in the industrialising cities of the 18th and early 19th centuries, none of them would have relished using such facilities. . . . The workhouse infirmaries were a refuge of last resort for paupers while the voluntary hospitals were for the labouring poor who could not afford private care at home.”49 While it would be an overstatement to say that Continental hospitals were models of enlightened medicine, the standards of French institutions seemed to consistently exceed those of English ones. It is difficult, however, to consistently differentiate between the mortalities that resulted from a lack of funding and those that resulted from the rudimentary state of early modern medicine. As Black himself notes, “By the first half of the 19th century, inpatient care in large general hospitals had often become unpleasant, was sometimes dangerous, and was largely ineffective.” Medical techniques included bleeding, purging, and encouraging patients to control pain through alcohol. “Surgical mortality was much higher in hospital than in private practice, and women had a high risk of contracting puerperal fever in the lying-in hospitals.”50 Staff members were in danger: “[T]hree of the first eight physicians employed at the new London Fever Hospital in 1849 died, and the mortality of nurses from contagious diseases in London hospitals was four times that of the female population.”51 Early modern medicine was very elementary, and hospitals were dangerous in England as well as in France. It seems clear, however, that the state of nursing in England was not as good as the care offered by Catholic religious communities in other parts of Europe. For instance, during the Crimean War, as Carol Helmstadter explains, “the British

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army’s medical department compared very unfavorably with that of the French. The Sisters of Charity, who provided the nursing in the French base hospitals, were especially admired, and the English government came under intense pressure to improve the army’s nursing care.”52 According to Elizabeth Fee and Mary Garofalo in their examination of British troops in the Crimea, “The soldiers were poorly cared for, medicines and other essentials were in short supply, hygiene was neglected, and infections were rampant. Nightingale found there was no clean linen; the clothes of the soldiers were swarming with bugs, lice, and fleas; the floors, walls, and ceilings were filthy; and rats were hiding under the beds. . . .” The death count was the highest of all hospitals in the region.”53 Thus, even if French practitioners did not fully understand the vectors of disease and contamination, standards of French hygiene elevated French medical practice above English models. And in no small degree, the roots of these standards can be found in the greater cultural emphasis that the French placed upon service to the poor—service that was often administered by devout laywomen. In 1854 Florence Nightingale assumed the position of Superintendent of Nursing Staff for British troops in the Crimea at the request of Sidney Herbert, the Secretary at War.54 Nightingale studied the care given to soldiers during different conflicts, such as the Franco-Prussian war and in British military campaigns in Africa.55 Her studies of conflicts reinforced her belief in the importance of hygiene. Nightingale had trained at the deaconess hospital in Kaiserwerth, Germany, run by a Protestant religious community (another variant of devout laywomen), and she visited many Catholic hospitals in France and Italy.56 She was a deeply religious woman who felt called to help the poor. After her work in the Crimea, Nightingale founded her school of nursing at St. Thomas’s Hospital in London, where she trained young women for a career in nursing and later established a training school for midwives at King’s College in London. For her, women needed to be trained to be medical professionals, but they were also undertaking a mission to serve humanity.57 England became a center of modern nursing care in the nineteenth century, but nursing was not professionalized in England until that time, when middle class families began to make space for women to seek education and employment beyond marriage. Nightingale represents the reinvention of nursing as a quasi-religious vocation. Charitable care in local parishes eventually improved, despite the negative impact the Reformation had on nursing. It is likely that parishes became more proficient providers of aid because of the demise of monasteries and their hospitals.58 As Gary Gibbs explains, when Londoners organized responses to the formidable problems of the city, they did so at the parish level.59 Between 1514 and 1524 London authorities required beggars to obtain a badge or license to beg within city walls. This policy helped to control begging, but it obviously did not address the issue of poverty.60 In 1533 London officials sought to stop all casual distribution of alms by making Parish Masters responsible for poor relief.61 In 1536 parliament ordered the parish to care for orphans and foundlings and to provide them with a trade for their future well-being.62 In the next year, the government established

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compulsory taxes called poor rates to support poor relief efforts. By the end of the century, London’s government was beginning to address the causes of poverty and set in place a system of relief to begin to mitigate destitution. According to G.R. Elton, under Queen Elizabeth England produced the only effective early modern national system of poor relief with the codes of 1597 and 1601.63 England’s system of poor relief grew more humane and sophisticated by the end of Elizabeth’s reign. In England women assisted the sick and poor in their parishes. “Older women, often widows and often themselves poor,” cared for the poor in England. Most people who took the poor into their homes had been destitute enough to receive relief at some point during their lives. Male- and female-headed households took in boarders, but Marjorie McIntosh, in her study of Hadleigh, believes that the women in the family took care of them. The town, concerned with needy children and adolescents, provided some money to poor children or their parents for their upkeep. Some poor children were sent to board with other families; if the child was very young this was usually because its mother had died, but if the child was older than five, he or she came from a poor family that was receiving aid and had younger children at home. The parish paid for the child’s care until about the age of eight, because at this age the child was useful in household, crafts, and agriculture and could begin to earn his or her keep. Teenagers might be placed into service by the town, with the goal of creating self-sufficient adults.64 In England charitable relief was organized by the parish and administered by men, but women held some important positions meant to enhance social order. This had been the case in the Middle Ages, and the system became more complex after the Reformation, when the population of London grew considerably. After the Reformation, the crown employed poor women in parishes to monitor the behavior of the young and care for the sick as a way of earning their charitable relief. “After the Reformation, parishes took increasing responsibility for reforming social and sexual behavior. Again they called on old practices to help in a new cause. Poor women in need of support were often in charge of controlling the behavior of young adults during worship.”65 Older women formed an important cohort in the parish, with the responsibility of maintaining social order. In 1592 the City of London issued an order to be obeyed in times of plague. The parish was to appoint two older “sober” women to work together to walk the neighborhoods and view the sick and the dead. They were “searchers” for victims of the plague, and in exchange for their service they received relief from the parish. Women were appointed to serve as searchers, and they could not refuse the work without risking the loss of their support. The women had to identify themselves as “contaminated” because of their constant exposure to plague.66 The searchers were marginalized members of the community. They were dependent older women without supportive family networks. As Richelle Munkhoff explains, “These women would have been among the most conspicuous figures of local authority, although they remain almost invisible to us. Hired to view their neighbours, searchers policed the plague in an official capacity. Required to examine and codify diseased bodies, they embodied the authority that

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sought to quantify the effect of plague on the community.” They were recognized as experts at a time of crisis and were an important part of the parish’s response to plague. Munkhoff’s research shows that the searchers were active from 1574, if not earlier, until 1836. The searchers collected data about the sick and dead by entering their homes and determining who was sick with plague and who had died from it. Using their information, the city produced a “bill of mortality,” which was published weekly and showed the number of deaths in London’s parishes. The city monitored the spread of plague using these bills and also made decisions based upon them. For instance, “The playhouses could re-open when plague deaths dropped to less than 30 per week.” The searchers also alerted city officials of houses that should be placed under quarantine.67 London’s parishes did entrust women with medical responsibilities. It was not easy to discern if someone was ill with plague or had died from it, because the symptoms could be vague. The city of London relied upon women to make these determinations. Parishes entrusted old women to do this work, largely because it was dangerous and difficult and no one else wanted to do it. The searchers were a marginalized and dependent population, disposable in a way other groups were not. In the eyes of the parish, women could inspect the sick in their homes, and they could also be called upon to care for the poor in their own homes. But by and large, women were not part of the institutions that cared for the sick and poor, and they certainly did not administer hospitals or run the parishes. In France nurses were trained as professionals in their religious communities, and to this day continue to administer and staff hospitals. In England nursing was not professionalized in the early modern period. Different systems for caring for the poor and sick developed in England and France. By the end of the sixteenth century, England’s parish-based assistance network was comprehensive and provided regular and predictable alms. Parishes replaced some of the work of monasteries after the Reformation, and the state increasingly used parishes to provide a range of services. The system in France relied more upon the generosity of benefactors and was perhaps less rational than that in England, but the quality of nursing care was superior. France’s nursing communities might have been more compassionate than the women hired by English parishes, since those delivering the services were doing so in emulation of Christ. Catholic theology classified the poor as a population through which those better off could earn their way to heaven, and thus Catholic culture valued the poor in a way non-Catholic cultures did not. Protestant theology emphasized a generalized work ethic, and valued the poor less. French nurses were certainly better trained than women in England in nursing practice in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. More significantly to this essay, France allowed communities of women religious an important place in networks of care; England did not. In France nursing was a sanctified vocation that provided women an outlet for a religious calling. The experiences of caregivers were different in England, where women were providing the care, but they were not trained to do this as the Daughters

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of Charity were. They might have felt a religious calling similar to Florence Nightingale’s, or, like the searchers, they might have felt coerced to serve. In this respect, the contrast with France is striking: there women who chose to enter religious communities to serve as nurses did so voluntarily and were trained by skilled women in the administrative and nursing techniques they would need to provide comprehensive care. In Catholic Europe, women had options. They could marry, and most did, but others chose to enter religious life in enclosed convents or in active communities working as nurses, teachers, and social workers. The situation was different in England. According to Claire Schen, “Women in sixteenth- and early seventeenthcentury London, by contrast, had fewer opportunities for public charitable roles and even began to lose some older forms of control over money and alms in the city.” In France women could serve as hospital administrators and nurses, whereas “in London, women did not serve in feminized administrative posts. . . . By the early seventeenth century, (male) parish officials, from church wardens to collectors for the poor, oversaw the relief of the deserving poor within the parish.” Schen continues, “The lack of women’s devotions or guilds in Protestantism and the limited opportunities for English women’s guiding roles in institutions or in parishes may reflect the hold of patriarchy within reformed religion.”68 Poor women might be searchers or they might serve the parish by caring for the sick or poor, but they were not an important force in shaping charitable or health care policies. Devout laywomen did important work in France serving the sick and poor. They were trained as professionals, usually lived in supportive communities, and did valued work in their towns and villages. Their liminal status between nuns and wives afforded them a place that women in Protestant nations did not have. It is my argument that this status was important in the development of quality nursing care in France, and England did not have professional nursing schools until the later nineteenth century because it lacked such communities. Notes  1. Sylvia Evangelisti, Nuns: A History of Convent Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 30.  2. Elizabeth Lehfeldt, Religious Women in Golden Age Spain: The Permeable Cloister (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005), 48–54.  3. Evangelisti, Nuns, 30.  4. Josephine A. Dolan, History of Nursing (Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders Company, 1968), 103; Vern L. Bullough and Bonnie Bullough, The Care of the Sick: The Emergence of Modern Nursing (New York: Prodist, 1978), 54; Monica E. Baly, Nursing and Social Change (London: William Heinemann Medical Books Ltd, 1980), 31, and Craig Harline, “Actives and Contemplatives: The Female Religious of the Low Countries Before and After Trent,” The Catholic Historical Review 81.4 (1995), 541–67, qtd. at 543. “Beguines”

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Reconsidered: Historiographical Problems and New Directions,  Monastic Matrix, Commentaria 3461 (August 2008).  5. H.J. Schroeder, ed. and trans., The Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent (Rockford, IL: Tan Books and Publishers, 1978), 223.  6. Elizabeth Makowski, Canon Law and Cloistered Women: Periculoso and Its Commentators 1298–1545 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1997), 71.  7. Francesca Medioli, “An Unequal Law: The Enforcement of Clausura Before and After the Council of Trent,” in Women in Renaissance and Early Modern Europe, ed. Christine Meek (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000), 136–152, qtd. at 143; Jo Ann Kay McNamara, Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns through Two Millennia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 322–23.  8. Elizabeth Rapley, A Social History of the Cloister: Daily Life in the Teaching Monasteries of the Old Regime (Ithaca: McGill-Queen‘s University Press, 2001), 112–13.  9. Alain Tallon, La France et le Concile de Trente (1518–1563) (Rome: École francaise de Rome, 1997), 521. 10. Victor Martin, Le Gallicanisme et la Réforme Catholique: Essai Historique sur l’Introduction en France des Décrets du Concile de Trente (1563–1615) (Paris: Auguste Picard Editor, 1919), 165 and 343. 11. Hubert Jedin and John Dolan, eds, History of the Church, Volume V, Reformation and Counter Reformation, trans. Anselm Biggs and Peter W. Becker (London: Burns and Oates, 1980), 515. See also Colin Jones, “Perspectives on Poor Relief, Health Care and the Counter-Reformation in France,” in Health Care and Poor Relief in Counter-Reformation Europe, ed. Ole Peter Grell, Andrew Cunningham, and Jon Arrizabalaga (New York: Routledge, 1999), 216. 12. Martin, Le Gallicanisme et la Réforme Catholique, 392. 13. Evangelisti, Nuns, 204–24. Some Ursuline communities in Italy remained open, however. See the essay by Querciolo Mazzonis in this volume. 14. Elizabeth Rapley, The Dévotes: Women and Church in Seventeenth-Century France (Buffalo: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990), 95, 121, and 126. 15. Judith Combes Taylor, “From Proselytizing to Social Reform: Three Generations of French Female Teaching Congregations, 1600–1720,” (Ph.D. diss., Arizona State University, 1980), 258–59. 16. Rapley, A Social History of the Cloister, 14. 17. Louise De Marillac, Écrits spirituels. Ed Élisabeth Charpy. (Paris: Filles de la Charité, 1983), 726. 18. Frances Ryan and John E. Rybolt, Vincent de Paul and Louise de Marillac: Rules, Conferences, and Writings (New York: Paulist Press, 1995), 169. 19. Archives de Maison Mère des Filles de la Charité (AMMFC), 187. The original letter, dated 13 May 1641, reads, “Je ne sais si vous passez pour seculiere.” 20. Bernard Pujo, Vincent de Paul, the Trailblazer (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), 203. 21. Muriel Joerger, “The Structure of the Hospital System in France in the Ancien Régime,” in Medicine and Society in France, ed. Robert Forster and Orest Ranum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 104–36. 22. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York: Vintage Books, 1988), 39.

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23. Archive Nationale (AN), S. 6160, Deux requestes des Echeuines d’Angers presentées l’une au Roy et l’autre a Mr l’Evesque d’Angers le 4e novembre 1639. See also Frances Wilkens, Six Great Nurses (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1962), 24. 24. John McManners, French Ecclesiastical Society under the Ancien Régime: A Study of Angers in the Eighteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1960), 90. 25. De Marillac, Écrits spirituels, Lettre 352. 26. Sister Marie-Genevieve Roux, “Children in Distress in the XVIIth Century,” Echoes of the Company (1989), 321. 27. De Marillac, Écrits spirituels, “Inconvénients pour la Compagnie,” 833. 28. John Hearsey McMillan Salmon, Society in Crisis: France in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 132 and 146. 29. De Marillac, Écrits spirituels, “Règlement pour la maison principale: Office de l’Apothicaresse,” 755–56. 30. Ibid. 31. De Marillac, Écrits spirituels, “Règlement pour la maison principale: Office de l’Apothicaresse,” 755–56. 32. Ibid., Lettre 632. 33. Dom David Knowles, The Religious Orders in England. Volume III: The Tudor Age (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 176. 34. Claire Cross, “Yorkshire Nunneries in the Early Tudor Period,” in The Religious Orders in Pre-Reformation England, ed. James Clark (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2002), 145–54, esp. 151. 35. Ibid., 145. 36. George William Otway Woodward, The Dissolution of the Monasteries (New York: Walker and Company, 1966), 16. 37. Ibid., 22. 38. Ibid., 154. 39. Cross, “Yorkshire Nunneries,” 152. 40. Marilyn Oliva, The Convent and the Community in Late Medieval England: Female Monasteries in the Diocese of Norwich, 1350–1540 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1998), 140. 41. Ibid., 157. 42. Ibid., 18. 43. Marjorie K. McIntosh, “Networks of Care in Elizabethan English Towns: The Example of Hadleigh, Suffolk,” in The Locus of Care: Families, Communities, Institutions and the Provision of Welfare Since Antiquity, ed. Peregrine Horden and Richard Smith (New York: Routledge, 1998), 71–89, qtd. at 72. 44. Ibid., 73–74. 45. Ellen Marianne Leonard, The Early History of English Poor Relief (1900; reprint New York: Barnes and Noble, 1965), 64. 46. Ibid., 219. 47. Ibid., 207. 48. Ibid., 215. 49. Nick Black, “Rise and Demise of the Hospital: A Reappraisal of Nursing,” British Medical Journal 331 / 7529 (December 10, 2005): 1394–96. 50. C.D. Haagensen and Wyndham E.B. Lloyd, A Hundred Years of Medicine (London: Beard Books, 1943); Thomas Lightfoot, “Some Practical Observations on the Disease Usually Called Puerperal Fever,” London Medical Times 561.21 (1850): 463–65. 51. Florence Nightingale, Notes on Hospitals (London: Parker and Son, 1859).

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52. Sioban Nelson and Anne Marie Rafferty, Notes on Nightingale: The Influence and Legacy of a Nursing Icon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), 29. 53. Elizabeth Fee and Mary E. Garofalo, “Florence Nightingale and the Crimean War,” American Journal of Public Health 100.9 (2010): 1591. 54. Nelson and Rafferty, Notes on Nightingale, 35; Lynn McDonald, Florence Nightingale at First Hand (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2010), 70. 55. McDonald, Florence Nightingale at First Hand, 48. 56. Martha Raile Alligood and Anne Marriner Tomey, eds, Nursing Theorists and Their Work (Maryland Heights, MO: Mosby, 2009), 71–90; Nelson and Rafferty, Notes on Nightingale, 3. 57. Nelson and Rafferty, Notes on Nightingale, 21. 58. McIntosh, “Networks of Care in Elizabethan English Towns,” 1. 59. Gary Gibbs, “New Duties for the Parish Community in Tudor London,” in The Parish in English Life 1400–1600, ed. Katherine L. French, Gary G. Gibbs, and Beat A. Kumin (New York: Manchester University Press, 1997), 163–77, esp. 173. 60. Ibid., 173. 61. Ibid., 174. 62. Ibid. 63. G.R. Elton, “An Early Tudor Poor Law,” The Economic History Review, New Series 6.1 (1953): 55–67, esp. 55. 64. McIntosh, “Networks of Care in Elizabethan English Towns,” 80, 84, and 85. 65. Claire S. Schen, “Women and the London Parishes 1500–1620,” in The Parish in English Life, ed. French, Gibbs, and Kumin, 258. 66. Richelle Munkhoff, “Searchers of the Dead: Authority, Marginality, and the Interpretation of Plague in England, 1574–1665,” Gender & History 11.1 (1999): 1–29, qtd. at 14. 67. Ibid., 1, 2, 4, and 10. 68. Claire S. Schen, Charity and Lay Piety in Reformation London, 1500–1620 (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2002), 242, 243, and 246.

Works Cited Primary Sources Archive Departmentale Maine et Loire [ADML] Hs. F6. Archives de Maison Mère des Filles de la Charité (AMMFC), 187. The original letter dated 13 May 1641 reads, “Je ne sais si vous passez pour seculiere.” De Marillac, Écrits spirituels. Ed Élisabeth Charpy. Paris: Filles de la Charité, 1983. Lettre 352. Archive Nationale (AN), S. 6160, Deux requestes des Echeuines d’Angers presentées l’une au Roy et l’autre a Mr l’Evesque d’Angers le 4e novembre 1639. De Marillac, Louise de. Écrits spirituels. Ed Élisabeth Charpy. Paris: Filles de la Charité, 1983. Secondary Sources Alligood, Martha Raile, and Anne Marriner Tomey, eds. Nursing Theorists and Their Work. Maryland Heights, MO: Mosby, 2009.

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Amussen, Susan. An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. Baly, Monica E. Nursing and Social Change. London: William Heinemann Medical Books, 1980. Black, Nick. “Rise and Demise of the Hospital: A Reappraisal of Nursing.” British Medical Journal 331 / 7529 (December 10, 2005): 1394–96. Bullough, Vern L., and Bonnie Bullough. The Care of the Sick: The Emergence of Modern Nursing. New York: Prodist, 1978. Clark, James, ed. The Religious Orders in Pre-Reformation England. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2002. Dolan, Josephine A. History of Nursing. Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders Company, 1968. Elton, G.R. “An Early Tudor Poor Law.” The Economic History Review, New Series 6, no. 1 (1953): 55–67. Evangelisti, Sylvia. Nuns: A History of Convent Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Fee, Elizabeth, and Mary E. Garofalo. “Florence Nightingale and the Crimean War.” American Journal of Public Health 100, no. 9 (2010): 1591. Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. New York: Vintage Books, 1988. Gibbs, Gary. “New Duties for the Parish Community in Tudor London.” In The Parish in English Life 1400–1600, edited by Katherine L. French, Gary G. Gibbs, and Beat A. Kumin, 163–77. New York: Manchester University Press, 1997. Haagensen, C.D., and Wyndham E.B. Lloyd. A Hundred Years of Medicine. London: Beard Books, 1943. Harline, Craig. “Actives and Contemplatives: The Female Religious of the Low Countries Before and After Trent.” The Catholic Historical Review 81, no. 4 (1995): 541–67. Jedin, Hubert, and John Dolan, eds. History of the Church. Volume V: Reformation and Counter Reformation. Translated by Anselm Biggs and Peter W. Becker. London: Burns and Oates, 1980. Joerger, Muriel. “The Structure of the Hospital System in France in the Ancien Régime.” In Medicine and Society in France, edited by Robert Forster and Orest Ranum, 104–36. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980. Jones, Colin. “Perspectives on Poor Relief, Health Care and the CounterReformation in France.” In Health Care and Poor Relief in CounterReformation Europe, edited by Ole Peter Grell, Andrew Cunningham, and Jon Arrizabalaga, 215–39. New York: Routledge, 1999. Jutte, Robert. Poverty and Deviance in Early Modern Europe. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Knowles, Dom David. The Religious Orders in England, Volume III: The Tudor Age. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1971.

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Lehfeldt, Elizabeth. Religious Women in Golden Age Spain: The Permeable Cloister. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005. Leonard, Ellen Marianne. The Early History of English Poor Relief. 1900. Reprint, New York: Barnes and Noble, 1965. Lightfoot, Thomas. “Some Practical Observations on the Disease Usually Called Puerperal Fever.” London Medical Times 561, vol. 21 (1850): 463–65. Makowski, Elizabeth. Canon Law and Cloistered Women: Periculoso and its Commentators 1298–1545. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1997. Martin, Victor. Le Gallicanisme et la Réforme Catholique: Essai Historique sur l’Introduction en France des Décrets du Concile de Trente (1563–1615). Paris: Auguste Picard Editor, 1919. McDonald, Lynn. Florence Nightingale at First Hand. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2010. McIntosh, Marjorie K. “Networks of Care in Elizabethan English Towns: The Example of Hadleigh, Suffolk.” In The Locus of Care: Families, Communities, Institutions and the Provision of Welfare Since Antiquity, edited by Peregrine Horden and Richard Smith, 71–89. New York: Routledge, 1998. McManners, John. French Ecclesiastical Society under the Ancien Régime: A Study of Angers in the Eighteenth Century. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1960. McNamara, Jo Ann Kay. Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns through Two Millennia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. Medioli, Francesca. “An Unequal Law: The Enforcement of Clausura Before and After the Council of Trent.” In Women in Renaissance and Early Modern Europe, ed. Christine Meek, 136–52. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000. Munkhoff, Richelle. “Searchers of the Dead: Authority, Marginality, and the Interpretation of Plague in England, 1574–1665.” Gender & History 11, no. 1 (1999): 1–29. Nelson, Sioban, and Anne Marie Rafferty. Notes on Nightingale: The Influence and Legacy of a Nursing Icon. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010. Nightingale, Florence. Notes on Hospitals. London: Parker and Son, 1859. Oliva, Marilyn. The Convent and the Community in Late Medieval England: Female Monasteries in the Diocese of Norwich, 1350–1540. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1998. Pujo, Bernard. Vincent de Paul, the Trailblazer. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003. Rapley, Elizabeth. The Dévotes: Women and Church in Seventeenth-Century France. Buffalo: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990. ———. A Social History of the Cloister: Daily Life in the Teaching Monasteries of the Old Regime. Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001. Roux, Sister Marie-Genevieve. “Children in Distress in the XVIIth Century.” Echoes of the Company. 1989.

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Ryan, Frances, and John E. Rybolt. Vincent de Paul and Louise de Marillac: Rules, Conferences, and Writings. New York: Paulist Press, 1995. Salmon, John Hearsey McMillan. Society in Crisis: France in the Sixteenth Century. Cambridge, UK: University Press, 1975. Schen, Claire S. Charity and Lay Piety in Reformation London, 1500–1620. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2002. ———. “Women and the London Parishes 1500–1620.” In The Parish in English Life 1400–1600, edited by Katherine L. French, Gary G. Gibbs, and Beat A. Kumin, 250–68. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997. Schroeder, Henry Joseph, ed. and trans. The Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent. Rockford, IL: Tan Books and Publishers, 1978. Tallon, Alain. La France et le Concile de Trente (1518–1563). Rome: École francaise de Rome, 1997. Taylor, Judith Combes. “From Proselytizing to Social Reform: Three Generations of French Female Teaching Congregations, 1600–1720.” Ph.D. diss., Arizona State University, 1980. Wilkens, Frances. Six Great Nurses. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1962. Woodward, George William Otway. The Dissolution of the Monasteries. New York: Walker and Company, 1966.

Part II

Perceptions of Holiness

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4 Historicizing the Beatas The Figures behind Reformation and Counter-Reformation Conflicts* Maria Laura Giordano

Beatas over the Longue Duré The beatas—women who chose many forms of secular life in order to serve God—offer new perspectives on the religious and social conflicts of the history of early modern Spain. Their lives bring to light less visible but no less crucial turning points in the history of the period. In general, beatas followed two lifestyles: beatas seorsum lived alone or with their families; beatas collegialiter lived in communal houses, or beaterios.1 This study will treat the former. The participation of Spanish beatas in the spiritual and material needs of ordinary people made them sensitive barometers of the political and social climates in which they were immersed. In order to grasp the full vitality of laywomen between the Reformation and the Counter Reformation, it is necessary to bring into focus the social profile of these workers for the faith, who participated in the quotidian spiritual and material needs of ordinary people. The aim of this essay is to reveal the pars costruens behind the history of the beatas: to treat them not simply as disruptive or marginal figures but rather as catalysts for the diverse social and religious conflicts during the Reformation and Counter Reformation. I concentrate on four distinct groups: beatas associated with the reform of the religious orders in the first decades of the sixteenth century; the visionary beatas who, during the same period, were instrumental in the implementation of anti-converso policies; the Franciscan tertiaries who led a movement of spiritual renewal known as alumbradismo in the 1520s and 1530s; and finally, the beatas of the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries whose spiritual and visionary experiences became the focus of the church’s efforts to control the attribution of holiness and mystical phenomena. This essay proposes reading the history of the beatas over the longue durée in order to appreciate the full spectrum of their religious beliefs, behaviors, and relations with institutions of power. The beatas’ resistance to Counter-Reformation enclosure is only part of this history. They were active participants in a variety of religious movements throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: their ranks included visionaries, mystics, evangelical teachers, care workers, and missionaries who sometimes worked in opposition to, sometimes in concert with the institutional church. Furthermore, the

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trajectory of the relationship between the church and the beatas over the longue durée was not one of oppression but one of accommodation: as I will show, the church increasingly mitigated its efforts to impose enclosure on beatas and found reasons to legitimate the third status. Beatas and the Movement of Monastic Reform Let us therefore start with the beginning of the sixteenth century, when Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros (1463–1517), charged with implementing the religious policies of King Ferdinand, became the great protector of the beatas. From the early Middle Ages, the Castilian kings had sought to promote the Observant reform of the regular clergy. During the first decades of the sixteenth century, Cisneros, a Franciscan, gave new impulse to this reform in the face of considerable obstacles. In particular, certain monastic orders were reluctant to give up the vast patrimony that they had accumulated during the Middle Ages and embrace the austere ideals of evangelical poverty. Cisneros relied on charismatic beatas, and in particular on a peasant woman, María de Santo Domingo (c. 1485–1524), also known as the beata of Piedrahita, to advance the reform cause. Following an adolescence and young adulthood dedicated to prayer, reclusion, and works of charity under the patronage of the Dominican convent in Piedrahita, at around seventeen years of age María took the habit of a Dominican tertiary and entered a beaterio in Ávila. In the spring of 1507, she was transferred to the Dominican brothers of Saint Thomas; she remained there only until October, when the provincial Diego Magdaleno authorized her to promote the Observant reform in the Dominican convents of Toledo. These frequent transfers, which were unusual, reveal two essential pieces of information: the beata had developed a brilliant career with the Dominicans, and they in turn had assigned her the delicate task of implementing reform in a strategic area that had proved resistant to it. Her prophetic gifts, communicated through ecstasies and trances, gave a seal of divine approval for the Observant reform. The tension between the Observants, whom Cisneros strongly supported, and their opponents was evident in a series of court cases brought against María between 1508 and 1510. In the end, María was acquitted, in large part due to the protection she enjoyed from powerful men: King Ferdinand, Cisneros, the Duke of Alba, and Don Fadrique Alvarez de Toledo.2 The latter, who also held the title of the first Earl of Piedrahita, ordered the convent of Aldeanueva built for the beata, where she resided as abbess until her death around 1524. As Jodi Bilinkoff has noted, each of these three patrons had precise reasons for supporting a prophetic visionary like María de Santo Domingo. For Ferdinand the Catholic, she helped fill the spiritual void left by the death of Queen Isabella. For the Duke of Alba, she tied the prestige of his lineage to the Dominicans residing in his territories. And for Cisneros, María helped promote the Observant reform and, on a personal level, advance his career in the church.3 That said, I would not exclude the possibility that the involvement of the first two patrons, although

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stimulated by the interests Bilinkoff noted, was also due to the desire to obtain a patrimonial benefit from the monastic reform—a project on which Cisneros had worked with determination, starting with his own order and proceeding to a segment of the Dominicans—always in close cooperation with political power. It is well known, in fact, that the land the conventualists (the Observants’ opponents) did not want to give up would be assigned to the crown. So in order to reaffirm, at least symbolically, his influence in its territories, the Duke of Alba supported a beata close to the heart of the Observant branch of the Dominican Order. The Converso Problem In 1478 the Catholic monarchs established the Holy Office of the Inquisition, an ecclesiastical court with the explicit mission of punishing conversos (Jewish converts to Christianity and their descendants) who had returned to their ancestral faith. The early 1480s inaugurated proceedings against alleged crypto-Judaizers in Ciudad Real and Cuenca (1489–1491).4 The Order of St. Jerome was among the first to feel the impact of the increasingly anti-converso climate. This prestigious order, which counted numerous New Christians among its members, was forced to debate whether or not to adopt “purity of blood” statutes, that is, requirements that postulants prove that they had no Jewish or Moorish ancestors. Following a wrenching debate, the monastery in Sisla, near Toledo, adopted the statutes.5 During the succeeding trials, which involved many friars of converso origin, María de Ajofrín, a beata who was a tertiary in the order, lent her voice to the debate. In 1484 she reported a vision in which a wrathful king appeared to her with a large knife in his mouth—which was interpreted as an allusion to a desire for justice against the sins of the clergy of Toledo. It seemed to herald, and perhaps even legitimate, the inquisitorial trials against alleged Hieronymite Judaizers, trials that in fact began the following year.6 We cannot know for certain whether María de Ajofrín consciously approved of the purity of blood statutes or the discriminatory mentality they supported, since her vision narratives come down to us through her confessor, Juan de Corrales, the prior of the monastery of Sisla, who notoriously favored introducing purity of blood statutes and who served as a judge in the trials against the Hieronymite friars. Nevertheless, the testimony of the tertiary did help condemn Juan de Madrid, a Hieronymite monk who was subsequently burned at the stake for crypto-Judaism.7 In a similar case, the Franciscan tertiary María de Toledo acted as an influential supporter of the Inquisition in the court of the Catholic Monarchs.8 It is possible that María de Toledo and María de Ajofrín bowed to the will of their confessors and chroniclers, and that these men, in turn, availed themselves of their penitents’ authority as foeminae divinae to win approval for highly divisive decisions, such as establishing the Holy Office. Just a few decades later the voice of yet another beata, Juana de la Cruz, gave support to anti-converso factions, which, in alliance with the Inquisition, cast doubt on the authenticity of the conversos’ Christian faith.

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Whether or not these three beatas consciously endorsed anti-converso policies or were tools of their confessors and patrons, their cases illustrate the important role they assumed (or that was thrust upon them) in claiming divine support for those policies. If the voices of María de Ajofrín, María de Toledo, and Juana de la Cruz were used to advance a sociopolitical project that would relegate the conversos to the margins of Christian society, two beatas in sixteenth-century Castile raised their voices in support of an opposing ideology. These women—both conversas—were the leaders of an important movement of religious renewal, alumbradismo, or iluminismo, whose origins can be traced to the Pauline spirituality of fifteenthcentury conversos.9 The leaders of this movement—the first important heterodox movement in early modern Spain—were Francisca Hernández and Isabel de la Cruz. We know little about Hernández, the leader of the movement in Valladolid. Arrested in 1530, under pressure from her captors she denounced many of her disciples. Her spiritual teaching can be discerned indirectly in the unreserved adoration she inspired in one of those disciples, the Franciscan Francisco Ortiz.10 This friar openly criticized the Inquisition and refuted the charges that Hernández had intimate relations with her male devotees; as a consequence he was incarcerated by the Inquisition.11 We likewise know little about Isabel de la Cruz, if we limit ourselves only to what is recorded in an excerpt from her inquisitorial interrogation.12 Nevertheless, her teachings may be partially reconstructed on the basis of the cases of the other alumbrados, in particular the conversa María de Cazalla, a laywoman and mother of six who, along with her daughters, was a great admirer and disciple of the beata. Despite the fragmentary nature of the sources, it is possible to discern Isabel’s commitment to catechizing conversos, since the church had made little effort in this regard. Espousing a form of Pauline Christianity, Isabel de la Cruz formed alliances with the Castilian nobility and urban elites, using them as a sounding board for the content of her preaching. In her spiritual teachings, she used a particular dialectical method: in the first phase, the neophytes, or principiantes, were encouraged to perform “outward acts” (actos exteriores) (fasts, mortifications, the recitation of prayers, observance of church ceremonies), while in the second phase they were shown the futility of such acts in their journey toward a personal relationship with God. They were thus guided to choose “interior acts” (actos interiores) to reach the next stage, namely that of the instructed, or instrutos. In this way, Isabel de la Cruz attempted to codify the experience of interior piety and Pauline spirituality as Christian practice. Isabel de la Cruz was one of the first alumbrados to practice a form of reading Scripture—a method later developed by the scriptural genius Juan de Valdés.13 As she taught her disciple Pedro Ruiz de Alcaraz, the purpose of reading Scripture was not to acquire scholarly knowledge of the “letter of the Law” but rather a means to “experience” God. The links to Valdes’ spirituality, which I have analyzed elsewhere, are too close to be denied.14 Exiled in Italy, where he fled to avoid being arrested by the Spanish Inquisition, Valdés several times noted in his

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works that the “Christian practice” based on the Bible is not ciencia (science) but experiencia (experience). He labored, as the famous Augustinian poet and scholar Luis de León did later, in order to close the gap between the Christian faith and direct contact with its sources, an obsessive effort countered by the publication of the Inquisition’s Index of Prohibited Books in 1551. Although is not possible to know Isabel de la Cruz’s teachings in their entirety due to the loss of inquisitorial trial records, her goal was to establish a “church of the perfected” through a genuine process of initiation, similar to the secret, mystical paths of the early Christian communities. Perhaps the most revolutionary aspect of her teaching (one shared with other Toledan alumbrados) was the doctrine of universal salvation: the belief that salvation was a promise made by God to all peoples, regardless of race or religious origin.15 This belief, drawn from the Pauline epistles but possibly influenced by contact with the Islamic faith of the moriscos (Moorish converts to Christianity), dissociated salvation from participation in the ritual life of the Catholic Church, those acts that Alumbrados called actos exteriores. Furthermore, this belief obviously could have destabilizing effects if perceived as an invitation to moral laxity. Its teachings, therefore, had to be transmitted only to those who were prepared to understand it correctly, in other words, “the perfected.” Ambivalence toward Enclosure To respond to the challenges represented by the Lutheran Schism, on December 4, 1563, the Council of Trent promulgated a decree imposing active and passive enclosure on professed nuns, on tertiaries who had taken solemn vowsand wore a religious habit, and on those who lived in community with the regular clergy without having taken solemn vows. In 1566 the Apostolic Constitution Circa pastoralis, issued by PiusV, reinforced the instructions stated in the Tridentine decree. The objectives of this measure did not differ in substance from those of the Observant reform. It therefore found fertile ground in Spain. However, some communities were slow to impose these reforms because of the scope and importance of the social roles of many beatas, who served as caregivers in hospitals, distributors of charity, and teachers. Furthermore, enclosure would have threatened the economic survival of women who depended on contact with the world to support their charitable activities. Perhaps in recognition of this dilemma, on September 20, 1567, Pius V responded to a petition by Philip II of Spain regarding Franciscan tertiary men and women who had been required to submit to the Observance and take solemn vows. The Pope’s reply was marked by moderation: Franciscan tertiaries who had professed solemn vows would henceforth be required to observe enclosure, but those who had professed simple vows could continue to live in the world. Five years later, in 1572, Pope Gregory XIII exempted tertiaries in Spain from the obligation imposed by Circa pastoralis to choose between professing solemn

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vows or returning home within fifteen to twenty days. They, too, could also continue to live as before (“permanerent prout antea vixerant).”16 Subsequent legislation further moderated the Tridentine decree and delayed the process of absorbing tertiaries into monastic life. In fact, many beaterios devoted to works of social assistance or the administration of hospitals and orphanages were preserved during the Counter Reformation.17 Inquisitorial correspondence gives evidence of the dilemma posed by the condition of the beatas. In a circular letter of October 25, 1575, the Suprema (the Inquisition’s high court in Madrid) asked the regional tribunals to give their opinion as to whether the lifestyle of the beatas seorsum (beatas who lived alone or with their families) should be prohibited. The inquisitors in Seville responded: We understand that in this city and district there are three kinds of beatas who live in their own houses and not in a community and who do not observe enclosure. Some, called “terceras,” wear the habit of a religious order, which they receive from the prelates of that order, and they make certain vows to them and promise obedience to them. There are others who wear a habit but do not receive it from any prelate. Rather, they wear it on their own authority and they do not vow obedience to anyone. Others either wear a habit or dress modestly and promise obedience to their confessors or other specific persons.18

The Seville inquisitors, acknowledging that many of the beatas of the first group lived chaste, pious lives, nevertheless expressed concern that their religious habits gave them a scandalous degree of liberty: “They wander through the towns with much more freedom than other women of their condition, and because of that habit they dare to go in and out as they please, . . . neglecting their responsibilities to their parents and homes.”19 But the inquisitors also recognized that these beatas enjoyed widespread support in their communities: “And since they do all this in the name of holiness and religion, and no one dares to prevent it.”20 The lifestyle of the third group struck the Seville inquisitors as especially pernicious: “The third kind of these beatas, who promise obedience to a particular person, should not be permitted in any way, because we understand that it is an invention of the alumbrados of our time, who remove daughters from service and obedience to their parents, and wives from obedience to their husbands. . . .”21 The inquisitors conclude, citing pastoralis, that all three beata lifestyles should be prohibited. Despite the inquisitors’ apparent support for Circa pastoralis, repeated legislation indicates that a number of dioceses had difficulty implementing enclosure. In 1583 the Provincial Council of Toledo prohibited the lifestyle of the beatas seorsum and threatened to punish any who were disobedient with excommunication. The Council also attempted to impose enclosure on beatas living in communities. The bishops of Calahorra and Calzada similarly tried to force enclosure on the beatas of the provinces of Gipuzcua, Cantabria, and Alava.22 Not all bishops supported enclosure, however. In October 1601, the bishop of Orihuela (Alicante), José Esteve, after a visit ad limina to his diocese, declared that the beatas he found there led a moral and virtuous life.23 Yet there are also known cases of clergy

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who participated in the establishment of beaterios before and after the Council of Trent. For example, Abbot Don Martín de Aguirresacona founded the beaterio Vera Cruz in 1550 in Bérriz (Vizcaya).24 In 1576 the Archbishop of Granada, Don Pedro Guerrero, founded the beaterio of Alhama de Granada and also wrote the constitutions for the community.25 Beatas and Alumbradismo Redivivus After the publication of the Inquisition’s edict identifying alumbradismo as a heresy in 1525—and after the trials of Francisca Hernández, Isabel de la Cruz, María de Cazalla, and many other alumbrados—this spiritual movement was virtually made ineffective. However, its spiritual legacy survived in the person of Isabel Ortiz. She was the daughter of a silversmith who had served noblewomen and sovereigns, including the Marquess of Cenete, the Queen of France, and Empress Isabel, the wife of Charles V. From the age of ten, she was a chambermaid for the Mendozas, whose ducal court in Guadalajara had been the cradle of the alumbradismo of the 1520s. She married a silversmith, but when her husband left her to seek his fortune in the New World, she returned to the ducal palace. There she became the spiritual guide and personal confidant of Doña Isabel de Aragón, the daughter of the Infanta Fortuna, niece and goddaughter of Ferdinand the Catholic and his second wife, Doña Germana de Foix. Doña Isabel assumed the title of Duchess of the Infantado in 1531 when her husband, Don Iñigo de Mendoza, became the fourth duke of that lineage. Doña Isabel was known for her alumbrado sympathies: she had welcomed María de Cazalla in her palace and was part of a small group of aristocrats—among them Brianda de Mendoza26 and María Arias, sister-in-law of the Duke of Medinaceli—who attended the sermons of María Cazalla’s brother, Bishop Juan de Cazalla.27 Ortiz’s teaching contained the essential elements of the alumbradismo that had captivated the noblewoman in her youth: the criticism of ritual acts performed without interior devotion. Committed to education and evangelization beyond the ducal palace, Ortiz became “so well known in Guadalajara that there was hardly anyone who had not met with her.”28 She taught the daughters of a notary of Alcalá and corresponded with nuns. She may be the author of two treatises—Pater Noster contemplativo, which she recited every night with the duchess, and the Credo, which, together with the first, offered a synthesis of the Suma de la doctrina christiana (Summary of Christian Doctrine) by Constantino Ponce de la Fuente, an alumbrado cleric and noted imperial chaplain later condemned for Lutheranism.29 Ortiz may also have been inspired by El espejo de ilustres personas, by the Franciscan Alonso de Madrid, published in Alcalá in 1525. The spiritual sources of her treatises revived works by authors that had been suppressed: not only Constantino’s Suma but also Erasmus’s Enchiridion. The Jesuits also influenced Ortiz; she attended their sermons and helped spread their discursive method of prayer based on meditation on Jesus Christ’s passion. She may have counted on association with the Society of Jesus, which was enjoying

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a period of political ascendance, to strengthen her authority as a spiritual teacher and give her controversial teachings the stamp of orthodoxy. Moreover, Ortiz confessed on one occasion, with merciless self-criticism, to pursuing worldly success not only for herself but also for her daughter, a cantora (singer) at the ducal court. But the Holy Office condemned her treatises, on which she had placed so much hope, as overwhelming evidence of female vanity. Many saw in that public condemnation an indirect attack on the Society of Jesus, which had come under suspicion, especially for its apostolate to beatas. Isabel Ortíz’s authorship of a spiritual treatise was seen as a problem of public order, a case of unlawful and disorderly conduct. In fact, the Inquisition focused on the point of female authorship, quietly leaving aside the doctrinal aspects of her teaching, which alone would have been sufficient to condemn her, even with a good lawyer. By then, the inquisitors were more interested in controlling the popular idea of sanctity, as performed by laywomen like Isabel Ortíz, than in rooting out the alumbrados’ heresy. Her reckless defense of mental prayer—“gold,” as Isabel called it, as opposed to the “straw” of vocal prayer—together with the Pauline and Erasmian traces in her book, were, in fact, minimized during the trial.30 It is also possible that the Inquisition was motivated by the desire to seize a golden opportunity to curb the rise of the Society of Jesus, which at this point still embraced aspects of affective and contemplative spirituality.31 Everything changed for Ortíz after her patron and protector, Doña Isabel de Aragón, died in February 1563: the Inquisition arrested Ortiz the following year. Although she had established a solid reputation as a spiritual teacher, not only at the ducal court but also in nearby Alcalá, some despised her for her Jewish ancestry. She was especially vulnerable because one of her grandfathers had been reconciled to the church for crypto-Judaism. The Jesuits did not come to her aid during her trial. Even the network of aristocratic relationships that she had enjoyed from childhood failed her. In fact, it was a lady in the circle of the duchess, perhaps at the urging of her confessor, who denounced Ortiz to the Inquisition. She was saved by her skilled lawyer, Gabriel Quemada, who, thirty years previously, had also won an acquittal for María de Cazalla. Quemada denied that Ortiz was the author of the treatise attributed to her, because she was a woman who “had not thought of anything on her own.”32 Intuiting the Inquisitors’ low opinion of women’s intellect and reliability, he devalued Ortiz’s spiritual teaching and questioned the trustworthiness of the women who testified against her. His rhetoric may have been misogynistic, but ironically it succeeded in winning an acquittal for Ortiz. The Control over Mystical Phenomena In 1639 the Inquisition of Toledo accused another beata, María Bautista, of alumbradismo. But by this date, the meaning of alumbradismo, as an inquisitorial category, had changed: it now signified primarily a “disordered devotion” rather

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than a body of philo-Protestant heresies, as had been the case a century earlier. In fact, for the clergy in the employ of the Holy Office, a woman like María Bautista (“a false, subversive, and rash saint” as she was described in trial records) represented the same threat of popular female holiness embodied by a laywoman like Isabel Ortíz almost one century before. María Bautista, a resident of Madrid and a widow with no children, was forty-two years old when the Inquisition finally decided to deal seriously with her.33 She had worn the habit of a beata for ten years and had been apprehended eight times during that period. For her, the opening of the trial was an opportunity to prove the authenticity of her divine gifts and her credibility as a spiritual writer. (She was the author of treatises similar to those written by Teresa de Ávila.) María Bautista had preached the word of God mostly in the homes of “mujeres desviadas” (“wayward women”), that is, former prostitutes and concubines. Her preaching had persuaded some women to marry. Others, venerated as saints and future spiritual teachers, were recruited to enter into one of the two convents that the beata aspired to establish. Following the teachings of St. Teresa, the beata practiced the oración de quietud (prayer of quiet; a form of contemplative prayer that culminated with the inner vision of God). Sometimes her raptures and revelations touched on current political themes, such as when she prayed to the Virgin Mary for peace during the war in Catalonia, the revolt in Naples and Sicily, and the loss of Portugal. Chronology was significant in Bautista’s case: her trial was conducted between 1638 and 1641, along with those of two other beatas of Madrid: Isabel de Briñas and María Maseda y Legarda. The first had been recruited by the Dominicans with the discreet mission of securing patrimony (bequests or legados píos) at the expense of the Jesuits and to weaken, through her activity, the Jesuits’ position at court. The second, with her hallucinatory visions, prematurely intoned a gloomy de profundis for the monarchy of Philip IV, which was floundering due to internal and external difficulties. The popularity of these women among the masses allowed them to serve as the public voice of dissent for those who disagreed with the policies of Philip IV and his prime minister, the Count-Duke Olivares.34 Returning to María Bautista, a peculiar aspect of her case is her confident and even familiar attitude toward the inquisitors. She went so far as to call them her “padres espirituales (“spiritual fathers”). She declared that many confessors and “hombres doctos” (“learned theologians”) had disappointed her in the past: they had been indifferent to her spiritual “motherhood” and failed to find in her writings anything that certified her holiness, but neither had they indicated any heresy. María Bautista evidently thought that the inquisitors would eventually recognize her spiritual merits. María Bautista’s case illustrates one of the unintended consequences of the spread of Counter-Reformation piety to the popular classes. The publication of the works of Teresa of Ávila had created an audience of female readers familiar with mystical language and desirous of imitating her.35 In an era in which altarpieces and paintings vividly celebrated the power of the divine and attempted to assuage a heightened fear of death and punishment in the afterlife, scores of women,

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spiritual mothers like María Bautista, became mediators between the faithful and the severe eschatology of the Counter Reformation, with the fear of hell and uncertainties of purgatory that it generated. In this sense, the trial of María Bautista was paradigmatic of the Baroque era. Whereas communities revered women like María Bautista as “living saints,” the Inquisition, motivated by the desire to control the attribution of holiness, moved to investigate these and similar women for possible holy fraud or delusion. The inquisitors recognized that María de Bautista had a “good wit,” knowledge of spiritual things, and a great ability to “imitate” the writings of the holy mother Saint Teresa. But no one, not even the calificador (theological expert), could be sure that this woman was not the victim of diabolical deception. Moreover, the inquisitors recognized that even Teresa de Ávila’s visions early in her career had been suspect. The problem was that the content of María Bautista’s treatises, which was perfectly in line with the teachings of Teresa de Ávila, could not be impugned. It was her conduct that had to be punished instead: her performance of a model of holiness different from the Tridentine paradigm, a model applicable only to a few men and women with proven heroic virtues. Nevertheless, María Bautista received a light punishment. She was penanced; that is, the Holy Office required her to reconsider her spiritual experience under the direction of her confessor. This was virtually an absolution, but for someone like María Bautista, who depended on the proceeds of her saintly reputation, it amounted to a sentence of social and economic death. What accounts for this lenience? Over the course of the sixteenth century, the Holy Office gradually softened its approach to female visionaries and miracle workers, preferring to see their behavior as a manifestation of self-deception or diabolical delusion rather than conscious deceit (“pretense of sanctity”).36 It is possible that the inquisitors’ lenience in these cases reflects a “strategy of persuasion”—an approach they deemed better suited to bringing these women back under their control. Furthermore, by treating them as deluded or weak women, the inquisitors demonstrated their authority as experts in the discernment of spirits (distinguishing authentic divine gifts from demonic delusions). The inquisitors nevertheless had to walk a fine line between proclaiming disbelief in miracles (and thus appearing to support the Protestant doctrine of the cessation of miracles) and encouraging popular credulity.37 Perhaps unintentionally, their attention to cases of pretense of sanctity undermined the proposed Counter-Reformation response to this doctrine: keeping the supernatural at a rational distance from everyday life. Brief Legal Excursus of the Beatas: A Battle Won Only at the beginning of the seventeenth century did the church truly understand that the world of the beatas could not be reduced to monastic enclosure. In contravention to the mandate of the Provincial Council of Toledo in 1583, which prescribed enclosure for beatas seorsum and collegialiter, a Roman document

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dated December 20, 1616, confirmed the juridical status of the beatas seorsum, who only thirty years earlier had been ordered to join convents. The document permitted these women to live under the protection of a religious order as tertiaries “propriis domibus, vel seorsum habitantes, sub praedictis privilegiis Ordinis, Tertia Regualae habitum deferent” (in their houses, or living alone, under monastic rule, wearing the Tertia Regula cloth). Once again, practical considerations had prevailed: the vow of enclosure was not mentioned, only the vows of poverty and obedience. The status quo was thus acknowledged. In fact, there did not appear to be an alternative. Twenty-nine years later, on November 23, 1643, the Sacra Congregazione of the Council of Trent called for the creation of conservatories, institutions without enclosure and solemn vows, whose rules were established by the bishop.38 The culmination of the process came in 1700. In this year, a license from the bishop was created to allow women of good morals and exemplary life to wear the habit of the beata once they had reached the age of forty.39 During the course of the century, two measures further loosened the strictures of Circa pastoralis. On May 26, 1727, the Dominican Pope Benedict XIII decided to turn the page on Circa pastoralis by regulating the lives of the collegialiter tertiaries in a different way than had been done by his illustrious predecessor. He acknowledged that during the 150 years that had elapsed since the publication of the Constitution of Saint Pius V and the century since the decree of the Congregation of Bishops and Regulars (published on December 20, 1616), tertiaries had lived “collegially in many places,” “with the knowledge and tacit consent of the bishops.” Furthermore, they had “flourished and continued to flourish without enclosure.” He therefore declared that [said tertiaries] cannot in anyway be obligated or pressured [to observe clausura], despite any regulations to the contrary, including apostolic ones. . . .”40 A little more than a century and a half after Circa pastoralis, the tone with which the pope referred to the tertiaries had changed. (One observes, for example, the courtesy of the expression “flourish and continue to flourish.”) This dispensation was affirmed by Clement XII, who on January 17, 1763, authorized the privileges of women of the third status, both collegialiter and seorsum. We have arrived at a critical threshold in the lives of the beatas. This document took stock of previous legislation and established new privileges. That said, the most noteworthy aspect is the emphatic will of the pope to regularize the actual condition of the beatas. The church, through its bishops, recognized the important social presence of tertiaries and laid claim to control over them—control that up to that time it had shared with the regular religious orders.41 Supporting this commitment, the popes welcomed not only the situation of the conservatories but also the many communities of women engaged in nursing or in educational activities, which were transformed into institutions of oblates with simple vows. In the first half of the nineteenth century, when Spain was attempting to suppress the monasteries and convents of the regular clergy, this commitment allowed secular institutions dedicated to educational and social activities to survive.42 From

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the second half of the nineteenth century onward, these secular congregations of beatas were reconfigured as so-called “new institutes” with simple vows, headed by a general mother superior but always under the jurisdiction of the bishop.43 These spread also in Latin America, where they had originated from a pre-existing network of beaterios. The history of beatas closes with the Code of Canon Law of 1917, which addresses only the situation of beatas collegialiter, allowing them to transform their communities into regular monasteries with a solemn vow, into congregations with a simple vow, or into a society of common life without a vow.44 Conclusions This essay has attempted to describe the presence of the beatas seorsum at crucial junctures of the Modern Age. Only by recognizing their status as epiphenomena of underlying social and religious forces can we appreciate their historiographic significance. The histories of the beatas María de Ajofrín, María de Toledo, and Juana de la Cruz illustrate the depth of the failure of the assimilation of the conversos into Christian society and the social and religious laceration caused by purity of blood statutes and the establishment of the Inquisition in 1478. In this same period, the charisma of María de Santo Domingo supported the monastic reform of the Catholic Monarchs. In the second decade of the sixteenth century, the conversa Isabel de la Cruz produced the first expression of alumbradismo, a Christian movement based on Pauline spirituality. Thirty years later Isabel Ortíz, also a conversa, showed that alumbradismo was still alive in the court of the Mendozas. Her collaboration with the Jesuits is paradigmatic of the kind of alliances between beatas and religious orders that would persist, not only in Spain but also in its colonies. A few decades later, the visions of the beatas in the entourage of Santa Rosa de Lima—the Dominican tertiary canonized in 1671— helped accredit the process of beatification for a few members of the Society of Jesus in Peru.45 Isabel Ortiz marks the end of an era. After her, the category of “inordinate devotion” became the major heresy of the Baroque Age: it was a measuring rod for divergence from the Counter-Reformation model of holiness, based on the systematic certification of supernatural experience. The fearless vestals of alumbradismo—Francisca Hernández, Isabel de la Cruz—gave way to unfortunate women like María Bautista and the many imitators of St. Teresa upon whom the Inquisition affixed the seal of madness, deception (iludentes), or self-delusion (ilusas). In this period, inquisitor-confessors tried to “reeducate” the minds of “deluded” women who undertook the adventure of holiness without having the prerequisites and qualities to do so.46“Living saints” to the people (and sometimes to the bishops),47 heretics, “false saints,” and alumbradas to the Holy Office, the beatas reflected the dramatic ambivalence of a church whose judgment oscillated between tolerance and prosecution. This trajectory calls into question the vision of

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an all-encompassing and uniform Counter-Reformation Church that consistently oppressed the beatas. Because many beaterios had to become cloistered convents, the figure of the beata seorsum, unencumbered by perpetual vows, remained one of the few channels between general society and the religious orders. Thanks to the labors of these workers of the faith, the church could continue to be a solid bastion against hunger, poverty, disease, and fear of hell. Nevertheless, the Inquisition was careful not to nourish the beatas’ spiritual teaching, not only because it threatened the male monopoly on preaching but, more important, because it promoted popular cults “from below” that lay outside the strict criteria for promoting new figures of saints “from above.” Retracing briefly the main stages of the juridical history of the beatas in the largely unexplored territory of canon law shows how the ambitious Counter-Reformation project to conventualize the life of the Terzia Regula occasionally had to cope with the multifaceted reality of its social role, which proved decisive for its survival. I therefore hope that this study, along with the growing interest in the beatas’ historiography of the Latin American world, will contribute to bringing them within a larger historical framework.48 Beatas’ public vocation made ​​them part of the conflicts and tensions that accompanied some of the most traumatic events in Spain during the modern era, revealing, as we have seen, some of its most ambiguous and controversial aspects. Notes  * Translated by Silvia Dupont and Alison Weber.  1. Eutimio Sastre Santos, “La condición jurídica de beatas y beaterios. Introducción y textos. 1139–1917,” Anthologica Annua 43 (1996): 287–509. See also Maria Laura Giordano, “Beatas, Spagna,” in Dizionario storico dell’Inquisizione, ed. Adriano Prosperi with Vincenzo Lavenia and John Tedeschi (Pisa: Edizioni della Normale: 2010), 161–65. Key studies on the beatas in early modern Spain include Ángela Atienza López, “De beaterios a conventos. Nuevas perspectivas sobre el mundo de las beatas en la España Moderna,” Historia Social 57 (2007): 145–68; Mary Elizabeth Perry, Gender and Disorder in Early Modern Seville (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 97–117; Mary Elizabeth Perry, “Beatas and the Inquisition in Seville,” in Inquisition and Society in Early Modern Europe, ed. Stephen Haliczer (Towson, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1987), 147–68; María Palacios Alcalde, “Las beatas ante la Inquisición,” Hispania Sacra 40.81 (1988): 107–31; about female lay piety among the Alumbrados in Extremadura, see Alison Weber, “Demonizing Ecstasy: Alonso de la Fuente and the Alumbrados of Extremadura”, in The Mystical Gesture. Essays on Medieval and Early Modern Spiritual Culture in Honor of Mary E. Giles, ed. Robert Boening (Ashgate: Aldershot, 2000), 141–58.  2. Jodi Bilinkoff, “Charisma and Controversy: The Case of María de Santo Domingo,” Archivo Domenicano 10 (1989): 55–66.  3. Jodi Bilinkoff, “A Spanish Prophetess and Her Patrons: the Case of María de Santo Domingo,” Sixteenth Century Journal 23.1 (1992): 21–34. About Cisneros, see José García

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de Oro, Un cardenal reformista en el trono de España (1436–1517) (Madrid: La Esfera de los libros, 2005).  4. Carlos Carrete Parrondo, “La Inquisición y los clérigos judaizantes de Cuenca (1489–1491),” Helmantica 30 (1979): 51–61. For the trials of conversos in Ciudad Real in 1483–1485, see Haim Beinart, Conversos on Trial (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, Hebrew University, 1981). Whether or not the conversos were, in fact, secret Judaizers is an intensely debated topic that lies outside the scope of this essay. My position is that the label was used to stigmatize the unresolved faith of individuals suspended between Judaism and Christianity.  5. Sophie Coussemacker, “Convertis et judaisants dans l’ordre de Saint-Jérôme. Un état de la question,” Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez 2 (1991): 5–27; Haim Beinart, “The Judaizing Movement in the Order of San Jerónimo in Castile,” Scripta Hierosolymitana 7 (1961) : 167–92.  6. Ángela Muñoz Fernández, “Santidad femenina, controversia, judeoconversa y Reforma,” in Modelos culturales y normas sociales al final de la Edad Media, ed. Patrick Boucheron and Francisco Ruiz Gómez (Cuenca: Casa de Velázquez-Ediciones de la Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, 2009), 387–428, esp. 409–10; Ángela Muñoz Fernández, Beatas y santas neocastellanas: ambivalencia de la religión correctoras del poder (ss XIV–XVII) (Madrid: Comunidad de Madrid, 1994). See also Ron Surtz, “María de Ajofrín: The Scourge of Toledo,” in Writing Women in Late Medieval and Early Modern Spain: The Mothers of St. Teresa of Avila (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 80–84. Regarding the trials of Hieronymite Judaizers, see Fidel Fita, “La Inquisición toledana. Relación contemporánea de los autos y autillos que celebró desde el año 1485 hasta el de 1501,” Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia 11 (1987): 289–322.  7. Sharon Faye Koren, “A Christian Means to a Conversa End,” Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies and Gender Issues 9 (5765/2005): 27–61, esp. 29–30.  8. Ángela Muñoz Fernández, “Santidad femenina,” 413–15.  9. On the fifteenth-century leaders of this movement, see Maria Laura Giordano, “ ‘La ciudad de nuestra conciencia.’ Los conversos y la construcción de la identidad judeocristiana (1449–1556),” Hispania Sacra 62.125 (2010): 43–91, esp. 43–71. See also Stefania Pastore, Il Vangelo e la spada. L’Inquisizione di Castiglia e i suoi critici (1460– 1598) (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2003). On the prominent role of conversos in this movement and their receptivity to Pauline Christianity, see Marcel Bataillon, Erasmo y España. Estudios sobre la historia espiritual del siglo XVI, trans. Antonio Alatorre (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1995), 59–61. As I will explain in the rest of this essay, alumbradismo was the name of a heresy the Spanish Inquisition ascribed to diverse forms of religiosity spanning the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Besides, the beliefs and practices of individuals identified as alumbrados varied widely. Álvaro Huerga’s fivevolume Historia de los alumbrados (Madrid: FUE, 1978–1994) traces the history of these diverse groups. For later manifestations of alumbradismo, see also the essay by Jessica Fowler in this volume. 10. Ángela Selke, El Santo Oficio de la Inquisición. Proceso de fray Francisco Ortiz (1529–1532)(Madrid: Guadarrama, 1968). 11. Mary E. Giles, “Francisca Hernández and the Sexuality of Religious Dissent,” in Women in the Inquisition. Spain and the New World, ed. Mary E. Giles (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 75–97. 12. These excerpts are included in the transcript of the trial of her disciple Pedro Ruiz de Alcaraz. See John Longhurst, “La beata Isabel de la Cruz ante la Inqusición, 1524– 1529,” Cuadernos para la Historia de España 25–26 (1957): 279–303.

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13. Massimo Firpo, Tra Alumbrados e spirituali: Studi su Juan de Valdés e il valdesianesimo nella crisi religiosa del ’500 italiano (Florence: Olschki, 1990); José C. Nieto, Juan de Valdés and the Origins of the Spanish and Italian Reformation (Geneva: Droz, 1970). 14. Maria Laura Giordano, “Nel nome di Paolo: umanesimo biblico e risonanze converse in Isabel de la Cruz e María de Cazalla (1512–1534),” in Donne e crisi nell’Europa cattolica (secoli XVI–XVII), La Bibbia e le donne, vol. 7.2, ed. Maria Laura Giordano and Adriana Valerio (Trapani: Pozzo di Giacobbe, 2014). 15. Stefania Pastore, “Mujeres, lecturas y Alumbradismo radical: Petronila de Lucena y Juan del Castillo,” Historia Social 57 (2007): 51–75. I have also explored this theme in “Nel nome di Paolo.” 16. Raymond Creytens, “La giurisprudenza della Sacra Congregazione del Concilio nella questione della clausura delle monache (1564–1576),” Apollinaris 37 (1964): 251–85; Elizabeth Lehfeldt, “Discipine, Vocation, and Patronage: Spanish Religious Women in a Tridentine Microclimate,” Sixteenth Century Journal 30.4 (1999): 1009–36. 17. Sastre Santos, “La condición jurídica,” 435–40. 18. “Lo que acerca de esto entendemos es que en esta ciudad y distrito se hallan tres géneros de beatas que viven en sus casas, fuera de comunidad y clausura: Unas que llaman terceras, que traen hábito de algunas de las religiones, el cual reciben de los prelados de ellas y en sus manos hacen cierta profesión y les prometen obediencia. Otras hay que andan con el mismo hábito de religión, pero no le reciben de mano de ningún prelado, sino ellas se lo ponen por su autoridad, ni dan a persona alguna la obediencia. Otras hay que viven en hábito de religión o honesto, y prometen la obediencia a sus confesores u a otras personas particulares”; Letter from the Tribunal of Seville to the Supreme Council of the Inquisition, May 27, 1577, cited in Álvaro Huerga, Historia de los Alumbrados (1570–1630) (Madrid: FUE, 1988), 4: 99. 19. “[A]ndan vagando por los pueblos donde moran, con más soltura que las otras mujeres de su cualidad, y por traer aquel hábito se atreven a entrar y salir donde les parece . . . dejan el servicio de sus padres y cuidado de sus casas”; ibid., 100. 20. “Y como todo esto [lo] hacen con título y nombre de santidad y religion, nadie se atreve a impedírselo”; ibid. 21. “El tercer género de estas beatas, que prometen la obediencia a personas particulares, parece que no se deben en manera alguna permitir, porque se entiende que es invención de los Alumbrados de este tiempo, que con esto substraen a las hijas del servcio y obediencia de sus padres,y a las mujeres de sus maridos . . .”; ibid. 22. See Juan Ignacio Tellechea Idígoras, “Diócesis de Calahorra y Santo Domingo. Las relaciones de visitas ad limina (1598–1794),” Anthologica Annua 38 (1991): 107–201, 114: “Preocupa al Obispo la situación en la zona vasca (Vizcaya, Alava y Guipúzcua) de muchos beaterios (domus feminarum quae beatae dicuntur). Guardan vida común bajo especie y color de recogimiento y profesión religiosa de diversas Ordenes, pero no observan clausura, de lo que siguen inconvenientes y daños en cuanto a ejemplaridad y respeto de su instituto.” 23. “Has devotas mulieres Episcopus Oriolensis suis ordinationibus ad optimum vitae genus et institutum redegit, et ad honestum vitae cultum et pieatate minstituit” (“Through his rules, Bishop Oriolense brought those religious women toward a good style of life and customs, and established an honest life and pious cult.”) See J. Martínez Valls, “Semblanza biográfica del obispo de Orihuela Don José Esteve Juan (1551–1603), y sus relaciones ad limina,” in Anthologica Annua 26–27 (1979–1980): 555–612, 599–600. The visit ad limina

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refers to the inspections bishops were required to make before giving the pope an account of the state of their dioceses. 24. María J. Arana, La clausura de las mujeres. Una lectura teológica de un proceso histórico (Bilbao Universidad de Deusto: Mensajero, 1992), 92–95; see also Ángela Atienza López, “De beaterios a conventos,” 165. 25. Sastre Santos, “La condición jurídica,” 529–30. 26. This noblewoman was the author of a beaterio’s constitution: see Maria Laura Giordano, “Erasmo in convento: Lo statuto per il beaterio di Nuestra Señora de la Piedad di Brianda de Mendoza (1525–1534),” in L’Europa divisa e i nuovi mondi. Per Adriano Prosperi, ed. Massimo Donattini, Giuseppe Marcocci, and Stefania Pastore (Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, 2011), 2: 252–64. 27. See Milagros Ortega Costa, Proceso de la Inquisición contra María de Cazalla (Madrid: FUE, 1978), 95, n. 55. 28. “Tan conocida en Gaudalajara en que no avía casi nadie con quien no tratase”; Archivo Histórico Nacional, Inquisición (hereafter AHN, Inq.), Proceso de Isabel Ortiz, leg. 104, exp. 5, f. 23r. See Maria Laura Giordano, Apologetas de la fe. Elites conversas entre Inquisición y Patronazgo en España (siglos XV–XVI) (Madrid: FUE, 2004), 219–39. 29. His bones were burned in an auto de fe in 1560 for Lutheranism, Fuente having died previously in prison. About him, see Michel Boeglin, “Constantino de la Fuente. Irenismo y herejía a mediados del siglo XVI en Castilla”, in Aspectos de la disidencia religiosa en Castilla-La Mancha en el siglo XVI, ed. Ignacio Javier García Pinilla (Toledo: Almudena, 2013), 223–49. 30. AHN, Inq., Proceso de Isabel Ortiz, ff. 73v–74r. She was accused of having told the duchess of Coruña to give up vocal prayer (which caused dizziness) and devote herself to contemplation; AHN, Inq., Proceso de Isabel Ortiz, f. 38v. 31. In the 1570s, the Society of Jesus would distance itself from contemplative spirituality. See Stefania Pastore, “La ‘svolta antimistica’ di Mercuriano: i retroscena spagnoli,” Dimensioni e problemi della ricerca storica 1 (2005): 81–93, and the essay by Alison Weber in this volume. 32. “No habia pensado nada de su cabeza”; ibid., ff. 86v–87r. 33. AHN, Inq., Proceso de María Bautista, leg. 102, exp. 2. 34. María Bautista recalls the case of another beata from the late 1580s, Lucrecia de León, whose dreams reflected the tensions that preceded the military defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588; Richard L. Kagan, Lucrecia’s Dreams. Politics and Prophecy in SixteenthCentury Spain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). I have examined the political context for the trials of two other seventeenth-century beatas, Isabel de Briñas and María Maseda y Legarda, in “Al borde del abismo: ‘Falsas santas’ e ‘ilusas’ madrileñas en la vigilia de 1640,” Historia Social 57 (2007): 75–97. 35. Virgilio Pinto Crespo, “La difusión de la literatura espiritual en el Madrid del siglo XVII: Los textos de María Bautista,” Edad de oro 12 (1993): 243–255, esp. 251. 36. Andrew Keitt, Inventing the Sacred: Imposture, Inquisition and the Boundaries of the Supernatural in Golden Age Spain (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2005); Stephen Haliczer, Between Exaltation and Infamy: Female Mysticism in the Golden Age of Spain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). 37. Adriano Prosperi, “L’elemento storico nelle polemiche sulla santità,” in Finzione e santità tra medioevo ed età moderna, ed. Gabriella Zarri (Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1991), 88–118, esp. 100. 38. Sastre Santos,“La condición jurídica,” 547. 39. Ibid., 554.

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40. “Attendentens insuper per annos, ut accepimus, centum et sexaginta ab edicta dicta constitutione S. Pii V, et per saeculum et ultra post decretum Congregationis Episcoporum et regularium emanatum XX decembre MDCXVI eiusce modi tertiarias collegialiter viventibus pluribus in locis, scientibus et tacentibus Ordinariis, floruisse, ac etiamnum florere sine clausura: declaramus,volumus et mandamus, easdem ad neutram, absolute teneri aut esse compellendas; non obstantibus contrariis ordinationibus etiam apostolicis, quibus expresse per praesentes derogamus. . .”; Thomas Ripoll, Bullarium Ordinis Praedicatorum, 8 vols (Rome: Mainardi, 1729–1740), 6: 615–35, n. 79, cited by Sastre Santos, “La condición jurídica,” 558–59. 41. Ubaldo Giraldi, Expositio juris pontificii juxta recentiorem Ecclesiae disciplinam, Nova romana editio accuratior, Pars Prima, (Romae: apud dominicum Ercole, 1829–1830), 1: 381–84. 42. “Quedan suprimidos desde luego todos los beaterios cuyo instituto no sea la hospitalidad o la ensenanza primaria.” (“All beaterios will be suppressed except those devoted to social and educational activities.”) On the legislation related to the abolishment of monasteries and convents stated in the decree of the Cortes (parliament) issued on March 8, 1836, see “Comunidades religiosas,” in Diccionario jurídico-administrativo (Madrid, 1858–1864), 1: 1454–59, 1454. 43. Sastre Santos, “La condición jurídica,” 577. 44. See “Cánones” numbers 487, 488, 673, 1308, in Codex Iuris Cononici 1917 (Rome: Typis Polyglottis Vaticanis, 1918). 45. Fernando Iwasaki Cauti, “Rosa de Santa María y las alumbradas de Lima,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 73.4 (1993): 581–613, esp. 593–94. See also the essay by Stacey Schlau in this volume. 46. For the concept of the confessor as a “doctor of the soul” in New Spain, see Mathilde Cotten, “Entre amour de Dieu et rejet de la nature humaine: Les ‘médicos del alma’ et les religieuses de Nouvelle-Espagne (XVIIè–début XVIIIè siècle),” Histoire(s) de l’Amérique Latin 5 (2010): 1–23. For the figure of the inquisitor-confessor, see Adriano Prosperi, Tribunali della coscienza. Inquisitori, confessori, missionari (Turin: Einaudi, 1996). 47. Gabriella Zarri, “Le sante vive: Per una tipología della santità femminile nel primo Cinquecento,” Annali dell’Istituto Storico Italo-Germanico in Trento 6 (1980): 161–99. 48. See Eldemira Ramírez Leiva, ed., María Rita Vargas, María Lucía Celis: Beatas embaucadoras de la Colonia (México City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1988). See also Antonio Rubial García, “Josefa de San Lluis Beltrán, La cordera de Dios. Escritura, oralidad y gestualidad de una visionaria del siglo XVII novohispano (1654),” in Monjas y beatas. La escritura femenina en la espiritualidad barroca novohispana. Siglos XVII y XVIII, ed. Asunción Lavrin and Rosalva Loreto López (Mexico City: Archivo General de la Nación Universidad de las Américas, 2002), 161–204; Ellen Gunnarsdottir, Mexican Karismata. The Baroque Vocation of Francisca de los Ángeles, 1674–1744 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004); and Nora E. Jaffary, False Mystics. Deviant Orthodoxy in Colonial Mexico (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005).

Works Cited Archival Sources AHN, Inq., Proceso de Isabel Ortiz, leg.104, exp. 5. AHN, Inq., Proceso de María Bautista, leg. 102, exp. 2. AHN, Inq., Proceso de María Bautista, ff. 139r. e v.

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Print Sources Ahlgren, Gillian T.W. “Negotiating sanctity: Holy Women in Sixteenth-Century Spain.” Church History 64, no. 3 (1995): 373–88. Arana, María J. La clausura de las mujeres. Una lectura teológica de un proceso histórico. Bilbao Universidad de Deusto: Mensajero, 1992. Atienza López, Ángela. “De beaterios a conventos. Nuevas perspectivas sobre el mundo de las beatas en la España moderna.” Historia Social 57 (2007): 145–68. Bataillon, Marcel. Erasmo y España. Estudios sobre la historia espiritual del siglo XVI. Translated by Antonio Alatorre. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1995. ———. “L’iñiguiste et la beata. Premier voyage de Calisto à México.” Revista de Historia de América 31 (1951): 59–75. Beinart, Haim. Conversos on Trial. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, Hebrew University, 1981. ———. “The Judaizing Movement in the Order of San Jerónimo in Castile.” Scripta Hierosolymitana 7 (1961): 167–92. Beltrán de Heredia, Vicente. Historia de la provincia de España (1450–1550). Rome: Istituto Storico Domenicano, 1939. Bilinkoff, Jodi.“Charisma and Controversy: The Case of María de Santo Domingo.” Archivo Domenicano 10 (1989): 55–66. ———. “A Spanish Prophetess and Her Patrons: The Case of María de Santo Domingo.” Sixteenth Century Journal 23, no. 1 (1992): 21–34. Biondi, Albano. “L’ ‘inordinata devozione’ nella Prattica del cardinale Scaglia (ca. 1635).” In Finzione e santità tra medioevo ed età moderna, edited by Gabriella Zarri, 306–25. Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1991. Boeglin, Michel. “Constantino de la Fuente. Irenismo y herejía a mediados del siglo XVI en Castilla”. In Aspectos de la disidencia religiosa en CastillaLa Mancha en el siglo XVI, edited by Ignacio Javier García Pinilla. Toledo: Almudena, 2013, 223–49. Carrete Parrondo, Carlos. “La Inquisición y los clérigos judaizantes de Cuenca (1489–1491).” Helmantica 30 (1979): 51–61. Codex Iuris Canonici. Rome: Typis Polyglottis Vaticanis, 1917. Cotten, Mathilde. “Entre amour de Dieu et rejet de la nature humaine: les ‘médicos del alma’ et les religieuses de Nouvelle-Espagne (XVIIè–début XVIIIè siècle).” Histoire(s) de l’Amérique Latin 5 (2010): 1–23. Coussemacker, Sophie. “Convertis et judaisants dans l’ordre de Saint-Jérôme. Un état de la question.” Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez 2 (1991): 5–27. Creytens, Raymond. “La giurisprudenza della Sacra Congregazione del concilio nella questione della clausura delle monache (1564–1576).” Apollinaris 37 (1964): 251–85. Firpo, Massimo. Tra Alumbrados e spirituali: studi su Juan de Valdés e il valdesianesimo nella crisi religiosa del ’500 italiano. Florence: Olschki, 1990.

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Fita, Fidel. “La Inquisición toledana. Relación contemporánea de los autos y autillos que celebró desde al año1485 hasta el de 1501.” Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia 11 (1987): 289–322. García de Oro, José. Un cardenal reformista en el trono de España (1436–1517). Madrid: La Esfera de los libros, 2005. Giles, Mary E. “Francisca Hernández and the Sexuality of Religious Dissent.” In Women in the Inquisition. Spain and the New World, edited by Mary E. Giles, 75–97. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1999. Giordano, Maria Laura. “Al borde del abismo: ‘falsas santas’ e ‘ilusas’ madrileñas en la vigilia de 1640.” Historia Social 57 (2007): 75–97. ———. Apologetas de la fe. Elites conversas entre Inquisición y Patronazgo en España (sigos XV–XVI). Madrid: FUE, 2004. ———. “Beatas, Spagna.” In Dizionario storico dell’Inquisizione, edited by Adriano Prosperi with Vincenzo Lavenia and John Tedeschi, 1: 161–65. 5 vols. Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, 2010. ———. “ ‘La ciudad de nuestra conciencia.’ Los conversos y la construcción de la identidad judeocristiana (1449–1556).” Hispania Sacra 62, no. 125 (2010): 43–91. ———. “Erasmo in convento: Lo statuto per il beaterio di Nuestra Señora de la Piedad di Brianda de Mendoza (1525–1534).” In L’Europa divisa e i nuovi mondi. Per Adriano Prosperi, ed. Massimo Donattini, Giuseppe Marcocci, and Stefania Pastore, 2: 252–64. Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, 2011. ———. “Nel nome di Paolo: umanesimo biblico e risonanze converse in Isabel de la Cruz e María de Cazalla (1512–1534)”. In Donne e crisi nell’Europa cattolica (secoli XVI–XVII), La Bibbia e le donne, vol 7.2, edited by Maria Laura Giordano and Adriana Valerio, 49–70. Trapani: Pozzo di Giacobbe, 2014. Gunnarsdottir, Ellen. Mexican Karismata. The Baroque Vocation of Francisca de los Ángeles, 1674–1744. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. Haliczer, Stephen, ed. Inquisition and Society in Early Modern Europe. Towson, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1987. Haliczer, Stephen. Between Exaltation and Infamy: Female Mysticism in the Golden Age of Spain. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Huerga, Álvaro. Historia de losAlumbrados (1570–1630). 5 vols. Madrid: FUE, 1978–1994. Iwasaki Cauti, Fernando. “Rosa de Santa María y las alumbradas de Lima.” The Hispanic American Historical Review 73, no. 4 (1993): 581–613. Jaffary, Nora E. False Mystics. Deviant Orthodoxy in Colonial Mexico. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005. Kagan, Richard L. Lucrecia’s Dreams: Politics and Prophecy in Sixteenth-Century Spain. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Kamen, Henry. Spain 1649–1714: A Society of Conflict. London and New York: Longman, 1983.

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Keitt, Andrew. Inventing the Sacred: Imposture, Inquisition and the Boundaries of the Supernatural in Golden Age Spain. Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2005. Koren, Sharon Faye. “A Christian Means to a Conversa End.” Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies and Gender Issues 9 (5765/2005): 27–61. Lehfeldt, Elizabeth. “Discipline, Vocation, and Patronage: Spanish Religious Women in a Tridentine Microclimate.” Sixteenth Century Journal 30, no. 4 (1999): 1009–36. Longhurst, John. “La beata Isabel de la Cruz ante la Inqusición, 1524–1529.” Cuadernos para la Historia de España 25–26 (1957): 279–303. Muñoz Fernández, Ángela. Beatas y santas neocastellanas: ambivalencia de la religión correctoras del poder (ss XIV–XVII). Madrid: Comunidad de Madrid, 1994. ———. “La Nuova Legge come ambito di eguaglianza tra i sessi in Juana de la Cruz (1481–1534).” In Donne e crisi nell’Europa cattolica (secoli XVI–XVII), La Bibbia e le donne, vol. 7.2, edited by Maria Laura Giordano and Adriana Valerio, 83–90. Trapani: Pozzo di Giacobbe, 2014. ———. “Santidad femenina, controversia, judeoconversa y Reforma.” In Modelo sculturales y normas sociales al final de la Edad Media, edited by Patrick Boucheron and Francisco Ruiz Gómez, 387–428. Cuenca: Casa de VelázquezEdiciones de la Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, 2009. Nieto, Jose C. Juan de Valdés and the Origins of the Spanish and Italian Reformation. Geneva: Droz, 1970. Ortega Costa, Milagros. Proceso de la Inquisición contra María de Cazalla. Madrid: FUE, 1978. Palacios Alcalde, María. “Las beatas ante la Inquisición.” Hispania Sacra 40, no. 81 (1988): 107–31. Pastore, Stefania. “Mujeres, lecturas y Alumbradismo radical: Petronila de Lucena y Juan del Castillo.” Historia Social 57 (2007): 51–75. ———. “La svolta antimistica’ di Mercuriano: i retroscena spagnoli.” Dimensioni e problemi della ricerca storica 1 (2005): 81–93. ———. Il Vangelo e la spada. L’Inquisizione di Castiglia e i suoi critici (1460– 1598). Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2003. Perry, Mary Elizabeth. “Beatas and the Inquisition in Seville.” In Inquisition and Society in Early Modern Europe, edited by Stephen Haliczer, 147–68. London: Croom Helm, 1987. ———. Gender and Disorder in Early Modern Seville. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. Pinto Crespo, Virgilio. “La difusión de la literatura espiritual en el Madrid del siglo XVII: Los textos de María Bautista.” Edad de oro 12 (1993): 243–55. Prosperi, Adriano. “L’elemento storico nelle polemiche sulla santità.” In Finzione e santità tra medioevo ed età moderna, edited by Gabriella Zarri, 88–118. Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1991. ———. Tribunali della coscienza. Inquisitori, confessori, missionari. Turin: Einaudi, 1996.

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Ramírez Leiva, Eldemira, ed. María Rita Vargas, María Lucía Celis: beatas embaucadoras de la Colonia. México City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1988. Rubial García, Antonio. “Josefa de San Lluis Beltrán, la cordera de Dios. Escritura, oralidad y gestualidad de una visionaria del siglo XVII novohispano (1654).” In Monjas y beatas. La escritura femenina en la espiritualidad barroca novohispana. Siglos XVII y XVIII, edited by Asunción Lavrin and Rosalva Loreto, 161–204. México City: Archivo General de la Nación Universidad de las Américas, 2002. Sastre Santos, Eutimio. “La condición jurídica de beatas y beaterios. Introducción y textos. 1139–1917.” Anthologica Annua 43 (1996): 287–509. Schutte, Anne Jacobson. “Per speculum in Enigmate: Failed Saints, Artists, and Self Construction of the Female Body.” In Creative Women in Medieval and Early Modern Italy: A Religious and Artistic Renaissance, edited by E. Ann Matter and John Coakley, 185–200. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 1994. Selke, Ángela. El Santo Oficio de la Inquisición. Proceso de Fray Francisco Ortiz (1529–1532). Madrid: Guadarrama, 1968. Surtz, Ron. “María de Ajofrín: The Scourge of Toledo.” In Writing Women in Late Medieval and Early Modern Spain: The Mothers of St. Teresa of Avila, 80–84. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995. Tellechea Idígoras, Juan Ignacio. “Diócesis de Calahorra y Santo Domingo. Las relaciones de visitas ad limina” (1598–1794).”Anthologica Annua 38 (1991): 107–201. Valdés, Juan de. Alfabeto cristiano. Reformistas Antiguos Españoles, Tomo XVI. Barcelona: Librería de Diego de Gómez Flores, 1983. Valls, J. Martínez. “Semblanza biográfica del obispo de Orihuela Don José Esteve Juan (1551–1603), y sus relaciones ad limina.” Anthologica Annua 26–27 (1979–1980): 555–612. Weber, Alison. “Demonizing Ecstasy: Alonso de la Fuente and the Alumbrados of Extremadura.” In The Mystical Gesture. Essays on Medieval and Early Modern Spiritual Culture in Honor of Mary E. Giles, edited by Robert Boening. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000, 141–58. Zarri, Gabriella. “Le sante vive: per una tipología della santità femminile nel primo Cinquecento.” Annali dell’Istituto Storico Italo-Germanico in Trento 6 (1980): 161–99.

5 Ecco la santa! Printed Italian Biographies of Devout Laywomen, Seventeenth-Eighteenth Centuries Anne Jacobson Schutte

Introduction Between the mid-1630s—when Pope Urban VIII and the Congregation of the Holy Office virtually completed their project of promulgating new rules for beatification and canonization—and the late 1790s, Italian publishers issued vernacular lives (vite) of some 900 reputedly holy people, 216 (about a quarter) of them lay and 137 (62 percent) of these female.1 Many of these biographies were designed explicitly to support efforts already under way to produce their subjects’ official recognition by the Congregation of Rites. Others aimed solely or primarily at edifying readers and stimulating emulation of the biographees’ devout lives. The subjects’ origins span the social spectrum: royalty, title-bearing nobility, urban patricians, middling and humble folk in cities and towns, and peasants. A considerable number were affiliated as tertiaries with a mendicant order. Some were virgins, others married women or widows, and a few purportedly both. Almost all those in the first social category, royalty, sooner or later became nuns. This essay concentrates on a sample of five particularly intriguing Italian devout laywomen of social provenances ranging from the nobility to the peasantry: Innocenza Rizzo, Girolama Veramonti, Rosa Maria Martini, Anna Maria Calegari Zucchini, and Francesca del Serrone. With a single exception, these women are completely unknown today,2 but during and shortly after their lifetimes all earned a reputation for holiness, both in their places of birth and further afield. Titles of their biographies suggest that early efforts to promote them via preliminary investigations on the diocesan level (processus super non cultu, processus ordinarius) earned all but one of them the status of “servant of God” (serva di Dio). Since only Giovanni Battista Cancellotti’s life of Francesca del Serrone appeared more than fifty years after the subject’s death (the minimum length of time that had to pass before the Congregation of Rites could begin active consideration of a cause), three other authors’ putting the appellation “venerable” in their titles reflected their personal initiative, not an official appellation conferred in Rome. Attempts to move the candidates to the next level, “blessed,” bore no fruit: none was ever beatified (let alone canonized), nor is any of them now under consideration for belated promotion.3

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These cases do not comprise all varieties of devout laywomen’s lives as found in vite. Exigencies of space preclude consideration of two socioeconomic/ religious categories, elite founders of religious institutions and lay sisters (secondclass servants in convents, far outnumbered by lay brothers).4 Still, these five lives display several significant features of lay female holiness: early commitment to virginity and marriage to God; consequent abhorrence of human marriage, sexual relations, and any sort of other contact with men except spiritual directors, who had to be obeyed in everything; frequent contact with otherworldly beings; and a sense of self as abject, sinful, and deserving of punishment through fasting, sleep deprivation, and corporal punishment with whips, toothed chains, and other instruments of torture. Models and Rules Did biographers of devout laywomen present their lives “as they actually happened”? Of course not. The writers considered here were constrained in several respects. In the first place, unlike the many confessors and spiritual directors who wrote lives of holy penitents, most of them lacked first-hand information about their subjects, with all the advantages and drawbacks—investment in and consequent partiality toward them—that such a relationship entailed. Only Enrico Maria Giuseppe Isolani knew his biographee, Zucchini, whom he did not confess but interviewed at length. Secondly, they were firmly convinced of their subjects’ holiness. From reading previous works in the genre, these authors learned exactly what elements the lives of prospective saints, male and female, must contain: precocious piety, first exhibited in earliest childhood; the subsequent life course; struggles with opponents, ill-disposed family members and others; last illness, death, funeral, and burial; manifold virtues and marvelous accomplishments in life; graces conferred from on high; postmortem prodigies. Earlier writers had presented these topics in various ways, none resembling a strictly chronological narrative. Accounts of last days, obsequies, and entombment, for example, were almost always placed in a section near the end, after discussions of virtues, graces, and prodigies. Unlike the models, the new rules on making saints, issued mainly between 1625 and 1634, were highly prescriptive. Gathered and published in 1642 under the name of Pope Urban VIII (r. 1623–1644), they are commonly but mistakenly attributed solely to him.5 Like many developments in the post-Tridentine era, as recent scholarship has shown, they originated with and were vigorously enforced by the senior and most powerful Roman congregation of cardinals, the Holy Office.6 The first two items in the 1642 collection, decrees promulgated by the Inquisition on March 3 and October 2, 1625,7 concerned the depiction and description of holy people in images and books and around tombs. “Modern” candidates, those deceased within the past century but not yet recognized by the Holy See, must not be shown with signs indicating holiness: “haloes,” “rays,” “clouds of light.”

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Without sanction from the bishop and the pope, they must not be credited with having performed “miracles” or having received “revelations.” Their tombs must not be adorned with inscriptions, paintings, sculptures in wax or silver, and other types of ex votos or illuminated by lamps or candles. Monetary offerings in their honor were to be held in a “secret place” until the Congregation of Rites opened a processus apostolicus. In short, nothing resembling premature cultic veneration was to be permitted.8 Word of these decrees spread rapidly. With the conspicuous exception of Pietro da Palermo, the biographers examined here sedulously avoided mentioning “miracles” and “revelations.” Instead, they employed such alternative nouns as “marvel,” “prodigy,” “grace,” and “favor,” along with associated adjectives and verbs. Whether any readers remained uncertain about what they were referring to seems extremely dubious. Portraits on or near title pages, probably chosen by publishers, depicted no haloes, rays, or clouds of light. Three years later, on January 15, 1628, Urban VIII articulated the fifty-year rule. To prevent immediate bursts of enthusiasm leading to hasty, ill-considered declarations of beatification and canonization, he forbade the Congregation of Rites to open a processus apostolicus until half a century after a candidate had died.9 This rule did not prohibit earlier diocesan proceedings and the publication of biographies. These conserved valuable information from witnesses who would not be alive to testify fifty years later. It did, however, have a negative impact on the number of causes that resulted in declarations of beatification. That none of the five women considered here achieved that status is not surprising. After fifty years, few interested parties—relatives, orders (of which tertiaries without solemn vows were not members), city governments—possessed the memory, enthusiasm, stamina, personnel, and above all money necessary to support the causes of people whom few, if any, had known in the flesh. By no coincidence, therefore, lay people, especially women, were overrepresented among the many whom Miguel Gotor rather tendentiously termed “losers” in the long march toward the honor of the altars.10 Concerned that bishops were not observing the decrees of 1625, and wishing to promote greater cooperation between them, the Inquisition, the Congregation of Rites, and secular rulers, on July 5, 1634, Urban VIII issued the brief Caelestis Hierusalem civis. It specified that except in “ancient” causes (those regarding candidates whose demise predated 1525), an investigation super non cultu to establish that he or she was not being venerated must precede the processus ordinarius and any other action on the diocesan level; that transcripts of the two investigations were to be forwarded to the Congregation of Rites but not opened until the pope gave his approval; and that secular as well as ecclesiastical authorities could inflict corporal and monetary punishments for non-compliance.11 Most important for our purposes is an addition made in the 1642 volume requiring writers of biographies to place, at the beginning and end of their books, statements known as protestations or proteste: affirmations that, since they had no intention of preempting the centuries-old papal prerogative of officially recognizing holiness,

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they did not claim to have written anything “other than human history.” As Gotor has observed, this stipulation forced biographers to become hypocrites. Had they not believed that their subjects’ lives manifested divine intervention, they would never have put pen to paper.12 Did writers of biographies engage in self-censorship in order to comply with the rules? Did those who examined and approved the publication of their books compel them to do so?13 The answer to both questions is probably yes, but only in the case of a handful of biographies that ended up on the Index of Prohibited Books is reconstruction of the latter variety of censorship conceivable. All that can be said for certain is that in these and most other biographies, observance of the stipulation concerning protestationes followed more the spirit than the letter. One writer, Pietro di Palermo, composed his in Latin but did not reproduce the exact wording of the 1642 publication, which was apparently not required. The other four writers presented proteste in Italian—a sensible decision, given that few of their prospective readers knew Latin. Two of the five, Cancellotti and Francesco Tassoni, dutifully put one protesta at the beginning and another at the end of their books.14 The others contented themselves—and evidently the inspectors of their works—with a single one. With biographers’ working parameters in place, we can turn to the five lives. For heuristic purposes, they are presented in descending order of social status. A Noble: Innocenza Rizzo Grimaldi (Trapani, 1599–1624) Born in the city of Trapani in western Sicily on December 16, 1599, baptized Benvenuta Diana, and known in the family by the latter name, this future tertiary was the third-born and middle daughter among Geronimo Rizzo and Erasma Grimaldi’s six children.15 Her father, the baron of Sant’Anna, belonged to a noble lineage founded centuries earlier in Naples, her mother to a venerable noble family of Genoa that had produced several doges.16 Unlike most parents, they welcomed the birth of a second daughter.17 As an infant, Diana availed herself sparingly of her wet nurse’s breasts. In other ways, she showed that she was headed toward holiness. When left alone, she cried until given a rosary and then contentedly sucked the beads one by one. Her siblings played childish games, but she occupied herself with constructing altarini (little altars, devout early modern children’s equivalent of doll houses). At age five, she began fasting on Fridays; soon she added Saturdays and feast days to her regimen of abstinence. When one of the family’s Muslim slaves carried her outside the city walls, they were charged by a bull. The animal retreated as soon as the slave, no doubt prompted by his little mistress, vowed to convert to Christianity—a promise he fulfilled.18 As she grew from childhood into adolescence, Diana went frequently to church with her mother, keeping her eyes modestly lowered. On one occasion, an uncle jokingly told his son to kiss Cousin Dianuccia; she slapped the boy in the face. To the dismay of household servants and slaves, she refused to eat off silver and

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majolica plates. She reprimanded her mother for spending excessive time dressing her hair, wanted her own cut, eschewed jewelry, and declared her intention to marry Christ.19 At age fifteen, Diana announced that she wanted to become a monaca di casa (a tertiary who lived in the parental home). Her parents protested that such a life destination for an elite girl was unheard of in Trapani. “Why,” they asked, “have you chosen that kind of life, full of harshness and poverty?” Why not become a respectable enclosed nun, or at least wait until they died, so that they would not have to suffer disgrace? At the insistence of the Reformed Observant Franciscan Innocenzo da Chiusa, a confrere of her spiritual director and vicar of his order’s new church in Trapani, they quickly capitulated. On December 8, 1620, Fra Innocenzo gave Diana and Caterina, her younger sister, new religious names (Innocenza and Serafina), cut their hair, and vested them in rough wool habits with rope belts. “Practically all the nobility of Trapani” attended the ceremony, and many other noblewomen in the city soon followed their example.20 In the family home, Geronimo Rizzo had an oratory constructed for his daughters: two cell-like rooms, one for prayer and the other in which they could live in isolation from the tumult of a large household. There they devoured spiritual books. While they were doing needlework, for instance, one of them read aloud from a book about virgin martyrs.21 Diana/Innocenza developed such a thirst for martyrdom “that she appeared not to be a maiden but a more than virile man.” Indeed, she told her sisters, “she wished that their sex could be changed, and that she might become Fra Innocenzo and her sister Fra Serafino.” She dreamed of heading off to missionize and court martyrdom among the heathen, a project understandably vetoed by her parents.22 In her mother’s company, she ventured only as far as churches and the local hospital, where they visited and consoled patients.23 A fervent practitioner of corporal penitence (fasting, wearing a hair shirt and toothed chains, frequently engaging in flagellation), she took communion daily and afterwards went into ecstasy for two or three hours.24 In 1659, when Pietro da Palermo’s book appeared, Caterina/Serafina was still alive.25 Innocenza’s life as a Reformed Observant Franciscan tertiary had lasted a week less than four years; she died on December 1, 1624. Before her burial in the order’s church of Sant’Anna, a great concourse of people flocked to view her corpse and snatch “relics.”26 In a brief appendix to his vita of Innocenza, the author treated the eldest of the Rizzo sisters, Isabella. Born in 1595, she was destined by her father to marry a cavalier. Although she had for a short time been a Capuchin tertiary, the prospect of marriage did not displease her. Then God, through Innocenzo da Chiusa and her sisters, knocked on the door of her heart. On April 10, 1621, the friar cut her hair and vested her under the name Anna Maria. Suffering from a high fever precipitated by a malady her biographer did not identify, she died two weeks later. Eventually she was buried in Sant’Anna below the tomb of Innocenza.27 Not surprisingly, the author of Innocenza Rizzo’s biography, Pietro da Palermo (born on an unknown date as Pietro Tognoletto e Ficano; died 1680), was a Reformed Observant Franciscan friar. His main vocation seems to have been

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writing about holy people affiliated with his order, a task to which he brought great enthusiasm. In his preface addressed “to the reader,” he stated that as far as holy people were concerned, “this could be called one of the most favored centuries that has yet come to pass.” He mentioned his biographies of two Sicilian confreres, Benedetto di San Fratello “il Moro” and Innocenzo da Chiusa, issued a few years earlier by the same publisher.28 Pietro da Palermo scrupulously enumerated his sources.29 Above all, he relied on a memoir by Innocenza’s first confessor, Gerolamo da Sutera, which at Innocenzo da Chiusa’s urging had been expanded and published in 1629 by the priest Ludovico Jacobilli.30 Pietro’s own contribution was a detailed account of legal proceedings aimed at securing Innocenza’s beatification: first, the processus ordinarius (1627–1628); then the processus remissoriale, authorized by the Congregation of Rites, in which the candidate’s virtues, actions, and miracles were examined in depth (1631–1632).31 Having examined the records of these proceedings on a visit to Rome, he listed by name every single official involved.32 His account of the exhumation and inspection of the body—a required feature of a processus remissoriale—is the most moving part of this section. On August 18, 1632, in the presence of Innocenza’s parents, brothers, sister, and the officials involved, a mason knocked open her tomb. They found her corpse incorrupt and smelling sweet, a marvel that reduced them all to tears.33 Received by the secretary of the Congregation of Rites in 1632, the processus remissoriale was declared valid on January 15, 1633.34 Well aware that the fifty-year clock had fifteen years yet to run, Pietro da Palermo expressed his hope that Innocenza’s cause would eventually move forward to beatification, an outcome to which his book was obviously designed to contribute.35 It never did. A Patrician: Girolama Veramonti (Ascoli Piceno, 1596–1665) Born in the small city of Ascoli Piceno in the Marche on January 10, 1596, Girolama was the daughter of Giuseppe Veramonti and Giulia Migliani, both members of local elite families. She had one sibling, the older and turbulent Alessandro, to whom their father preferred his devout daughter. From an early age, on weekdays she spent most of her time when not in school praying and playing with her altarino. On Sundays and feast days she accompanied her mother to church in the morning; in the afternoon, after attending Christian Doctrine class, she attracted as many little girls as possible to her home, where they played with the altarino and then went to a nearby church to recite the Rosary and litanies. She begged money from her father to give alms, especially to female prisoners. Before knowing what the words “vow” and “virginity” meant, she solemnly resolved to remain a virgin. Teasingly, her brother accused her of sinning; her father administered a feigned absolution by passing a cross across her lips. All around town, she was known as “Giamma Santa.”36 Girolama’s mother died when the girl was eight years old. Servants mistreated the Veramonti siblings until a maternal aunt, Lucidonia Migliani, stepped in. A local

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Dominican tried to arrange for Girolama to be placed in education in a Venetian convent. Aunt Lucidonia objected that such was not the custom in Ascoli, where adolescent girls were secluded at home until marriage or monachization. When she was fifteen, her father had an opportunity to remarry and decided to find spouses for his two children. For his daughter, he chose a promising young patrician of Ascoli, Venanzio Ferri. Girolama was horrified, but her spiritual director informed her that since her vow of virginity was contingent on her father’s agreement, it was not binding. As the wedding date approached, “certain suppurating boils leaking putrid bubbles of blood appeared around the bride’s lips.” Her prospective motherin-law urged Venanzio to break off the marriage. Nonetheless, it took place two days before the end of Carnival.37 The following day, while participating in the traditional pre-Lenten joust, Venanzio fell from his horse, injuring his knee and giving his mother an excuse for forbidding the couple to have intercourse. Shortly thereafter, he died.38 Everyone in Ascoli, Girolama’s biographer maintained, believed that her marriage had never been consummated. She refused to discuss the issue with her peers, but very likely she opened up to her confessors.39 Moving back to her father’s home, dressed in a self-designed widow’s garb, she investigated the possibility of becoming a nun. When the Discalced Carmelites of Florence and every other religious house she approached refused to admit her,40 she decided to make her own convent in a room on the top floor of her father’s house—freezing in winter, torrid in summer. Seldom did she leave the house; when her stepmother or sister-in-law was about to give birth, she fled to Aunt Lucidonia’s. With a friend, the pious patrician Calidea Iannelli, she made occasional excursions into the countryside to collect thorns, which they placed in their beds to puncture their naked flesh. Other penitential materials she employed included beans in her shoes to render walking painful, a hair shirt, and a whip for flagellation.41 Girolama began to confess to the rector of the Jesuit Collegio di San Venanzio and to teach Christian Doctrine to girls there. At home, her father, stepmother, sister-in-law, and the servants took an increasing dislike to her. Around 1635, she decided to move out and live on her own. A license to do so issued by the Jesuit general in Rome overcame her confessor’s opposition. She was lent a little house into which she moved with nothing other than a printed image before which to pray. She accepted furniture on loan and donations of food. Repeated attempts by her father and brother to overturn this arrangement were foiled by the papal governor of Ascoli. The Jesuits found servants for her: first a little orphan girl, then two bizzoche (tertiaries) from Loreto. They ate like horses, stole, spoke ill of her all around town, and soon departed.42 The Jesuits of Ascoli considered Girolama, who gave them money and altar furnishings, to be their mother as well as their daughter, but the relationship occasionally grew tense. One rector of the Collegio di San Venanzio was on the point of yielding to her father’s demand that she be sent back to the paternal home. In October 1641 she received a letter from a Jesuit in Rome, Torquato Parisiani,

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encouraging her not to succumb to melancholy. Assuming that his confreres in Ascoli had prompted this gratuitous advice, she took offense and elected an Oratorian priest as her confessor. Before long, the trouble blew over, and she resumed confessing to Jesuits.43 Having predicted the day and hour of her death, Girolama returned her household furnishings to those who had lent them. When people attempted to visit her, Cardinal Bishop Giulio Gabrielli limited access to physicians, relatives, and only four others at a time. On her demise in May 1665, a concourse of potential relic-snatchers was held at bay by forty soldiers assigned by the governor as her body was carried to San Venanzio. All the members of the military escort hoped for as compensation was “a bit of relic.”44 The next day she was buried in San Venanzio with only Jesuits in attendance. One of them, who had confessed her for nine years, composed but did not publish the first biography of Girolama. A processus ordinarius, about which Tassoni provided no details except the names of a few witnesses, was held. One day, the author hoped, additional witnesses— including missionaries now in the East Indies and other “pupils” of Girolama— would be heard from.45 The biography ends with a third book entitled “Some marvelous things.”46 Francesco Tassoni (Fermo, 1629–Rome, 1688) had no known direct connection with Ascoli Piceno and Girolama Veramonti. Apparently he spent most of his career in Rome, ending his life as confessor at the Jesuit Seminario Romano. He published nothing else.47 When and from whom he received her longtime confessor’s manuscript, which he used in composing his biography, he did not explain. A Middle-Class Young Woman: Rosa Maria Martini (Florence, 1746–1769) One of several children of Santi Martini and Maria Anna Ricci, a couple of slender means but “singular probity,” Rosa Maria was born on June 6, 1746, in the Florentine parish of Santa Felicita, on the south side of the Arno just beyond the Ponte Vecchio. Her biographer did not specify her father’s occupation, but the fact that her parents managed to send her and her eldest brother, Antonio, to school probably indicates that the family can be situated somewhere in the middling sector of Florentine society. By age five, she was already exhibiting “a modest maturity”: innate love of purity, disinclination for dealing with men, and avoidance of children’s games. Having been taught by her parents to read, she spent most of her time perusing spiritual books and saints’ lives and helping her younger siblings to achieve literacy. Every Sunday and feast day she heard Mass in the morning and attended Christian Doctrine classes in the afternoon. Her teachers considered Rosa Maria their best pupil.48 Santi and Maria Anna decided to further Rosa Maria’s education by sending her to school, where she could learn “what was best suited to her status and their needs.”49 She was taught plain sewing, embroidery, and working with fine linen—skills with which she could help fill

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the family’s coffers—and instructed further in piety. Her teachers found in her “a marvelous seriousness, not austere and harsh, coupled with a placid joviality, showing herself always cheerful.”50 Rosa Maria was admitted to Communion at age ten. Her directors would have been willing to administer it daily, but she considered herself unworthy of such a privilege. In her mid-teens, afraid that she had concealed grave sins in confession, she entered a period of spiritual aridity lasting more than a year. Unsuccessfully, her family tried to diagnose the problem and divert her. One day with a sister, she went to the church of San Jacopo sopr’Arno, staffed by the Fathers of the Mission (Vincentians), and asked to make a general confession. Surmising that the devil would impede her from doing so, a confessor told her to return later. Trying vainly to prepare for recounting her whole life, she found herself capable only of an ordinary confession. The expert confessor managed to lift her spiritual fog and persuade her to give up such small vanities as pretty clothes and a fashionable hairdo. So that she could better regulate her day, he gave her a book by Father Barry: La solitudine di Filagia, originally intended for nuns.51 After her father died of a stroke in 1763, Rosa Maria worked even harder to support her family without giving up a spiritual life that involved harsh penitence. Illness, probably tuberculosis, set in; physicians frequently sent her to live with a peasant family in the country, where the air was better. Early in 1769, she entered the final stage of her life. On her last visit to San Jacopo sopr’Arno, she could not stand and was barely able to kneel. In mid-January she had to take to her bed. She died on January 21 and was buried in her parish church, Santa Felicita.52 Rosa Maria’s many devotees commissioned an engraver to copy her portrait, promptly reproduced and marketed by the Florentine printer and vendor Giovacchino Capraro. Copies sold throughout the city to customers of all ranks, including nuns, “fostered a cult not permitted by the Church for uncanonized people.” The single-sheet imprint made its way far beyond Florence; graces attributed to her posthumous intercession were reported from numerous cities. Exactly how and when the cult was suppressed—necessary before the archbishop of Florence could open a processus super non cultu, which the title of the book indicates that he did—the author did not say.53 The identity of the anonymous “priest of Reggio in Lombardia” who wrote Rosa Maria Martini’s biography was securely established long ago: Vincenzo Cattelani (Reggio Emilia, 1742–1804), an Oratorian priest whose main literary occupation was writing poetry.54 On a visit to Florence, Cattelani stated, he was urged by many people devoted to Rosa Maria to compose her biography, particularly for the benefit of girls living in the world. For those frightened by the lives of austerely penitent saints, he wrote, this book would be an encouragement rather than a disincentive to imitate its subject. “In her there isn’t a gloomy apparatus of clamorous macerations [of the flesh] and long, rigorous fasts, or anything else to frighten even the most timid and cowardly spirits.”55

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From Peasant to Proletarian: Anna Maria Calegari Zucchini (Bologna, 1643–1741) The eldest child of Luigi Calegari and Costanza Negri, peasants on the estate of the counts Calderini, Anna Maria was born on July 22, 1643, in the hamlet of San Girolamo dell’Archoveggio, just outside Bologna. The family was so povertystricken that their landlords had to provide seeds and dispense them from the traditional tribute of grapes and chickens. During the famine of 1648, their diet consisted solely of unsalted raw roots. Despite Anna Maria’s abject circumstances, God wanted her to be an example of perfection. When she was five, the parish priest of Santa Maria Maddalena in Strada San Donato, Luca Gardini, recognized her spiritual gifts. He, along with others, would serve as her confessor for thirty years.56 Early in life, Anna Maria began to weave silk veils to support her parents and their seven younger offspring.57 On the death of both parents, she assumed charge of her surviving siblings. In 1657 she moved inside the city limits of Bologna. At age fourteen she began to attend the Jesuit church of Santa Lucia, where Luigi Carnoli became her spiritual director. When she expressed the desire to dedicate her virginity to Christ, Carnoli told her that God had other plans: she must marry.58 So she did at age thirty-one to Bartolomeo Zucchini, a “coarse, eccentric” weaver of table linens. He occasionally drank to excess and beat her.59 Of their seven offspring, four died before age seven. Anna Maria, who continued to weave veils at home, was a good housekeeper and attentive mother to her remaining three children. When she caught her daughter Flavia staring at people on the street, she pulled her into a church and prayed that she fall ill and have to stay in bed; the girl immediately sickened and died three years later. Without warning, Carlo, who had become a carpenter at age twelve, suddenly left home. Hearing that he was in Rome, his parents sent their only other surviving son, Bernardino, to look for him. It was too late: he found his brother dead in the hospital of Santo Spirito. Beginning at age nine, Bernardino wove veils, then worked as a carpenter, and finally ended up in his father’s occupation. He wished to marry a woman of whom Bartolomeo did not approve. Father and son fought but eventually reconciled, and the two families lived in the same house.60 From dawn to dusk, according to Bernardino, Anna Maria instructed her children in Christian principles. She had them read aloud from “devout books.”61 Although completely illiterate, she noticed when they made mistakes and compelled them to start over again from the beginning. Outside the home, Anna Maria Zucchini worked assiduously to convert people, particularly young girls, to the devout Christian life. Confessors recommended her as a mentor, and she attracted many disciples, whom she counseled and consoled about all sorts of problems. She gave lectures in her own home and those of others (including patricians), as well as in convents. When she reprimanded a noblewoman for treating her servants harshly, the object of her criticism reformed her behavior.62

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At age ninety-six, Zucchini fell ill and was taken to the hospital of Santa Maria Maddalena, where she patiently spent the last two years of her life, receiving many visitors. Her husband died in the same hospital ten months before she expired on August 31, 1741. Dressed in a Discalced Carmelite habit, her body was taken to the Oratorian Church of Santa Maria di Galliera, accompanied by great crowds. Relic-seekers managed to snatch pieces of her habit, scapular, finger- and toenails, and hair. She was buried in a common tomb.63 Zucchini’s biographer, the patrician Ercole Maria Giuseppe Isolani, was born in Bologna in 1686. After studying in Rome and Turin, he returned to his native city, where in 1705 he became an Oratorian priest. After he died of a stroke in 1756, his confreres undertook to secure his beatification, which never occurred.64 Isolani’s main source of information about Zucchini was a series of interviews he conducted with her and recorded in a manuscript referred to in the biography as the Collocazione.65 With permission from the archbishop of Bologna’s vicar general, he also obtained transcripts of several notarized depositions attesting to her holiness.66 A Peasant: Francesca del Serrone (near San Severino, 1557–1601) Francesca del Serrone was the sole holy woman considered in this essay to attract two biographers.67 The third child of a peasant couple, Ciccone “del triglio” and Menica Bocccaccio, she was born in Serrone, a village near the town of San Severino (now San Severino Marche, province of Macerata), on July 22, 1557.68 Surprised by labor pains, her mother gave birth on a stairway leading to the family’s stall. Three days after she was baptized as Maddalena, her name was changed to Francesca in honor of her recently deceased paternal grandmother. When her mother’s milk dried up and money was lacking to hire a wet nurse, a lactating neighbor stepped in to feed her.69 Francesca displayed early signs of holiness: disdaining vanities, praying and attending church often, and—in imitation of her sister and Saint Catherine of Siena—fasting and giving alms. Her father’s early demise was followed by the death of her mother (by implication, a suicide) when she was nine. Hostile relatives and neighbors refused to lend a hand, leaving her with only one protector: Ulisse d’Aleutio, her spiritual director. He took her several times to Macerata and then to Loreto to consult his mentor, the Jesuit Clemente Fantozzi, who advised her to meditate on the Passion. For several years she shuttled between the homes of relatives in nearby villages: her brother and sister, Antonio and Ottavia, both older than she, and a maternal uncle, Sabbatino Boccaccio. Antonio treated her badly, depriving her of food and bedding, beating her, and knocking her teeth out. At Ottavia’s house, a theft by a neighbor was blamed on her, causing her brotherin-law to expel her. A similar theft of bread from her uncle’s house, also attributed to Francesca, led her to take refuge again with her brother in Serrone. Every so often, visits from the Virgin Mary consoled her.70

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Throughout her life, Francesca was plagued by disability and illness. From the beginning, she spoke slowly with a stutter.71 In her teenage years, a swollen belly led malicious people, especially an aunt but not her brother, to accuse her of having become pregnant through selling her body.72 She ran a slow fever and her fingers fused like goose feet, ailments eventually cured by God. A wound on her breast bled copiously when she meditated on Christ’s Passion. The devil frequently assaulted her.73 At age seventeen, Francesca began to frequent San Severino in order to visit the numerous bodies of saints in churches there. She chose a confessor in town, the Oratorian priest Bartolomeo Achillei, and followed all his advice. Even in foul weather, she never missed communion: “[W]ith the speed of a dove, she ran hungrily toward the odor of the bread of life dispensed to the faithful at the holy altar.”74 Her reputation for holiness spread in and beyond San Severino. Among the many favors bestowed on her by the Virgin was the ability to embroider, but the most important was literacy: reading, the rules of grammar, and writing, knowledge of which she passed on to other women. Out of modesty, she attributed her writings to a Capuchin.75 Francesca made many pilgrimages to the Holy House at Loreto, as well as visiting Assisi and Cingoli, where she formed a close friendship with the Franciscan Third Order Regular nuns of Santo Spirito. On a trip with her uncle Santi and other sanseverinati to Rome for the 1575 Jubilee, she talked with and confessed to Filippo Neri, founder of the Congregation of the Oratory. At first, he dismissed her as a “vagabond and hypocrite.” When she expressed her ambition to don the habit of a Franciscan tertiary, he ridiculed her: “What habit are you dreaming about, when you’re worthy only of guarding and herding sheep?” Her calm reaction convinced him of her good faith. Before heading home, she kissed the feet of Pope Gregory XIII.76 Having long wanted to become an enclosed nun, Francesca achieved the next best thing available to her: on February 22, 1579, she vested as a Franciscan tertiary.77 She continued to live in relatives’ homes. After recounting a long series of “marvelous” occurrences in her lifetime,78 Cancellotti briefly described her death on April 7, 1601, at age forty-three, which she had foreseen. It took place at her niece’s house in a village near San Severino; from there, her body was carried to the Church of San Paolo, just outside the town. A huge crowd of people attempted to snatch relics until the corpse was removed to the locked sacristy. She was buried in the new Oratorian Church of the Madonna dei Lumi.79 In short order, the Oratorians undertook to get Francesca beatified. In 1607 the new parish priest of Serrone (nephew of her three successive Oratorian confessors) received permission from the bishop to interrogate witnesses. In 1623 her tomb was opened for inspection of the body. Investigations conducted in San Severino and Cingoli between 1625 and 1629 were forwarded to the Congregation of Rites.80 Let us hope, wrote Cancellotti, that Francesca’s cause eventually goes forward.81 It did not.

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Giulio Scampoli (1616–1688) the first biographer of Francesca del Serrone, was born into a noble family of San Severino. At age fifteen he professed as a Clerk Regular of Saint Paul (Barnabite). After studying in Rome, he spent most of his life teaching rhetoric in schools run by his order in central Italy.82 As noted earlier, his work seems less trustworthy than his successor’s. His style epitomizes the most pretentious, overblown sort of Baroque prose. He provides no indication of what sources of information he used. Dedicated to Cardinal Bishop Girolamo Verospi of Osimo, a devotee of Francesca, the book also contains a dedication by Scampoli’s cousin Ottavio Divini to the consuls and priors of San Severino, whom he urged to finance the resumption of her cause in Rome.83 Francesca’s second biographer, the Jesuit Giovanni Battista Cancellotti (San Severino, 1598–Rome, 1670), spent most of his life in the Eternal City. A renowned professor of eloquence at the Collegio Romano for twelve years, he served as confessor to Cardinal Fabio Chigi before and after the latter’s ascent to the papal throne as Alexander VII (r. 1655–1667); he dedicated this book, commissioned by the people of San Severino, to Papa Chigi.84 Among the few other published works bearing Cancellotti’s name are the never-completed Annales Mariani, also dedicated to Chigi.85 Only three years old when his fellow sanseverinata Francesca died, he could not have known her. In his preface and conclusion, Cancellotti was very precise about his sources: the processus ordinarius celebrated in San Severino in 1625; several previous works, printed and in manuscript; and a manuscript in the Biblioteca Vallicelliana.86 Suggestions for Further Research Devout laywomen in early modern Italy, like their counterparts in other regions, came from a wide variety of socioeconomic backgrounds and familial circumstances. Drawing firm conclusions from such a small sample would be hazardous. Nonetheless, this essay suggests some hypotheses worth testing. In contrast to previous assumptions, not all, perhaps not even most, of the biographers had served as their subjects’ confessors or spiritual directors. Operating at some distance in time, place, and religious affiliation, they did not enjoy first-hand knowledge of—or suffer from direct investment in—the people about whom they wrote. Prominent among these outsiders were members of orders and congregations founded in the Counter-Reformation era, Jesuit and Oratorian priests, whose activity in composing vite may have stemmed more often from assignments made by their superiors than from the exercise of individual preferences. This possibility deserves further investigation. So, too, as already suggested, does the enforcement of rules regarding publications about candidates for beatification. A third topic that merits additional systematic attention is the reactions of the holy women’s contemporaries, both during their lifetimes and after their deaths. It appears that thaumaturgic powers topped the list of services they provided. How important were their predictive powers—and, even more significant in regard to the issue of women’s roles, their functioning as counselors, teachers, and even preachers? In short, the agenda for comparative examination of devout laywomen is wide open.

Figure 5.1 [Vincenzo Cattelani, C.O.] Vita della Serva di Dio Rosa Maria Martini fanciulla secolare fiorentina composta da un sacerdote di Reggio di Lombardia. Florence: Domenico Marzi, 1773. Engraving by Gaspero Pecchioni. Rare Book Collections, Georgetown University Library, Booth Family Center for Special Collections, Washington, DC.

Figure 5.2 Ercole Maria Giuseppe Isolani, C.O. Vita di Anna Maria Calegari Zucchini Bolognese detta volgarmente Madonna Anna Zucchini. Bologna: Stamperia di S. Tommaso d’Aquino, 1743. Engraving by Giovanni Fabbri. Rare Book Collections, Georgetown University Library, Booth Family Center for Special Collections, Washington, DC.

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Notes  1. This approximate figure derives from inspection of the website http://www.sbn.it/ opacsbn/opac/iccu/antico.jsp (through 1830), abbreviated hereafter as ICCU, which I have consulted frequently over the past several years. This invaluable online catalog of books includes the holdings of practically all Italian libraries, secular and religious, large and small. Copyrighted in 2010, it continues to be updated. I have also examined the online catalogs of the Biblioteca Ambrosiana and the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, which evidently chose not to participate in ICCU. In citing seventeenth- and eighteenth-century titles and quoting passages I have retained the original spelling, with the exception of substituting i for j and modernizing the use of u and v.  2. Francesca del Serrone, the last woman discussed here, constitutes the exception. A Google search of “Francesca Serrone Val Gardena” once brought up a commercial website offering opportunities to purchase costly hand-carved wood statues of her in three different finishes and ten sizes.  3. Simona Durante of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints kindly informed me that no dossiers on these five women are in that body’s archive. Personal communication, June 12, 2013. There are, however, a few in the fondo Riti, Processi of the Archivio Segreto Vaticano (see nn. 31, 80).  4. On the former group, see Anne Jacobson Schutte, “Elite Matrons as Founders of Religious Institutions: Ludovica Torelli and Eleonora Ramirez Montalvo,” in Patronage, Gender & the Arts in Early Modern Italy: Essays in Honor of Carolyn Valone, eds Katherine McIver and Cynthia Stollhanz (New York: Italica Press, 2015), 103–25.  5. Urban VIII, Decreta servanda in canonizatione et beatificatione sanctorum (1642). The lengthy titles of and full publication details about pre-modern books mentioned in the essay may be found at the end of the list of works cited.  6. Miguel Gotor, I beati del papa: Santità, Inquisizione e obbedienza in età moderna (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2002), esp. 285–334.  7. The latter was a Thursday, the day on which the pope presided over regular meetings of the Holy Office.  8. “cum laureolis, aut radiis, seu splendoribus . . . Tabellae, Imagines & res alia . . . & lampades, & alia lumina . . . miracula, vel revelationes . . . in secreto . . .” Urban VIII, Decreta, 2–6; Gotor, I beati del papa, 285–96. For “ancient” candidates, on the contrary, evidence of a preexisting cult was required.  9. Gotor, I beati del papa, 325. 10. “perdenti.” Ibid., 114–26, 388. Obviously it was not the deceased candidates but their supporters who “lost.” 11. Urban VIII, Decreta, 7–16; Gotor, I beati del papa, 308–19. 12. “non aliter, quam humanam historiam.” Urban VIII, Decreta, 18–20, quotation at 19; Gotor, I beati del papa, 325. 13. Who these inspectors were depended on the religious affiliation of the author and the place of publication—a subject for another study. 14. Tassoni, Vita della venerabile serva di Dio Girolama Veramonti d’Ascoli, §§4v, 245–46; Giovanni Battista Cancellotti, S.J., Vita della venerabile serva di Dio Francesca dal Serrone di San Severino, Tertiaria of S. Francesco, n. p. at beginning, 203. 15. Pietro da Palermo, Vita della venerabile . . ., 1–4. (Prefatory material and the text are numbered separately. Unless otherwise indicated, subsequent citations refer to the body of the text.) The first name Benvenuta, omitted in this account, is supplied by Mario Serraino,

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Trapani invitissima e fedelissima (Trapani: Corrao, 1985), 57. The population of Trapani in the sixteenth century was around 16,000. Serraino, Trapani invitissima e fedelissima, 47. 16. Serraino, Trapani invitissima e fedelissima, 41; Pietro da Palermo, Vita della venerabile, 1. 17. Ibid., 3. The author evidently considered it unnecessary to explain why most parents in the middle and upper classes experienced “poca allegrezza” (little joy) at the birth of a daughter: provided that she survived into adolescence, they would have to amass a marital or spiritual dowry for her. 18. Ibid., 1–9. See also 58: conversion of the Rizzo family’s slave, Braij, who also took the baptismal name Giovanni (perhaps a repetition of the same story) and a slave belonging to a neighboring family. 19. Ibid., 9–13. 20. “Perché hai ti si eletta una vita si fatta? Piena d’asprezze e povertà.” “quasi tutta la nobiltà di Trapani.” Ibid., 9–30; qtd. at 26, 29. 21. Ibid., 151. Undoubtedly this was the anonymous Leggendario delle santissime vergini, which, after circulating in manuscript in the fifteenth century, was published innumerable times until at least 1796. 22. “che non pareva donzella, ma un huomo più che virile . . . che desiderava esserle mutata il sesso, e che essa divenisse Fra Innocenzo, e la sorella Fra Serafino.” Pietro da Palermo, Vita della venerabile, 53–55; quotation at 54. Serafino da Francofonte, a Reformed Observant Franciscan lay brother renowned for his holiness, died in Messina in 1616. Pietro da Palermo’s biography of him came out in the same year as Innocenza’s (Palermo: Giuseppe Bisagni, 1659). 23. Pietro da Palermo, Vita della venerabile, 55–60. 24. Ibid., 37–52. 25. Ibid., 36. So was their brother Placido, Pietro da Palermo’s “patron” and probable commissioner of the book, which the author dedicated to him. Ibid., dedication, 3–6. 26. Ibid., 74–83. 27. Ibid., 151–62. Few early modern authors without medical training recognized that “fever” is a symptom of disease, not a cause of death. 28. “questo può dirsi essere uno de’ più favoriti secoli di quanto sin hora ne siano scorsi.” Ibid., Al lettore, 7–10, qtd. at 7. His two previous biographies, both published by Pietro dall’Isola, appeared in 1652 (Benedetto) and 1655 (Innocenzo); the latter book was reissued in 1677 (Palermo: Domenico d’Anselmo). Google yields scant information about his biography of a jurist of Noto, a servo di Dio named Geronimo Iuglia or Iueglio (Palermo: Domenico d’Anselmo, 1671; Naples: Michele Monaco, 1693); no copy of either edition seems to have survived. He spent the last years of his life compiling a massive chronicle of the Reformed Observant Franciscans in Sicily: Paradiso serafico del fertilissimo Regno di Sicilia, 2 vols (Palermo: Domenico d’Anselmo, 1667–87). 29. Pietro da Palermo, Vita della venerabile, 130–48. 30. Ludovico Jacobilli (Rome, 1598–Foligno, 1664), Vita . . . Innocenza Ricci. Gerolamo da Sutera died in Rome in 1627 as penitentiary at San Giovanni in Laterano. Jacobilli may have met him and/or Innocenzo da Chiusa there before moving to Foligno. 31. The transcript of the second processus may be found in the Archivio Segreto Vaticano, Congregazione dei Riti, Processi, 3288–89. 32. Pietro da Palermo, 117–21, 129. 33. Ibid., 122–24. 34. Ibid., 125–29.

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35. Ibid., 129. 36. Francesco Tassoni, Vita . . . Girolama Veramonti, 3–13. I have found no population figures for Ascoli Piceno in Girolama’s lifetime. That in the seventeenth century it may have been about the same size as Innocenza Ricci’s Trapani and Francesca del Serrone’s San Severino seems a reasonable surmise. 37. “intorno alle labra della Sposa comparissero certe macchie spruzzante di stomacoso subbolimento di sangue.” Ibid., 26. Although Tassoni did not explicitly say so, Venanzio’s mother must have jumped to the conclusion that the pustules indicated venereal disease. It is much more likely that they were a psychosomatic manifestation of her aversion to marriage. 38. Ibid., 13–33. 39. Ibid., 25, 30. 40. Strict congregations of nuns in Italy rarely accepted applications from widows, excepting members of royalty, whom they could not refuse. Faced with this bar, some elite widows founded their own convents. See, for instance, Angelo Arcangeli, Vita . . . Brigida di Gesù. . . . 41. Tassoni, Vita . . . Girolama Veramonti, 33–40. 42. Ibid., 40–78. 43. Ibid., 86–102. How she acquired the money to make charitable gifts her biographer does not explain. 44. Ibid., 197. 45. “un po’ di reliquia.” Ibid., 187–211, qtd. at 197. In the margin opposite the remark about the first biographer (203) are several names, but no indication which of them was the author. 46. Alcune cose maravigliose. Ibid., 212–44. 47. Carlos Sommervogel, S.J., Bibliothèque de la Compagnie de Jésus, 11 vols (Brussels: Polleunis et Centerick par la Province de Belgique, and Paris: Oscar Schepens– Alphonse Picard, 1890–1932), 7: col. 1091. 48. “singolar probità,” “una modest maturità.” Vincenzo Cattelani, Vita . . . Rosa Maria Martini, 1–20, qtd. at 1, 3. The parish of Santa Felicita was controlled by Benedictine nuns in the adjacent convent. 49. “quanto era più confacente al di Lei stato, ed a’ loro bisogni.” That her instructors were termed maestre (mistresses) rather than suore or monache (sisters, nuns) makes clear that this was a lay day school. Ibid., 21–22, qtd. at 22. Antonio, who studied with the Oratorians at San Firenze, died at age eighteen. Ibid., 20. 50. “una serietà maravigliosa, che niente però sapeva di austero, ed aspro, congiunta con una placida giovialità, per cui sempre vedesavi allegra.” Ibid, 21–33, qtd. at 23. 51. Ibid., 40–57. The first edition of this book by the Jesuit Paul de Barry (1587– 1661) had come out in French more than a century earlier (Lyon: Philippe Borde, 1641). Sommervogel, 1: col. 948. ICCU lists eighteen editions of the Italian translation by an unnamed Jesuit (Matteo Gherardelli) published between 1659 and 1735. 52. Cattelani, Vita . . . Rosa Maria Martini, 63–100, 210–29. 53. “eccedendo anche in un culto non permesso dalla Chiesa alle persone non canonizzate.” Ibid., xi, 225–29, qtd. at 227. 54. Luigi Cerretti, Notizie bibiliografiche e letterarie (Reggio Emilia: Torreggiani, 1833), 129–153, 476. 55. “non vi in essa tetro apparato di strepitose macerazione, di rigorosi, e lunghi digiuni, né altra cosa capace a ritirare anche leggermente li spiriti più timidi, e pusillanimi.” [Cattelani], xi–xiii. In almost the only reader’s note I have encountered in a biography,

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Francesco Gori of Siena wrote that he used it while doing the Spiritual Exercises in 1840 and 1841. ICCU, record of copy held in Biblioteca diocesana Alessandro VII, Monteriggioni (province of Siena), which I have not inspected. 56. Ercole Maria Giuseppe Isolani, Vita . . . Anna Maria Calegari Zucchini, 1–5. 57. Many lower-class women wove silk veils and ribbons on hand looms in their homes. Since they did not belong to guilds and were not incorporated into the proto-factory system, their activities are difficult to trace. 58. Isolani, Vita . . . Anna Maria Calegari Zucchini, 5–8. 59. “rozzo, “bizarro.” Ibid., 8, 12–15, qtd. at 12. 60. Ibid., 8–21. 61. “libri devoti.” Ibid., 19. 62. Ibid., 21–39. 63. Ibid., 162–85. 64. Carlo Barbieri, Memorie . . . Ercole Maria Giuseppe Isolani; Giovanni Fantuzzi, Notizie degli scrittori bolognesi, 9 vols. (Bologna: Stamparia di S. Tommaso d’Aquino, 1781–1794), 4: 368–71; “Isolani (Ercole Maria Giuseppe),” in Nuovo dizzionario, 9: 84. 65. Isolani, Vita . . . Anna Maria Calegari Zucchini, 1–5. Gabriella Zarri kindly informed me that no manuscript of the Collocazione survives in Bolognese libraries. According to Fantuzzi (370), Isolani spent more than 100 scudi on producing Zucchini’s biography. 66. Isolani, Vita . . . Anna Maria Calegari Zucchini, v–ix. 67. Virgilio Scalompi [pseudonym for Giulio Scampoli], Vita . . . Francesca del Serrone; Giovanni Battista Cancellotti, Vita . . . Francesca del Serrone. For the most part, I follow Cancellotti because his work appears to be more reliable than Scampoli’s. 68. A century later, the population of San Severino and its subject hinterland was around 15,000. Raoul Paciaroni, San Severino nelle pagine dei suoi scrittori (San Severino Marche: Città di San Severino Marche, 1995), 39. 69. Cancellotti, Vita . . . Francesca del Serrone, 3–5. I have not been able to determine whether “del triglio” was a place name, an occupational title, a nickname, or a surname. The detail about the neighbor’s nursing her comes from Scampoli, Vita . . . Francesca del Serrone, 4–5. 70. Cancellotti, Vita . . . Francesca del Serrone, 6–19. 71. Ibid., 201. 72. From her teens until the end of her life, the same malady, eliciting the same accusations of loose morals, afflicted Maria da Città di Castello (Cerbara, Città di Castello, 1594–Perugia, 1651). Jacopo Oddi, Breve racconto . . . Maria da Città di Castello, 34–40. The author attributed her false pregnancy to hydropsy (edema). 73. Cancellotti, Vita . . . Francesca del Serrone, 19–35. 74. “con velocità di colomba correva famelica al solo odore del pane di vita eterna dispensata a Fideli nel sacro Altare.” Ibid., 36–50, qtd. at 47. Scampoli, Vita . . . Francesca del Serrone, 38, gave the age at which she began to spend much of her time in San Severino. 75. Cancellotti, Vita . . . Francesca del Serrone, 46–61. 76. “vagabonda, & hipocrita.” “Che habito vai tu sognando, mentre meriti d’esser fatto custode, e condottiera di pecore?” Ibid., 75, 84–113, qtd. at 103–7. Filippo Neri’s celebrated mildness and joviality did not extend to people in the lower social orders. 77. Cancellotti, Vita . . . Francesca del Serrone, 116–21. Scampoli, who put her vestition two years earlier, specified that a relative and members of the female Compagnia del Cordone (the rope belt of Saint Francis) in San Severino helped her buy fabric for a

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habit. Scampoli, Vita . . . Francesca del Serrone, 66–69. No doubt she was well aware, as was Maria da Città di Castello a generation before, that “among peasants, few virgins find it possible to become nuns” (fra Contadini a poche zitelle succede il potersi monacare.). Oddi, 18. 78. Cancellotti, Vita . . . Francesca del Serrone, 129–77. 79. Ibid., 178–85. 80. A transcript of the two-city processus remissoriale may be found in Archivio Segreto Vaticano, Congregazione dei Riti, Processi, 2869–73. 81. Cancellotti, Vita . . . Francesca del Serrone, 197–99. 82. Scampoli frequently published under a pseudonym. On the title page of this book, he called himself Vincenzo (his birth name) Scalompi (an anagram of his surname). Paciaroni, San Severino nelle pagine dei suoi scrittori, 35–39. 83. Scampoli, Vita . . . Francesca del Serrone, unnumbered pages at beginning of book. 84. Cancellotti, Vita . . . Francesca del Serrone, title page, †2r–v. 85. Sosio Pezzella, “Cancellotti, Giovanni Battista,” in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani (Rome: Istituto della Encyclopedia Italiana, 1960–), 17 (1974): 744–45. 86. Cancellotti, Vita . . . Francesca del Serrone, 197–99, 201–3.

Works Cited Pre-1800 Works Arcangeli. Arcangelo, S.J. Vita della madre Brigida di Gesù fondatrice del Collegio di S. Orsola in Piacenza. Rome: De’ Rossi, 1759. Barbieri, Carlo, C. Or. Memorie della vita e virtù del servo di Dio Ercole Maria Giuseppe Isolani prete della Congregazione dell’Oratorio. Venice: Simone Occhi, 1761. Cancellotti, Giovanni Battista, S.J. Vita della venerabile serva di Dio Francesca dal Serrone di San Severino, Tertiaria of S. Francesco. Rome: Varese, 1665. Cattelani, Vincenzo, C. Or. Vita della Serva di Dio Rosa Maria Martini fanciulla secolare fiorentina composta da un sacerdote di Reggio di Lombardia. Florence: Domenico Marzi, 1773. Fantuzzi, Giovanni. Notizie degli scrittori bolognesi. 9 vols. Bologna: Stamparia di S. Tommaso d’Aquino, 1781–1794. Isolani, Ercole Maria Giuseppe, C. Or. Vita di Anna Maria Calegari Zucchini bolognese detta volgarmente Madonna Anna Zucchini, libri quattro. Bologna: Stamparia di S. Tommaso d’Aquino, 1743. Jacobilli, Ludovico. Vita della serva di Dio, suora Innocenza Ricci da Trapani, descritta dal p. f. Girolamo da Sutera minore osservante. Foligno: Agostino Alterij, 1629. Nuovo dizzionario ovvero storia in compendio . . . composto di una società di letterati in Francia . . . [Translation of Louis-Mayeul Chaudon, O.S.B., Nouvelle dictionnaire, 7th French edition, 1789]. 22 vols. Bassano del Grappa: Remondini, 1796.

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Oddi, Jacopo, O.S.A. Breve racconto d’alcune cose più principali, che sono venute a notitia della vita di suor Maria da Città di Castello Tertiaria dell’Ordine de Servi. Perugia: Giovanni Lorenzi, 1669. Pietro da Palermo, O.M. Obs. Ref. Vita della venerabile serva di Dio suor Innocenza Rizza, e Grimaldi da Trapani vergine Tertiaria de’ Min. Oss. Riformati con un Compendio della vita di suor Anna Maria Sua sorella vergine Tertiaria dell’istesso ordine. Nuovamente raccolte. Palermo: Pietro dell’Isola, 1659. Scalompi, Virgilio [Giulio Scampoli], C.R.B. Vita della venerabile suor Francesca del Serrone del territorio di S. Severino tertiaria di San Francesco. Macerata: Agostino Grisei, 1649. Tassoni, Francesco, S.J. Vita della venerabile serva di Dio Girolama Veramonti d’Ascoli. Rome: Ignazio Lazzari, 1679. Urban VIII Pont. O. M. Decreta servanda in canonizatione et beatificatione sanctorum. Accedunt instructiones et declarationes quas E.mi et R.mi S.R.E. Cardinales praesulesque Romanae Curiae ad id muneris congregate ex eiusdem Summi Pontificis mandato condiderunt. Rome: Reverenda Camera Apostolica, 1642. Post-1800 Works Cerretti, Luigi. Notizie bibiliografiche e letterarie. Reggio Emilia: Torreggiani, 1833. Gotor, Miguel. I beati del papa: Santità, Inquisizione e obbedienza in età moderna. Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2002. Paciaroni, Raoul. San Severino nelle pagine dei suoi scrittori. San Severino Marche: Città di San Severino Marche, 1995. Pezzella, Sosio. “Cancellotti, Giovanni Battista.” In Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, 17: 744–45. Rome: Istituto della Encyclopedia Italiana, 1960– (1974). Schutte, Anne Jacobson. “Elite Matrons as Founders of Religious Institutions: Ludovica Torelli and Eleonora Ramirez Montalvo.” In Patronage, Gender & the Arts in Early Modern Italy: Essays in Honor of Carolyn Valone, edited by Katherine McIver and Cynthia Stollhanz, 103–25. New York: Italica Press, 2015. Serraino, Mario. Trapani invitissima e fedelissima. Trapani: Corrao, 1985. Sommervogel, Carlos, S.J., Bibliothèque de la Compagnie de Jésus. 11 vols. Brussels: Polleunis et Centerick par la Province de Belgique, and Paris: Oscar Schepens–Alphonse Picard, 1890–1932.

6 Flying in Formation Subjectivity and Collectivity in Luisa Melgarejo de Soto’s Mystical Practices Stacey Schlau

One of the most notable (and notorious) disciples of Rosa de Lima (1586–1617), Luisa Melgarejo de Soto (1578–1651) played a key role among the supporters and comrades of the Dominican tertiary who would later become America’s first patron saint. Significantly, she also engaged in a mystical exploration of her own, especially after the young holy woman’s death. Yet unlike the soonto-be-canonized ascetic, she found herself caught up in the web of inquisitional procedures, and was prosecuted and incarcerated for many years because of her writings and teachings. The extant part of the record of Melgarejo’s trial offers a glimpse into her spiritual practices as a devout laywoman, albeit filtered through the biases of ecclesiastic officials. Additional documents in her voice and those of others called to testify at the trial and in other proceedings enrich the portrait of a woman considered a pious exemplar by many, including the influential Jesuits with whom she was closely associated. Embedded in the socio-religious manners of colonial Lima’s elite classes, Melgarejo’s and others’ written accounts of her religious thoughts and behaviors provide insight into what Nancy Van Deusen has called the “circuits of knowledge” generated by the women who were inspired by the virginal beata Rose of Lima.1 Melgarejo attempted to fashion a life not as a miracle-working ascetic but as a visionary witness and intercessor. Her model of sanctity, quite different from Rosa’s, met with mixed success in a society that harbored deeply ambivalent attitudes toward would-be holy women. As Luis Miguel Glave affirms, Melgarejo belonged to a group of women eventually deemed alumbradas (Illuminists), who emerged in a viceregal center seeking its Creole identity at the beginning of a socio-cultural crisis that later in the century became acute.2 During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, many beatas recognized a clear spiritual connection between saving themselves and helping to reestablish order out of what was perceived to be social chaos. In America the figure of “the holy woman who suffered in order to expiate the city’s sins,” the most common version of the beata, appeared repeatedly.3 Women considered extraordinarily spiritual were transformed into heroes in popular devotion, because they served as intermediaries with the supernatural world.4 The number of beatas was also closely tied to the kind of religiosity propounded in sermons and through religious written and visual texts that emphasized virtuous

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behavior rather than miracles. Books recounting saints’ lives were extremely popular, and religious art inspired some women with the desire to experience miracles and ecstasies; however, ecclesiastic officials considered humility and obedience to (male) religious authority particularly important. Theologians’ differing approaches to the problem of women’s use of reason and susceptibility to the senses produced conflicting views on the advisability of women’s reading and writing. These tenets had a direct impact on women’s understanding and performance of their spirituality.5 Although beatas constituted an integral component of religion and society in colonial Spanish America, they also needed to balance the expression of trances and ecstasies with the religious virtues preferred by male authorities.6 As Frank Graziano has asserted, “Beata mysticism . . . relied on the collective first to provide the context in which it was meaningful and then to acknowledge, accept, laud, and make socially beneficial the mystic’s union with God. . . . Beata mysticism unified divinity and polity, Christ and creation, corporal and mystical body.”7 More broadly, Sánchez suggests that in the popular imagination one might become a folk hero through public mystic experiences.8 In this way, beatas might build their case for spiritual rectitude not only on good works but also on displays that seemed to point toward the supernatural. Religious Politics: Doña Luisa, the Holy Office of the Inquisition, and the Society of Jesus Despite the official determination of the soon-to-be Saint Rose of Lima’s orthodox exemplarity and Luisa Melgarejo de Soto’s important role as witness to the future saint’s entrance into heaven, in 1623 she and five other of Rosa’s disciples were accused of being ilusas (deluded visionaries) and alumbradas and were brought before the Inquisition. During Melgarejo’s trial, many testified that they had witnessed her revelations, visions, and divine favors. The inception and progress of the proceedings illuminate the workings of religion and society in early seventeenth-century Lima. Although the Holy Office arrested and prosecuted Doña Luisa, the case was eventually dismissed, a fate better than the one faced by her colleagues in Rosa’s circle. The portrait of Luisa Melgarejo de Soto that emerges in the trial records and among historians of the colonial period reflects the complexity and ambivalences of the society in which Melgarejo sought to establish a spiritual identity. When Doña Luisa is remembered in studies of the period, normally she is recalled in connection with Rose of Lima.9 She is rarely studied as a significant autonomous religious actor, and some scholars today share the judgment of the colonial Holy Office and consider her a false mystic. René Millar Carvacho, for instance, accepts as true the accusation that she was an ilusa. He ascribes her ultimate release from the inquisitorial prison to her husband’s social position and the intervention of her Jesuit confessors.10 Some contemporary historians go so far as to argue that Melgarejo deceived the educated men of her circle, secular and religious. Using

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language and a tone that reveal his dismissive view of beatas and his suspicion of women mystics’ manipulation of male ecclesiastics, Fernando Iwasaki Cauti states: “Unlike the beatas surrounding her, Luisa Melgarejo was not a gullible neighborhood saint but rather an influential mystic.” Further, he asserts that the Jesuits were “mere putty in her hands.”11 Both remarks belie the complicated reality of a well-connected colonial woman striving toward religious agency in a time and place in which the normative understanding of female spirituality was contested. Through a close examination of extant inquisitorial and other records, it is possible to pursue a line of analysis that does not rely on (neo)colonial dogmatic assumptions but rather on the idea that for Doña Luisa the dedication to a religious life outweighed other, more worldly concerns. In alliance with the Jesuits, who formed the intellectual center of her society, she created a space in which to exercise her mystic vocation by putting herself at their service. In addition to privileged status, drive and determination allowed her the agency and autonomy in the quest for spiritual perfection. Perhaps anticipating the potential controversies such a search might create, Melgarejo developed a complex set of behaviors and relationships that reveal as much about the circumstances of her life as they do about the devout laywoman herself. As an elite married woman, Doña Luisa did not conform to the behavior expected of a virginal beata like Rosa de Lima. According to the trial transcripts, her attitude was not sufficiently humble. She also exercised her vocation in both exterior (church and other gatherings) and interior spaces (her home, the houses of others in her most intimate circle, and the confessional). Although ultimately prosecuted, she found a way to create a devout praxis and become a holy exemplar for other women and an elite group of men, including powerful Jesuits. Melgarejo’s story reveals not only the strength of her mystical purpose but also how a woman might gain subjectivity through piety outside the confines of convent walls and without extreme asceticism. Doña Luisa’s life story also unveils how the various socio-religious classes of Creole society in Lima in the early seventeenth century interacted. Born in Tunja, New Granada, to a prosperous family of the lower nobility of Seville, she was known for her beauty, saintliness, virtue, and good works. In addition, she was considered a learned woman. Her husband, Dr. Juan de Soto, had been president of San Marcos University; their home was an important cultural and intellectual gathering place in which men and women of diverse classes and races could converse on spiritual matters. After Rosa de Santa María’s death, Melgarejo’s social and religious position became far more precarious, despite the general acceptance at the time that “she [Rosa] was a saint and her promoter, Luisa Melgarejo, was another.”12 Isabel de Soto testified in 1623 that when she lived in Dr. Soto’s house, “since . . . I saw so much saintliness in . . . Doña Luisa, I was envious and wanting to know more of her life, I often saw her take many disciplines and pray often.” Another woman in Rosa’s circle, Ana María Pérez, noted that she had imitated Luisa Melgarejo’s

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spiritual practices.13 When Rosa de Santa María died, Doña Luisa saw and interpreted the future saint’s entrance into heaven “among choirs of angels and sounds of trumpets.”14 On that occasion, she spent more than four hours recounting aloud the events occurring in her visions.15 Afterward, the group of beatas who had been intimate with the soon-to-be-canonized Dominican tertiary facilitated and nurtured the young mystic’s saintly reputation.16 Millar Carvacho notes, “Luisa Melgarejo’s revelations contributed to creating a multi-pronged social projection of Rosa’s death.”17 Six years after Rosa’s death, the Tribunal arrested the women who had formed the core of the largest group of alleged alumbradas in Lima’s history.18 While Melgarejo’s trial was suspended without resolution, the other women were condemned and participated in the 1625 auto de fe; their sentences, however, varied. Inés de Velasco (Spaniard, married), Ana María Pérez (quadroon, married), Isabel de Ormaza o de Jesús (indigenous, born in Lima, married), María de Santo Domingo (Creole, unwed beata), and Inés de Ubiarte (Creole, nun) did not have Melgarejo’s privilege or connections; inquisitional officials were concerned about all these women.19 Van Deusen notes that in the viceregal capital, knowledge was shared within and across class, race, and perhaps even gender lines.20 Using Rosa de Lima’s circle as an example, she demonstrates that personal connections influenced spiritual practices.21 Once Rosa de Lima died, Luisa Melgarejo de Soto became the center of that circle. The collective testimony of witnesses who participated in those religious activities that filled her days praises her piety, intimacy with the divinity, and devotional knowledge. Transcribed by an ecclesiastical secretary, the words of those called to testify at her trial convey general admiration. Fifty-nine notebooks in which Melgarejo’s visions and ecstasies had been recorded were confiscated.22 All were probably destroyed, as ordered. Thus, the direct textual evidence of her spirituality in the form of writing remains mostly missing. Indirectly, however, her role as exemplar, teacher, student, and visionary emerges with great clarity. The transcribed words of other witnesses reflect the dangers of writing during the colonial period about a visionary life without retiring from the world or conforming to the role of a self-sacrificing woman. Doña Luisa’s connection with her confessors (two of whom were also confessors to Rosa de Santa María and Inés Velasco) and with the Jesuit Order in Lima was central to her story and her fate. Her relationship with them was ongoing and profound. She visited them regularly. They loaned her books from their library, one of the best in Lima.23 They served as her confessors. They asked that she use her ecstatic experiences to help achieve their goals and write mystical texts that the Society used to further the beatification proceedings of members of the Order.24 Later, they repaid the service. The Jesuits were divided over the question of female spirituality, a dissention frequently aggravated by internal power struggles and disagreements over apostolic goals. Despite the support Melgarejo enjoyed from her confessors, a Jesuit, Juan Muñoz, denounced her to the Inquisition. Although he later retracted the charge,

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Muñoz, who had also known Rosa de Lima, asserted that three of Melgarejo’s confessors asked her to either resolve theological questions or investigate which Jesuits had entered heaven during her mystic trances. He showed inquisitorial officials a document that he claimed had been written by Melgarejo, in which she recounted one of her visions. This text reveals the reciprocity that existed between Doña Luisa and her religious advisors.25 One confessor, Diego Martínez, ordered her to find out whether or not a deceased member of the order, Father Juan Sebastián, had gone to heaven. She assured him of her desire to obey; not unexpectedly, while hearing mass soon after, she “understood that he was in heaven and I saw him in the chorus of saintly doctors with a palm leaf and great majesty.” As she recounted this vision to Dr. Roca, Father Juan Sebastián again appeared before her: “And with a glorious, grateful face, he gave the doctor his blessing.” Melgarejo reacted predictably: “I cried in abundance and with sighs caused by my desire to see myself already in that celestial country and blessed city.”26 During her trial, one witness affirmed, “I also found out that God had revealed to her the canonization of St. Ignatius and that four Jesuit priests understood it as [true] testimony.”27 In short, the relationship that Melgarejo developed with certain Jesuits meant that she might exercise her spirituality by matching their goals with hers, which at the same time gave her more leeway to explore the hazardous path of visionary experience. According to Diego Martínez, a Jesuit generally recognized for his saintliness who became her confessor and allowed her to continue writing during the eight or nine years that she was his penitent,28 the well-known Jesuit theologian and mystic Diego Álvarez de Paz was the first to order her to write about her mystical life: [A]bout eight or nine years ago he confessed and interacted with this witness and he ordered her to write about the favors that God gave her. And the papers that said Doña Luisa has written about her ecstasies, trances, visions, favors, mercies, and gifts from God, she has written them ordered by this witness and by Father Diego Álvarez de Paz.29

Martínez protected her when he insisted that he and Álvarez de Paz had ordered the ecstatic to write. Ironically, he took responsibility by taking it away from her. Unlike Rosa de Santa María, who refused to keep a spiritual journal, Melgarejo complied. In the trial documents, another Jesuit, Father Martín Díaz de Contreras, was reported as having said, “He had seen all the papers he had that were written by the above-named Doña Luisa Melgarejo, and he had found nothing in them that seemed bad, and in any case, she had to obey [him].”30 With similar rhetorical strategies, both established themselves as having authority over the accused, thereby shielding her from the repercussions of exercising religious autonomy. In a move designed to promote their penitent’s orthodox exemplarity, “The Jesuits in Lima evaluated Luisa Melgarejo’s writings by comparing them with those of Teresa, and they marketed Melgarejo as a ‘new Teresa of Ávila’.”31 The Jesuits’ timely emendations of Melgarejo’s notebooks obstructed the Tribunal’s investigations into the content of Melgarejo’s writing, reports of direct

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contact with the divinity, and the subsequent written account of events. Diego Martínez testified that when they found out that the Holy Office had taken Inés Velasco prisoner and confiscated her papers, they knew that the inquisitors would soon demand that Luisa Melgarejo’s writings be surrendered as well. The three confessors amended, corrected, and deleted sections of her notebooks in an attempt to ensure that the inquisitors find her ecstasies of holy, not demonic origin. The inquisitorial officials’ statement confirmed the intervention: It seems terrible to us that . . . the Fathers of the Society, without this trial being theirs, have taken away, added, and erased the words that have a dangerous quality and some clearly heretical, and made them Catholic doctrine or of lesser error, without considering that amending, eliminating, or adding substantially, it would no longer be Doña Luisa’s revelation, but rather the invention of Torres or Contreras, without even saying that everyone has lied.32

If the confessors had not acted, the beata might have been found guilty. Certainly, her Jesuit friends aided Melgarejo’s cause. Clearly, she repaid the debt by using her authorial and mystic prowess to further the aims of the Society in Lima. Unable or unwilling to conform to the accepted image of the beata as had Rose of Lima, Melgarejo did not succeed in convincing the inquisitorial commissioners of her holiness. The inquisitors noted that she seemed well fed and took care of her appearance, which indicated that she neglected the practice of mortification: her good health meant to them an inordinate concern with physical, as opposed to spiritual well-being. In stark contrast to Rose of Lima’s extreme asceticism and resultant poor health, Luisa Melgarejo’s vigor was deemed incompatible with her reputation as a living saint. The practices of reading and writing may have contributed to her unseemliness. With her colleagues, especially Inés Velasco and Inés Ubiarte, she primarily read saints’ lives: their models were mostly medieval mystics, not those who conformed to the more accepted early modern paradigm, such as Teresa of Ávila (although they knew her works) or Rosa de Santa María (although they were her disciples). The three beatas also wrote about their visions and other mystical experiences: fifty-four notebooks of Velasco’s and three of Ubiarte’s, as well as Melgarejo’s fifty-nine, were confiscated and publicly burned.33 Melgarejo’s voice, even if muffled, can be heard more clearly than her colleagues’, partly because she, more than any other, initiated the cult of Rose of Lima, and partly because she counted more than they in Lima society. Although she articulated her visionary life primarily in interior spaces—her home, others’ houses, the confessional, and the Jesuit college of San Pablo— Melgarejo was recognized throughout the city. Like other beatas, such as Angela Carranza, she experienced trances in church and in front of many witnesses.34 Experiencing ecstasy in public might enhance a beata’s reputation for sanctity, but it also had the potential to raise suspicion. As one witness reported in her trial, while Melgarejo was in church and in the midst of an ecstasy, a servant approached to ask how she would like her eggs prepared; she answered “scrambled,” then

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returned immediately to her contemplative state.35 Subsequently, promptly at the lunch hour she left for home to eat.36 While the veracity of the anecdote cannot be proved, the behavior would have been noticed at the time. During the intervening centuries, scores of scholarly and popular biographies of Saint Rose of Lima have reproduced the incident until it has become accepted as historical truth. Melgarejo’s rendition of Rosa’s ascension to heaven had brought her fame, and with fame came scrutiny. The public nature of her ecstasies, in the absence of severe asceticism, seems to have been one factor that left Melgarejo vulnerable to charges of feigned holiness. Although severe asceticism was not an official criterion for holiness, it clearly was important in seventeenth-century Lima society. For a time after Luisa Melgarejo’s trial was suspended in 1624, she did not participate in public life in Lima. Like all the beatas of the group of Rosa’s disciples, she had been temporarily silenced by the authorities. In the decade of the 1630s, however, the Inquisition shifted its locus of interest to “the great conspiracy” of Judaizers.37 Lima’s importance, its strong ecclesiastic and civil infrastructure, and Melgarejo’s status as a member of the Creole elite with influential friends made it possible for her to regain some measure of respectability. Throughout, she maintained her connection to the Jesuits and they continued to function as valuable allies. According to reports, two weeks before Doña Luisa died, she had a vision of her imminent death and sent for two Jesuit priests. By then a wealthy widow, Melgarejo bequeathed all her property to the Society of Jesus. Significantly, most of the luminaries of the capital, including the viceroy, attended her funeral—a measure of her return to prominence.

Embodying the Role of Mystical Go-Between Remembered today less for her own thoughts and actions than as a disciple of Rosa de Lima, Luisa Melgarejo’s role in history remains that of a mouthpiece rather than a mystic and spiritual exemplar in her own right. Although Rosa de Lima was not beatified until 1667 and was canonized in 1671, the first series of hearings for her beatification process began just months after her death. On November 10, 1617, Melgarejo was summoned to testify. (She also testified in the second series of hearings, the apostolic process, in 1630.)38 That she was called reflected the ecclesiastic judgment of her orthodoxy, although Hampe Martínez suggests that the inquisitional trial negatively affected the process of sanctifying Rosa de Lima for a brief period.39 Still, none of the other disciples who were later brought before the Inquisition testified during this process. Throughout the seventeenth century, biographers of the would-be saints of Lima continued to praise Melgarejo’s religiosity. When Ramón Mujica Pinilla cites Francisco Antonio Montalvo’s tome published in Rome in 1683, El Sol del Nuevo Mundo ideado y compuesto en las esclarecidas operaciones del bienaventurado Toribio Arzobispo de Lima, he notes that Montalvo asserted that Doña Luisa “had great perfection; she [was] skilled in all kinds of virtues and good deeds. During the spiritual peace of prayer she

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came to enjoy the sweetness that its silence gives to those who, with humility and love, study and frequent it.”40 This judgment, published three decades after Melgarejo’s death, indicates a return to a more general positive assessment of her piety, orthodoxy, and exemplarity. Recent scholarly arguments that the trials of Melgarejo and her cohort at the very least slowed down the drive toward canonizing Rosa de Lima reflect attitudes similar to those of colonial ecclesiastics, who saw extreme asceticism as the touchstone for sanctity. Religious culture of the time “lauded Rose’s abuse of her body, applauded her virginity, marveled at her heroic tolerance of asceticism and pain, and endorsed her conviction that this torturous route led to mystical marriage and an eternity of heavenly bliss.”41 During the past two decades, scholars have continued to emphasize the saint’s extreme mortifications, withdrawal from the world, and refusal to participate in self-aggrandizement, at the same time suggesting or stating that Melgarejo did not live up to Rosa’s ascetic standard. Both Frank Graziano and Ramón Mujica Pinilla seem to imply that Doña Luisa was deluded. Graziano more than once refers to Melgarejo’s utterances on the night of Rosa de Lima’s death as “ravings,”42 while Mujica Pinilla opines, quoting the limeña saint, “As opposed to her contemporaries, the more divine favors and gifts that Rosa received in her soul, the greater were her penances and the more profound was her contention that she deserved ‘a thousand hells’ because she was ‘the greatest sinner in the world’.”43 Despite the emphasis on contrasting her with Rosa, Doña Luisa’s words from her oral testimony during ecclesiastical proceedings were transcribed into writing by others. Three documents produced under greatly differing circumstances are discussed below: the interrogation and responses for the first process of Rosa de Lima’s beatification, the ecstatic soliloquy recounting Rosa’s entrance into heaven, and excerpts from the inquisitional trial. Melgarejo’s testimony during the ordinary process of 1617 reflected the generally accepted guidelines for pious laywomen, as outlined in the benchmark cautionary guidebooks and treatises by Miguel Godínez and Diego Pérez de Valdivia.44 Her 1617 testimony was brief, to the point, and shaped by the thirty-two questions asked of each witness during the process. In her answers she emphasized Rosa de Lima’s abstinence, humility, imitatio (desire to imitate Christ’s suffering), obedience, and purity. Beginning with the formulaic assertion that Rosa “was a true recollect and lived with great perfection,” Doña Luisa rarely deviated from prescribed language in the words of praise she consistently articulated.45 Juan de Soto, her husband, responded to the same questions, but the answers contained much more explicit detail. About abstinence, for instance, he describes witnessing Rosa de Santa María’s refusal of all food except a piece of bread dipped in salt water and chili. As an example of her penitential practices, he recounts an anecdote in which Rosa’s mother hit her on the head: when she began bleeding from the blow because she was wearing the spiked crown, the young woman laughed. He quotes a favorite expression of Rosa’s, speaking to God: “Loves, give me suffering,” and notes that on her deathbed he heard her say, “Lord, I am about

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to call myself deceit, you well know that I can take no more, and when I asked you for suffering, I thought it would be similar to what came before.” Finally, while he answers question 24 (regarding visions) only briefly, avoiding mystical and theological matters, he describes at length external events, including the funeral procession and the general feeling in the city after Rosa’s death.46 In contrast, Melgarejo frequently resorts to hearsay, especially when describing the young limeña’s daily routines. Her most consistent sources are María de Uzátegui, wife of Gonzalo de la Maza, in whose house Rosa de Lima lived for the last few years of her life, and María de Oliva, the deceased young holy woman’s mother. Regarding fasting, according to María de Oliva Rosa could not ingest anything else on the days when she took communion. Oliva also swore that her daughter became enraptured while consuming the Host, according to Melgarejo. Regarding Melgarejo’s knowledge of Rosa’s practices of imitatio, she states that the same witnesses described to her the beata’s penitential crown, hair shirt, and other tools of mortification. Having established her veracity with others’ words, she affirms that she herself has seen Rosa’s acts of charity, fasts, spiritual exercises, and prayers for others. Underlining the rhetorical, symbolic significance of illness that held sway in that period, she recounts what she has witnessed: She saw her suffer three serious illnesses, at different times, and with different, severe pains, especially in her final illness, when she died. And she saw that she was extremely patient, and tolerated a great deal. She carried that suffering with her, and accepted God’s will; and she never showed any impatience whatsoever.47

Explicit about the final moments of the mystic’s death, she notes that she entered the room as the priests finished giving Rosa extreme unction. The witness highlights the beata’s repentant words and actions; in addition, “She saw that she was perfectly able to speak until the moment of death.”48 That the soon-to-be saint retained the power of the word appears to gain as much significance in Melgarejo’s eyes as her humility, attitude of self-deprecation, and self-flagellation. Regarding miracles, both Luisa Melgarejo and Juan de Soto deemed one to be of particular importance. On April 30, 1617, they each testified at some length that they had seen the portrait of Jesus in the chapel in Gonzalo de la Maza’s house sweat tears three times within two and three-quarters hours after Rosa’s death (553–56). Naturally, this apparent miracle was considered a clear sign of Rosa’s favored status as the divinity’s chosen one. Most important, Luisa Melgarejo testifies that in the days following her death, Rosa appeared to several persons. This is the only question (number 24) that she answers at length. She mentions her own vision of the young woman’s entrance into heaven, “in an intellectual vision with great glory,” but the bulk of the narrative attributes apparitions to other persons. Detailed descriptions of the second-hand visions of one “spiritual person” (probably the witness) shape the narrative, but descriptions of many others’ similar ecstasies support the case for beatification. Melgarejo explicitly places the visions into one of two categories: imaginative and

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intellectual. Following St. Augustine’s classification, these two categories were considered more spiritual than corporeal visions, and therefore less likely to be deceptions. That she distinguishes them reflects her theological studies as well as generally held knowledge of the period.49 Melgarejo notes that Rosa had appeared holding a virgin’s palm frond several times in an imaginative vision and once in an intellectual one. A few days later, as “this person”50 was praying to Rosa to intervene on behalf of the city and the territory, she saw her in heaven. Rosa assured her: “Yes, sister, whatever is needed for the glory of God, whom I am enjoying, I will intercede and ask that His Majesty grant it.” Melgarejo continues, noting that the same person (again, probably referring to herself) saw Rosa in her white habit, covered in roses, in an imaginative vision. Further, both Melgarejo and Rosa de Santa María seem to emphasize this person’s exemplarity: in another vision, the person is assured that Rosa went straight to heaven, without going through purgatory. She had predicted this, because on the day of Rosa’s death, while praying, she had asked God to take her in his heart, and he replied, “I have her in my heart, because she always had me in hers, and her death will be glorious.” That same night, after Rosa died, she saw the future saint surrounded by sweetly singing angels. Finally, when Rosa entered the hermitage in her parents’ garden, this person “saw her as a brilliant star; and she emitted bright rays of light with which she illuminated and combatted the indifference of this person.”51 For this reason, Melgarejo testifies, she used to throw herself at Rosa’s feet, and once, when she offered to be Rosa’s scribe, she did so on her knees because she owed her respect and reverence. The entire description serves to establish Rosa as exemplar and future saint, as well as confirming Melgarejo’s role as intermediary. Through her formulaic references to “this person,” she simultaneously performs humility and asserts her holiness by synecdoche. While Melagarejo’s testimony during the first interrogation process was relatively brief, her account of the Dominican beata’s ascent into heaven, witnessed during a trance in the hours after Rosa de Lima’s death, offers much detail. Based on supposedly literal transcriptions by Juan Costilla de Benavides and Fray Francisco Nieto (a Dominican), the document is contained in Gonzalo de la Maza’s testimony during the Primer proceso.52 The florid language reflects many of the tropes of early modern and colonial mysticism, yet the narrative voice is astonishingly self-assured. The young beata’s exceptional piety and standing in the ranks of those in heaven is assumed, and the speaker’s spiritual exemplarity is implied. Repeatedly inserting herself into the narrative, Melgarejo often directly addresses her deceased “sister.” She exclaims, for instance, that she had repeatedly told Rosa that her suffering on earth would be rewarded in heaven. Continuing, she commiserates: “Oh my Rose, oh sister of mine, my poor sister, poor me.”53 The close identification of speaker and subject implicitly explains why Doña Luisa not only experiences the visions but also is permitted to articulate them. Her audience, those who attended Rose of Lima’s deathbed, participates by listening for hours.

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Clearly, the words she utters are highly significant, since they were ordered to be transcribed into writing for posterity. Undoubtedly, some in Lima had already discussed Rosa’s possible canonization. The ecstatic begins with an extended metaphor that plays with the name Rosa: she insists that the beata has been planted in the garden of heaven, where she will not wither. Calling the newly deceased “divine Rose,” she describes her current abode, a place in which love prevails: In that heavenly Jerusalem, virgins love, hermits love, patriarchs love, prophets love, apostles and evangelists love, confessors love, martyrs love, disciples love, widows love, saintly wives love.54

Noteworthy are the insistent repetition of the word “love” and the mention of three categories of women: virgins, widows, and wives. Received into heaven by its queen, the Virgin Mary, she, too, becomes a queen, because in material life she conquered her passions. Rosa is beloved of all in this paradise. The repetition of her name creates a ritual song: “Divine Rose, divine Rose, much beloved Rose, and the rose so enjoys that fragrant odor, oh, the Rose, oh how she now enjoys what will end.”55 Imagery associated with a garden recurs, perhaps evoking the hermitage in Gonzalo de la Maza’s garden, where Rosa spent so much time. She is compared to a sunflower, always turning toward divine light: “Rose, infused with the divine sun of justice, you appeared as the sun because of the divine sun’s participation. Oh, how fertile your soul, that sun was you, Rose, a sunflower. How you enjoyed this sun, how you always faced toward Him; that is why He took you away at such a young age.”56 Consistent with Baroque theological tenets, early death is viewed as a gift, because union with the divinity occurs after a brief material life. Metamorphosis dominates the account. Rosa’s penitential crown in life and the palm for virginity are transformed into regal accoutrements in heaven: they become crown and scepter. Her hermitage in the garden mirrors the landscape of heaven; the little hut becomes the eternal realm. Also, the room in which Rosa de Santa María has just died is reconfigured into a holy place. The narrative ends with the ultimate transformation of the soul in God, in a line that echoes St. John of the Cross: “To be transformed in the beloved.”57 Overall, the speech process converts the young mortal woman’s physical space and instruments into sacred apparatuses, and the Dominican beata herself into a saint in the making. Speech and hearing are essential elements of the narrative. The aural quality of the revelations serves to remind listeners of the recently deceased young woman’s special relationship with the divinity. The transcription also emphasizes orality. Not only does the speaker repeat many words and phrases, she also imitates the rhythms of chanting, especially in the references to God. We hear, for instance, the cry, “Lord, your goodness is infinite, infinite, infinite. Oh infinite being,” and then the intoning of “[W]hat is God? God is a very simple, the highest, the sweetest substance; God is all good; God is all glory; God is all consolation; God is all

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beauty; God is all truth.”58 Notably, Melgarejo expresses mystical ecstasy even as she articulates Rosa’s intimate connection with and proximity to the supreme deity. God himself becomes a primary addressee; Doña Luisa exclaims, for instance, “The whole world is a drop of dew in You, the infinite sea.” In her trance, she defines God as Husband, as Love, as Holy Book: “Fortunate are those, My Lord, who are written in You, the book of eternal life, where they will see each other and read forever.” God even evokes the material wealth of Peru, since he opens a gold mine of charity and faith: “[O]h the finest gold of charity, emanates from You My Lord, like a rich vein, oh a wonderful vein, oh an endless vein, so that they who dig in You My Lord become rich; they take out more, more and more and there is no end.”59 Thus laudatory epithets and metaphors as well as an exalted tone contribute to the rhetorical emphasis on the significance of the occasion: Rosa’s ascent to heaven to accompany her divine bridegroom. With her voice, words, and embodied self, Melgarejo unites those who have assembled in the room where the future saint of Lima and of the Americas has just died, transforming the gathering into a congregation dedicated to furthering a Catholic, Creole vision of Peru, within a sacred space and time. The speaker fully exploits the symbolic value of the ostensibly frail yet multifaceted figure of Rose of Lima. At the same time, Doña Luisa freely expresses her own spiritual subjectivity, with the full approval of some of the most important people in the viceregal capital. Melgarejo’s excursions into visionary territory also occur at the behest of the Jesuits. In a document entitled “Transcription of an Account by Doña Luisa de Melgarejo held by Father Diego Martínez of the Society of Jesus,” initiated at the request of a confessor (Martínez), the ecstatic mystically investigates whether another Jesuit has gone to heaven and, if so, what place he has there. She notes that her motivation was obedience, as if to anticipate and ward off accusations of pride and false visions. During mass one morning, I heard that he was in heaven and I saw him in a chorus of saintly doctors, with a palm, and great majesty; and great light illuminated my mind . . . and . . . the saintly father appeared to me again and . . . Father Ignacio Sebastián very clearly stated, “Oh good friend,” and I cried and sighed a lot, because of my desire to be there, in that celestial country and blessed city . . . in Lima, 12 July 1622.60

Importantly, Melgarejo confirms Father Ignacio’s entrance into heaven. Still, although the vision as recorded is ostensibly about the deceased Jesuit, it manages to express the ecstatic’s desire to join him in heaven. Implicitly she asserts her spiritual worth, her right to enter the heavenly realm. Five years after the first (ordinary) process regarding Rose of Lima, Luisa Melgarejo speaks again and her words are again transcribed, this time by an inquisitional scribe at her trial. But, as happened with all defendants, Doña Luisa’s voice was drowned out by the many witnesses who testified regarding

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her heterodoxy or orthodoxy and spiritual behavior. To begin, when the Jesuit priest Juan Muñoz (called Jesús Muñoz in the trial record) denounced Melgarejo in his audience with Inquisitors in July 1622, he identified her as one of many false female visionaries in the city: “[T]here is such a large number of women who, creating a tumult, are accustomed to going into trances and some even fly in this city of Lima.”61 Here Muñoz articulates an often-voiced concern of certain members of the clergy at the time, that Lima was a city besieged and threatened by would-be holy women, who were perceived by ecclesiastic authorities as out of control and in need of suppression. Muñoz’s perspective resonates with the testimony of Inés de Velasco, another of the beatas in the circle around Rosa, also a defendant in one of the Holy Tribunal’s trials: [S]he has seen that all women who wish to serve Our Lord and dedicate themselves to Him have many books of devotion and of good examples and she does not think this is bad. But it seems to her that spiritual books are not useful for women and . . . she is sure that from reading in these books comes this damage. . . . And it seems to her that it would be a great service to God to confiscate all the writings of the women who write about what happens to them in prayer, because they will have and could have some error such as this one has had in what they write.62 [emphasis mine]

In ironic contrast with the spiritual practices in which she and her colleagues collectively engaged before Rosa de Lima’s death, when questioned by the Tribunal, Velasco endorses the view that women should not read books dedicated to visions and spirituality. She roundly condemns the group’s former practices, using formulaic language to echo the ecclesiastic authorities’ distrust of women becoming involved in theological matters. Testifying on October 21, 1623, Velasco confirmed not only her knowledge of Melgarejo’s visionary activities but also of her having written about them. Further, she insisted that Dr. Soto, Melgarejo’s husband, had transcribed, without his wife’s knowledge, her writings about spiritual subjects and her utterances during trances. Subsequently, the witness hastens to assure the judges that in their exchanges about visionary experiences, she and Melgarejo not only recounted events but also questioned whether they were authentic or not: “[W]hen she would tell Doña Luisa de Soto what happened to her during her trances and prayers, she would note that of the things that happened to her, many were probably from her imagination and so it would be a good idea to write them down afterward so that she would not forget.”63 Velasco describes other events, including when Melgarejo went into a trance during a procession and looked toward heaven as though ascending. She ends her testimony, however, by assuring her listeners that this behavior seemed to be fakery. The reader may surmise that Velasco’s need to present herself as blamelessly as possible, given the charges of the Holy Tribunal against her, would encourage her to err on the side of extreme orthodoxy as defined by ecclesiastic officials, rather than support a former spiritual comrade.

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Others praise Melgarejo, however, indicating that her reputation of saintliness was not completely tarnished. Conjecture about the motivation for another witness’s positive representation of Melgarejo would be futile, since the record does not reveal much. An implied intimacy may underlie the testimony of Isabel de Soto, given that she had lived in Soto and Melgarejo’s house for nine years. Isabel de Soto both admires Doña Luisa’s spiritual exemplarity and admits that she engaged in writing and maintained close relationships with select Jesuits: “[D]oña Luisa was so saintly that I was anxious to know about her life; I saw her discipline herself and pray a great deal. I also saw her writing. And once she completed a notebook she used to take it to the Jesuits, to Father Diego Álvarez de Paz, and as I said, I tried to see some of these notebooks and I cannot remember if I read them or she read them to me.”64 The acts of reading and writing appear here to be more collective than individual: sharing writing was common in this circle of women, and reader responses were more or less immediate. Reflecting a common trope among early modern Hispanic women mystics, Soto also highlighted divine figures’ ability to console and give comfort. Not only did Melgarejo often see saints and angels, but God and Jesus acted out stereotypically gendered family roles: they became father and husband. The first protected her when she was attacked by demons: It was also in her notebooks that one night, when she was sitting on a chair in her patio, she saw Our Lord sitting on a chair, surrounded by many saints. Also, she told me that while disciplining herself she saw a legion of demons, which frightened her. And then she felt Our Lord so close to her that she felt his hair touch her on her face and He said, “Child, do not be afraid, for I am here with you.”65

And Jesus, the bridegroom of all professed nuns, acted as her surrogate husband: “It was also in her notebooks that one night when her husband was not there . . . she began to pray to Our crucified Lord . . . and he said, “My daughter, I come to accompany you during this absence of your husband.”66 Emphasized in these visions is the proprietary, caring manner in which the male godhead treats the female supplicant. Isabel Soto’s testimony in praise of her mentor’s mystical prowess and saintliness, given during an inquisitional trial, underscores the possible power of shared religious fervor among some women. Certainly, the setting and circumstances made possible a spiritual community and mystical practices that emphasized their relationship not only with the sacred figures of colonial Catholicism but also among themselves and their intimates, confessors, and acquaintances. In the relatively congenial religious climate of Lima during Rosa’s lifetime, those relationships worked well. Buttressed by the twin roles of spokesperson for the canonization of her “sister” and teacher, Rosa of Lima, and as visionary ambassador for certain members of the Jesuit Order in Lima, furthering their goal of establishing the holiness of

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certain of their deceased brothers, Luisa Melgarejo de Soto’s performance of spiritual exemplarity offers one possible model for asserting agency in a society of conflictive and hierarchical ideologies. Her model was not without risk. Her perceived failure to conform to the ascetic practices espoused by the virginal Rose of Lima evidently raised suspicions of feigned sanctity in some quarters; dissention among the Jesuits further weakened her position. Nevertheless, her model of piety ultimately was accepted. Thanks to her powerful ecclesiastical and secular allies, Melgarejo was able to continue to witness, interpret, and promote the spiritual gifts and saintly character of Rose of Lima. Notes  1. Nancy E. Van Deusen, “Circuits of Knowledge among Women in Early SeventeenthCentury Lima,” in Gender, Race and Religion in the Colonization of the Americas, ed. Nora E. Jaffary (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007), 137–50.  2. Luis Miguel Glave, “De rosa y espinas: Creación de mentalidades criollas en los Andes (1600–1630),” Documento de Trabajo 52 (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1993; http://www.iep.org.pe, el 4 de septiembre 2007), 26 (accessed March 15, 2013).  3. Luis Miguel Glave, “Santa Rosa de Lima y sus espinas: La emergencia de mentalidades urbanas de crisis y la sociedad andina (1600–1630),” in Manifestaciones religiosas en el mundo colonial americano, ed. Clara García Ayluardo and Manuel Ramos Medina (Mexico City: INAH, CONDUMEX, Universidad Iberoamericana, 1993), 109–20, qtd. at 118. All quotations in Spanish are translated; translations are mine.  4. Ana Sánchez, “Angela Carranza, alias Angela de Dios. Santidad y poder en la sociedad virreinal peruana (s. XVII),” in Catolicismo y extirpación de idolatrías. Siglos XVI–XVIII,” ed. Gabriela Ramos and Henrique Urbano (Cuzco: Centro Bartolomé de Las Casas, 1993), 236–92, esp. 274. See Anne Schutte’s essay in this volume for an account of attempts to authorize five Italian women as spiritual exemplars via the publication of spiritual biographies.  5. See René Millar Carvacho, “Falsa santidad e Inquisición: Los procesos a las visionarias limeñas,” Boletín de la Academia Chilena de la Historia 108–9 (2000), 277– 305, esp. 293; Nancy E. Van Deusen, “Reading the Body: Mystical Theology and Spiritual Actualisation in Early Seventeenth-Century Lima,” Journal of Religious History 33.1 (2009): 1–27, esp. 4. In this essay, the author offers an excellent overview of the act of reading and its links to spirituality in the seventeenth-century Spanish empire.  6. Nine beaterios, or communal houses for beatas, were founded in Lima alone between 1669 and 1691. René Millar Carvacho, Inquisición y sociedad en el virreinato peruano (Santiago: Ediciones Universidad Católica de Chile, 1998), 113.  7. Frank Graziano, Wounds of Love: The Mystical Marriage of Saint Rose of Lima (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 99.  8. Sánchez, “Angela Carranza,” 274.  9. More recently, she has been mentioned in association with Ursula de Jesús, her servant and a mystic in her own right. Nancy E. Van Deusen has published a study and translation of Ursula’s revelations: The Souls of Purgatory: The Spiritual Diary of a Seventeenth-Century Afro-Peruvian Mystic, Ursula de Jesús (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004).

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10. Millar Carvacho, Inquisición y sociedad, 359. 11. “Luisa Melgarejo de Soto y la alegría de ser tu testigo, Señor,” Histórica 19.2 (1995): 219–50, esp. 227. 12. Glave, “De rosa,” qtd. at 20. 13. Histórico Nacional, Inquisición, Madrid (hereafter AHN), libro 1030, fol. 224; qtd. in Millar Carvacho, “Falsa santidad,” 295. 14. Teodoro Hampe Martínez, “El proceso de canonización de Santa Rosa (Nuevas luces sobre la identidad criolla en el Perú colonial),” Hispania sacra 48.98 (1996): 719–37, qtd. at 722. 15. This, in spite of Millar Carvacho’s comment in “Rosa de Santa María” that what she said “is highly chaotic and confused.” See “Rosa de Santa María (1586–1617). Génesis de su santidad y primera hagiografía,” Historia 36 (2003): 255–73, qtd. at 259. 16. Glave, “De rosa,” 20. 17. Millar Carvacho, “Rosa de Santa María,” 260. 18. Glave, “De rosa,” 17. 19. Ana María Pérez, a cuarterona (one-quarter of African descent), and therefore of lower racial status than the others, who were criollas (Creoles), received the most severe sentence. She had been able to join their discussions and prayers because she worked as the cook in Rosa de Santa María’s house. After participating in the auto-da-fe and receiving 200 lashes, she was put under house arrest for a year. Gender politics filtered down from the institutional to the personal level; the commissioners charged her husband with monitoring her to ensure that she did not have contact with anyone else. See Glave, “De rosa,” 25. 20. Van Deusen, “Circuits of Knowledge, esp. 142, 150. 21. Ibid, 142. 22. Although Glave (“De rosa,” 22) cites Guillermo Lohmann, who states that Luisa Melgarejo could not write and that she hid that deficiency “with the pretext of being unable to use her right arm,” Millar Carvacho cites Father Juan Mélendez, who, in his account published at the end of the seventeenth century, declares that Luisa Melgarejo always wrote on her knees in front of Rosa of Lima (“Rosa de Santa María,” 258, n. 16). 23. For a discussion of their library, see Luis Martin, Chapter 4, “Jesuits and Books,” in The Intellectual Conquest of Peru: The Jesuit College of San Pablo, 1568–1767 (New York: Fordham University Press, 1968), esp. 74–96. 24. Iwasaki Cauti, “Mujeres al borde de la perfección: Rosa de Santa María y las alumbradas de Lima,” Hispanic American Historical Review 73.4 (1993): 594. 25. In the inquisitional archives and quoted by Iwasaki, “Mujeres,” 594. 26. Luisa Melgarejo de Soto, “Traslado del proceso de testificaciones . . . contra Doña Luisa de Melgarejo,” AHN, Legajo 1647, no. 5, esp. folios 6v–7r. 27. Melgarejo, “Traslado,” 20v. 28. Ramón Mujica Pinilla, “El ancla de Rosa de Lima: Mística y política en torno a la patrona de América,” in Santa Rosa y su tiempo, ed. José Flores Araoz, Ramón Mujica Pinilla, Luis Eduardo Wuffarden, and Pedro Guibovich Pérez (Lima: Banco de Crédito del Perú, 1995), 53–211, qtd. at 60. 29. AHN, Legajo 1647–1, carta del Lic. Gaytán, Lima, 1.VII.1624; quoted in Iwasaki Cauti, “Luisa Melgarejo de Soto,” at 223, and in Iwasaki Cauti, “Mujeres,” 595, n. 41. 30. Melgarejo, “Traslado,” 26r. 31. Graziano, Wounds, 48. 32. Iwasaki Cauti, “Mujeres,” 595–96.

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33. Ibid., 598. 34. See Stacey Schlau, “Género sexual y comodificación religiosa: El caso de Angela Carranza,” in Nictímene . . . sacrílega: Estudios coloniales en homenaje a Georgina Sabat– Rivers, ed. Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel and Mabel Moraña (México D.F.: Universidad del Claustro de Sor Juana, Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, 2003), 111–33. 35. “Traslado,” esp. fol. 19v. 36. See, for instance, Ángela Olivares Gullón, Santa Rosa de Lima: Rosa de Lima, Rosa de América (Madrid: Edmat, 2005), esp. 31–32. 37. The Lima Tribunal’s period of most intense persecution of suspected Judaizers occurred 1635–1639, during which inquisitional officials claimed that they needed to eliminate the “great conspiracy.” In the 1639 auto-da-fe, sixty-five people were declared guilty of Judaizing. See Stacey Schlau, Gendered Crime and Punishment: Women and the Hispanic Inquisitions (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 29–30. Also see Millar Carvacho, Inquisición y sociedad, and Paulino Castañeda Delgado and Pilar Hernández Aparicio, La inquisición en Lima: (1635–1696), vol. 2 (New York and Oxford: Berhahn Books, 2001). 38. Van Deusen, Souls, esp. 16; Mujica Pinilla, “El ancla de Rosa de Lima,” esp. 60. 39. Hampe Martínez, “Proceso,” 722. 40. Mujica Pinilla, “El ancla de Rosa de Lima,” 60. 41. Graziano, Wounds, 3. 42. Ibid., 64, 100. 43. The quotes from Rosa de Lima are from Proceso I, fols. 254, 291; these and the rest of the quote are in Mujica Pinilla, “El ancla de Rosa de Lima,” 64. 44. Miguel Godínez, Practica de la theologia mystica (The Practice of Mystical Theology, 1682) and Diego Pérez de Valdivia, Aviso de gente recogida (Advice to the Recollect, 1585). For Pérez de Valdivia’s advice to beatas, see Alison Weber’s introduction to this volume. 45. Hernán Jiménez Salas, ed., Primer proceso ordinario para la canonización de Santa Rosa de Lima (Lima: Monasterio de Santa Rosa de Santa María de Lima, 2002), 155. 46. Ibid., 169, 171, and 172–74. 47. Jiménez Salas, Primer proceso, 157. 48. Ibid., 158. 49. See “Visions and Apparitions,” Catholic Encyclopedia, http://www.newadvent.org/ cathen/15477a.htm (accessed April 20, 2013). 50. Scribes for beatification processes recorded testimonies in the third person. 51. Jiménez Salas, Primer proceso, 158; 158–159; 159. 52. Ibid., esp. 81–86. 53. Ibid., 84. 54. Ibid., qtd. at 81–82. 55. Ibid., qtd. 82. 56. Ibid., 58. 57. Ibid., 86. 58. Ibid., 85. 59. Ibid., 85. 60. “Traslado de un papel de doña Luisa de Melgarejo que tiene el padre Diego Martinez de la compañía de Jesus,” AHN, legajo 1647, no. 5, 7r. 61. Ibid., 2r.

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150 62. Ibid., 13r–13v. 63. Ibid., 14r. 64. Ibid., 20r. 65. Ibid., 20v–21r. 66. Ibid., 20v.

Works Cited Castañeda Delgado, Paulino, and Pilar Hernández Aparicio. La inquisición en Lima: (1635–1696), vol. 2. New York: Berhahn Books, 2001. Flores Espinoza, Javier F. “Hechicería e idolatría en Lima colonial (siglo XVII).” In Poder y violencia en los Andes, edited by Henrique Urbano and Mirko Lauer, 55–74. Cusco: Centro de Estudios Regionales Andinos Bartolomé de las Casas, 1991. Glave, Luis Miguel. “De rosa y espinas: Creación de mentalidades criollas en los Andes (1600–1630).” Documento de Trabajo 52. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1993; http://www.iep.org.pe, el 4 de septiembre 2007, 1–26 (accessed March 15, 2013). ———. “Santa Rosa de Lima y sus espinas: La emergencia de mentalidades urbanas de crisis y la sociedad andina (1600–1630).” In Manifestaciones religiosas en el mundo colonial americano, edited by Clara García Ayluardo and Manuel Ramos Medina, 109–20. Mexico City: INAH, CONDUMEX, Universidad Iberoamericana, 1993. Graziano, Frank. Wounds of Love: The Mystical Marriage of Saint Rose of Lima. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Hampe Martínez, Teodoro. “El proceso de canonización de Santa Rosa (Nuevas luces sobre la identidad criolla en el Perú colonial).” Hispania sacra 48, no. 98 (1996): 719–37. Iwasaki Cauti, Fernando. “Luisa Melgarejo de Soto y la alegría de ser tu testigo, Señor.” Histórica 19, no. 2 (1995): 219–50. ———. “Mujeres al borde de la perfección: Rosa de Santa María y las alumbradas de Lima.” Hispanic American Historical Review 73, no. 4 (1993): 581–613. Jiménez Salas, Hernán, ed. Primer proceso ordinario para la canonización de Santa Rosa de Lima. Lima: Monasterio de Santa Rosa de Santa María de Lima, 2002. Martín, Luis. The Intellectual Conquest of Peru: The Jesuit College of San Pablo, 1568–1767. New York: Fordham University Press, 1968. Melgarejo de Soto, Luisa. Traslado del proçesso de testificaciones que se han Rdo. en el Sto. Officio de la Inqon. del piru que reside en la çiudad de los Reyes contra Doña Luisa de Melgarejo muger del Dor. Julio de Soto abogado de la Rl. Audia. Desta dicha çiudad. Sobre y en raçon de los arrobos extasis y rebelaçiones y otros favores que ha tenido y tiene de N. Sr. Archivo Histórico Nacional, Madrid, Inquisición, legajo 1647, no. 5.

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Millar Carvacho, René. “Falsa santidad e Inquisición: Los procesos a las visionarias limeñas.” Boletín de la Academia Chilena de la Historia 108–9 (2000): 277–305. ———. Inquisición y sociedad en el virreinato peruano: Estudios sobre el tribunal de la Inquisición de Lima. Santiago: Ediciones Universidad Católica de Chile, 1998. ———. “Rosa de Santa María (1586–1617). Génesis de su santidad y primera hagiografía.” Historia 36 (2003): 255–73. Mujica Pinilla, Ramón. “El ancla de Rosa de Lima: Mística y política en torno a la patrona de América.” In Santa Rosa y su tiempo, edited by José Flores Araoz, Ramón Mujica Pinilla, Luis Eduardo Wuffarden, and Pedro Guibovich Pérez, 53–211. Lima: Banco de Crédito del Perú, 1995. Olivares Gullón, Ángela. Santa Rosa de Lima: Rosa de Lima, Rosa de América. Madrid: Edmat, 2005. Sánchez, Ana. “Angela Carranza, alias Angela de Dios. Santidad y poder en la sociedad virreinal peruana (s. XVII).” In Catolicismo y extirpación de idolatrías. Siglos XVI–XVIII,” edited by Gabriela Ramos and Henrique Urbano, 236–92. Cuzco: Centro Bartolomé de Las Casas, 1993. Schlau, Stacey. Gendered Crime and Punishment: Women and the Hispanic Inquisitions. Leiden: Brill, 2013. ———. “Género sexual y comodificación religiosa: El caso de Angela Carranza.” In Nictímene . . . sacrílega: Estudios coloniales en homenaje a Georgina SabatRivers, edited by Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel and Mabel Moraña, 111–33. México D.F.: Universidad del Claustro de Sor Juana, Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, 2003. Van Deusen, Nancy E. “Circuits of Knowledge Among Women in Early Seventeenth-Century Lima.” In Gender, Race and Religion in the Colonization of the Americas, edited by Nora E. Jaffary, 137–50. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007. ———. “Reading the Body: Mystical Theology and Spiritual Actualisation in Early Seventeenth-Century Lima.” Journal of Religious History 33, no. 1 (2009): 1–27. ———, ed. The Souls of Purgatory: The Spiritual Diary of a Seventeenth-Century Afro-Peruvian Mystic, Ursula de Jesús. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004. “Visions and Apparitions.” In Catholic Encyclopedia. http://www.newadvent.org/ cathen/15477a.htm (accessed April 30, 2013).

7 Illuminated Islands Luisa de los Reyes and the Inquisition in Manila* Jessica Fowler

In 1663 a former Jesuit, Francisco de los Rios, appeared before the Holy Office of New Spain. After his recent expulsion from the Society of Jesus in Manila, he returned to Mexico armed with information he believed would be of interest to the inquisitors. To discharge his conscience, he related how he had identified a group of alumbrado heretics living near and even within the Jesuit school in Manila. He told of an indigenous woman, Luisa de los Reyes, who experienced raptures and visions, and convinced a number of his ex-colleagues that she was blessed by God and was even a saint.1 The inquisitors were intrigued. How had a heresy that originated in Spain nearly a century and a half earlier arrived at the farthest outpost of the Spanish Empire? So began the cases of the only individuals accused of alumbradismo across the Pacific. Upon investigating, the inquisitors quickly realized that the suspects in the Philippines had no direct connection to any of those previously accused of this heresy. The protagonist, a Pampangan woman, had never left the Philippines and did not even speak Spanish. The Jesuits accused as her accomplices had no previous record of suspicious activity. Heretics had not arrived in the Philippines via any sort of heterodox evangelizing effort. Instead, the Inquisition had unwittingly abetted the spread of knowledge of the heresy of alumbradismo to the archipelago through the success of its very own pedagogical efforts. The Inquisition was the sole institution whose jurisdiction reached across all Spanish territories and whose goal to maintain orthodoxy required it to question, attempt to understand, and then classify and categorize heresy. In doing so, the Inquisition produced a clearly delineated knowledge about what constituted heresy. The creation and dissemination of this knowledge through inquisitorial procedures, such as the auto de fe and its relaciones (reports of such events), insured that at least in some cases knowledge of deviance spread faster than the actual practice of the deviant behavior. Utilizing documents from Spain and Mexico, this essay augments the limited historiography on the Spanish Inquisition in the Philippines. The proliferation of Inquisition studies over the last decades has focused on Spain. Work on the colonies is dominated by studies of the tribunal in New Spain.2 Despite being a dependent of New Spain’s tribunal, the Inquisition in the Philippines remains

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largely overlooked, leaving unexplored the institution’s trans-Pacific arm. The major exception and only monograph dedicated to the topic is the foundational work of José Toribio Medina.3 Henry Charles Lea spends fewer than twenty pages on the archipelago.4 Furthermore, these accounts rely solely on documents from the Supreme Council of the Inquisition, or Suprema, in Spain. However, a cache of records about these cases also exists in Mexico. This essay utilizes documents in both locations to discuss the only known cases of trans-Pacific alumbradismo. Spain’s permanent presence in the Philippines began in 1565 with the expedition of Miguel López de Legazpi. The heart of the Spanish presence in the islands was and would always remain Manila, since most Spaniards, lured by the promise of trade, stayed in or near the city. The Manila galleon provided the lifeline between this city and New Spain’s mainland. The Philippines never became a profitable colony, and the crown’s continuing commitment to the islands took on a religious and missionary character. Augustinian friars arrived with Legazpi, followed shortly later by the Discalced Franciscans in 1578, the Jesuits in 1581, and finally the Dominicans in 1587.5 Within a decade of their arrival, the Jesuits founded the Colegio de San Ignacio in Manila. This was the setting for the troubling events surrounding the indigenous woman Luisa de los Reyes. The Inquisition in the Philippines was a dependent office of the tribunal of New Spain and was overseen by a commissioner. His task was to gather information and testimony, send it to the inquisitors in Mexico, and then await further instructions. Only after receiving authorization could he arrest suspects and place them on the next ship back to Acapulco and then overland to the tribunal in Mexico City. This process added years to the already notoriously slow workings of the Inquisition, making the institution especially ineffectual in the Philippines.6 The commissioner handled few cases, only a small percentage involving charges of heresy; efforts at censorship proved largely futile, and Edicts of Faith were published only sporadically.7 In Manila the Inquisition was better known for antagonizing secular authority than for enforcing orthodoxy.8 The denunciation provided by Francisco de los Rios in 1663 was the first the inquisitors in Mexico heard about the affair of the indigenous woman and her Jesuit advocates, and it prompted them to investigate.9 De los Rios claimed that Luisa de los Reyes, a young indigenous beata of the Pampanga ethnic group, had resided outside the Jesuit school in Manila for years and was a familiar figure because of her frequent participation in the sacraments of penance and communion with the Jesuits.10 According to de los Rios, she believed herself to be a saint.11 However, considering his recent expulsion from the order, his efforts “to discharge his conscience” by implicating his former brethren were suspicious at best.12 His termination, he admitted, resulted when the confessor of his servant broke the seal of confession to report him to the Jesuit provincial for spending a night in the home of a widow. Breaking the confessional seal was problematic, but de los Rios’s actions were deemed more so and the superior chose to expel him for his offense against the honor of the Society.13

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Despite his own transgressions, de los Rios alleged that in 1654 de los Reyes convinced the Jesuit Francisco Manuel Fernández, her confessor, of her holiness. She was persuasive enough that he involved two other Jesuits, Javier Riquelme and Juan Bautista Surero, and together the three formed a cohort of devotees.14 Fernández, the propagandist of the group, unabashedly praised and publicly declared de los Reyes a woman of divine virtue, blessed by God. On multiple occasions he announced that his wish to know a female saint, such as Saints Teresa of Ávila, Catherine of Siena, or Agnes, was satisfied by his interactions with de los Reyes. Her marvelous feats only confirmed his conviction of her sanctity. According to her followers, she had died multiple times, only to be miraculously returned to life by God to suffer for the souls in purgatory. Her blessings included fits of fainting, raptures, and ecstasies, during which her eyes rolled back, she grimaced, and she called out to angels and other celestial beings. She also possessed the ability to heal the fatally ill.15 Certain of the sanctity of all that he witnessed, Fernández began to record de los Reyes’s revelations and raptures and prepared to write her biography.16 The fact that regular “confession served as a catalyst for life writings” is clear. However, more difficult to discern is the motivation for doing so.17 Such writings could have promoted Fernández himself as a renowned confessor to a holy figure, his order for uncovering a hidden saintly figure among the indigenous, or even the larger colonial project in which “religious women played an important part in establishing a spiritual-cultural colonial power.”18 None of the previously stated characteristics of this case were particularly surprising. The Jesuits had found Pampangos (considered the “Castilians of the Indios”), and Pampango women in particular, to be especially receptive to their evangelizing mission.19 Although beatas were not unknown in the islands, these women were limited in the ways they could channel their newfound religious fervor.20 Though two indigenous beatas participated in the missionary work of the Augustinians in the first half of the century, and two indigenous women joined convents during the 1630s, by the 1660s similar efforts were denied.21 The likelihood of formal acceptance into a Third Order was equally remote. A beaterio for indigenous beatas had been founded in Bolinao, nearly 300 kilometers to the north of Manila, by the Recollects in 1659 but fell victim to conflicts over spiritual administration just two decades later.22 The Jesuits would eventually oversee a beaterio for Filipinas, under the guidance of Ignacia del Espíritu Santo, a woman of Chinese and Tagalog origin, but this would occur too late to provide a viable option for de los Reyes. In the middle of the century there were few outlets for the religious expression of devout Filipinas, thus leaving de los Reyes in a particularly precarious position.23 Such women, however, did not find themselves without advocates. Friars from various orders realized the potential of these women to spread Catholic teachings, extolling their service and praising their virtue in biographies, especially during the seventeenth century. The Jesuits were at the forefront of this tendency.24 In fact, the earliest female religious congregation, a group of beatas exiled from Japan, had been placed under Jesuit supervision upon their arrival in Manila.25

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When the last of these beatas died they were interred in the Society’s school of San Ignacio.26 At the same moment that the Jesuits lost these models of female sanctity, certain members of the Society began to seek out new exemplars of feminine virtue, such as Luisa de los Reyes. As an indigenous laywoman, even if particularly holy, she was an unlikely saint. Nonetheless, this identity made her attractive to an evangelizing order seeking converts in the farthest reaches of the Spanish Empire, especially as the Jesuits prepared to embark on the “spiritual conquest” of the Mariana Islands.27 In reality, the Jesuits’ ability to harness the potential of even indigenous women to become exemplary Christians made these women “trophy converts,” proof of the success of the Jesuits’ global mission.28 Had this been the full extent of the deeds of de los Reyes and her supporters, they might have continued without inquisitorial intervention. It was not heresy to believe a woman was especially gifted by God. However, suspicion mounted as de los Rios recounted Fernández’s alleged contention that this woman’s holiness was so pervasive that he could touch, caress, and even embrace her without any sensual desires or movement in him. Apparently in awe of her abilities, Fernández, sometimes accompanied by Riquelme, regularly visited de los Reyes’s home, where they would feed the beata by hand before reclining on a mattress to discuss spiritual matters. Fernández supposedly brought her gifts of bread and chocolate and, on one occasion, golden bracelets. Ostensibly he described de los Reyes as a pearl, placed in his hand by God, that he would not release for anyone.29 Not everyone was convinced. In 1654, the Jesuit provincial concluded that de los Reyes was not on a righteous or saintly path and ordered Fernández, her confessor, to terminate all communication. Fernández refused and claimed he would not obey his provincial, or even the Pope, if ordered to abandon his duties to her. In reaction to his obstinacy, his co-religionists seized all his writings about de los Reyes to determine if they should denounce him to the Inquisition. The Jesuits proved indecisive on this point but made certain to burn Fernández’s papers and banish him from Manila.30 The Inquisition found Fernández’s defiance of his superior’s orders for the sake of a woman of questionable character and dubious sanctity deeply disturbing. De los Rios’s denunciation provided the foundation on which the Inquisition would assess de los Reyes and her Jesuit supporters. The inquisitorial staff in New Spain accepted his description of de los Reyes as a beata without questioning the nature of her profession or vows. Neither Surero nor Riquelme referred to her as a beata, at least not initially. It is unclear how Fernández described her because no documentation remains of any formal proceedings against him. By this period it would have been clear, especially to the Jesuits who had suffered earlier brushes with the Inquisition for their support of pious laywomen and association with alleged alumbrado groups, that beatas readily incited inquisitorial suspicions. The delicate position of the beata, a pious laywoman living outside the cloister, had a long history in Spain. Some beatas enjoyed great popularity and renown in the early decades of the sixteenth century, but the Council of Trent, in theory, obliged these women to accept enclosure or return to live with their families. In

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reality, many women continued to ascribe to this lifestyle, often with male support. By the end of the century, however, the Inquisition had become increasingly convinced that beatas represented a threat to orthodoxy.31 Among the variety of ways to discredit such a woman was to charge her as a member, or even leader, of what the Inquisition deemed “the heretical sect of alumbrados.” This class of heretic was first defined by an Edict of Faith in 1525 to describe a group of beatas and their followers active around Toledo, Spain, who spoke out against the exterior rituals of Catholic practice. The alleged sect never wrote a formal statement of doctrine, leaving the onus on the Inquisition to identify and formulate what exactly this group believed.32 According to the Edict of 1525, alumbrados rejected vocal prayer as imperfect and deprecated the importance of auricular confession. They allegedly claimed there was no need to give an accounting of one’s soul to anyone but God, denied the efficacy of good works, and rejected the veneration of images, saints, and even the cross as forms of idolatry.33 Their fundamental stance that an individual could have a relationship with God unmediated by the Catholic Church seemed particularly dangerous coming from a group led by New Christians and beatas, especially after Martin Luther’s schism.34 The definition of alumbradismo, although originating in the 1520s, was not static. In subsequent decades the behaviors that characterized this heresy changed substantially.35 However, the prominence of a spiritually gifted woman, often a beata, remained a constant among suspected groups. In 1575 inquisitors in Seville highlighted the propensity of beatas to promote the “invention of the alumbrados of this time.”36 New Spain never released an Edict of Faith solely addressing alumbrado heretics, but rather incorporated this heterodoxy into the General Edict of Faith. The “Sect of the Alumbrados” as described in the General Edict continued to emphasize such errors as the claim that mental prayer was superior to vocal prayer, the denial of the need for intermediaries between the individual and God, and the disparagement of the spiritual value of good works, ritual, and the veneration of saints and images. However, the Inquisition’s understanding of these alleged heretics by the 1570s had come to include ecstatic demonstrations of their supposed heavenly gifts. The Edict now explained how alumbrados believed that “certain fervors, shaking and fainting fits that they suffer are indications of the love of God.”37 Increasingly it was this behavior, often occurring during sacred moments such as the receiving of the Eucharist, that came to characterize those accused of the heresy. The fact that the earliest group charged as alumbrados would have loathed such exterior manifestations of God’s love was of no consequence. By the end of the seventeenth century, cases of alumbradismo, especially of this more performative genre, had been prosecuted across Spain and its colonies.38 De los Rios, not satisfied with merely inciting the suspicions that would accompany his identification of de los Reyes as a beata, also equated her to alumbrados recently punished in Mexico. De los Rios explained how a report of the 1659 auto de fe in Mexico City, a Relación de auto de fe, arrived at the Jesuit school in Manila by 1660 and was read and discussed with interest by members of the Society.39 In his denunciation, de los Rios recounted how this document

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discussed the case of “a Teresa” punished as an imposter and alumbrada, as well as the fact that her confessor and “accomplice,” the priest Joseph Bruñón de Vertiz, was burned in effigy for his participation in her crimes.40 De los Rios, supposedly in discussion with other Jesuits, claimed to have realized the analogous nature of de los Reyes and her Jesuit followers in Manila with these individuals punished in New Spain: “This was the express case of the beata Luisa de los Reyes and the fathers Manuel Fernández and Javier Riquelme.”41 Three years later, de los Rios identified de los Reyes and her followers as heretics by citing this document to the inquisitors of New Spain, at least as he remembered it. While the proceedings of the Inquisition theoretically remained secret, the auto de fe was designed for public edification. Although an Edict of Faith elucidated the tenets of heresy in the hopes of stimulating denunciations, it was at the auto de fe that the crimes and heresies of the community were dramatically put on display. The handling of cases from the Philippines in Mexico, including formal punishment at an auto de fe, should have protected the residents of Manila from this particular didactic exercise. However, the inquisitorially sanctioned documentation of these events ensured that the knowledge of heresy that could be gleaned from autos de fe would be disseminated to a much broader audience than just those present for the event. De los Rios recounted to the inquisitors that in a “report of the auto de fe celebrated by this Holy Office, in which a Don Joseph Bruñón de Vertiz was relaxed in effigy, one Teresa was also punished as an alumbrada and imposter.”42 This was accurate. According to the report, the priest Bruñón de Vertiz had been punished as “a heretic and his effigy was relaxed to the secular arm, with his bones that were exhumed.” What de los Rios failed to mention was that Bruñón de Vertiz had been imprisoned and charged as “vehemently suspect as an alumbrado.”43 This particular case had been entwined with the cases of four sisters, each of whom faced the Inquisition on charges of feigned sanctity. Almost immediately after his imprisonment Bruñón de Vertiz submitted himself to the Inquisition and its judgment. However, during his years of imprisonment, he would pen vitriolic diatribes against the Inquisition and the Catholic faith, convincing the inquisitors that his earlier deference was a sham and that as a relapsed heretic he deserved to die.44 His punishment, according to the report, was meant to serve as an example to those who might be tempted to endorse the plague of such “lost silly women (mugercillas), wicked in body and soul,” who, hiding their diabolic deceptions under a cloak of sanctity, could lead even a religious man “to the precipice of the greatest of evils, which is heresy.”45 De los Rios also cited the case of “a Teresa,” who, he claimed, was punished in the same auto de fe as an alumbrada and imposter.46 His memory proved less accurate on this count. A certain Teresa Romero did face inquisitorial punishment in the 1659 auto de fe as one of the sisters who Bruñón de Vertiz believed experienced divine visions, revelations, and ecstasies, which he transcribed and publicized without the sanction of the Church.47 The report of the auto de fe liberally referred to Romero as an imposter who feigned raptures, ecstasies,

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revelations, miracles, combats with the devil and, perhaps most incriminating of all, sanctity.48 However, not once was she charged as a heretical alumbrada in this document, despite de los Rios’s memory otherwise. De los Rios’s recollection led him to state that it was the woman involved, Teresa Romero, who was accused as an alumbrada, when in fact it was the priest who defended her delusions, Bruñón de Vertiz, who was so charged. The woman played the deceiver and was therefore guilty of deceit, but the priest’s sustained defense of her constituted heresy. This distinction between fraud and heresy was crucial in the Inquisition’s reasoning and choice of punishment.49 This same dynamic existed in the cases from Manila. The formal accusation against the Jesuits in 1667 stated that it was their continued belief in the fictions and false revelations of de los Reyes, despite the orders of their superiors, that demonstrated their adherence to the errors of the alumbrados.50 Though beatas continued to play a role in many of the manifestations of alumbradismo, over time the Inquisition became more concerned with the men, whether secular priests or members of religious orders, who followed, publicized, and defended them without the sanction and approval of their superiors or the Church.51 Although de los Rios cited the report of the auto de fe from 1659, this was in all likelihood only his most recent encounter with the charge of alumbradismo. Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit order, had faced the Inquisition accused as an alumbrado, and the order was regularly implicated in alleged outbreaks of the heresy, especially in the 1570s in southern Spain.52 Nonetheless, in his testimony he referenced the report of the auto de fe, a product of the Inquisition and its procedure, as his authoritative source. The denunciation of de los Rios epitomized the self-referential loop created by the Inquisition: providing the Inquisition with accusations based on evidence provided by that same institution in their punishment of similar accusations.53 The report of the auto de fe, or at least de los Rios’s memory of it, whether used in good conscience or not, ultimately spurred his denunciation and made it possible for him to construct the affair of de los Reyes and her Jesuit supporters as yet another manifestation of alumbradismo. This heresy had not spread to the Philippines due to contact between individuals accused as members of this sect. Instead, it was the Inquisition’s definition of what alumbradismo was and who should be punished for such deviance that reached the Philippines. Once spread among the Jesuit order, one of them—de los Rios—discovered appropriate suspects for the charge.54 Ironically, the discourse about the alumbrado heresy was disseminated by the same institution charged with eradicating it: “The Inquisition played a fundamental role in regulating orthodox Catholicism in colonial Mexico, and, through this regulation, in creating deviant Catholics,” even as far away as the Philippines.55 As Andrew W. Keitt aptly put it, “Whatever the intention of the church authorities, we must remain attentive to the potential unintended consequences of efforts to impose social discipline.”56 Thus, the alumbrado heresy, at least in the Philippines, was born of the circulation and discussion of inquisitorial documentation among the Jesuits, including de los Rios.57

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The Holy Office in New Spain, however, did not immediately acquiesce to de los Rios’s identification of alumbrados in Manila. From its foundation, charges of formal heresy were infrequent in New Spain, even more so in the Philippines.58 Upon receipt of the testimonies from Manila, the inquisitors of New Spain proceeded to a formal theological assessment, or calificación, of “the life and habit of Luisa de los Reyes, india beata resident in Manila and of the fathers Javier Riquelme, Francisco Manuel Fernández, and Juan Bautista Surero,” as presented in thirty suspicious propositions.59 Six calificadores (theologians used to determine the weight of heretical claims) judged the alleged offenses. Their assessment made it clear that the prime concern was the Jesuits’ support for de los Reyes and declarations of her sanctity in defiance of their superiors. The theologians voted unanimously on over twenty of the offenses, judging them to be aberrant behaviors of varying degrees. However, their opinions split on the remaining ten accusations, those most likened to formal heresy. The calificadores formed two distinct voting blocs. The stronger, both in size and rigor, included a Dominican, a Mercedarian, and a Franciscan. These men identified the Jesuits as heretics. Proof of their participation in “the sect of the alumbrados” included Riquelme and Fernández’s claim that their desire to know a female saint like Catherine or Teresa was satisfied upon encountering de los Reyes. According to these theologians, Fernández’s slavish devotion to de los Reyes, resulting in his repeated defiance of his superior’s orders, was also proof of his “alumbrado” character. Fernández’s assertion that she was like a pearl placed in the hand by God, that he would renounce for no one, reaffirmed this judgment. The theologians judged that Fernández’s claim that he could touch de los Reyes’s face and chest, even embrace her, without feeling any “sensual movement” was only an effort to conceal the fact that he was an alumbrado.60 On the other hand, the more lenient theologians, an Augustinian and a Jesuit, appraised these same propositions as fraudulent, scandalous, ill-sounding, rash, imprudent, and simply a means to disguise fraud. Although this assessment was not approving, it did not liken the actions of the Jesuits to heresy, a significantly more serious offense. Only four propositions dealt solely with de los Reyes, although she was implicated in two others alongside the Jesuits. According to the calificadores, de los Reyes was alone culpable for her claims to have seen and experienced the pain of purgatory. The testimony alleging that she was seen walking with a young man whom she later slept with further marked her as a fraud, rather than a member of a heretical sect.61 Along with the Jesuits, she was accused of believing herself a saint, aiding her Jesuit followers in propagating her sanctity, and claiming to experience raptures and ecstasies in the presence of these same men. The theologians did not designate these acts as heretical. In fact, the closest any of her presumed offenses came to actual heresy was her alleged claim that through her intercession God had removed a soul from hell. The judges pointed to this as an example of “formal heresy,” though they failed to identify the exact genre. De los Reyes was never clearly identified with the heresy of alumbradismo.62 In April 1669 the Jesuit provincial in Manila wrote to the tribunal of New Spain demanding a report on the pending cases against his brethren. The tribunal

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reported to the Suprema in Madrid about the matter. The dispatch included the details of the denunciation, aggregate testimony, and the Jesuits’ efforts to handle the affair without inquisitorial involvement. The tribunal’s staff in New Spain concluded that, based on the testimony and theological assessments, they should pursue the cases against the Jesuits Fernández, Riquelme, and Surero, especially considering “the danger that there may be in treating things of the spirit with women, and more so indigenous women.”63 However, these cases had already caused a stir among the Jesuits in Manila. The tribunal of New Spain, perhaps fearing a confrontation with the Jesuits in the Philippines or even the order at large, chose instead to suspend the cases and allow the Society to discipline their own.64 The historians Medina and Lea concluded that this ended the entire affair. However, previously unstudied documents in Mexico show that at least one of these cases was far from over. In 1672 the inquisitors of New Spain wrote to the Suprema admitting that de los Reyes’ case, because she was an indigenous woman, lay outside their jurisdiction.65 The indigenous peoples of the New World had enjoyed exemption from inquisitorial persecution since 1571 because they failed to qualify as “people of reason.”66 This exemption, resting on the assumption that de los Reyes was too ignorant to knowingly contravene orthodoxy, placed the burden of guilt on the Jesuits who had encouraged, believed, and patronized her. Seven years earlier, when the proceedings had opened, these cases had been referred to as against “Luisa de los Reyes and accomplices.”67 Upon admitting their inability to prosecute de los Reyes, the tribunal carefully referred to the cases as those of “the Fathers Javier Riquelme and Francisco Manuel Fernández of the Society and other accomplices.”68 Despite the tribunal’s earlier suspension of the case against the Jesuits, a new prosecutor, Don Alonso Cevallos y Gutiérrez, reopened the matter in 1674. While previous theological assessments treated the group as a whole, Cevallos y Gutiérrez was now interested in the specific offenses of Riquelme, who still resided in Manila.69 The inquisitors consented. By this time both Fernández and Surero had died and de los Reyes’s exemption from inquisitorial scrutiny left Riquelme the last man standing to be held responsible for the deeds of the entire group. The separate theological assessment of Riquelme appeared the following year in 1675 and exhibited obvious overlap with the previous assessment. However, what defined Riquelme as an alumbrado to the theologians this time were the same deeds previously attributed to the now deceased Fernández: disobedience to his superiors by continuing communication with de los Reyes, inappropriate fondling, and providing her with alms.70 Two days after this latest assessment, again at the urging of the prosecutor, the inquisitors ordered Riquelme to appear before them in Mexico City. The directive reached Manila three years later at the end of 1678. The Jesuits in Manila made an effort to locate the papers of the deceased Fernández to accompany Riquelme back to New Spain, but they were unable to do so.71 In 1680, five years after the dispatch of the order, Riquelme appeared before the inquisitors of New Spain and was promptly arrested.72

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While awaiting Riquelme’s arrival, however, the inquisitors received a crucial document. The new commissioner in the Philippines had travelled to Luisa de los Reyes’ natal village of Abucay, where she had returned after leaving Manila, to interview her about her experiences with the Jesuits. By all accounts de los Reyes’s greatest supporter had always been Fernández, but due to his death the commissioner directed his questions to the man who had previously been only an accessory, Riquelme. This is the only testimony from de los Reyes in the extant documentation and is mediated through a Tagalog translator. More than a decade after the initiation of the cases against her and her supporters, when asked if she knew or presumed why she had been summoned she pleaded ignorance. The commissioner proceeded to more specific questions, asking if she knew Riquelme, if he had come to her home, given her alms, shared food with her, or reclined on a mattress with her to discuss spiritual matters such as her visions and revelations or ecstasies, all actions previously attributed to Fernández. She denied all these things, claiming she only discussed spiritual matters with Fernández. De los Reyes described her visions to the commissioner in the process of explaining her discussions with her confessor. Contrary to the aggregate testimony, however, she claimed that Fernández disapproved of her visions, attributing them to mental weakness. As for Riquelme, she claimed she only knew him because she had seen him with Fernández and they had only exchanged simple courtesies because he did not speak her language. However, in the marginalia of her testimony, the commissioner chose to note that, in fact, Riquelme had preached in de los Reyes’s native language on various occasions.73 What de los Reyes failed to mention in her testimony, however, is revealing. She never mentioned the incidents of her supposed deaths and miraculous resurrections to suffer for the souls in purgatory. She made no mention of Jesuits ever visiting her home, sharing food, or inappropriately touching her. She painted Fernández as a voice of reason, condemning her foolish visions rather than blindly endorsing them as others had claimed. Absent were any claims to divine gifts or sanctity, or reference to others attributing them to her. De los Reyes chose to deflect concern about the Jesuits, admitting to only minimal interactions with Riquelme and depicting Fernández as a wise and cautious spiritual director. It was a radically different picture than the one painted by previously collected testimony. Rather than any conscious strategy to thwart inquisitorial procedure, de los Reyes’s testimony may have been simply an attempt to put an end to an investigation that had, by this time, dragged on for over a decade. Back in Mexico, Riquelme received his first hearing before the inquisitors months after his imprisonment and more than fifteen years after his alleged devotion to de los Reyes began. Riquelme provided the most complete description of de los Reyes’ life and visions as well as her interactions with her confessor. He narrated how only after the death of de los Reyes’ original confessor did she begin working with Fernández. Under his counsel to examine her heart, body, and soul, giving it all over to God as her true husband, de los Reyes supposedly took a vow of chastity.74 Fernández then allegedly began instructing her in

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spiritual matters, teaching her about heaven, the Holy Trinity, Jesus Christ, and the Virgin Mary. De los Reyes’ visions began in the wake of this instruction and sometimes included demons in the form of bulls, snakes, dragons, or even caiman alligators. Other times her visions were more celestial. Apparently, female saints appeared to her, as did an apparition of the crucified Christ. Once the Virgin Mary, accompanied by a young Jesus, appeared to ask if de los Reyes would accept a crown of thorns to suffer for the souls in purgatory. These visions lasted whole days, sometimes multiple days, and led those around her to believe she had died. According to Riquelme, such events led Fernández to question her experiences, but he concluded that the occurrence of similar events in the lives of saints, both the torments of demons and apparitions of the divine, meant that de los Reyes was indeed spiritually gifted. During Riquelme’s hearings he never described de los Reyes as a beata, and never referred to any form of heresy, at least not until hearing the charges against him. After considering the testimonies from Manila, the initial denunciation, and Riquelme’s statements, the inquisitorial prosecutor formally accused Riquelme in August 1680. Adopting the language of the denunciation by de los Rios and utilized by the calificadores, the prosecutor described de los Reyes as a beata and charged Riquelme as an alumbrado. In opening and closing statements, the prosecutor argued that Riquelme, through the “fictions and false revelations occasioned by a certain woman, an indigenous Pampanga beata, that he had believed, said and committed actions demonstrating that he follows and falls into the errors of the alumbrados.”75 The prosecutor identified the supposed offenses: Riquelme’s belief and broadcasting that the beata was a saint who had died repeatedly and was miraculously returned to life by God to suffer for the souls in purgatory, claiming that her intercession could free souls from purgatory as well as heal the sick, and his willingness to bring her alms and attest that she had in fact received gifts from God greater than those of saints Catherine of Siena or Teresa of Ávila. Riquelme’s lesser crimes consisted of lies, deceptions, rash actions, and beliefs scandalous and injurious to the Holy Catholic faith. Hearing his formal accusation, Riquelme now adopted the language of the prosecutor, referring to de los Reyes as a beata and the heresy of alumbradismo. In his first response to the accusation, Riquelme conscientiously avoided describing de los Reyes as a beata, instead calling her “an indigenous woman” or simply “the said Luisa de los Reyes.” By his second hearing, Riquelme realized that conceding this point was likely in his best interest and began describing de los Reyes as a beata or the “said indigenous beata.” This was not his only linguistic adoption from the inquisition’s accusation. Finally hearing the charges against him, he chose to deny his participation by embracing the idiom of the heresy he was charged with, mimicking the language of the prosecutor in asserting that he had not believed, said, or committed any of the errors of the “sect of the alumbrados.”76 Like de los Rios previously, Riquelme only deployed the vocabulary of the heresy of alumbradismo after it had been provided to him by his encounter with the Inquisition or its documents.

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Later that year and while still imprisoned, Riquelme adjusted his defensive tactics, choosing to acknowledge some of the accusations while pleading ignorance to others. He recognized that his accusation as an alumbrado stemmed from his alleged support for the revelations and visions of de los Reyes and for approving and publicizing her as a servant of God against the admonitions of his superiors. Still, Riquelme asserted that “the body of this offense, the quality and fundamental principal of it have not been proven,” but conceded that if he had erred, it was out of ignorance. Not informed of the witnesses against him as mandated by inquisitorial procedure, Riquelme nonetheless surmised that the first testimony against him, “the driving force of all this case,” was his “mortal enemy” Francisco de los Rios. He went on to name others in the Society of Jesus whom he suspected of speaking ill of him for various malicious reasons. Since the testimony of mortal enemies—if it could be confirmed that they were such—was inadmissible, this was one of the best tactics available to inquisitorial suspects.77 The rest of the allegations he decried as lies or the sole doing of the now deceased Fernández. Finally, at the end of 1680, the inquisitors reached a decision in the case of Riquelme. Despite reopening the case after its previous suspension, the inquisitors chose leniency. They voted to reprimand him in the inquisitorial courtroom, although making it clear that if he ever approved of such visions or revelations of any other person they would proceed against him with the greatest of rigor. That same year Riquelme was planning his return trip to Manila as a respected member of the Society of Jesus. He died in Manila in 1692.78 Conclusion From the case of Luisa de los Reyes and her Jesuit supporters in Manila it is obvious that in some cases the Inquisition’s efforts to stamp out heresy actually, and ironically, provided the knowledge necessary to spread it. The institution’s pedagogical efforts to enforce orthodoxy ultimately facilitated the identification and spread of deviance: “Heresy did and does not exist in and of itself, but only in relation to orthodoxy.”79 By identifying a “sect of alumbrados,” the Inquisition forced itself into the position of guaranteeing the reality of this group, and there was no better means than through Edicts of Faith and autos de fe.80 Without the prosecution of alumbrados by the Inquisition in Spain in the sixteenth century or in Mexico in the middle of the seventeenth century, there would have been no identification of alumbrados in the Philippines: “The Inquisition created the vocabulary of the alumbrado heresy, taught it to the public, who denounced practitioners in their communities, and catalogued its existence in trial proceedings.”81 The knowledge and categories produced by inquisitorial persecution spread particularly successfully through the learned Jesuits amidst their global evangelizing mission. The Jesuits’ official charge to “alumbrar” (enlighten) those they encountered was therefore ironically fulfilled by enlightening them about a heresy by the same name, alumbradismo.82

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After facilitating this dissemination of knowledge, and therefore charges, of alumbradismo to the Philippines, the Inquisition ultimately proved wary of pursuing such heresies across the Pacific. This reluctance was two-pronged. The first difficulty stemmed from the individuals accused. Although the composition of the group was not atypical of alumbrado cells, a number of other characteristics were inconsistent with inquisitorial ideas about this heresy by this time. The predominance of men in the accused cohort mirrored trends of other contemporaneous alumbrado allegations. In the seventeenth century alumbrado prosecutions increasingly found fault with the confessors of women who wandered down unholy and unrighteous paths.83 These directors of conscience were believed to be as guilty as, if not more than, the female penitents they placed their faith in and publicized as holy. Among the inquisitors it was assumed that the illusions of a simple woman should have been curbed, rather than encouraged and publicized, by her confessor.84 Furthermore, in the seventeenth century in New Spain, nearly all alleged alumbrados were criollos, that is, individuals of Spanish heritage born in the New World.85 De los Reyes’ indigenous identity made her not only an unlikely alumbrada but also exempt from inquisitorial jurisdiction. Alongside de los Reyes, the other accused individuals were Jesuits. Although members of the Society were regularly suspected of colluding with alumbrados, the order had proven itself a formidable adversary when it came to interference by the Inquisition. Therefore, although de los Rios’s allegations shared certain parallels with inquisitorial conventions regarding alumbrado suspects, and did convince the institution to investigate, the Inquisition ultimately refrained from punishing them. Secondly, despite de los Rios’s use of a heretical idiom provided and sanctioned by the Inquisition, the alumbradismo uncovered in Manila lacked doctrinal substance at a time when the Inquisition’s interest was being diverted toward other forms of heterodoxy. The alleged propositions of those accused lacked the antinomian sentiments that were the touchstone of alumbrado heretics, even as the expectations of how those sentiments were manifested had radically changed over time. The Manila group failed to emphasize key alumbrado concepts, such as the importance of mental prayer and the rejection of church mediation between the individual and God. In fact, it was the alleged sentiments of impeccability amidst inappropriate physical contact that perhaps most identified the Manila group as alumbrados in the inquisitorial mind.86 Although the group’s practices were occasionally likened to heresy, in reality they were more closely related to various types of religious errors, such as solicitation by confessors, disobedience to religious superiors, feigned sanctity, or suspicious propositions, rather than any willful contravention of orthodoxy. Additionally, by this time the Holy Office had found its previous interest in alumbrados diverted to newer, more pressing heterodoxies. The concerns of the Inquisition were evolving, alumbrados were no longer a heresy of particular concern, and ultimately “as an institution, the Inquisition was relatively unresponsive to theories that did not fit into its current agenda.”87

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Heretics of all sorts only “materialized under the glaring spotlight of publicity and vanished when no interest was shown in them.”88 The burden of disseminating knowledge about heresy, through its definition and classification, ultimately rested with the very institution whose purpose was to eradicate the products created by this knowledge. However, when the inquisitors demonstrated restraint in their prosecution, or at least publication, of particular crimes, so, too, did the Catholic population upon which they depended for denunciations. The Inquisition’s restraint in handling the cases of alleged alumbrados in Manila ensured that these cases would never be cited as evidence to justify the identification of more alumbrados. Although the heresy of alumbradismo would remain listed in the Edict of Faiths read aloud in Manila in the Tagalog language as late as 1778, heretics of this genre were never again identified in the Philippines.89 The example of de los Reyes and her Jesuit supporters demonstrates that the Holy Office of New Spain, although it readily investigated allegations of heresy, did not accept denunciations of alumbradismo casually or uncritically.

Notes  *  Research for this chapter was conducted through the generosity of the University of California’s Pacific Rim Research Program.  1. Archivo General de la Nación (Mexico), Inquisición, Vol. 608, exp. 1, f. 1–9; hereafter AGN.  2. Important works that address alumbrados in New Spain include Nora Jaffary, False Mystics: Deviant Orthodoxy in Colonial Mexico (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004); Jacqueline Holler, “ ‘More Sins than the Queen of England’: Marina de San Miguel before the Mexican Inquisition,” in Women in the Inquisition: Spain and the New World, ed. Mary E. Giles (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 209–28. The most thorough treatment of this heresy as it appeared in Mexico can be found in pages 593–914 of Álvaro Huerga, Los alumbrados de hispanoamerica (1570–1605) (Madrid: FUE, 1986), the third of his five-volume Historia de los Alumbrados (Madrid: FUE, 1978–1994).  3. José Toribio Medina, El tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición en las Islas Filipinas (Santiago de Chile: Imprenta Elzeviriana, 1899).  4. Henry Charles Lea, The Inquisition in the Spanish Dependencies (New York: Macmillan, 1908).  5. John Leddy Phelan, The Hispanization of the Philippines: Spanish Aims and Filipino Responses, 1565–1700 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2010 (1967)), 8–13, 31–33, 36.  6. This travel sometimes resulted in lost correspondence and occasionally even the death of prisoners. Lea, Inquisition in the Spanish Dependencies, 299–304.  7. Edicts of Faith would be read aloud sometimes fifty years apart. This type of document was a catalog of heresy, meant to be read aloud to the populace to inform them of the types of deviance they should be prepared to denounce. F. Delor Angeles, “The Philippine Inquisition: A Survey,” Philippine Studies 28.3 (1980): 253–283, 280.  8. Lea, Inquisition in the Spanish Dependencies, 305–8.  9. The Inquisition’s commissioner in Manila was already gathering testimony.

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10. AGN, Inquisición, Vol. 608, exp. 1, f. 4. The Jesuits were known for advocating and teaching the practice of frequent confession and communion. Robert Aleksander Maryks, Saint Cicero and the Jesuits: The Influence of the Liberal Arts on the Adoption of Moral Probabilism (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008), 19–23. Nevertheless, some clerics argued that frequent communion, especially when practiced by laywomen, diminished the mystery of the sacrament. Jodi Bilinkoff, Related Lives: Confessors and Their Female Penitents, 1450–1750 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 92–95. 11. AGN, Inquisición, Vol. 608, exp. 1, f. 4–4v. 12. Ibid., Vol. 608, exp. 1, f. 4; Vol. 604, exp. 45, f. 528. All translations are the author’s own. 13. Archivo Histórico Nacional (Spain), Inquisición, Legajo 2274, s.f. Hereafter AHN. 14. It is interesting to note that despite the international character of the Company of Jesus in Manila, all of the Jesuits involved in the case of Luisa de los Reyes were Spanish. 15. For other examples of religious women and their various experiences in the Spanish Indies, see Magnus Lundberg, Mission and Ecstasy: Contemplative Women and Salvation in Colonial Spanish America and the Philippines (Uppsala, Sweden: Uppsala Universitet, 2015). 16. AHN, Legajo 2274; AGN, Inquisición, Vols 604, 608. For more information on confessors’ propensity to author the spiritual biographies of their penitents, see Kathleen Ann Myers, Neither Saints Nor Sinners: Writing the Lives of Women in Spanish America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Jodi Bilinkoff, Related Lives. 17. Myers, Neither Saints Nor Sinners, ix. 18. Ibid., viii; J. Michelle Molina and Ulrike Strasser, “Missionary Men and the Global Currency of Female Sanctity” in Women, Religion, and the Atlantic World (1600–1800), ed. Daniella Kostroun and Lisa Vollendorf (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 156–79. 19. Luciano P.R. Santiago, “ ‘To Love and Suffer’: The Development of the Religious Congregations for Women in the Philippines During the Spanish Era (1565–1898),” Philippine Quarterly of Culture and Society 23.2 (1995): 167, 182. 20. Ángel Martínez Cuesta, “Monjas y beatas en Filipinas, 1621–1898,” in I Congreso internacional del monacato femenino en España, Portugal y América, 1492–1992, vol. 1 (León: Universidad de León, 1993), 514. 21. The Royal Monastery of the Immaculate Conception of the Barefoot Nuns of Saint Clare was the first female convent in Manila and was opened in 1621. However, it did not admit indigenous women. Santiago, “To Love and to Suffer,” 166–68, 171–74, 180–84; Luciano P.R. Santiago, To Love and to Suffer: The Development of the Religious Congregations for Women in the Spanish Philippines, 1565–1898 (Manila: Atento de Manila University Press, 2006), 63–68; Lundburg, Mission and Ecstasy, 164–65. 22. Santiago, To Love and to Suffer, 87. 23. Ibid., 119–28; Luciano P.R. Santiago, “The ‘Living Documents’ of Mother Ignacia del Espíritu Santo (1663–1748), Unitas 63 (1990): 546–54. 24. For further information, see Santiago, “ ‘To Love and to Suffer,’ ” 168–69. On the Jesuits’ role as confessors to female penitents, see Bilinkoff, Related Lives, 8; Andrew W. Keitt, Inventing the Sacred: Imposture, Inquisition, and the Boundaries of the Supernatural in Golden Age Spain (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 104; Molina and Strasser, “Missionary Men and the Global Currency of Female Sanctity”; Elizabeth Rhodes, “Join the Jesuits, See the World: Early Modern Women in Spain and the Society of Jesus,” in The Jesuits II: Cultures,

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Sciences, and the Arts, 1540–1773, ed. John W. O’Malley, et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 33–49; Maryks, Saint Cicero and the Jesuits, 26–30. On specific examples of beatas in the Philippines praised by the Jesuits see Santiago, To Love and to Suffer, 40–42. 25. See the essay by Haruko Ward in this volume, “Women Apostles in Early Modern Japan, 1549–1650.” 26. Santiago, “To Love and to Suffer,” 171–74. 27. Alexandre Coello de la Rosa, “Colonialismo y santidad en las islas Marianas: La sangre de los mártires (1668–1676),” Hispania Sacra 63 (2011): 707–45. 28. Molina and Strasser, “Missionary Men and the Global Currency of Female Sanctity,” 160, 169. 29. AHN, Legajo 2274, s.f. 30. Ibid. 31. On the changing attitudes towards beatas, see Mary Elizabeth Perry, Gender and Disorder in Early Modern Seville (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 97–117, and the essay by María Laura Giordano in this volume, “Historicizing the Beatas: The Figures behind Reformation and Counter-Reformation Conflicts.” 32. All the extant documentation of these earlier cases was created for and by the Inquisition within the context of prosecuting these individuals as a cohesive sect. The organization of this group, in reality, seems to have been significantly less coherent than the Inquisition believed, in the 1520s as well as the coming centuries as the charge of alumbradismo spread across the entire Spanish Empire. Moore reminds us that “the very process of identifying and rebutting heresy gave it a greater coherence, and therefore a more menacing aspect, than it actually possessed.” R.I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Authority and Deviance in Western Europe, 950–1250, 2nd edition (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), 67. 33. Antonio Márquez, Los Alumbrados (Madrid: Taurus, 1972), 273–83. 34. Alastair Hamilton, Heresy and Mysticism in Sixteenth-Century Spain: The Alumbrados (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 65–75. 35. Jessica Fowler, “Assembling Alumbradismo: The Evolution of a Heretical Construct,” in After Conversion: Iberia and the Emergence of Modernity, ed. Mercedes García-Arenal (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2015, forthcoming). 36. AHN, Inquisición, Legajo 2946, s.f. 37. “ciertos ardores, temblores, y desmayos que padecen, son indicios del amor de Dios.” General Edict of Faith, Mexico, 1650, AGN, Inquisición, Edictos, vol. 3, f. 101v. 38. Fowler, “Assembling Alumbradismo”; Huerga, Historia de los Alumbrados, vol. 5. 39. Rodrigo Ruíz de Zepeda Martínez, Relación del auto general de la fee celebrado . . . en la muy noble y muy leal ciudad de México (Mexico:1659). AHN, Inquisición, Legajo 2274, s.f. 40. This punishment was reserved for those who were sentenced to death but had escaped the Inquisition or died in its prisons. Vertiz’s punishment was due to the latter. AGN, Inquisición, vol. 608, exp. 1, f. 5v. 41. “Hay está el caso expreso de la beata Luisa de los Reyes y de los padres Manuel Fernández y Javier Riquelme.” AGN, Inquisición, vol. 608, exp. 1, f. 5v. 42. Ibid. 43. “Fue declarado por Herege, y su Estatua fue relejada a la justicia y braço seglar, con sus huesos, que fueron exhumados” Ruíz de Zepeda Martínez, Relación del auto general.

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44. Henry Charles Lea, Chapters from the Religious History of Spain Connected with the Inquisition (New York: Burt Franklin, 1890), 367–73, 492–93. 45. “el que dio crédito a unas mugercillas perdidas, malas en cuerpos, y almas, y le condujeron al precipicio del último de los males, q[ue] es la Heregía; y este es el fruto, que de ordinario se coge de la comunicación de mujeres embusteras, revelacioneras, y con capa de virtud, y santidad son más dañosas, que el infierno todo! Y quiera la Divina bondad sirva de escarmiento a Eclesiásticos, a Regulares, y a seculares lo acaecido, para que las eviten como a peste, y como a contagio diabólico, y no sucedan otros casos semejantes al referido” Ruíz de Zepeda Martínez, Relación del auto general. 46.  AGN, Inquisición, Vol. 608, exp. 1, f. 5v. 47. “y en este mesmo auto salió al teatro del mundo el infelice de don Joseph Bruñón de Vertiz, effecto de esta verdad y de las maldades e iniquidades de esta rea y de sus hermanas.” Ruíz Zepeda Martínez, Relación del auto general. 48. Ibid. 49. Lea, Inquisition in the Spanish Dependencies, 239. 50. AGN, Inquisición, Vol. 608, exp. 1, f. 1. 51. Adelina Sarrión Mora, Beatas y endemoniadas: mujeres heterodoxas ante la Inquisición, siglos XVI a XIX (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2003), 283–84, 324–25. 52. Ignacio Cacho Nazabal, Iñigo de Loyola el heterodoxo (San Sebastián: Universidad de Deusto, 2006), 149–91; Enrique García Hernán, Ignacio de Loyola (Madrid: Taurus, 2013). 53. Jaffary, False Mystics, 17. 54. Moore, Formation of a Persecuting Society, 296. 55. Jaffary, False Mystics, 4. 56. Keitt, Inventing the Sacred, 181. 57. By the seventeenth century the inquisitor Alonso de Salazar Frías had already recognized the role proscriptive efforts played in spreading deviance. He wrote, “There were neither witches nor bewitched until they were talked about written about.” Gustav Henningsen, The Witches’ Advocate: Basque Witchcraft and the Spanish Inquisition (1609– 1614) (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1980), i. 58. Delor Angeles, “The Philippine Inquisition,” 280. 59. AGN, Inquisición, Vol. 604, exp 45, f. 561v. 60. Ibid., f. 562–562v, 566v–567. This type of antinomianism had come to the fore of alumbradismo accusations during the 1570s and would remain a recurring theme. Hamilton, Heresy and Mysticism, 35, 119. 61. AGN, Inquisición, Vol. 604, f. 565v–566r. 62. Ibid., f. 562–569v. 63. AHN, Inquisición, Legajo 2274, s.f. 64. Ibid.; Medina, El tribunal del Santo Oficio, 62–66; Lea, Inquisition in the Spanish Dependencies, 305. 65. “por ser india.” AHN, Inquisición, Libro 1061, f. 401. 66. Lea, Inquisition in the Spanish Dependencies, 210–11; Delor Angeles, “The Philippine Inquisition,” 271. 67. AGN, Inquisición, Vol. 604, exp. 45, f. 526. 68. AHN, Inquisición, Libro 1061, f. 401. 69. AGN, Inquisición, Vol. 608, exp. 1, f. 52. 70. Ibid., f. 53.

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71. It is unclear why they searched for papers that they previously claimed to have burned. 72. AGN, Inquisición, Vol. 608, exp. 1, f. 69–71. 73. “flaqueza de cabeza.” Ibid., f. 62–63v. 74. “[F]emale penitents were trained to have deeper insights into their consciences and to reflect seriously on the way God was guiding their lives. . . .” Markys, Saint Cicero and the Jesuits, 29. 75. “ficciones y revelaciones mentidas ocasionadas por cierta mujer india beata Pampanga ha creído, dicho y hecho acciones que le manifiestan sigue y caer los errores de los alumbrados.” AGN, Inquisición, Vol. 608, exp. 1, f. 90. 76. Ibid., f. 102–111v. 77. Ibid., f. 127–130v. 78. Ibid., f. 132–133, 135. Horacio de la Costa, Jesuits in the Philippines, 1581–1768 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), 435, 601, 616. 79. Edward Peters, ed., Heresy and Authority in Medieval Europe: Documents in Tradition (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1980), 14. 80. Henningsen, The Witches’ Advocate, 208. 81. Jaffary, False Mystics, 16. 82. Coello de la Rosa, “Colonialismo y santidad,” 718. 83. Jaffary, False Mystics, Appendix 1; Rodríguez Delgado, Santos o embusteros, 69– 70. 84. Adelina Sarrión Mora, Beatas y endemoniadas: mujeres heterodoxas ante la Inquisición, siglos XVI a XIX (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2003), 283–84, 324–25. 85. Jaffary, False Mystics, 4, Appendix 1. Adriana Rodríguez Delgado, Santos o embusteros: Los alumbrados novohispanos del siglo XVII (Mexico: Gobierno del Estado de Veracruz, 2013), 70. 86. Rodríguez Delgado, Santos o embusteros, 87–98. 87. Alison Weber, “The Inquisitor, the Flesh, and the Devil: Alumbradismo and Demon Possession,” in Dämonische Besessenheit: Zur Interpretation eines kulturhistorischen Phänomens, ed. Hans de Waardt (Bielefeld: Verlag fur Regionalgeschichte, 2005), 188. 88. Henningsen, The Witches’ Advocate, 387; Jaffary, False Mystics, 16–17. 89. AGN, Inq. Vol. 1172, exp. 6, f. 62.

Works Cited Archival Sources Archivo General de la Nación. Fondos de Inquisición. Mexico City. Archivo Histórico Nacional. Fondos de Inquisición. Madrid. Printed Sources Bilinkoff, Jodi. Related Lives: Confessors and Their Female Penitents, 1450– 1750. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005. Cacho Nazabal, Ignacio. Iñigo de Loyola el heterodoxo. San Sebastián: Universidad de Deusto, 2006.

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Coello de la Rosa, Alexandre. “Colonialismo y santidad en las islas Marianas: La sangre de los mártires (1668–1676).” Hispania Sacra 63 (2011): 707–45. Costa, Horacio de la. The Jesuits in the Philippines, 1581–1768. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961. Delor Angeles, F. “The Philippine Inquisition: A Survey.” Philippine Studies 28, no. 3 (1980): 253–83. Fowler, Jessica. “Assembling Alumbradismo: The Evolution of a Heretical Construct.” In After Conversion: Iberia and the Emergence of Modernity, edited by Mercedes García-Arenal. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2015, forthcoming. García Hernán, Enrique. Ignacio de Loyola. Madrid: Taurus, 2013. Hamilton, Alastair. Heresy and Mysticism in Sixteenth-Century Spain: The Alumbrados. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992. Henningsen, Gustav. The Witches’ Advocate: Basque Witchcraft and the Spanish Inquisition, 1609–1614. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1980. Holler, Jacqueline. “ ‘More Sins than the Queen of England’: Marina de San Miguel before the Mexican Inquisition.” In Women in the Inquisition: Spain and the New World, edited by Mary E. Giles, 209–28. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Huerga, Álvaro. Historia de los Alumbrados. 5 vols. Madrid: FUE, 1978–1994. Jaffary, Nora. False Mystics: Deviant Orthodoxy in Colonial Mexico. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. Keitt, Andrew W. Inventing the Sacred: Imposture, Inquisition, and the Boundaries of the Supernatural in Golden Age Spain. Leiden: Brill, 2005. Lea, Henry Charles. Chapters from the Religious History of Spain Connected with the Inquisition. New York: Burt Franklin, 1890. ———. The Inquisition in the Spanish Dependencies. New York: Macmillan, 1908. Lundberg, Magnus. Mission and Ecstasy: Contemplative Women and Salvation in Colonial Spanish America and the Philippines. Uppsala, Sweden: Uppsala Universitet, 2015. Márquez, Antonio. Los alumbrados. Madrid: Taurus, 1972. Martínez Cuesta, Ángel. “Monjas y beatas en Filipinas, 1621–1898.” In I Congreso internacional del monacato femenino en España, Portugal y América, 1492– 1992 vol. 1: 511–29. Leon: Universidad de León, 1993. Maryks, Robert Aleksander. Saint Cicero and the Jesuits: The Influence of the Liberal Arts on the Adoption of Moral Probabilism. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008. Medina, José Toribio. El Tribunal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición en las Islas Filipinas. Santiago de Chile: Imprenta Elzeviriana, 1899. Molina, J. Michelle, and Ulrike Strasser. “Missionary Men and the Global Currency of Female Sanctity.” In Women, Religion, and the Atlantic World (1600–1800), edited by Daniella Kostroun and Lisa Vollendorf, 156–79. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009.

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Moore, R.I. The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Authority and Deviance in Western Europe, 950–1250. 2nd edition. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007. Myers, Kathleen Ann. Neither Saints nor Sinners: Writing the Lives of Women in Spanish America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Perry, Mary Elizabeth. Gender and Disorder in Early Modern Seville. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. Peters, Edward, ed. Heresy and Authority in Medieval Europe: Documents in Translation. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1980. Phelan, John Leddy. The Hispanization of the Philippines: Spanish Aims and Filipino Responses, 1565–1700. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2010 (1967). Rhodes, Elizabeth. “Join the Jesuits, See the World: Early Modern Women in Spain and the Society of Jesus.” In The Jesuits II: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540–1773, edited by John W. O’Malley, S.J., Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Steven J. Harris, and T. Frank Kennedy, S.J., 33–49. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. Rodríguez Delgado, Adriana. Santos o embusteros: Los alumbrados novohispanos del siglo XVII. Mexico: Gobierno del Estado de Veracruz, 2013. Ruíz de Zepeda Martínez, Rodrigo. Relación del auto general de la fee celebrado . . . en la muy noble y muy leal ciudad de México. Mexico, 1659. Santiago, Luciano P.R. “The ‘Living Documents’ of Mother Ignacia del Espíritu Santo (1663–1748). Unitas 63 (1990): 546–54. ———. “ ‘To Love and to Suffer’: The Development of the Religious Congregations for Women in the Philippines during the Spanish Era.” Philippine Quarterly of Culture and Society 23, no. 2 (1995): 151–95. ———. To Love and to Suffer: The Development of the Religious Congregations for Women in the Spanish Philippines, 1565–1898. Manila: Atento de Manila University Press, 2006. Sarrión Mora, Adelina. Beatas y endemoniadas: mujeres heterodoxas ante la Inquisición, siglos XVI a XIX. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2003. Weber, Alison. “The Inquisitor, the Flesh, and the Devil: Alumbradismo and Demon Possession.” In Dämonische Besessenheit: Zur Interpretation eines kulturhistorischen Phänomens, edited by Hans de Waardt, 177–91. Bielefeld: Verlag fur Regionalgeschichte, 2005.

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Part III

Confessional Crossings

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8 Elastic Institutions Beguine Communities in Early Modern Germany Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane

In 1753 a German engraver named Anton Beck painted a small image of a beguine, which he then pasted onto the final page of an eclectic collection of urban sketches. A modest figure from the Auf dem Werder community in the city of Braunschweig, the beguine is garbed in simple cap and dress and depicted in profile as she goes about her business of collecting alms for charity.1 The little work, which might appear at first glance unremarkable, is nonetheless historically illuminating: the talented Beck was a keen observer of the social world around him, and although his decision to paint a local beguine was unusual, he was not alone in paying attention to such lay religious women. Many other local figures, including founding families, clergy, and city council members, lavished ink on representations of beguine life in other ways: income, expenditures, membership, historical origins, appointed supervisors, house rules, memorials, prayer guidelines, administrative shifts, and even a periodic complaint or petition from the women themselves were recorded. As a result, Beck’s book on the city archive shelves is only one of dozens of volumes pertaining to the eighteen or so beguine communities in Braunschweig that existed well into, and in many cases beyond, the early modern period.2 The socio-spiritual niche that beguines occupied in premodern Braunschweig was not a singular case, moreover, but representative of local contexts across the empire. Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, gatherings of devoted women in German-speaking lands continued to fill the longstanding, locally embedded role of prayer and social service for single women. Hundreds of beguine communities dotted the German landscape, having taken root in cities and villages across the empire, shifting organically in response to pressures within the local environment. And although one might expect Protestant reformers to have disbanded any communities surviving from the Middle Ages, ample evidence testifies to the enduring and valued presence of beguine communities across the sixteenth-century empire and beyond. German scholars have long studied medieval beguines, but historiographical boundaries and the challenges of identifying and gathering sources have dramatically curtailed attention to early modern communities.3 In the past twenty years or so, historians including Günter Peters, Andreas Wilts, Letha Böhringer, Brigitte Hotz, and Jörg Voigt have contributed comparative and thematic analyses

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Figure 8.1 Beguine of the Auf dem Werder community. Anton Beck (1753). Stadtarchiv Braunschweig H III 1: 15, 195. Courtesy of the Stadtarchiv Braunschweig.

regarding the late-medieval history of lay religious women’s groups, but early modern communities have not received similarly sustained attention. An exception is Frank Michael Reichstein’s 2001 monograph Das Beginenwesen in Deutschland, which directly treats the question of beguine survival through the early modern period.4 In his statistical analysis of 249 beguine communities and their last mention in the documentary record, for example, Reichstein suggested that over 40 percent survived the Reformation, and 22 percent endured through the nineteenth century.5

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Although such quantitative analysis is only as reliable as the categories and definitions on which it depends, other research findings reinforce Reichstein’s contention that the beguine communities extended far beyond 1500; Erica Gelser, for example, notes that the beguines of Münsterland “were not living secret, hidden lives” but were visible and routinely documented broadly deep into the early modern period.6 I argue that Gelser’s point applies not only for the northwestern lands but also far more broadly across the empire. The following thus offers a preliminary exploration of beguine communities’ diverse cultural meanings in early modern Germany and of their historical manifestation across traditional historiographical boundaries. I use the term “beguine” as an umbrella category referring to lay religious women, whose defining characteristics include simple rather than solemn oaths, the possibility of mobility, control over property, and whose actions are visible to and scrutinized by the local community. Three specific goals underpin the analysis: first, to examine contemporary ideological commentaries about German beguines that have in turn shaped historiographical interpretations of lay religious women’s history; second, to introduce the wealth of local archival evidence for assessing beguine history; and finally, to suggest elasticity as a definitive characteristic of such communities, a feature consistently discernible in the “collective arrangements, strategies, and functions” that allowed lay religious sisterhoods to adapt within shifting historical contexts.7 Critics and Commentators If one were to rely on the most readily available primary sources regarding beguines in early modern Germany—the exhortatory or polemical writings of learned men— one would assume that contemporaries viewed such women and their communities with ambivalence at best. As Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski neatly put it, medieval beguines symbolically served as cultural “floating signifiers,” and it seems that the same conceptual utility persisted through the early modern centuries.8 Hostile characterizations from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries crystallized around a few key stereotypes, all themselves rooted in starkly binary categories and none of them novel to the period: beguines were lazy or able-bodied beggars; they were false and filthy hypocrites; and they were lustful deceivers. Put simply, they were simultaneously too much of one thing and not enough of its opposite, though (as we will see) the precise characteristics associated with them proved remarkably interchangeable. A quick survey of German literary representations reveals the surprising symbolic utility of beguines for communicating quite different, even contradictory messages. First, Catholic writers in the fifteenth-century empire regularly invoked the beguine as a figure of scorn, building on the late-medieval tradition of mockery. A classic example of the medieval satirical tradition is the beguine Constrained Abstinence featured in the French Romance of the Rose: “a wanton bitch” who “dressed as a beguine” and, carrying a psalter and wearing a pious expression,

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lasciviously cavorts with the friar False Seeming.9 Although less well known to modern readers than the Romance, the German texts are equally strategic in their rhetorical use of beguines. An example is the Reformatio Sigismundi, a popular and politically influential anonymous tract that was penned in 1439 within the context of the Council of Basel and circulated widely in German (including a first printing in 1475). The text contains a diatribe against beguines, whom the author depicts as suspect housemaids or cooks to Franciscan friars: casting aspersion on the “Kellerinnen” (cellarers) as bawds, he excoriates them further as “able poor” who beg rather than work.10 Similar critiques echoed through the writings of other late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Catholic reformers, particularly those of an active circle in Strassburg, whose members associated beguines with feigned piety. In his satirical Ship of Fools (1494), Sebastian Brant linked pious laywomen with hypocrisy under the heading “Of Falsity and Deception: ‘Monk, Priest, Beguine, lay brothers, they are false and unclean, for wolves in sheep’s clothes now are seen.’”11 Brant’s friend Geiler von Kaisersberg (1445–1510), a renowned secular priest and popular preacher who was part of reform circles further south in Würzburg and Augsburg, similarly caricatured religious people: “Priests, Monks, and Beguines are not as holy as they seem.”12 Shortly before the onset of the Protestant movement, the Franciscan Thomas Murner (d. 1537), another member of the Strassburg reform circle, also targeted beguines with his own brand of savage wit: a rude poem in his Narrenbeschwörung of 1512 mocked pious religious women again in traditional terms.13 Evidently a strand of late-medieval concern about women’s “false seeming” still resonated in the sixteenth century, since these writers drew upon a longstanding trope of beguines as hypocrites. As women of simple oaths rather than solemn or binding formal adherence to a religious rule, beguines’ active dedication to chastity and service could only be confirmed by public observation. The very visibility of their piety thus rendered them a particularly tempting symbol of hypocrisy, an association likely further reinforced by the German vernacular rhyme of “beguine,” “seen,” and “seem.” Catholic writers were not alone in using beguines to represent hypocrisy and suspect morality, since reformers from disparate theological positions also strategically deployed the image of pious laywomen. However, while the Strassburg and other reformers prior to 1517 perceived the salient problem as the difference between nuns and beguines, for Protestant theorists the problem was their disturbing similarity. No less a figure than Johannes Bugenhagen (1485–1558), Martin Luther’s confessor and the “Second Apostle of the North,” depicted them as linked to nuns “through the devil’s teaching.”14 After the onset of the Reformation, beguine symbolic power continued to resonate across some surprising lines: the famed German astrologer Johannes Carion (d. 1537) targeted “monks, nuns, beguines, and priests” in an apocalyptic prophecy;15 in Calvinist Geneva, a polemical map of the dangers of Rome featured wolf-faced beguines as topographical markers of hypocritical Catholic depravity;16 and even the Anabaptist Melchior Hoffman (d. 1548), whose doctrinal attitudes differed

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so sharply from those of his contemporaries above, shared their contempt for religious women and lumped nuns and beguines together as “brides of the devil and harlots of heaven.”17 As voices of the Catholic Reformation clashed with those of the mid-century Protestant movement, the conceptual elasticity of beguines proved as resilient and useful as ever—now not only for negative but also as positive models. In the late 1540s, for example, two very different figures in radically opposed camps both invoked beguines as laudable spiritual models. On the one hand, the ascetic Carthusians of Cologne brought the beguine Maria van Hout and her nine sisters to the city in 1548, praising her piety, visionary writings, and communal life as exemplary Catholicism.18 On the other hand, a Protestant chronicler of Konstanz and former Zwinglian named Gregor Mangolt wrote in 1548 of the local beguine houses, “[Their] religion is much closer and more similar to the Christian religion than that of the other monks and nuns: they do right to help and serve the sick, the imprisoned, the condemned, the dying, and the dead . . . all without payment.”19 Beguines, it seems, could indeed serve conceptually as all things to all people.20 Thus are the dichotomous writings of contemporary theologians and spiritual leaders insufficient sources for approaching beguine history. Such material tells us a great deal about the various authors and their priorities and symbolic strategies, but very little about the lived experiences and entrenched meanings of beguine communities in European landscapes. As Katherine Gill has observed about beguines in the Italian context, dichotomous representations “in the end only inform us about the general cultural environment. The real history of the bizoke [beguine] lies in myriad specific contexts, in local settings, in the efforts of handfuls of women here and there. For, even more than convents, the institutions of the pinzochere [beguine] reflect particular places and particular women.”21 Far from the marginal, isolated, and doomed communities depicted by much historiography—and equally far from the lascivious hypocrites of premodern polemic—lay religious women in Germany consistently located themselves within dynamic epicenters of exchange with family, kin, neighbors, supervisors, and benefactors. A series of other historiographical tendencies has also contributed to the relative invisibility of early modern beguine communities. First, despite an abundance of localized studies in Dutch, Flemish, and German, academic divisions of language, regional emphasis, and periodization have hindered comparative research of communities of devout laywomen. Second, an unintentional consequence of traditional emphasis on the history of orders and ecclesiastical institutions and hierarchies has been a tendency to frame devout laywomen in negative terms: as neither wife nor nun, lacking a formal rule, failing to become an approved order, and so on. Such negative framing has prevented scholars from perceiving how diverse these women’s lives could be, and how deeply rooted they were in positive, mutual local bonds. Third, reliance on traditional analytical frameworks rooted in binary categories (including lay/religious, regulated/unregulated, medieval/early modern, and Catholic/Protestant) has placed beguine history at an interpretive

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disadvantage. Such rigid interpretive categories obscure rather than illuminate the historical flexibility of laywomen’s communities. And finally, terminology has proven a formidable obstacle, since the various names employed to identify devout laywomen, such as “beguine,” “schwester,” “geistliche schwester,” and “mulier devota,” never bore discrete, mutually exclusive, or static meanings.22 Limited interpretive categories have not only cloaked the very complexity and adaptability of beguine communities but also rendered invisible the ubiquity and social centrality of such laywomen’s institutions. Indeed, a particularly consistent thread across Anglophone perceptions has been to emphasize categorical awkwardness, marginality, and ecclesiastical pressure. Viewed through this lens, it appears logical that beguines were pressured out of existence by the Council of Vienne decrees (published in 1317), or by a push into Third Orders in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, or by the Protestant Reformation, and so on. However, a phenomenon to which so many deaths are attributed would seem instead to represent an intriguing historical resilience that demands further investigation.23 Since confessional frameworks and binary models are too constraining, we need different tools with which to develop a fuller picture of devout laywomen’s historical significance.24 Perhaps the most definitive feature of beguine communal life over the longue durée was an operational elasticity that allowed adaptation to local conditions within a surprisingly uniform set of behavioral parameters reinforced across space and time. As we rethink our metaphors, another productive direction for scholarship on laywomen’s communities will be to borrow from sociology to recast the meaning of “institution” in a sense that better reflects this elasticity of communal gatherings in premodern Europe. In sociologists’ terms, an institution is not an entity but a process: a system of regularly enacted rules, beliefs, norms, and organizations that together generate routine patterns of social behavior. To be clear, regularity is not the same as uniformity, and every beguine house was independent and thus unique; yet recent research indicates a strikingly pronounced similarity in the contours of expectations and practical structures across space and time. I suggest that the hundreds of devout laywomen’s communities that dotted Germany represent exactly such elastic systems, and that the archival evidence illuminates how routinely beguine communities transcend traditional divisions of time, purpose, and confession. Elasticity in Practice When viewed together rather than in isolation, the scattered but abundant routine financial transactions and institutional agreements in German archive collections offer intriguing hints as to early modern beguine community structures and their various enduring local meanings. Thus, rather than slicing the material across traditional binary categories, the following presents a range of examples drawn from across the empire: although each is unique in its fundamentally homegrown

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institutional nature, each also variously illustrates the limitations of sharp divisions and binary analytical categories for approaching beguine history. Assumptions of a precise chronological endpoint to the phenomenon of pious laywomen’s communities are perhaps the simplest to challenge. A far from exhaustive survey of early modern beguine houses with documented origins as early as the thirteenth century would include communities in Bremen, Essen, Friedberg, Grünberg, Hamburg, Hildesheim, Lemgo, Minden, and Münster. Despite the Council of Vienne decrees published in 1317 and periodic clerical warnings about the dangers of heretical or unregulated women, the first decades of the fourteenth century actually witnessed a proliferation rather than a decline of German beguine house foundations. Local women and men of all ranks, and even clergymen, invested financial and spiritual hope in new beguine communities between 1320 and 1350, many of which continued to operate long past 1500.25 In Würzburg, for example, a laywoman named Richza von Hallenburg founded a community in 1324, which she designated as a home for sixteen “truly poor” women or virgins over the age of forty who could not afford their own upkeep. The members were to care for the poor in service, live harmoniously together, and make linen and wool cloth, not for luxury sale but for use in the church.26 As in all of the other examples here, the house (a “domus biginarum”) and its members appeared periodically in the local documentary record over the centuries to come: for example, the women were involved in financial transactions in 1387, 1562, and 1587.27 Reichstein suggests that it held nine beguines in 1610 and sixteen by 1700, a number equaling the original fourteenth-century foundation.28 Beguine institutions originating in the first half of the fourteenth century also survived long past 1500 in other cities and villages, including Braunschweig, Bregenz, Coburg, Essen, Frankfurt am Main, Gerresheim, Hagenau, Konstanz, Lübeck, Lüneburg, Minden, Nürnberg, Offenhausen, Recklinghausen, Riga, Stade, Stralsund, and Wismar. Although the mid-fourteenth-century wave of new foundations abated after 1350, beguine houses continued to take root alongside the long-established sisterhoods for centuries to come. A community established in Überlingen in 1389, for example, was still being documented as a “Beginenkloster” in 1659, and, given that in 1471 they participated in a “Bettelgang,” or begging expedition, to Solothurn, approximately 150 kilometers away, the “baginen von Überlingen” were clearly uncloistered.29 Another flourishing community was the Mariengarten house of Wesel (founded in 1427), which had grown sufficiently large by 1463 that Herzog Johann I von Kleve prohibited the sisterhood from exceeding eighty sisters; according to Reichstein, a remaining “Beguinenschwester” from the community died in 1622.30 Finally, in Anton Beck’s hometown of Braunschweig, a laywoman named Anna Ruschen established the Henning-Rieken beguine house in 1585 at Magni-Kirchhof for women at least fifty years old.31 Ruschen’s purpose was apparently to provide a pious home for women who had been in household service, thus combining the traditional beguine emphasis on single women and service with the charitable aspect of safe haven for the elderly. Yet

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one should not be too hasty in designating the Henning-Rieken community as simply a poorhouse: even these worthy older maids were still required to maintain reputations for chastity and modesty and to pray for others; moreover, they were designated specifically as beguines in documents, indicating that local founders and supporters perceived continuity with older traditions. In fact, the relation between religious and secular qualities in beguine houses has long posed a challenge to historians. Although there is no doubt that the premodern church put enormous emphasis on the division between lay and religious status, ecclesiastical authorities did not always agree with each other or with earlier papal writings regarding beguine status.32 On the contrary, evidence indicates that local perceptions often accommodated fluidity between secular and religious qualities, whether in the expected services performed by beguines or in their designated location within tax and legal structures. Such flexibility is particularly evident in the beguines’ complex relations to other institutions, including mendicant orders and hospitals. In Coesfeld in 1288, a laywoman named Margareta Stolterink founded a community with six other women. For the following several centuries, the Stoltering house appears periodically in medieval administrative records: in 1417, for example, the city council and the Franciscans of Münster combined the Stoltering house with the Franciscan-affiliated Liliendal beguine community. However, as Gelser notes, there is no documentary evidence of the Stoltering women’s adherence to the Third Order rule either before or after the merger— the act of fusion did not therefore change either community’s traditional way of life.33 A diocesan visitation (inspection) in 1572 suggests that the Stoltering house continued to operate through the Reformation period essentially unchanged from its late-thirteenth-century foundation. The Stoltering community did not “have a rule but they promise[d] to observe the statutes and customs of the house along with a roll with the existing elders, of which they have a multitude”; in terms of religious observance, the beguines still attended the parish church and prayed the Hours in their chapel, interceding for founders, family, and friends; “[I]n addition, on Sundays and feast days the Gospel and the Epistle [were] read at the table with expositions of the Church fathers.” Moreover, the women continued to claim strong local support for their way of life through the early modern period: in a document from 1783, the women of Stoltering and Liliendal appealed to the General Vicar for support against the city council, which they said was forcing them to accept a new member despite the house’s insufficient funds to care for her. In their defense, the Vicar warned civic authorities to stop interfering with the women’s community.34 The Süsternhaus (Sisterhouse) of Hannover claims a comparable institutional history of deep social embeddedness, one that also blended secular and sacral qualities. First documented in the early fourteenth century, the community most likely grew organically out of gatherings of pious single women and only later took on a more official form and organization.35 In 1357, the women’s local connections were documented in a series of city council records regarding the

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construction of a tower still known as the Beginenturm.36 Occupying a street long termed Beginenstrasse, the Sisterhouse continued as a local Hannover institution through the sixteenth century; further rules clarifying operational points were issued in 1510, 1520, and 1530.37 Among the stipulations of the first round of reissued statutes was the requirement that all newly accepted beguines should be Franciscan tertiaries (the Franciscan cloister was near the beguine house). By 1530, however, the wave of reform seems to have prompted some of the now Franciscanaffiliated beguines to leave the city; and six years later, the city formally dissolved the Sisterhouse.38 Nevertheless, the remaining women were allowed to continue to live in the beguine house and teach children as they had for many years.39 One might well ask to what extent these women and the local authorities still understood them to be beguines. For although the trajectory suggests transformation from a pious institution into what seems an old age home, one should again be cautious about drawing too sharp a distinction between the two. Both were rooted in local charitable impulses and inhabited by single women of different socioeconomic status. Both required decorous and chaste behavior as a condition of membership and indicated a concern for the connections among women, prayer, family, and Christian morality. The common threads again suggest that we are dealing with complexities among—rather than divisions between— forms of life. Care for the sick, dying, and dead has particularly long associations with devout laywomen. As Letha Böhringer cautions, however, these interactions varied so significantly over time and place that sweeping generalizations serve to blur rather than clarify beguine history.40 Yet there are intriguingly frequent linkages between beguine piety and bodily service across the empire. In Bavarian cities such as Augsburg and Regensburg, for example, founders established “Soulhouses” or “Seelhäuser” from medieval centuries through the early modern era.41 In Munich a citizen named Martin Katzmair established in 1476 a beguine community known as the Katzmair-Seelhaus, followed by a documented series of foundations by the Wibrecht (1495), Rosenbusch (c. 1575), and Barth (1595) families.42 Other examples abound in the north, such as the Nordenhospital of Hamm (Recklinghausen), which bears a documented institutional history spanning nearly six centuries.43 In April 1281 the bishop of Münster granted permission for religious services to be held at the local hospital, which had just been cooperatively founded by the local nobility and citizens of the city.44 In 1315 the citizens and city council of Hamm issued a first rule for the residents’ way of life, presumably largely reflecting the patterns and behaviors already in place for the preceding thirty years: the size of the community was limited to forty members, although no further evidence speaks to their specific characteristics.45 A century later, however, a new set of statutes in 1417 by the leading secular authorities of the city limited the number of members to twentyone and specified the requirements for admission in terms quite consistent with beguine life elsewhere in Germany.46 Now there were to be twenty-one poor “virgins or women” provided for by the income of the hospital; they were to

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continue wearing modest and simple clothing, as they long had (“von alters her”); and like all beguines (or devout laywomen by other names), their place in the community depended on successfully maintaining a reputation for chastity, obedience, and piety.47 Revising statutes over the decades was not in itself unusual, however, since the centrality of beguine institutions and the complex combination of supervisory webs made periodic adjustments necessary—often at the behest of the beguines themselves, who were keen to have privileges (whether new or traditional) enshrined in text. Thus in 1442 the beguines at the Nordenhospital received yet another set of statutes, which this time bore the imprint of the Graf Gert von der Mark, whose forbears had helped to establish the hospital over a century earlier. The much more detailed statutes from 1442 are still typical of beguine rule elsewhere, stipulating the requirements for acceptance and departure, clothing, deportment, and possessions, and regulating the penalties and consequences for misbehavior. Although the sources still provide little specific information about the actual daily caritative practices and routines, the revised 1442 statutes did now speak directly to the religious function: residents were to pray for the souls of founders and their families, and to do so both individually and as a community at stipulated times.48 Given how consistent the new statutes were with the dozens of other German beguine regulations from the fourteenth century on, the new statutes probably did not represent substantial operational changes but rather a more detailed documentation of existing practices. By 1442, therefore, the twenty-one single women of the hospital were clearly perceived as pious Christians in service to others, whether through physical care of the sick or spiritual care through regular prayer. Across the sixteenth century, periodic documentation provides further glimpses into the local functions and meanings of the hospital. In particular, the surviving texts underscore the women’s centrality to, rather than marginality within, the community: in 1510 the city council decided that in contrast to past precedent of accepting women from different regions and from different socioeconomic groups, only citizens’ daughters from Hamm or descendants of the hospital’s founders would be accepted in the future. And in 1515 the council further determined that the hospital residents were not to take in children any longer, claiming that the noise disrupted the women’s prayer.49 The reference to children is intriguing, suggesting that the hospital beguines had been educating children, as frequently occurred in German beguine houses elsewhere, or providing other kinds of care for friends and family, or perhaps both. In 1657 Hamm city authorities set forth new statutes that limited membership to noble or elite women, but otherwise retained the general features of the 1442 rule until the hospital’s dissolution under secularization in 1805. For nearly 600 years, therefore, the Nordenhospital inhabited space profoundly shaped by both religious and secular currents, as did the Süsternhaus of Hannover and the Coburg Niederkonvent. Even as each institution grew organically in distinct local environments, it developed along operational lines comparable to those elsewhere

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in Germany; each variously experienced and responded to the upheavals of reform and warfare that rippled across the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century empire. Our final examples reinforce those findings by exploring how even the presumably clear divide between Catholic and Protestant does not hold in beguine contexts. In fact, archival evidence suggests routine confessional flexibility and accommodation within beguine communities after the onset of the Protestant and Catholic reformations, particularly—if surprisingly—in the reformed north. By the mid-sixteenth century, beguine communities in the north seem to have frequently accommodated not only Catholic but also reformed or evangelical women. Wolter suggests that the Nordenhospital contained residents of both confessions, and Gelser indicates a similar pattern in Bocholt and Coesfeld, where the advance of the Reformation was slow and piecemeal.50 One is reminded here of earlier fifteenth-century mixed houses, wherein women subject to a Third Order rule lived side by side with unaffiliated beguines; the extent of tension (if any) within these communities, and the internal operations of mixed communities—if that is indeed an appropriate way to represent the women’s understanding of their gatherings— awaits further exploration. So, too, does the very question of doctrinal identity and beguine life in the early modern period: not only do examples of confessionally mixed houses abound in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but also cases of fully reformed evangelical houses, whose very existence confounds the traditional assumption that beguines were a medieval Catholic phenomenon. Founded in 1255 by the dukes of Holstein, Stormarn, and Schauenberg, the beguine house of St. Jacobi was located in the court across Steinstrasse from the church of St. Jakob. In 1529, under Bugenhagen’s reform program, it was transformed into a Jungfrauenstift (a generic term associated with reformed communities for women). It survived in that form until the mid-twentieth century.51 Beguine houses typically did not have communal property; books and other devotional texts remained under individual ownership and were thus generally transferred as bequests to other individuals upon a beguine’s death. Thus the fifteen surviving devotional volumes (including marginal sketches, pasted woodcuts, and inscribed names) from the sixteenth-century St. Jakobi beguine community are a rare treasure.52 Bugenhagen’s influence also extended to Braunschweig, which had reformed quickly and thoroughly in 1528; as a consequence, all the beguine communities in Braunschweig were officially evangelical from that time. Among them the community of St. Petri offers a particularly interesting final example of a cross-confessional institutional history. In 1290 Bishop Sigfried of Hildesheim confirmed the statute according to which a local smith named Johann Münstedt gave his house and a basic set of regulations to the “twelve sisters at St. Petri,” indicating that the beguine gathering had (like so many others in medieval Germany) preexisted formal documentation.53 Over the subsequent centuries, the “beyghinnen” or “baghinen” house emerged periodically in the late medieval and early modern documentary records. In 1330, for example, authorities approved the women’s request to receive pastoral care from the priest of St. Petri.54 Although

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their community’s location in the city placed them officially under the spiritual purview of St. Andreas, the latter was geographically inconvenient; moreover, the women had long developed a close bond with the priests of St. Petri, and the strength of existing relationships likely also played a role in their choice. In any case, the document represents a formal recognition of the beguines’ preference. After the city’s embrace of the new evangelicalism in 1528, the community of St. Petri appears to have continued with little disruption or operational shift through the early modern centuries. The only evidently documented transition was that of greater city council involvement during the sixteenth century, a pattern once again characteristic of broader beguine histories across the empire. In Braunschweig the city council assigned two members responsibility for supervising the St. Petri house, along with other beguine communities; these pairings seem to have taken their apparently lifelong role very seriously, maintaining extensive records of the women’s names, financial transactions, and donations, and even unearthing historical records for the communities. The specific institutional histories of local beguine communities were thus evidently important to the women and their administrators. In 1753, Andreas Melchior Gryphiander, a city council member and assigned supervisor (provisor) of the St. Petri beguines, collected and translated texts relating to the history of the women’s community from 1290.55 The materials include eighteen different documents filling seventy-six folios, including a printed German translation of the original Latin foundation statute from 1290. Even though the community did become technically reformed, the foundation documents, rules, and even the cycles of charitable donation and prayers seem to have remained in effect.56 For centuries, women joined the house, enacted its requirements of chastity, humble service, and prayerful piety, and, through their movements and activities, knit the community into the broader networks around them. If “Protestant beguine” rings oxymoronic, therefore, the fault lies not with the sources but with our categories and the presumed meanings we assign to them. As Merry Wiesner-Hanks noted, “[T]he distinction between Protestant and Catholic that is so important in understanding the religious and intellectual history of sixteenth-century Europe may have ultimately been less important to the women who lived in convents or other religious institutions than the distinction between their pattern of life and that of the majority of laywomen.”57 But what did that mean? How did gatherings of women dedicated to intercessory prayer for Christian souls negotiate the shift to evangelical beliefs? What did it mean in practice to be an evangelical or Protestant beguine community? And how might the geography of reform and currents of earlier religious affiliation have influenced beguine trajectories in early modern Germany? More work remains to be done, and compelling answers will require a thoughtful triangulation of local sources, regional patterns, and broader comparisons across time and space. There is no shortage of source material. To offer only one particularly remarkable example, consider the 112-year series of records for the St. Johannis beguine house maintained by civic supervisors in identically formatted volumes

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between 1668 and 1780.58 Among the many insights to be gleaned from this rich archival material is the fact that when the women of the smaller Huneborstler and Autor von Giebels houses blended with the beguines of St. Johannis in 1781 and moved to a new location at Eiermarkt 7, the separate institutional identities of all three groups remained intact. From that year on, the records for St. Johannis continue as before, followed by a new series of entries for the other two communities: each was administered separately and accounted for separately, including full lists of the women’s names. Even though they inhabited the same physical space, therefore, the beguines’ original gatherings were not dissolved into one another: not only did they evidently continue to identify with and be perceived as members of their original community, but the records also indicate that new members regularly continued to join each of the sisterhoods.59 Conclusion Both the councilman Gryphiander and the engraver Beck invested time, thought, ink, and paper in their representations of beguines. For both men, the women (baghinen) were evidently recognized members of the city of Braunschweig, sisters whose way of life occupied a centuries-old niche in which Christian piety, caritative service, and the socioeconomic needs of single women productively fused. Such practical, local awareness of historical continuities is poorly served by interpretive categories emphasizing theological rupture and binary opposition. Two initial conclusions regarding the elasticity of beguine communities offer a starting point for reassessing the broader role of devout laywomen’s institutions in premodern European history. First, the beguine model of chaste single women in prayerful and caritative service to community was fundamentally rooted in active spiritual expression rather than in doctrine; as a result, the major theological disputes of the sixteenth century were generally peripheral to their concerns. Second, the fundamentally autochthonous quality of beguine communities and their traditional fusion of secular and sacral identities meant that local authorities could reposition the women’s gatherings in response to upheaval. That is, German beguine houses were flexible both in their internal functions and in their broader relationship to the world around them, able to accommodate change even as the core characteristics and operational requirements of observable chastity and reputable deportment remained virtually unchanged over the centuries. It is this very consistency over time that makes sense of the apparently contradictory deployment of beguine-assymbol by the elite commentators discussed at the beginning of this essay. Even as beguine gatherings and their networks shifted in response to historical pressures, the evidence suggests broad contemporary appreciation for women’s institutions and an abiding respect for the often centuries-old founding intentions. German beguine houses were not exactly the same communities as their medieval predecessors, but that should go without saying, as it does for any kind of historical community, including formal orders: one need only think of the dramatic

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institutional rifts within the Franciscan order between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, for example. Institutions must be resilient to survive, and a clear foundational purpose and effective administrative system certainly aids longevity. Thus, the resilience and enduring local popularity of beguine communities is an intriguing historical phenomenon, one that demands further consideration due to its fundamental grounding in local environments. Although more work is necessary to develop a thorough understanding of the diverse trajectories of early modern beguine communities, initial soundings suggest that far more houses ended as a result of dwindling interest, warfare, local building programs, and early nineteenth-century secularization than as a consequence of ecclesiastical pressure.60 Future studies will also benefit from attentiveness to the categories deployed to determine the ends and beginnings of gatherings; narratives of first and last beguines are problematic, depending as they do upon entrenched categories, implicit power structures, and unexamined assumptions.61 The evidence also puts to rest the historiographical myth of beguine extinction as an inevitable consequence of the watershed events of the fourteenth, fifteenth, or sixteenth centuries. Attention to the local record sharpens our awareness of the gap between ecclesiastical theory and lived experience: beguine communities variously weathered and responded to the edicts of the Council of Vienne, Observant Reform, Protestant Reform, and the Council of Trent, as they did to plague, warfare, economic upheaval, and all of the other historical forces shaping the lives of their contemporaries. Erica Gelser’s observation regarding the beguine houses of Münsterland applies equally to the broader German context: Their resilience over more than five centuries suggests their vitality, strength, and ongoing relevance to the people in their cities. As lay people, the beguines lived as part of the world while also living, much like religious men and women, within the world of the sacred. [Beguine communities] were a quiet presence despite threats of ecclesiastical or civic reforms and the upheavals of the Reformation, and they achieved a balanced position as both a part of, and yet separate from, their cities and social order. Their unique ecclesiastical station as beguines had proved unproblematic, even beneficial, to their sustained existence.”62

Since sisterhoods formed networks within local contexts rather than on the margins of society, beguine communities represent rich sites through which to explore the intersections of gender, culture, piety, and economy in early modern Germany.63 In contrast to the polemical usages of beguine-as-symbol, Anton Beck and Andreas Melchior Gryphiander both regarded beguines as uncontroversial residents of their eighteenth-century context, worthy objects of study and representation. Future research will no doubt discern new patterns that better represent the multifold meanings of pious laywomen’s communities over time. A richer perspective will surely result from broadening our definition of institutions to refer not only to formally organized and self-perpetuating bureaucratic structures but also to the informal matrices of exchanges, ideas, and relationships characteristic of lay religious women’s houses and the environments that enfolded them.

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Notes  1. Stadtarchiv Braunschweig H III 1: 15, 195. I am grateful to Frau Elisabeth Sandfort for pointing out this image to me, and also for so generously sharing her knowledge of the medieval and early modern beguines of Braunschweig. I also thank the staff of the Stadtarchiv for their gracious and exceptionally efficient support during my research trip in the summer of 2013.  2. The Stadtarchiv holdings pertaining to beguines in Braunschweig (medieval and early modern) can be found in the following document collections: A (Urkundenarchiv), B (Altes Ratsarchiv), C (Älteres Magistratsarchiv, 1671–1825), D (Jüngeres Magistratsarchiv, 1825–1930), F (Rechnungsarchiv), G (Sonderarchiv nichtstädtischer Provenienz), and H (Sammlungen). The archive website allows a keyword search that yields more specific information about each manuscript reference to beguines, although the holdings are not yet digitized (www.stadtarchiv-braunschweig.findbuch.net/php/main.php?ar_id=3697).  3. A stimulating first step is the collection of essays on early modern lay religious women in Germany Welt-Geistliche Frauen in der frühen Neuzeit: Studien zum weiblichen Semireligiosentum, ed. Anne Conrad (Aschendorff Verlag, 2013). Elisabeth Sandfort’s forthcoming Ph.D. dissertation from the Universität Braunschweig also treats early modern beguines in the city.  4. Frank-Michael Reichstein, Das Beginenwesen in Deutschland: Studien und Katalog (Berlin: Verlag Dr. Köster, 2001). One significant contribution of Reichstein’s research is the exhaustive list of nearly 600 communities and secondary documentation, and transcription of over two dozen beguine community rules and statutes. That said, the monograph is extremely ambitious, with the result that there are substantial weaknesses in the book’s organization of source material and interpretive framework.  5. Reichstein, Das Beginenwesen, 136.  6. Erica Gelser, Lay Religious Women and Church Reform in Late Medieval Münster: A Case Study of the Beguines, Ph.D. diss. (University of Pennsylvania, 2008), 278. Gelser’s dissertation joins a number of excellent yet-unpublished doctoral studies on beguines.  7. Katherine Gill, Penitents, Pinzochere, and Mantellatae: Varieties of Women’s Religious Communities in Central Italy, c.1300–1520, Ph.D. diss. (Princeton University, 1994), 251, n. 21.  8. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, “Satirical Views of the Beguines in Northern French Literature,” in New Trends in Feminine Spirituality: The Holy Women of Liège and their Impact, ed. Juliette Dor, Lesley Johnson, and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999), 237–49, qtd. at 239.  9. Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Romance of the Rose, trans. Frances Horgan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 185. 10. Heinrich Koller, Reformation Kaiser Siegmunds (Stuttgart: A Hiersemann, 1964), 217 ff. 11. Sebastian Brant, The Ship of Fools (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2011), 329. 12. Quoted in Friedrich Schroeder, “Die Beginen in Goch,” Annalen des historischen Vereins für den Niederrhein, insbesondere das alte Erzbistum Köln 75 (1903): 1–63, at 1. 13. Thomas Murner, Die Narrenbeschwörung ed. Karl Goedeke (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1879), 219–21. 14. Johannes Bugenhagen, Was man vom Closter leben halten sol am allermeist fur die Nonnen vnd Begynen geschrieben, aus der heiligen schrifft (Wittenberg: Georgen Rhaw, 1529), 55.

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15. Berlin, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Ms. germ. fol. 938, fol.7v. “Munch, nunnen, beginen vnd pfaffen.” 16. On the map in relationship to lay religious women, see Katherine Gill, “Open Monasteries for Women in Late Medieval and Early Modern Italy: Two Roman Examples,” in The Crannied Wall: Women, Religion, and the Arts in Early Modern Europe, ed. Craig Monson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 22. For a fuller analysis, see Dror Wahrmann, “From Imaginary Drama to Dramatized Imagery: The Mappe-Monde Nouvelle Papistique, 1566–1567,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtald Institutes 54 (1991): 186–205. 17. Irvin Buckwalter Horst, The Dutch Dissenters: A Critical Companion to Their History and Ideas (Leiden: Brill, 1986), 77. 18. Kirsten Marie Christensen, “In the Beguine Was the Word: Mysticism and Catholic Reformation in the Devotional Literature of Maria van Hout (d. 1547),” Ph.D. diss. (University of Texas at Austin, 1998). 19. Gregor Mangolt and Alfred Vögeli, eds, Schriften zür Reformation in Konstanz, 1519–1538, 2/2 (Osiandersche Buchhandlung, 1973), 1094, n. 477. 20. Tanya Stabler Miller, The Beguines of Medieval Paris: Gender, Patronage, and Spiritual Authority (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 171. 21. Gill, “Open Monasteries,” 24. 22. As others have noted, naming patterns for pious laywomen varied significantly over time and place (see the collected essays in Letha Böhringer, Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane, and Hildo van Engen, eds, Labels and Libels: Naming Beguines in Northern Medieval Europe (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014). 23. On the relationship between historiographical frameworks and the many reported deaths of beguine history, see Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane, “Did Beguines Have a LateMedieval Crisis? Historical Models and Historiographical Martyrs” (“Forum: Revisiting Joan Kelly’s “Did Women Have a Renaissance?”), Early Modern Women 8 (2013): 275–88. 24. For example, spectra and continua are useful metaphors for representing a range of possibilities and underscoring sustained interactions between beguines and their environments. However, both images still reflect a model of opposing endpoints. Even better for moving beyond categorical opposition are multidimensional metaphors such as webs and networks, conceptual frameworks that scholars will no doubt productively augment in the future. 25. The trend during the 1330s and 1340s towards documentation and reissuing of statutes for beguine houses is a marked phenomenon across the empire. The Council of Vienne decrees appear to have inadvertently prompted a wave of textual and legal bulwarks ensuring that the women’s houses remained open, rather than having initiated (as long presumed) a broad closure of beguine communities in Germany. See Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane, “From Case Studies to Comparative Models: Würzburg Beguines and the Vienne Decrees,” in Labels and Libels, ed. Böhringer, Deane, and van Engen, 53–82. 26. Würzburg Staatsarchiv, Würzburger Urkunden, No. 7076. 27. Ibid., Nos 7077, 72/50, and 72/51. 28. Reichstein, Das Beginenwesen, 371. 29. Andreas Wilts, Beginen am Bodenseeraum (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1994), 454–55. 30. Reichstein, Beginenwesen, 355. 31. Stadtarchiv Braunschweig GV9.

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32. See Elizabeth Makowski, “A Pernicious Sort of Woman”: Quasi-Religious Women and Canon Lawyers in the Later Middle Ages (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1995); and Elizabeth Makowski, Canon Law and Cloistered Women: Periculoso and Its Commentators, 1298–1545 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1997). 33. Gelser, Lay Religious Women, 53–54, n. 199. Gelser also notes that “between 1372 and 1600, there were more than sixty records; almost all of these involved the sale of Rente, of either the beguine house or individual beguines living in the Stoltering house,” 217. 34. Ibid., 335–37, 56–57. 35. Hermann Hoogeweg suggests origins as early as 1251. Verzeichnis der Stifter und Klöster Niedersachsens vor der Reformation (Hannover: Hahn’sche Buchhandlung, 1908), 52. 36. A. Neumeister and E. Haberle, “Beguinenturm in Hannover,” in Deutsche Konkurrenzen 6.2 (1896): 15–32; Carl Ludwig Grotefend and Georg Friedrich Fiedeler, Urkundenbuch der Stadt Hannover (Hannover: Hahn, 1860), 369. 37. Reichstein, Beginenwesen, 409. 38. Klaus Mlynek, Geschichte der Stadt Hannover, vol. 1, (Hannover: Schlütersche Verlagsanstalt und Druckerei, 1992), 37, 39, 47, 50. 39. Reichstein, Beginenwesen, 257. 40. Letha Böhringer, “Beginen und Schwestern in der Sorge für Kranke, Sterbende, und Verstorbene: Eine Problemskizze,” in Organisierte Barmherzigkeit. Armenfürsorge und Hospitalwesen in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit, ed. Artur Diemeier (Regensburg: PustetFriedrich, 2010), 175–55; and “Siechenmägde, Barbierinnen und Hebammen: Frauen im Gesundheitswesen der Stadt Köln im Mittelalter und in der Frühen Neuzeit,” in 2000 Jahre Krankheit und Gesundheit in Köln, ed. Thomas Deres (Köln: Kölnisches Stadtmuseum, 2005), 127–39. Christine Guidera, “The Role of the Beguines in Caring for the Ill, the Dying, and the Dead,” in Death and Dying in the Middle Ages, ed. Edelgard DuBruck and Barbara Gusick (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), 51–72. 41. See, for example, Lyndal Roper, The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 246–49; Anneliese Hilz, “Seelhäuser und Seelfrauen im spätmittelalterlichen Regensburg,” in Organisierte Barmherzigkeit: Armenfürsorge und Hospitalwesen in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit, ed. Artur Dirmeier (Regensburg: Verlag Friedrich Pustet, 2010), 157–72. 42. The Katzmair beguine house rule was reissued in 1543; care for the sick remained a priority. Edited in Reichstein, Beginenwesen, 312. 43. Christina Wolter, “Hospital, Beginenhaus, Stift: Weibliche Lebensgemeinschaften im Nordenshospital (1281–1805),” in Die vergessene Geschichte: 775 Jahre Frauenleben in Hamm, ed. Antje Flüchter-Sheryari and Maria Perrefort (Druckerei Achenbach: 2001, Hamm), 27–35, qtd. at 37. 44. Ibid., 27. 45. Wilhelm Kohl, “Das Nordenhospital vor Hamm,” in 750 Jahre Hamm, ed. Herbert Zink (Hamm, 1976), 81–99, qtd. at 83; Wolter, “Hospital, Beginenhaus, Stift,” 35, n. 1. 46. Printed in Johann Diederich von Steinen, Westfälische Geschichte, Pt. IV (Münster, Mehren u. Hobbeling, 1963), 669–71. 47. Ibid. 48. Wolter, “Hospital, Beginenhaus, Stift,” 31, 35, n. 20. 49. Wolter, “Hospital, Beginenhaus, Stift,” 33, n. 34.

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50. Wolter, “Nordenhospital,” 35; Gelser, Lay Religious Women, 312. 51. Monika Böse and Katrin Tiemann, “Der Beginenkonvent im spätmittelalterlichen Hamburg,” Zeitschrift des Vereins fiir hamburgische Geschichte 82 (1996): 1–28. The original foundation document is no longer extant, but a copy is in Johann Martin Lappenberg, ed., Hamburgisches Urkundenbuch, Band I (Hamburg: Perthes-Besser & Mauke, 1842), #589. 52. Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg, Codex Conventus 1–15. 53. The Stadtarchiv Braunschweig holdings pertaining to St. Petri are AIII 3: 74–83, CIII4: 35, GV7: 6, and GV9: 9. 54. Stadtarchiv Braunschweig AIII3: 76–83. 55. Stadtarchiv Braunschweig GV7: 5. 56. Other communities reissued rules in the eighteenth century. In 1783, for example, the beguines of St. Annen received a newly articulated schedule of daily activities, prayers, and pious songs, most likely from the 1752 Marburg Hymnal (Stadtarchiv Braunschweig HV 104). 57. Merry Wiesner-Hanks, “Women and the Reformations: Reflections on Recent Research,” History Compass 2 (2004): 1–27. See also Gelser, Lay Religious Women, 308. 58. Stadtarchiv Braunschweig FII 7: 581–690. 59. For example, records indicate that thirty-five women, termed both “conventuales” and “beginen,” were living in the newly blended house in the early 1780s, and that each of the three groups had recently admitted new members (Stadtarchiv Braunschweig, FII7: 692–701). 60. Reichstein offers a starting point, having compiled a short list of communities closed by secularization, including those in Ingoldstadt and Lindau (1802), Worms (1803), Horb, Kaufbeuren, and Würzach (1806), Augsburg and Pfullendorf (1807), Ulm and Überlingen (1808), and Münster (1809). Mid-century closings include Würzburg and Wismar (1852), Aachen (1874), and (general nineteenth century) Frankfurt, Lübeck, Marsberg, Nürnberg, and Cologne. Communities in Osnabrueck, Lemgo, and Hamburg survived the early decades of the twentieth century. 61. A compelling model, albeit from a very different historical context, is Jeanne O’Brien’s analysis of “first” and “last” narratives and their implications for indigenous history in the Americas: Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). 62. Gelser, Lay Religious Women, 351. 63. As the collected essays in this volume indicate, opportunities for comparative work abound. For an intriguing parallel in the English context, see Amy Froide’s treatment of devout laywomen in “The Religious Lives of Singlewomen in the Anglo-Atlantic World: Quaker Missionaries, Protestant Nuns, and Covert Catholics,” in Women, Religion, and the Atlantic World (1600–1800), ed. Daniella Kostroun and Lisa Vollendorf (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 60–78.

Works Cited Bennett, Judith, and Amy Froide, eds. Singlewomen in the European Past: 1250– 1800. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998. Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Renate. “Satirical Views of the Beguines in Northern French Literature.” In New Trends in Feminine Spirituality: The Holy Women

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of Liège and Their Impact, edited by Juliette Dor, Lesley Johnson and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, 237–49. Turnhout: Brepols, 1999. Böhringer, Letha. “Beginen und Schwestern in der Sorge für Kranke, Sterbende, und Verstorbene: Eine Problemskizze.” In Organisierte Barmherzigkeit. Armenfürsorge und Hospitalwesen in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzit, edited by Artur Diemeier, 127–55. Regensburg: Pustet-Friedrich, 2010. ———. “Siechenmägde, Barbierinnen und Habammen: Frauen im Gesundheitswesen der Stadt Köln im Mittelalter und in der Frühen Neuzeit” In 2000 Jahre Krankheit und Gesundheit in Köln, edited by Thomas Deres. 127–39. Köln: Kölnisches Stadtmuseum, 2005. Böhringer, Letha, Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane, and Hildo van Engen, eds. Labels and Libels: Naming Beguines in Northern Medieval Europe. Turnhout: Brepols, 2014. Böse, Monika, and Katrin Tiemann. “Der Beginenkonvent im spätmittelalterlichen Hamburg.” Zeitschrift des Vereins für Hamburgische Geschichte 82 (1996): 1–29. Brant, Sebastian. The Ship of Fools. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2011. Christensen, Kirsten Marie. “In the Beguine Was the Word: Mysticism and Catholic Reformation in the Devotional Literature of Maria van Hout (d. 1547).” Ph.D. diss., University of Texas at Austin, 1998. Conrad, Anne, ed. Welt-geistliche Frauen in der Frühen Neuzeit: Studien zum weiblichen Semireligiösentum. Münster: Aschendorff Verlag, 2013. Deane, Jennifer Kolpacoff. “ ‘Beguines’ Reconsidered: Historiographical Problems and New Directions.” Monastic Matrix (August 2008). Commentaria 3461, http://monasticmatrix.org/commentaria/beguines-reconsidered-historiographicalproblems-and-new-directions (accessed February 8, 2014). ———. “Did Beguines Have a Late-Medieval Crisis? Historical Models and Historiographical Martyrs.” Early Modern Women 8 (2013): 275–88. ———. “From Case Studies to Comparative Models: Würzburg Beguines and the Vienne Decrees.” In Labels and Libels: Naming Beguines in Northern Medieval Europe, edited by Letha Böhringer, Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane, and Hildo van Engen. Turnhout: Brepols, 2014. ———. “Geistliche Schwestern: The Pastoral Care of Lay Religious Women in Medieval Würzburg.” In Partners in Spirit: Women, Men, and Religious Life in Medieval Germany, 1100–1500, edited by Fiona Griffiths and Julie Hotchin, 237–70. Turnhout: Brepols, 2013. De Lorris, Guillaume, and Jean de Meun. The Romance of the Rose. Translated by Frances Horgan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Froide, Amy. “The Religious Lives of Singlewomen in the Anglo-Atlantic World: Quaker Missionaries, Protestant Nuns, and Covert Catholics.” In Women, Religion, and the Atlantic World (1600–1800), edited by Daniella Kostroun and Lisa Vollendorf, 60–78. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009. Gelser, Erica. Lay Religious Women and Church Reform in Late Medieval Münster: A Case Study of the Beguines. Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2008.

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Gill, Katherine. “Open Monasteries for Women in Late Medieval and Early Modern Italy: Two Roman Examples.” In The Crannied Wall: Women, Religion, and the Arts in Early Modern Europe, ed. Craig Monson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 15–47. ———. Penitents, Pinzochere, and Mantellatae: Varieties of Women’s Religious Communities in Central Italy, c.1300–1520. Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1994. ———. “Scandala: Controversies Concerning Clausura and Women’s Religious Communities in Late-Medieval Italy.” In Christendom and Its Discontents: Exclusion, Persecution, and Rebellion, 1000–1500, edited by Scott L. Waugh and Peter D. Diehl, 177–203. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Guidera, Christine. “The Role of the Beguines in Caring for the Ill, the Dying, and the Dead.” In Death and Dying in the Middle Ages, ed. Edelgard DuBruck and Barbara Gusick (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), 51–72. Hilz, Anneliese. “Seelhäuser und Seelfrauen im spätmittelalterlichen Regensburg.” In Organisierte Barmherzigkeit: Armenfürsorge und Hospitalwesen in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit, edited by Artur Dirmeier, 157–72. Regensburg: Verlag Friedrich Pustet, 2010. Hoogeweg, Hermann. Verzeichnis der Stifter und Klöster Niedersachsens vor der Reformation. Hannover: Hahn’sche Buchhandlung, 1908. Horst, Irvin Buckwalter. The Dutch Dissenters: A Critical Companion to their History and Ideas. Leiden: Brill, 1986. Hotz, Brigitte. Beginen und Willige Armen in spätmittelalterlichen Hildesheim. Hildesheim: Bernward, 1998. Karant-Nunn, Susan. The Reformation of Feeling: Shaping the Religious Emotions in Early Modern Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Kohl, Wilhelm. “Das Nordenhospital vor Hamm.” In 750 Jahre Hamm, ed. Herbert Zink (Hamm, 1976), 81–99. Koller, Heinrich. Reformation Kaiser Siegmunds. Stuttgart: A Hiersemann, 1964. Lappenberg, Johann Martin, ed. Hamburgisches Urkundenbuch, Band I. Hamburg: Perthes-Besser & Mauke, 1842. Makowski, Elizabeth M. “A Pernicious Sort of Woman”: Quasi-Religious Women and Canon Lawyers in the Later Middle Ages. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1995. ———. Canon Law and Cloistered Women: Periculoso and Its Commentators, 1298–1545. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1997. Mangolt, Gregor, and Alfred Vögeli, eds. Schriften zür Reformation in Konstanz, 1519–1538, 2/2. Osiandersche Buchhandlung, 1973. Miller, Tanya Stabler. The Beguines of Medieval Paris: Gender, Patronage, and Spiritual Authority. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. Mlynek, Klaus. Geschichte der Stadt Hannover, vol. 1. Hannover: Schlütersche Verlagsanstalt und Druckerei, 1992. Murner, Thomas. Die Narrenbeschwörung. Edited by Karl Goedeke. Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1879.

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Neumeister, A., and E. Haberle. “Beguinenturm in Hannover.” Deutsche Konkurrenzen 6.3 (1896): 15–32. Peters, Günter. “Norddeutsches Beginen- und Begardenwesen im Mittelalter.” Niedersächsisches Jahrbuch für Landesgeschichte 41/42 (1969/70): 50–118. Reichstein, Frank-Michael. Das Beginenwesen in Deutschland: Studien und Katalog. Berlin: Verlag Dr. Köster, 2001. Roper, Lyndal. The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Schroeder, Friedrich. “Die Beginen in Goch,” Annalen des historischen Vereins für den Niederrhein, insbesondere das alte Erzbistum Köln 75 (1903): 1–63. Shepard, Alexandra, and Garthine Walker, eds. Gender and Change: Agency, Chronology and Periodisation. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Ms. germ. fol. 938, fol.7v. Stadtarchiv Braunschweig H III 1: 15, 195 (www.stadtarchiv-braunschweig. findbuch.net/php/main.php?ar_id=3697) Steinen, Johann Diederich. Hamm Beguine Statute. Westfälische Geschichte, Pt. IV. Münster: Mehren u. Hobbeling, 1963, 669–71. Voigt, Jörg. Beginen im Spätmittelalter: Frauenfrömmigkeit in Thuringen und im Reich. Cologne: Böhlau-Verlag, 2012. Wahrmann, Dror. “From Imaginary Drama to Dramatized Imagery: The MappeMonde Nouvelle Papistique, 1566–1567.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtald Institutes 54 (1991): 186–205. Wiesner-Hanks, Merry. “Women and the Reformations: Reflections on Recent Research.” History Compass 2 (2004): 1–27. Wilts, Andreas. Die Beginen in Bodenseeraum. Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1994. Wolter, Christina. “Hospital, Beginenhaus, Stift: Weibliche Lebensgemeinschaften im Nordenshospital (1281–1805).” In Die vergessene Geschichte: 775 Jahre Frauenleben in Hamm, edited by Antje Flüchter-Sheryari and Maria Perrefort, 27–35. Hamm: Druckerei Achenbach, 2001. Würzburg Staatsarchiv, Würzburger Urkunden, No. 7076.

9 Neither Nun nor Laywoman Entering Lutheran Convents during the Reformation of Female Religious Communities in the Duchy of Braunschweig, 1542–1655 Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer* Despite opposing monastic life, the Lutheran Duke August of BraunschweigWolfenbüttel issued a monastic rule for the convents in his territory in 1655. The ordinance stated two main functions for the Lutheran religious houses for women: first, the convent was to be a “place . . . [for single women] to withdraw from troubles in the world to live a pure and chaste unmarried life.” Second, the convent was to serve as a location to educate young women and children in “the fear and knowledge of God” and “quiet . . . maidenly work.” True convents could provide these purposes, the ordinance points out, without demanding “fraudulent and forced” vows marring Catholic convents. Instead, a woman promised the abbess to live “chastely, obediently, and peaceably” and not to act “contrary to God” during her official entry (Einkleidung) into the Lutheran convent. One additional stipulation in this and earlier convent regulations required the abbess to “inform” and get the “confirmation” from the duke before any girl or woman could enter or leave a convent as resident or student.1 The diverse ideas about the convent’s function held by territorial leaders, nuns, the applicants, and the laity emerge in the discussions resulting from this requirement. A supplicant’s potential to uphold a specific definition of monastic life became central to negotiations for her entrance into the convent. Despite initial calls for the complete dissolution of convents by Martin Luther and other early reformers, by the mid-sixteenth century some evangelical theologians and political leaders came to support the continuation of female monastic life. Although concurring that convents should not exist, Johannes Bugenhagen, then a pastor and reformer in Braunschweig, counseled rulers to allow “old or sick” nuns or those nuns unable to find “an honorable situation” to remain in their convents with evangelical preachers. In his 1529 tract on female monastic life, he furthermore advised those women remaining in convents to occupy themselves with reading scripture.2 Political leaders in Saxony, Württemberg, and other Lutheran territories put these suggestions on convents into practice by the 1540s. This practical solution for evangelical nuns unable or unwilling to leave convents also allowed predominantly Catholic convents to continue in Lutheran areas. The continuing demand for female religious life transformed discussions advocating convents continuing in the short term into

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treatises redefining the original intention of religious foundations. By 1536 Luther argued that monastic institutions had been established “to raise learned people and virtuous women.” As long as no binding vows were required, he supported reinstating these educational institutions to provide society with “church officials,” “the necessary people for secular government,” and “well-raised girls to serve as housemothers and domestic managers.”3 Lutheran monasteries and convents provided education, but not yet the retreat from the world evident in August’s 1655 convent order. Unlike the archdioceses of Magdeburg and Mainz, where two-thirds of convents functioning in 1500 no longer existed as convents by 1600, thirty of the thirty-two convents in the principalities of Braunschweig and Lüneburg remained open through the seventeenth century and beyond.4 One reason for this remarkable convent survival was that the unstable political circumstances and reversals on religious policy in the early sixteenth century led reformers and rulers in the region in the later sixteenth century to support female religious houses rather than to force closures and upset potential supporters.5 Additionally, inconsistent ideas about these institutions’ purpose attracted applicants with varying expectations about the way of life they would lead therein. With the exception of local scholars of Lower Saxony, few have explored the evangelical female monastic life during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.6 This essay considers how convents were transformed in Lutheran territories from traditional monastic institutions into a complex system of lay religious communities. By focusing on the controversies surrounding the supplications to enter the convent, this study shows how groups reinterpreted religious houses to serve their individual or collective financial, religious, or civic needs. First, Lutheran theologians and territorial and civic officials did not intend them to function like traditional convents; they sought to reconfigure these institutions by asserting territorial authority over the convent and appropriating property management. They also placed many Lutheran women in the convent by using their right to veto or suggest applicants. Second, despite the language highlighting women’s free choice, guardians or parents made most decisions about whether a girl or young woman would enter a religious life. Relatives’ interests in placing extra daughters, disabled girls, or unwanted wards in a convent remained consistent with earlier practice but gained a new language justifying this decision. Third, most women managed to practice a spiritual life much as they had before the reform, and resisted change in subtle ways by educating the next generation of nuns and maintaining traditional customs. Most professed women remained in the religious houses their entire lives and never married. Yet the women came to self-identify as Lutheran. The negotiations between these divergent interests of the laity, convents, and territorial officials created a much more diverse novitiate than any could have expected. As a result, the women, including former nuns and newly professed women, faced shifting social norms and religious practices that allowed religious pluralism, forced unexpected coexistence, and established claustration in practice, if not by mandate.

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Establishing the Lutheran Female Religious House The shifting political fortunes and church politics in the various Welf territories of Braunschweig and Lüneburg complicated the reform movement during the sixteenth century. In 1528 the Wittenberg-educated Duke Ernst implemented the new teachings in the principality of Lüneburg, a policy that met with resistance.7 Uncertainty about the evangelical movement, especially among noble families, made continuing to support existing convents appealing for political leaders. In 1568 Duke Julius of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel sought to establish a uniform convent reform policy throughout the region. The previous resistance from nuns unwilling to accept the Augsburg Confession experienced by his predecessors made this goal problematic. His solution allowed established nuns to retain their traditional beliefs and rituals and focused on novices to establish a genuinely evangelical female religious community. When introducing the evangelical movement into Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel and Calenberg-Göttingen between 1542 and 1547, reform leaders enforced their religious policy with church ordinances and visitations. In 1542 the Schmalkaldic League forces led by Landgrave Philipp of Hesse and Elector John Frederick of Saxony occupied Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel. Johannes Bugenhagen and Antonius Corvinus published a church ordinance for the region in 1543, which condemned the monks’ and nuns’ “false service to God and imagined religion.”8 Reformers were cautious in taking steps to end monasticism in practice. During the church reorganization, Lutheran visitors in 1542 and 1544 were advised to give nuns wishing to leave the convent a proper settlement in line with what they brought with them into the convent, but to allow those unwilling to leave to stay under the Lutheran abbesses’ authority.9 The Schmalkaldic League’s arrival in Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel emboldened the Lutheran Duchess Elisabeth, then regent for her young son in the neighboring Calenberg-Göttingen, to introduce the reformation into her territories.10 Her Lutheran church ordinance, written by Antonius Corvinus and Urbanus Rhegius, repeated the core Lutheran criticism on monastic life: “[H]ow is it possible that such a large, lazy, and idle crowd of men and women all would simultaneously possess the divine gift of chastity?”11 Her convent rule asserted that the only justification for enclosed communities was to teach the young “to be learned, godly, and possess good manners.” Convent inhabitants were instructed to wear “simple, honorable . . . clothing,” and “those who wanted to stay, might stay, and those who wanted to leave, could leave,” thus demonstrating how “Christian freedom was better understood [in the early church] than it is now.”12 This brief Lutheran phase ended in Lower Saxony in 1547, when the Catholic Duke Henry V regained control in Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel and Eric II, a convert to Catholicism, took authority from his mother in CalenbergGöttingen. Officials told nuns to return to their traditional rules and habits and reversed the reforms introduced in the 1540s. Even in Lüneburg, the reform movement faltered during the imperial regency and subsequent succession crises after Ernst’s death in 1546.

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Throughout Lower Saxony, political and religious leaders began a sustained political effort to transform the convents into Lutheran educational institutions under territorial rule by creating concrete regulations for them during the later sixteenth century. After the instability in Lüneburg during the reign of William the Younger (1559–1592), Ernst II (1592–1611) and his brother and successor Duke Christian (1611–1633) renewed efforts to enforce the reform movement in convents. After inheriting Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel in 1568, the Lutheran Duke Julius renewed monastic reform, especially in convents, through church ordinances and visitations, which he extended when he inherited Calenberg-Göttingen in 1584.13 The 1569 Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel church order, written by Martin Chemnitz, church superintendent in Braunschweig, and Jacob Andreae, a Tübingen professor and theologian from Württemberg, supported a gradual transition from traditional religious orders to the new secular educational institutions envisioned by reformers. Sections concerning nuns illustrated Lutheran doctrine and limited toleration for continued Catholic practices. In the 1569 church order, Chemnitz and Andreae underscored the Lutheran position that convents were founded in the early church as nothing more than “schools” to instruct noble girls in the “true knowledge and fear of god” and that vows given upon entrance to the convent were temporary promises similar to those given any parent. Andreae also published a report elaborating “why the women could . . . set aside their order and habits . . . in good conscience.”14 Andreae argued that the Augsburg confession was not a “new belief” but rather a return to the “old Catholic Christian belief” of the Old and New Testaments, and admonished the nuns to learn the difference between “superstitious, false divine service” and “true divine service.”15 Andreae asserted that the secular female religious communities [Damenstift], such as Quedlingberg, Wunstorf, Gandesheim, and Heiningen, had retained the original “Christian” purpose of convents evident in scripture and the early church, in part because the women did not make binding vows and girls learned to “run their own homes and be blessed with children.”16 He praised the duchy of Braunschweig for not “tearing down” or “allowing [these communities] to fall into ruin,” and choosing instead to recreate an institution that allowed “monastics, male and female” to remain in place in “true ancient Catholic, Apostolic, Christian belief.”17 Political leaders in the sixteenth century modeled their convent regulations on the Damenstift, or female religious communities housing canonesses, to establish female religious institutions without solemn monastic vows. The church order stipulated that all new postulants were not to take the veil and habit or make binding vows of eternal virginity. Andrea described how the traditional habits had erroneously come to signify the women as “superior” spiritually to those outside the convent.18 Instead, he argued that women living in the religious community should wear a “black dress and white headdress” as honorable women did. Andreae described the uniform colors and style of female clothing as ensuring that “none could scorn another” as they might if any girl “dressed more sumptuously than the other.” Perhaps most significantly, the 1568 ordinance established that no new nun

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would be admitted without ducal approval, restricted convent membership, and allowed children to be educated only if money was provided for their room and board.19 Ultimately, reformers assumed, the convents would cease to function as religious houses as the last traditional nuns died. Reformers presumed the confessional identity of women remaining in the convents during the initial reform to be different from that of those who joined as avowed Lutherans. To reinforce these changes, rulers in the duchy of Braunschweig and their officials sought to use the Latin term domina (Domina), which signifies a female householder, rather than the previously used abbess (Äbtissin) or prioress (Priorin).20 Whether the women in the convents were nuns or not was left ambigious by the use of the term Jungfrau, which could be understood as maiden, virgin, or nun in German. Andreae distinguished between a “house regulation” and a “church ordinance,” saying that the food served and other stipulations were essentially the same as those rules set in place by a “house father” or “house mother” and that these could change.21 Territorial officials also expected that the physical space of the convents would become secular, as they transferred convent resources, property, and personnel to ducal control. The nuns in convents did not passively accept these assumptions as the secular authorities had expected. Many applicants, their sponsors, and the women living within religious houses continued to use the older term, Äbtissin, creating a complex religious identity.22 Some supplicants and authors believed that the young women were expected to remain in religious houses only temporarily before marriage, while others expected monastic life to be binding until death. These differences inevitably led to conflicts. In 1572, for instance, Julius focused his second convent rule on minimizing waste and maximizing convents’ financial stability (and that of his own treasury) by inventorying convent property, right down to the “hens, eggs, and geese.”23 He expected this move to be unobtrusive. Many nuns affected by this policy, however, rejected dividing the convent’s spiritual and practical functions and viewed this regulation as a challenge to their vocation and independence. Several nuns from Steterburg expressed shock at the announcement by Franz Hintersdorf, their new superintendent, about losing their “work.” The nuns asserted that they had tended their property and so should not lose their rights. They then conveyed their fear that officials intended to drive them from the convent, begging that the duke allow them instead to continue their work so no one could say they neglected their duty.24 The differing sense of purpose and goals for a convent and monastic life expressed by each constituency in the initial reform continued in subsequent interactions between convents and officials seeking to implement the new convent ordinance. These different expectations regarding a convent’s purpose and a nun’s vocation are evident in supplications for temporary and permanent entrance into the religious houses. The new policy meant that both the ruling prince and abbess had to give their permission for any woman to receive schooling or profess in the house. This regulation required frequent correspondence between abbesses and territorial rulers, which often included the original supplication from a woman, her

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relatives, or her guardian. Between 1570 and 1640 approximately seventy women petitioned for admission to former convents in Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, Calenberg, and Lüneburg.25 The justifications contained in appeals from the laity in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries provide demands for a spiritual vocation not contained in either the doctrinal discussion of Bugenhagen, Andreae, and Corvinus or the educative function of the convent envisioned by territorial princes such as Julius. Retaining a Spiritual Life On the surface, the women’s lives within convent buildings changed after the 1542, 1568, and 1572 ordinances: the property and financial concerns were run by ducal officials and the nuns served as educators for girls or occupied themselves with useful work such as reading, sewing, and reading scripture in German.26 The petitions from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries indicate that these institutions did not always operate as outlined in regulations. As the above discussions have made clear, many women entered convents for reasons other than education, the only allowable purpose designated in the church orders and convent regulations. At the same time, however, abbesses and conventuals inhabiting the convents followed a systematic strategy of negotiation and delays to improve their chances of selecting postulates and novices favorable to their traditional customs, rituals, and beliefs. By the late sixteenth century, political and church authorities promised not to force older nuns to put aside their habits or food rituals, such as fasting, and asked the nuns to practice toleration. As the ordinance stated, nuns were to trust that the duke did not wish “to lead them from the old catholic, apostolic, Christian belief to a new belief or damned sect and heresy,” reminding them that the duty of a “true subject” was to accept “true religion.”27 Confessors and pastors reminded the nuns that the older customs and rituals did not serve God, but allowed nuns to pray and sing in German or Latin according to “what they understood,” and conducted religious services in both languages, although scriptural readings were exclusively in German. Nuns retaining traditional clothing or food customs were instructed not to “curse or abuse” any nun setting aside these practices, and the new Lutheran nuns were instructed to live in peace with the traditional nuns. Andreae reminded all nuns to “live side by side and with each other in Christian peace and blessed unity until they reached, through God’s mercy, a unified Christian understanding in belief and God’s Word.” In setting up a system by which some inhabitants retained their spiritual life, rulers inadvertently allowed those women to perpetuate rituals and religious identity through their educational roles. A significant gap often existed between a nun’s public confessional identity and her private religious practice and belief.28 One seventeenth-century comment about Anna von Marnholt, the first Lutheran abbess of Lüne (1562–1580), shows how extreme that difference could be: “[S]he did not designate herself as the

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first Lutheran Domina, but was designated so by a ducal decree, which shows that she did not uphold the new teaching, because she did not banish or forbid the following: 1. . . . Candlemas; 2. On green Thursday, she washed the nuns’ feet; [and] 3. Foster children and pupils in the convent were not, as the Duke commanded, Lutheran but rather still Catholic maidens.” The commentator added that this contradicted ducal policy to “allow the Catholic nuns to die out, and henceforth only admit Lutheran girls.”29 If the abbess and some or all applicants maintained the previous customs, convents did not make the envisioned confessional transition. Although the secular authorities saw the Lutheran convent school as a temporary stage in a girl’s life, many students sought to join convents permanently. In 1595 Georg von Ilten described how his daughter had spent several years in Steterburg learning “prayer, reading, and sewing” and was now “begging him daily” to allow her to remain in the convent.30 The Steterburg abbess and nuns supported her application, reporting that she had learned enough to read and sing with the nuns.31 Ducal officials began to request additional information before granting permission for a student to enter a convent. In 1590 the abbess responded to questions about the preparation of several students in Weende who were seeking investiture after several nuns departed to marry or enter other convents. She reported that the three women in question were in their early twenties, daughters of citizens from neighboring towns, and students in the convent. She admitted that they had not yet mastered Latin. The Wolfenbüttel chancellor and council responded that they would consider the application if the young women’s relatives provided the loca dotis, or dowry, to enter the convent.32 During visitations of ostensibly Lutheran convents, officials found many nuns had only superficially accepted the ordinance to preserve their community and gain specific applicants. Students attending the convent schools often developed an inclination to profess, which nuns supported if they showed promise in retaining older customs. In 1607 Gertrud Koch, abbess at Mariengarten, pronounced several girls studying in the convent and wishing to profess as “qualified,” especially in singing. Ducal officials withheld their support after they discovered that the girls were deficient in specific skills, including one girl who was unable to read.33 Officials became more cautious about admitting former students when they could not confirm that they held Lutheran beliefs. Territorial princes remained cognizant that the resident nuns retained the final decision about who entered the convent and took the veil.34 The nuns’ focus on spiritual life led them to support applicants, including former servants, who showed willingness to participate in convent rituals and customs. In 1594 Johann Schrader requested that his thirty-year-old daughter Elisabeth enter Mariensee because she “was not inclined towards marriage” and wanted to remain permanently in the convent where she had served for a decade.35 In 1624 Anna Schröder requested that Dorothea Luardts, her servant and companion, be made a canoness in Steterburg. Schröder explained that during the previous eight years Luardts had accompanied her to choir and had learned to sing and read well enough to qualify for the position. Luardts now wished to live her life “in quiet

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solitude and contemplation . . . and to retreat from the world.”36 Nuns thus had some control over the education and customs of their congregation. By the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, nuns in Weende, Hilwartshausen, and other convents in the region were resisting shifts in their rituals and traditions, even as they sought to remain outwardly compliant.37 After a forceful request from the noble von Lahr family, the Weende abbess responded that the nuns of her convent “witnessed daily that the nobility are no different than the lower status when they are taken in to a convent. . . . [A]nd that it only leads to trouble if they dine, drink, and are clothed differently than [nuns] from the lower estate.” The nuns then insisted that they not be “occupied with idle noble people.”38 Conflicts over the necessity of a novitiate showed another area of continuing mixed expectations between convents and ducal officials. Some congregations pushed for candidates to spend time in the convent before they became postulants to make sure they possessed acceptable qualifications. Although Duchess Elisabeth supported Katharina de Rasche’s application, her uncle Stats de Rasche, a lieutenant-colonel, reported that the convent was “holding to their statutes and old customs, that the nuns must have a one-year novitiate to learn Latin and singing before taking the veil.” He complained that “no reason for this custom” existed.39 In response to a request to allow Anna Sophia von Krosigk, Heinrich von Kampe’s widow, to profess in Isenhagen, Abbess Maria Schenk responded that other young women, including two residents who had already spent a long time in the congregation and sang the service with them, also wished to profess.40 Many convent inhabitants preferred to invest young women inclined to a spiritual life, and that usually meant the women they had trained. Differences in the ways convents responded to these petitions resulted in communities with distinct identities and characteristics. Some convents, parti­ cularly those that had a long tradition as Augustinian canonesses, demonstrated a strong local identity as noble religious foundations. In 1638 Magdalena Eberling requested a place as a canoness in the convent when one became available. She explained that she, a poor girl, had been a servant for the canoness Elisabeth von Brandenstein until her death. Eberling expressed her preference for life within the convent over secular life and declared that her only goal was to become a canoness to serve the poor and God.41 Although the nuns at Wienhausen confirmed her good work, they recommended sending her to another convent. Duke Frederick responded that since, according to her recommendation, Eberling “conducted herself well and had a particular desire for monastic life,” he would like to see them admit her.42 In Wienhausen, however, noble status held great significance even after reform, a factor that for these nuns was more significant than Eberling’s spiritual inclination.43 Indeed, there is no evidence that Eberling was granted admission to Wienhausen.44 Similarly, convents resisting doctrinal or ritual changes sought to delay any attempts by ducal officials to add women likely to introduce these changes. Ducal officials used similar delaying tactics. The negotiation that resulted as each side sought to get its candidate admitted to the convent led to unique compromises.

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In 1615 Duchess Elisabeth sought to postpone admission of Maria, the niece of Ilsebeth Salzman, a current nun, to Mariengarten, citing the fact that three previous girls she had sent had not yet professed. Her officials then agreed to allow the convent’s candidate to profess at the same time as the ducal postulants.45 Finances also influenced ducal decisions to delay a woman’s petition to enter the convent. In 1633 Duke Christoph replied to the convent’s petition to allow Armgarth von Mesenberg, who had already been living in Ebstorf for four years, to profess, reminding them that they could only do that if a nun’s death left a position open.46 In doing so, the duke enforced the regulation designating a specific size for the convent congregation, above the nuns’ objection. This delayed von Mesenberg’s entry and maintained confessional balance in the convent. Because of the necessity of agreement from both duke and abbess, both sides eventually accepted postulants they did not want in order to get those they did, thereby allowing a dynamic confessional situation to continue. New nuns were expected to follow Lutheran teachings as outlined in formal convent rules written by Lutheran theologians, which were designed to return the convents to the “true belief” and purpose of convents as outlined by Andreae. Yet many women sponsored by the abbess or the convent, including those residing in the convent as pupils or servants, carried on the customs that reformers had intended to make obsolete. This meant that former convents still functioned in part as traditional monastic institutions and that many nuns conducted themselves as they had before their acceptance of the Augsburg Confession. Building a New Monastic Life Lutheran territorial rulers in Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel sought to deal with residual resistance from current nuns when establishing their reform policy in the convents by shifting the confessional balance within the convent. Initially, ducal officials strategically moved women around to promote Lutheranism. Such efforts were not always welcomed, even by women favorable to the Augsburg Confession, since entering a convent inhabited by traditional nuns brought these new members into conflict with nuns hostile to their efforts.47 To achieve parity and eventual control over the convent, rulers adopted a policy of favoring Lutheran petitioners.48 As a first step, they focused on the educational purpose they envisaged for the convents, favoring candidates who expressed educational goals over other applicants. Their efforts soon conflicted with the convent’s needs as well as the interests of those seeking to enter the convent by using education as an intermediate step to a religious vocation. The educational role played by convents became a desired commodity for noble and non-noble applicants seeking shortterm means to achieve a long-term provision for daughters and wards, prompting demands that rulers sponsor applicants without means.49 Guardians, parents, relatives, and independent women used multiple tactics to acquire the limited places in a convent.

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Territorial princes sought to prevent the nuns from filling the convent with their own pupils by sponsoring women of reliable Lutheran identity with ties to the state. Even in the principality of Lüneburg, where the reform process was more entrenched, certainty about an applicant’s confessional identity remained important. In 1611 the widowed Duchess Dorothea (of Denmark) sought funding from her son to support housing and educating the “baptised Turk” in Lüne.50 Financial support could secure loyalty in such cases. Rulers used sponsored education as a way to provide for relatives of deceased clergy and other court officials. At least three pupils listed for Brunshausen in the late sixteenth century were local Lutheran pastors’ daughters, a pattern seen in other areas as well.51 Duchess Elisabeth of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel asked Wöltingerode to educate master carpenter Andreas Ludwig’s daughter for two years following his long service to the court, and sponsored the education of court musician Karl Cassanus’s daughter after his death.52 The stakes increased when officials sponsored confirming a new novice. In 1634 Duke August requested that Anna Maria von Thal be allowed to enter Walsrode, citing her “good service, prayers, and devotions” and her father’s “true service” to the territory.53 Many women benefited from the rulers’ confidence that the female relatives of their trusted officials would exhibit equivalent political and confessional loyalty once they entered convents. Convents distrusted applicants with such close political affiliations to secular rulers and resisted accepting them by claiming that space was limited or going to great lengths to demonstrate why such women were unqualified. In response to von Thal, the Walsrode nuns protested that Anna Maria had not been educated in the convent and that August’s attempt to force them to take her was against a 1626 financial settlement. The nuns explained how they were already housing nuns from convents destroyed during the war, reminding their prince that he should protect them.54 They emphasized this by underlining the fifteenth provision, which stipulated that “the deceased’s share could be divided proportionately among the surviving nuns” and that positions left vacant by a nun’s death could remain unfilled.55 This conflict was not unique. Duke Christian renewed efforts to find a place in a convent school for the two young daughters of the deceased Bardowick dean, after the Celle city council failed to secure them a place in Ebstorf. He requested that Isenhagen grant Anna Maria a position in the convent as a personal favor, noting Dr. Gerhard Becker’s “true service” and the continuing service of her uncle, the jurist Dr. Ludwig Weissenhauer.56 Abbess Elisabeth von den Knesebeck responded that the duke’s intercession in this “and other similar cases” left them little option other than to obey. She then pointed out how much damage the convent suffered after an attack in 1627.57 Although unsuccessful in preventing the girl from entering in both instances, the convents did bargain for additional financial resources for building projects and support for other novices in the process. An exception to the conflict over pupils emerges in the case of noble applicants. Noble families continued to expect convents to provide their daughters with a secure residence when it was not convenient or financially possible to have them at home.58 In 1588 Hilmar von Oberg, a member of an old Hanoverian family, requested

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that his daughter enter the convent “for a while” in order to be educated.59 In 1618 Andreas von Mandersloh requested Duke Christian’s support for his daughter’s application to enter Walsrode without a dowry.60 The political leaders supported the nobility’s desire to use convents as a safe location in which their daughters could grow up and be educated.61 Unlike their retainers, rulers emphasized noble status rather than confessional affiliation in their appeals for noble girls.62 In 1619 Duke Christoph recommended that Ebstorf admit the widowed Duchess Hedwig of Braunschweig-Luneburg, citing her “excellent background.”63 They also were forceful in insisting that convents educate noble women. In 1617 Duke Frederick Ulrich made clear that Barsinghausen was to support and teach Judith, Dietrich von Eddingerode’s daughter, and “others of her estate and age.”64 In 1633 Duke Christian supported Ernst von Bothmer’s request that his young daughters be educated at Isenhagen, adding a reminder to the nuns that the convents were founded so “that good people’s children be housed and educated and raised in the true fear of God, discipline, honor, and all Christian virtues.”65 The ducal courts demonstrated equal willingness to sponsor noble women for permanent places as nuns, even in convents where they had been educated. Education became a common step in a longer-term solution for some noble women. By the seventeenth century, noble women or their guardians often simultaneously requested to enter a school and to profess as nuns when their education concluded.66 In 1609 Anna and Elisabeth von Rhode petitioned to enter a convent after their parents died so that they might be “raised to god’s fear.” In response Duchess Elisabeth added her support for these “fatherless and motherless children now left in great inconvenience” by their parents’ death, and subsequently supported their investiture at Mariengarten.67 Territorial princes made sure noble girls ended up at predominantly noble convents and were willing to take a stepped approach to making sure that they got there. In 1613 Duke Christoph supported the education of Christoph von Schlistede’s daughter and Hans Haverkarst’s daughter “in god’s fear and good manners” at Ebstorf, suggesting that they could profess at Wienhausen after a few years when places became available.68 The duke made sure the women entered convents with appropriate noble representation, although this did not necessarily support his confessional policy. In this way, noble women in convents could and did retain close ties to traditional customs. Lay supplicants were aware that supporting territorial financial and religious policies would enhance their appeal. Their applications often highlighted the woman’s commitment to becoming a well-educated Lutheran. In 1590 Magdalena von Bochenaute petitioned to enter one of the “evangelical convents” in Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel because those convents near her were “papist.”69 These petitions emphasized how a specific convent, or all the convents in Lower Saxony, followed the “original” or “true” intent of religious communities outlined by Corvinus and Andreae. In 1634, during the Thirty Years War, Anna Fresin requested that her daughter move from her convent in the diocese of Bremen to Walsrode so she might remain in a “Christian estate” due to “changes” in local convents during conflicts with imperial troops.70 Some lay petitioners viewed an

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educational spot as a stepping-stone to a girl’s entering a convent permanently. After their sister and brother-in-law died suddenly, Elisabeth and Catharina Rauen asked that their seven-year-old niece attend school and then profess in a convent. Noting that she was “a pious, disciplined child,” the sisters wrote that they saw the convent as a “refuge” for “a poor abandoned orphan.”71 Rulers were not forthcoming with aid in such cases. Many poor, non-noble supplicants seeking education or permanent convent positions for daughters or wards found their appeals for fee waivers either ignored or forwarded without comment to convents uninterested in their applications. In traditionally noble convents, secular rulers sponsored the admission of poor, noble girls even over wealthy, non-noble applicants and used entrance fees and boarding costs as one method to limit the number of girls they educated. Most application letters from non-noble women and their sponsors highlighted the fact that the women had reached their majority, could read and write in German and Latin, understood good and evil, and wished to remain in the convent until their death. Given that they had to get permission from the abbess and the duke, these statements could allow each to see a girl as upholding their values. Even when petitioners sought long-term solutions for female relatives, they focused on education and doctrinal reasons for choosing convent life, thus underscoring compliance with the published ducal regulations. Refuge from the World Even among lay supplicants citing Lutheran doctrine, justifications contained in appeals from the laity in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries showed considerable variations. The most frequent requests came from lay supplicants asking for long-term care for women who were ill or disabled or seeking protection for those who were orphaned, suffering economic misfortune, or displaced by war.72 These letters suggest a lay expectation that the nuns would and should care for the sick and provide a home for those women unable to survive on their own, thus redefining convents as hospitals and refuges. While no one described these functions as secular, the rationale given in the appeals focused on the physical challenges faced by the applicant rather than on her spiritual conviction. Despite apprehension expressed by convents and ducal officials, supplicants sought entry for female wards or relatives primarily because the girl or young woman was disabled, poor, or displaced by war, making little more than nominal attempts to prove their orthodoxy or spiritual vocation. Nuns used subtle means to oppose pressures to expand their responsibilities to care for the sick and disabled. At the same time, petitioners sought to convince nuns that their candidates could fulfill ritual functions and conform to traditional spiritual values in the convent. Nuns routinely had provided nominal health care for ill members and supported admitting female relatives, including those with disabilities. Petitions from abbesses and nuns suggest that convents were

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aware of the need to balance precedent with increasing lay demands that they assume more caretaking functions. In 1582 Ursula Kircks, the first evangelical abbess of Brunshausen, requested that her niece Margarete Rosenbom be invested as nun to guarantee she would be “looked after for the rest of her life,” since a childhood injury had rendered her “useless to the world.” Kircks emphasized that Margareta had spent her years in the convent in “reading, prayer, and divine services.”73 Some abbesses who rejected external petitions were mindful that the laity expected convents to provide refuge and protection. After noting that the nuns understood that the convent was “created and founded to assist with such abandoned orphans and fragile people,” Abbess Christina von Havighorst denied the petition of the orphaned and disabled Anna Storch to profess in Wienhausen. She then explained that their convent regulations allowed them to admit only as many nuns as they could accommodate and that a recent fire in the convent had left them unable to accept any new members needing special care.74 Anna Storch’s guardians then promised full financial support for up to two years until a position opened up so the already well-educated and literate Anna could “get used to the Latin and singing,” a strategy that secured her entry into the convent.75 Petitioners pointedly mentioned those qualifications favored by convents or rulers to improve the chances for a disabled applicant. The type of disability mattered in many applications for entrance into convents, as they did for hospitals.76 New convent rules established that a woman had to be able to understand Lutheran doctrine and read scripture to profess. Thus, when parents and guardians emphasized a convent’s spiritual role, they downplayed or concealed any disability involving cognitive impairment. In 1590 Valentin Schmidt, a Göttingen citizen, described his daughter Anna as someone uninterested in “worldly matter,” who spent all her time in “prayer or reading.” After citing the church ordinance that convents were founded to educate “the children of pious people,” Schmidt then requested that his daughter be “instructed in good maidenly discipline and fear of God” in a territorial convent.77 The Domina at Weende responded that the girl’s neighbors reported that Anna Schmidt was not “quite all there” and was incapable of learning. She pointed out that her convent and others were not equipped with sufficient personnel or financial resources to care for “poor, fragile” children like Schmidt and advised ducal officials to find another solution.78 The duke simply denied Schmidt’s petition, informing him that those entering a convent had to be “qualified” and able to “be useful” in the convent.79 Officials and convents were uncooperative in accommodating applicants with cognitive disabilities considered serious enough to prevent full comprehension of doctrine and faith. In this way state officials supported the nuns’ position that the convent still served a spiritual function. Secular officials were not always consistent in their decisions about applicants unable to understand Lutheran doctrine or contribute to the convent. Officials did offer some women with cognitive impairments the option of returning to convents where they had lived or studied previously. This exception to the policy on disabled applicants occurred mostly in Lüneburg, where officials struggled with how to

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proceed during Duke William’s battle with mental disorder.80 In 1587, before his final breakdown, Duke William requested that Margarete Megels be allowed to return to Isenhagen, reminding the nuns that Margarete suffered a cognitive impairment and that her father’s death had left her without means or relatives to provide her care or protection, calling her future care a “Christian work.”81 Ducal officials in Lüneburg delayed investiture if the cognitive impairment was temporary and the woman eventually could be “useful” and “qualified.” In 1620 Duke Christian requested that Sophie Bussmann be allowed to reside in the convent until she recovered her physical health and “proper understanding,” at which point he advised that she be formally invested.82 Not all cases met with such consideration. Events surrounding the Thirty Years War heightened the tensions between state officials and convents over applicants with physical disabilities and health issues. After their father’s death, Judith and Christina Düsterthale soon experienced how their poor health threatened their survival during the war. They described to Duke Frederick Ulrich that they understood offering entrance into a convent was how he provided for the “poor and miserable.” Nuns in Mariengarten responded that they had suffered much damage during the war and were unable to care for or provide for such fragile women.83 In 1631 Duke Christian asked Walsrode to take the deceased chancellor Johannes Backmeister’s “fragile” daughter into the convent for “the rest of her life.”84 Noting their desire to be obedient, the nuns responded that their current financial situation left them unable to admit new nuns until another nun died. They also noted that many “noble nuns” displaced by the war in his and neighboring territories were suffering for their evangelical beliefs, hinting that they therefore should take precedence over Backmeister for confessional and status reasons.85 Duke Christian responded that the girl’s fragile condition meant that the nuns should consider her petition equal to those of women “able to prove the usual ancestry and holiness.”86 In doing so, the duke asserted that the convents were to serve a social role as well as uphold traditional functions for the nobility. That the laity viewed convents primarily as places to house women with chronic illnesses, psychological disorders, physical limitations, or developmental disabilities becomes evident by the seventeenth century. Many petitioners expressed concern over providing care for disabled daughters or wards as they themselves aged. In 1619 William Meldow, a goldsmith and citizen in Celle, remarked, “[O]ur ancestors never imagined when they built the convents . . . that these would be used for poor, pious, and honorable maidens, to get their daily food and board during the time when they did not want to enter into a marriage.” He then asked that Wienhausen allow his daughter Margarete to return to the convent. Abbess Christina von Havighorst responded that they already had three “fragile” residents requiring constant care and assistance, which left them unable to provide sufficient supervision for her continual suicide threats and disruptive behavior.87 In 1644, after her husband, Jürgen Klinge, a silversmith at Wienhausen, died, Ilsebe Bessen asked that her daughter Anne Ursula Klinge be allowed to enter the convent as a canoness because the girl’s back injury left “no place in the world

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for her other than the convent.”88 The laity considered disabled women exempted from the Lutheran expectation that all women were to marry, run households, and tend to children, and thus believed that they were owed protection and care within the convent. Even as the laity pushed territorial rulers to include a custodial or nursing purpose for convents, the nuns resisted redefining their work, and territorial princes expressed reservations about the financial implications of providing such care. As part of their attempt to maintain strict control over the conventuals, rulers required that nuns’ nursing take place within the convents and be restricted to inhabitants of the convents. This quasi-enclosure ultimately prevented the nuns from providing the same type of community-based charitable functions provided by convents and lay religious groups in other regions. At least in Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, rulers came to require conventuals and postulants to remain enclosed within their religious communities, and expected these religious houses to be places separate from the world. The women themselves sought to retain aspects of their previous houses, including ability to visit family. As a result, convents in Lower Saxony did not adopt a mandated function as health care or charitable facilities or make a transition to hospitals. Conclusions Political leaders in the principalities of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, CalenbergGöttingen, and Braunschweig-Lüneburg sought to assure that previously Catholic convents were transformed as rapidly as possible into new secular female religious communities. Political leaders instituted ways to control the property and financial dealings of convents through provosts and other officials who carefully controlled the election of Dominas. Rulers expected monastic life to be transformed and eventually become extinct as Dominas abandoned solemn monastic vows. All the female religious houses in these regions officially accepted the Augsburg Confession and Lutheran church regulations by the late sixteenth century, when the nuns turned over administration of their properties to territorial rulers. That seeming compliance did not mean that they practiced the regulations as outlined, and many convents functioned much as they had before reform by seeking likeminded novices. Growing ambiguity about the purpose served by convents and the nuns’ vocation shaped the Lutheran religious houses into something unexpected. By designating the convent as a “refuge from the world,” August’s 1655 convent regulation recognized the shift in function that had been negotiated over the previous decades. Whereas many lay female religious houses continued to interact with their communities, the religious houses in Lower Saxony proved an exception in creating differing ways of observing a new form of Lutheran enclosure. The dual regulation asserted by secular and church officials as well as by the abbess, and the attempted strict control over those entering and leaving the convent, was designed to maintain claustration.

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Yet these policies had unintended and contradictory consequences. Internal convent resistance and reinterpretation of rules and lay demands to use the convents in ways not envisioned by reformers shaped new female religious communities that were a highly individual, complex mix of old and new customs and doctrines.89 As the petitions for entrance demonstrate, many houses effectively became religiously pluralistic during the extended transitional stage between Catholic and Lutheran confessional beliefs. The result was an institutional structure that, to varying degrees, incorporated features of lay religious communities, traditional convents, and noble religious foundations. It was, consequently, one in which nuns were neither recognizably nuns nor laywomen, Lutheran nor Catholic. Furthermore, despite August’s assertion, these communities promised something remarkably close to the traditional monastic solemn vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Notes  * I would like to thank the Western Kentucky University Office of Research and History Department for generous financial and institutional support to complete the research for this article.  1. NdsStAWf, 41 Alt Fb1, Nr. 460, 22v–43v, esp. 22v–23r (01.08.1655), article 1, 4. For a discussion of investiture [Einkleidung] in Catholic convents, see Ulrike Strasser, State of Virginity: Gender, Religion, and Politics in an Early Modern State (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 125–26.  2. Johannes Bugenhagen, Was man vom Closter leben halten sol, am allermeist fur die Nonnen vnd Begynen geschrieben, aus der heiligen schrifft (Wittenberg: Georg Rhau, 1529), Hvv.  3. Martin Luther, Schmalcaldische Artikel (Wittenberg, 1536), 6v (Article 2.3), 21v (Article 3.14) [UB Heidelberg, Cod. Pal. germ. 423] http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/ cpg423/0001 (accessed February 19, 2014)]; Ruth Görnandt, “Zwischen katholischem Erbe und protestantischen Beliebigkeit? Zur Fragen nach dem Wesen evangelischen Klöster in Geschichte und Gegenwart,” in “Kloster-Blicke”: Bilder aus evangelischen Frauenklöstern, ed. Bärbel Görcke (Neustadt am Rübenberge: Kloster Mariensee, 2011), 16.  4. Inge Mager, “Niedersachsische Frauenklöster und Damenstifte in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart,” Kraichtaler Kolloquien 1 (1998): 115–31, esp. 117. In BraunschweigLüneburg: Ebstorf, Isenhagen, Lüne, Medingen, Walsrode, Wienhausen. In BraunschweigWolfenbüttel: Bodenwerder (Kemnade), Brunshausen, Dorstadt, Gandersheim, Heiningen, Marienkloster (Gandersheim), Marienberg (Helmstedt), Lamspringe, Steterburg, Wöltingerode. In Calenberg-Göttingen: Barsinghausen, Derneburg, Escherde, Fredelsloh, Marienwerder, Hilwartshausen, Höckelheim, Mariengarten, Mariensee, Weende, Wennigsen, Wiebrechtshausen, Wülfinghausen, Wunstorf. The remaining two—Eldagsen and Annenkloster (Göttingen)—did not become Lutheran. Remaining nuns were allowed to reside in the building until the death of the last inhabitant, but the congregation renounced the right to admit new members.  5. Hans-Walter Krumwiede, Kirchengeschichte Niedersachsens (Göttingen: Vanden­ hoeck & Ruprecht, 1997), 129–42. The four principalities are Calenberg-Göttingen, Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, Braunschweig-Lüneburg, and Grubenhagen. Only the first three are considered in this essay.

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 6. Hans Otte, ed., “Einleitung,” in Evangelisches Klosterleben: Studien zur Geschichte der evangelischen Klöster und Stifte Niedersachsen (Göttingen: V & R Unipress, 2013), 11–19; Susan Boettcher, “The Social Impact of the Lutheran Reformation,” in Lutheran Ecclesiastical Culture, 1550–1675, ed. Robert Kolb (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 305–59; Merry E. Wiesner, “Ideology Meets the Empire: Reformed Convents and the Reformation,” in Gender, Church and State in Early Modern Germany (New York: Longman, 1998), 47–62, esp. 53–54; Hanna Dose, Evangelischer Klosteralltag: Leben in Lüneburger Frauenkonventen 1590–1710, untersucht am Beispiel Ebstorf (Hannover: Hahn, 1994); Ida-Christine Riggert, Die Lüneburger Frauenklöster (Hannover: Hahn, 1996).  7. Inge Mager, “Reformatorische Klosterpolitik im Dienste der Bildung: Unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Herzogin Elisabeth von Calenberg-Göttingen und des Herzogs Julius von Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel,” in Kloster und Bildung im Mittelalter, ed. Nathalie Kruppa and Jürgen Wilke (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2006), 559–73; Renate Oldermann, “Geistliches und soziales Leben im Jahrhundert nach der Reformation: Beispiele aus niedersächsischen Frauenklöstern und—stiften,” in Evangelisches Klosterleben, ed. Hans Otte, 165–66.  8. Emil Sehling, ed., Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen des XVI. Jahrhunderts, Band 6/1, Niedersachsen: Die Welfischen Lande, and Band 6/2, Niedersachsen: Die Fürstentümer Calenberg-Göttingen und Grubenhagen (Tübingen: Mohr, 1955–1957), 6/1, 22–82; Johannes Bugenhagen and Antonius Corvinus, Christlike Kerken-Ordninge im lande Brunschwig, Wulffenbüttels deles (Wittenberg, 1543), Cir; Tom Lorentzen, Johannes Bugenhagen als Reformator der öffentlichen Fürsorge (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008), 146–51.  9. LKAB, KV Helmstedt, v. 447, 36–37; Gerhard Taddey, Das Kloster Heiningen von der Gründung bis zur Aufhebung (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1966), 118–19. 10. Annaliese Sprenger-Ruppenthal, “Die Herzogin Elisabeth von Calenberg-Göttingen und der Landgraf Philipp von Hessen,” in Gesammelte Aufsätze: Zu den Kirchenordnungen des 16. Jahrhunderts (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2004), 251–77. 11. Sehling, Kirchenordnungen, 6/2: 779; Antonius Corvinus, Vam Kloster lëuende, wat dat sülue yn der hilligen Schrifft vnde vornemesten Vedern, vor einen grundt hebbe. Jtem wo sick henfort de Klosterlüde, yn dem löffliken Förstendome Hertogen Ericks des Jüngern, holden schöllen (Hildesheim: Hennig Rüdem, 1543). 12. Sehling, Kirchenordnungen, 6/2: 845, 848. 13. Uwe Ohainski, “Die zweite Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttelsche Klosterordnung von 9. Januar 1573. Einleitung und Edition,” Braunschweigische Jahrbuch 80 (1999): 55–59. 14. Jakob Andreae and Martin Chemnitz, Kirchenordnung Unnser von Gottes Genaden, Julij, herzogen zu Braunschweig und Lüneburg (Wolfenbüttel: Horn, 1569), 393–94; Jakob Andreae, Christlicher und gründlicher Bericht, welcher gestalt die Herrn und Jungfrawen Clöster im Herzogthum Braunschweig, Wulffenbütlischen theils, Reformiret. Aus welchem die Jungfrawen nicht allein ir Gewissen gegen Gott bewaren, sondern auch meniglich genugsame rechschafft geben können, das sie aus keiner Leichtfertigkeit, sondern mit bestedigem grund des Catholischen Christlichen Glaubens und reinem Gewissen, die Kappen sampt dem Orden abgelegt verlassen. Allen fromen Christen, besonders aber den Closter Jungfrawen, nutzlichen zu lessen (Magdeburg: Andrea Gehen and Wilhelm Ross, 1569), Givr–v; Sehling, Kirchenordnungen, 6/1: 281–336; Amy Leonard, Nails in the Wall: Catholic Nuns in Reformation Germany (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), 57–58.

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15. Andreae, Christlicher und gründlicher Bericht, Bir–Biir, Civr. 16. Ibid., Aiir, Giiir–v, Hir–Hiiiv, Niir. 17. Ibid., Niiiv. 18. Ibid., Iiiiv–Iivr. 19. Andreae and Chemnitz, Kirchenordnung, 401. 20. Andreae, Christlicher und gründlicher Bericht, Giiiv; Boettcher, “Social Impact,” 306–7; Hans Goetting, ed., Das Bistum Hildesheim, 2: Das Benediktiner(innen) kloster Brunshausen (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1974), 128; Annette Kugler, “ ‘Pour la conservation de la maison royale.’ Das Brandenburgische Kloster Heiligengrabe als Beispiel eines evangelischen Damenstifts,” in Zisterzienser: Norm, Kultur, Reform—900 Jahre Zisterzienser, ed. Ulrich Knefelkamp (Berlin: Springer Verlag, 2001), 333. Boettcher points out that the normative usage of the term is more varied, although Goetting suggests that “Domina” dominated in the last third of the sixteenth century and Kugler asserts that it is a key shift evident in evangelical religious houses. 21. Andreae, Christlicher und gründlicher Bericht, Iiv–Iiiir. 22. For a study of an analogous case of complex religious identity, see Juan Ignacio Pulido Serrano, “Plural Identities: The Portuguese New Christians,” Jewish History 25 (2011): 129–51. 23. Ohainski, “Die zweite Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttelsche Klosterordnung,” 59–60, 68. 24. NdsStAWf, 11Alt Stet, Nr. 86 (05.06.1572). 25. In Wolfenbüttel-Braunschweig, this was during the reigns of Julius (1568–1589), Heinrich Julius (1589–1613), and Frederick Ulrich (1613–1634), when WolfenbüttelBraunschweig controlled Calenberg, and in Lüneburg during the reigns of William (1559–1592) [regency, Dorothea of Denmark, 1587–1592], Ernst II (1592–1611), Christian (1611–1633). 26. Andreae and Chemnitz, Kirchenordnung, 395–401. 27. Andreae, Christlicher und gründlicher Bericht, Giv. 28. Franziska Dösinger, “Vom geistlichen Stand und sittlichen Lebenswandel: Niedersächsiche evangelische Klöster zwischen landesherrlicher Norm und alltäglicher Frömmigkeitspraxis,” in Evangelisches Klosterleben, ed. Hans Otte, 187–202. 29. KlA Lü, A3, 2. 30. NdsStAWf, 11Alt Stet, Nr. 86 (30.08.1595), (09.08.1596). 31. NdsStAWf, 11Alt Stet, Nr. 86 (09.05.1597), (16.08.1604). 32. NdsHStAH, Cal. Br. 7, Nr. 1722, 1–3 (30.08.1590), 4–5 (02.09.1590), 15–17 (04.02.1591), 22 (14.02.1591), 24–25, 37–40 (04.03.1593). 33. NdsHStAH, Cal. Br. 7, Nr. 1026, 14–15 (06.02.1607), 16–17 (02.05.1608); 19 (18.08.1609); August Blauel, “XII. Beiträge zur Geschichte des Klosters Mariengarten,” Neues Vaterländisches Archiv 10.2 (1826): 300–301. Nuns remained largely Catholic in practice through the Thirty Years War. 34. NdsHStAH, Celle Br. 49, Nr. 138 (25.02.1608). 35. NdsHStAH, Cal. Br. 7, Nr. 1254 (12.03.1594). 36. NdsStAWf, 11 Alt Stet, Nr. 86 (05.12.1624). 37. Ernst Böhme, Michael Scholz, and Jens Wehner, Dorf und Kloster Weende: Von Anfänge bis ins 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Stadt Göttingen, 1992), 206–15. 38. NdsHStAH, Cal. Br. 7, Nr. 1722, 51–2 (07.10.1604). 39. NdsStAWf, 2 Alt, Nr. 9758 (17.05.1611, 08.06.1611, 02.03.1612, 12.07.1612).

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40. NdsHStAH, Celle Br. 49, Nr. 177 (14.06.1625, 31.10.1625, 09.11.1625). 41. NdsHStAH, Celle Br. 49, Nr. 348 (29.10.1638). 42. NdsHStAH, Celle Br. 49, Nr. 348 (04.01.1639). 43. Riggert, Lüneburger Frauenklöster, 377. 44. Eberling is not listed among the nuns in Horst Appuhn, ed., Chronik und Totenbuch des Klosters Wienhausen (Wienhausen: Schweiger & Pick, 1986). 45. NdsHStAH, Cal. Br. 7, Nr. 1026, 30–47, esp. 44–7 (22.03.1615). 46. NdsHStAH, Celle Br. 49, Nr. 144 (05.06.1633). 47. NdsStAWf, 11 Alt Stet, Nr. 86 (14.04.1589); NdsHStAH, Cal. Br. 7, Nr. 1893 (14.07.1584). 48. NdsStAWf, 11 Alt Stet, Nr. 86 (31.01.1579); NdsHStAH, Cal. Br. 7, Nr. 1722, 26 (21.02.1593). 49. Sabine Graf, “Das erzieherische Wirken der Calenberger Frauenklöster nach der Reformation,” in Evangelisches Klosterleben, ed. Otte, 203–17; Dose, Evangelischer Klosteralltag, 234–35. 50. NdsHStAH, Celle Br. 49, Nr. 223 (24.01.1611). 51. NdsStAWf, 2 Alt, Nr. 3503; Goetting, Das Bistum Hildesheim, 73. 52. NdsStAWf, 2 Alt, Nr. 9748 (07.05.1605); NdsStAWf, 2 Alt, Nr. 9752 (16.04.1608); NdsHStAH, Cal. Br. 7, Nr. 1722, 53–54 (20.04.1611), 56–57 (10.06.1612). 53. NdsHStAH, Celle Br. 49, Nr. 349 (23.08.1634); NdsHStAH, Celle Br. 49, Nr. 347 (09.08.1624). 54. NdsHStAH, Celle Br. 49, Nr. 349 (26.11.1634); Wilhelm von Hodenberg, ed., Archiv des Klosters St. Johannis zu Walsrode (Celle: Capaun-Karlowa’sche Buchhandlung, 1859), 328. Anna Maria von Thal was listed as the prioress in Walsrode in 1639. 55. NdsHStAH, Celle Br. 49, Nr. 349 (06.10.1634; 19.10.1634); von Hodenberg, ed. Archiv des Klosters St. Johannis zu Walsrode, 385, Nr. 410 (26.07.1628). 56. NdsHStAH, Celle Br. 49, Nr. 142 (21.07.1628); NdsHStAH, Celle Br. 49, Nr. 179 (31.08.1633); KlA Ise, CI, 3c (03.09.1633). 57. KlA Ise, CI, 3c (24.09.1633). 58. NdsHStAH, Celle Br. 49, Nr. 223 (06.02.1603). 59. NdsHStAH, Celle Br. 49, Nr. 175 (24.06.1588); NdsHStAH, Celle Br. 49, Nr. 225 (13.11.1619) 60. NdsHStAH, Celle Br. 49, Nr. 343 (07.10.1618); NdsHStAH, Celle Br. 49, Nr. 180 (09.03.1639, 06.04.1639). 61. NdsStAWf, 41 Alt Fb1, Nr. 302 (13.07.1603). 62. NdsHStAH, Celle Br. 49, Nr. 372 and Nr. 373 (17.02.1609); NdsHStAH, Cal. Br. 10, Nr. 883 (02.03.1613). 63. NdsHStAH, Celle Br. 49, Nr. 141 (19.05.1619). 64. NdsHStAH, Cal. Br. 7, Nr. 197 (23.10.1617); NdsHStAH, Cal. Br. 7, Nr. 1722, 58–59 (30.04.1611), 60 (17.05.1611), 61–62 (12.12.1611), 63 (02.03.1612), 64–65 (16.03.1612). 65. KlA Ise, CI, 3d0 (16.03.1633, 19.03.1633); NdsHStAH, Celle Br. 49, Nr. 178 (19.03.1633). 66. NdsHStAH, Celle Br. 49, Nr. 137 (19.02.1606). 67. NdsHStAH, Cal. Br. 7, Nr. 1026, 30–38. 68. NdsHStAH, Celle Br. 49, Nr. 140 (20.04.1613). 69. NdsStAWf, 2Alt, Nr. 8762, Doc. 5, 10 (22.12.1590). 70. NdsHStAH, Celle Br. 49, Nr. 348 (08.07.1634); Sabine Graf, “Die vier katholischen Klöster Harsefeld, Altkloster, Neukloster und Zeven im evangelischen Erzstift Bremen,” Stader Jahrbuch (2001/2002): 51–78.

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71. NdsHStAH, Cal. Br. 7, Nr. 1026, 11–12 (19.01.1605), 13 (01.03.1605); NdsHStAH, Celle Br. 49, Nr. 346 (11.08.1624). 72. Mary Lindemann, Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 120–54, esp. 121. 73. NdsStAWf, 2 Alt, Nr. 9260, Doc. 1 (01.01.1582), Doc. 2 (25.01.1582), Doc 3 (28.04.1582), Doc. 4–6, Doc. 7 (12.05.1582), Doc. 8 (14.12.1582), Doc. 9 (24.03.1583); Goetting, Das Bistum Hildesheim, 34, 66–67, 71. 74. NdsHStAH, Celle Br. 49, Nr. 375 (03.07.1613). 75. NdsHStAH, Celle Br. 49, Nr. 375 (28.06.1613; 13.07.1613); KlA Wienhausen, Bestand A, Fach 3, Nr. 2 (24.06.1613, 15.07.1613); Appuhn, ed., Chronik und Totenbuch des Klosters Wienhausen, 89. The nun Anna Storch (Storks) is recorded as having died in Wienhausen in 1659. 76. H.C. Erik Midelfort, A History of Madness in Sixteenth Century Germany (Stanford: Stanford University, 1999), 362–65. 77. NdsHStAH, Cal. Br. 7, Nr. 1722, 6–7, 10–11 (03.10.1590, 10.10.1590). 78. NdsHStAH, Cal. Br. 7, Nr. 1722, 12–13 (14.11.1590). 79. NdsHStAH, Cal. Br. 7, Nr. 1722, 21 (09.02.1591); NdsStAWf, 2 Alt, Nr. 8770 (01.03.1610). 80. H.C. Erik Midelfort, Mad Princes of Renaissance Germany (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1994), 60–70. 81. NdsHStAH, Celle Br. 49, Nr. 174 (24.07.1587); KlA Ise, CI, 3c1, 1, Nr. 48, 1582; KlA Ise, BV Eggelling Chronik, 183; Wolfgang Brandis, ed., Chronik des Klosters Isenhagen, Teil I: 1578–1720 (Gifhorn: Kreisarchiv, 2005), 31; Megels previously left the convent after the nuns were unable to control her behavior in 1582, and was sent a Taler in 1585 to help her settle into her life outside the convent. She was not listed among the nuns in 1595. 82. NdsHStAH, Celle Br. 49, Nr. 37 (10.01.1620). 83. NdsHStAH, Cal. Br. 7, Nr. 1026, 48–59 (17.10.1628). 84. NdsHStAH, Celle Br. 49, Nr. 350 (15.02.1631). 85. NdsHStAH, Celle Br. 49, Nr. 350 (16.04.1631). 86. NdsHStAH, Celle Br. 49, Nr. 350(02.05.1631). 87. NdsHStAH, Celle Br. 49, Nr. 374 (September/October 1619); KlA Wie, Best. A, Fach 3, Nr. 2 (07.10.1614). 88. NdsHStAH, Celle Br. 49, Nr. 380 (27.06.1644); NdsHStAH, Cal. Br. 7, Nr. 1317 (12.02.1650). 89. NdsStAWf, 41 Alt Fb1, Nr. 470, 14r–22v (19.01.1573).

Works Cited Archival Sources Landeskirchliches Archiv Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel [LKAB] KV Helmstedt, v. 447 Niedersächsiches Staatsarchiv Wolfenbüttel [NdsStAWf] 2 Alt, Nrs. 3503, 8762, 8770, 9260, 9748, 9752, 9758 11 Alt Stet, Nr. 86 41 Alt Fb1, Nrs. 302, 460, 470 Niedersächsiches Hauptstaatsarchiv Hannover [NdsHStAH]

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Cal. Br. 7, Nrs. 197, 1026, 1254, 1317, 1722, 1893 Cal. Br. 10, Nr. 883 Celle Br. 49, Nrs. 37, 137–38, 140–42, 144, 174–75, 177–80, 223, 225, 343, 347– 50, 372–75, 380 Klosterarchiv Isenhagen [KlA Ise] CI, 3d0 CI, 3c1, Nr. 48 BV Eggelling Chronik Klosterarchive Lüne [KlA Lü] A3, 2 Klosterarchive Wienhausen [KlA Wie] Bestand A, Fach 3, Nr. 2 Primary Sources Andreae, Jakob. Christlicher und gründlicher Bericht, welcher gestalt die Herrn und Jungfrawen Clöster im Herzogthum Braunschweig, Wulffenbütlischen theils, Reformiret. Aus welchem die Jungfrawen nicht allein ir Gewissen gegen Gott bewaren, sondern auch meniglich genugsame rechschafft geben können, das sie aus keiner Leichtfertigkeit, sondern mit bestedigem grund des Catholischen Christlichen Glaubens und reinem Gewissen, die Kappen sampt dem Orden abgelegt verlassen. Allen fromen Christen, besonders aber den Closter Jungfrawen, nutzlichen zu lessen. Magdeburg: Andrea Gehen and Wilhelm Ross, 1569. Andreae, Jakob and Martin Chemnitz. Kirchenordnung Unnser von Gottes Genaden, Julij, herzogen zu Braunschweig und Lüneburg. Wolfenbüttel: Horn, 1569. Bugenhagen, Johannes, and Antonius Corvinus. Christlike Kerken-Ordninge im lande Brunschwig, Wulffenbüttels deles. Wittenberg, 1543. Bugenhagen, Johannes. Was man vom Closter leben halten sol, am allermeist fur die Nonnen vnd Begynen geschrieben, aus der heiligen schrifft. Wittenberg: Georg Rhau, 1529. Corvinus, Antonius. Vam Kloster lëuende, wat dat sülue yn der hilligen Schrifft vnde vornemesten Vedern, vor einen grundt hebbe. Jtem wo sick henfort de Klosterlüde, yn dem löffliken Förstendome Hertogen Ericks des Jüngern, holden schöllen. Hildesheim: Hennig Rüdem, 1543. Julius of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel [Jakob Andreae and Martin Chemnitz]. Kirchenordnung Unnser von Gottes Genaden, Julij, herzogen zu Braunschweig und Lüneburg, etc. Wie es mit Lehr und Ceremonien unsers Fürstenthumbs Braunschweig Wolffenbütlischen Theils, Auch derselben Kirchen anhangenden sachen und verrichtungen, hinfurt . . . gehalten warden sol. Wolfenbüttel, 1569. Luther, Martin. Schmalcaldische Artikel. Wittenberg, 1536 [UB Heidelberg, Cod. Pal. germ. 423] http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/cpg423/0001 (accessed February 19, 2014).

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Edited Primary Sources Appuhn, Horst, ed. Chronik und Totenbuch des Klosters Wienhausen. Wienhausen: Schweiger & Pick, 1986. Brandis, Wolfgang, ed. Chronik des Klosters Isenhagen, Teil I: 1578–1720. Gifhorn: Kreisarchiv, 2005. Hodenberg, Wilhelm von, ed. Archiv des Klosters St. Johannis zu Walsrode. Celle: Capaun-Karlowa’sche Buchhandlung, 1859. Sehling, Emil, ed. Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen des XVI. Jahrhunderts, Band 6 /1, Niedersachsen: Die Welfischen Lande, and Band 6/2, Niedersachsen: Die Fürstentümer Calenberg-Göttingen und Grubenhagen. Tübingen: Mohr, 1955–1957. Secondary Sources Blauel, August. “XII. Beiträge zur Geschichte des Klosters Mariengarten.” Neues Vaterländisches Archiv 10. 2 (1826): 233–328. Boettcher, Susan. “The Social Impact of the Lutheran Reformation.” In Lutheran Ecclesiastical Culture, 1550–1675, edited by Robert Kolb, 305–59. Leiden: Brill, 2008. Böhme, Ernst, Michael Scholz, and Jens Wehner. Dorf und Kloster Weende: Von Anfänge bis ins 19. Jahrhundert. Göttingen: Stadt Göttingen, 1992. Dose, Hanna. Evangelischer Klosteralltag: Leben in Lüneburger Frauenkonventen 1590–1710, untersucht am Beispeil Ebstorf. Hannover: Hahn, 1994. Dösinger, Franziska. “Vom geistlichen Stand und sittlichen Lebenswandel: Niedersächsiche evangelische Klöster zwischen landesherrlicher Norm und alltäglicher Frömmigkeitspraxis.” In Evangelisches Klosterleben, ed. Hans Otte, 187–202. Goetting, Hans, ed. Das Bistum Hildesheim, 2: Das Benediktiner(innen)kloster Brunshausen. Das Benediktinerinnenkloster St. Marien vor Gandersheim. Das Benediktinerkloster Clus. Das Franziskanerkloster Gandersheim. Germana Sacra, Neue Folge, 8. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1974. Görnandt, Ruth. “Zwischen katholischem Erbe und protestantischen Beliebigkeit? Zur Fragen nach dem Wesen evangelischen Klöster in Geschichte und Gegenwart.” In “Kloster-Blicke”: Bilder aus evangelischen Frauenklöstern, edited by Bärbel Görcke, 14–26. Neustadt am Rübenberge: Kloster Mariensee, 2011. Graf, Sabine. “Das erzieherische Wirken der Calenberger Frauenklöster nach der Reformation.” In Evangelisches Klosterleben, ed. Otte, 203–17. ———. “Die vier katholischen Klöster Harsefeld, Altkloster, Neukloster und Zeven im evangelischen Erzstift Bremen.” Stader Jahrbuch (2001/2002): 51–78. Krumwiede, Hans-Walter. Kirchengeschichte Niedersachsens. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1997.

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Kugler, Annette. “ ‘Pour la conservation de la maison royale.’ Das Brandenburgische Kloster Heiligengrabe als Beispiel eines evangelischen Damenstifts.” In Zisterzienser: Norm, Kultur, Reform—900 Jahre Zisterzienser, edited by Ulrich Knefelkamp, 323–40. Berlin: Springer Verlag, 2001. Leonard, Amy. Nails in the Wall: Catholic Nuns in Reformation Germany. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005. Lindemann, Mary. Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Lorentzen, Tom. Johannes Bugenhagen als Reformator der öffentlichen Fürsorge. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008. Mager, Inge. “Niedersachsische Frauenklöster und Damenstifte in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart.” Kraichtaler Kolloquien 1 (1998): 115–31, esp. 117. ———. “Reformatorische Klosterpolitik im Dienste der Bildung: Unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Herzogin Elisabeth von Calenberg-Göttingen und des Herzogs Julius von Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel.” In Kloster und Bildung im Mittelalter, edited by Nathalie Kruppa and Jürgen Wilke, 559–73. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006. Midelfort, H.C. Erik. A History of Madness in Sixteenth Century Germany. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. ———. Mad Princes of Renaissance Germany. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1994. Ohainski, Uwe. “Die zweite Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttelsche Klosterordnung von 9. Januar 1573. Einleitung und Edition.” Braunschweigische Jahrbuch 80 (1999): 55–71. Oldermann, Renate. “Geistliches und soziales Leben im Jahrhundert nach der Reformation: Beispiele aus niedersächsischen Frauenklöstern und–stiften.” In Evangelisches Klosterleben, ed. Hans Otte, 165–77. Otte, Hans, ed. Evangelisches Klosterleben: Studien zur Geschichte der evangelischen Klöster und Stifte Niedersachsen. Göttingen: V & R Unipress, 2013. Pulido Serrano, Juan Ignacio. “Plural Identities: The Portuguese New Christians.” Jewish History 25 (2011): 129–51. Riggert, Ida-Christine. Die Lüneburger Frauenklöster. Hannover, 1996. Sprenger-Ruppenthal, Annaliese. “Die Herzogin Elisabeth von CalenbergGöttingen und der Landgraf Philipp von Hessen.” In Gesammelte Aufsätze: Zu den Kirchenordnungen des 16. Jahrhunderts, 251–77. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004. Strasser, Ulrike. State of Virginity: Gender, Religion, and Politics in an Early Modern State. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007. Taddey, Gerhard. Das Kloster Heiningen von der Gründung bis zur Aufhebung. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1966. Wiesner, Merry E. “Ideology Meets the Empire: Reformed Convents and the Reformation.” In Gender, Church and State in Early Modern Germany, 47–62. New York: Longman, 1998.

10 Marina de Saavedra A Devout Laywoman on a Confessional Frontier (Zamora, 1558–1559)* Doris Moreno Martínez

The Confessional Frontier Much has been written about the so-called Lutheran group of sixteenth-century Valladolid. In the nineteenth century, writing from very diverse ideological positions, Juan Antonio Llorente, Adolfo de Castro, Benjamin W. Wiffen, Luis Usoz y Río, Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo, and Ernst H.J. Schaeffer assembled the essential documentation regarding the men and women who were tried by the Spanish Inquisition between 1558 and 1561. None questioned their Protestant identity.1 In the twentieth century, in his extraordinary study of the reception of Erasmus in sixteenth-century Spain, Marcel Bataillon called this identification into question: Protestantism came late to Spain, he claimed, and failed to take root because Erasmism had previously fulfilled the desires for spiritual renovation in broad sectors of Spanish society. According to the French Hispanist, the practices of the so-called Lutheran groups of Castile were better explained in the context of the autochthonous alumbrado movement than as an authentic reformist cult. At any rate, it was a question of diluted, low-intensity “protestantism,” not capitalized and suitably enclosed in quotation marks.2 In contrast, José C. Nieto defended the thesis that the individuals from Seville and Valladolid who were tried by the Holy Office were clearly Protestants (with a capital P) working in harmony with the transalpine Reformation. Yet far from being mere recipients of ideas from the north, these groups were the genuine project of a Spanish reform movement in which Juan de Valdés surely played an essential role.3 José Ignacio Tellechea also dismissed any doubt about the matter. In his judgment, along with traditional anti-clericalism, the core concepts of Protestant dogma (redemption and satisfaction in Christ, faith and assurance of salvation, free will, the role of the church and the sacraments, and the logical ramifications of these principles) were clearly present in the inquisitorial testimonies of the principal figures. Nevertheless, not all the accused in these trials were equally conversant with the new doctrines and religious practices. That is, a significant number of those tried for Lutheranism in the middle of the sixteenth century should be located somewhere on a spectrum between orthodoxy and heterodoxy.4 Recent years have witnessed an important historiographic renewal on this subject, thanks

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to the work of scholars such as Werner Thomas, Michel Boeglin, and Tomás López Muñoz. An outstanding monograph by Stefania Pastore, emphasizing the impact of alumbradismo and the ideas of Juan de Valdés on figures such as Constantino Ponce de la Fuente, has contributed enormously to how we debate the question of confessional identities in early sixteenth-century Spain. Much remains to be done, however. The cases of men and women tried for Lutheranism in mid-sixteenthcentury Spain call for new studies attending to the dynamics of the spread of new ideas among them; paying close attention to their sociological profiles, religious practices, forms of communication, and relations with religious orders; and focusing directly on the role of women.5 In this essay, groups of so-called Lutherans from Valladolid, Pedrosa del Rey, Toro, Zamora, Palencia, and Logroño will serve as the frame of reference. Although they are identified as Lutherans in trial records, I follow the lead of José Ignacio Tellechea Idígoras by referring to them as “protestants,” sensu lato.6 Nuns, beatas, and devout laywomen played key roles in these groups. Many were literate in Spanish and Latin, and a considerable number of the manuscripts and printed texts that nourished Spanish protestants passed through their hands. These women approached biblical texts with avid curiosity and delighted in spiritual conversation. Their respectable social position endowed them with the spiritual authority to disseminate discreetly new ideas and practices. In Pedrosa del Rey, there was a house of very active beatas whose guardian was Pedro de Cazalla, a major figure among the religious dissidents. In Valladolid, women—Juana Sánchez, a beata who committed suicide while imprisoned by the Inquisition, and Beatriz de Cazalla, also a beata—were prominent in spreading the new ideas. A considerable number of nuns from the convents of Belén and Santa Catalina in the same city were also implicated in trials for Lutheranism. In Toro, the Marquise of Alcañices, Doña Elvira de Rojas, provided protection for her daughter Doña Ana Enríquez and her circle of friends and female servants. Inquisitorial documents cite twenty women from Zamora as having participated in suspect encounters or conversations. More than half of those tried for Lutheranism in this city and its surroundings were women. Among them, Marina de Saavedra, previously unstudied, deserves attention. The protestant group in Zamora was inspired by the proselytism of Cristóbal de Padilla, the Marquise of Alcañices’ steward, but the effective leader of the group was Marina de Saavedra. An illiterate married woman, she was not a “spiritual mother” like other, more famous women tried by the Inquisition, notably Isabel de la Cruz, Francisca Hernández, and María de Cazalla. Since she had a living husband, she does not fit the traditional profile of the beata as a single or widowed laywoman. Nevertheless, despite her attempt in the courtroom to minimize her role, her influence on her contemporaries was sustained and profound.7 Reading the record of her inquisitorial trial leads to the conclusion that she was fully conscious of the extent to which her new beliefs were at odds with accepted orthodoxy. Indeed, on the basis of her trial and those of others, the inquisitors came to the conclusion that Marina de Saavedra had believed Protestant dogma for several months.

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Marina de Saavedra’s Familial and Social Context Marina de Saavedra was born around 1509 in Zamora. Both sides of her family were from the mountainous regions near Santander and the city of Toro. Her grandparents and paternal uncles had a long history of service to the Crown and had held various ecclesiastical offices. Orphaned at a relatively early age, she became a ward of her uncle Gregorio Macías, a canon in Zamora and secretary to the prior of the Order of San Juan de Jerusalén, who signed her dowry letter in 1534. Canon Macías had close relations with various spiritual groups, including disciples of Bartolomé de Carranza, the future archbishop of Toledo (and inquisitorial suspect after 1558). A note in Macías’s will of 1550 suggests that he had contacts with Juan de Ávila, the famous “preacher of Andalusia,” and his school.8 The inventory of his library made at his death in the same year reveals a churchman of varied interests in religion, history, and literature. It is difficult to know for certain what influence Canon Macías had on his niece. We know from her trial that, although she was illiterate, she seems to have been accustomed to listening to works read aloud in groups. The stipulations of Marina de Saavedra’s uncle’s will point to a relationship of intimacy and trust between them, suggesting that at the very least she grew up in an environment open to the circulation of new ideas and was nurtured in an atmosphere of affective spirituality. Marina de Saavedra’s marriage to Pablo Cisneros de Sotelo (also known as Sotelo de Cisneros) in 1534 must have further expanded her wide-ranging cultural formation. Cisneros de Sotelo, a widower with children, belonged to an important family of hidalgos (lesser nobility) from Zamora whose members from the end of the fifteenth century rendered important service to their city (as judges, lawyers, and representatives to the Cortes, or parliament), to the upper nobility (as administrators and advisors), and to the monarchy (as soldiers and conquistadors). These were three sources of wealth and power that the Sotelos—the parents, uncles, and brothers of Pablo Cisneros de Sotelo—knew how to exploit. Relatives of Friar Diego de Deza, Inquisitor General (1498–1507) and Archbishop of Seville (1504–1523), the brothers Alonso and Francisco de Sotelo, Pablo’s uncles, held various offices under his patronage. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the former was a receptor (notary for sequestrations) of the Holy Office in the bishoprics of Cuenca, Siguenza, Calahorra, Osma, Palencia, and Valladolid; the latter was his Deza’s right-hand man until the archbishop’s death in Seville. At this time, in 1523, Alonso de Sotelo, Knight Commander of the Order of Santiago, went on to become the majordomo of the Duke of Medinasidonia. This Alonso de Sotelo financed the conquest of America, specifically the voyages of Alonso de Ojeda, until 1504.9 In 1526 he ordered the foundation of a women’s hospital in Zamora, of which the Sotelos were designated patrons in perpetuity. Pablo’s brothers—Antonio, Gregorio, and Juan—also played important roles in the conquest and exploitation of America. Antonio de Sotelo participated with Hernán Cortés in the conquest of Mexico, renovated the parish church of San Andrés in Zamora, and ordered the construction of a beautiful chapel for the

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Sotelos, with a tomb for himself and his parents sculpted by Pompeo Leoni. His brother, Gregorio de Sotelo, made a fortune in Peru as an encomendero before returning to Zamora in the early 1550s.10 Bernardo de Sotelo accompanied Cortés and Diego de Almagro during the conquest of Peru. Juan de Sotelo, the conquistador of Panama, left a large fortune at his death.11 Pablo Cisneros was increasingly active in city government in the 1540s, representing the city of Zamora in the Cortes of 1555. The Sotelos and other Zamoran nobles constituted a strong, cohesive social class with enormous influence on the public life of the city. With her marriage, Marina gained access not only to new and exciting information about conquests and wealth in the Americas but also to a local world of tightly knit social and political connections.12 Marina’s natal and marital families were firmly anchored in Zamoran society, one in which the church and community piety played an important role. With a population of around 7,745, Zamora in the mid-sixteenth century boasted thirty parishes, numerous confraternities, eleven convents, five monasteries, and a number of beaterios (communal houses for beatas).13 On account of massive male emigration to the New World, single women—that is, never married, widowed, or married to absent husbands—were a notable feature of the social landscape, as was the poverty that beset them. In 1561, widows made up 24 percent of the total households in Zamora; women living without men accounted for 66.6 percent of the poor.14 Local authorities viewed with great suspicion the networks single women often formed to ensure their economic survival. For this reason, in the 1540s the judges of Zamora passed a number of ordinances regulating public order. Here is one example: “Considering the distress of young women who live alone or in houses with other women, where there is much indecency and pandering, we order that henceforth young women, whether unmarried or widowed, shall not live in a house alone; furthermore, we order that no married woman or widow may shelter single women or keep them in her company, under pain of banishment from the city for a year, twenty days in jail, or a fine of 200 maravedís.”15 In this context, numerous beaterios were founded in Zamora during the first half of the sixteenth century. Most—Santa Marina, Santa Marta and San Bernabé, and Santa Paula—were Third Order Franciscan houses; others, like Santa Isabel, outside the city walls, had no monastic affiliation. In Zamora, as elsewhere in Castile, beaterios stood at the center of the multifaceted religious effervescence.16 Confraternities also featured prominently on Zamora’s religious landscape. In the middle of the sixteenth century, with 7,745 inhabitants, Zamora had 153 of them. In comparison, Toledo, with 60,000 inhabitants, supported 143 confraternities; the numbers for Florence and Lyon, with populations similar to Toledo’s, were 75 and 65 confraternities, respectively. Thus in Zamora there was one confraternity for every fourteen households, while in many parts of New Castile (Toro, Valladolid, and Palencia, for example) the ratio was one confraternity for every 100 households. Considering that 30 percent of Zamora’s population appeared in censuses as poor, its confraternities, which served a high percentage of the city’s population, provided a veritable safety net for the city and its environs.

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The confraternities of Zamora, organized according to social strata (there were confraternities for nobles, priests, guild members, and so forth), promoted acts of charity as a fundamental component of imitatio Christi: succoring the hungry and thirsty, clothing the naked, visiting the sick, accompanying the dying, giving shelter to the homeless, and redeeming captives of the Muslims. They fostered solidarity among their members through communal meals, religious gatherings, and devotion to a particular image or saint. Confraternities exerted considerable social weight: they had their own chapels and chaplains, offered prayers in times of public crisis, and displayed an important visible presence during ceremonies honoring their patron saints. Their communal devotions included the public confession of sins and restitution of ill-gotten goods following absolution. Perhaps most controversially, confraternity members attended the dying, carrying out responsibilities such as giving extreme unction and tolling bells for the dead—activities that after the Council of Trent would be officially reserved for parish priests.17 William Christian has called attention to the strong sentiment of universal brotherhood that confraternities fostered in Spain, a sentiment that proved to be almost as threatening to the clergy as the Protestants’ doctrine of universal priesthood.18 From the middle of the sixteenth century and especially after Trent, the church hierarchy increasingly insisted on placing confraternities under its own supervision and control. Its motives are evident. Particularly in cities, confraternities represented social spaces in which the laity could exercise considerable discretion in developing forms of piety independent of ecclesiastical initiative and supervision.19 Marina de Saavedra must be understood in the context of this urban society in which works of charity formed part of a communal religiosity. This religiosity brought together—in public and private spaces—nobles, canons, male and female religious, priests, beatas, artisans, and people of all other types and conditions. Zamora’s protestantism grew out of this rich soil. By tracing Marina’s spiritual itinerary, we can confidently infer her participation in one or more of these groups.20 The Spiritual Itinerary of a Devout Laywoman The primary source for Marina de Saavedra’s history is the record of the inquisitorial trial against her, which began in late June 1558.21 Witnesses describe her as an exceptionally pious woman of fragile health who suffered periodically from palsy. According to her neighbors, from the time she was a young woman she lived withdrawn from the world.22 She had a personal oratory in her home (a sign of her elevated socioeconomic status) to which she withdrew for meditation. From this oratory she reportedly cried out to God, at first in whispers but later in a loud voice: “Lord, I believe what you order me to believe.”23 She went to confession every fifteen days in her parish of Santa María de la Horta or in another parish or convent church. She regularly helped the moribund prepare for death. She gave food and shelter to six indigents in her home, and fifteen days before

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Easter (April 10) in 1558 she took several abandoned children into her home.24 Her dedication to the ill and to the poor in city hospitals amazed her neighbors. Her penances and fasts were so extreme that they left her “almost half dead.”25 Around the end of 1557 something began to change in Marina de Saavedra’s life as a result of a closer relationship with Cristóbal de Padilla, the Dominican friar Domingo de Rojas, and Cristóbal de Ocampo, a core member of the Castilian protestants. Padilla served as steward to Doña Elvira de Rojas, the widowed Marquise of Alcañices, and tutor to her sons, whom he had accompanied during their years at the University of Salamanca. In her palace in nearby Toro, Doña Elvira gave cover to a group of individuals, constantly in motion, who were interested in the new religious ideas. The conversations, books, and ideas they shared in Doña Elvira’s palace would eventually result in their arrest by the Inquisition. The group included the marquise’s chaplain, Sabino Astete, who was a canon from Zamora and friend of Bartolomé de Carranza. From Flanders in 1557, Astete sent to Doña Elvira notebooks containing the manuscript of Carranza’s Comentarios sobre el Catechismo (Commentaries on the Christian Catechism), the work that in the following year would become the center of a bitter polemic and lead to Carranza’s denunciation to the Inquisition. The chief magistrate of Toro, Don Carlos de Seso, and the royal preacher Agustín Cazalla often visited the palace in the company of Friar Domingo de Rojas, Doña Elvira’s brother. It is possible that Doña Elvira also made use of the services of the Bachiller Antonio Herrezuelo. Doña Elvira’s daughter, Ana Enríquez, maintained a retinue of pious women, including the beata of Pedrosa, Juana Velázquez, and several female disciples of Pedro de Cazalla. Pedro de Sotelo, Marina de Saavedra’s nephew, was the marquise’s majordomo. The sisters Beatriz and Constanza Vibero had lived in Doña Elvira’s palace, and Don Juan de Ulloa Pereira, a knight of the Order of San Juan de Jerusalén, was a frequent visitor. All these individuals appeared in the autos de fe celebrated in Valladolid in 1559. Some were condemned to death by fire; others were reconciled to the church. The widowed marquise gave a warm welcome to individuals with a wide variety of beliefs. A similarly wide variety of religious works circulated among this group: Juan de Ávila’s letters, Doctrina (Doctrine) by Fray Domingo, Ciento y diez consideraciones (One Hundred and Ten Considerations) by Juan de Valdés, Calvin’s Institutio, and texts by Martin Luther and Johannes Brenz. It is difficult to know exactly how these texts were read and interpreted. In Pedrosa del Rey, Friar Domingo de Rojas was accused of leading a celebration of the Last Supper with a Protestant meaning on at least two occasions. At any rate, given that Pedrosa del Rey and Valladolid are generally believed to have been the geographical axes for what the inquisitors called Spanish Lutheranism, we believe it is necessary to reconsider the circle associated with the Marquise of Alcañices in Toro. It is significant that when Cristóbal de Padilla felt endangered he did not seek advice from Pedrosa del Rey or Pedro de Cazalla, but from Antonio Herrezuelo de Toro. In Zamora and Aldea del Palo, Padilla’s broad circle of relationships included members of the cathedral chapter, the Order of San Juan de Jerusalén, and

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Dominicans. But women were the most important protagonists, and Marina de Saavedra was their link to this world. From late 1557 on, her social interactions were colored by her new beliefs. The record of her inquisitorial trial allows us to follow her spiritual itinerary: she continued to practice works of charity, but now they took on a distinct character. She opened her home to like-minded neighbors and family members like her nephew Pedro de Sotelo. Every visit was an occasion for spiritual conversation, especially when Padilla was present. Marina insistently invited female friends and acquaintances to her house, where she offered them a safe space for dialogue. “Seek me and you will find me,” she would say to them.26 Marina continued visiting hospitals, convents, and churches, but as her relationship with Padilla developed she was less motivated to make auricular confession. Attending Mass seemed less significant, fasts had disappeared from her routine, and she went to confession less frequently. She attended her parish church, Santa María de la Horta, but also went further afield, to the church of Aldea del Palo (a small village of 180 inhabitants around 1558); to Pontejos, a small town near Zamora where her daughter Ana lived; and to the Hieronymite monastery of Montamarta. Within the city of Zamora, she systematically visited the beaterios of Santa Isabel and Santa Paula in addition to the female house of the Order of San Juan de Jerusalén next to her parish. She also visited, although less frequently, the monasteries of San Jerónimo and Santo Domingo. In Santa Paula she engaged in animated conversations over meals with the beatas and other visitors of both sexes. On occasion, she visited other women, offering to arrange meetings for them with Padilla in her own home.27 At all times and in all spaces, Marina appears to have played a key role: she reflected on the new ideas, shared her doubts, and expressed her feelings about them. She also grew increasingly conscious of the dangerous novelty of the ideas she was sharing and of the necessity for secrecy: And while speaking with certain persons about the passion of God, this witness [Marina de Saavedra] told them about purgatory, persuading them with a comparison that that person [Padilla] told her that they should not believe in purgatory, . . . and one of those persons asked her sadly where the souls of the dead were. And she [Saavedra] answered either in heaven or in hell. And said person shrugged and said she didn’t know anything. And this witness told her again to believe what God orders, as I do. And she [Saavedra] urged the persons to whom she told these things to keep them secret.28

Like innumerable illiterates, Marina de Saavedra read with her ears. In Zamora, as elsewhere in early modern Europe, the new religious ideas were communicated through oral readings in groups. After gathering together in her house her daughter, sister-in-law, neighbors, and maids, Padilla would read to them, mainly from a little book of Christian doctrine attributed to Fray Domingo de Rojas (which was especially popular among women) and from the letters of Juan de Ávila, especially those that spoke of God’s mercy.29 There probably were other occasions for group reading, since many confraternities stipulated times for reading edifying texts

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communally; the same practice was observed in convents and beaterios. The readers and listeners, who assimilated the texts in a very personal manner, went on to disseminate new ideas and information.30 What did Marina de Saavedra believe? In her statements and in the testimony from other witnesses at her trial we find the basic elements of protestant doctrine: justification by faith and rejection of works as meriting salvation, the negation of purgatory, and opposition to the sale of bulls and indulgences: “She said indulgences were filthy and a deceit. . . . She said that it wasn’t necessary to give indulgences, for Our Lord had secured a general pardon through his suffering and she said not to tell this to anyone or mention it in confession, because it was something that benefited the priests. . . . She said that God did not pardon because of bulls but because of his own blood and then she said that Padilla had told her this.”31 Fasts, chanted prayers, and other penitential practices were futile: “Marina de Saavedra said that she didn’t flagellate herself anymore because Our Lord had already paid for all of us.”32 Good works should not be performed from fear or obedience but as a grateful response to the salvation already received from God through Jesus Christ.33 She reportedly told a neighbor that “when she went to confession, she should confess all her sins to God beforehand mentally and feel repentance for them and that this was true confession and the way sins were pardoned, and afterwards she could go and confess to a priest. Her neighbor understood this to mean that true confession was what one confessed to God and the other kind of confession [auricular confession] didn’t matter for salvation.”34 For Marina de Saavedra the Eucharist was now fundamentally a personal, intimate act of spiritual cleansing that she practiced “in order to be clean for his service”; it was at once an act of giving—not God giving himself to the believer but the believer giving himself to God.35 God was present in the communion wafers spiritually, not physically, because God was to be adored in the spirit. God was celebrated within one’s heart, as an intimate experience. These were indeed dangerous propositions, for they led to the devaluation of the role of priests as intercessors to the divine. Limbo no longer existed for Marina: infants who died before baptism enjoyed the presence of God according the faith of their parents.36 She did not deny the intercession of the saints, but she did encourage her interlocutors to commend themselves directly to God and adore the saints in spirit, looking upward when praying before religious images.37 Marina began to question the authority of bishops and the pope himself to pardon sins. Her joy in salvation received as a gift of God gave new significance to all her quotidian experiences, from her charitable activities to going to confession or attending Mass. Even her attitude toward the most important religious festivals and seasons—Lent and Holy Week—changed, since she now believed that they should be celebrated not with sadness but with joy for what God had done.38 The benefits of Christ, justification by faith, works as a response to the salvific work of God and not as merit prior to salvation, a profound joy resulting from her new experience of faith, Mass as the intimate celebration of faith, confession as foremost a dialogue with God, anticlerical criticism, negation of purgatory, the symbolic nature of the Last Supper—

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these themes were very much alive in the theological and spiritual panorama of sixteenth-century Spain. We can trace them back to Franciscan and Dominican currents of spirituality, to alumbradismo, and to the teachings of Juan de Valdés. In Marina’s trial, the new ideas emerge not as an elaborate, dogmatic corpus but as a conjunction of ideas or fertile seeds in her life, seeds that suggest an authentic pious conversion. Was she a protestant at heart, if not by doctrine? Marina before the Holy Office: “Her Offense Was Her Simplicity” At the beginning of Easter Week in 1558, the Dominican friar Antonio de la Ascensión preached a powerful sermon on Catholic doctrine as it was understood by the church and announced to the citizens of Zamora that there was a heretic among them. Along with other women in her circle, Marina de Saavedra was present at that Mass, as was Cristóbal de Padilla. She would later state in her trial that at that moment she realized—as did her daughters, neighbors, and maids—that Padilla had deceived them. Those who had until then listened to his conversations with sympathy now hastened to discharge their consciences before the bishop of Zamora. The city was shaken with panic and suspicion. The inquisitorial trial against Marina de Saavedra officially began at the end of June 1558. Her statements over the course of the trial reflect changing strategies for exonerating herself or at least limiting collateral damage. Especially notable are her attempts to exculpate her two daughters and her husband. Her six sons are never mentioned. The trajectory of her statements leads from total denial of the charges, to contradictory acceptance of some charges, and finally, to admission in detail to the beliefs and practices of which the inquisitors were already aware. She admitted to having accepted the new ideas for a brief period but alleged that she was not aware that they were dangerous; she affirmed that, of course, she had never been a dogmatizer, nor had she intended to deceive others. If she had believed erroneously, it was because of her womanly, weak, and gullible disposition, which had led her to listen to a seemingly respectable man like Cristóbal de Padilla. On March 7, 1559, the inquisitors ruled that the charges brought by the prosecuting attorney against Marina de Saavedra were proven and mandated that she be reconciled to the church and then imprisoned for life. According to the sentence read during the auto de fe of May 23, 1559, she was to wear a penitential garment thereafter at all times and her goods were to be confiscated. During this and the subsequent auto de fe of 21 May, all the citizens of Zamora directly associated with Marina’s spiritual circles appeared: Pedro de Sotelo, Cristóbal de Padilla, and Cristóbal de Ocampo were condemned to death by bonfire; like Marina de Saavedra, her neighbor Leonor de Toro was sentenced to reconciliation followed by perpetual imprisonment. Those who did not appear in the auto received lesser sentences. Immediately after the auto de fe and at the petition of her husband, Marina was remanded to the custody of a relative in Zamora. Three days later Pablo Cisneros

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de Sotelo asked permission to remove her to his house in Aldea del Palo because, in addition to her longstanding illnesses, “she had lost her mind.”39 We do not know precisely when, but we can assume that after recovering from her illness Marina returned to the inquisitorial jail in Valladolid, where she shared a cell with Ana Enríquez, the daughter of the Marquise of Alcañices, and with Leonor de Cisneros, who would later be burned as a relapsed heretic. Illness continued to beset Marina; at the beginning of October 1563, she pitifully implored the inquisitors to allow her to return home to spend the winter there “because I suffer from palsy and this is the only remedy to my ailment and I believe that otherwise I will not be able to go on living.”40 To return home: this was the last wish of Marina de Saavedra documented in the record of her trial. Epilogue After the auto de fe, the Cisneros de Sotelo family initiated an impressive strategy for recuperating their lost honor and goods. Beginning in the summer of 1559, her husband began the legal battle against the royal treasury and the treasurer of the Holy Office to recover his patrimony. A long trial followed in which Pedro Cisneros de Sotelo’s principal argument was that the majority of the confiscated goods belonged to him prior to his marriage to Marina, whose dowry had not even been paid in full.41 In 1560 his two oldest sons sought legal confirmation that, despite the heresy committed by their mother, they had the right to be awarded the habit of the Order of San Juan de Jerusalén and become members of the prestigious Confraternity of San Nicolás de los Caballeros in Zamora. Their mother, now a widow, lived a very Christian life, they argued, and if she erred, “her offense was simplicity and excessive credulity in the words of some people she trusted.”42 Furthermore, they specified that all her children had been born long before she fell into heresy. The inquisitors issued a rather ambiguous document of rehabilitation that declared the Saavedra sons eligible for civic or honorary offices and benefices.43 In 1567, when the younger sons also sought admission to the Order of San Juan, they requested a more explicit legal document stating clearly that they were eligible for membership in the military orders of San Juan, Santiago, Calatrava, and Alcántara. This time, the family made a bold move by engaging the services of one of the most prestigious attorneys of the time, Doctor Martín de Azpilcueta, then serving as defense lawyer for Archbishop Carranza, who was at that time imprisoned by the Inquisition.44 Finally, in 1570, Francisco de Sotelo, Marina’s son-in-law and a patron of the Hospital of Sotelo, wrote from Rome to inform his co-patrons that he had obtained for the hospital the bones of Saint Zeno, the bishop of Verona famous for his fight against the Arian heresy. The economic, social, and symbolic capital of the Sotelo line appeared to be safe.45 They had exorcized the threat of infamy. What happened to Marina de Saavedra? How did she end her days? My investigations in the archives of Zamora have not yielded any additional

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information to date. The testimony of her sons in 1566 emphasized that their widowed mother lived very much in conformity with orthodox practices. We will never know if Marina’s behavior represented a genuine re-conversion to Catholic piety or mere external conformity that masked withdrawal into a deep, interior space in which she could maintain the protestant convictions that had given her joy through a personal dialogue with God. Translated by Alison Weber and Anne J. Schutte Notes  * This study forms part of Research Project HAR2011–26002, financed by the Ministry of Science and Innovation of the Ministry of Spain. ORCID: 000–0003–2880–9533. I am grateful to Alison Weber and Anne J. Schutte for their translation and suggestions for this essay. A longer version of this essay in Spanish is to appear in Cuadernos de Historia Moderna 40 (2015).  1. For a complete bibliography on the topic, see Frances Luttikhuizen, La Reforma en España, Italia y Portugal, siglos XVI y XVII. Bibliografía actualizada (Seville: Eduforma, 2009).  2. Marcel Bataillon, Erasmo y España: Estudios sobre la historia espiritual del siglo XVI, trans. Antonio Alatorre (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1966), esp. 706.  3. José Constantino Nieto, Juan de Valdés and the Origins of the Spanish and Italian Reformations (Geneva: Droz, 1970).  4. José Ignacio Tellechea Idígoras, “El protestantismo castellano (1558–1559): un ‘topos’ (M. Bataillon) convertido en ‘tópico’ historiográfico,” in El erasmismo en España, ed. M. Revuelta Sañudo and Ciriáco Morón Arroyo (Santander: Sociedad Menéndez Pelayo, 1986), 304–22; José Ignacio Tellechea Idígoras, “Perfil teológico del protestantismo castellano del siglo XVI: Un Memorial inédito de la Inquisición, 1559,” Diálogo Ecuménico 17 (1982): 315–33.  5. Stefania Pastore, Una herejía española, trans. Clara Álvarez Alonso (Madrid, Marcial Pons, 2010); Michel Boeglin, “Evangelismo y sensibilidad religiosa en la Sevilla del Quinientos: Consideraciones acerca de la represión de los luteranos sevillanos,” Studia Historica. Historia Moderna 27 (2005): 163–89; Miquel Almenara and Manuel Ardit, “Nuevas perspectivas sobre los movimientos protestantes valencianos en el siglo XVI,” Estudis: Revista de historia moderna 23 (1997), 75–100; Werner Thomas, La represión del protestantismo en España, 1517–1648 (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2001).  6. The inquisitors’ conclusions regarding the homogeneity of these varied groups have led historians astray. In my opinion, these groups should be studied not only in terms of resemblances but also according to what distinguishes them, not only in terms of their specific religious practices but also their sociological composition and their strategies for transmitting new ideas. Tellechea Idígoras, long interested in the inquisitorial trial of the archbishop of Toledo Bartolomé de Carranza, most thoroughly studied these groups. Thanks to his extraordinary work, we know a great deal about the role played by the brothers Pedro and Agustín Cazalla (with their relative María de Cazalla in the background); the Italian D. Carlos de Seso or Juan Sánchez, the person who inspired the extraordinary novel by Miguel Delibes, El Hereje (1998); and the relations of this group with the disciples of Juan de Valdés. José Ignacio Tellechea Idígoras, “Prolegómenos jurídicos del proceso de Carranza.

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Los protestantes de Valladolid,” Anthologica Annua 7 (1959): 215–336. For a complete bibliography of this scholar’s important work, see http://www.fundaciontellechea.org/ bibliografia.html. (Accessed: 28/10/2013)  7. Adriano Prosperi, “Dalle ‘divine madri’ ai padre spirituali,” in Women and Men in Spiritual Culture, XIV–XVII Centuries. A Meeting of South and South, ed. Elisja Schulte van Kessel (The Hague: Netherlands Publications Office, 1986), 71–90; Ángela Atienza López, “De beaterios a conventos. Nuevas perspectiva sobre el mundo de las beatas en la España Moderna,” Historia Social 57 (2007): 145–68.  8. He affirmed having given financial support to improvements made to the parish church of Santa María de la Horta on the occasion of a visit from Juan de Ávila: Archivo Histórico Nacional, Inquisición, leg. 4599, exp. 7, f. 122v; hereafter AHN. On the influence of Juan de Ávila in Castilian cities, see Jodi Bilinkoff, The Ávila of Saint Teresa: Religious Reform in a Sixteenth-Century City (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), esp. 80–87.  9. Demetrio Ramos, “Alonso de Ojeda, en el gran proyecto de 1501 y en el tránsito del sistema de descubrimiento y rescate al de poblamiento,” Boletín americanista 7–9 (1961): 33–87. 10. Encomenderos were Spanish colonists who were granted the right to use Indian laborers by royal degree. 11. Archivo General de Indias, Lima, 565, leg. 2, f. 144, f. 22 y Panamá, 234, leg. 4, ff. 106v–107v. 12. On this sociopolitical network, see also José María Carretero Zamora, Cortes, monarquía, ciudades. Las Cortes de Castilla a comienzos de la época moderna (1476– 1515) (Madrid: Siglo Veintiuno, 1988), 325. 13. Maureen M. Flynn, “Confraternal Piety in Zamora in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Period,” Ph.D. diss. (University of Wisconsin, 1985), 86. 14. Twenty percent of the 1,745 inhabitants in 1561 were poor. For the demographics of Zamora, see Juan Carlos Rueda Fernández, “Zamora en los siglos XVI y XVII. Estudios demográficos,” Studia Zamorensia 2 (1981): 117–34. 15. Cesáreo Fernández Duro, Memorias históricas de la ciudad de Zamora, 4 vols (Madrid, 1882), vol. II, 265. 16. Francisco Javier Lorenzo Pinar, “Monjas disidentes. Las resistencias a la clausura en Zamora tras el Concilio de Trento,” in Disidencias y exilios en la España Moderna, ed. Antonio Mestre Sanchis and Enrique Giménez López (Alicante: Universidad de Alicante, 1997), 7–80. 17. Maureen M. Flynn, “Charitable Ritual in Late Medieval and Early Modern Spain,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 16.3 (1985): 335–48. 18. William Christian, Religiosidad local en la España de Felipe II, trans. Javier Calzada and José Luis Gil Arista (Madrid: Nerea, 1991), 307. Originally published as Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981). Bartolomé Bennassar describes a similar situation for Valladolid: Valladolid en el Siglo de Oro. Una ciudad de Castilla y su entorno agrario en el siglo XVI (Valladolid: Ámbito, 1983), 390. 19. Nicholas Terpstra, Adriano Prosperi, and Stefania Pastore, eds, Faith’s Boundaries: Laity and Clergy in Early Modern Confraternities (Turnout: Brepols, 2013). For Spain: Inmaculada Arias de Saavedra and Miguel Luis López-Guadalupe, “Las cofradías y su dimensión social en la España del Antiguo Régimen,” Cuadernos de Historia Moderna 25 (2000): 189–232. For a brief synthesis, see William Callahan, “Confraternities and Brotherhoods in Spain, 1500–1800,” Confraternitas 12.1 (2001): 17–25.

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20. Jodi Bilinkoff underscored the importance of these urban contexts in sixteenthcentury Castile for understanding the personality of Teresa of Ávila in The Ávila of Saint Teresa. 21. As is widely recognized, inquisitorial sources must be read with caution and corroborated to the extent possible with other sources. There are no other direct sources for Marina de Saavedra’s beliefs. However, I have consulted the surviving documents related to the other inquisitorial trials for Lutheranism from Zamora, the civil proceedings conducted by the Holy Office a posteriori, and related notarial records of the Archivo Histórico Provincial de Zamora, the Archivo Histórico de la Diócesis de Zamora, the Archivos Notariales of the city of Zamora, and the Archivo de la Diputación de Zamora. 22. “e que desde que era doncella era mujer de mucho recogimiento,” Proceso, 18v. 23. “Señor yo creo lo que mandas que crea,” Proceso, 56r. 24. Ibid., 59v. 25. “casi quedaba medio muerta,” ibid., 82v. 26. “buscadme y me hallaréis,” ibid.,18v. 27. Ibid., 40v. 28. Inquisitorial scribes recorded testimony in the third person. “E hablando con ciertas personas sobre cosas de la pasion de Dios les dixo esta confesante [Marina de Saavedra] lo del purgatorio persuadiéndoles con una comparación de las que le dixo aquella persona que creyesen no aver purgatorio . . . / E que una de aquellas personas con tristeza le pregunto que donde avian estado las animas de los difuntos / E que le respondió que en la gloria o infierno / E que la dicha persona se le encogio diziendo que no sabia nada / E que esta confesante le tornó a dezir creer lo que Dios manda que asi lo hago yo / E que encomendaba a las personas a quien dezia estas cosas el secreto dello,” ibid., 88r. 29. On the importance of these spiritual reading communities, see Antonio Castillo Gómez, “Leer en comunidad. Libro y espiritualidad en la España del Barroco,” Vía Spiritus 7 (2000): 99–122. 30. Manuel Peña, “Libros permitidos, lecturas prohibidas (siglos XVI–XVII),” Cuadernos de Historia Moderna. Anejos 1 (2002): 85–101. 31. “que sacar para perdones es una suciedad e una burlería,” Proceso, 18r; “dixo que no era menester dar para perdones, que nuestro señor había hecho perdón general por su pasión y que no lo dijese a nadie ni hiciese caso dello aunque confesase, que era interés de clérigos,” ibid., 26r; “que ya Dios no perdonaba por bullas sino por su propia sangre y luego dixo que Padilla lo decía,” ibid., 26v. 32. “Dijo Marina de Saavedra que ya no se azotaba porque Nuestro Señor había pagado ya por todos,” ibid., 26r. 33. Ibid., 12r. 34. “que quando se fuese a confesar se confesase antes a Dios mentalmente de todos sus pecados e tuviese arrepentimiento dellos que esta era la verdadera confesión e por aquella se perdonaban los pecados e después se confesase al sacerdote y la vecina entendió que la confision que se hacía a Dios mentalmente era la verdadera confesión e que la otra confesión [no hazia] el caso para la salvación,” ibid., 12r. 35. “por andar limpia en su servicio,” ibid., 20r. 36. Ibid., 20v. 37. Ibid., 88v. 38. The notion of joy—understood as evangelical “good news”—was a distinctive theme in the new spirituality. It can be found in the writings of Bishop Juan de Cazalla.

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Stefania Pastore has traced it to the first alumbrados. See “Mujeres, lecturas y alumbradismo radical: Petronila de Lucena y Juan del Castillo,” Historia Social 57 (2007): 51–73. 39. “[estaba] fuera de jucio,” Proceso, 93r. 40. “porque yo me tollezco de la enfermedad de la perlesía y desta manera podría remediar mi necesidad para adelante y otra ninguna yo la siento para poder vivir,” Proceso, 94r. 41. AHN, Inquisición, leg. 4599, exp. 6 y 7. 42. “su delicto fue simplicidad y sobrado crédito que dio a algunas personas de quien ella confiava,” Proceso, 95r. 43. Ibid., 93v. 44. Real Biblioteca de El Escorial, Sig. 33-I-9, n. 17. Iuris responsum D. Martini de Azpilcueta, Doctoris Navarri, 1–6v. 45. Archivo de la Diputación de Zamora, Leg. 87, exp. 56.

Works Cited Archival Sources Archivo de la Diputación de Zamora, legajo 87 Archivo General de Indias, Lima, 565, legajo 2, and Panamá 234, legajo 4 Archivo Histórico Nacional, Inquisición, leg. 4599 Bibliotheque National de France. Proceso de Marina de Saavedra. Mss. Espagnol. 456 Real Biblioteca de El Escorial, Sig. 33-I-9, n. 17. Iuris responsum D. Martini de Azpilcueta, Doctoris Navarri Printed Sources Almenara, Miquel, and Manuel Ardit. “Nuevas perspectivas sobre los movimientos protestantes valencianos en el siglo XVI.” Estudis: Revista de historia moderna 23 (1997): 75–100. Arias de Saavedra, Inmaculada, and Miguel Luis López-Guadalupe. “Las cofradías y su dimensión social en la España del Antiguo Régimen.” Cuadernos de Historia Moderna 25 (2000): 189–232. Atienza López, Angela. “De beaterios a conventos. Nuevas perspectivas sobre el mundo de las beatas en la España Moderna.” Historia Social 57 (2007): 145–68. Bataillon, Marcel. Erasmo y España: Estudios sobre la historia espiritual del siglo XVI. Trans. Antonio Alatorre. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1966. Bennassar, Bartolomé. Valladolid en el Siglo de Oro. Una ciudad de Castilla y su entorno agrario en el siglo XVI. Valladolid: Ámbito, 1989. Bilinkoff, Jodi. The Ávila of Saint Teresa: Religious Reform in a Sixteenth-Century City. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989. Boeglin, Michel. “Evangelismo y sensibilidad religiosa en la Sevilla del Quinientos: Consideraciones acerca de la represión de los luteranos sevillanos.” Studia Historica. Historia Moderna 27 (2005): 163–89.

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Callahan, William. “Confraternities and Brotherhoods in Spain, 1500–1800.” Confraternitas 12, no. 1 (2001): 17–25. Carretero Zamora, José María. Cortes, monarquía, ciudades. Las Cortes de Castilla a comienzos de la época moderna (1476–1515). Madrid: Siglo Veintiuno, 1988. Castillo Gómez, Antonio. “Leer en comunidad. Libro y espiritualidad en la España del Barroco.” Vía Spiritus 7 (2000): 99–122. Christian, William. Religiosidad local en la España de Felipe II. Trans. Javier Calzada and José Luis Gil Arista. Madrid: Nerea, 1991. Originally published as Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981. Fernández Duro, Cesáreo. Memorias históricas de la ciudad de Zamora. 4 vols. Madrid: Establecimiento Tipográfico de los Sucesores de Rivadeneyra, 1882. Flynn, Maureen M. “Charitable Ritual in Late Medieval and Early Modern Spain.” The Sixteenth Century Journal 16, no. 3 (1985): 335–48. ———. “Confraternal Piety in Zamora in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Period.” Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1985. Fundación José Ignacio Tellechea Idígoras. Bibliografía. http://www. fundaciontellechea.org/bibliografia.html (accessed May 14, 2014). Lorenzo Pinar, Francisco Javier. “Monjas disidentes. Las resistencias a la clausura en Zamora tras el Concilio de Trento.” In Disidencias y exilios en la España Moderna, edited by Antonio Mestre Sanchis and Enrique Giménez López, 7–80. Alicante: Universidad de Alicante, 1997. Luttikhuizen, Frances. La Reforma en España, Italia y Portugal, siglos XVI y XVII. Bibliografía actualizada. Seville: Eduforma, 2009. Menéndez Pelayo, Marcelino. Historia de los Heterodoxos Españoles. Vol. 1. Madrid, Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1986. Original publication 1880– 1882. Nieto, José Constantino. Juan de Valdés and the Origins of the Spanish and Italian Reformations. Geneva: Droz, 1970. Pastore, Stefania. “Mujeres, lecturas y alumbradismo radical: Petronila de Lucena y Juan del Castillo,” Historia Social 57 (2007): 51–73. ———. Una herejía española. Trans. Clara Álvarez Alonso. Madrid: Marcial Pons 2010. Originally published as Un’eresia spagnola. Spiritualita conversa, alumbradismo e Inquisizione (1449–1559). Florence: Leo Olschki, 2004. Peña, Manuel. “Libros permitidos, lecturas prohibidas (siglos XVI–XVII).” Cuadernos de Historia Moderna. Anejos 1 (2002): 85–101. Prosperi, Adriano. “Dalle ‘divine madri’ ai padre spirituali.” In Women and Men in Spiritual Culture, XIV–XVII Centuries. A Meeting of South and South, edited by Elisja Schulte van Kessel, 71–90. The Hague: Netherlands Publications Office, 1986. Ramos, Demetrio. “Alonso de Ojeda, en el gran proyecto de 1501 y en el tránsito del sistema de descubrimiento y rescate al de poblamiento.” Boletín americanista 7–9 (1961): 33–87.

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Rueda Fernández, Juan Carlos. “Zamora en los siglos XVI y XVII. Estudios demográficos.” Studia Zamorensia 2 (1981): 117–34. Tellechea Idígoras, José Ignacio. “Perfil teológico del protestantismo castellano del siglo XVI: Un Memorial inédito de la Inquisición, 1559.” Diálogo Ecuménico 17 (1982): 315–33. ———. “Prolegómenos jurídicos del proceso de Carranza. Los protestantes de Valladolid.” Anthologica Annua 7 (1959): 215–336. ———. “El protestantismo castellano (1558–1559): Un ‘topos’ (M. Bataillon) convertido en ‘tópico’ historiográfico.” In El erasmismo en España, edited by M. Revuelta Sañudo and Ciriáco Morón Arroyo, 304–22. Santander: Sociedad Menéndez Pelayo, 1986. Terpstra, Nicholas, Adriano Prosperi, and Stefania Pastore, eds. Faith’s Boundaries: Laity and Clergy in Early Modern Confraternities. Turnhout: Brepols, 2013. Thomas, Werner. La represión del protestantismo en España, 1517–1648. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2001.

11 Devout Recusant Women, Advice Manuals, and the Creation of Holy Households “Under Siege” Ellen A. Macek

In 1604 the Jesuit Robert Persons wrote “An Instruction, and direction for the spiritual helpe of such Inglish gentlewomen, as desyre to lead, a more retired & recollected life then the ordinarie in Ingland doth yeald.” Persons was responding to the situation of some English Catholic women who would not join a religious community but “do desyre some other moderate course of life and conversation, as not altogether leaving the world, but only cutting of the superfluous and noysome vanities therof, by walking a more sure path towards their salvation.”1 Late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century laws prohibited the practice of Roman Catholicism in England, but penalties for continued religious observance and for harboring Catholic priests were often applied unevenly depending upon the political agenda of the monarchy, the attitudes of local officials, and the gender and social status of the noncompliant recusants.2 Women were considered recusants when they refused to obey the legal restrictions on their religious practice, even when husbands or other male relatives showed at least token adherence to the newly established Church of England as so-called church papists.3 Some recusant women, such as Dame Gertrude More, entered traditional convents for Englishwomen on the continent and thrived. Mary Ward and her “English Ladies” sought, albeit unsuccessfully, to design a new religious model for devout women, proposing a life of apostolic engagement in the world patterned after Jesuit ideals.4 But a number of devout English women, especially those of noble or gentry origin, chose to remain at home, transforming their households into religious sanctuaries frequented by missionary priests, family members, and neighbors who stubbornly held to the ancient faith. It was in such “holy households” that devout women maintained a daily schedule not unlike that of a monastic establishment, centered around Mass and the reception of sacraments (when a priest was available), supplementary devotions such as meditation, recitation of litanies and rosaries, instruction of children and adults in the faith, and the corporal works of mercy, especially care for the poor and sick.5 Laurence Lux-Sterritt argues that accounts of their lives, often written by their “ghostly fathers” (spiritual directors), contain obvious hagiographical elements designed to model an active holiness.6 Nevertheless, such lives reveal concrete details about recusant religious practice when women

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found themselves challenged to move beyond their households to confront legal, material, and moral demands generated by their opposition to civil authorities. Relying upon contemporary printed and written instructions to guide them in addition to personal spiritual direction, recusant women justified their actions in the public sphere. Thus, what was once private, the devout practice of religion within the privacy of Catholic homes, became the object of public scrutiny of “disorderly” households (headed by women under clerical influence), providing historians concrete evidence of recusant women’s resistance.7 Instructions for Creating a “Holy Household” While Philip Howard, Earl of Arundel was imprisoned for recusancy, his wife, Anne Dacre Howard (1557–1630), the Countess of Arundel, began to offer her homes to the Jesuit Robert Southwell and his associates for activities such as celebrating Mass, administering the sacraments, and establishing a clandestine printing press.8 Southwell acted as spiritual adviser to the couple, who had converted to Catholicism, and it is in Southwell’s A Short Rule of Good Life, apparently written for his patroness, that we find a clear model for the spiritual organization of the substantial recusant household, based upon modifications of parts of Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises. Nancy Pollard Brown suggests that Southwell wrote for “an anxious, well-intentioned person, harried by the circumstances of life at the head of a substantial Elizabethan household, not too imaginative or highly educated, haunted by the fear of failure in the undertaking to which as a Christian and a Catholic he is committed.”9 First printed by the Jesuit Henry Garnet at a secret press in England in 1596– 1597, Catholic publications of the Short Rule continued into the early seventeenth century.10 Southwell’s work, circulating in manuscript before and after its first printing, appears to have guided several recusant households, including those of Anne Dacre Howard, her aunt Magdalen Dacre Brown, and Dorothy Lawson, a niece of Magdalen’s daughter, Lady Dormer.11 In his sixth chapter, Southwell outlined a model daily schedule for creating a disciplined spiritual household. He advised that upon rising, the Catholic devote some minutes to prayer and meditation. After a morning filled with household duties, recitation of the rosary normally followed around 11 a.m., and then dinner, prefaced and followed by prayer and remembrance of the poor. To conclude the day, Southwell recommended Evensong and beneficial reading followed by an examination of conscience and evening prayer.12 Southwell detailed how holy days must be kept with suggestions for “reading good bookes, hearing sermons, and such like godly exercises, not lightly running over them, . . . but pawsing upon such things as move my affection, and printing them wel in my mind & memory.” In preparation for the reception of the Eucharist, he advised frequent sacramental confession of sins and a biannual general confession. When no priest was available, the confession of sin to God was

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beneficial.13 The reading of Southwell’s rules should take precedence over other reading, “unlesse leasure serve me to do both.” Some part must be read each week, “so deviding it, that at the moneths end I may have read all, seeking to print these spiritual directions in my mind, and endevouring to put them in daily practice.”14 Southwell urged close attention to the religious and moral education of servants and children, the provision of suitable tutors for the children, and their initiation into religious devotion followed by sacramental preparation.15 He also suggested a novel way (“a spiritual recreation”) of honoring the saints, especially for those who could not display objects of Catholic devotion throughout the public rooms of the house. Southwell proposed imagining rooms devoted to particular saints, making them “as it wer into a chappel or church that is devoted to such a Saint” who might be associated with the purpose of the room or evoke a particular attitude or virtue. One might also devote rooms to recalling events in Christ’s life, such as the remembrance of the Last Supper in the dining room.16 Anne Dacre Howard’s biographer claimed that she, following Southwell’s instructions, “was always as carefull and diligent, as others are remisse, carelesse, and negligent; for that settled course of vertue and devotion to which he then advised her, she continued with great exactness and perseverance even to her death. . . .”17 After 1595 when both her husband and Southwell had died for their faith, Anne Howard, “the principal Countesse of England, and next in dignity to the Queen for a long time,” acted in a humble, “courteous and affable” manner, wrote her biographer. As dowager of the house of Howard, she maintained Catholic practice at home while supporting the expansion of the Jesuit mission abroad by funding the Jesuit English College in Ghent.18 Her ghostly father noted her financial support of needy people from the upper classes, her work with the poor, especially through her medical skills, and her efforts in bringing individuals back to the faith.19 Her simple dress, lack of ostentation, and willingness to submit to spiritual direction impressed him; her fear of the Lord motivated her constant attention to God’s will. But uppermost was her adherence to the faith for close to fifty years after reconciliation to Catholicism as a young woman. According to him, the Countess “was often presented, and indited for it; and not only passed through many boisterous blasts of persecution which happened in those dayes, without ever shewing any frailty.”20 She maintained her attendance in chapel at Mass, Evensong, and Litanies until she became bedridden; then she continued to take part in those rites that could be performed in her bedchamber. Some Protestant ministers were so impressed by her piety and charity that they praised her example “for those of their Religion to imitate.”21 Southwell’s advice to Anne Dacre Howard had provided the model of a “holy household” that other recusant women would emulate, including her aunt, Magdalen Dacre Browne. A “Little Rome” Lady Magdalen Viscountesse Montague (1538–1608) was the second wife of Sir Anthony Browne, first Viscount Montague. As dowager she exerted considerable

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religious and ideological leadership, especially after the 1592 death of her husband and before his young heir, the second Viscount, came into his own influence. Dr. Richard Smith’s recollections of his spiritual daughter, presented in the laudatory style of a funeral sermon and not without its hagiographical elements, could not have been far removed from reality because, as Michael Questier suggests, they were published in Latin shortly after her death.22 Smith recounted that the young Magdalen Dacre rose early for chapel and spent part of the night in prayer while attending Mary Tudor’s court. After the death of her husband of thirty-six years, this mother of eight children achieved “a more setled freedome of exercising her vertue.” Modest in dress, humble in bearing, and chaste in action, she did not hide her faith; rather, she openly wore a cross or carried her rosary beads. She was devoted to traditional forms of piety such as litanies, the office, the psalter, examination of conscience, and scrupulous attention to Mass and the sacraments (including weekly confession and an annual general confession). Spending much of her day in prayer in either her chapel or her bedchamber, she observed the fasting and Ember Days into her old age. She even sought to be relieved of some of the tedious secular tasks her estate demanded.23 Lady Magdalen Montague’s household consisted of around eighty people, including resident chaplains, to whom she gave protection and free exercise of the Catholic faith as well as providing access to the sacraments for relatives and neighbors, making for “a visible Church or Company of Catholikes” that never experienced prolonged persecution by authorities. At her home base of Battle Abbey, which Protestant observers called “Litle Rome,” she exercised herself in strengthening the faith of her immediate descendants (two granddaughters become nuns and none of her immediate family lapsed into Protestantism). She also provided charity for the neighboring poor, to the extent that she raised the ire of some Protestants who viewed her activity as encouraging the undeserving poor. She established a chapel, accommodating up to 120 worshippers, half of them being communicants. Regular observance of solemn feasts and weekly sermons created an environment of religious continuity as well as introducing an emphasis on preaching.24 Smith compares his task of reflecting on the life of Lady Montague to that of the ancient fathers such as Jerome and Augustine, who wrote about the exemplary lives of ancient Christian Roman women. Although Smith provides little evidence of Lady Montague’s choice of spiritual reading, one can assume that Southwell’s Rule and Jesuit spirituality in general provided timely guidance for her and other women who desired a devout life.25 The Creation of a “Holy Household” Dorothy Constable Lawson (1580–1632) was born into a family related to the Montagues. Her mother, Margaret Constable, had been imprisoned for her recusancy, and Dorothy Constable brought her Catholic loyalty into her marriage in

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1597 with Roger Lawson, eventually converting the Lawson household, including her husband before his death in 1613 or 1614. Her biographer tells us that in her younger years she “was retired like a St. Catherine, within the closett of her heart att home” and that her choice of a married vocation was in obedience to her parents; she herself perhaps would have chosen a different vocation, had the conditions allowed.26 Dorothy Lawson’s biographer, William Palmes, S.J., was the last of several Jesuit advisors. His recollections included comparisons with other holy women but little mention of Lawson’s shortcomings. After her husband’s death, she became a more active agent in the practice of her religion. Vowing never to marry again, she devoted the rest of her life to nurturing her own faith and that of her neighbors and household, especially guiding her fifteen children, many of whom went to the continent for further education and pursuit of their vocations.27 At the time of her death, she had been instrumental in the conversion of all the neighboring families, having established six altars for liturgy and becoming known for her charity.28 Her chapel services resembled those of a religious institution, with Mass in the morning and Evensong in the afternoon including litanies and a de profundis. Feast days often included a sermon, with catechesis of the household and neighboring children when the sermon was lacking. The customary Holy Week services preceded the Easter rites when those who had made their Easter communion (sometimes close to 100) afterwards joyfully broke “Lent’s neck” with her.29 She hosted six Jesuits annually for their Spiritual Exercises, seeing personally to their meals and attending all their masses. Her spiritual director wrote that he received his superior’s approval “to impart . . . the priviledges of the Society, and make her by communication partaker of their works, as if shee were a member thereoff,” an honor bestowed on benefactors of religious orders.30 Dorothy Lawson usually confessed and received the Eucharist every Sunday and feast day. She made an examination of conscience twice daily, and biannually she entered into a three-day retreat, making a general confession. Her daily religious practices included the renewal of her morning intentions four times during the day and her attention to the Jesuit-inspired practice of meditation with reflection on the life of Christ made “solitary in her closset.” Palmes commented that she declared her prayer “served her for a guide in every day’s journey, and that the regulating, or well ordering of her actions, depended much of the success thereoff.” She perused The Imitation of Christ slowly so that she might digest it, and she read to her servants and companions from spiritual books.31 When she built a new residence, she devoted it to the saints Anthony and Michael, with each room named for an individual saint. The richly appointed chapel attracted many visitors from different socioeconomic levels and nations, built as it was near the river Tyne and marked with the name of Jesus. Amazingly, her “little hermitage” escaped persecution during her lifetime.32 When Lawson expressed a desire to withdraw to a more contemplative life, Palmes conferred with the Jesuit superior William Holtby and they decided that

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ballancing in one scale her years, and want of health, in the other the great good which would be neglected, if shee solely attended to her own soul, resolved in our Lord to more advantagious for his glory, and her crown to persever as she had begun, not only in the study of her own perfection, but allso in the pursuance and acquisition of others.33

To this decision, obviously motivated by Jesuit mission aims, she humbly submitted, continuing her oversight of a “holy household” until her death. The examples of the devout Catholic households of Dorothy Lawson and Magdalen Browne followed a routine similar to that of a religious house, with a discipline whose outlines were clearly borrowed from clerical advice, such as that of Southwell, and found a welcome reception in homes of widows intent upon sacralizing their domestic space. But not all “holy households” were so unperturbed by the political and legal pressures for conformity that increased during the late Tudor and early Stuart eras. “Holy Households” under Siege According to the family’s twentieth-century chronicler, the Vaux households headed by Eleanor Vaux Brookesby and her unmarried sister Anne Vaux followed a routine with a “regular round of prayer and spiritual exercises, but punctuated by the constant coming and going of Jesuits to consult their superior, the bi-annual meetings, the arrival of mysterious messengers with letters.”34 The houses they rented were taken under the names of Protestant acquaintances, and those who lived in them sometimes used aliases.35 The Vaux women furnished chapels, hiding places, and classrooms to facilitate the progress of the English Mission. Their activities attracted the attention of authorities, placing themselves and their guests on a collision course with the law. It was in the oral and written advice of their clerical advisors that they found some support in facing the moral challenges of judicial procedures against recusants. Eleanor and Anne Vaux, the oldest and the youngest daughters by the first marriage of William, Lord Vaux, were associates of several Jesuits including John Gerard and Henry Garnet, Superior of the Jesuits in England from 1586 until his execution in 1606. The sisters came naturally to their recusant dissent, following in the footsteps of their father and brother Henry.36 Eleanor Vaux (1560?—c. 1625), who was widowed after three years of marriage to Edward Brookesby, raised her two children and an adopted daughter while heading a female household where Catholic devotion was paramount. In a letter to the Jesuit General in 1593, Garnet describes the sisters as “the widow and the virgin, illustrious by birth, fidelity, and holiness of life, whom I sometimes in my thoughts liken to the two women who used to lodge Our Lord.”37 Anne Vaux (1562–c. 1637), considered the “Jesuitarum mater,” remained unmarried and devoted her entire life to recusant activities, becoming the spiritual daughter of Garnet and taking private religious vows. Perhaps the most

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famous incident illustrating her nature was related by Garnet, who described the close call that some Jesuits experienced in October 1591 while the sisters were hosting one of the semiannual gatherings of Jesuits including Garnet, Gerard, and Southwell. On that occasion, Anne Vaux acted as the mistress of her sister’s house when Eleanor Vaux was unable to tolerate the constant harassment of the pursuivants.38 Telling the officials that the man who had just left (a layman who subsequently joined the Jesuits) was a relative, Anne Vaux endured the search for priests and Catholic objects; no arrests followed. Garnet recalled: “The virgin always conducts these arguments with such skill and discretion that she certainly counteracts their persistence and their interminable chatter. For though she has all a maiden’s modesty and even shyness, yet in God’s cause, and in the protection of His servants, virgo becomes virago.” He also attested to the devout nature of the Vaux sisters’ household: “There could be no lack of angel guardians in a house so angelic, and where so many holy women were consecrated to God.”39 In Anstruther’s opinion, Garnet’s account of this incident suggests that there were a considerable number of devout women and that they were following the regular observance of a religious house. Anne at all events had taken the vows of religion privately and was to all intents and purposes a nun. Her small property belonged to the community and her life was directed by Father Garnet. Perhaps this applied to most of them but we have very little information about the others.40

The relationship of Anne Vaux and Father Garnet included bountiful hospitality and spiritual direction but eventually developed into one of interdependence, with Vaux acting when necessary as business agent and liaison with other Jesuits. In a letter to Garnet shortly after his arrest for suspected involvement in the Gunpowder Plot, Anne Vaux testified to her great need for his (or someone’s) direction. While in prison, Garnet received needed items through Vaux’s intervention, and she passed on Garnet’s directions to his men about temporary leadership of the Jesuits. In time, Anne Vaux found herself imprisoned, forced to answer to the authorities, and accused of a sexual relationship with Garnet, a common accusation aimed at recusant women. In one of his final letters to her, Garnet advised that she preferably remain a laywoman with her sister in service to the church in England and under the Society’s oversight. If she should travel abroad, he suggested that an unenclosed devout life would serve her best. Reiterating that Jesuits could not receive vows from devout women, he advised her on the status of her personal vows of obedience and poverty after he died and indicated that annuities would support her, with the excess to be given to the mission after her death.41 In the same letter to Anne Vaux, Garnet added that if his hidden books were found, she should claim them as her own, indicating that Vaux was not only a devout woman but also an intelligent one who might be presumed to be the possessor of learned or pious texts.42 During her own imprisonment and interrogation, she resisted many attempts on the part of officials to oppose her testimony to that of Garnet.

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Elizabeth Roper Vaux (?–c. 1625) was the grand-niece of Margaret Roper, Thomas More’s daughter, and widow of Anne Vaux’s half-brother and Lord Vaux’s heir, George, who died in 1594.43 At the time of her husband’s death, Elizabeth Vaux had under her care her minor son, Edward, Lord Vaux, who had inherited a title making him one of England’s leading barons. The Jesuit John Gerard described how, as one of Elizabeth Vaux’s chaplains, he weaned his hostess from her immoderate grief and taught her meditation. Resolving to live a life of chastity and poverty, Elizabeth Vaux devoted her resources to the service of God and His servants; and she herself would be a kind of handmaid to them to wait on their wants. Lastly and before all else, she would be obedient. She would carry out what she was told to do as perfectly as if she had made a vow—in fact, she complained that our priests were forbidden to receive such vows.

She sought to find a house that would be secure enough from the attention of authorities “where life could go on in as nearly the same way as in our colleges [that is, Jesuit institutions], and this she achieved in the end.”44 By eventually remodeling the Vaux family seat at Harrowden, “a Jesuit College in the heart of England,” Elizabeth Vaux created a preparatory school that served as fertile ground for male vocations. Anstruther views Harrowden as “a centre of operations,” defying numerous English laws designed to prevent the practice of Catholicism and the education of children in that faith tradition.45 The Vaux women also nurtured female vocations. Elizabeth Vaux’s second daughter, Joyce Vaux, eventually became one of Mary Ward’s “English Ladies.” Frances Burroughs, a cousin raised by Eleanor Brookesby, later entered St. Monica’s convent in Louvain. She recalled that in Brookesby’s home she learned “to say her prayers, then instructed in Catholic religion, for this was a very Catholic house.”46 After the Gunpowder Plot in 1605, authorities transported Elizabeth Vaux to London. Reports show how well she followed Jesuit advice. Under examination she denied receiving any priest into her house, although she admitted knowing Gerard and others as Catholic laymen. Later she provided Gerard with a thousand florins to escape to the continent on the same day in 1606 that Garnet was executed. According to Anstruther, by 1610 all Vaux males had fled to the continent, while the females “were still at their posts.”47 Tension among duties to the state, to one’s family, and to one’s God is evident in the accounts of numerous recusants who found themselves accused of sheltering Catholic priests. How to reconcile one’s civil obedience with the moral imperatives of opposition to a heretical regime became the matter of advice orally and in writing. In 1598 Henry Garnet wrote the so-called “A Treatise of Equivocation” in response to an incident in 1592 involving Anne Bellamy, a young woman from a recusant family whose testimony at Father Southwell’s trial revealed Jesuit support of equivocation.

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Garnet’s treatise, which appears to have existed only in manuscript until the nineteenth century, would have been circulated among those who sheltered Jesuits.48 Garnet stated that equivocal statements are different from lies and provided multiple examples, including those from scriptural and patristic sources, for “mixed propositions” that the equivocator uses, expressing one part of a statement but reserving the rest mentally. He concluded with “a short instruction how a man may behave him selfe judiciouslye and discretely in his examination by oath, without prejudice to his sowle, or injury to his neighbor.”49 Garnet’s advice for devout recusants revealed a positive attitude toward female moral agency, a point underscored because Garnet had changed the title of “A Treatise of Equivocation” to “A Treatise against Lying and Fraudulent Dissimulation: Newly Overseen by the Author, and Published for the Defence of Innocency and the Instruction of Ignorants.”50 The lives of the three Vaux women reflect a distinct kind of spirituality influenced by traditional practice, oral and written advice from their spiritual fathers, and an unconventional moral agency in the midst of complex legal and social realities. According to Philip Caraman, Garnet had once suggested in a letter to his superior, Aquaviva, “that there were in England many ladies who could serve the Church more profitably in their country homes than in convents abroad.”51 The Vaux women had proved the worth of his insight; even under siege, their homes continued as “holy households,” sometimes left to their own guidance. The last household considered became an accidental hermitage for an openly defiant Catholic woman. From Courtly Household to Humble Hermitage Elizabeth Tanfield Cary (1585/86–1639), Lady Falkland, came from Protestant gentry. She was a precocious child who often found herself isolated, turning to books as companions and learning several languages including Latin and Hebrew. Her biography, written by one of her four daughters (probably Anne or Lucy Cary), who were nuns at the Cambrai Benedictine convent, praised her stubborn faith without ignoring her character flaws. Married at a young age to Sir Henry Cary (later Viscount of Falkland), who entered the union for financial gain, Elizabeth Cary spent her early marital life separated from her husband while he served in the military. Finding herself deprived of books in her in-laws’ house, she turned to writing, a skill that served her well later as an author and translator. She wrote several works before 1610, including her play The Tragedy of Mariam.52 Eventually Elizabeth became the mother of eleven children and dutifully accompanied her husband to Ireland, where he served as lord deputy from 1622 to 1629. Elizabeth’s moral compass and religious inclinations were obvious even before her public conversion. Her daughter wrote that she was a faithful friend to many in their dying moments, first “for their comfort” and later after her

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conversion, “that she might be ready to assist them, if God should give them light and grace to desire to be so.”53 With her return to England and the public revelation of her conversion to Catholicism in 1626, she incurred the wrath of King Charles I and endured six weeks of house arrest. Her husband cut off financial support and removed the children from her. There followed a tumultuous life for Cary, who tried to solidify her financial standing through various, usually unsuccessful legal and financial maneuvers. Despite attempts on the part of Queen Henrietta Maria to reconcile the couple, they never again lived together, although Elizabeth Cary was at her husband’s deathbed in 1633, when she offered him spiritual comfort in the absence of a priest.54 Although submissive when her conscience would allow, Cary had followed Father Henry Garnet’s written advice by refusing to acknowledge the right of the government or her husband to dictate her religious beliefs. Garnet’s aim in A Treatise of Christian Renunciation (1593) was to provide support for any “distressed Catholicke in steed of a comfortable sermon whansoever he wanteth other meanes of fruitfull encouragements.”55 Garnet argued that a Christian was bound to closer ties with Christ and his church than with familial relationships. He counseled “that in case a woman by her husband be urged to go to the Church or do any unlawfull acte of religion: much more than in other carnall sinnes she may, yea and is bound to forsake him, least loving danger she perish therin.”56 Observing that in great matters Elizabeth Cary “showed no sense of fear, especially where the service of God or conversion of souls was concerned,” her daughter described her mother’s increasing isolation from the court and her existence in rented houses.57 In a letter to Lord Conway, Cary asked that the king send her to Essex, where she might live in a cottage and “pass my time quietly.” At present, she wrote: “I have nor meat, drink, nor clothes, nor money to purchase any of them, and long have I been in this misery. I lie in a lodging where I have no means to pay for it.”58 Lady Falkland’s lifestyle was changing. She began dressing simply in “plain black, frieze or coarse stuff, or cloth” and retreated from banquets and entertainments, finding it difficult to keep the days of fast and abstinence required by her new faith. During one Lent, she survived mostly on “nettle porridge” and plain bread.59 Her experiences of living on the margins of society gave her more time for reflection, writing, and prayer. Composing in verse the biographies of earlier Christian women such as Mary Magdalene, the martyr St. Agnes, and Elizabeth of Portugal undoubtedly provided Cary with models for the acceptance of her own difficulties. She likewise must have found solace in the meditations of the Benedictine Louis de Blois, whose works her spiritual father John Cuthbert Furdson, O.S.B., found so comforting before his death and whose writings Cary was translating into English before her own death. Blosius counseled the devout to live plainly: “If even such things as seem necessary are wanting, praise God, confide in him, who cannot forsake his servants, although sometimes he may profitably permit them to be pinched with want.”60

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In his Treatise of Renunciation, Garnet had denounced schismatic parents who led their children astray, caring more for material gain (such as retaining their property in light of heavy fines imposed on recusants) than the salvation of their souls.61 He advised faithful Catholic wives: Lett your effeminate husbands like unto the wife of Job impugne your holy constancy: and you with manly courage like unto another Job expect God’s patience. Lett your husbands like infidels invite you to their infidelity; but you by your virtew and godly perseverance endevour to sanctify both their and your children.62

Cary’s fervent plans and prayers for her dependent children’s conversions eventually resulted in six of them seeking refuge as Catholics on the Continent, where they entered Benedictine convents or schools. Her youngest sons enjoyed the financial support of Queen Henrietta Maria, who also provided a Catholic burial for Lady Falkland within her personal chapel, one of two designed by Indigo Jones.63 The Benedictine Cuthbert Furdson, Cary’s spiritual father, had translated and published an English version of Smith’s Life of Lady Montague in 1628, about the time when Cary’s public adherence to recusancy created such havoc. Although information about Cary’s daily religious practice is limited, her life reflects some of Magdalen Browne’s familial and religious leadership.64 The obituary of Cary’s daughter, Lucy Magdalen Cary of the Benedictine Convent at Cambrai, remarked on “the prayers and tears of the Lady, her mother, who never ceased to implore heaven for the conversion of her children, being a woman of an extraordinary piety.”65 Lady Falkland’s biographer noted that her mother “did most highly reverence all the precepts, ordinances, and even ceremonies of the Catholic Church.” She always honored priests, but she especially respected the Benedictines, who had been her spiritual fathers and had enrolled her in the Confraternity of St. Benedict shortly before her death.66 Elizabeth Cary’s resignation to her life as a poor recusant widow seems to have been guided by Benedictine spirituality, now being reintroduced through the activity of Benedictines in the English mission. She faced death, according to her daughter, “by much exercise of contrition, resignation, and confidence,” not caring whether she would live or die. “In which preparation to death, it is very like she was much helped by her being conversant in the works of Blosius, which it may well be believed the providence of our Lord did for that end put into her hand.”67 Her biographer wrote that Cary had translated “some (intending to have done it all had she lived) of Blosius out of Latin,” an activity that appears to have had a tempering influence in her final months. Blosius’s directions in Seven Exercises spoke directly to Elizabeth’s situation: Thou must resign thy self wholly, as well as thou canst, to his most just judgement, and most acceptable good pleasure: Thou must I say, leave thy self absolutely to him, permitting him to do with thee, to send to thee, to take away from thee, whatsoever he will, and as he will.68

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Elizabeth Cary had found herself deserted by family and friends, living a life of poverty and humility, but comforted by the oral and written advice of spiritual directors. Her household had become a “hermitage,” if only by default. In post-Reformation England, often as a result of an absent or deceased male head of the household, devout women sometimes formed their own domestic religious communities, reflecting Catholic Reformation sensibilities as well as continuities with medieval practice. They fostered a disciplined piety, provided a nursery for the formation of new Catholics, and offered hospitality to support the mission aims of their ghostly fathers. Far from the expectations of the decrees at the Council of Trent, they pragmatically adapted devout women’s aspirations to contemporary situations and resources, creating sacred spaces (“a visible church,” a “little hermitage,” “a very Catholic house,” according to their biographers) for use by themselves and other recusants.69 Their temporary vocations differed in intent and reality from those of enclosed women: they sacrificed an anticipation of permanent safety abroad for active evangelization at home. In creating domestic churches under siege by civil authorities, they pursued the quiet lay activism of early Christian women whose example their biographers held up for praise.70 The advice of a spiritual director was important and dutifully followed when it was available, but in its absence, manuscripts and books acted as spiritual guides and provided opportunities for negotiation with the limitations placed upon them by state, church, and society.71 Notes  1. In quoting sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century passages and titles I have retained the original spelling with the exception of expanding some contractions and substituting v for u and i for j. [Robert Persons, S.J.], “An Instruction,” October 30, 1604, Archives of the British Province of the Society of Jesus, London, Anglia VI, 53 (formerly at Stonyhurst College). I thank Robert Scully, S.J., and especially Thomas McCoog, S.J., archivist of the British Province of the Society of Jesus, who located this transcription in Persons’s papers. For an elaboration of the contents of Persons’s “Instruction” see Scully, “The Lives of Anne Line: Vowed Laywoman, Recusant Martyr, and Elizabethan Saint,” in this volume. See also J.C.H. Aveling, The Handle and the Axe: The Catholic Recusants in England from Reformation to Emancipation (London: Blond & Briggs, 1976), 89–90.  2. Marie B. Rowlands, “Recusant Women 1560–1640,” in Women in English Society, 1500–1800, ed. Mary Prior (London: Methuen, 1985), 149–80, here 149–60.  3. Alexandra Walsham, Church Papists: Catholicism, Conformity and Confessional Polemic in Early Modern England (Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 1999).  4. For the experiences of enclosed women in exile, see Claire Walker, Gender and Politics in Early Modern Europe: English Convents in France and the Low Countries (Houndmills, Hants: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Rowlands, “Recusant Women,” 166–74.  5. See Alexandra Walsham, “Translating Trent? English Catholicism and the Counter Reformation,” Historical Research 78.201 (2005): 294–99; Colleen Marie Seguin, “ ‘Addicted unto Piety’: Catholic Women in England, 1590–1690,” Ph.D. diss. (Duke

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University, 1997); and Lisa McClain, Lest We Be Damned: Practical Innovation and Lived Experience among Catholics in Protestant England, 1559–1642 (New York: Routledge, 2004). Lyndal Roper used the term “holy household” to describe the Protestant impact on domestic relations (The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989]).  6. Laurence Lux-Sterritt, “ ‘Virgo Becomes Virago’: Women in the Accounts of Seventeenth-Century English Catholic Missionaries,” Recusant History 30.4 (2011): 537–53. For spiritual directors, see also Ellen A. Macek, “ ‘Ghostly Fathers’ and Their ‘Virtuous Daughters’: The Role of Spiritual Direction in the Lives of Three Early Modern English Women,” The Catholic Historical Review 90.2 (2004): 213–35; Colleen M. Seguin, “Ambiguous Liaisons: Catholic Women’s Relationships with Their Confessors in Early Modern England,” Archive for Reformation History 95.1 (2004): 156–85.  7. Rowlands, “Recusant Women,” 160; Frances E. Dolan, Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999); Frances E. Dolan, “Gender and the ‘Lost’ Spaces of Catholicism,” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 32.4 (2002): 641–65.  8. The Lives of Philip Howard, Earl of Arundel, and of Anne Dacres, His Wife, ed. the Duke of Norfolk, E.M. (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1857). This printed version of a manuscript written in the 1630s by an anonymous Jesuit and last chaplain of the Countess should be read in conjunction with a recently discovered missing chapter found in C.A. Newdigate, S.J., “A New Chapter in the Life of B. Robert Southwell, S.J.,” The Month 157.801 (1931): 246–54. See also Seguin, “Addicted unto Piety,” 161–70; Robert Southwell, S.J., Two Letters and Short Rules of a Good Life, ed. Nancy Pollard Brown (Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia, 1973), introduction, xxv.  9. Brown, Two Letters, introduction, xxxv; see xxv–xxxviii, 114 n.31. See Susannah Monta, “Uncommon Prayer? Robert Southwell’s Short Rule for a Good Life and Catholic Domestic Devotion in Post-Reformation England,” Redrawing the Map of Early Modern English Catholicism, ed. Lowell Gallagher (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 245–71, here 256–61. 10. Brown, Two Letters, introduction, xliii–xliv, xlvii–xlviii, lii–liv. The prefaces in Garnet’s editions allude to Benedictine monastic practices (Monta, “Uncommon Prayer?” 258–59). 11. See Nancy Pollard Brown, “Paperchase: The Dissemination of Catholic Texts in Elizabethan England,” in English Manuscript Studies 1100–1700, vol. 1, ed. Peter Beal and Jeremy Griffiths (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 120–43, here 134–35; Nancy Pollard Brown, “A Shorte Rule of Good Life: A Handbook for the English Mission,” Recusant History 30.1 (2010): 47–59. For the Montague and Lawson households, see below; Seguin, “Addicted unto Piety,” 154, n. 92; 177, n. 182. 12. [Robert Southwell, S.J.], A Short Rule of Good Life [English secret press, 1602– 1605], sigs. C6v–C11v. A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland, and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475–1640 22968.3. Hereafter cited as STC I or STC II (for books from 1641–1700). 13. Ibid., sig. C12v, see C11v–D2v. 14. Ibid., sigs. D3r–D3v. 15. Ibid., sigs. D5r–D9r. 16. Ibid., sigs. F10v–G1v. McClain argues that recusants had to follow a pragmatic religious practice, especially in the absence of traditional rituals and sacraments (Lest We

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Be Damned, 45). See McClain’s description of Southwell’s adaptations, 57–62; Dolan, “Gender,” 661, 664. 17. Newdigate, “New Chapter,” 250. 18. Lives of Philip Howard and Anne Dacres 283, 286–87, 292; Newdigate, “New Chapter,” 253–54; Seguin, “Addicted unto Piety,” 167–70. 19. Lives of Philip Howard and Anne Dacres 212–14, 247–51, 283–84, 308–15; Newdigate, “New Chapter,” 252. 20. Lives of Philip Howard and Anne Dacres, 292–93, 182–85, 284–88. According to Seguin, the Countess had taken a vow of chastity (“Addicted unto Piety,” 168). 21. Lives of Philip Howard and Anne Dacres, 251, 254–58. See also Monta, “Uncommon Prayer,” 261–64. 22. Michael C. Questier, Catholicism and Community in Early Modern England: Politics, Aristocratic Patronage and Religion, c. 1500–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 209, 212–13. See An Elizabethan Recusant House Comprising the Life of the Lady Magdalen Viscountess Montague (1538–1608), ed. A.C. Southern (London: Sands, 1954), introduction, viii–xvi. See also Seguin, “Addicted unto Piety,” 154–61. In 1625, Dr. Smith became Vicar Apostolic in England as Bishop of Chalcedon. 23. Richard Smith, The Life of the Most Honorable and Vertuous Lady, the Lady Magdalen Viscountesse Montague. Written in Latin, and Published Soone After Her Death: By RICHARD SMITH, Doctour of Divinity, and Her Confessour. Translated into English by C.F. ([St. Omer, English College Press], 1627), sig. B3v, see sigs. A3v, B2v–C3v, D3r, D4r–E2r. STC I: 22811. 24. Ibid., sigs. D1r–D1v, D2v–D3r, D4r, E2v–E3v; Questier, Catholicism, 213–17; Seguin, “Addicted unto Piety” 156–57, 263. 25. Smith, Life, *3v–*4r, B3v, F4r–F4v. See McClain on the Catholic construction of communities of prayer and of the book (Lest We Be Damned, 245–51). Elizabeth Rhodes argues that Ignatian spirituality encouraged such discipline and empowerment in devout Spanish women (“Join the Jesuits, See the World: Early Modern Women in Spain and the Society of Jesus,” in The Jesuits II: Cultures, Sciences, and Arts, 1540–1773, ed. John W. O’Malley, S.J., et al. [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006], 33–47). 26. William Palmes, S.J., The Life of Mrs. Dorothy Lawson of St. Antony’s near Newcastle-on-Tyne (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: J.G. Forster, 1855), 8–10; see also 5–7, 16– 17, 21–22. Lawson was the niece of Lady Elizabeth Dormer, daughter of Lady Magdalen Montague. See Seguin, “Addicted unto Piety,” 177, n. 182. 27. Palmes, Life, 15, 21–25, 47–49, 54. For Lawson’s relationships with her spiritual directors, see Macek, “Ghostly Fathers,” 220–24; Seguin, “Addicted unto Piety,” 177–83; Seguin, “Ambiguous Liaisons,” 178–81. 28. Palmes, Life, 26, 45–46. 29. Ibid., 43–44. 30. Ibid., 51, 47–48. 31. Ibid., 38–39; see also 37, 40–41, 48. 32. Ibid., 29–31. See McClain, Lest We Be Damned, 60. 33. Palmes, Life, 36. 34. Godfrey Anstruther, O.P., Vaux of Harrowden: A Recusant Family (Newport: R.H. Johns, 1953), 195. 35. Ibid., 191–92. 36. Ibid., 94, 100–103, 108, 111, 158–59, 166–71, 182–83. See also Philip Caraman, Henry Garnet, 1555–1606, and the Gunpowder Plot (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1964),

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36, 39–40. Their brother Henry had participated in a young male network accompanying Catholic priests around the country before his death in 1587. Anne and Eleanor Vaux were cousins of Anne Dacre (Seguin, “Addicted unto Piety,” 217, and “Ambiguous Liaisons,” 173). 37. Anstruther, Vaux, 94, 179–80, 186, 388, 460, quoted at 186; Caraman, Garnet, 39–42. 38. Anstruther, Vaux, 185–91, 460–62; Seguin, “Addicted unto Piety,” 170–77. 39. Anstruther, Vaux, 188–91, quoted at 189–90. 40. Ibid.,191. 41. Caraman, Garnet, 349–50, 367–71, 421–24; Anstruther, Vaux, 344–51, 353, 361–63, 368; Seguin, “Addicted unto Piety,” 171–73. For accusations of priests’ sexual improprieties, see Dolan, “Whores,” 87–94. 42. Anstruther, Vaux, 363. 43. Ibid., 204–6, 221–32, 453. Elizabeth Roper Vaux was a cousin of Dorothy Dormer Huddlestone, granddaughter of Lady Magdalen Browne. See Anstruther, Vaux, 301; Questier, Catholicism, 333. 44. John Gerard: The Autobiography of an Elizabethan, trans. Philip Caraman (London: Longmans, Green, 1951), 147–49, see also 144–46; Anstruther, Vaux, 237–45. 45. Anstruther, Vaux, 244, see also 243, 245; Gerard, Autobiography, 160–61. Anne Vaux was later involved in a Jesuit school in Derbyshire (Seguin, “Addicted unto Piety,” 177; Anstruther, Vaux, 460–62). 46. Quotation from St. Monica’s Convent Chronicle (Anstruther, Vaux, 180; see 179– 82, 375–7). 47. Ibid., 379; see also 317–21, 375. 48. Caraman, Garnet, 253–55, 351; Brown, Southwell’s Short Rules, introduction, xiv–xvii; A Treatise of Equivocation, ed. David Jardine (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1851), introduction, iv–x, xiii–xix. The Treatise is unsigned. Jardine does not claim that Garnet is definitely the author, but most sources attribute A Treatise of Equivocation to Garnet. See A.E. Malloch, “Father Henry Garnet’s Treatise of Equivocation,” Recusant History 15.6 (1981): 387–95. 49. Treatise of Equivocation, 102; see 17–25, 103–6. 50. Ibid., title page as altered by Garnet and printed in Jardine, sig. *B; see also Caraman, Garnet, 255, 351. 51. Caraman, Garnet, 422. 52. Elizabeth Cary, Lady Falkland, The Tragedy of Mariam: The Fair Queen of Jewry. With The Lady Falkland: Her Life by One of Her Daughters, ed. Barry Weller and Margaret W. Ferguson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), introduction, 1–59. Cary’s life is found at 183–275. 53. Ibid., 199, see 190–201; see also Weller and Ferguson’s introduction, 4–5, 7. 54. Cary, Her Life, 201–21; also see the introduction, 7–8. 55. [Henry Garnet, S.J.], A Treatise of Christian Renunciation [London, Garnet’s first press, 1593], sigs. A6r–A6v. STC I: 11617.8. 56. Ibid., sig. G2v–G3r; see also sigs. A5v, C3v, D6v–D7r, E7v–G2r. 57. Cary, Her Life, 216; see also 206–13. 58. The Lady Falkland: Her Life, ed. Richard Simpson (London: Catholic Publishing, 1861), appendix, 143–46. 59. Cary, Her Life, 194, 223–24, 216, 248. According to Weller and Ferguson’s introduction, in the last decade of her life, Elizabeth Cary gave away much of her meager resources (9).

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60. Lewis Blosius, Seven Exercises or Meditations: By Which a Man May Be, in a Short Time, Established in the Fear of God, and in a Good and Holy Life (London, 1686), F9r– F9v. STC II: 3204. (The translator of this edition is unknown.) Louis de Blois or Blosius (1506–1566) was a Flemish Benedictine monk known for his spiritual writings. See Cary, Her Life, 186, 213–14, 228–30, 264. 61. Garnet, Treatise of Renunciation, sigs. G3r–G7v. 62. Garnet, Treatise of Renunciation, sig. K1r. 63. Cary, Her Life, 222–23, 228, 230–32, 261–63, 266–67, 275. On dangerous religious spaces created by a Catholic consort, see Dolan, “Gender,” 648–49. 64. Cuthbert Furdson is only identified as the English translator of Smith’s biography of Lady Browne by his initials C. F. See note 23 above. See also Southern, Elizabethan Recusant House, introduction, xv–xvi; Seguin, “Addicted unto Piety,” 154, n. 92. 65. Lady Falkland, appendix, 185–86. 66. Cary, Her Life, 271–72. 67. Cary, Her Life, 274–75. Benedictine participation in the mission had begun in 1619 (Walsham, “Translating Trent,” 295). 68. Cary, Her Life, 186; Blosius, Seven Exercises, sig. D3r. 69. Smith, Life, D1V; Palmes, Life, 31; Frances Burroughs’s observation, quoted from St. Monica’s Convent Chronicle by Anstruther, Vaux, 180, respectively. 70. McClain notes the recusant identification with early Christians (Lest We Be Damned, 235–42, 269–72). See also Scully, “Line,” in this volume. 71. See Alexandra Walsham, “ ‘Domme Preachers’? Post-Reformation English Catholicism and the Culture of Print,” Past & Present 168.1 (2000): 72–123; McClain, Lest We Be Damned, 46–48.

Works Cited Anstruther, Godfrey, O.P. Vaux of Harrowden: A Recusant Family. Newport: R.H. Johns, 1953. Aveling, J.C.H. The Handle and the Axe: The Catholic Recusants in England from Reformation to Emancipation. London: Blond and Briggs, 1976. Blosius, Lewis. Seven Exercises or Meditations: By Which a Man May Be, in a Short Time, Established in the Fear of God, and in a Good and Holy Life. London, 1686. STC II: 3204. Brown, Nancy Pollard. “Paperchase: The Dissemination of Catholic Texts in Elizabethan England.” In English Manuscript Studies 1100–1700, edited by Peter Beal and Jeremy Griffiths, vol. 1, 120–43. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989. Brown, Nancy Pollard. “A Shorte Rule of Good Life: A Handbook for the English Mission.” Recusant History 30, no. 1 (2010): 47–59. Caraman, Philip. Henry Garnet, 1555–1606, and the Gunpowder Plot. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1964. Cary, Elizabeth, Lady Falkland. The Tragedy of Mariam: The Fair Queen of Jewry. With The Lady Falkland: Her Life by One of Her Daughters. Edited by Barry Weller and Margaret W. Ferguson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

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Dolan, Frances E. “Gender and the ‘Lost’ Spaces of Catholicism.” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 32, no. 4 (2002): 641–65. ______. Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999. An Elizabethan Recusant House Comprising the Life of the Lady Magdalen Viscountess Montague (1538–1608). Edited by A.C. Southern. London: Sands, 1954. [Garnet, Henry, S. J.], A Treatise of Christian Renunciation. [London: Garnet’s first press, 1593]. STC I: 11617.8. John Gerard: The Autobiography of an Elizabethan. Translated by Philip Caraman. London: Longmans, Green, 1951. The Lady Falkland: Her Life. Edited by Richard Simpson. London: Catholic Publishing, 1861. The Lives of Philip Howard, Earl of Arundel, and of Anne Dacres, His Wife. Edited by the Duke of Norfolk, E.M. London: Hurst and Blackett, 1857. Lux-Sterritt, Laurence. “ ‘Virgo Becomes Virago’: Women in the Accounts of Seventeenth-Century English Catholic Missionaries.” Recusant History 30, no. 4 (2011): 537–53. Macek, Ellen A. “ ‘Ghostly Fathers’ and Their ‘Virtuous Daughters’: The Role of Spiritual Direction in the Lives of Three Early Modern English Women.” The Catholic Historical Review 90, no. 2 (2004): 213–35. Malloch, A.E. “Father Henry Garnet’s Treatise of Equivocation.” Recusant History 15, no. 6 (1981): 387–95. McClain, Lisa. Lest We Be Damned: Practical Innovation and Lived Experience among Catholics in Protestant England, 1559–1642. New York: Routledge, 2004. Monta, Susannah. “Uncommon Prayer? Robert Southwell’s Short Rule for a Good Life and Catholic Domestic Devotion in Post-Reformation England.” In Redrawing the Map of Early Modern English Catholicism, edited by Lowell Gallagher, 245–71. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012. Newdigate, C.A., S.J. “A New Chapter in the Life of B. Robert Southwell, S.J.” The Month 157, no. 801 (1931): 246–54. Palmes, William, S.J. The Life of Mrs. Dorothy Lawson of St. Antony’s near Newcastle-on-Tyne. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: J.G. Forster, 1855. [Persons, Robert, S.J.]. “An Instruction, and direction for the spiritual helpe of such Inglish gentlewomen, as desyre to lead, a more retired & recollected life then the ordinarie in Ingland doth yeald.” October 30, 1604, Archives of the British Province of the Society of Jesus, London, Anglia VI, 53 (formerly at Stonyhurst College). Questier, Michael C. Catholicism and Community in Early Modern England: Politics, Aristocratic Patronage and Religion, c. 1500–1640. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Rhodes, Elizabeth. “Join the Jesuits, See the World: Early Modern Women in Spain and the Society of Jesus.” In The Jesuits II: Cultures, Sciences, and the

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Arts, 1540–1773, edited by John W. O’Malley, S.J., et al., 35–47. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. Roper, Lyndal. The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989. Rowlands, Marie B. “Recusant Women 1560–1640.” In Women in English Society, 1500–1800, edited by Mary Prior, 149–80. London: Methuen, 1985. Seguin, Colleen Marie. “ ‘Addicted unto Piety’: Catholic Women in England, 1590–1690.” Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1997. ———. “Ambiguous Liaisons: Catholic Women’s Relationships with Their Confessors in Early Modern England.” Archive for Reformation History 95, no. 1 (2004): 156–85. Smith, Richard. The Life of the Most Honorable and Vertuous Lady, the Lady Magdalen Viscountesse Montague. Written in Latin, and Published Soone After Her Death: By RICHARD SMITH, Doctour of Divinity, and Her Confessour. Translated into English by C.F. [St. Omer: English College Press], 1627. STC I: 22811. [Southwell, Robert, S.J.], A Short Rule of Good Life. [English secret press, 1602– 1605]. STC I: 22968.3. Southwell, Robert, S.J. Two Letters and Short Rules of a Good Life. Edited by Nancy Pollard Brown. Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia, 1973. A Treatise of Equivocation. Edited by David Jardine. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1851. Walker, Claire. Gender and Politics in Early Modern Europe: English Convents in France and the Low Countries. Houndmills, Hants: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Walsham, Alexandra. Church Papists: Catholicism, Conformity and Confessional Polemic in Early Modern England. Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 1999. ———. “ ‘Domme Preachers’? Post-Reformation English Catholicism and the Culture of Print.” Past & Present 168, no. 1 (2000): 72–123. ———. “Translating Trent? English Catholicism and the Counter Reformation.” Historical Research 78, no. 201 (2005): 288–310.

Part IV

Alliances

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12 Convent Alternatives for Rich and Poor Girls in Seventeenth-Century Florence The Lay Conservatories of Eleonora Ramirez di Montalvo (1602–1659) Jennifer Haraguchi* On August 30, 1620, at eighteen years of age, the Florentine noblewoman Eleonora Ramirez di Montalvo married Orazio Landi against her will, having been forced by her relatives to leave the Poor Clares at the convent of San Jacopo in Via Ghibellina, where she had intended to profess solemn vows. Approximately five years later, Montalvo left her husband, moved in with her brother, and decided to establish a religious house for poor young women.1 As a married woman, Montalvo was not permitted to govern a convent, so she formed a small school in her brother’s home, eventually founding a lay conservatory for underprivileged girls called Il Conventino. Twenty-four years later, in 1650, with the support of the Grand Duchess Vittoria della Rovere (1622–1694), wife of Ferdinando II de’ Medici, Montalvo established another lay conservatory—this time for elite women—at Villa La Quiete in the northeast environs of the city.2 Il Conventino and La Quiete functioned like convents in administrative matters, except that the women who resided there were called ancille (handmaidens) instead of monache (nuns) and they made simple promises of obedience to a superiora (superior) instead of professing solemn vows before a priest.3 Under Montalvo’s guidance, Il Conventino occupied various locales throughout Florence: in Via degli Alberti, in Borgo San Niccolò, and in the San Lorenzo district, where Montalvo set up an oratory for her girls in Via dell’Amore.4 In addition to educating and providing for the needs of the poor, Montalvo sometimes welcomed upper-class girls to Il Conventino, including the daughters of the prominent Petrelli and Cambianchi families, and also Montalvo’s nieces.5 As more aristocratic families sought to place their daughters in Montalvo’s care, she decided that it would be best to separate the socioeconomic groups. Her followers relate in the Annali (Annals) that divine intervention led Montalvo to a wealthy donor who, for 7,000 scudi, purchased La Quiete, a Medicean villa in the municipality of Quarto in the direction of Sesto Fiorentino.6 In 1650 Montalvo transferred her aristocratic girls to this lay conservatory. In the late seventeenth century, the grand duchess had a church built at La Quiete that followed the architectural model of convent churches—showcasing both an outer and an inner chapel. In the outer chapel, complete with ceiling fresco and gold trim, the public gathered in pews in front of the altar to participate

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in Mass. In the inner chapel, composed of simple wooden choir seats hidden from the public’s view, Montalvo’s ancille observed the service through a metal grate from the upper level. When it came time to take communion, the ancille descended an internal staircase to the lower choir to receive the host from the priest through an open grate behind the altar. In the upper choir of the inner chapel at La Quiete stands a small statue of the Virgin Mary encased in glass. In her left hand, the Virgin holds a small set of keys, and in her right a miniature copy of Montalvo’s Costituzioni (Regulations). For centuries this statue has symbolized the importance of rules and authority and Mary’s preeminence in governing La Quiete. Directly below the statue in the lower choir, Montalvo’s ancille witnessed a more tangible representation of authority: every year an important ceremony took place in which the outgoing superiora presented the Costituzioni and the actual keys to La Quiete through the grate to the priest in the outer church; at a later point in the ceremony, the priest then passed the keys back through the grate to the newly elected superiora.7 This figurative distinction—looking to the Virgin Mary for directional guidance while showing deference to ecclesiastical command in administrative matters— illustrates the balance of power that Montalvo effectively achieved between two distinct sources of authority: the mystical leadership of the Virgin Mary and the earthly governance of church leaders. By founding lay conservatories that did not require solemn vows, she faced unique circumstances that required innovative thought. Claiming authority from the Virgin Mary, Montalvo implemented ideas that were unconventional for her time. Il Conventino and La Quiete were deemed conservatori (conservatories) with the understanding that they would conserve (from the Italian verb conservare) a young woman’s virginity and honor, and the post-Tridentine Church sanctioned them as “congregations.”8 Nonetheless, ecclesiastical authorities kept a close watch on these congregations and pressured many of them into accepting strict enclosure. For example, the Company of Saint Ursula, organized in 1535 by Angela Merici, only maintained its status as a congregation until 1585, when the women who belonged to it were required to profess in the Order of Saint Ursula.9 The Collegio della Guastalla, established in sixteenth-century Milan by the countess of Guastalla, Ludovica Torelli (1500– 1569), was a boarding school for girls that Torelli’s followers were unable to carry on after her death.10 An exceptional case, the Collegio della Beata Vergine, founded in Cremona in 1610 by Lucia Perotti, appears to have maintained its original design into the late eighteenth century as a secular congregation with an emphasis on the education of aristocratic women.11 But this tolerance was rare. In England, Mary Ward (1585–1645) founded schools for girls based on a Jesuit model, all but one of which were closed in 1631 by Pope Urban VIII because the girls refused to wear religious habits and did not adhere to the rules of enclosure; Ward was also condemned as a heretic (a condemnation that was later revoked).12 In that same year, the widow Faustina Mainardi established her “Casa delle zitelle” (“House of unmarried women”) in Florence’s Canto alla Mela for the education of young women who were preparing to enter the convent. Mainardi’s

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sin and fate were much worse than Ward’s. On November 28, 1641, Mainardi’s “Casa” was condemned by the Inquisition and Mainardi was put in prison for life. She was charged as an accomplice to the lascivious scheme of her Jesuit confessor, Pandolfo Ricasoli, and seven of his friends (clergymen and noblemen) who entered the complex on a regular basis.13 In the wake of sanctions placed on congregations, Montalvo was careful to make her lay conservatories appear like convents in administrative matters. Her Costituzioni implement a structure very similar to that of monastic Costituzioni and propose regulations that govern four distinct areas of life in her conservatories: administrative affairs, communal living and spiritual ritual, obedience and mortification, and enclosure.14 However, both Montalvo’s Costituzioni and firsthand accounts of life in these conservatories, written by the women who resided there, reveal Montalvo’s deviations from post-Tridentine regulations. These include modified enclosure, eremi (“hermitages” or micro-communities at La Quiete), freedom to choose one’s vocation at fifteen years of age, and participation of servants in learning and worship. An examination of archival documents regarding both administrative theory and actual practice in Montalvo’s alternative communities demonstrates Montalvo’s innovative approach to the education of women and suggests ways in which she successfully avoided church censorship.15 With the support of Vittoria della Rovere, Montalvo established alternative schools for rich and poor girls outside the convent that endured in line with her vision and ideals for almost 300 years.16 By Whose Authority? For Montalvo, the Virgin Mary represented divine authority and guidance. In her Costituzioni of 1645 for Il Conventino, Montalvo identifies the superiora, the highest administrator at Il Conventino, as the Virgin Mary’s representative on earth;17 in her Costituzioni for both Il Conventino (1645) and La Quiete (1656– 1657), she encourages her ancille to turn to the Virgin Mary for all their needs.18 Montalvo’s reliance on the Virgin Mary’s direction was recognized and accepted by church authorities. The Scolopian priest Sigismondo Coccapani writes in his late seventeenth-century biography of Montalvo that she claimed to have received very precise instruction from the Virgin Mary on how to compose her Costituzioni. Coccapani points out that Montalvo established non-traditional rules regarding clothing, food, and the education of the poor, and justified her rules by attributing them to the uncontestable design of the Virgin Mary: [Montalvo] then said to her girls that she wrote them [the Costituzioni] more according to the teachings of the blessed Virgin herself rather than following her own thinking, regarding dress as well as food and social standing of the girls: “Because I would have wanted,” she said, “to dress you in brown and the Madonna wanted black; I would have wanted you to eat meat a few days a week, and she prohibited me from doing it; I would have wanted to compose the

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According to Coccapani, Montalvo said she was inspired by the Virgin to consider character rather than social status (one of the primary considerations in selecting girls for the convent) when choosing young women for her conservatories.20 Where critics may dismiss Coccapani’s statement as a hagiographical trope, it nonetheless offers an important insight into the challenges that Montalvo faced as she sought to reconcile her desire to provide education to young women of all social classes with the Florentine Church’s position, which, at the time, did not include the education of the poor. Coccapani implies that Montalvo found it difficult to make decisions that departed from the convent tradition, but he acknowledges that her belief in the inspiration of the Virgin Mary allowed her to innovate within that tradition. While the Florentine Archbishop Pietro Niccolini approved Montalvo’s Costituzioni of 1645 for Il Conventino,21 ecclesiastical authorities did not sanction Montalvo’s Costituzioni of 1656–57 for La Quiete until 1679—twenty years after Montalvo’s death—when they were modified by Paolo Segneri and endorsed by the Grand Duchess Vittoria della Rovere.22 Fausta Casolini, a scholar who gathered documents for Montalvo’s beatification proceedings in the 1950s, believed that Montalvo composed her Costituzioni for La Quiete (1656–57) in 1650 and that she may never have sought approval from the church for the following reasons: (1) Archbishop Pietro Niccolini was ill and died in December 1650; (2) Montalvo knew that, as a married woman, she was not the ideal candidate to found a religious institution for noblewomen, even though she had successfully established her first conservatory for underprivileged girls; and (3) Montalvo wanted La Quiete to maintain a certain degree of autonomy.23 According to Casolini’s analysis, Montalvo exhibited some restraint in approaching ecclesiastical authorities with the exact details of the organization and administration of La Quiete. It appears that she chose not to submit her second Costituzioni to authorities in order to avoid having to change or eliminate certain regulations. Distinctive Features of Montalvo’s Costituzioni: The Eremo and Vocational Choice The three sets of regulations that Montalvo wrote for her communities of women reveal how her lay conservatories differed from convents in administrative matters. First, in the Costituzioni of 1645 and Istruzione alle maestre (Instructions for Teachers), Montalvo emphasizes a young woman’s freedom to choose one of three vocations at fifteen years of age, and second, in the Costituzioni of 1656–57, she establishes her concept of eremi, or micro-communities composed of groups of women (usually three to four persons and sometimes as many as seven, but not more) who lived, worked, and worshipped together at La Quiete. Where the Costituzioni of monastic communities typically specify that nuns must reside in individual cells or large dormitories within the convent,24 Montalvo’s

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Costituzioni of 1656–57 delineate eremi, or appartamenti (apartments), at La Quiete.25 One of Montalvo’s plays, Rappresentazione delle virtù e dei vizi (Play of the Virtues and Vices)26—which she had her young women perform at La Quiete for recreation and instruction—illustrates how an eremo functioned: with an older woman as “mother” and teacher, a young woman as “older sister,” and smaller children as “little sisters” all living closely together within an enclosed religious space. The eremo provided, in Montalvo’s view, greater experiences for learning from one another than were available in the traditional convent environment, where an older nun was assigned as a teacher to young novices. Montalvo’s eremo simulated an element of the outside world—the family (albeit without a father)—in an effort to teach much more than the recitation of prayers and the reading of devotional literature. Each person in the eremo had to learn how to get along with the others and how to inspire and serve the others. Montalvo’s eremo functioned as an ethical, practical, and social nucleus for the good of the individual as well as for the community as a whole, and established an intimate and private learning environment that may have prompted women to choose good behavior because of their allegiance to a particular eremo. The eremo did not conform to convent expectations and was even similar to beguine houses, many of which had been suppressed by post-Tridentine authorities.27 It is perhaps for this reason that Vittoria della Rovere, twenty years after Montalvo’s death, had all the details about the eremo removed from La Quiete’s Costituzioni. Just as Montalvo instituted the novel concept of the eremo as a distinctive feature in her communities of women, she also implemented the unconventional idea that young women should be granted some freedom of choice in mapping out their own futures, according to God’s wishes and within the bounds of societal expectations. As she states explicitly in her Costituzioni of 1645, “[L]et them understand their freedom, so that they may choose, of their own free will, that state to which they feel, after having prayed a lot, most inspired by God.”28 Montalvo’s Istruzione alle maestre are more specific than the Costituzioni on this point. In her Istruzione, Montalvo proposes the vocational options available to her young women at fifteen years of age: (1) accept a marriage proposal, (2) take solemn vows in a convent elsewhere, or (3) remain for life at La Quiete or Il Conventino as ancille stabilite (established handmaidens). She instructs the teachers accordingly: [D]on’t dissuade them for an instant from their vocation, letting them elect for themselves whether to marry, become a nun, or remain in this congregation, whichever they desire most, according to the inspiration they receive; they need only to understand what they are doing and know that in whichever condition they choose they are obliged to love and serve God.29

In an era of widespread arranged marriages and forced monachization, Montalvo took pride in establishing educational institutions that offered young women an acceptable alternative to the standard roles of wife and nun.30 Montalvo also believed in offering her young women the option of leaving the congregation at any time. The Costituzioni of 1645 permitted the young women to

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withdraw from the congregation if that was their wish; however, if they chose to leave, they could never come back: “[I]f any girl wants to leave the congregation, in making her thoughts known to the superiors in the proper way, she will be allowed, on the condition that she can never return.”31 Montalvo provides no explanation as to why the young women would not be given a second chance, but one can assume that she designed her lay conservatories only for those who did not manifest any doubt in their desire to be there. The superiors at Il Conventino and La Quiete could ultimately reject a young woman’s decision when she acted in a disagreeable or questionable manner. For example, they could send her away at any time if she did not “persevere in the path of perfection,” if she was of a “bad disposition,” if she was not capable of learning spiritual exercises, or if she caused harm to another.32 Nonetheless, Montalvo’s emphasis on the importance of choice and the ease with which girls could leave and superiors could send girls away was unique in an era in which monastic Costituzioni did not provide the option of leaving the convent, except through a complicated legal process and humiliating (and sometimes cruel) punishments for bad behavior or the breaking of vows.33 Modified Enclosure: Theory vs. Practice Montalvo may have been specific in the Costituzioni when discussing the eremo and the freedom to choose a vocation—concepts that distinguished her conservatories from convents—but she was not so forthright in describing the modified type of enclosure that her young women observed at Il Conventino and La Quiete. In fact, her Costituzioni, as shown previously, reinforce the idea of strict enclosure, in part to appease religious authorities. However, documents written by the ancille themselves—Regole per le Montalve (Rules for the Montalve), Ordini (Orders), Annali (Annals), and “Piccolo commentario alle Costituzioni” (“Brief Explanation of the Regulations”)—tell us that Montalvo’s communities did not observe the strict enclosure promoted in her Costituzioni and, when pressured to adhere to rules of enclosure, the ancille at La Quiete demanded permission to live according to less-restrictive regulations. They believed in a modified type of enclosure that allowed them to visit friends and relatives. For young women deciding whether or not to remain in the conservatory, entering and exiting of their own free will in order to experience life within and without would have offered them the opportunity to make an informed decision about their life’s vocation. The concept of enclosed religious communities dates back to the Carolingian period, when authorities established rules of enclosure primarily to protect monasteries and convents from barbaric invasions. From the twelfth century on, the church believed that nuns could focus more fully on their devotions when they completely separated themselves from the outside world. More important, ecclesiastical leaders thought that women best preserved their chastity behind locked doors and high walls. In 1298, Boniface VIII made physical segregation

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a requirement for all female religious communities. However, many religious institutions did not fully comply with this ruling in the centuries that followed— especially houses of the third order (tertiaries)—since it was not clear that enclosure was required of them. In 1563 the Council of Trent reiterated Boniface’s decree and applied it to third-order convents. In 1564, 1566, and 1568, Pio IV and Pio V made additional clarifications to the ruling. In 1566 the archbishop of Milan, Carlo Borromeo, established very strict regulations for the diocese of Milan, which ecclesiastical leaders all over Italy eventually adopted. These rules covered even the most minute details of convent architecture, including the thickness and height of the convent walls; the number of doors and keys; the dimensions of the walls, doors, and grates through which the nuns communicated with the outside world; the number of bars and opaque windows; the size of the opening in the grate where the priest administered communion; and the number, form, dimensions, and functions of the ruota (service wheel) through which goods and services passed in the parlor and sacristy. In 1610 Urban VIII ordered communities of tertiaries to accept enclosure, sometimes against the wishes of their founders.34 While Montalvo’s Costituzioni reproduce the rules of enclosure, in reality the girls of Il Conventino could not adhere to strict enclosure because their oratory was located in Via dell’Amore, which was down the street from their living quarters. The Ordini specify instructions for a certain behavior that Montalvo wanted her girls to exhibit as they walked through the streets to the oratory or on an errand for the superiora: We do not ever go outside alone, but always in pairs, and the novices go with the stabilite. Outside we keep our eyes downcast and our hands back and covered up as well as we can, and we try to walk with a serious and humble demeanor. And if someone speaks to us on the street, we should not detain ourselves listening for long, but with some modest sign take our leave without speaking. And we do the same in church, unless the father confessor is there, since we may speak to him, but we try to hurry up as quickly as possible. And if the mother [superior] should need to send [us] somewhere, only the person to whom has been assigned the duty should speak and only when necessary.35

The guidelines reported here are identical to those found in treatises regarding laywomen’s behavior and demonstrate that Montalvo wanted her young women to act within the parameters of traditional expectations for women in secular society.36 Virginia Guidi’s “Piccolo commentario alle Costituzioni” also reveals that Montalvo did not require strict enclosure for her women. For example, Montalvo permitted the ancille stabilite to visit churches and attend sacred functions, and even to see their friends, provided that they came back to stay the night at Il Conventino.37 At La Quiete, too, the ancille observed a type of modified enclosure. For the entire year prior to becoming stabilita, superiors allowed a young woman to leave and return to the congregation as she pleased and to wear fashionable attire. They wanted to make sure that she was truly committed to pledge herself to the

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congregation. A month before a young woman became stabilita, Regole per le Montalve indicate that she lived at home in order to “prove” herself: Before receiving the habit, the lady who is to enter the community remains a bride for a year, in which time she dresses with pomp and fashionable attire, if she wants to, and enters and exits the house of her own free will, going to Florence to visit relatives and churches, being entrusted to her mother, and if she doesn’t have a mother, to a close relative, with whom she will reside, being strongly encouraged so that with such pastimes she should not lose the spirit and devotion.38

On a young woman’s return to La Quiete after this period of “proving,” the ancille would watch her closely in order to gauge her true intentions. The practice of visiting friends and relatives extended well into the eighteenth century; the ancille attended parties at Palazzo Pitti and other Medicean villas in order to demonstrate to the outside world that they were not nuns and that they resided willingly at La Quiete.39 However, Montalvo’s conservatories did implement certain rules of enclosure when they wanted to keep undesirable persons and ideas out, as the following example makes clear. On August 29, 1661, two years after Montalvo’s death, the Florentine Archbishop Francesco Nerli ordered Montalvo’s followers at La Quiete to move back to Florence, take solemn vows, and accept strict enclosure.40 Montalvo’s group of twenty-five women refused.41 Their founder had secured certain rights for them; it was not Montalvo’s intention for them to become nuns, and she had established that the grand duchess, as opposed to the diocese, would govern their secular conservatory. Displeased by their defiant stance, the archbishop had his chancellor post an ecclesiastical interdict on their door informing them that there would be no Mass held at La Quiete and no visits by a confessor. The chancellor initially tried to place the interdict through the ruota, but the ancille would not accept it there—they used the ruota to reject the very authority that prescribed its implementation.42 Notwithstanding the threat of punishment, Montalvo’s followers did not give in to the archbishop’s demands. As a result, for six months the women were not permitted to take communion in the comfort of their oratory and had to endure taunting from others as well as the quarter-mile walk through the cold corridor to the church down the road where they received the sacrament.43 But despite these hardships, their rebellion was successful. On February 26, 1662, Mass was once again held in the oratory at La Quiete. And because of Vittoria della Rovere’s intervention, the church granted permission to Montalvo’s ancille to stay at La Quiete and maintain their original status as a secular conservatory governed by the granducal family.44 Servants at Il Conventino and La Quiete Elite citizens of early modern Italy confirmed their prestige and power— symbolically and materially—by retaining a house full of servants. Servants

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cleaned, made bread, worked in the kitchen and garden, boiled and washed laundry, and took care of the animals. Early modern convents also relied on servants for household maintenance.45 Of the total number of nuns in Florentine convents in 1672, historians argue that servant sisters occupied twenty-eight percent of the convent population.46 Convent servants came from rural and lowerclass families, paid a smaller dowry than choir nuns who arrived at convents from affluent homes, and were deliberately kept in subordinate positions.47 This division along class lines contradicted the philosophy of monastic unity, and yet the church found a way to justify the need for servants. In one particular ruling, the Sacred Congregation of Bishops and Regulars stated that elite nuns needed servants because noblewomen were physically incapable of performing domestic tasks: “[B]y being nobles and . . . used to spiritual exercises they often contract illnesses from [hard work].”48 In the period between 1650 (La Quiete’s founding) and 1659 (Montalvo’s death), La Quiete housed eighteen ancille stabilite and eight young servant girls. Like the choir nuns in convents, the ancille stabilite of Montalvo’s congregations served as administrators and teachers, while the servants performed domestic tasks. The Costituzioni of 1656–57 state that La Quiete accepted as servants healthy country girls who were at least sixteen years of age, of good constitution, accustomed to hard work, and desirous to serve God. The Costituzioni required that administrators treat the servants kindly and charitably, provided that they observed the rules of humility, modesty, devotion, and seclusion. In a very unusual move for the time, Montalvo permitted even the poor, orphaned, and illegitimate girls at Il Conventino to retain servants. The Costituzioni of 1645 state that when the young women at Il Conventino could not perform all the housework required of them, they could take in two or three country girls, at least sixteen years of age, “for service to the house” (“per servitio della Casa”). They were to be healthy, of good disposition, and willing to serve God; they were to be treated “charitably like the others” (“con ogni carità come l’altre”). Montalvo touted the value of the work of servants and urged her ancille not to distract servants from their duties. It is perhaps for this reason that the Costituzioni of 1656–57 state that the servant girls at La Quiete were exempt from fasting and disciplining themselves because it would have impeded their work. However, we find in Virginia Guidi’s “Piccolo commentario alle Costituzioni” that Montalvo expected the servants of Il Conventino to fast and discipline themselves at least twice a week (and even more frequently if they obtained approval to do so), except when they performed strenuous work like boiling and washing clothes.49 Virginia Guidi’s observation that Montalvo permitted servants to participate, to a certain extent, in the ascetic practices of Il Conventino confirms that Montalvo expected servants to be involved in the devotional life of the community.50 Notwithstanding the social distinction and separate tasks that Montalvo delineated for ancille and servants, Montalvo’s Costituzioni of 1656–57 encouraged both social groups at La Quiete to worship together. According to the Costituzioni for La Quiete, Montalvo wanted the servant girls to recite prayers morning and

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night (including part of the rosary and other unspecified oral prayers), primarily within their own social group, and to perform the first mental prayer of the day together with the elite ancille. This practice would have been highly unusual in early modern convents, where administrators did not allow servants to pray or recite offices out loud with the choir nuns.51 By encouraging ancille and servants to practice mental prayer together, Montalvo mitigates some of the customary disparities between the elite and their servants. Additional sources provide further confirmation that she made attempts to eliminate some of the inequalities between the two groups and provide learning experiences for the servants. For example, Regole per le Montalve indicate that every Sunday after vespers the ancille and servants were to gather together for a conference, or group meeting. In the conference, someone was to offer a prayer referred to as the “atto d’amore” (“act of love”), and the superiora was to ask everyone—servants and noblewomen alike—to summarize what they had learned that morning from the Gospels: “[O]ne should speak in front of everybody with all simplicity and say how she truly feels in her heart, not superficially and not to show off her intellect.”52 Then the superiora was expected to relate what she herself had learned, exhorting everyone present to remember what they had heard. The sacristan or the hebdomadaries would then read from Roberto Bellarmino’s Dottrina cristiana (Christian Doctrine), transformed by Montalvo into dialogue form, with one woman acting as the teacher and another as the disciple, after which everyone would sing a hymn of praise.53 The superiora was to remind all the women to say their prayers, and the conference would end with her blessing. No distinctions were to be made between servants, stabilite, or their superiors. Gospel learning in these instances was to be offered in the same manner to all, regardless of their background. Regole per le Montalve and “Ricordi appartenenti alle superiori” (“Remembrances Belonging to the Superiors”) reiterate further how Montalvo promoted the intellectual and spiritual development of her servants. Regole per le Montalve state that Montalvo required the servants at La Quiete to receive specific lessons on how to say their oral prayers. She wanted them to gather together twice a month for thirty minutes. The superiora appointed someone to teach them the rosary and the crowns (Montalvo had them perform this prayer when someone died) and other “devotions in line with their status” (“devozioni proporzionate alloro stato”).54 The “Ricordi appartenenti alle superiori” specify that any servant at La Quiete—“whoever has the desire, all according to each one’s ability” (“chi ne havesse voglia tutto secondo la capacità di ciascuna”)—may learn to read and write.55 Montalvo placed remarkable emphasis in her communities of women on the education of servants (albeit a remedial learning geared specifically towards servants), whereas traditional religious institutions, according to Silvia Evangelisti, deliberately kept servants in subordination without providing learning opportunities for them.56 In her Istruzione alle maestre, Montalvo also encouraged the noblewomen of La Quiete to learn how to perform certain household tasks that were considered servants’ work:

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They should know how to sweep and clean a room, make a bed, keep track of the linens and woolens and other household furnishings, take care of the sick with diligence, and charitably, according to the doctor’s orders . . . and it would even be good if they knew a little bit about cooking, making bread and pasta, and doing the laundry, or in other words, that little amount that one does for the sacristy.57

From a moral and religious perspective, Montalvo wanted her girls to work in order to avoid idleness, a condition that led to temptation, according to the Ordini,58 but Montalvo wrote in her Istruzione alle maestre that she also believed in teaching her ancille invaluable skills for the governing of their future homes: “[T]hey should do these arduous tasks . . . because, in the case of necessity, they should know how to do everything and be in charge and govern since that is necessary for good house government.”59 The young noblewomen of La Quiete learned firsthand how to oversee all of the administrative and domestic duties in order to manage a household, if they chose the vocation of wife and mother, or the conservatory, if they decided to remain at La Quiete for life. By having affluent young women at La Quiete perform these menial tasks, Montalvo practiced the advice of the post-Tridentine cardinal and educator Silvio Antoniano, who wrote in his Tre libri dell’educatione christiana dei figliuoli (Three Books on the Christian Education of Children) that housework was a praiseworthy activity even for women of noble birth.60 At La Quiete servants and noblewomen sometimes worked side by side in order to complete chores more quickly and efficiently. By performing these tasks, noblewomen also learned how to be more charitable to the servants: On Sundays, the bell-ringer gives the bell two long rings and the following morning everyone brings or has someone else bring their mended clothes to the assigned place and, together with the servants, everyone charitably lends a hand, all except those who are not legitimately able. . . . Once the clothes are dry, everyone brings them, or has them brought, to a place and they are folded as they like, provided that all is done without interrupting the work of the young servant girls. And so as not to wear everyone out, the laundry is done in less time than it takes to make bread, dust, or do other arduous tasks.61

Notwithstanding Montalvo’s efforts to minimize some of the differences between ancille and servant girls at La Quiete, she still followed the conventions of her day by defining servants by their duties and dress. For example, Montalvo clearly distinguished servant girls from ancille in the ceremony in which the young women were to be established for life at La Quiete. Regole per le Montalve reveal that servants and ancille followed the same procedure in the ceremony, except when it came time for the vestimento (vestment ceremony).62 When ancille went to the adjacent room and changed from “magnificent clothing” (“abiti pomposi”) to “our habit” (“vestire del nostro”), the servant girl was dressed instead “like an outside servant girl, but in black” (“come una fanciulla di fuori che serve, ma

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vestita di nero”). The ceremonial experience that had begun in unity thus ended in disparity. Even if servants became stabilite like the others, their community still marked them by the outward appearance of their servant clothes. This divergence was profoundly symbolic here, as it was in convents.63 Their external appearance labeled them as subordinate, even as they continued to participate in some of the devotional activities alongside the noblewomen. Still, Montalvo took advantage of these markers of social difference to teach spiritual lessons in unity and equality. According to Regole per le Montalve, when everyone gathered together to prepare to receive Holy Communion, the servants made their confessions to the priest first, even before the noblewomen: “We begin with the last servant, following in rank up to the prioress.”64 This pattern of serving those of lesser circumstances first and having the noblewomen wait their turn alludes to Christ’s words in the parable of the laborers in the vineyard: “So shall the last be first and the first last.”65 By accommodating the servants before the elite, Montalvo reminded the ancille of the importance of overcoming pride and of understanding that Christ offers eternal rewards to all, regardless of social and economic circumstances. Vittoria della Rovere herself demonstrated the importance of overcoming pride—albeit sanctimoniously, it seems—on a visit to La Quiete. The Annali record that on May 24, 1689, the grand duchess put on a servant’s apron and began serving others in the refectory.66 Conclusion Montalvo’s treatment of servants and the poor, when considered as a whole, certainly does not transcend the values and hierarchical system of seventeenthcentury Florentine society, but critics must recognize that Montalvo pushed the boundaries of traditional expectations regarding the organization and administration of institutions for women’s education. While Montalvo initially attempted to imitate the ideals of convent life and adhere to ecclesiastical counsel, her status as a married woman compelled her to create a lay conservatory instead and to seek guidance from other authoritative—and more sympathetic—sources. For example, when she recognized that the conservatory environment allowed her more freedom to innovate within the convent tradition, she claimed inspiration from the Virgin Mary and sought the support of the Grand Duchess Vittoria della Rovere. Relying on the authority of these two prominent female figures, Montalvo forged new ground in making the eremo, modified enclosure, the opportunity to choose one’s vocation, and the education of the poor important parts of religious communities for women. A pioneer in women’s education, Montalvo challenged the societal expectation that young women should prepare themselves either for marriage or for the convent. Montalvo offered a respectable “third path”67 where women, affluent or not, did not have to be nuns to increase their knowledge of spiritual concepts and to have intense spiritual experiences, where they could become teachers of a wide range of religious and secular subjects, and where

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they could remain for life in a semi-enclosed setting with a measured amount of freedom that allowed them to work to sustain themselves and their community of women. Notes  * I would like to thank the nuns at Villa La Quiete in Florence for allowing me to consult the manuscripts of their archive. I also thank the Institute of International Education for providing the Fulbright grant that facilitated my initial research in Italy. I am especially grateful to Elissa Weaver for introducing me to Montalvo’s writings and guiding me through my research and writing. I thank her, Armando Maggi, Rebecca West, Alison Weber, Craig Harline, Valerie Hegstrom, Rex Nielson, and Zach Cannon for their comments and suggestions on previous drafts of this essay.  1. The marriage between Montalvo and Landi was allegedly never consummated and their separation was consensual; however, they remained married and on good terms until his death on April 7, 1656, three years prior to her own on August 10, 1659. For more on Montalvo, see Geltrude Steinberg, Una lode alla Santissima Trinità: Eleonora Montalvo, mistica fiorentina del 1600 (Florence: Tipografia Gino Capponi, 2002) and Geltrude Steinberg, “Brevi note sulle origini della Quiete e sulla sua fondatrice Eleonora Ramirez de Montalvo,” in Storia, devozione, restauri a Villa La Quiete: Il santissimo crocifisso di San Jacopo a Ripoli, ed. Cristina De Benedictis (Florence: Graficalito, 1999), 17–25. See also Maria Bandini Buti, ed., Poetesse e scrittrici, vol. 2 (Rome: E.B.B.I., 1942), 350; Sira Serenella Macchietti, “Eleonora Ramirez Montalvo per il rinnovamento dell’educazione femminile nel ’600,” in Educazione, scuola e formazione docente, eds. Claudio Desinan and Bianca Grassilli (Udine: Del Bianco Editore, 1994), 201–12; Gerardo Antignani, Eleonora Ramirez di Montalvo, 1602–1659 (Siena: Cantagalli, 1977); and my “Educating Rich and Poor Girls in Seventeenth-Century Florence: Eleonora Ramirez di Montalvo, Her Lay Conservatories and Writings,” Ph.D. diss. (The University of Chicago, 2010), and “Vita di Eleonora: A Unique Example of Autobiographical Writing in Counter-Reformation Italy,” I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance 17.2 (2014): 369–97. I am currently preparing a critical edition and English translation of Montalvo’s writings for the series The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe, edited by Margaret King and Albert Rabil, Jr.  2. The grand duchess took La Quiete under her protection and gave Montalvo six scudi a month in financial assistance; by 1667 she provided 50 ducati a month to La Quiete, including an extra 550 at Christmas. At her death, Vittoria della Rovere left 600 ducati a year to La Quiete and 4,000 ducati for education purposes. See Archivio della Quiete (hereafter cited as AQ), Annali, 7r, 15v, 46r. See also Archivio della Provincia Toscana dei Padri Scolopi di San Giovannino (hereafter cited as APS), Sigismondo Coccapani, Vita della venerabile serva di Dio Donna Leonora Ramirez Montalvo, 235, who makes a reference to Vittoria della Rovere’s monetary assistance as early as 1651.  3. In the early modern period, the solemn vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience were professed before a priest or bishop, and with that profession a young woman entered a specific religious order and could never marry. Simple vows, on the other hand, were private, reversible, and not recognized by the church, which meant that a young woman could still marry. For more on the distinction between solemn and simple vows, see Dizionario degli istituti di perfezione (hereafter DIP), ed. Guerrino Pelliccia and Giancarlo Rocca (Roma: Edizioni Paoline, 1974–2003), s.v. “voto.”

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 4. The name of Via dell’Amore was later changed to Via Sant’Antonino. The oratory for Il Conventino is now the Oratory of San Giuseppe at number 15. Here, a noteworthy fresco that depicts Montalvo presenting her ancille to the Virgin remains on the ceiling.  5. Florentina beatificationis et canonizationis venerabilis servae dei Eleonorae Ramirez Montalvo viduae Landi fundatricis ancillarum SS.mae Trinitatis et divinae incarnationis († 1659), Positio ex officio compilata super introductione causae et super virtutibus (Typis Polyglottis Vaticanis, 1984), 277 (hereafter cited as Positio). Montalvo’s initial desire to educate the poor alongside the rich is similar to that of the great humanist educator Vittorino da Feltre (1378–1446), who sponsored the education of underprivileged children. In his schools, Vittorino da Feltre accepted children from many socioeconomic backgrounds, treating them all equally and encouraging a sense of responsibility toward the poor. See Eugenio Garin, “L’immagine del bambino nella trattatistica pedagogica del Quattrocento,” in Storia dell’infanzia dall’antichità al Seicento, ed. Egle Becchi and Dominique Julia (Bari: Laterza, 1996), 202.  6. AQ, Annali, 1v–2v. In the early seventeenth century, the Grand Duke Ferdinando I de’ Medici used La Quiete as a hunting lodge. The villa derives its name from a ceiling fresco in the gallery on the second floor—painted by Giovanni da San Giovanni and commissioned by the Grand Duchess Cristina di Lorena—portraying a peaceful woman who has calmed the four winds that rest at her feet.  7. Positio, 320–21, and AQ, “Ricordi relativi alle funzioni delle elezioni delle superiore,” in Contratti e altri documenti dal N. 1 al N. 20, N. 134.  8. In 1616 the Congregation of Bishops and Regulars, established to govern the clergy and convents, acknowledged religious communities that did not want to take vows or observe enclosure, referring to them as “congregations” instead of “convents.” See DIP, s.vv. “congregazione,” “congregazione religiosa.”  9. On Angela Merici and her Ursuline communities, see Gabriella Zarri, Recinti: donne, clausura e matrimonio nella prima età moderna (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2000), 178–200. See also Querciolo Mazzonis, Spirituality, Gender, and the Self in Renaissance Italy: Angela Merici and the Company of Saint Ursula (1474–1540) (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2007); Mazzonis’s essay in this volume; and Charmarie J. Blaisdell, “Angela Merici and the Ursulines,” in Religious Orders of the Catholic Reformation, ed. Richard L. DeMolen (New York: Fordham University Press, 1994), 99–136. 10. Torelli founded the Angeliche in 1530 and, in 1557, left them in order to establish the Collegio. For more on Torelli and the Angeliche, see Renée Baernstein, A Convent Tale: A Century of Sisterhood in Spanish Milan (New York: Routledge, 2002). 11. The organization of the Collegio may have been similar to that of La Quiete, except that whereas La Quiete was governed by the grand duchy and offered educational opportunities to servants as well as to young noblewomen, the Collegio was placed under the jurisdiction of the diocese and emphasized the education of aristocratic women. See Massimo Marcocchi, “Le origini del Collegio della Beata Vergine di Cremona, istituzione della Riforma Cattolica (1610),” in Annali della Biblioteca Statale e Libreria Civica di Cremona, XXIV, 1973 (Cremona: Biblioteca Statale e Libreria Civica di Cremona, 1974), 7–68. 12. For more on Ward, see Marlo Belschner, “Mary Ward,” in Encyclopedia of Women in the Renaissance: Italy, France, and England, ed. Diana Robin, Anne R. Larsen, and Carole Levin (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2007), 383; Madre Immolata Wetter, “Mary Ward,” in Congregazioni laicali femminili e promozione della donna in Italia nei secoli XVI e XVII, ed. Claudio Paolocci (Genova: Associazione Amici della Biblioteca Franzoniana,

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1995), 119–25; and Margaret Mary Littlehales, Mary Ward: Pilgrim and Mystic (Tunbridge Wells, Kent: Burns and Oates, 1998). Silvia Evangelisti also mentions the Visitandines of France, who maintained an open community of religious women for eight years, until 1618, when the bishop of Lyons received a declaration from Pope Paul V requiring them to enter a contemplative religious order with perpetual vows. Additionally, Evangelisti writes of the Daughters of Charity in Paris, who received approval for their open community from the Pope in 1668 and who appear to have had some degree of longevity in their original design; however, their focus was on community service as opposed to the education of women (Nuns: A History of Convent Life, 1450–1700 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007], 219–30). On the Sisters of Charity, see also the essay by Susan Dinan in this volume. 13. Jacopo Riguccio Galluzzi, Istoria del Granducato di Toscana sotto il governo della casa Medici, 2nd edition, vol. 6 (Livorno: G.T. Masi, 1781), 365–70. See also Giuseppe Conti, Fatti e aneddoti di Storia fiorentina (secoli XIII–XVIII) (Florence: R. Bemporad & Figlio, Editori, 1902), 509–15, and Gaetano Imbert, La vita fiorentina nel Seicento secondo memorie sincrone (1644–1670) (Florence: R. Bemporad & Figlio, 1906), 176–77. 14. The rubrics of these categories are mine. My understanding of the content of the costituzioni of religious communities comes from Francesca Bianchini, “Regola del vivere, regola del convivere,” in Donna, disciplina, creanza cristiana, ed. Gabriella Zarri (Roma: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1996), 189–204. 15. This essay offers evidence primarily from previously unexamined documents, which are listed in the bibliography. 16. La Quiete became a convent only in 1939 when the congregation accepted the invitation of Cardinal Elia Dalla Costa to take perpetual vows. From then on its members were called “Suore Montalve” instead of “Signore Montalve.” See Steinberg, Una lode, 53. Il Conventino, which was moved in 1779 to occupy the suppressed convent of Sant’Agata in Via San Gallo, and then to occupy San Jacopo di Ripoli in Via della Scala in 1886, merged with La Quiete in 1886. See Osanna Fantozzi Micali and Piero Roselli, Le soppressioni dei conventi a Firenze: riuso e trasformazioni dal sec. XVIII in poi (Florence: Libreria Editrice Fiorentina, 1980), 167 and 219. 17. AQ, Eleonora Montalvo, Costituzioni, 1645, 8. 18. Ibid., 7; AQ, Montalvo, Costituzioni, 1656–57, 3v. 19. “[E]lla poscia diceva alle sue fanciulle di averle scritte più secondo gli insegnamenti della stessa Beatissima Vergine che secondo il proprio pensiero tanto nell’abito quanto negli alimenti e nella condizione delle persone: ‘Perchè averei voluto,’ diceva ella, ‘vestirvi di tane e la Madonna volle di nero; averei voluto che mangiasse carne alcuni giorni della settimana ed ella me lo vietò; averei voluto compor la congregazione solo di gentildonne ed ella disse che non voleva serrata questa porta di perfezione a qualunque figliuola nata di buone e onorate persone.’ ” APS, Sigismondo Coccapani, Vita della venerabile serva di Dio Leonora Ramirez di Montalvo, 171–72. All translations are mine. In quoting seventeenthcentury passages and titles I have retained the original spelling. 20. It is unclear exactly how Montalvo received direction from the Virgin Mary. It is possible that she believed this happened through speaking visions. One of Montalvo’s ancille recounted an experience that Montalvo had when Saint Emerenziana appeared to tell her who should perform her role in a play that Montalvo wrote on the saint’s life: “Quando la compose la vita di Santa Emertiana [sic], la signora madre nu [sic] sapeva quale sorella lei volessi per devota Santa Emerentiana. Gli apparve vestita di bianco, cioè, una veste fatta a fiori e disse, ‘Voglio la Teresia per mia devota . . .’ ” (APS, Bartolomeo Guidi, ed., “Relazione della Sorella Teresa Cioli per conto de miracoli della Sig.ra Eleonora Montalvi

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quale tra delle prime figlie ed ha visto il tutto,” in Vita dell’Illustrissima Signora Leonora Montalvi, 739). 21. The Archbishop Pietro Niccolini’s approval and seal is found at the end of the Costituzioni of 1645. 22. Fausta Casolini presents a transcription of Montalvo’s original Costituzioni of 1656–57 alongside the revisions made by Paolo Segneri in 1679 and Curzio Sesti in 1693 in Positio, 314–52. The revisions are not substantial—except for the removal of Montalvo’s concept of eremi (to be discussed below). 23. Positio, 309. 24. Silvia Evangelisti, Nuns, 28. 25. AQ, 2v. 26. For an analysis and partial transcription of this play, see my “Reinforcing Rules of Conduct in Eleonora Ramirez di Montalvo’s Rappresentazione delle virtù e de’ vizi,” in Scenes from Italian Convent Life: An Anthology of Theatrical Texts and Contexts (15th– 17th centuries), ed. Elissa Weaver (Ravenna: Longo Editore, 2009), 171–92. 27. DIP, s.vv. “beghine, begardi, beghinaggi.” 28. “[L]i si facci intendere la sua libertà acciò volontariamente elegga quello stato al quale doppo avere fatto molti orazioni si sentirà inspirata da Dio.” AQ, Montalvo, Costituzioni, 1645, 2. 29. “[N]on le distogliete punto dalla loro vocazione, lasciando ch’elegghino di maritarsi, monacarsi, o restare in questa congregazione come più li piacerà secondo che saranno inspirate; basta che intendino quello che fanno e sappino ch’in ogni stato son obligate ad amare e servire Dio.” AQ, Montalvo, Istruzione alle maestre, 6v. 30. In establishing rules for her conservatories, Montalvo’s own forced marriage would have been foremost in her mind. The Venetian nun Arcangela Tarabotti (1604–1652), the most well-known critic of forced monachization, wrote about the unjust treatment of young women who were coerced into convent life in L’inferno monacale (not published until 1990) and La tirannia paterna (published posthumously as La semplicità ingannata). For a study of the effects of forced monachization see Anne Jacobson Schutte, By Force and Fear: Taking and Breaking Monastic Vows in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011). 31. “[S]e alcuna volessi escire della congregazione avvisando il suo pensiero con debiti modi a’ superiori, sarà compiaciuta, con patto di non potervi più ritornare.” AQ, Montalvo, Costituzioni, 1645, 3. I have not found a similar statement in the Costituzioni of 1656–57 and have not been able to determine if this was also the case at La Quiete. 32. Ibid., and AQ, Montalvo, Costituzioni, 1656–57, 8r. 33. Some of the punishments included wearing torn clothing, doing the servants’ chores, and staying in a type of prison within the convent. Convent administrators could also prohibit the girls from voting, combing their hair, and washing their faces. See Silvia Evangelisti, “Ricche e povere: Classi di religiose nelle comunità monastiche femminili tra Cinque e Seicento,” in Nubili e celibi tra scelta e costrizione (secoli XVI–XX), ed. Margareth Lanzinger and Raffaella Sarti (Udine: Editrice Universitaria Udinese, 2006), 37–48, esp. 44. 34. DIP, s.v. “clausura.” While in some specific cases in the seventeenth century women succeeded in professing vows without accepting enclosure, the church did not generally tolerate this type of arrangement until the eighteenth century. For more on enclosure and attempts to enforce it, see Elissa Weaver, Convent Theatre in Early Modern Italy: Spiritual Fun and Learning for Women (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 20–24.

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35. “Non andiamo mai fuora sole, ma sempre dua, e le novizie vanno con le stabilite; fuora tenghiamo gl’occhi bassi e le mane rimesse e più coperte che possiamo, e cerchiamo di andare con grave et humile compositione; e se per la strada ci vien parlato da qualche persona non ci tratenghiamo molto in ascoltare, ma con qualche modesto cenno ci lientiamo senza parlare; et il simile facciamo in chiesa se però non fussi il padre confessore, che a lui gli rispondiamo con parole, ma cerchiamo con buon termine di spedirci più presto che sia possibile. E se occorressi che la signora madre avessi bisognio di mandare in qualche luogo parlerebbe solo quella a chi lei imponessi il negotio [e] solo il necessario.” APS, Ordini, 2r. 36. See Gabriella Zarri, “Christian Good Manners: Spiritual and Monastic Rules in the Quattro- and Cinquecento,” in Women in Italian Renaissance Culture and Society, ed. Letizia Panizza (Oxford: European Humanities Research Centre of the University of Oxford, 2000), 76–91. 37. Cited in Positio, 269. 38. “Prima di ricevere l’abito, la signora da stabilirsi sta un anno sposa nel qual tempo veste volendo con pompa e foggie, esce e entra in casa a suo beneplacito, andando a Firenze in visite di parenti e chiese, consegnandola alla madre e in mancanza di quella a qualche parente più stretta colla quale può villeggiare, raccomandandola con premura acciò con tali passatempi non perda lo spirito e devozione.” BRF, Regole per le Montalve. 39. Steinberg, Una lode, 43, n. 53. 40. AQ, Annali, 11r–12r. 41. Of the women who would have been at La Quiete in these years, I counted the names of sixteen ancille stabilite and nine converse (servants) on the “Elenco degli individui componenti la comunità del Nobil Ritiro della Quiete dall’epoca della Fondazione avvenuta il di 11 giugno 1650” located in Montalvo’s bedroom at La Quiete as a framed document. 42. AQ, Annali, 12r. 43. Ibid., 12v. 44. Ibid., 13v. While the grand duchess originally advised the women at La Quiete to follow the archbishop’s edict, she gained sympathy for their situation when she was visited by the Marchesa Lucrezia Torrigiani Riccardi, who intervened on their behalf. From the account in the Annali, it is not entirely clear why the ancille were ordered to return to Florence and become nuns. However, La Quiete was in financial difficulty at the time and the Annali record that, after the archbishop ordered them to return to Florence, they were outraged by the constant flow of visitors who wanted to buy their villa. 45. Gabriella Zarri, “Monasteri femminili e città (secoli XV–XVIII),” in Storia d’Italia, Annali 9: La Chiesa e il potere politico dal Medioevo all’età contemporanea, ed. Giorgio Chittolini and Giovanni Miccoli (Turin: Giulio Einaudi Editore, 1986), 422–23. 46. Marco Della Pina, “ ‘Il paradiso delle monache’: La popolazione religiosa femminile in Italia nel Seicento,” in Bollettino di demografia storica 22 (1995), 73–93, cited in Silvia Evangelisti, “Ricche e povere,” 39. 47. DIP, s.vv. “classi di religiose,” “le converse.” 48. “[P]er esser nobili, et . . . avezze ad esserciti spirituali ne contraggono spesso delle infermità.” Breve Compendio, decisione relativa alla città di Fano, 1627, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, cited in Silvia Evangelisti, “Ricche e povere,” 41. 49. Cited in Positio, 270. Guidi also points out that the servants at Il Conventino were required to pay 100 scudi on entering the community, apparently to demonstrate their commitment to learn how to pray and mortify themselves in addition to performing the manual labor that was required of them. At La Quiete, on the other hand, according to the Costituzioni of 1656–57, the servants did not have to pay anything on entering the community.

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50. Ibid., 271. Guidi points out, however, that the servants at Il Conventino were not permitted to say the offices. Their devotions consisted in reciting thirty-four Ave Marias, beginning with the Pater noster and ending with Sub tuum praesidium. 51. Evangelisti, “Ricche e povere,” 44. 52. “[D]eve dirsi da tutte con ogni simplicità e come veramente si sente nel quore, non per apparenza né per mostrarsi bell’ingegno.” BRF, Regole per le Montalve. 53. Montalvo wrote dialogues on the Jesuit Cardinal Roberto Bellarmino’s Dottrina cristiana for this very purpose: Aggiunta al dialogo della Dottrina cristiana piccola and Aggiunta al dialogo della Dottrina cristiana grande (AQ; shelfmark unknown). 54. BRF, Regole per le Montalve. The Franciscan Crown, as practiced today, is a “seven-decade rosary, each decade consisting of an Our Father and 10 Hail Marys, with two additional Hail Marys at the end of the seventh decade followed by an Our Father and a Hail Mary for the pope.” See M.F. Laughlin, “Crown, Franciscan,” in New Catholic Encyclopedia, 2nd edition (Farmington Hills, MI: Gale), 4: 387. 55. AQ, Bartolomeo Guidi, ed., “Ricordi appartenenti alle superiori,” in Copie di tutti gli scritti della venerabile, 384v. 56. Evangelisti, Nuns, 31. 57. “[S]appino spazzare e ripulire una stanza, accomodare il letto, tenere conto de’ pannilini e lani, ed altre masserizie di casa, governare bene un’inferma con diligenza e carità secondo l’ordine del medico . . . e sarà ancora bene che sappino qualche poco cucinare, fare pane e paste, e fare il bucato, cioè, quel piccolo che si fa per la sacrestia.” AQ, Montalvo, Istruzione alle maestre, 3v. Silvia Evangelisti notes that the servants always took care of the sick, which was considered to be one of the most unpleasant jobs in the convent (Nuns, 31). 58. APS, Ordini, 4v–5r. 59. “[A]bbino a fare queste opere faticose . . . perché in caso di necessità possino mettere mano in ogni cosa e sappino ordinare e comandare che tanto ci vuole per il buon governo di una casa.” AQ, Montalvo, Istruzione alle maestre, 3v–4r. 60. See Rudolph M. Bell, How to Do It: Guides to Good Living for Renaissance Italians (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990), 180. 61. “[L]a domenica, la sonatrice dà nel campanello due lunghette, e la mattina seguente tutte fanno portare o portano al luogo dovuto i panni appuntati, e tutte fra loro serventi fanno carità di dar mano, chi non è però leggitamente impedita . . . asciutti si mettono in un luogo, che ciascuna se li porta o se li fa portare, se li ripiegano a suo gusto purché tutto segua senza impedimento alli offizi da esercitassi dalle fanciulle serventi; e per non affaticarsi tanto le persone si fa il bucato in tempo che non ci sia da fare il pane, spolverare, o altre faccende laboriose.” BRF, Regole per le Montalve. 62. “Modo di vestire, chi si stabilisce,” BRF, Regole per le Montalve. 63. Evangelisti, Nuns, 32. 64. “Si comincia dall’ultima servente, seguitando per ordine fino alla priora.” BRF, Regole per le Montalve. 65. Matthew 20:1–16 (Douay-Rheims). The parable describes how all the laborers were paid equally, regardless of the amount of time they spent working. See, in particular, verse 8: “And when evening was come, the lord of the vineyard saith to his steward: Call the labourers and pay them their hire, beginning from the last even to the first.” See also Mark 9:34, where Christ uses the same language to teach his disciples about the dangers of prideful behavior: “If any man desire to be first, he shall be the last of all and the minister of all.” 66. AQ, Annali, 34v. 67. Gabriella Zarri writes of the phenomenon of the terzo stato in Recinti, 453–80.

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Works Cited Archival Sources Archivio della Provincia Toscana dei Padri Scolopi di San Giovannino (APS), Florence Cellini, Girolama. Ordini che ci à dato la nostra signora Madre, 1638–40. Reg. Rel., 91. Coccapani, Sigismondo. Vita della venerabile serva di Dio Leonora Ramirez di Montalvo. Reg. Rel., 89. Guidi, Bartolomeo. Vita dell’Illustrissima Signora Leonora Montalvi. Reg. Rel., 144. Archivio della Quiete (AQ), Florence Annali Guidi, Bartolomeo, ed. Copie di tutti gli scritti della venerabile. ———. Libro dell’opere dell’illustrissima signora Eleonora Montalvi, 1672. C III. Montalvo, Eleonora. Aggiunta al dialogo della Dottrina cristiana grande. ———. Aggiunta al dialogo della Dottrina cristiana piccola. ———. Costituzioni, 1645. AVII, n. 32. ———. Costituzioni, 1656–57. AVII, n. 39. ———. Istruzione alle maestre. AVII, n. 46. “Ricordi relativi alle funzioni delle elezioni delle superiore.” In Contratti e altri documenti dal N. 1 al N. 20, N. 134. Biblioteca Riccardiana (BRF), Florence Regole per le Montalve, 1745 and 1746. Printed Sources Antignani, Gerardo. Eleonora Ramirez di Montalvo, 1602–1659. Siena: Cantagalli, 1977. Baernstein, Renée. A Convent Tale: A Century of Sisterhood in Spanish Milan. New York: Routledge, 2002. Bandini Buti, Maria, ed. Poetesse e scrittrici. Vol. 2. Roma: E.B.B.I., 1942. Bell, Rudolph M. How to Do It: Guides to Good Living for Renaissance Italians. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990. Belschner, Marlo. “Mary Ward.” In Encyclopedia of Women in the Renaissance: Italy, France, and England, edited by Diana Robin, Anne R. Larsen, and Carole Levin, 383. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2007. Bianchini, Francesca. “Regola del vivere, regola del convivere.” In Donna, disciplina, creanza cristiana, edited by Gabriella Zarri, 189–204. Roma: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1996.

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Blaisdell, Charmarie J. “Angela Merici and the Ursulines.” In Religious Orders of the Catholic Reformation, edited by Richard L. DeMolen, 99–136. New York: Fordham University Press, 1994. Conti, Giuseppe. Fatti e aneddoti di storia fiorentina (secoli XIII–XVIII). Florence: R. Bemporad & Figlio, Editori, 1902. Dizionario degli istituti di perfezione. Edited by Guerrino Pelliccia and Giancarlo Rocca. 4 vols. Rome: Edizioni Paoline, 1974–2003. Evangelisti, Silvia. Nuns: A History of Convent Life, 1450–1700. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. ———. “Ricche e povere: Classi di religiose nelle comunità monastiche femminili tra Cinque e Seicento.” In Nubili e celibi tra scelta e costrizione (secoli XVI– XX), edited by Margareth Lanzinger and Raffaella Sarti, 37–48. Udine: Editrice Universitaria Udinese, 2006. Fantozzi Micali, Osanna, and Piero Roselli. Le soppressioni dei conventi a Firenze: riuso e trasformazioni dal sec. XVIII in poi. Florence: Libreria Editrice Fiorentina, 1980. Florentina beatificationis et canonizationis venerabilis servae dei Eleonorae Ramirez Montalvo viduae Landi fundatricis ancillarum SS.mae Trinitatis et divinae incarnationis († 1659), Positio ex officio compilata super introductione causae et super virtutibus. Typis Polyglottis Vaticanis, 1984. Galluzzi, Jacopo Riguccio. Istoria del Granducato di Toscana sotto il governo della casa Medici. 2nd edition, vol. 6. Livorno: G.T. Masi, 1781. Garin, Eugenio. “L’immagine del bambino nella trattatistica pedagogica del Quattrocento.” In Storia dell’infanzia dall’antichità al Seicento, edited by Egle Becchi and Dominique Julia, 182–203. Bari: Laterza, 1996. Haraguchi, Jennifer. “Educating Rich and Poor Girls in Seventeenth-Century Florence: Eleonora Ramirez di Montalvo, Her Lay Conservatories and Writings.” Ph.D. diss., The University of Chicago, 2010. ———. “Reinforcing Rules of Conduct in Eleonora Ramirez di Montalvo’s Rappresentazione delle virtù e de’ vizi.” In Scenes from Italian Convent Life: An Anthology of Theatrical Texts and Contexts (15th–17th centuries), edited by Elissa Weaver, 171–92. Ravenna: Longo Editore, 2009. ______. “Vita di Eleonora: A Unique Example of Autobiographical Writing in Counter-Reformation Italy.” I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance 17, no. 2 (2014): 369–97. Imbert, Gaetano. La vita fiorentina nel Seicento secondo memorie sincrone (1644– 1670). Florence: R. Bemporad & Figlio, 1906. Laughlin, M.F. “Crown, Franciscan.” In New Catholic Encyclopedia, 2nd edition, vol. 4, 387. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale, 2003. Littlehales, Margaret Mary. Mary Ward: Pilgrim and Mystic. Tunbridge Wells, Kent: Burns and Oates, 1998. Macchietti, Sira Serenella. “Eleonora Ramirez Montalvo per il rinnovamento dell’educazione femminile nel ’600.” In Educazione, scuola e formazione

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docente, edited by Claudio Desinan and Bianca Grassilli, 201–12. Udine: Del Bianco Editore, 1994. Marcocchi, Massimo. “Le origini del Collegio della Beata Vergine di Cremona, istituzione della Riforma Cattolica (1610).” In Annali della Biblioteca Statale e Libreria Civica di Cremona, XXIV, 7–68. Cremona: Biblioteca Statale e Libreria Civica di Cremona, 1974. Mazzonis, Querciolo. Spirituality, Gender, and the Self in Renaissance Italy: Angela Merici and the Company of Saint Ursula (1474–1540). Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2007. Schutte, Anne Jacobson. By Force and Fear: Taking and Breaking Monastic Vows in Early Modern Europe. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011. Steinberg, Geltrude. “Brevi note sulle origini della Quiete e sulla sua fondatrice Eleonora Ramirez de Montalvo.” In Storia, devozione, restauri a Villa La Quiete: Il santissimo crocifisso di San Jacopo a Ripoli, edited by Cristina De Benedictis, 17–25. Florence: Graficalito, 1999. ———. Una lode alla Santissima Trinità: Eleonora Montalvo, mistica fiorentina del 1600. Florence: Tipografia Gino Capponi, 2002. Weaver, Elissa. Convent Theatre in Early Modern Italy: Spiritual Fun and Learning for Women. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Wetter, Madre Immolata. “Mary Ward.” In Congregazioni laicali femminili e promozione della donna in Italia nei secoli XVI e XVII, edited by Claudio Paolocci, 119–25. Genova: Associazione Amici della Biblioteca Franzoniana, 1995. Zarri, Gabriella. “Christian Good Manners: Spiritual and Monastic Rules in the Quattro- and Cinquecento.” In Women in Italian Renaissance Culture and Society, edited by Letizia Panizza, 76–91. Oxford: European Humanities Research Centre of the University of Oxford, 2000. ———. “Monasteri femminili e città (secoli XV–XVIII).” In Storia d’Italia, Annali 9: La Chiesa e il potere politico dal Medioevo all’età contemporanea, edited by Giorgio Chittolini and Giovanni Miccoli, 359–429. Turin: Giulio Eiunadi Editore, 1986. ———. Recinti: donne, clausura e matrimonio nella prima età moderna. Bologna: Il Mulino, 2000.

13 The Lives of Anne Line Vowed Laywoman, Recusant Martyr, and Elizabethan Saint Robert E. Scully, S.J.

In the late sixteenth century, Elizabethan England was officially Protestant and Catholicism appeared to be in terminal decline. The launching of the Catholic mission of the seminary priests in 1574, however, which was soon supplemented and expanded by the advent of the Jesuit mission in 1580, injected new signs of life into the Catholic body. While the role of the Catholic clergy was probably indispensable in the revival of a committed—if minority and somewhat underground—Catholic community, many laymen and women also played crucial roles in this harrowing and at times heartbreaking endeavor.1 The life and death of one woman in particular, Anne Line, has generally not received the degree of attention that her efforts and long-term impact deserve, although that is beginning to change.2 The goal of this essay is to highlight the ways in which this remarkable woman helped to create a new path for early modern Catholic women—outside of either the marital household or the convent—to live a life of religious devotion that was inextricably linked with active service to God and neighbor. Although Anne Line lived a relatively short life, it was quite eventful and supports the mounting evidence that, even in such a male-dominated era, a woman of conviction and purpose could, in fact, have a significant impact through a life of apostolic action and contemplation. Anne, whose original name was evidently Alice, was born into a prosperous Protestant landowning family, the Heighams (or Highams) of Jenkyn Maldon in Essex. Although the year is uncertain, she was probably born around 1567. Her father, William, was a fervent Calvinist and evidently expected his children to follow suit. However, both Anne and her brother William became increasingly disenchanted with the Puritanism of their youth, and they were drawn to and eventually converted to Catholicism. As a result, their outraged father expelled them from the family home, disinherited his son, and refused his daughter her promised dowry. As a young girl, Anne Heigham had worked in the service of a lady whose husband was connected with Queen Elizabeth’s court. Therefore, even though Miss Heigham had received the education and training proper for a young gentlewoman, she now found herself a destitute, young, single woman, in difficult straights, and dependent on her brother.3

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For his part, William lived for a while in a house in London where he supported a priest, William Thompson, who served for a time as Anne’s chaplain. William Heigham was eventually arrested for his faith and spent some time in Bridewell prison. As the peripatetic Jesuit missioner John Gerard described it, “This is the prison which they use for vagabonds, making them do hard labor under the lash. There I visited [Heigham] and found him working the great tread-mill dripping with perspiration.” Upon his release, Heigham took up service in a Catholic household, becoming the tutor to the master’s young son. It was there that Gerard “went to call on him and had a long talk with him about his vocation.” After finally going into exile, Heigham spent his later years in Spain, where he became a Jesuit lay brother, serving in the land of the Society’s founder, Ignatius of Loyola, until his death in 1625.4 As for Anne Heigham, probably in the year 1583 she married Roger Line, who was from a well-to-do family in Hampshire. Although there is some dispute concerning his family’s religious background, he was apparently disinherited for his embrace of the Catholic faith, forfeiting both his father’s and his uncle’s estates. He rebuffed an entreaty to attend the established church in order to retain his patrimony by stating, “If I must desert either the world or God, then I desert the world, for it is good to cleave to God.”5 Roger—though evidently not Anne, at least not at that point—was arrested for running afoul of the recusancy laws, for which he was imprisoned, fined, and probably forced into exile in 1586. He settled in Flanders, where he became a pensioner of King Philip II of Spain, though he shared this largesse by regularly sending money to his wife until his unexpected death in 1594 at the age of only twenty-seven. Like his wife, and in commitment to his faith, Roger Line had embraced “a life of poverty and holiness.”6 At that critical juncture, Anne Line, rather than succumbing to a passive role as a sickly and poverty-stricken widow, in essence reconstructed her identity by engaging in an active career of ministry and service with and for the English Catholic community, centered in London.7 Her stance was especially remarkable in light of the fact that she suffered from “an infirm constitution of body, troubled with almost continual headaches, and withal inclined to dropsy, and so ill every spring and fall that her friends at each of these seasons feared she would be carried off by death.”8 The Jesuit superior of the English mission, Henry Garnet, based on his eyewitness experience, gave an even more dramatic description of her fragile state: “[S]he was such an invalid that it would seem that it was by a miracle that God preserved her for martyrdom. I have seen her more than once almost dead; and thus constantly her infirmities brought her to the last extremity.”9 Despite these infirmities, Anne Line became a vital part of the Catholic missionary endeavor. In particular, she joined her efforts with those of the Jesuit John Gerard, who introduced her to the Wisemans, a Catholic recusant family. As Gerard later wrote, he took Line “to the [Wisemans’] house where I was staying [Braddox (Broadlands) in Essex] and the family gave her board and lodging while I provided her with whatever else she needed.”10 Gerard was able to assist her and others, he noted, “out of the alms given to me” by generous and

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often well-to-do Catholic gentry and aristocratic individuals and families.11 Of particular long-term importance, Gerard and others, with the crucial assistance of colleagues like Line, established and operated safe houses in London for the benefit of both Catholic clergy and laity. London, in addition to being an important missionary site, was a crucial crossroads between England and continental Europe as well as within England itself, being the place where many Catholics came, especially religious and missioners, either on their way to the Continent or arriving from there and awaiting assignments in the various English shires.12 Henry Garnet highlighted one such furtive Catholic site and Anne Line’s central role in running it: Now for some years we took a house to harbor those priests who were entering the kingdom, as also those young men and maids who had to pass over to Flanders; and to be at the same time a refuge for priests, who were in the kingdom, when they had need. And for this purpose there was no person more suitable to take charge of the household than [Line], since it was both a charity not to leave her in want in her great infirmities and, as she was a grave and virtuous person, no better could be wished for to keep the house in order; and this she was able to do with ease.13

John Gerard worked more directly with Anne Line and evidently served for a time as her spiritual director and confessor.14 He described her indispensable role as follows: “When I decided to establish the house [in London] . . . I could think of no better person than her to put in charge of it. She was able to manage the finances, do all the housekeeping, look after the guests, and deal with the inquiries of strangers. She was full of kindness, very discreet and possessed her soul in great peace.”15 In light of Line’s devoted and loving service to her co-religionists, and mindful of the traditions relating to some well-known women disciples of Jesus in the Gospels (especially the sisters Martha and Mary, and Mary Magdalen), the local Catholic community affectionately called her “Mrs. Martha” or “Mrs. Magdalen,” because, as Garnet explained it, “she acts the part of both.”16 Moreover, in addition to their spiritual significance, these names provided her with useful aliases as she engaged in her varied and potentially perilous activities, particularly in light of the zeal of the Elizabethan government’s pursuivants as well as the danger of betrayal by “false brethren.”17 With regard to her own spiritual life, and in tandem with contemporary trends in Jesuit and Tridentine spirituality, Anne Line engaged in frequent confession and communion.18 According to Challoner: Her devotion was unfeigned; she received the Blessed Sacrament at least once a week, and always with abundance of tears. Her conversation was edifying, willingly discoursing on spiritual subjects, and not on worldly vanities; and what was particularly remarkable in her was the desire she had of ending her days by martyrdom; on which account she bore a holy envy to priests and others, who seemed to be in a fairer way to that happy end than she, or any other of her sex, were.19

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Gerard recalled Line’s desires regarding martyrdom in her own words: “Often she would say to me: ‘I naturally want more than anything to die for Christ, but it is too much to hope that it will be by the executioner’s hand. Possibly Our Lord will let me be taken one day with a priest and be put in some cold and filthy dungeon where I won’t be able to live very long in this wretched life.’ ” As Gerard concluded, in light of Line’s eventual capture and death, “So she said, and indeed her delight was in the Lord, ‘and the Lord granted the petitions of her heart.’ ”20 While such attitudes may seem strange, if not troubling, to the modern mindset, they were not unusual in the contested context and related religious fervor of the Reformation.21 As another—and more immediate—sign of the depth of her spiritual commit­ ment, Anne Line took voluntary vows of poverty, chastity, and (evidently) obedience, though she did not enter a convent or a religious order, despite the Council of Trent’s attempt to mandate a cloistered life for vowed women.22 According to Henry Garnet, “She had taken a vow of chastity and also of poverty, and I believe of obedience also, though there was no one who would receive it; however she observed it as far as was possible by following every advice that was given her; though she herself was possessed of such prudence as I have not seen in many women.”23 While it is not clear why, supposedly, “no one . . . would receive” her vows (beside the fact that Jesuits were prohibited from receiving vows of obedience from women), this strongly suggests that Catholic religious leaders in general were ill at ease in accepting or formalizing vows of a woman who had every intention of remaining active in the world, as opposed to entering a cloistered convent in strict observance of the Tridentine decrees. The Council had mandated that No nun shall after her profession be permitted to go out of the monastery, even for a brief period under any pretext whatever, except for a lawful reason to be approved by the bishop; any indults and privileges whatsoever notwithstanding. Neither shall anyone, of whatever birth or condition, sex or age, be permitted, under penalty of excommunication to be incurred ipso facto, to enter the enclosure of a monastery without the written permission of the bishop or the superior.24

In fact, both before and after Trent many convent walls were more permeable than many of the church’s male hierarchy thought appropriate or safe for nuns.25 Moreover, the papal constitution Circa pastoralis (1566) compelled tertiaries to take solemn vows and accept enclosure. Thus, theoretically at least, the Council of Trent and subsequent legislation put into question the legitimacy of women who felt called to a vowed life but not a cloistered one.26 But as the essays by Susan Dinan, Queriolo Mazzonis, and Alison Weber in this volume demonstrate, churchmen in France, Italy, and Spain found ways to tolerate and even informally legitimate a female “vocation” between marriage and monasticism. In the restricted and officially Protestant environment of Elizabethan England, where convents were banned, the question of whether

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a woman could live a spiritual but actively apostolic life was particularly urgent.27 There clearly was a desire for such an unofficial vocation on the part of some English Catholic women, just as there was evidently support for this on the part of some clergy. As an intriguing instance, in 1604 (several years after Anne Line’s death and perhaps based on examples like hers), Robert Persons, the prefect of the English Jesuit mission, wrote “An Instruction and direction for the spiritual help of such English gentlewomen as desire to lead a more retired and recollected life than the ordinary in England doth yield.” This was addressed to women “not having commodity to enter into a monastical life,” but who “do desire some other moderate course of life and conversation, as not altogether leaving the world, but only cutting of[f] the superfluous and noisome vanities thereof, by walking a more sure path towards their salvation.” Citing the example of some other countries, Persons said that women could embrace a “retirement of life in their own houses,” as many do “with exceeding profit and comfort to their souls, especially in Spain and Italy, notwithstanding the great commodity of monasteries” in those countries, with insufficient dowries being one among a number of factors in their decisionmaking. Among a range of circumstances and callings, such a lifestyle could be attractive to virgins, to widows desiring to live in “the holy estate of continent widowhood,” and even to married women who might choose to enter into such a state for a certain period of time.28 In addition to this eremitical style of life, Persons outlined a more communal option whereby a number of spiritually inclined women “join together in some house of their own, or some part or portion of [a] friend’s house,” and engage in both individual and communal devotions and activities, including common spiritual readings. On the complex question of the taking of religious vows, Persons wrote as follows: Some of these [women] make vows to God for their greater constancy in virtuous life, and this both for increase of their merit and more obligation to perseverance, but these vows are made in different sorts, according as their ghostly father [i.e., spiritual director] that knoweth their consciences shall approve, without whose consent no vow ought to be made by them; some make one vow, some two, some all three, some perpetually, some for a time, and some with other limitations.29

Persons goes on to discuss briefly the nature and options relating to the three classic religious vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. With regard to the latter, “The vow of religious obedience is made commonly to the ghostly father to obey his directions in this manner of life; some will add also for their greater devotion that the same vow shall extend to the spiritual mother, if they have one over them.” This vow could be taken for a limited time and could be renewed, “as they shall think good according to the trial which they have had of themselves in that time.” In like manner, such devout women might decide to embrace a vow of chastity, “which maybe first for some certain time to prove themselves, and after may be enlarged as they shall think good, and feel themselves inspired by the

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motion of God’s holy spirit.” This option was available even to married women, provided that they had the “consent of their husband,” in light of the holy bond of matrimony.30 Lastly, concerning the vow of poverty, there were limitations for semi-religious women because “they must live upon their own portions, or by labor of their hands.” Still, they “may vow some sorts of poverty . . . , as for example, that they will have only the use of their goods for necessary and convenient maintenance, meaning to give or leave the rest to God, and to poor people for his sake, now, or at their deaths, and the like.” Through such understandings and living out of the vows, “godly women, which otherwise have not means to follow the way of perfection in the other manner of entering into religious monasteries do attain unto it this way . . . in the world.”31 Persons concludes by speculating as to how much of this semi-religious lifestyle “might be put in use in our country at this day.” With regard to such desires among Catholic women in England, although they would face greater difficulties than in Catholic countries, “yet I do not see but that much of this might be practiced by God’s holy assistance, which assistance is always greater where the impediments and hindrances be more strong.”32 In the case of Anne Line, in the 1590s she found herself a destitute widow. Even if marriage was a possibility, she seems to have been determined to live a semi-religious life in which she embraced the traditional religious vows but adapted and lived them in a non-traditional manner, in part out of necessity in the anti-Catholic environment of late Elizabethan England, and perhaps in part as an experiment in trying to create a new and more capacious option for religious devotion between the cloister and the matrimonial household. In the constricted world of the persecuted Catholic recusant community, Line lived out her vows, as far as was possible, by, in essence, turning the houses that she operated into sacred spaces—for herself, her fellow residents, and her guests—which fostered both individual and communal, private and public spirituality.33 In terms of both her spiritual life and her ministry, she became “a kind of Jesuit lay-sister.”34 Thus, Anne Line’s life serves as a good example of ways in which some of the Catholic faithful tried to live their lives more in conformity with what they believed to be the spirit of the Tridentine Church as opposed to the strict letter of the law regarding enclosure.35 As we have seen, Line had been operating a safe house in London for priests on the Catholic mission in England, as well as for other men and women who were passing through the city on their way to or from continental Europe. However, after John Gerard’s daring escape from the Tower of London in 1597, following several years’ imprisonment and torture that he had bravely suffered there and elsewhere, Anne Line was forced to move to other quarters. As Gerard described in his Autobiography, “After my escape from prison, [Line] gave up managing the [original] house. By then she was known to so many people that it was unsafe for me to frequent any house she occupied. Instead, she hired apartments in another building and continued to shelter priests there.”36

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Henry Garnet also provided an explanation for the need to move from the original house: The coming there of so many people, the expenses, and false brethren caused us to abandon that house and to provide for [Line] in another way. We procured that, with the aid of some good Catholics, there should be prepared for her a very commodious apartment where she would have room for some girls to instruct, and a separate room for a priest, who in that place could provide access for Catholics, and where sometimes those of the Society who might come to London could have a lodging.37

These new accommodations became in many ways a Catholic center in the midst of Elizabethan London. As Garnet explained, it had a resident priest who could celebrate Mass and offer the sacraments to the local Catholic community, and it also had space to lodge visiting priests who were in London, some preparing to cross the Channel, others awaiting assignments or lodgings on the Catholic mission in other parts of England or Wales. Perhaps most intriguing of all, this apostolic center had room to instruct young girls. As we have seen, Anne Line had received a certain level of education as a young gentlewoman. Still, it is somewhat surprising that she was able to run a schoolroom of sorts in this Catholic enclave in the city of London.38 It seems as if not only Line and the resident and visiting priests, but also this whole Catholic center managed to operate and, in effect, hide in plain sight.39 Nevertheless, with so much at risk, and for all of their safety’s sake, Gerard rented a separate house in the city, where various members of the London Catholic community, including Anne Line, could come for spiritual counsel or to attend Mass. On one occasion (July 21) in the summer of 1599, Gerard was there along with Line and a handful of other Catholic ladies and gentlemen when some justices of the peace, alerted to Gerard’s whereabouts, raided the house. Only good fortune, some surreptitious hiding places, and the brave subterfuge of another Jesuit, Brother John Lilly, saved Gerard and others from almost certain capture. For his part, Gerard had “climbed up into the hiding-place which was built in a secret gable of the roof.” Lilly, who had refused to join Gerard in the priest hole in order to act as a decoy, was taken prisoner because he allowed the authorities to believe that he was or might be a priest, perhaps even Gerard—their most desired prey. As Gerard later noted, Lilly “tricked those tricksters, who called off their search for priests.” The others, including Anne Line and Mary Lady Lovell, “had to give bail to appear when summoned,” but were otherwise left undisturbed.40 Line courageously continued her work and managed to avoid the government’s dragnet for almost another two years. Her undoing, however, came on Candlemas Day (the Purification of Mary, February 2) in 1601 at the center that she operated in London. Generously, but as it turned out naively, she allowed an unusually large number of Catholics to come in to attend Mass on that feast day. This aroused the suspicions of neighbors, who in turn notified the constables. The house was soon raided, causing considerable confusion among both pursuivants and pursued alike. The presider, Fr. Francis Page, managed to reach the relative safety of the priest

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hole that Mistress Line had prepared for just such a contingency. Even though the authorities were unable to find any priests, Line and several others were arrested on suspicion of harboring seminary priests. One of the other prisoners, Mrs. Margaret Gage (the daughter of Baron Copley), was eventually set at liberty through the intervention of a certain nobleman.41 This leniency is a telling example of the reality and benefits of deference in Elizabethan society, especially when, as here, these involved considerations of, and allowances for, both class and gender.42 In sharp contrast to the lenience accorded the aristocrat Mrs. Gage, Mrs. Line experienced a very different fate. Fr. Garnet described her situation, and his correspondence with her, as follows: Mistress Martha was put in prison and I sent there to inquire whether she was in want of anything, so that I might provide it. She wrote me a letter, thanking me much for my care and saying that there was nothing in particular and that God was providing for her; and therefore she could not wish nor allow me to give her anything of that which was for the peculiar use of the Society; but, if there came into my hands any part of what was distributed in common, she would much appreciate it if sometimes I remembered her.43

Line wrote to Garnet on February 23, three weeks after she had been apprehended. This communication back and forth is an indication of the surprising permeability of Elizabethan prisons, where officials or guards might be sympathetic to certain prisoners or might be willing to accommodate them for an “inducement” in order to supplement their meager salaries.44 This also suggests that, although the resources of the Catholic and Jesuit missions were limited, there was a common fund of sorts, especially for those most in need.45 Line soon found out what awaited her and wrote, “my indictment is already written by the Lord Chief Justice himself [Sir John Popham]; and I am told that I shall be condemned for having harbored a priest—so they say.” As Garnet went on to explain: “She spoke in this way because, in order not to inculpate such persons as were there, they [Line and the others who were arrested] would not acknowledge that there was a priest there.” He concluded, “let the innocent blood of these many martyrs be upon their heads without any concurrence by us.”46 Mrs. Line was brought to trial at the Old Bailey on February 26, despite the fact that she was so ill that “she was unable to rise from her bed. This was testified to by the Sheriffs and warders of the prison, and it was hoped that they would let her be; but Popham gave orders that at all costs she was to come, even should she be carried in her bed.”47 The reality was only slightly less dramatic. Unable to walk, Anne had to be carried to court in a chair between two attendants. It is not difficult to understand why many people considered Lord Chief Justice Popham, who served as the trial judge, to be “a bitter enemy of the Catholics.”48 Although “there was no evidence that any priest had been in her house [particularly one from overseas, a capital offense] . . . Popham impressed upon the jury that they should mark well that this lady was in the habit of receiving numerous priests and Jesuits when they first entered the country and repeated

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‘Mark this well.’ ” In addition, documents noted that “The Mass vestments and other Catholic objects seized in her house were also exhibited.” Despite the dearth of direct evidence—most notably the failure to find any priests there—the jury dutifully followed the judge’s directives; they found Anne Line guilty of the felony of harboring priests, and she was sentenced to die the next day.49 John Gerard later wrote about the final days of his friend, co-worker, and spiritual directee, undoubtedly with a swell of emotions, and he clearly regarded her few possessions as treasured relics: She received the sentence of death with manifest joy and thankfulness. . . . Back in prison she sent, a short time before her execution, a letter to Father Page, the priest who had escaped at the time she was caught. I have the letter with me now. In it she disposed of her few possessions and left me a large finely wrought cross of gold which had belonged to her husband. Three times she mentioned me in the letter, referring to me as her Father. She left also some few debts which she begged me to pay off. Later, by word of mouth, she bequeathed me her bed, but when I came to buy it back from the gaolers who had ransacked her cell after her death, all that I could get was her coverlet, which I used afterwards whenever I was in London and felt safer under its protection.50

It is fascinating to note here a spiritual reversal of roles between John Gerard and Anne Line. He had been her spiritual director, and she had referred to him as her “Father.” At the same time, through her death and—in the mind of Gerard—her martyrdom and entrance into the communion of saints, she had become his model and protector. This is evident in the way that he underscores not only the fact that she had left him several of her possessions, but also by manifesting how much these meant to him. He mentions, for example, that one of Line’s letters came into his hands. One can sense the spiritual connection when he writes, “I have the letter with me now.” He then mentions that she had bequeathed him a “cross of gold,” and that he also managed to retrieve her coverlet. With regard to these objects, while the cross served as an explicit religious symbol, the coverlet became an implicit one for Gerard because, as he described its physical and spiritual significance: “I used [it] afterwards whenever I was in London and felt safer under its protection.” Obviously, these material objects had become cherished relics. Anne Line had initially been under John Gerard’s spiritual protection; after her death, it seems clear that he believed himself to be under hers.51 As to the poignant story of Anne Line’s execution, on February 27, 1601, her warder told her that “she must go to her death; for which news she thanked him most heartily and many times. And so she dressed herself with such alacrity as was incredible, joy giving her strength, and during all that time, which was little more than a quarter of an hour, she spoke at every opportunity to the Catholics, being in great consolation, though they were very sad.”52 Line’s subsequent journey from the jail to the gallows is very telling: When she was put in the cart along with some thieves, who were heretics, she made the sign of the cross; and her friends assembled about her and were

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insistent that she should leave them some memento of her; and she gave them what she had. And, having given everything, when she was at the gallows, she asked the executioner for a knife and cut off the lace on her petticoat and gave it to a friend.53

It would seem that, similar to Gerard, Line’s friends desired to have these mementos as relics, objects by which to remember her, not just physically but even more so spiritually, right down to “the lace on her petticoat.” They all sought to have a tangible connection with the soon-to-be martyr. Moreover, it could be argued that through her ministry to the Catholic community, down to the very end, Anne Line had in some sense adopted and exercised a semi-sacerdotal role.54 She finally arrived at Tyburn, the place of martyrs. According to Garnet, “The day was intensely cold, and it was snowing heavily, and all wondered that, being so very weak and exhausted, she did not perish.”55 On the contrary, Line was buoyed by a sense of divine accompaniment. She dismissed the Protestant ministers who were trying, even to the last, to convert her. Defiantly, she stood her ground and boldly proclaimed: “I am sentenced to die for harboring a Catholic priest, and so far I am from repenting for having so done, that I wish, with all my soul, that where I have entertained one, I could have entertained a thousand.”56 Gerard movingly described her last moments: “[I]n her exaltation, she kissed the gallows and kneeling down began to pray. She went on praying until the hangman had done his work.”57 In fact, Anne Line was only the first of three Catholic martyrs who died on that freezing February day. Following her execution, two priests suffered even more grisly fates. The first, Mark Barkworth, was, like Line, a Catholic convert. He was a seminary priest who had become a Benedictine shortly before his death. Upon his execution he embraced Line’s body while it was still hanging and exclaimed, “O blessed Mrs. Line, who hast now happily received thy reward! Thou art gone before us, but we shall quickly follow thee to bliss, if it please the Almighty.” Barkworth then suffered the gruesome penalty of being hanged, drawn, and quartered—alive until the very end.58 He was followed by the third martyr to die that day, Roger Filcock, a friend of Anne Line who had been admitted to the Society of Jesus while serving on the mission. As Gerard summarized their relationship, up to and including their executions, Mrs. Line “gave up her soul to God in company with the Jesuit martyr, Father Filcock, who had often been her confessor and had always been her friend.”59 Like Barkworth, Filcock was hanged, drawn, and quartered, but he was apparently allowed to hang until he was dead before he was “cut down, dismembered, bowelled, and quartered.”60 In all, a devout laywoman, a Benedictine, and a Jesuit bravely went to their deaths on that blood-soaked day at Tyburn.61 In reviewing the various accounts of Anne Line’s life, one enters into the borderland between biography and hagiography.62 Considering the fact that she was an impoverished and sickly widow, in addition to being a member of a persecuted religious minority, her courageous stance in operating London safe houses and remaining resolute through her ordeals of imprisonment, trial, and execution

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provides, at a minimum, evidence supporting her status as a religious heroine and a willing martyr. Yet, beyond these qualities, many of her co-religionists saw clear evidence of sanctity. For example, in referring to her as “that saintly widow,” John Gerard expressed an evidently widely held Catholic point of view, namely, that Anne Line was a living saint, and one whom God was preparing for martyrdom. Several incidents toward the end of her life seemed to confirm this divine favor. One day while in prison, she supposedly “heard a most sweet melody,” which others nearby did not hear. However, “later towards evening, seeing that Fr. Roger [Filcock] had been taken from them,” she believed that the “melody was intended to summon the father [to his death]. But as events unfolded [as Garnet surmised], it was to summon her as well.”63 On another occasion during her final days, “while saying the Vespers of our Lady, she had seen a bright light which caused her to marvel.” At first, “she had confessed it as a superstition; but now, since our Lord was calling her so soon to Himself, she thought that it had been from God.”64 Thus, through the eyes— and ears—of faith, Line continued to respond to what she believed to be a divine directive calling her to be faithful to her convictions, even unto death. It is also interesting to note here that she had apparently developed an understanding of “the discernment of spirits,” a practice described by Ignatius of Loyola in his Spiritual Exercises, by means of which individuals can reflect upon their experiences in order to discern whether or not they genuinely come from God.65 Line had initially been inclined to dismiss the bright light that she had perceived as being a mere “superstition,” but upon further information and reflection, she came to believe that it was indeed “from God.” Evidently, John Gerard had directed her and others through the Exercises and had shared some of its major insights with the retreatants.66 Over the long term, Anne Line’s courageous and ultimately self-sacrificing life and death gave her genuine spiritual—as well as literary—staying power.67 In addition to her personal commitment to living a vowed life, she became a “professional,” namely, a woman “who made the harboring of priests a full-time occupation,” despite the well-known dangers.68 She thereby helped to insure the very survival of the Catholic mission and community. Revered as she was by many of her contemporaries, the Catholic Church formally acknowledged her heroism and sanctity in the twentieth century. She was beatified in 1929 and later canonized by Pope Paul VI, on October 25, 1970, thus becoming one of the venerated Forty Martyrs of England and Wales.69 In taking this step, the Catholic Church was acknowledging not only Anne Line’s courageous death but also her heroic life. She forged a third vocation of sorts, a middle way between the two traditional, normative options for Catholic women: marriage or the cloister. She was able to combine the active and the contemplative lives, traditional women’s work and non-traditional, even semisacerdotal activities and modes of loving service. She did all this in spite of, or perhaps even because of, the real possibility of martyrdom. Anne Line was willing to give her all and, thereby, set a powerful example. She proved that, even in the

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early modern era, a woman of faith and daring could, in essence, write her own poignant spiritual autobiography, not so much in words as through her courageous and at times defiant deeds. In so doing, she became a powerful spiritual model for both her own and future generations—of men and, especially, of women.

Notes  1. On the Catholic mission in general and the Jesuit mission in particular in the Elizabethan era, see Thomas M. McCoog, S.J., The Society of Jesus in Ireland, Scotland, and England, 1541–1588: ‘Our Way of Proceeding?’ (Leiden: Brill, 1996); Thomas M. McCoog, S.J., The Society of Jesus in Ireland, Scotland, and England, 1589–1597: Building the Faith of Saint Peter upon the King of Spain’s Monarchy (Burlington, VT: Ashgate/ Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 2012); Robert E. Scully, S.J., Into the Lion’s Den: The Jesuit Mission in Elizabethan England and Wales, 1580–1603 (St. Louis: The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 2011); Francis Edwards, S.J., ed. and trans., The Elizabethan Jesuits: Historia Missionis Anglicanae Societatis Jesu (1660) of Henry More (London: Phillimore, 1981); John Gerard, The Autobiography of a Hunted Priest, trans. Philip Caraman (New York: Pellegrini & Cudahy, 1952) [hereafter Gerard]; William Weston, The Autobiography of an Elizabethan, trans. Philip Caraman (London: Longmans, Green, 1955).  2. See Martin Dodwell, “Revisiting Anne Line: Who Was She and Where Did She Come From?” Recusant History 31.3 (2013): 375–89; Martin Dodwell, Anne Line: Shakespeare’s Tragic Muse (Brighton: The Book Guild, 2013); Roland Connelly, The Women of the Catholic Resistance: In England, 1540–1680 (Edinburgh: Pentland Press, 1997), 107–11. On the role of Catholic women, see Scully, “Elizabethan Catholic Women,” in Into the Lion’s Den, 241–89; Marie B. Rowlands, “Recusant Women, 1560–1640,” in Women in English Society, 1500–1800, ed. Mary Prior (London: Methuen, 1985), 149–80. On the wider role of women in early modern England, see Patricia Crawford, Women and Religion in England, 1500–1720 (London: Routledge, 1996).  3. Dodwell, “Revisiting Anne Line;” Gerard, 82; Henry Foley, S.J., Records of the English Province of the Society of Jesus (London: Burns and Oates, 1877), 1: 414; Philip Caraman, Henry Garnet (1555–1606) and the Gunpowder Plot (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1964), 277. Dodwell speculates that “Alice” may have adopted the name of “Anne” upon her conversion, “Revisiting Anne Line,” 382–83.  4. Gerard, 82–83. See also Foley, Records, 1: 414.  5. Gerard, 83.  6. Ibid. See also Henry Garnet to Father General Claudio Aquaviva, London, March 11, 1601, in Archivum Britannicum Societatis Iesu (hereafter ABSI), 46/12/2, ARSI, Angl. 31, ff. 172–83v., pp. 20–21; Foley, 1: 114. According to Dodwell, “At some point their only child was taken from them to be brought up by Roger’s Protestant relatives.” “Revisiting Anne Line,” 377.  7. With regard to the status and options for widows in early modern England, see Barbara J. Todd, “The Remarrying Widow: A Stereotype Reconsidered,” in Women in English Society, 1500–1800, ed. Mary Prior (London: Methuen, 1985), 54–92. The author concludes that “through the early modern period widows came to be less likely to remarry.” Part of the explanation was probably the fact that they were “aware of the consequences of their subordination should they marry again” (83).

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 8. Richard Challoner, Memoirs of Missionary Priests (New York: P.J. Kenedy and Sons, 1924), 257–59.  9. ABSI 46/12/2, p. 20. 10. Gerard, 83–84. See also Connelly, Women of the Catholic Resistance, 109. 11. Gerard, 82. 12. With regard to the importance of London for the Catholic mission as well as its particular advantages and dangers, see Scully, Into the Lion’s Den, esp. 113–16. See also Susan Brigden, London and the Reformation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). 13. ABSI 46/12/2, p. 21. 14. For a fascinating study of such spiritual relationships in the early modern Catholic world, see Jodi Bilinkoff, Related Lives: Confessors and Their Female Penitents, 1450– 1750 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005). She notes that the significant number of Jesuits serving in these roles “no doubt reflects the Society’s strong mission as spiritual directors” (8). 15. Gerard, 84. With regard to Jesuit ministry to and with women, see John W. O’Malley, The First Jesuits (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), esp. 75–76; Scully, Into the Lion’s Den, 241–89, esp. 241–42. 16. Foley, 7, Part 2: 1355–58. See also ABSI 46/12/2, p. 21. 17. ABSI 46/12/2, p. 21. 18. For a discussion of important developments in early Jesuit spirituality, see John W. O’Malley, “Some Distinctive Characteristics of Jesuit Spirituality in the Sixteenth Century,” in Saints or Devils Incarnate?: Studies in Jesuit History (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 165–80. 19. Challoner, Memoirs, 258. 20. Gerard, 84. See also Challoner, Memoirs, 258. 21. See Brad S. Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). 22. Anne Line was certainly not alone. As Jodi Bilinkoff’s study confirms, “current research . . . points to the wide range of religious styles practiced by Catholic women, even after the Council of Trent would seem to have prohibited anything but the cloister.” Related Lives, 7. See also Silvia Evangelisti, Nuns: A History of Convent Life, 1450–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Jo Ann Kay McNamara, Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns through Two Millennia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), esp. 385–562. 23. ABSI 46/12/2, pp. 21–22. According to Gerard, Anne Line at one point “made a vow of chastity, a virtue she practiced even in her married life.” Gerard, 86. 24. H.J. Schroeder, O.P., trans., The Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent (Rockford, IL: Tan Books, 1978), 221. 25. See, for example, Elizabeth A. Lehfeldt, Religious Women in Golden Age Spain: The Permeable Cloister (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005). 26. This was a shift from the later Middle Ages, when there was often wider latitude for both men and women, formally or informally, to become tertiaries, especially in the mendicant orders. According to Carmen Florea, “For those men and women wishing to live a certain type of religious life not inside a convent’s walls but in the world, a third path was available.” See Carmen Florea, “The Third Path: Charity and Devotion in Late Medieval Transylvanian Towns,” in Communities of Devotion: Religious Orders and Society in East Central Europe, 1450–1800, ed. Maria Craciun and Elaine Fulton (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), 91–120, qtd. at 92. 27. Regarding Queen Elizabeth’s take on “convents,” when some councilors suggested prisons for women, she retorted: “You have had your way with the men. Would you have

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me shut the women up too—like nuns in a convent? A fine thing that would be!” See Weston, Autobiography, 33. 28. Robert Persons, S.J., “An Instruction,” October 30, 1604, in ABSI (Stonyhurst Anglia VI. No. 53, 259). (Spelling and punctuation have been modernized. In addition, the author would like to thank Fr. Tom McCoog, S.J., for his generous assistance in locating this important document and making it available for citation.) See also Francis Edwards, S.J., Robert Persons: The Biography of an Elizabethan Jesuit,1546–1610 (St. Louis: The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1995). With regard to married women entering for a time into a semi-secluded and presumably chaste state, that would have to be based on an agreement between a wife and her husband, and was probably fairly rare (see below). 29. Persons, “An Instruction.” 30. Ibid. There was evidently a range of opinions on the propriety of making a vow of obedience to one’s confessor. The reference to a “spiritual mother” likely relates to a female spiritual guide or perhaps to an informal religious superior. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid. 33. See, for example, Frances E. Dolan, “Gender and the ‘Lost’ Spaces of Catholicism,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 32.4 (2002): 641–65. 34. Dodwell, “Revisiting Anne Line,” 376–77. 35. See John W. O’Malley, Trent: What Happened at the Council (Cambridge: Belknap/ Harvard University Press, 2013), in which the author highlights a number of areas in which the decrees of Trent were interpreted or imposed by the “Tridentine” Church in ways that the Council Fathers may not have intended or concerning which they had disagreed among themselves. 36. Gerard, 84. See also ibid., 141–42. 37. ABSI 46/12/2, p. 21. 38. It would seem that Anne Line instructed some girls, though evidently not boys. In this she was in accord with a movement that fostered female education in many areas of early modern Europe. In Catholic areas this was usually spearheaded by laywomen and nuns; in both cases many of these women tried to move beyond the traditional strictures of lay versus cloistered life, including Anne Line and Angela Merici. See, for example, Charmarie J. Blaisdell, “Angela Merici and the Ursulines,” in Religious Orders of the Catholic Reformation, ed. Richard L. DeMolen (New York: Fordham University Press, 1994), 99–136, and the essay by Querciolo Mazzonis in this volume. 39. For a discussion of Catholic households in late sixteenth- and early seventeenthcentury England, and the important role of recusant women in establishing and running them, see Ellen A. Macek, “Devout Recusant Women, Advice Manuals, and the Creation of Holy Households ‘under Siege,’ ” in this volume. 40. Gerard, 150–55. See also Godfrey Anstruther, O.P., Vaux of Harrowden: A Recusant Family (Newport, England: R.H. Johns, 1953), 202–3. 41. Gerard, 84–85; ABSI 46/12/2, p. 22; Challoner, Memoirs, 258. See also Edwards, Elizabethan Jesuits, 319–21. 42. See, for example, Susan Dwyer Amussen, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). 43. ABSI 46/12/2, pp. 22–23. 44. See Brian A. Harrison, “Prisons of London,” in A Tudor Journal: The Diary of a Priest in The Tower, 1580–1585 (London: St. Pauls, 2000), 111–21; Scully, Into the Lion’s Den, 365–72.

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45. See John Bossy, The English Catholic Community, 1570–1850 (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1975), 229–37; Thomas M. McCoog, S.J., “ ‘The Slightest Suspicion of Avarice’: The Finances of the English Jesuit Mission,” Recusant History 19 (1988): 103–23. 46. ABSI 46/12/2, p. 23. 47. Ibid., p. 24. 48. Challoner, Memoirs, 258. See also Caraman, Henry Garnet, 278–79. 49. ABSI 46/12/2, p. 24. See also Gerard, 85; Edwards, Elizabethan Jesuits, 325–26; Foley, Records, 1: 424–25. 50. Gerard, 85. For more on such spiritual friendships, which Bilinkoff describes (in theory and presumably often in practice) as “chaste but passionate friendships between priests and their female penitents,” see Related Lives, 76–95, qtd. at 95. 51. Gerard, 85. See also Anne M. Myers, “Father John Gerard’s Object Lessons: Relics and Devotional Objects in Autobiography of a Hunted Priest,” in Catholic Culture in Early Modern England, ed. Ronald Corthell, et al. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 216–35, esp. 233. As Myers explains, “Gerard invests these objects with the traditional curative and protective qualities of the relic” (233). For a broader discussion of Catholic versus Protestant understandings of the material and the spiritual, see Arthur F. Marotti, “In Defence of Idolatry: Residual Catholic Culture and the Protestant Assault on the Sensuous in Early Modern England,” in Redrawing the Map of Early Modern English Catholicism, ed. Lowell Gallagher (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 27–51. 52. ABSI 46/12/2, pp. 28–29. 53. Ibid., 29. 54. See a discussion of ways in which other recusant women adopted semi-sacerdotal roles in Macek, “Devout Recusant Women,” in this volume. 55. Foley, Records, 7, Part 2: 1363. 56. Challoner, Memoirs, 259. 57. Gerard, 85–86. See also ABSI 46/12/2, pp. 29–30. Anne Line was the last woman in England to be hanged for harboring priests, but, as Patricia Crawford points out, “Three other women were under sentence of death in prison at Elizabeth’s death but were subsequently pardoned.” Women and Religion in England, 63. 58. Challoner, Memoirs, 253–59, qtd. at 259. See also ABSI 46/12/2, pp. 27–31; Foley, Records, 1: 416–19; ibid., 7, Part 2: 1363–64; Godfrey Anstruther, O.P., The Seminary Priests: Vol. I. Elizabethan, 1558–1603 (Ware, England: St. Edmund’s College, n. d. [1968]), 21–22. 59. Gerard, 86. 60. Challoner, Memoirs, 255–59, qtd. at 257. See also ABSI 46/12/2, pp. 24–31; Foley, Records, 1: 405–14; ibid., 7, Part 2: 64–66; Edwards, Elizabethan Jesuits, 321–25. 61. For Garnet’s description of how “he was able to gather relics of these [three] martyrs,” see Caraman, Henry Garnet, 281. 62. With regard to historiographical writing in the early modern era, see Bilinkoff, Related Lives, 9–10, 32–45. For additional historical and historiographical background, especially as related to national identity, see Catherine Sanok, “The Lives of Women Saints of Our Contrie of England: Gender and Nationalism in Recusant Hagiography,” in Catholic Culture in Early Modern England, ed. Corthell, et al., 261–80. 63. ABSI 46/12/2, p. 28. 64. Ibid., p. 29. See also Challoner, Memoirs, 259.

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65. See The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius, trans. George E. Ganss, S.J. (St. Louis: The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1992); see, in particular, “Rules for the Discernment of Spirits,” nos. 313–36, at pages 121–28. 66. According to Roland Connelly, upon Gerard’s escape from the Tower, he organized “in Mrs. Line’s house the Thirty Days Retreat in which he preached the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius.” Women of the Catholic Resistance, 109. It is highly likely that Anne would have participated in that retreat. With regard to the “light,” see Challoner’s description and interpretation in his Memoirs, 259. 67. For the evidence that Shakespeare may well be referring to the fates of Anne and Roger Line in some of his writings, see Dodwell, Anne Line: Shakespeare’s Tragic Muse. 68. Rowlands, “Recusant Women,” 158. 69. For a thoughtful ecumenical perspective on these canonizations, see Andrew Atherstone, “The Canonisation of the Forty English Martyrs: An Ecumenical Dilemma,” Recusant History 30.4 (2011): 573–87.

Works Cited Amussen, Susan Dwyer. An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. Anstruther, Godfrey, O.P. The Seminary Priests: Vol. I. Elizabethan, 1558–1603. Ware, England: St. Edmund’s College, n. d. (1968). ———. Vaux of Harrowden: A Recusant Family. Newport, England: R.H. Johns, 1953. Atherstone, Andrew. “The Canonisation of the Forty English Martyrs: An Ecumenical Perspective.” Recusant History 30, no. 4 (2011): 573–87. Bilinkoff, Jodi. Related Lives: Confessors and Their Female Penitents, 1450– 1750. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005. Blaisdell, Charmarie J. “Angela Merici and the Ursulines.” In Religious Orders of the Catholic Reformation, edited by Richard L. DeMolen, 99–136. New York: Fordham University Press, 1994. Bossy, John. The English Catholic Community, 1570–1850. London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1975. Brigden, Susan. London and the Reformation. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989. Caraman, Philip. Henry Garnet (1555–1606) and the Gunpowder Plot. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1964. Challoner, Richard. Memoirs of Missionary Priests. New York: P.J. Kenedy and Sons, 1924. Connelly, Roland. The Women of the Catholic Resistance: In England, 1540–1680. Edinburgh: Pentland Press, 1997. Crawford, Patricia. Women and Religion in England, 1500–1720. London: Routledge, 1996. Dodwell, Martin. Anne Line: Shakespeare’s Tragic Muse. Brighton: The Book Guild, 2013. ———. “Revisiting Anne Line: Who Was She and Where Did She Come From?” Recusant History 31, no. 3 (2013): 375–89.

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Dolan, Frances E. “Gender and the ‘Lost’ Spaces of Catholicism.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 32, no. 4 (2002): 641–65. Edwards, Francis, S.J. Robert Persons: The Biography of an Elizabethan Jesuit, 1546–1610. St. Louis: The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1995. Edwards, Francis, S.J., ed. and trans. The Elizabethan Jesuits: Historia Missionis Anglicanae Societatis Jesu (1660) of Henry More. London: Phillimore, 1981. Evangelisti, Silvia. Nuns: A History of Convent Life, 1450–1700. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Florea, Carmen. “The Third Path: Charity and Devotion in Late Medieval Transylvanian Towns.” In Communities of Devotion: Religious Orders and Society in East Central Europe, 1450–1800, edited by Maria Craciun and Elaine Fulton, 91–120. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011. Foley, Henry, S.J. Records of the English Province of the Society of Jesus. 7 vols. London: Burns & Oates, 1877–1884. Garnet, Henry. Letter to Father General Claudio Acquaviva, London, March 11, 1601. In Archivum Britannicum Societatis Iesu, 46/12/2, ARSI, Angl. 31, ff. 172–83v., esp. pp. 20–32. Gerard, John. The Autobiography of a Hunted Priest. Translated by Philip Caraman. New York: Pellegrini & Cudahy, 1952. Gregory, Brad S. Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. Harrison, Brian A. A Tudor Journal: The Diary of a Priest in The Tower, 1580– 1585. London: St. Pauls, 2000. Ignatius of Loyola. The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius. Translated by George E. Ganss, S.J. St. Louis: The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1992. Lehfeldt, Elizabeth A. Religious Women in Golden Age Spain: The Permeable Cloister. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005. Marotti, Arthur F. “In Defence of Idolatry: Residual Catholic Culture and the Protestant Assault on the Sensuous in Early Modern England.” In Redrawing the Map of Early Modern English Catholicism, edited by Lowell Gallagher, 27–51. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012. McCoog, Thomas M., S.J. The Society of Jesus in Ireland, Scotland, and England, 1541–1588: ‘Our Way of Proceeding?’ Leiden: Brill, 1996. ———. The Society of Jesus in Ireland, Scotland, and England, 1589–1597: Building the Faith of Saint Peter upon the King of Spain’s Monarchy. Burlington, VT: Ashgate/Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 2012. ———. “ ‘The Slightest Suspicion of Avarice’: The Finances of the English Jesuit Mission.” Recusant History 19 (1988): 103–23. McNamara, Jo Ann Kay. Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns through Two Millennia. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996. Myers, Anne M. “Father John Gerard’s Object Lessons: Relics and Devotional Objects in Autobiography of a Hunted Priest.” In Catholic Culture in Early Modern England, edited by Ronald Corthell, et al., 216–35. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007.

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O’Malley, John W. The First Jesuits. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993. ———. “Some Distinctive Characteristics of Jesuit Spirituality in the Sixteenth Century.” In Saints or Devils Incarnate?: Studies in Jesuit History, 165–80. Leiden: Brill, 2013. ———. Trent: What Happened at the Council. Cambridge: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2013. Persons, Robert, S.J. “An Instruction and direction for the spiritual help of such English gentlewomen as desire to lead a more retired and recollected life than the ordinary in England doth yield” (1604). In Archivum Britannicum Societatis Iesu. Stonyhurst Anglia VI. No. 53, 259. Rowlands, Marie B. “Recusant Women, 1560–1640.” In Women in English Society, 1500–1800, edited by Mary Prior, 149–80. London: Methuen, 1985. Sanok, Catherine. “The Lives of Women Saints of Our Contrie of England: Gender and Nationalism in Recusant Hagiography.” In Catholic Culture in Early Modern England, edited by Ronald Corthell, et al., 261–80. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007. Schroeder, H.J., O.P., trans. The Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent. Rockford, IL: Tan Books, 1978. Scully, Robert E., S.J. Into the Lion’s Den: The Jesuit Mission in Elizabethan England and Wales, 1580–1603. St. Louis: The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 2011. Todd, Barbara J. “The Remarrying Widow: A Stereotype Reconsidered.” In Women in English Society, 1500–1800, edited by Mary Prior, 54–92. London: Methuen, 1985. Weston, William. The Autobiography of an Elizabethan. Translated by Philip Caraman. London: Longmans, Green, 1955.

14 Letters, Books, and Relics Material and Spiritual Networks in the Life of Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza (1564–1614) María J. Pando-Canteli

In 1611 Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza wrote this letter from London to the English Jesuit Joseph Creswell, then in Valladolid: If your honour can send me one of the books I asked for, I beg you to do so. I strongly wish to have Cayrasco’s Lives of the Saints in verse, all twelve months of them, and of those here that understand the language some like them very much indeed. What you have been so kind as to send me so far, sir, I have received, but I have not been able to look at them. The friends will look at them but they say when things like this are in Spanish, it is silly and pointless to write them in any language other than English, or at least Latin. If it is written for them, they say, what use is it in Spanish? I am sending over England’s Book of Religion, where you will see the most monstrous lies that you have heard in your life, sir. A Protestant gentleman sent me his so that I could see his splendid religion, and I have folded over each page where there are lies and contradictions, of which there are many, so you can see them. [I] was showing a Protestant the horrendous blasphemies that Calvin writes in his book Institutions on this very point. . . . He replied that it weighs on his soul that such a great man had said such things, but he could also guarantee that were Calvin alive today he would change his mind about these statements, and this from an elderly man and a graduate, who fancies himself as learned. [W]e have Mother Teresa’s book about her life, in English, and very well translated. [T]his relic is flesh from the breast of holy Father Roberts, which, seeing that it had gone bad, I removed. Please give a little of it to Señor Ceráin from me, sir. (Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza to Joseph Creswell, S.J., London, September 3, 1611)1

When Carvajal wrote this letter to Creswell, she had already been in England for more than six years. She had arrived in London in the turbulent times immediately after the Gunpowder Plot and remained there until her death in 1614. Joseph Creswell was then in Valladolid, in charge of St. Alban’s, the English Jesuit College founded in 1589 with the support of Philip II. Creswell and Carvajal corresponded intensely and extensively throughout her entire time

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in London, especially between 1607 and 1611. She, a member of the powerful Mendoza family, retained much of the social and cultural capital her name conferred, despite her radical decision to renounce all material wealth and pursue a life of poverty and chastity. Carvajal grew up with her aunt María Chacón in the closed circle of the royal family, in the Convent of Descalzas Reales, Madrid, and then under the strict supervision of her uncle Francisco Hurtado de Mendoza, former ambassador at the Court of the Holy Roman Emperor. Later on she became engaged in the activities of the Society of Jesus, and her commitment to the Jesuits continued and intensified when she moved to Valladolid and settled very close to St. Alban’s. There, Carvajal met Creswell and, probably inspired by narratives of the martyrdom of Henry Walpole and other Jesuits, she donated her inheritance to the Society of Jesus for the foundation of an English novitiate in Flanders. Determined to devote her life to fighting the expansion of Protestantism, in 1605 she moved to England to live the life of an active apostle.2 Her letters are firsthand political chronicles that offer fascinating and unusual historical accounts of one of the most controversial and turbulent periods in AngloSpanish relations.3 The letter to which this fragment belongs abounds in details about the political situation and particular circumstances of persecuted Catholics in England and provides an excellent account of women’s engagement in crossnational cultural interactions in early modern Europe. Carvajal’s correspondence was part of well-wrought transnational networks through which persons, ideas, and cultural artifacts circulated in multiple directions. Carvajal’s correspondence must be understood as more than a collection of personal communications peripheral to the great religious and political struggles of early modern Catholicism; rather, it represents a complex body of material, textual, and symbolic exchanges through which Carvajal engaged in the creation of a transnational Catholic community. Early modern women’s letters constituted complex discourses where private and public voices merged, and where the female voice adopted many guises. To approach these texts as simple historical chronicles, or as quaint expressions of women’s literacy, is to miss much of the richness that lies precisely in their interstitial quality. I agree with Sara Jane Steen when she vindicates the need “to cross disciplinary boundaries [when analyzing early modern letters], and treat the biographical, historical, social, political, psychological, economic, and rhetorical contexts in which the letters were produced.”4 Only in this way can the nuances of the different female voices be heard. The female writer adopts different personae, making of the epistolary text a fictional discourse in which a self-fashioning subject recreates multiple identities: the female mystic, the active apostle, the proud Spanish noble, the religious proselytizer, the humble, self-mortifying Catholic, the political conspirator, the loyal friend, the devout relic-maker, and the martyrologist. All these identities and others converge and interact in the letters of Luisa de Carvajal. Commenting on women’s epistolary production and its persuasive force in the early modern period, Jane Couchman and Ann Crabb argue that these texts “have a direct impact on the unfolding of events.”5 Luisa de Carvajal’s letters are

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complex and dynamic artifacts and, as such, they make things happen. Multiple genres—political pamphlets, theological theses, martyrdom narratives, local custom accounts, hagiographies, and mystical autobiographies—come together, challenging modern disciplinary boundaries and clearcut divisions between the public and the private, the fictional and the real, the political and the personal. Therefore, the epistolary genre provides an extraordinary framework to harbor and legitimate discourses that could hardly be articulated otherwise by this woman or others like her. This, of course, complicates the inquiries into how women’s discursive practices contribute to the material and symbolic circulation of religious artifacts and political ideas within the European Catholic community and, particularly, between Spain and England.6 Furthermore, Carvajal’s letters to Joseph Creswell, Rodrigo Calderón, and Magdalena de San Jerónimo in Brussels show the importance of women’s agency in creating cross-national networks of influence, and illustrate the importance of Carvajal’s and other women’s intellectual activity in the cosmopolitan promotion of Catholicism.7 Women participated as writers, translators, disseminators, and receptors of iconic and textual narratives. And thus they contributed to a pan-European community of believers and strengthened Spanish imperial politics. It is in this context that Carvajal’s letter to Creswell stands as a particularly interesting case, for it underscores the importance of devotional literature and objects in women’s proselytizing activities. More specifically, it deserves a detailed analysis as it illustrates Carvajal’s direct agency in three activities that were crucial for the advancement of Catholicism and the cohesion of the Catholic monarchy of the Hapsburgs: the publication, translation, and circulation of Spanish authors outside Spain; the active apostolate through the direct intervention in religious disputes and theological debates; and lastly, the exchange and circulation of relics as material, bodily expressions of a collective and transnational devotion that challenged national allegiances. In the circumstances of intense mutual scrutiny and profound religious division between England and Spain, these continuous exchanges challenged official censorship. Carvajal asks Creswell for Caraysco’s Vidas de Santos because the saints’ lives “give great pleasure here to those who understand the language,” and returns the favor by sending him the most recent Protestant publication about the Church of England.8 The confidence and authority she displays in commenting on theological questions with Protestants indicate not only that Carvajal was engaged in the reading of Catholic authorities, but also that her reading was far from superficial. She read the articles of the Church of England and Calvin’s Institutions and was eager to discuss theological matters, not only with this learned Jesuit but also with her unnamed religious opponent, “an elderly man and a graduate, who fancies himself as learned,” whom she tried to indoctrinate in the principles of the Roman Church. This seems to have been one of her favorite activities in London, if one counts the number of occasions she mentions to her correspondents her interventions in favor of the Catholic faith, in deliberately risky circumstances and

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places. She often engaged in conversations with religious opponents, to whom she displayed all her persuasive skills and her knowledge of Catholic doctrine. In a letter to Inés de la Asunción, an old disciple and friend from her years in Madrid, she narrates how she achieved the conversion of an old lady, “with us helping her faltering judgment and memory with our words.”9 Catholic proselytism in early modern England relied very much on oral transmission, and Carvajal embraced the Jesuit practice of engaging in theological discussions with Protestants, as her accounts of her many activities in London illustrate.10 Carvajal’s further reference in the same letter to the autobiography of Saint Teresa “in English, very well translated” demonstrates that the translated editions of Catholic Spanish authors enjoyed popularity in England despite censorship. The text that she refers to could be the translation by Michael Walpole, S.J., published in Antwerp in 1611.11 Of Creswell’s other text, which likely circulated in Spanish or Latin, she reports the complaints of her English companions: “[I]f it is written for them, they say, what use is it in Spanish?” What text is Carvajal referring to that the English Catholics consider for them? It could be Creswell’s Historia de la vida y martirio que padeció el P. Henrico Volpolo (Account of the Life and Martyrdom of Father Henry Walpole), published in Madrid in 1596. However, given the celerity with which certain books underwent editions and translations, and also given the publication of James I’s Proclamations of Penal Laws hardly a year before, it is likely that she refers to the famous pamphlet Joseph Creswell wrote in Spanish against these Proclamations.12 About this last work, Carvajal comments in another letter to Creswell, only a month later: The book against the proclamation and latest laws is a fine piece of work, but it is in Spanish, which means it is worth little or nothing here. I think that it could be of great value in English to encourage and strengthen the Catholics. Your Honour should know that they are not as fervent as is painted over there, and this is a drawback because they themselves dismiss the book if they see anything in it which is untrue, even were it in their favour. I have certainly seen this myself and heard them ask in such instances, “Why do they write such lies in books?” If you send one of these books to me or Mr. Rich, at Louvain, sir, we could get it printed in English. (Luisa de Carvajal to Joseph Creswell, London, October 15, 1611)13

Why were some English Catholics suspicious about what was being said in texts such as Creswell’s? Carvajal justifies this distrustful attitude as an expression of the weak fervor and faith of some of these English: “[T]hey are not as fervent as painted over there,” although to a modern reader, it seems clear that it is not a simple question of faith. Her words point to one of the most pervasive and hotly debated issues about religious culture in early modern England: the mutual distrust between English and continental Catholics. Anti-Spanish sentiment, dating from the 1580s and intensified after the Gunpowder Plot in 1605, mixed with insular distrust for what came from the Continent. Trained in English colleges in Spain, the Jesuits of the English Mission, such as Persons, Allen, and Creswell, championed

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a political rhetoric of persuasion and justification that may have contributed to this distrust, especially in their vituperation of English Protestant politics and English monarchs.14 Joseph Creswell became one of Robert Persons’s closest collaborators after he settled in Spain in 1591. He first participated in the management of the English colleges in Seville and Valladolid and later served as advisor on English affairs at the courts of Philip II and, more prominently, Philip III. Scholars report on Creswell’s advancing career in Spain and refer to the considerable bulk of his correspondence and continuous reports for both the Spanish crown and the papal Nuncio.15 The Calendar of State Papers refers to the English spy Giles van Hardwicke, who reported to London in April 1599 that “the jesuite Creswell hath so good intelligence that their waggeth not a strawe in the Inglishe court but he heareth of it . . . [T]his Creswell hath weekly a porter’s burden of letters of intelligence from all places which is the cause of his estimation in this land.”16 Given the intense correspondence between Carvajal and Creswell during these years and the detailed information on English political and religious affairs that Carvajal reports, she was certainly one of his most valued sources of intelligence. However, Carvajal shows a permanent distrust of the English Catholics she visits, as she also perceives that her presence does not raise enthusiasm among them. She complains about their attitudes toward foreigners, particularly Spaniards: “For anything to do with Spain they show a remarkable hatred, even many of the good ones. And my being Spanish has not helped in any way to get them to love me. It seems to me they think Spain is by nature obliged to serve them.”17 The English, according to Carvajal, were not reliable couriers and were changeable in their allegiances: “[W]hen they are there (in Spain) they seem agreeable and very saintly and devout, but once they are here, they change substantially.”18 She might be referring to the English she met while living by St. Albans College in Valladolid, mostly English exiles studying under the supervision of the Jesuits or young English ladies on the way to some other Catholic institution in the peninsula.19 This mutual distrust reveals the anxieties around questions of identity beyond religious creed. If Carvajal distinguished between reliable Catholics (those engaged in the English Mission on the Continent, particularly the Jesuit priests) and unreliable ones (those who were ambivalent about conforming to the Laws or reluctant to hide priests or shelter foreigners, especially if they were Spanish), so did some English Catholics. They may have felt, according to Carvajal’s report, that not all subversive actions could be justified ad maiorem Dei gloriam, and that continental Catholicism—caught up in the feverish activism of the Jesuits—and foreign proselytizers might want to use them as vehicles, not only to introduce and restore Catholicism in England but to hand the English nation over to the Spanish. Their suspicious question that Carvajal reports with annoyance, “Why do they write those lies in books?”—something that would make sense expressed by an English Protestant, but certainly not by a Catholic—destabilizes the idea of a homogeneous Catholic community on both sides of the Channel.20 In any case, Carvajal’s request was for an English translation printed in St. Omer that very year, 1611.21 Whether she or the so-called Mr. Rich of Louvain—likely

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Richard Gibbons22—were actually involved in this publication, we do not know, but Carvajal was far more active and engaged in the circulation of print culture than any ordinary reader, and probably more than the English political officers might presume. The Carmelite friar Jerónimo Gracián writes from Brussels about the book exchange he keeps with Carvajal, “I used to send her Catholic books and she sent back pamphlets and heretical books that were published there, and we needed to know of them to warn Spain.”23 Carvajal’s letters to Inés de la Asunción, Mariana de San José, and Creswell abound in details about the difficulties of getting requested books delivered; some were lost on the way and others detained in customs in Flanders, one of the safest channels.24 When in 1608 Carvajal asks Creswell for another edition of the Lives of Saints, she insists on the necessity of this kind of book in England, “for these examples are urgently needed by the Catholics . . . and I can translate them into English for my maids and those who visit.”25 She ordered the Lives of Saints, but also works by Juan de Ávila, Luis de Granada, and even “un vocabulario de Antonio, en latín o en español” (that is, a Spanish or Latin dictionary by Antonio de Nebrija). There is no evidence other than this that she was engaged in translation, yet it is likely that these texts might have been read collectively, with Carvajal translating orally into English from the Spanish, or glossing them in Latin (hence the need for Nebrija’s dictionary), probably for the small circle of young maids under her supervision and Catholic families of her acquaintance. Although much has been said about the oral and iconic quality of Catholic indoctrination versus the literate, printed quality of Protestantism, it is important to note that in this case the oral transmission should not be understood as the logical channel to catechize an illiterate population but as the inevitable consequence of the censorship imposed upon Catholic devotional literature. In this regard, Carvajal’s accurate acquaintance with recent Catholic publications, the sophistication of some of her theological arguments, and her fluent use of Latin (as can be traced in most of her correspondence to Joseph Creswell, Rodrigo Calderón, and Luis de la Puente) place her far from the cliché of the illiterate female Catholic devotee. On the contrary, they reveal her to be one of the many learned women on whom Catholic authorities relied for the advancement of the creed.26 Her active commitment to the Catholic cause in England may have been what led the Kinsman brothers to make her the dedicatee of their translation of Alfonso de Villegas’s Flors Sanctorum or the Lives of Saintes (1609): To the Excellent Piouse Lady, Madonna Aloysia & c [T]he holie lives, happie deaths, and glorious raigne of saintes, . . . written by a goldly and learned Spaniard in Spanish, now turned into English, can to none be so well presented, as the most noble Spanish Ladie; leaving Spaine to sojourne in England. Esteeming the reproach of Christ, and of Catholic faith in a strange countrie, better, then not onlie the riches and glorie of Spaine, but also then the quiet repose, and publike use of religion in the Catholike kingdome . . . Through your Ladiship’s handes therefore, this booke shall be passéd to all devote or well disposed persons . . .” K.E. (my italics)27

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The choice of Luisa de Carvajal as dedicatee of the first English translation of a well-known work in Spain that she had likely read in the original Spanish indicates that the Kinsman brothers trusted her commitment to Catholic instruction in Britain. Likewise, Richard Gibbon’s translation of the influential Jesuit Luis de la Puente’s Meditaciones, Meditations vpon the mysteries of our holie faith (Douai, 1610) was also dedicated to her.28 These dedications suggest that Carvajal could easily facilitate the translation, publication, and circulation of these and other books, since her strategic and liminal position as a Spanish alien in England made her an influential player in these cross-national networks. Translation is one of the activities that contribute most actively to the permeability of linguistic and geographical boundaries; it can become a powerful mechanism of hybridization and ideological penetration as well as appropriation. The works of the Jesuits Ribadeneyra, Luis de la Puente, Francisco Suárez, Francisco Arias, and Alfonso Rodríguez were rapidly translated into the European vernacular languages by Catholic presses in the Spanish Netherlands and with the invaluable help of the powerful machine of Spanish imperial politics. A glimpse at these and other Spanish Catholic authors translated into English in the times of Elizabethan and Jacobean persecution of Catholics demonstrates that the Spanish presence was far from negligible. Despite the censorship imposed on English printing and the proliferation of anti-Spanish and anti-papist pamphlet literature, Spanish religious authors were read and translated into English.29 Most of them were published in Flanders—in Douai, St. Omer, Louvain, Antwerp, or Brussels, often in printing presses managed by the Jesuits or owned by Catholic allies. Yet translations, as the example above indicates, managed to cross the Channel and circulate in England, despite censorship. During her time in England, Carvajal was a key figure in the circulation of Catholic books and the dissemination of Catholic cultural practices. In her letters, she often referred to the material circulation of books and other goods and remarked on the best channels to evade control. Ordinary channels would have proved unreliable and unaffordable, therefore most of the time she resorted to the diplomatic couriers of the Spanish ambassador. The status and importance of her addressees justified the privileged channel: her correspondents included prominent Jesuits of the English Mission like Joseph Creswell; Rodrigo Calderón, secretary to the Duke of Lerma; Magdalena de San Jerónimo, a ladyin-waiting to the Infanta in Brussels; and her cousin the Marchioness of Caracena, wife of Luis Carrillo de Toledo, viceroy of Valencia. Sending letters and packages through diplomatic couriers, often via Flanders, did not prevent interception. In a letter from 1610, Carvajal recounts the difficulties encountered in smuggling books from the Continent through customs and describes how, thanks to the direct intervention of the Spanish ambassador, these boxes avoided confiscation: “The books have arrived. It was not little work to pass through customs . . . if it were not Don Pedro’s intervention [Pedro de Zúñiga], boxes would have been opened and everything would have been lost.”30 Despite the apparent difficulties of introducing Catholic books into England, The Lives of Saints underwent at least eight English reimpressions and editions

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between 1609 and 1638, all printed in Flanders or France. This was a very popular work, and not only among English Catholics. Teresa of Ávila had explicitly recommended its reading in her Constitutions, and the Spanish Carmelite nuns in Flanders also demanded it in a French translation.31 Arranged in readings for the twelve months of the year, the narratives of the lives and deaths of martyred saints abound in all kinds of details on their physical torment and liberating deaths. Soon translated into most European languages, the work became an authentic bestseller and was a favorite reading in most religious communities and households. As editions multiplied, exempla of new saints were added to those of martyrs of the early Roman Church. In this way, Ribadeneyra’s and Villegas’s editions in English were augmented with new versions of English and Irish martyrs, which suggests that hagiographies and records of martyrdom were not only vehicles for religious edification but also acts of political resistance.32 The lives of the numerous martyrs of Elizabeth’s and James’s reigns—beginning with Thomas Moore and followed by the emblematic Edmund Campion—constituted narratives appropriated by their Jesuit coreligionists, whose religious zeal matched their political longings for a Catholic monarchy. Edmund Campion’s martyrdom was recorded by Robert Persons and Henry Walpole. Henry Walpole himself was martyred not much later, and his life and death were reported by his Jesuit brother, Michael Walpole, who was Carvajal’s confessor and spiritual director. These hagiographies, readings approved and encouraged by confessors and spiritual advisors, were particularly popular among women, and responded to the Counter-Reformation project of spiritual and physical discipline. The Lives of Saints served as models of conduct and spiritual guides but also as inspiring forces for those willing to follow their example. It is in the imitation of these texts and inspired by them that many women were encouraged to write their autobiographies as an exercise in discipline and self-examination. Some of these texts circulated in manuscript among communities of women, mostly within convents, and were widely read in these communities together with the canonical lives of saints and prayer books. This is the case with the lives of Ana de Jesús, Ana de San Bartolomé, and Anne of the Ascension, all engaged in founding Carmelite convents in Flanders, whose vitae, unlike that of their founder, Teresa of Ávila, circulated in manuscript for a long time before they were published, or were not published at all.33 The Life of Saint Teresa was not only printed but underwent numerous editions and translations, although this was not the rule for spiritual life-writing; Teresa’s early canonization in 1622 no doubt facilitated the dissemination of her Life. At the other extreme was the narrative of the life and death of Margaret Clitherow, an English Catholic whose popularity grew through manuscript and oral circulation and whose vita was not printed until the nineteenth century.34 Jodi Bilinkoff, remarking on the importance of the spiritual biographies, observes that this genre “helped to connect individual Catholics to a pan-European . . . community of believers.” Whether in manuscript or in printed form, some of these autobiographies shared with the canonical texts of the lives of saints the goal of inspiring a life of perfection and, most important, of actively

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engaging women as readers, occasional translators, interpreters, copyists, and consumers in cross-national communities.35 As shown in her letters, Carvajal’s active engagement in the production and circulation of The Lives of Saints, hagiographies, and autobiographies indicates that she valued them as a powerful source of inspiration for these persecuted Catholics that brought them closer to the many English priests imprisoned and tortured under the Penal Laws. Carvajal also evinces in her letters an awareness that the narratives of saints and the spectacle of martyrdom could be conveyed in alternatives to print. Whether in images, manuscript narratives, popular tales transmitted orally, relics, or canonical printed accounts, the lives of saints and martyrs were reproduced, reinvented, and circulated among the community of believers.36 When, in the letter to Creswell cited at the beginning of this essay, Carvajal encloses a piece of Father Robert’s flesh as a relic, she is not only participating in a conventional exchange of gifts but also producing an iconic narrative. Relics were artifacts that played a powerful role and participated equally in the networks established for the circulation of goods and the fortification of patronage relationships. By sending relics of the English martyrs, Carvajal was disseminating news of the Catholic persecution in England to other places in Europe and establishing a symbolic continuity that embraced their cause and that of the Catholic community in general. Furthermore, Carvajal’s engagement with the production and dissemination of relics allowed her to participate in an exclusive gift exchange circuit, in which she repaid the favors she received from her benefactors and friends with relics. In the example cited above, the relic is a “gift” for Ceráin, the legal secretary who helped her in her lawsuit before leaving Spain. Ceráin, in return, sends her Spanish books that she will use in her apostolate.37 Carvajal’s role went beyond that of mere recorder of events, for she realized that whatever happened on the scaffold would not endure unless it was translated into powerful verbal messages. Undeniably, her knowledge of the genre of the lives of saints and martyrs empowered her to undertake the construction of these narratives. Shaping these material and textual discourses was a powerful symbolic practice, legitimized by her membership in an elite group and confirmed by the recipients of the discourse and the exclusive channels of circulation.38 Furthermore, the awareness of her privileged position enabled her to venture into the production and dissemination of these narratives. A letter to Rodrigo Calderón in 1613 provides this vivid description: Through Rivas I am sending your lordship with this some little bows made out of flowers that shout out for love. The joyous blood in which they were dipped was shed out of true love for God’s great glory. With my own hands I bloodied them all over in the very entrails of the last martyr while his veins were still bubbling. It was very glorious, as you will see by the account I shall send you, when I have it neatly written up, sir [my italics].39

Text and relic complement each other in the construction of this memorable narrative. Consequently, Carvajal’s account of martyrdom becomes a complex discourse in which not only do the visual and the verbal interact, but also material

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evidence is incorporated into the textual narrative with stunning immediacy. In doing this, Carvajal once more brings to life the glorious death of the martyr, in an exercise that replicates the physical recreation of the suffering Christ in the Eucharist. This commemoration of the body in pain thus turns the martyr into a natural intermediary with God: “The holiness of the martyr’s life and his presumed prime intercessory position after death,” Anne Dillon contends, “combined to make a potent force which was permanently lodged in and mediated through these relics.”40 After all, in her terrestrial “mediation,” by sending this narrative to the Secretary of the Duke of Lerma, Carvajal secures its circulation in an exclusive and influential circle where boundaries between the political and the devotional are blurred. Not all narratives of martyrdom follow the same pattern. Unlike this case and that of Father Roberts described earlier, Carvajal does not report Henry Garnet’s execution as a witness on the ground. Rather, she purchases the narrative from a reliable witness, “a trustful father . . . who wrote every detail down and then offered it in a most truthful and ordered relation,” and sends it to Spain, “to the fathers of his Nation,” in her firm determination to create this imagined community of Catholic believers.41 Witnesses of executions composed stories, made several copies, and sold them; prisoners likely to become martyrs, Carvajal reports, sold images and pictures from their cells, usually to Catholic devout women who visited them and turned these images into relics. Carvajal not only participated in these iconic productions of martyrdom but also contributed to their commercial dissemination by paying ransom for martyrs’ bodies from Newgate.42 In the same way that Carvajal was engaged in the construction of these narratives, both as texts and relics, she was the recipient of other martyrdom texts that circulated in manuscript. The case of an English martyr called Marta that circulated through Flanders offers a salient example. 43 While still in Valladolid, Carvajal received letters from Magdalena de San Jerónimo reporting on the martyrdom of an English lady. Carvajal asked for the narrative “of the martyrdom of that English lady that I have not seen here.” A few months later, she must have received the account, as she writes again to San Jerónimo: “The relation of this saint Marta, of your own handwriting, has been at the English College until now, and I return it to you at your request.”44 It is not known who this English lady was, but it is not improbable that she was Margaret Clitherow, considering contemporary variations of names. It is through the hands of San Jerónimo in Brussels, who likely copied a Spanish version from an English original, that this narrative circulated in Spain, through Carvajal, to the community of the English Jesuits of St. Alban’s, who in turn accessed this narrative in the Spanish translation. Circulation implied that the material copy of the narrative had to be returned once it was read, probably to continue its transit to other readers. When Carvajal returned the copy, as requested, she demanded more narratives like it: “I pray you to provide us with more, although we send them back, once read,”45 and in doing this, she was fully participating in an elite transnational network that involved textual production and

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circulation at all stages—composition, translation, publication, and circulation— and that questioned national and linguistic boundaries. Traditional historiography has underestimated not only the complexity of women’s letters but their significance as political and religious acts. For Carvajal and other Catholic women during the period of the Penal Laws, letter-writing represented much more than the exchange of personal information. Through correspondence these women transmitted vital information between English and continental Catholics, engaged in religious polemic, and forged religious and political networks. The concept of the early modern personal letter must also be broadened to consider the multi-party circulation of texts and material objects. Women’s epistolary activity thus challenges the traditional dichotomies of public/private, personal/political, and textual/material. As letters, books, and relics passed through the hands of friends, patrons, and co-religionists, women helped build a transnational Catholic community. The extraordinary energy emerging from these letters shows that devout laywomen like Carvajal made things happen and were able to establish solid and reliable alliances through which some of the most fascinating episodes in early modern religious politics took place. Notes  1. “Si me puede vuestra merced enviar un libro de los que he pedido, le suplico lo haga, y deseo mucho los de Cayrasco en verso, de vidas de Santos, todos doce meses: gustan mucho dellos acá algunos que entienden la lengua. . . . Él que vuestra merced me ha hecho merced, recibo ahora: no le he podido ver; veránle los amigos, pero dicen, cuando son en español semejantes cosas, que es bobería y frialdad escribirlas en lengua no inglesa, o por lo menos en latín; dicen, que lo que se escribe para ellos ¿de qué sirve ser en español? [A]hí envío el libro de la religión de Inglaterra, do verá vuestra merced las más monstruosas mentiras que ha oído en su vida. Envióme un gentilhombre protestante el suyo, para que viese su linda religión, y yo he doblado la hoja en cada mentira y contradición, que tiene muchísimas, para que las vea. [M]ostrábale yo a un protestante las horrendas blasfemias que Calvino escribe en su libro de Instituciones en este punto . . . y respondióme que le pesaba en el alma que hubiese dicho tales cosas un tan gran hombre, pero que me aseguraba que, si fuera vivo en este tiempo, él mudara de parecer en ellas. . . [T]enemos el libro que escribió la Santa Madre Teresa de su Vida, en inglés, muy bien traducido. [E]sa reliquia es de la carne del pecho del santo padre Roberts, que, sobre es mala, quite dél. Dé vuestra merced un poco al señor Ceráin de mi parte (a Joseph Creswell, Londres, 3 de septiembre de 1611).” Venerable Dª Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza,. Epistolario y poesías. Edited by Jesús González Marañón and Camilo María Abad. Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, 1965), 329–32. Subsequent quotations will be referred as Epistolario, followed by page number. The English translation follows Glyn Redworth and Chris Henstock, eds, The Letters of Luisa de Carvajal, 2 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012), 2: 171–73.

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 2. There are a number of studies on Luisa de Carvajal. The most thoroughly documented biography is Glyn Redworth, The She-Apostle. The Life and Death of Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). See also Anne J. Cruz, “Luisa de Carvajal y su conexión jesuita,” Actas XI AIH (Irvine: University of California at Irvine, 1994), 97–104; Anne J. Cruz, “Willing Desire: Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza and Female Subjectivity,” in Power and Gender in Renaissance Spain. Eight Women of the Mendoza Family, 1450–1650, ed. Helen Nader (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 177–93, and more recently Cruz’s edition of The Life and Writings of Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza (Toronto: ITER and Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2014); Elizabeth Rhodes, This Tight Embrace: Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza 1566–1614 (Marquette University Press, 2000); María J. Pando-Canteli, “ ‘Tentando vados’: The Martyrdom Politics of Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza,” Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies 10.1 (2010): 17–25.  3. See Redworth and Henstock, eds, The Letters of Luisa de Carvajal.  4. Sara Jane Steen, “Behind the Arras: Editing Renaissance Women’s Letters,” in New Ways of Looking at Old Texts, ed. W. Speed Hill (Binghampton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1993), 20.  5. Jane Couchman and Ann Crabb, “Form and Persuasion in Women’s Letters, 1400– 1700,” in Womens’s Letters across Europe, 1400–1700. Form and Persuasion, ed. Jane Couchman and Ann Crabb (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 5.  6. In the use of the expression “material and symbolic circulation” I am indebted to Anne J. Cruz in her inspiring introduction to Material and Symbolic Circulation between Spain and England, 1554–1604 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008).  7. See María J. Pando-Canteli, “Expatriates. Women’s Communities, Mobility and Cosmopolitanism in Early-Modern Europe: English and Spanish Nuns in Flanders,” in Women Telling Nations, ed. Amelia Sanz and Suzan van Djik (Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2014): 85–101. In this essay I explore the agency of Carvajal and other women in the creation of networks that allowed for the expansion of Spanish Catholic orders on the Continent, particularly the foundation of Carmelite convents in Flanders and the national tensions in the community life.  8. It could be Thomas Rogers’s 1607 edition of the Anglican creed: The faith, doctrine, and religion, professed, & protected in the realme of England, and dominions of the same: expressed in 39 articles, concordablie agreed vpon by the reuerend bishops, and clergie of this kingdome, at two seuerall meetings, or conuocations of theirs, in the yeares of our Lord, 1562, and 1604. One of the very few publications in verse of lives of saints is Templo militante (1603) by Bartolomé Caraysco Figueroa (1540–1610).  9. “ayudando con nuestras palabras la flaqueza de su juicio y memoria” (Epistolario, 294). 10. Alison Shell has studied the oral quality of much of early modern English religious controversy and the importance of orality and popular culture in the transmission and dissemination of both Catholic and anti-Catholic doctrines; Oral Culture and Catholicism in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), esp. 150–60. 11. The lyf of the mother Teresa of Iesus, foundresse of the monasteries of the descalced or bare-footed Carmelite nunnes and fryers,of the first rule. Written by herself, at the commaundement of her ghostly father, and now translated into English, out of Spanish. By W.M. of the Society of Iesus. Very profitable for all vertuous and deuout people, and for all those that are desyrous to be such, or at least do not obstinately depriue themselues of so great a benefit (Antwerp, 1611). See D.M. Rogers and Anthony F. Allison, Contemporary

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Printed Literature of the English Counter-Reformation between 1558 and 1640 (Brookfield, VT: Scholars Press, 1989); “A Bibliography of Spanish-English Translations 1500–1640,” www.ems.kcl.ac.uk/apps/index.html (accessed July 20, 2009). For a study of this translation of St. Teresa’s autobiography, see Kathleen Spinnenweber, “The 1611 English Translation of St. Teresa’s Autobiography: A Possible Carmelite-Jesuit Collaboration,” www.skase.sk/ Volumes/JTI02/pdf_doc/1.pdf (accessed July 20, 2013). 12. These penal laws, published in June 1610 and somehow resulting from the antipapist sentiment after the Gunpowder Plot, enforced persecution against Catholics, issued higher fines against those rejecting the Oath of Allegiance, and forced even more Catholics into exile on the Continent. 13. “El libro contra la proclamación y leyes últimas es muy lindo; pero es en español, que acá vale poco o no nada. Pienso será de gran provecho en inglés para animar y fortificar los católicos. No son, sepa vuestra merced, tan fervorosos como allí los pinta; y éste es un inconveniente, porque ellos mesmos desestiman el libro en viendo algo que no es verdad en él, aunque sea en su favor; y yo lo he visto, cierto, y oído decirles en caso semejante: ¿Para qué escriben esas mentiras en los libros? Si vuestra merced envía uno destos libros a mí o a Mr. Rich, a Lovaina, podrá ser se imprima en inglés” (Epistolario, 333). 14. Robert Persons wrote various texts on the need to restore Catholicism in England. In A Conference About the Next Succession (1594), Persons explicitly advocates the right of the Infanta to the throne of England. On Persons’s particular vision of an encompassing cosmopolitan Catholicism, see Christopher Highley, Catholics Writing the Nation in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 151–87. 15. See Albert Loomie, The Spanish Elizabethans. The English Exiles at the Court of Philip II (New York: Fordham University Press, 1963); Luís Tobío, Gondomar y los católicos ingleses (A Coruña [La Coruña, Spain]: Publicacións da Area de Ciencias Sociales y Políticas do Seminario de Estudios Gallegos, 1987), esp. 244–50. According to Loomie (193), Robert Persons, who was then in Rome as superior of all the English Jesuits, chose three persons as deputies and informants in the still irregular administration of the English Jesuits scattered in Britain and the Continent: Creswell in Spain, Garnet in Britain, and Holt in the Low Countries. 16. Ibid., 193–95. 17. “En lo que toca a España muestran notable desamor a ella, aun muchos de los muy buenos; y ser española no me ha ayudado nada a que me quieran bien. Paréceme piensen que España esté en la natural obligación de servirlos” (Epistolario, 298). 18. “que estando allá, dan satisfacción y parecen muy devotos y santos, [y] venidos acá se truecan muchísimo” (Ibid., 319). 19. See letters to Magdalena de San Jerónimo in May and November 1603 from Valladolid (Epistolario, 131–34, 136–38). 20. A number of authors have written on the conflictive allegiances of the English Catholics. See John Bossy, The English Catholic Community, 1570–1850 (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1975); Mark Netzloff, “The English Colleges and the English Nation. Allen, Persons, Verstegan, and Diasporic Nationalism,” in Catholic Culture in Early Modern England, ed. Ronald Corthell, Frances E. Dolan, Christopher Highley, and Arthur F. Marotti (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 236–60; and Christopher Highley, Catholics Writing the Nation. 21. A proclamation published vnder the name of Iames King of Great Britanny. With a briefe & moderate answere therunto. Whereto are added the penall statutes, made in

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the same kingdome, against Catholikes. Togeather with a letter which sheweth the said Catholikes piety: and diuers aduertisements also, for better vndersatnding of the whole matter. Translated out of Latin into English (Saint-Omer: English College Press, 1611). 22. Richard Gibbons (1547–1632), Jesuit and translator, might have coincided with Carvajal during his time as teacher of canon law in Spain, although most of his activity was developed in Flanders, in Louvain, Douai, and St. Omer. In 1610 he translated Luis de la Puente’s popular Meditations and dedicated it to Carvajal. See Antonio Palau y Dulcet, Manual del librero hispanoamericano. Tomo XIV (Barcelona: Librería Palau, 1962), 257. 23. “que yo la enviaba libros católicos, y ella de allá me enviaba avisos y libros heréticos que allá salían, y era necesario tener de ellos aviso para avisar a España.” The text appears on the envelope of one of the letters sent by Luisa to Ana de Jesús, to Brussels, on November 14, 1613 (Epistolario, 414–15). 24. Inés de la Asunción was one of Carvajal’s companions in the small community she held in Valladolid. Mariana de San José, an Augustinian Recollect and later founder of the Monasterio de la Encarnación in Madrid, kept correspondence with Carvajal and was the one to receive her body when it was repatriated to Spain in 1614. 25. “que hacen falta tales ejemplos a los católicos . . . y yo puedo, a las mías y otros que vienen a mi, volver los en inglés suficientemente” (Epistolario, 245). 26. Frances Dolan’s Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999) offers a thorough revision of the Protestant construction of Catholic women as illiterate and irrational, “loyal to a religion that coddled their incapacities . . . [and] preyed on their ignorance” (27). 27. The liues of saints. Written in Spanish by the learned and reuerend father Alfonso Villegas. Diuine, of S. Dominicks order. Translated out of Italian into English, and compared with the Spanish by W. & E.K. B. (St. Omer, 1609). 28. Puente, a Spanish Jesuit whom Carvajal met in Valladolid, was a firm supporter of the English Mission and advisor to Carvajal on spiritual matters. They corresponded, although only one letter from La Puente to Carvajal is preserved (Epistolario, 453). See Redworth, The She-Apostle, 153–54. 29. On the translation activity of the Jesuits, see Peter Burke, “The Jesuits and the Art of Translation in Early-Modern Europe,” in The Jesuits II: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts 1540–1773, ed. John O’Malley (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 24–32; Rogers and Allison, Contemporary Printed Literature. On English anti-papist pamphlets and literature, see Arthur F. Marotti, Religious Ideology and Cultural Fantasy (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005); Frances Dolan, Whores of Babylon. 30. “Los libros han venido. Ha costado no poco sacarlos de la aduana . . . si no fuera por Don Pedro abrieran la caja y perdiérase todo” (Epistolario, 298). 31. The Spanish Carmelite Ana de San Bartolomé, writing from her convent in Flanders, asks the French Cardinal Pierre Bérulle for books, among them Flos sanctorum: “those of saints’ lives, if they are available in French” [de los de vidas de santos, si los hay en francés]; Julian Urkiza, Obras completas de la Beata Ana de San Bartolomé (Burgos: Editorial Monte Carmelo, 1998), 827. 32. The editions of St. Omer 1621 and 1630 added new lives, and the Rouen edition of 1636 includes the lives of Irish saints like St. Patrick and St. Colome: The liues of saints. Written in spanishe by the R.F. Alfonso Villegas Dominican & faithfully translated into Englishe wherunto are added the liues of sundrie other saints out of F. Ribadeneira. Surius and other approued authors: with the liues of S. Patrick S. Brigid and S. Columba

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patrons of Ireland (Rouen, 1636). See also Stephen Haliczer, Between Exaltation and Infamy: Female Mystics in the Golden Age of Spain (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2002), 29–30. 33. The biography of Ana de Jesús was written and published by Father Angel Manrique in 1631, and the autobiography of Ana de San Bartolomé appeared for the first time in a Flemish translation in 1632. In the case of Anne of the Ascension, her autobiography was never printed and forms part of the manuscript collection at Lanherne. See Anne Hardman, English Carmelites in Penal Times (London: Burns, Oates & Washbourne, 1936). As for Luisa de Carvajal, her autobiography and various writings were collected by her confessor, Michael Walpole, and published in Madrid in 1632 by the Licenciado Muñoz. See also Isabelle Poutrin, Le voile et la plume (Madrid, Casa Velázquez, 1995), 127–34; 221–30. 34. John Mush’s Life of Margaret Clitherow was published in 1877. Frances Dolan notes how this case contrasts with many other male martyrs whose martyrdoms were soon circulating in print (Whores of Babylon, 176). 35. Jodi Bilinkoff, Related Lives. Confessors and Their Female Penitents, 1450–1750 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 98. 36. Anne Dillon, The Construction of Martyrdom in the English Catholic Community (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 98–122. 37. The transit of books and exchange for relics is also documented in other letters. See Epistolario, 319, to Magdalena de San Jerónimo; 183, to Creswell; 345, to Rodrigo Calderón; 370, to the Marquees of Caracena; and 372, to the Countess of Vargas, among others. Glyn Redworth provides an insightful explanation of Carvajal’s creation of relics out of martyred bodies and the detailed account of the process, from the gathering of bodily remains to their dissemination as gifts (“God’s Gift? Sacred Relics, Gift Giving, and Luisa de Carvajal’s Preparation of the Holy During the Long Reformation,” Nuncius. Journal of the Material and Visual History of Science 27.2 (2012): 270–88. 38. Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), esp. 22–24, 164. 39. “Envío aquí por Rivas a vuestra señoría unas flores o lazadas que claman amor. Por amor verdadero y a gran gloria de Dios, se derramó la gran sangre con que están teñidas. Yo las mojé con mi mano en la de sus propias entrañas del mártir último, y venas borbolleando por una y otra parte. Fue muy glorioso, como verá vuestra señoría por la relación que enviaré, cuando la tenga acabada en limpio” (Epistolario, 406). Rodrigo Calderón, secretary to the Duke of Lerma, was married to Inés de Carvajal, Luisa’s cousin. 40. Dillon, The Construction of Martyrdom, 102. 41. “Un padre de toda confianza y verdad, tomando lugar muy cerca, fue apuntándolo todo, y después lo sacó en verdaderísima y ordenada relación. Della compré un traslado que envié a España a los padres de su nación” (Epistolario, 173). The concept of “imagined communities,” coined by Benedict Anderson, makes full sense in this context insofar as the religious community of believers that Carvajal imagines is grounded in the same unselfconscious coherence, materialized in a “myriad of specificities and particularities: . . . this sermon, that tale, this morality play, that relic.” See Anderson’s Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), esp. 16, 23. 42. See for instance Epistolario, 181. The theme is fascinating and deserves a separate analysis. 43. See her account of the martyrdom of Father Garnet, her report on the miracle of Garnet’s straw, and her detailed account of the martyrdom and death of Father Roberts (Epistolario, 172–74, 193, 312–13, 322–24).

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44. “La relación de su letra del martirio de la santa Marta han tenido hasta ahora en el colegio inglés, y yo la vuelvo a vuestra merced porque me lo manda” (Epistolario, 118, 124). 45. “[S]uplico a vuestra merced se sirva de que las veamos, aunque sea para tornarlas a enviar, en leyéndolas” (Epistolario, 126).

Works Cited A proclamation published vnder the name of Iames King of Great Britanny. With a briefe & moderate answere therunto. Whereto are added the penall statutes, made in the same kingdome, against Catholikes. Togeather with a letter which sheweth the said Catholikes piety: and diuers aduertisements also, for better vndersatnding of the whole matter. Translated out of Latin into English. SaintOmer: English College Press, 1611. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Bibliography of Spanish-English Translations, 1500–1640. http://www.ems.kcl. ac.uk/apps/index.html (accessed July 20, 2009). Bilinkoff, Jodi. Related Lives. Confessors and their Female Penitents, 1450–1750. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005. Bossy, John. The English Catholic Community, 1570–1850. London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1975. Bourdieu, Pierre. Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991. Burke, Peter. “The Jesuits and the Art of Translation in Early Modern Europe.” In The Jesuits II: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts 1540–1773, edited by John O’Malley, 24–32. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. Carvajal y Mendoza, Venerable Dª Luisa de. Epistolario y poesías. Edited by Jesús González Marañón and Camilo María Abad. Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, 1965. Corthell, Ronald, Frances E. Dolan, Christopher Highley, and Arthur F. Marotti, eds. Catholic Culture in Early Modern England. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007. Couchman, Jane, and Ann Crabb. “Form and Persuasion in Women’s Letters, 1400– 1700.” In Women’s Letters Across Europe, 1400–1700. Form and Persuasion, edited by Jane Couchman and Ann Crabb, 3–18. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. Cruz, Anne J. “Luisa de Carvajal y su conexión jesuita.” Actas XI AIH. Irvine: University of California at Irvine, 1994, 97–104. http://www.cvc.cervantes.es/ obref/aih (accessed July 13, 2008). ———. “Willing Desire: Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza and Female Subjectivity.” In Power and Gender in Renaissance Spain. Eight Women of the Mendoza Family, 1450–1650, edited by Helen Nader, 177–93. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004. Cruz, Anne J., ed. The Life and Writings of Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza. Toronto: ITER and Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2014.

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———. Material and Symbolic Circulation between Spain and England, 1554– 1604. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. Dillon, Anne. The Construction of Martyrdom in the English Catholic Community. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002. Dolan, Frances E. Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender and SeventeenthCentury Print Culture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999. Haliczer, Stephen. Between Exaltation and Infamy: Female Mystics in the Golden Age of Spain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Hardman, Anne. English Carmelites in Penal Times. London: Burns, Oates & Washbourne, 1936. Highley, Christopher. Catholics Writing the Nation in Early Modern Britain and Ireland. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Hulfton, Olwen. “ ‘Every Tub on Its Own Bottom’: Funding a Jesuit College in Early Modern England.” In The Jesuits II: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts 1540–1773, ed. John O’Malley, 5–23. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. Loomie, Albert J. The Spanish Elizabethans. The English Exiles at the Court of Philip II. New York: Fordham University Press, 1963. Marotti, Arthur F. Religious Ideology and Cultural Fantasy. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005. Nader, Helen, ed. Power and Gender in Renaissance Spain: Eight Women of the Mendoza Family, 1450–1650. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004. Netzloff, Mark. “The English Colleges and the English Nation. Allen, Persons, Verstegan, and Diasporic Nationalism.” In Catholic Culture in Early Modern England, edited by Ronald Corthell, Frances E. Dolan, Christopher Highley, and Arthur F. Marotti, 236–60. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007. Palau y Dulcet, Antonio, Manual del librero hispanoamericano. Tomo XIV. Barcelona: Librería Palau, 1962. Pando-Canteli, María J. “Expatriates. Women’s Communities, Mobility and Cosmopolitanism in Early-Modern Europe: English and Spanish Nuns in Flanders,” in Women Telling Nations, ed. Amelia Sanz and Suzan van Djik, 85–101. Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2014. ———. “ ‘Tentando vados’: The Martyrdom Politics of Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza.” Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies 10, no. 1 (2010): 17–25. Redworth, Glyn. “God’s Gift? Sacred Relics, Gift Giving, and Luisa de Carvajal’s Preparation of the Holy During the Long Reformation.” Nuncius. Journal of the Material and Visual History of Science 27, no. 2 (2012): 270–88. ———. The She-Apostle. The Life and Death of Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Redworth, Glyn, and Chris Henstock, eds. The Letters of Luisa de Carvajal. 2 vols. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012. Rhodes, Elizabeth. “Join the Jesuits, See the World: Early Modern Women in Spain and the Society of Jesus.” In The Jesuits II: Cultures, Sciences, and

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the Arts 1540–1773, edited by John O’Malley, 33–50. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. ———. This Tight Embrace: Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza 1566–1614. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2000. Rogers, D.M., and Anthony F. Allison. Contemporary Printed Literature of the English Counter-Reformation between 1558 and 1640. Brookfield, VT: Scholars Press, 1989. Shell, Alison. Oral Culture and Catholicism in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Spinnenweber, Kathleen. “The 1611 English Translation of St.  Teresa’s Autobiography: A Possible Carmelite-Jesuit Collaboration.” http://www.pulib. sk./skase/Volumes/JTI02/pdf_doc/1.pdf (accessed July 20, 2013). Steen, Sarah Jane. “Behind the Arras: Editing Renaissance Women’s Letters.” In New Ways of Looking at Old Texts, edited by W. Speed Hill, 20. Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1993. Tobío, Luís. Gondomar y los católicos ingleses. A Coruña [La Coruña, Spain]: Publicacións da Area de Ciencias Sociales y Políticas do Seminario de Estudios Gallegos, 1987. Urkiza, Julián. Obras completas de la Beata Ana de San Bartolomé. Burgos: Monte Carmelo, 1998. Villegas, Alfonso de. The liues of saints. Written in Spanish by the learned and reuerend father Alfonso Villegas. Diuine, of S. Dominicks order. Translated out of Italian into English, and compared with the Spanish by W. & E.K. B. St. Omer, 1609.

15 Women Apostles in Early Modern Japan, 1549–1650 Haruko Nawata Ward*

During the Christian Century in Japan (1549–1650), Japanese women cultivated various forms of ministry, drawing on both Buddhist and Christian monastic traditions. Early modern missionary documents not only describe these women as pious and devout but also note their genuine religious vocation. In various languages, they are referred to as bicuni (nuns), jennhonin (female lay preachers), virgens (women who took the vow of perpetual sexual renunciation), superioras (abbesses), mardomas (heads of confraternities), caseras (women who provided shelters for refugee priests), beatas (holy women), and pinzochere (tertiary women), as well as in more general terms as confessoras (survivors of torture), martyrs, and saints.1 I have discussed elsewhere the diverse types of these women apostles who contributed to the steady growth of the nascent Christian church and sustained their communities during persecution.2 This essay further examines several examples of devout women in whom missionaries recognized an apostolic vocation. Missionary records are my main sources because they preserve fragments of these women’s written and spoken words and provide ample descriptions of their actions. Unfortunately, almost all writings by the women themselves were either destroyed or lost during the periods when Japanese rulers instigated persecutions of Christian converts. Like other biographies of martyrs and aspiring saints, these documents are hardly objective. Historians need to note the missionary tendency to use hyperbole to appeal to their readers in Europe. Yet there is a strong indication that these women shared the missionaries’ idea of an apostolate and strove to embody it in contexts far from Europe. Their records show that the most prominent aspect of any woman’s apostolate was witnessing to the faith, or missionary evangelization, through public proclamation, debate, persuasion, and resistance to religious oppression to the point of martyrdom. Both Jesuits and mendicant friars (who did not necessarily work amicably together in the mission field) recorded the lives and deeds of Japanese women. The mendicants’ documentation is sparse compared to the Jesuits’; nonetheless, there is more than sufficient evidence of Japanese women’s active apostolate underground. By reading these documents chronologically and in comparison, it becomes apparent that the missionaries came to genuinely respect and were often amazed by these

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women’s pursuit of costly discipleship. Working in the difficult environment of Japan, and always understaffed, the missionaries relied heavily upon laity in the work of evangelization. They quickly recognized women’s contributions and the importance of collaborating with women in their shared apostolic mission. But they did not expect to see these women take up their apostolic spirit to the point of banishment and execution by the Japanese government. As the church never established any official religious orders for women in Japan during this period, technically, these women were devout laywomen. Yet the fact that missionaries referred to them with religious (bicuni) and semi-religious titles (tertiary women) suggests that the missionaries to some extent accepted the women’s self-definition as apostles. Their strong commitment, courage, and sense of authority initially did not fit readily within the missionaries’ expectations about these women converts. However, unofficially many missionaries came to view the women as their companions. The best known of these was Naitō Julia (ca. 1566–1627), a former abbess of a Buddhist nunnery, who was inspired by Jesuit missionaries and established a society of Christian women catechists called the Miyaco no bicuni (Nuns of Miyako). Women catechists’ success in converting people is well documented by the Jesuits; however, because of their success the government banished the Miyaco no bicuni from Japan in 1614. The Jesuits continued to record the history of these women, who became contemplatives, during their exile in the Philippines until 1656. Other women to be examined worked closely with the Jesuits, Dominicans, Franciscans, and Augustinians during the harsh years of persecution in Japan. These included virgins (virgens) who became martyrs when they refused to break their vows of virginity and marry (Blessed Hayashida Magdalena, d. 1613, and Oiwa Monica, d. 1624); heads of underground women’s confraternities (Julia of Kami, d. 1630); and Blessed Lucía de Freitas, a Franciscan tertiary burned at the stake in 1622. The Society of Jesus under Portuguese royal patronage established the first Christian mission in Japan in 1549. For the next fifty years, a papal bull guaranteed a Jesuit monopoly on this mission. The Society, as a clerical order without a second order for nuns or a third order for the laity, did not plan to promote the religious vocation of women in Japan. Yet in Japan, as elsewhere, the Jesuit active apostolate, including their strong commitment to missionary work in the world, attracted many women. Earlier, a conflict erupted between Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Society, and his long-time supporter Isabel Roser and her two female companions, whom Loyola briefly admitted as members in the Society (1545–1546).3 This conflict led Loyola to dismiss Isabel and other women from the Society and encourage them to enter enclosed monasteries. Loyola sought and obtained the papal bull Licet debritum, which permanently released the Society from the obligations of the curacy of women’s souls. The Society’s Constitutions of 1558 clearly state that the Jesuits must not “take charge of religious women or any other women whatever to be their regular confessors or to direct them.”4 Thus the door was shut to any effort to establish an official female Jesuit order. The Jesuits’ decision was in conformity with the decrees of the Council of Trent

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and subsequent papal legislation, which mandated enclosure for nuns and tertiary women who had taken solemn vows.5 But in reality, as Norberg states, “the Tridentine edicts concerning claustration had little or no effect” in many sectors of the Catholic world, especially in light of “the appearance of so many ‘active’ orders.”6 When the women working with Mary Ward (1585–1645) adopted a Jesuit-style active apostolate, they met with many criticisms from the Jesuits and faced papal suppression. Other women associated with the Jesuits in England remained lay in order to pursue an active apostolate. In France, some Jesuits and bishops supported women who adopted the Jesuit active apostolate, but designated them not as religious but as members of the confraternity with a simple private vow.7 In Japan, although the Jesuits never established a women’s branch and did not allow women to be official members, they let their women followers live out their missionary ideal, so central to their mission, rather freely. In contrast to their European counterparts, they never mocked these women as Jesuitesses nor cited their Constitutions or any other ecclesiastical regulations to prohibit Japanese women from adopting an active apostolate. This did not mean that these Japanese women faced no challenges. The Jesuits in Japan were assigned as bishops after Japan became a Catholic diocese in 1588, and they also were responsible for promulgating Tridentine standards. Yet they were able to maintain much freedom in their way of proceeding. They adopted a policy of cultural accommodation, which went beyond a superficial compliance with Japanese social decorum to embrace the publication of literature in Japanese and the inclusion of native catechists as preachers. While the Jesuits included these male catechists in their ranks, and later initiated the ordination of native clergy, they did not grant the same privilege to women. In general the Jesuits in Japan followed the church’s teachings that the primary role of a woman was to be that of a wife and mother. Japanese political, social, familial, and religious conditions were never favorable to women’s conversion to Christianity—a foreign religion. Women were expected to stay home, bear sons, and serve the family members at the patriarchs’ will. Only very exceptional Buddhist nuns were able to exercise public leadership. Gradually the Tokugawa government systematized and gained control of all these feudal families. The active Christian women discussed in this essay faced not only opposition from their immediate families but government persecution as the leaders of a prohibited religion and rebels who stepped out of their place in the family in pursuit of their religious vocation. Yet women converts in the Jesuit mission responded to what they perceived as an apostolic calling. By 1587 the presence of the Christian church had grown to the extent that Unifier Toyotomi Hideyoshi issued an Edict of Expulsion of the Jesuit Fathers, which stated that Christianity was destroying traditional Japanese values. In 1597, one year after the first bishop, Pedro Martins, a Jesuit, arrived in Japan, Hideyoshi ordered the execution of twenty-six missionaries and Japanese male Christian leaders in Nagasaki. About this time, Bishop Martins confirmed Naitō Julia, who had been baptized earlier. Around 1600 Julia founded and became the superiora of Miyaco no bicuni. Women catechists of Julia’s society took the three

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vows of virginity, poverty, and obedience under the supervision of two Jesuits. Following the Jesuit model, these women were active evangelists, preachers, teachers, catechizers, baptizers, pastoral leaders, and religious debaters. The friars from Manila under Spanish royal patronage also sought ways to work in Japan in the 1590s. Most of the twenty-six martyrs of Nagasaki (1597) belonged to the Franciscan order. In 1608 the Franciscans, Dominicans, and Augustinians succeeded in securing papal revocation of the former bull (1585) that restricted evangelization in Japan to the Jesuits. These mendicants had longstanding associations with devout women in their second and third orders, and they quickly made provisions for Japanese laywomen and men to become members of tertiary orders. Their brief stay did not allow them to create the second order of professed nuns, however. After Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu established his government in 1603 and adopted Confucianism as the state ideology in 1607, Confucian principles began to permeate political, social, familial, educational, and religious structures. In 1612 the second Shogun, Hidetada, reissued the total ban on Christianity. In 1614 the government expelled missionaries and religious leaders, including the Miyaco no bicuni, from Japan. The Miyaco no bicuni resettled in the house beside the Jesuit church in San Miguel outside of Manila and became contemplative beatas. Between 1614 and 1650, the Tokugawa government tried to eradicate all Christians from Japan. During these years of harsh persecution, women apostles continued to work among underground communities alongside the missionaries in hiding. Martyrdom became the final destiny for Hayashida Magdalena, Oiwa Monica, Julia of Kami, and Lucía de Freitas. Seventeenth-century missionary reports did not wait for the formal process of beatification to designate these women martyred saints. Naitō Julia and Miyaco no bicuni The story of Naitō Julia and her society of women catechists, as recorded in two contemporary Jesuit texts, reveals many facets of Japanese women’s apostolate during the Christian Century. In the Jesuit annual letter of 1634–1635 from the Province of the Philippines, Juan de Salazar (1582–1645) reported on the monastic community of elderly Japanese women who had been expelled from Japan two decades earlier and were being cared for by the Jesuits in Manila. Noting the deaths of four members in recent years and the fact that there were only six living members in the community, Salazar felt a need to preserve the memory of the origin of this community in Japan. He included an extensive account of the community’s founder, Doña Nayto Julia, who had died in 1627 at the age of sixtytwo. He confirmed her noble lineage: she was a sister of the late Don Juan Toucan Nayto, once the feudal king of Tamba, who also had died in exile in San Miguel. Salazar, a Spanish missionary in Manila since 1605, used several designations for Julia’s vocation. First he describes her as a nun (monja) who had converted from

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Buddhism to Christianity. Forty-two-year-old Julia had been an extremely devout, fervent, and bright “Buddhist nun” (o monja gentil) for twenty years.8 During her Buddhist meditation, she learned, through “natural reason” (“por razon natural”), that the true salvation of her soul by God the Creator of heaven and earth would be achieved through the Christian religion. Guided by this “ray of light” (rayo de luz), the “enlightened” (alumbrada) Julia heard catechetical sermons, was baptized, and soon was confirmed.9 Immediately she devoted herself to the service of Jesus Christ with the same fervor she had shown in her service as a Buddhist nun. Julia and her female Christian companions, after consecrating themselves to Christ by taking the three vows, founded a community. Salazar had no problem equating European and Japanese Buddhist nuns: he called Julia’s community “a monastery of Christian bicuni” (“un monasterio de Becuni [sic] Christianas”).10 For him, the differences between the European nuns and Buddhist bicuni were minimal. Both were devout women who wore a distinguishing habit, but instead of a veil, the bicuni wore something like a “scholar’s cap” (virreta). The praiseworthy devotion of the bicuni was redirected from the “false gods of Japan” (“los dioses falses de Japon”) to the Christian God.11 As the “holy founder,” “captain,” “superior,” and “rector” of this community of Christian bicuni, Julia composed the Rule in twelve sections.12 All these guidelines concerned discipline in mental prayer, litanies, meditation, spiritual exercises, and mortification of the flesh, according to a daily schedule and liturgical season. Beyond the penitential character of the Rule, Salazar underscored how Julia became a very successful evangelist for the Jesuits: Usually she taught non-Christians Christian doctrine, catechizing them so that they would be converted to our holy faith and be baptized, and at the same time, she attended to the teaching of Christians, instructing them so that they would be ready to confess and receive the holy sacrament. And she was so busy with these holy ministries that regardless of her deep desire to retreat so as to make the [spiritual] exercises of our father Saint Ignatius, she was seldom able to obtain them from the fathers of our Society because they were continuously sending her to evangelize in various kingdoms, cities, and private houses where our own could not go.13

According to this description, the Jesuits entrusted Julia with the task of being a Jesuit evangelistic catechist-preacher (dōjucu) and sent her as their missionary, even when she wanted to practice quiet meditation by making Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises. Moreover, the Jesuits granted Julia full authority to baptize on their behalf. Salazar explains that Japanese noblewomen of the highest rank would not speak with men, not even Buddhist clergy. Julia opened the door for the conversion of these women: not only was she a noblewoman of royal blood, which allowed her access to other noblewomen, but she also was gifted with intelligence, prudence, and versatile knowledge of Buddhist doctrine and was thus able to differentiate “false” Buddhist teachings from the “true” teachings of the Catholic faith. Julia

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was apparently very successful at this task: “Convinced by the reasoning of Lady Julia, many ladies of Japan with their daughters and families accepted our holy faith and received baptism by her hand because we [the Jesuits] were not able to administer it.”14 Canon law does allow the laity to perform baptism, in emergency situations, such as imminent death, when a priest is not available. However, in these situations, the Jesuits appear to have adopted a very broad definition of emergency and allowed Julia a sacerdotal role in baptizing these numerous noblewomen converts. There clearly was close collaboration between Naitō Julia and the Jesuits in an environment that was increasingly hostile toward Christian conversion. For example, Salazar said that the Jesuits sent Julia to secretly baptize the “Queen,” a wife of a “King” (or daimyo) of the three large kingdoms of Vijen, Farima, and [Mi] masaka, and her infant son. After her baptism, the queen sent her other two young sons and many of her servants to the Jesuits for their baptism. Because the queen wanted to make a confession but the Jesuits could not approach her, her Christian servants “made a small hole in the wall of her room, through which Father Pedro Morejón heard her confession to her heart’s content.”15 Julia’s public proselytizing met with violent reactions from her former Buddhist colleagues, who appealed to the authorities to arrest and execute her. The 1587 Edict of Expulsion of the Jesuit Fathers was never rescinded, making her evangelism an act of defiance of the law. Salazar emphasized Julia’s desire for martyrdom, but said that the Jesuits thought it better for her to hide from the public to avoid persecution of the entire church. In obedience to the Jesuits, she fled from Kyoto three times and stayed away for several years. While Julia was a missionary elsewhere, she entrusted to Nacaxima Madalena, her cousin and “the true reflection of her virtues and prudence,” “not only the governance of the house and her companions but also the office of preaching.”16 It is important to note that Salazar called the members of Julia’s society “women companions” (compañeras), corresponding to his use of “companions” (compañeros) for the members of the Society of Jesus, again indicating the Jesuit sentiment that these women were partners in their mission.17 It is also important to note that Salazar used the term “the office” of preaching, which the Jesuits normally reserved for their missionaries and male catechists who specialized in preaching in Japanese. Naitō Julia and Nacaxima Madalena thus acted as unofficial preachers in the Jesuits’ stead. When Julia returned to Kyoto, her daughters received her with joy. Salazar depicted Julia as beloved and respected by all those with whom she interacted through her holy work. Her outreach extended beyond the circle of noblewomen to men and women of all classes. Her dedication to the “salvation of these neighbors” was fueled by her frequent “fervent prayers” and “extensive retreats to make the Exercises.” God adorned her with all virtues of the perfect degree in “an enlightened charity” and “blazing love” for her neighbors. Her virtues of patience, humility, and chastity were angelic and she never had “bad thoughts,” even when conversing and discussing with a wide variety of people.18

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It is difficult to determine if Julia’s lost writings contained such expressions of fervent prayer, blazing love, and designation of God as divine Majesty, so reminiscent of Teresa of Ávila. Salazar may have borrowed these images and attributed them to Julia. However, other documents also attest that Julia’s ministry reached across the social boundaries of class, gender, age, geography, and national origin at a time when Tokugawa Confucian society was becoming stringently hierarchical, stratified, and xenophobic. Following the second ban on Christianity issued by Shogun Hidetada in 1612, the magistrate of Kyoto destroyed Christian temples and the oratory of Julia’s community. During the second week of Advent in 1613, soldiers arrested Julia and her women and demanded that they renounce their faith. There are several accounts of torture administered to Julia and the members of her community. The letter of 1634–1635, for example, underscores the use of shaming (verguença) tactics: these monastic women were verbally threatened and their naked bodies exposed in public.19 The letter also includes an incident in which a Buddhist priest (bonço) covers Julia’s naked, tortured body with his mantle and tells her to become a religious (religiosa) of Amida Buddha (of Jōdo-shū). Julia spits in his face, and the confused and shamed priest goes away cursing these women to hell.20 Salazar gives a powerfully hagiographic portrayal of these women as pure, resolute, defiant, and joyful “saints, servants of God, and the brides of Jesus Christ,”21 covered with the garment of snow, as pure as “the Lord’s in his day of transfiguration,” and praising God in celestial harmony.22 In the freezing cold, they are “ablaze with love in their souls,” and their faces are “as beautiful as the angles.”23 The evening is for them a “Christmas Eve” (Nochebuena). As these women would not renounce their faith, the shogunate ordered their expulsion from Japan with the Jesuits. They were transported from Kyoto to Nagasaki and from there deported to Manila on November 8, 1614. The ship arrived in Manila on February 21, 1615. Salazar concludes his eulogy of Julia: “[The women] arrived [in Manila] . . . for the great good of everyone in this Republic of [the] Philippines and our Province. In this city, they were able to proceed with their religious way of life without anyone bothering them. They all live together in a community in a house next to our church in this village of San Miguel, with great edification and example for all in this empire of many and such diverse nations.”24 Although Salazar did not state it clearly, we know from other sources that the life of these women radically changed in the Philippines, where they adopted enclosure and abandoned the active apostolate that was their defining characteristic in Japan. Salazar writes that the women engaged in intercessory prayers, using a list of the names of people for whom they prayed, “especially Jesuits.”25 He describes the relationship between the women and the Jesuits in filial terms: the women were “glad for the success and progress of this Province, and felt sorry for their adversity, like a mother who is pleased with the good fortune but upset by the affliction of her sons.”26 The Society saw to it that the women received adequate

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donations to sustain themselves, noting that they “only cared about the greater glory of God and obtaining the greatest happy progress for the Province and our Society of Jesus, whom they, like a sweetest mother, keep in the most intimate part of their hearts.”27 Of course “for the greater glory of God” was the Jesuit motto. In addition to these expressions of emotional and spiritual ties, which seem to have bound Julia’s society and the Jesuits, the Jesuits in Manila took care of the women’s physical welfare. While the Society supported male catechists (dōjucu and cambō) financially as semi-clerical members, Julia’s community in Japan was self-supporting. In Manila, however, women of this diaspora community were reduced to poverty and depended on charity. At the end of Julia’s life story, Salazar adds short paragraphs on four other members of her community. Nacaxima Madalena, who co-founded the community with Julia and served as abbess in Julia’s absence, died in 1622. Iga Maria, a daughter of the daimyo of Iga and also a founding member of the community, died in 1636.28 She catechized non-Christians in Japan for many years, and upon her advice several noblewomen received baptism. She taught Christians how to confess and receive communion. Paccu Marina, originally from Korea, received baptism in 1606 and joined Julia’s community in 1612. She became blind but had celestial visions and died in 1636. Salazar notes that when Madalena, Maria, and Marina joined the community, they entrusted all their worldly goods to Julia, “following the examples of the Christians of the Early Church.”29 Other members came from the lower social strata. The fourth member of the community, whose death in 1636 was noted by Salazar, was Lucia, Julia’s maidservant. She served in the community kitchen initially, but after many years was allowed to take the three vows to join the beatas.30 Francisco Colín (1592–1660), another Spanish Jesuit missionary in Manila, dedicated four long chapters to the “Congregacion de las Señoras Japonas, consagradas de Dios” (Congregation of the Japanese Ladies, Consecrated to God) in his massive Labor Evangélica, completed in 1656 as the official Jesuit history of the Philippines mission. Arriving in Manila in 1626, Colín became one of the women’s confessors. In these chapters, he reconstructs the history of this community from contemporary eyewitness accounts, Jesuit annual letters, personal interviews, confessors’ reports, and journals (now lost) written in Japanese by some women. Colín noticed the discrepancy between the Jesuit principles of not having a female house and the character of Julia’s community, which seemed very much like an order of nuns. The community did not enjoy papal recognition, but “it lacked nothing for a very perfect life, very similar to that which the orders approved by the Holy See profess.”31 Colín describes the active apostolate of Julia and her society in Japan but spends much more energy describing the visions and contemplative life of the last members, Luzia de la Cruz (1580–1656) and Tecla Ignacia (1579–1656), whom he personally knew well.32 With great respect and affection for these confessoras, Colín records many visions and intercessory prayers that they provided for the Jesuits and for the diverse population of colonial and native residents in San Miguel and Manila. He calls these women servants of God, confessoras, compañeras, virgens, beatas, santas, and recogidas (women

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withdrawn from the world). He writes that he witnessed the deaths of the two last members of the community in 1656 and depicts the scenes of funeral Mass that the Jesuits said for them: “[T]o fulfill the obligation that these servants of God were always known to have deserved, so also at the death [of Luzia and Tecla] all the religious of the [Jesuit] Province offered the same numbers of masses and votive prayers for them as they do for their own dead.”33 Thus, both Salazar and Colín referred to Naitō Julia and her women catechists with numerous reverential designations. The Jesuits regarded them not simply as devout helpers of the mission but as their apostolic companions in evangelism, ministries, prayers, persecution, and expulsion. Neither the women nor the Jesuits explain why the Miyaco no bicuni adopted enclosure in exile; perhaps cultural and language differences made it necessary. Yet both Jesuits affirm that in their active apostolate in Japan for fourteen years and in their contemplative life devoted to intercessory prayers intramuros in San Miguel for thirty-nine years, these women’s devotion to God and the Jesuit mission, as well as the Jesuits’ admiration and support of them, albeit unofficial, was continuous. Blessed Hayashida Magdalena Both Jesuits and mendicants left records of several individual women who took vows of virginity and actively persuaded others to accept their faith. Unlike the Miyaco no bicuni, they did not form a society. Martyrdom, literally witnessing, became the final act of evangelization for some of these virgens. Blessed Hayashida Magdalena was burned alive in 1613 by the order of Daimyō Arima Naozumi Miguel, an apostate son of the Christian Daimyō Harunobu Protásio. Magdalena, about eighteen years old at the time of her death, died with her parents (Hayashida Sukeemon León and Marta), her twelve-year-old brother, Diogo, and four others. In his report, the Portuguese Jesuit Sebastián Vieira (1572–1634) focuses on the actions of Magdalena, referring to her consistently as a virgin (virgem).34 After the sentencing, the eight processed to the execution site, dressed in white garb marked with a cross in front and back. The members of their Marian confraternity flanked the procession, carrying candles and rosaries and singing litanies antiphonally in loud voices. At the site, the officials tied each to a pole and started the fire. Vieira notes the special devotion that Magdalena invoked in the onlookers. When the cords that tied her hands burned off, Magdalena took the embers with her freed hands and held them over her head as a sign of reverence. Then, as she was “on the way to enjoy her spouse” (“o meio de ir gozar seu esposo”), she bowed down, making the sign of the cross with her right hand “with much tranquility” (“con muito quietação”). Although Magdalena did not preach, Blessed Jacinto Orfanel (1578–1622), a Spanish Dominican witness, interprets this dramatic gesture as a verbal act: “as if she were saying, ‘I place these [burning embers] over my head, I respect and adore them,’ and knowing that the Lord provided her these means by which to give her the Lord’s mercy.”35 Vieira and Orfanel confirm that Christians

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who observed Virgem Magdalena’s holy death initially stole her body for relics. Eventually, her body was returned to Bishop Luís Cerqueira, also a Portuguese Jesuit. The bishop celebrated a special mass for virgin martyr Magdalena and buried her alongside her parents in the Jesuit cemetery. At her burial, the bishop declared that these eight were true martyrs and that therefore the faithful should venerate their relics, “as permitted by the Sacred Council of Trent.”36 This declaration was finally fulfilled in 2008 when the Vatican beatified 188 martyrs of Japan, including Hayashida Magdalena and her companions. The Vatican and Japanese bishops emphasized the obedience of wives and children who followed their familial faith to martyrdom.37 They do not note Magdalena’s special vocation as a virgem, which both Vieira and Orfanel underscored. Oiwa Monica Other cases of virgens show more explicitly how their refusal to marry was problematic. Tokugawa Confucian society demanded that women observe filial piety. It was customary for feudal lords and patriarchs to arrange marriages for political and military alliances and to produce male heirs. However, virgin Christian women who were unwilling to break the vow of chastity (virgendade) paid for their steadfastness with their lives. Virgem Oiwa Monica was executed alone at age twenty-seven in Kubota on February 14, 1624. The account by the Portuguese Jesuit João Rodrigues Giram (1558–1629) underscores that Monica died to protect her vow of virginity. In 1622 Monica, whose last name is not known, was serving as a lady-inwaiting for Lady Nixinomaru, the second wife of Lord Satake of Akita. Lord Satake sent Nixinomaru away to Kyoto when it was discovered that she had received secret baptism with her court ladies. Monica came to live with her elder brother, who arranged her marriage. First, Monica said that she would consider marriage to a Christian man, whether he was from “a high or lower class, poor or rich,” but under no circumstances would she marry a non-Christian.38 Her brother rejected her offer and harassed her until she declared that she would not marry anyone, much less a non-Christian, because of her vow as a Christian virgem. Her bewildered brother sent a Christian man named Katsu Uneme João to question her. In her reply to Uneme João, Monica’s strong identity as a virgem is clearly apparent: It has been two years since my brother talked to me about marriage, partly because he wants me to marry someone who would not give him trouble, without lowering his social status, and partly because I am living in his house despite what happened to my women companions who finally succumbed and left the faith. . . . My brother did not want me to marry a Christian as I suggested first. I did not want to marry a non-Christian, whom he suggested, because in so doing I will place my soul at risk. That was why I made up my mind to take a vow of chastity, which I did, and made a promise to Saint Mary. Why would

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I want to mock Holy Mary? As a consequence, I cannot marry, either a Christian or non-Christian.39

Uneme João reported back to her brother and explained to him how serious such a Christian vow was. Her brother also respected such religious vows and no longer pressed Monica to marry. Late in 1623, the wife of Governor Umezu Hariemon demanded twice that Monica renounce her faith and marry someone whom she designated. Monica made it clear that she would “give her life to Christ” (“pera dar a Vida per Christo”). Her relatives tried to make her renounce her faith, even bribing the servants not to call her by her Christian name, Monica, but refer to her by her Japanese name, Iwa. To demonstrate her determination, Monica went into a room in front of her relatives and shaved her head, saying, “Look here, I am this determined” (“resoluta”). For Japanese, shaving one’s head was an act of renouncing the world. Her relatives then delivered her to the authorities. In February 1624 the governor ordered her execution. Giram praises this pure virgem, stating that her beheading made “the snow red with her holy blood, while her soul, whiter and purer than the snow, flew to the sky” (“a neve vermehla com o santo sangue e a alma mais branca e pura que a neve vodando a ceo”).40 There is a posthumous legend surrounding Monica. Her relatives were alleged to have hidden a box that contained her remains so that the Christians could not remove them for relics. In July a great flood washed up her unmarked coffin at the gate of Tentokuji, the governor’s family temple. They found her body still beautiful and life-like. They reburied her in a plot next to the temple. Then people began seeing beautiful boys circling the pine tree in the courtyard of the temple at night, and Christians thought that these were angels celebrating the feast of the holy martyr. On the anniversary of Monica’s death in 1625, a fire destroyed the temple and all the priests and monks perished. Giram concludes her story on March 25, 1626, recalling King Nebuchadnezzar’s first dream in the Book of Daniel, in which “a small stone came down from heaven, hit the great statue and destroyed it, breaking it into pieces.” Giram compares Monica to that divine stone, which destroyed the kingdoms of idol worshippers, saying, “Now, this is our rock (that is what Monica’s Japanese name Iwa means), which coming out of the river with the flood, hit this great temple and destroyed it.”41

Julia of Kami While the women catechists and virgens took vows, other devout women exercised apostolic leadership without vows as the heads of lay confraternities. They functioned as pastors, chaplains, and elders for those under their care. The rules and descriptions of confraternities from 1612 and 1618 noted the office of jennhonin (literally “good woman:), boa mulher (good woman), or buone vecchie (good elderly women).42 By designating this as an office, the Jesuits recognized

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these women’s semi-religious status. The Portuguese Jesuit Cristóvão Ferreira (ca. 1580–1650) notes that Julia of Kami, a widow, was head (mardoma) of a confraternity of women in Amakusa for many years. This “good woman,” “with her devotion and exemplary life,” guided other women “with much zeal and spiritual benefits, so that they respected Julia’s virtue and authority and followed her good counsel.”43 When Julia was sixty, the authorities removed her from her residence because of her public Christian witness. She retreated to a nearby forest with other Christians. Her community, also on the run, had not forgotten her ministry to them. Their attempts to return Julia to her home failed, and Julia moved on to Uchida, where she hid among other Christian women. In the next wave of persecution, she fled into a forest for forty days. She was sustained by the alms of Christian refugees. Ferreira reports with sadness that she gradually wasted away and was found dead sometime in September 1630. Blessed Lucía de Freitas The Dominicans, Franciscans, and Augustinians readily appointed women as heads of their confraternities and admitted several devout women to their tertiary orders. Compared to the numerous detailed Jesuit accounts, records of the mendicant orders are limited, although more women associated with these orders received earlier beatification.44 Reliable sources are few for the two canonized virgin martyr saints Saint Magdalena of Nagasaki (d. 1634), a tertiary claimed by both the Dominicans and the Augustinians, and Saint Marina of Ōmura (d. 1634), a Dominican tertiary. Documentation on the martyrdom of three Franciscan missionaries and fifteen male and three female Christians all associated with the mendicants, on August 16, 1627, in Nagasaki, come from the Jesuit records. All were beatified in 1867. Blessed Tsuji Vaz Maria, a Franciscan tertiary, was martyred with her Korean-born husband. Blessed Kiyota Magdalena was a Dominican tertiary. Very little was recorded about Blessed Francisca Pinzòchera, who was also a Dominican tertiary.45 Her son Antonio died in the same persecution. Her curious designation “Pinzòchera” suggests that she lived like a beguine. An example of a woman with strong vocational identity and multiple religious affiliations was Blessed Lucía de Freitas. At age eighty, she was the only woman burned at the stake with twenty-four priests on September 10, 1622, in Nagasaki. She was a Franciscan tertiary and a protector (casera) of the Franciscan priest Blessed Ricardo de Santa Ana (1585–1622) in her house, but also a mardoma of the Dominican Confraternity of the Rosary.46 By the time of their arrest in 1621, the priest was sick and suffering from dementia. A Dominican account describes Lucía’s procession to the execution site: “She came out of her cell in her [Franciscan] habit, embraced the most devout Crucifix, speaking to it a thousand words of admiration, and singing the Magnificat aloud.”47 The officials tore Lucía’s cassock, but devout women in the crowd prevented them from tearing her undergarment. A Jesuit report recounts how Lucía demanded to be placed

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next to the highest ranking clergyman, namely, the Jesuit superior Carlos Spinola (1564–1622), and receive absolution from him: “Our Lord granted her such pious and good desire, and she was next to Father Carlos Spinola. As he was the first among the priests and religious, he took the first place in this. This devout and manly woman made a confession to such a holy and virtuous neighbor [Spinola], asking him to give her the last absolution, which the Father granted her with much delight.”48 Thus, by her insistence Lucía gained the second place in rank after Spinola among other priests and religious, an honor the Jesuits, Franciscans, and Dominicans would not have granted her. Lucía claimed visible leadership in a male religious order and, in the imagination of her chronicler, transcended her sex: she became a “virile” woman. Conclusion There are many more women apostles whose stories need to be explored further. However, from these examples it is clear that the seventeenth-century missionaries, both the Jesuits and the mendicants, perceived that women apostles engaged in a wide range of ministries with a sense of vocational identity. Naitō Julia utilized her learning and experiences as Buddhist nun and abbess in her new vocation as Catholic nun and abbess. She and the women catechists of the Miyaco no bicuni, with vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience, lived as uncloistered missionaries, preachers, evangelists, and proselytizers, aiding the Jesuits, who did not have an official framework to include them in their Society. They survived arrest, torture, and deportation but became enclosed contemplative visionary nuns in the Philippines, where the Jesuits expressed camaraderie and respect for these women as if they were members of the Society and their spiritual mothers. Hayashida Magdalena and Oiwa Monica, who took vows as virgens, defended both the Catholic faith and their commitment to celibacy to the point of being executed by the government. Julia of Kami and heads of women’s confraternities continued to act publicly as pastors for Christians during the height of persecution. Tertiary women worked alongside missionaries in hiding. Lucía de Freitas expressed her vocational identity in words and actions and was executed alongside a Jesuit leader. Ironically, while all the missionary writers in Japan who recorded the accounts of Magdalena, Monica, and Lucía later became martyrs, Cristóvão Ferreira, who left accounts of Julia of Kami and numerous other women apostles, became a notorious apostate in 1633 under torture. The Silence, Shusaku Endo’s novel, which has recently attracted the attention of film director Martin Scorsese, does not tell the full stories of any women apostles, which the missionaries (including Ferreira), at the risk of their own lives, keenly recorded. Critical inquiry into the historical realities of these women’s religious self-identities has only just begun. For now, these examples from Japan provide a different perspective on Tridentine Catholicism: namely, whereas in Europe priestly control over nuns’ and

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laywomen’s active apostolate tightened, in Japan women’s religious vocational aspirations were more fully realized, albeit at great peril and personal cost. Notes  * I am grateful for the generous grants for this project provided by Columbia Theological Seminary’s Sabbatical Grant; a Lilly Theological Research Grant Faculty Fellowship from the Association of Theological Schools; a William Scheide Fellowship from the Center of Theological Inquiry; and residence at the Jesuit curia in Rome. I am also grateful for ideas and suggestions offered by Christina Lee and Ronald Surtz at Princeton University, and members of the History Department Colloquium at the Princeton Theological Seminary and the Columbia Theological Seminary.  1. Most common spellings in the early modern Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian are used. Since there are no exact English equivalents for the Japanese terms, only approximate translations are given. Most literature published by the Jesuit Press in Japan between 1591 and 1614 spelled bicuni for the word 比丘尼. 比丘尼, which is the Japanese adaptation of the Sanskrit bhiks.unī, female disciples of Buddha, but came to mean Buddhist convent nuns of higher ranking with some clerical endorsement who preached regularly to the congregants. Jennhonin 善女人, literally, good woman, derives from Nichiren-shū, the Buddhist term for a lay female “missionary” preacher and teacher who remains in the world without becoming bicuni. Its male equivalent is jennanxi, 善男子. Examples of Christian adaptations of jennhonin as saints were found also in Jesuit Press publications, including Sanctos no gosagveo no vchi nvqigaqi (Excerpts from the Acts of the Saints), 2 vols (Kazusa: Jesuit College, 1591), 2: 78.  2. Haruko Nawata Ward, Women Religious Leaders in Japan’s Christian Century, 1549–1650 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009).  3. See Hugo Rahner, Saint Ignatius Loyola: Letters to Women, trans. Kathleen Pond and S.A.H. Weetman (New York: Herder and Herder, 1960), 251–95.  4. St. Ignatius of Loyola, The Constitutions of the Society of Jesus, trans. George E. Ganss (St. Louis: The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1970), 263.  5. Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. Norman P. Tanner, 2 vols (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990), 2: 776–84. On Pius V’s Circa Pastoralis of 1566 and its adverse affect, see Gemma Simmonds, “Women Jesuits?” in The Cambridge Companion to the Jesuits, ed. Thomas Worcester (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 121.  6. Kathryn Norberg, “The Counter-Reformation and Women Religious and Lay,” in Catholicism in Early Modern History: A Guide to Research, ed. John O’Malley (St. Louis: Center for Reformation Research, 1988), 135, 138. See also Anne Conrad, “Das Konzil von Trient unt die (unterbliebene) Modernisierung kirchlicher Frauenrollen,” in Das Konzil von Trient und die Modern, ed. Paolo Prodi and Wolfgang Reinhard, Schriften des ItalienischDeutschen Historischen Instituts in Trient, 16 (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 2001), 327– 47, on the discussion on the implications of the Council of Trent on women.  7. See Simmon, “Women Jesuits,” 123–33, on Mary Ward and Sisters of Saint Joseph. See also Joseph Grisar, “Jesuitinnen: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des weiblichen Ordenswesens von 1550–1650,” in Reformata Reformanda: Festgabe für Hubert Jedin zum 17 Juni 1965, ed. Erwin Iserloh and Konrad Repgen, 2 vols (Münster Westfalen: Aschendorff, 1965), 2: 70–113, on controversies surrounding women’s responses to Jesuit active apostolate.

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 8. Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu (ARSI), Philippinarum 7I (Juan de Salazar, annual letter 1634–1635, to Muzio Vitelleschi), 195v. Judging from other accounts, Salazar erred in calculating Julia’s age, since she must have been thirty-two years old, rather than forty-two, in 1597. Space limitation does not permit extensive citations in the original languages. However, I have included key phrases or words in the original Spanish or Portuguese that illustrate the missionaries’ efforts to find European cultural equivalents for the experiences of these women.  9. Ibid., 196. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid. 12. These designations of Julia—santa fundadora, capitana, superiora, and rectora— appear in ARSI, Phil. 7I, 195 and 197v; Julia’s Rule is listed in 197–197v. 13. “Enseñava de ordinario la doctrina Christiana a los gentiles catechizando para que se convirtiessen a nostra santa fe y bautizassen, atendia juntamente a la enseñança de los Christianos industiandolos como se avian de confessar y reçivir el santissimo sacramento, y andava tan ocupado en estos santos ministerios que por mas que deseava el retirarse a hazer de proposito los exerçiçios de Nostro Padre San Ignaçio pocas vezes los pudo alcançcar de los Padres de nostra compañia porque la embiavan de continuo a evangeliçar a varios Reinos y ciudades y casas particulares donde los nuestros no podian ir”; ibid., 197v–198. Here and in the following transcriptions, the original spelling and diacritics are preserved. I am grateful to Laura Nieto and Claudia Aguilar for assistance with the Spanish translations. 14. “Convençidas de las rrazones de Doña Julia muchas señoras de Japon con sus hijas y familias reçivieron nostra santa fee, y su mano de Baptismo por no poderselo administrar los nuestros”; ibid., 198. 15. “[H]icieron en la pared de una sala de la Rejna un pequeño agujero por donde se pudo confesar a su gusto con el Padre Pedro de Morejon”; ibid., 199v. This queen was Ukita Gō Maria, wife of Daimyō Ukita Hideie and daughter of Maeda Toshiie, governor of Kyoto. On Pedro Morejón (1562–1639) and his relationship with Naitō Julia and Miyaco no bicuni in Japan and the Philippines, see Haruko Nawata Ward, “Women in the Eyes of a Jesuit between the East Indies, New Spain and Early Modern Europe,” in Western Visions of the Far East in a Transpacific Age (1522–1671), ed. Christina H. Lee (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 117–35. 16. “Dexo en su lugar todas tres vezes por superiora de la Madalena Nacaxima prima suya y verdadero retrato de su virtud y prudençia encargandole no solo el govierno de la casa y de sus compañeras sino también el offiçio de la predicaçion a las señoras de aquel reino”; ARSI, Phil. 7I, 199. 17. Ibid., 196v. 18. These expressions—“la saluacion de los proximos,” “oraçiones jaculatorias,” “largos exerçiçios retirados,” “ençendida caridad,” “abrasado amor,” and “un mal pensamiento”— appear in ibid., 200. 19. ARSI, Phil. 7I, 200v–201v. Another eyewitness account by a Spanish merchant more explicitly describes a rape. See Bernardino de Avila Girón, Relación de Reino de Nippon, partially translated and cited in George Elison, Deus Destroyed: The Image of Christianity in Early Modern Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 217. 20. ARSI, Phil. 7I, 202. 21. These hagiographic designations and descriptions, “santas, siervas de Dios, esposas de Jesu Christo,” are found in ibid., 200v–202v. In the Catholic tradition, “servant of God” is the official title bestowed on someone whose cause for beatification has been submitted (or is ready to be submitted) to the Congregation of Rites. Salazar seems to have been using the term proleptically.

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22. “de su señor en el dia de su transfiguraçion”; ibid., 201v. 23. “en su almas se inçendio de la charidad,” hermossimos a los Angeles; ibid., 202v. 24. “llegaron . . . para grand bien de toda esta Republica y Provinçia nuestra de Philipinas. En esta ciudad sin impedimento ninguno prosiguieron su modo de Religioso de vida, viviendo todas juntas en comunidad en una casa junto a nuestra Iglesia deste pueblo de S. Miguel con gran edificaçion y exemplo de todo este imperio de tantas y tan varias naciones”; ARSI, Phil. 7I, 203v. 25. “[E]n particular de la Compania”; ibid., 195. 26. “[H]olgandose con los buenos sucessos y progressos de esta Provinçia, y sintiendo sus adversidades, como una madre, se goza de buena suerte, y se amarga de la aflicion de sus hijos”; ibid. 27. “a las que solo cuydan de la mayor gloria de dios nuestro señor y de alcançar de su mayor felisses progressos a esta Provincia y a toda nuestra Compania de Jesus a quien como a madre dulcissima tienen en lo intimo del coraçon”; ARSI, Phil. 7I, 206v–207. 28. Ibid., 204v–205. 29. “[I]mitando a los Christianos de la primitiva Iglesia”; ibid., 204. 204v, 205 (in Marina’s case, she followed the examples of Saints Magdalena and Mary). 30. Ibid., 206. 31. “[P]orque aunque no era Religion confirmada por la Sede Apostolica, fuera esta solemnidad, no le faltava nada para una vida perfectissima, muy conforme a la que professan las Religiones aprobadas por la Silla Apostolica”; Francisco Colín, Labor Evangélica, ministerios apostolicos de los obreros de la Compañía de Jesús, fundacion, y progressos de su providencia en las Islas Filipinas, 3 vols (Madrid, 1663; repr. Pablo Pastells, Barcelona: Henrich, 1900–1992), 3: 551. 32. For a fuller discussion of these women and their visions, see Ward, Women Religious Leaders, 83–104. 33. “[P]ara cumplir con las obligaciones que siempre reconoció dever á estas siervas de Dios. Y assi en su muerte [de Luzia y Tecla] todos los Religiosos desta Provincia les han ofrecido el mismo numero de Missas, y sufragios, que acostumbran por sus difuntos”; Colín, Labor Evangélica, 3: 560. 34. ARSI, Jap.Sin. 57, 271v (Sebastián Vieira, annual letter 1613, to General Claudio Aquaviva, Nagasaki, March 16, 1614). Virgem is the singular form of virgens. 35. “[S]obre mi cabeça las pongo, estimo, y adoro, reconociendo en esto la gran merced que el Señor disponia hazerla por medío dellas”; Jacinto Orfanel [and Diego Collado], Historia eclesiastica de los successos de la christiandad de Japón, desde el año de 1602 que entro en el la Orden de Predicadores, hasta el de 1620 (Madrid: Viuda de Alonso Martin, 1633), 21v. 36. “[N]a forma que o sagrado Concilho Tridentino o permitte”; ARSI, Jap.Sin. 57, 271v. The decrees of the twenty-fifth session of the Council of Trent state that the bishops should instruct the faithful that “the holy bodies of the holy martyrs . . . are to be venerated by the faithful”; Decrees, 2: 775. 37. See “Beatification of 188 martyrs embodies the faith in Japan and Asia,” by Pino Cazzaniga, posted on November 26, 2008, on the website of AsiaNews.it.: http://www. asianews.it/news-en/Beatification-of-188-martyrs-embodies-the-faith-in-Japan-andAsia-13860.html (accessed June 1, 2014); and “Junkyōsha to watashitachi 3,” by Bishop Mizobe Osamu, on the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Japan website, http://www.cbcj. catholic.jp/jpn/feature/kibe_187/mizobe3.html (accessed June 23, 2007). 38. “Ja de dous annos a esta parte me falla meu irmão em casamento. E posto que poi huã parte dezejo de me casar por lhe não dar trabalho, nem lhe fazer gastos estando em sua casa con tudo vendo outra o que aconteçeo a alguas de minhas companhras que finalmente

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por este caminho retroçederão e deixarão a fé. . . . Meu irmão não me quis casar com Chirstão como eu queria. Eu vendo o perigo de mihna alma não me quis casar con gentio como elle queria. Pello que me determineis fazer voto de castidade como fiz e a tenho prometido a Santa Maria, e pello consequinte, ja me não posso casar, nem com Chirstão, nem com gentio”; ARSI, Jap.Sin. 61, 49v (João Rodrigues Giram, annual letter of 1625, to General Mutio Vitelleschi, Macao, March 15, 1626). 39. ARSI, Jap.Sin. 61, 50. 40. Ibid., 50v. 41. “[H]ua pequena pedra que de ceo de monte, deu naquella grande estatua, e a destruio, e fez em pedaços: agora esta nossa pera, ou Rocha (que isso quer dizer Iva nome Japonico de Monica) sobindo do rio com aquella enchente, deu neste grande templo e o destruio”; ibid., 51v. See Daniel 2: 34–35. 42. On jennhonin, see note 1. On other titles for female confraternity officers, see Ward, Women Religious Leaders, 338–40. 43. “[C]om muito divota e de vida examplar era mardoma da confraria des mulhres o qual offria fazer un muito zelo e proveito spititual das outras que por sou virtude e autoridade a estimavão muito, e sequião facilmente seus bon’s conselher”; ARSI, Jap.Sin. 62, 64 (Cristovão Fereira, annual letter of 1629 and 1630, August 20, 1631). 44. See the list of canonized and beatified saints from Christian-Century Japan and their religious affiliation in the appendix of Juan G. Ruiz de Medina, El Martirologio del Japón (1558–1873) (Rome: Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 2000), as of 2000: the list of the 188 new blessed in 2008 are found at http://www.cbcj.catholic.jp/jpn/feature/kibe_187/ list(0708).pdf (in Japanese, accessed June 1, 2014). 45. ARSI Lustiniana 58I, 25 lists these persons’ names, titles, and affiliations. See ARSI Jap.Sin. 63, 247–247v (Pedro Morejón, Relación de los mártires del Japón del año 1627, Mexico: Juan Ruiz, 1631), which designates Francesca [sic] and Magdalena as beatas. 46. Orfanel, Historia eclesiastica, Supplementa, 138v. Her last name is misspelled as Fletes. 47. “Como saliesse de la carcel con el Habito de la dicha orden, e abraçada con una devotissima Imagen de un Cruzifixo diziendo le mil requebros, y cantando la Magnificat en vos alta”; Orfanel, Historia eclesiastica, Supplementa, 168v. Her name is spelled here as Flores. 48. “[N]osso Snor lhe comprio tao pio e bom deseijo e assi ficou ve tinta ao Pe Carlos qua era o primeiro dos sacerdotes e religisos sendo tao bem nisto o que tomou o primeiro lugar, a qui se consolou esta devote varonil molher com tao santo e virtuoso ustinho elha pedio a derradeira absoluicao que o Padre co juito gusto lha concedeo”; ARSI Jap.Sin. 60, 246v (Bento Fernandes, Relaçam das vidas, e mortes gloriosas que por pregarem o Santo Evangelho nos reinos de Japão aluguns Padres, e Irmãos da Companhia de Jesus . . ., Nagasaki, December 16, 1622). See also ARSI Jap.Sin. 60, 16v (João Rodrigues Giram, annual letter of 1622, to General Mutio Vitelleschi, Macao, March 15, 1623).

Works Cited Archival Sources Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu (ARSI) Philippinarum 7I, 181–394v. De Salazar, Juan. Annual letter of the Philippines Province 1634–1635 to General Muzio Vitelleschi.

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Jap.Sin. 57, 261–76v. Vieira, Sebastián. Annual letter 1613 to General Claudio Aquaviva, Nagasaki, March 16, 1614. Jap.Sin. 60, 1–108v. Rodrigues Giram, João. Annual letter of 1622 to General Mutio Vitelleschi, Macao, March 15, 1623. Jap.Sin. 60, 222–56v. Fernandes, Bento. Relaçam das vidas, e mortes gloriosas que por pregarem o Santo Evangelho nos reinos de Japão aluguns Padres, e Irmãos da Companhia de Jesus padeceram no anno de mil seiscentos, e vinte e dous, feita pollo Padre Bento Fernandes da mesma Companhia residente em Japam. Nagasaki, December 16, 1622. Jap.Sin. 61, 1–62v. Rodrigues Giram, João, Annual letter of 1625 to General Mutio Vitelleschi, Macao, March 15, 1626. Jap.Sin. 62, 1–77v. Fereira, Cristovão. Annual letter of 1629 and 1630. August 20, 1631. Jap.Sin. 63, 197–260v. Morejón, Pedro. Relación de los mártires del Japón del año 1627. Mexico: Juan Ruiz, 1631. Lustiniana 58I, 25. Published Primary Sources Avila Girón, Bernardino de. Relación de Reino de Nippon. Partially translated and cited in George Elison, Deus Destroyed: The Image of Christianity in Early Modern Japan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973, 216–17. Colín, Francisco. Labor Evangélica, ministerios apostolicos de los obreros de la Compañía de Jesús, fundacion, y progressos de su providencia en las Islas Filipinas. 3 vols. Madrid, 1663. Reprint Barcelona: Henrich, 1900–1902. Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils. 2 vols. Edited by Norman P. Tanner. Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990. Orfanel, Jacinto, [and Diego Collado]. Historia eclesiastica de los successos de la christiandad de Japón, desde el año de 1602 que entro en el la Orden de Predicadores, hasta el de 1620. Madrid: Viuda de Alonso Martin, 1633. Sanctos no gosagveo no vchi nvqigaqi. Edited by Toshiaki Kōso. Kirishitan seisen. Kazusa 1591; facsímile, Tokyo: Yūshōdō, 2006. St. Ignatius of Loyola. The Constitutions of the Society of Jesus. Translated by George E. Ganss. St. Louis: The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1970. Secondary Sources Catholic Bishop’s Conference of Japan. List of 188 Martyrs for Beatification. http://www.cbcj.catholic.jp/jpn/feature/kibe_187/list(0708).pdf (accessed June 23, 2007). Cazzaniga, Pino. “Beatification of 188 martyrs embodies the faith in Japan and Asia.” 26 Nov. 2008. AsiaNews.it, http://www.asianews.it/news-en/ Beatification-of-188-martyrs-embodies-the-faith-in-Japan-and-Asia-13860. html (accessed June 1, 2014).

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Conrad, Anne. “Das Konzil von Trient unt die (unterbliebene) Modernisierung kirchlicher Frauenrollen.” In Das Konzil von Trient und die Modern, edited by Paolo Prodi and Wolfgang Reinhard, 327–47. Schriften des ItalienischDeutschen Historischen Instituts in Trient, 16. Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 2001. Grisar, Joseph.“Jesuitinnen: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des weiblichen Ordenswesens von 1550–1650.” In Reformata Reformanda: Festgabe für Hubert Jedin zum 17Juni 1965. 2 vols. Edited by Erwin Iserloh and Konrad Repgen, 2: 70–113. Münster Westfalen: Aschendorff, 1965. Mizobe, Osamu.“Junkyōsha to watashitachi 3.” Katorikku shinbun. August 13, 2006. Catholic Bishops’s Conference of Japan. http://www.cbcj.catholic.jp/ jpn/feature/kibe_187/mizobe3.html (accessed June 23, 2007). Norberg, Kathryn. “The Counter-Reformation and Women Religious and Lay.” In Catholicism in Early Modern History: A Guide to Research, edited by John O’Malley, 133–46. St. Louis: Center for Reformation Research, 1988. Rahner, Hugo. Saint Ignatius Loyola: Letters to Women. Translated by Kathleen Pond and S.A.H. Weetman. New York: Herder and Herder, 1960. Ruiz de Medina, Juan G. El Martirologio del Japón 1558–1873. Rome: Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 2000. Simmonds, Gemma. “Women Jesuits?” In The Cambridge Companion to the Jesuits, edited by Thomas Worcester, 120–33. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Ward, Haruko Nawata. Women Religious Leaders in Japan’s Christian Century, 1549–1650. Women and Gender in the Early Modern World. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. ______. “Women in the Eyes of a Jesuit between the East Indies, New Spain and Early Modern Europe.” In Western Visions of the Far East in a Transpacific Age (1522–1671), edited by Christina H. Lee, 117–35. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012.

16 Jesuit Apologias for Laywomen’s Spirituality Alison Weber

Sebastián de Covarrubias’s Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española (Treasury of the Castilian or Spanish Language) (1611) defines beata as follows: A woman who wears a religious habit and, living outside a community and in her private house, makes a vow of celibacy and lives in reclusion, dedicating herself to prayer and works of charity. . . . The name in itself seems arrogant, but it is widely used, despite the fact that, as Saint Thomas affirms, “nemo in hac vita dici potest beatus” [no one in this life can be called blessed] . . . And thus, [the beata] must be judged in the long term, considering her reclusion, tranquility of spirit, and disposition to achieve blessedness.1

Covarrubias neatly captures the ambivalence toward beatas in post-Tridentine Spain. In the opinion of this lexicographer, a beata was at once a possible religious fraud and a potential saint. As demonstrated in the essays in Part 1 of this volume, pious laywomen were tolerated at least in part because they performed valuable material and/or spiritual services to their communities. But by the 1560s and 1570s beatas had become increasingly associated with certain behaviors that raised suspicions among churchmen and the laity alike. In 1575 the Supreme Council of the Inquisition issued a circular letter to local tribunals asking for their opinion on the best way to deal with the problem of single women who enjoyed an unusual degree of independence from male authority, appeared not to engage in productive work, and claimed special spiritual gifts. Some tribunals were indifferent to the issue, but others took measures to regulate the beatas’ behavior and religious practices. With a few notable exceptions, however, beatas were not disciplined harshly.2 Nevertheless, beatas who had gained some renown as holy women—and there were scores of them in early modern Spain—presented a continual interpretive challenge. Were their ecstasies signs of extraordinary—and transferable—divine favor? Were their demonic torments signs of special holiness? Did the intimacy of the confessor-penitent relationship represent a danger for both parties? Ecclesiastics arrived at different answers to these questions, but in perhaps no other religious order was the ambivalence more keenly felt than in the Society of Jesus. This essay examines three texts by Jesuits that address the problem of

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laywomen’s spirituality. The first two are, at least on the surface, cautionary; the third is decidedly apologetic. But all three betray an ambivalence that was part of larger questions faced by Counter-Reformation ecclesiastics: Was it possible to channel women’s piety toward the goal of forming a more perfect Christian society? Did the promise of Galatians 3:28—“there is no longer male or female”— apply to a dangerous world riven by schism and sexual temptation? It is well known that in the first years after his conversion, Ignatius of Loyola formed close ties with women—associations that occasioned his first brush with the Inquisition.3 After he arrived in Venice in 1535, aristocratic women endowed the first Jesuit colleges and churches and used their influence to smooth his way at the papal court. One of the early ministries of the Jesuits was the conversion of prostitutes. By the late 1540s, however, Loyola began to caution Jesuits to avoid association with lower-class women and to leave the charitable work directed toward prostitutes in the hands of their aristocratic women followers. In the Constitutions (adopted in 1554), Ignatius also specified that, in order to maintain the mobility required of their ministry, the members of the Society should not be regular confessors—especially not to woman, lay or religious. In short, by the 1550s, Ignatius and his companions had become acutely aware of the drawbacks of an apostolate to women—especially women of the lower social orders. The scores of comments by Ignatius and the early Jesuits that seemingly denigrate women must be understood in the context of their vulnerability to scandal, which can be attributed to a number of factors: a heightened concern for clerical purity in response to Protestant attacks on a celibate priesthood, rumors of Ignatius’s own erotic history, widespread notions of women’s sensuality, and a growing concern over the feminization of interior spirituality.4 Although the Jesuits adopted ever stricter regulations about how to act as confessors to women, they refused to prohibit a practice considered essential to their mission. Despite considerable pressure to the contrary, the early Jesuits resisted excising women from their original charism of “the help of souls,” that is, bringing about a conversion that was at once spiritual and social.5 There are numerous examples of Jesuits who offered parts of the Spiritual Exercises to women or collaborated with them in educational and social reforms.6 The tension between a ministry to the laity and the awareness of the dangers of an apostolate to women became especially acute for Spanish Jesuits in the 1570s. In the impoverished regions of Andalusia and Extremadura, Jesuits, along with disciples of the famous preacher Juan de Ávila and reformed Franciscans, had been remarkably successful in stimulating lay piety and promoting the regular observance of the sacraments, especially among women, some of whom were taking communion frequently—once a week or even once a day. Although some clerics applauded this fervor as a welcome sign of religious renewal, others saw it as a socially disruptive democratization of religious life.7 At the end of 1570, Alonso de la Fuente, a Dominican friar in the employ of the Inquisition, discovered that a Jesuit priest, Gaspar Sánchez, had taught contemplative prayer to a group of beatas, who subsequently experienced strange ecstasies after taking communion.

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Fuente was convinced that the beatas who wept and moaned or became insensate upon receiving the Eucharist were a new manifestation of alumbradismo, the heresy that had been condemned in Toledo in 1525. Furthermore, the Dominican friar was convinced that Jesuits of Jewish origin were the principal propagators of this sect. Although there is no evidence of direct contact between the Toledo alumbrados and the beatas and their teachers in Extremadura, and despite the fact that the anti-ritualistic stance of the former was contrary to the Eucharistic enthusiasm of the latter, both groups considered mental prayer to be the portal to intimate contact with the divine. On the basis of this common denominator, the Inquisition authorized edicts of faith against a new “outbreak” of alumbradismo.8 Throughout the 1570s the Dominican friar attacked the Jesuits as alumbrado magicians and sorcerers who seduced their confessional daughters to make a pact with the devil. The inquisitors were not entirely convinced of Alonso’s demonic theory, but they nevertheless initiated investigations that eventually led an auto de fe in 1579 in which nine men were punished for confessional solicitation and ten women for their complicity with their seduction.9 Although none of the men penanced in Extremadura was a Jesuit, the scandalous charges exacerbated the tension between two tendencies in the Society: one that emphasized education and preaching and another that allowed for eremitical withdrawal and contemplative prayer. Under General Everard Mercurian (1573–1581) the anti-contemplative position prevailed.10 It was in this context that the Jesuit Baltasar Álvarez (1533–1580) wrote a brief treatise, “Advice Regarding the Style of Speaking about Spiritual Things as Opposed to the Bad Language of the Alumbrados.” According to Álvarez’s biographer, Luis de la Puente (1554–1624), the treatise was composed at the behest of Juan Suárez, the Jesuit provincial of Castile, in response to the Spanish Inquisition’s 1574 edict against the alumbrados of Extremadura.11 Álvarez had been well regarded as a spiritual director of women and served several times as rector of Jesuit colleges and master of novices. His penitents included not only two famous peasant holy women from Ávila, Mari Díaz and Ana Reyes, but also the Carmelite nun and monastic reformer Teresa de Ahumada—the future saint of Ávila.12 But by 1573, the Jesuit hierarchy had become increasingly wary of the kind of contemplative prayer Álvarez espoused. It is plausible that Sánchez, a member of the anti-contemplative Jesuit faction, solicited this text in order to see whether Álvarez was willing to draw a firm line between his style of spiritual direction and that of the alumbrados, thus putting him on notice, as it were. Philip Endean describes the resulting document as “nothing more than a balanced, somewhat pedestrian extension of the Ignatian rules on the same subject,” that is, Ignatius’s “Rules for Thinking with the Church.”13 I argue, however, that a closer reading reveals an apologia—and given the context of the 1574 edict, a bold defense of laywomen’s spirituality. The “Advice” follows Loyola’s Aristotelian philosophy of virtue as the aurea mediocritas—the golden mean: “Since all errors depart from the truth by going to one extreme or another, whereas the truth is in the middle, it is appropriate to use

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moderation not only in feeling but also in speaking.”14 Álvarez accordingly issues the following recommendations: One should not praise mental prayer so much that it sounds like disdain for vocal prayer; one should use religious images as aids for mental prayer; no one should recommend long periods of mental prayer or promise great delights from it; one should not practice mental prayer to the detriment of obedience, charity, or health. However, he attenuates these caveats with a decisive affirmation that mental prayer is not only for the perfect. More boldly he asserts that Jesuits should not hide the scriptural truth “regarding the delights and consolation that God communicates to souls, which those who seek him with truth and humility and persevere in their friendship and communication with him are accustomed to experience” (my emphasis).15 Notably (and I believe intentionally), Álvarez occludes the gender of the hypothetical subjects of this advice on mental prayer, referring to them with gender-inclusive masculine plural nouns or collective nouns: gente (people) and personas (persons). He similarly evades referring specifically to status, simply noting that teaching mental prayer requires discretion and attention to people’s “nature and estate” and that “fulfilling the commands that all owe their superiors according to their estate should take precedence over periods of prayer, especially extended periods.”16 Ultimately, he insists, the goal of mental prayer is not to learn to “think about spiritual things” but to achieve a total social and spiritual reformation: Let them be taught and instructed to direct what they meditate upon to the reformation of their lives and customs; not being content to learn only a way of thinking about spiritual things but learning at the same time the way to achieve purity of conscience by meditating on such things; striving to be better every day with the grace of the Lord and the teaching and light of prayer, to be more obedient to their superiors; more long-suffering with their equals; more charitable toward their kin and strangers; more fond of humble, low positions; more temperate in their ambition to rise and in their sorrow at seeing themselves forgotten and not esteemed as they wish . . .  more willing to break the will of their own whims.17

In other words, Álvarez affirms that the goal of mental prayer is the change of heart that effects the peaceable, charitable behavior of the ideal Christian parishioner. Far from fomenting disorder, “thinking about spiritual things” promotes the meekness necessary for sustaining a charitable and peaceful Christian community. Having established the positive social effects of prayer, Álvarez makes another seemingly unremarkable statement about prayer and temptation: It should be noted that the more the devil hates the exercise of prayer the more he resorts to a great number of serious temptations, taking on a thousand shapes and colors to separate us from its practice. . . . Prayer should not for this reason be abandoned or considered superstitious. Rather, it is necessary to teach how to respond to these temptations so as not to abandon these exercises . . .  let the people be prepared to suffer these tribulations, and let them not think they are promised physical appearances of the devil, but on the other hand do not deny to

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them that Our Lord sometimes is accustomed to permit these things to happen to his chosen ones, for many ends and for their own good, giving them help and interior light to suffer and triumph over them [my emphasis].18

It is notable that here Álvarez not only affirms that God permits demonic temptations, but does so as a sign of special, though impenetrable preference. As I will argue, this notion that demonic temptations signaled divine favor, despite a long history in the church, had become associated with heterodox behavior. He follows up with more apparently anodyne comments on the importance of consulting with “learned men,” especially regarding “sensory things”: The communication of God and his presence does not consist principally and essentially in sensory things, although it is true that these sensory effects, consolations, and other good movements are known to result from interior communication with God our Lord. And therefore these sensory feelings should not be universally disdained as illusions of the devil, for that would be a grave misunderstanding, but rather examined closely and discreetly, according to the advice of learned and experienced men, and the rules the Saints have left for the discernment of spirits [my emphasis].19

Once again, it is important not to pass over too quickly a key term, “consolation,” which, like “demonic temptation,” had acquired a heterodox valence. In the Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius described consolation as an “interior motion” that occurs when the soul “is inflamed with love of its Creator and Lord.” Although spiritual, consolation might have dramatic physiological effects, such as profuse weeping. Ultimately, however, the effects of consolation, according to Ignatius, were increased charity and tranquility: “[U]nder the word consolation I include every increase in hope, faith, and charity, and every interior joy. . . .”20 Álvarez thus finds himself in the difficult position of distinguishing the Ignatian notion of consolation—the manifestation of a spiritual-social conversion—from the dramatic ecstatic behavior of beatas who had attracted the attention of the Inquisition. Accordingly, Álvarez affirms that consolations are not a sign of sanctity, nor is desiring to experience them contrary to sanctity—as long as that is not one’s ultimate goal. One should not extol these experiences but speak of them in ordinary language and be governed by the teachings of the church. God’s consolations are most often interior, but not always so. One should try not to display these consolations with “swaying motions and so forth,” although sometimes the movements inspired by God do “come out” in “exterior signs.”21 If the sensations that produce these movements happen often, one should ask God to lead him (or her?) by another path. Here, Álvarez passes over the fact that the indecorous Eucharistic behaviors—the “swaying motions and so forth”—were a female phenomenon. He thus defends the notion of consolation as a physiospiritual “motion” by stripping it of its feminine inflection. Álvarez next turns to the question of mortification. His position is once again Ignatian: the true purpose of mortification is not to torment the flesh or cause

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great pain but to subdue the passions so that one may become less angry, more tolerant of insult, more long-suffering in the face of calamity, less punctilious regarding honor, and more tolerant of family and strangers. The passions cannot be uprooted but only moderated: therefore it is necessary that contact with women be cautious, serious, and brief. One enigmatic remark deserves close attention: “It is great folly to pretend that one can safely engage in certain amorous exchanges in the name of mortification; and this goes for unchaste touching.”22 Although it is difficult to know exactly what he means by “dares y tomares” (which I translate as “exchanges”), this suggests that Álvarez suspected that some confessors were exposing themselves to sexual temptation as a form of mortification. Fasts, vigils, and taking the discipline are preferable exercises, although such practices must be in accord with one’s strength, estate, and occupation. Exterior mortification is to be recommended to the laity, but more important is interior subjection of desires to God’s will. Significantly, Álvarez does not figure mortification as an act with spiritual significance in and of itself. That is, he does not refer to any redemptive value for the pain occasioned by mortification apart from its effects on the passions. Álvarez now proceeds to an issue that directly bears on one of the charges against the alumbrados: their private vows of obedience to confessors that take precedence over obedience to parents, husbands, or other prelates.23 He acknowledges that it is prudent to be governed by wise and experienced men. This is not what the decree of the Holy Office condemns but rather the private vows of obedience to a particular confessor. Jesuits must not accept such vows of obedience, insist on “general confessions” (a confession in which the penitent gives his or her entire spiritual history), or provoke excessive affection from one’s penitents. Jesuits should discourage disorderly Eucharistic behavior, such as the desire to take communion with excessive frequency or receive many forms. One should be cautious in referring to the “hunger for the Lord” (“hambre del Señor”), especially if it is understood to mean physical hunger. Retreating somewhat from this hard-line position on Eucharistic fervor, he adds, “Nevertheless, the effect of love, which this good desire [to take communion] may cause, can be called hunger.”24 Only in the last section, “Regarding Marriage, Chastity, and Religious Orders,” does Álvarez abandon his gender-neutral language. Jesuits must not encourage women to make a vow of chastity without great caution, or speak ill of marriage. They should not advise beatas to wear a habit, much less become involved in the governance of beaterios (communal houses). They should not persuade women to become beatas, except in very rare instances and according to particular circumstances. Finally, they should speak humbly and not give the impression that they “want to take over sanctity or its teaching.”25 Scores of works on the discernment of spirits had taken similar positions on the question of “sensible” consolations and demonic torments. Indeed, Loyola’s “Rules for the Discernment of Spirit” acknowledge that sensible consolations can

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result in the course of making the Spiritual Exercises and that the devil resorts to temptations to obstruct spiritual progress. But in the Spain of 1575, the fulcrum of aurea mediocritas had shifted. Despite his cautious qualifications, Álvarez was endorsing beliefs and practices that had become tinged with heterodoxy by the new “outbreak” of alumbradismo: high esteem for mental prayer, the possibility of sensory consolations from God, demonic temptations as a sign of divine favor, moderation in penance, and Eucharistic “hunger.” These were precisely the beliefs and practices that Alonso de la Fuente identified as the heart of his newly discovered heresy. In sermons, correspondence with the Inquisition, and a report sent to Philip II, Fuente insistently sounded the alarm. He was offended that priests—including Jesuits—were teaching mental prayer to ignorant women who scarcely knew the basic vocal prayers of the church. He rejected entirely the notion that God can be perceived through the senses: “They teach and practice a precept that is the root of the greatest heresies: that grace comes to the soul with signs perceived through the senses.” He was scandalized by the idea that divinely permitted demonic temptations were a sign of advanced spirituality. In the friar’s eyes, this precept hid a horrendous reality: “The devil . . . comes to the alumbradas and has intercourse with them and soils them with a thousand pollutions, and the alumbradas call this the temptations of the just, and [their confessors] go into secret rooms with them to exorcise them against said demons, and have intercourse with the alumbradas.”26 Their Eucharistic burning and trembling was nothing more than an attempt to cover up abominable things, worse than those of Sodom and Gomorrah. These alleged doctrines were incorporated in the inquisitorial edicts of 1574.27 If Suárez expected from Álvarez a document that would reinforce the edict point by point, he must have been disappointed. As we have seen, Álvarez refused to condemn mental prayer as inappropriate for the laity, expressed sympathy for victims of demonic temptations, and more generally left open the possibility for ecstatic lay spirituality. Suárez ordered Álvarez to rewrite the treatise the following year.28 Álvarez’s position in the Society did not improve. In 1576 Mercurian ordered Álvarez not to teach his style of prayer “to those in the house or outside it; and that he should be cautious (tuviese recato) in his way of speaking, for the times are dangerous.” In 1577 the visitor to the Spanish province instructed Álvarez to “apply himself more to dealing with men, where there is less danger and more profit.”29 Despite attempts by the Jesuit hierarchy to avoid scandal by disciplining its mystically inclined members, the question of Jesuits’ proper mission to laywomen did not go away. Ten years after the trial of the alumbrados from Extremadura, Pedro de Ribadeneyra (1527–1611) published Tratado de la tribulación (Treatise on Tribulation), a work occasioned by another scandal involving female piety.30 In 1588 the Inquisition of Portugal penanced the Dominican nun María de la Visitación for pretense of sanctity: after years of celebrity as a living saint, it was revealed that she had painted simulacra of the wounds of Christ on her hands, side, and forehead.31 Although this notorious case involved a nun, Ribadeneyra

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was aware that the phenomenon of alleged stigmata was rampant among lay holy women: Certainly, it has been lamentable to see the throng of silly, deceived women who in our day have appeared in many of the most illustrious cities of Spain. These women, with their ecstasies, revelations, and stigmata have so excited and fooled the people who practice prayer and things of the spirit that it seemed that the woman who did not have these ecstasies and extraordinary gifts was not esteemed [as holy], . . . and it seemed that all believed that holiness and revelations must go hand in hand.32

Through these scandals, Ribadeneyra argues, God wishes to discourage the contagious spread of false miracles: This is what God wants to teach us, . . . to restrain the facility with which many persons in various places appeared with stigmata, giving occasion for other frivolous women esteemed as spiritual to desire to have them, persuading themselves that they at least had interior stigmata, and even persuading some to imitate and counterfeit them.33

It is important to note that unlike the alumbrado hunter Alonso de la Fuente, Ribadeneyra does not claim that these women are willing accomplices of the devil. The false stigmatics, he implies, are victims of their own credulity or vanity, not of the devil. Like Álvarez, Ribadeneyra refuses to denounce mental prayer as a dangerous practice: “Prayer in itself is a very holy thing, very useful and necessary for conquering passions, resisting the devil, and triumphing over hell and conquering heaven.”34 Similarly, he refuses to identify ecstasy with demonic illusion. Eschewing the by now controversial noun arrobamiento (rapture), he refers instead to “consolations and sweet delights,” which he allows are irresistible, though not a sure sign of holiness. In fact, God may test those who serve him by withdrawing those delights: [God] wanted to test and refine [Saint Catherine of Siena], and for this reason he gave demons license to use their malice and attack the holy virgin with lascivious temptations, and with visible bodies perform dirty acts in her presence, and when she turned to God, he hid from her. . . . This cross is terrible and very heavy . . . and thus the Lord does not give it except to persons who are experienced and robust in virtue.”35

Surprisingly, in a treatise lamenting a plague of mujercillas (“little women,” a derogatory diminutive with connotations of ignorance, arrogance, and immodesty), Ribadeneyra presents a laywoman bearing the stigmata as the authorizing figure for the now precarious notion of the temptations of the just: What should we say of the blessed holy virgin Catherine of Siena, who after suffering such ugly and abominable temptation, which for her pure soul were a greater torment than hell itself? . . . She turned to her sweet Spouse and

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said, “My Lord, where have you been? Why have you left me alone?” “Not alone,” responded the Lord; “for I was here, watching while you struggled, and I delighted in your victories. . . .” Afterwards He rewarded her in such extreme measure that the favors and gifts he gave her would seem incredible.36

In other words, Ribadeneyra’s cautionary anti-woman discourse is, at significant moments, disrupted by a pro-woman apologia: the affirmation of God’s power to bestow his supernatural gifts on his chosen bride. Another tactic might be called “gender-inclusive blame.” Delusion is not exclusively a female problem, the Jesuit argues, but a problem of human nature: “[With these scandals] God makes clear to us the weakness and misery of our human nature, and that most of us men govern ourselves by exterior appearances . . . , since we pay so much attention to stigmata and exterior signs and so little to the solid virtues of many servants of God . . .” (my emphasis).37 Ribadeneyra’s class and gender bias against beatas is undeniable.38 But to characterize his attitude as misogynistic would be to ignore his allegiance to an inclusive Pauline spirituality that was increasingly difficult to defend. In the context of the scandalous fall of the nun of Lisbon, Ribadeneyra must be read as much for what he does not say about women as what he says against them. He laments that deceived and deceiving women have brought tribulation to the republic, but he clings to the possibility of a quotidian spirituality that might lead men and women to “the emendation of daily life, the correction of customs, and the reform of the republic.”39 I turn now to a Jesuit who is a much more enthusiastic apologist for devout laywomen than his predecessors. Alonso de Andrade (1590–1672) held various positions in the Society of Jesus: as professor of moral philosophy, rector of the Jesuit College of Plasencia, and as missionary to Orán in North Africa and the Canary Islands. He also served as legal consultant to the Spanish Inquisition. The author of various devotional guides and biographies, he addressed the status of beatas in the second part of Libro de la guía de la virtud y de la imitación de Nuestra Señora (Guide to Virtue and Imitation of Our Lady; 1642).40 Andrade makes a remarkably bold theological defense of the third status as a sacred Christian vocation: I call “religious” those who in their life and profession follow in the footsteps of the first religious, and imitate the virtue of those [early days of the Church]; although their vows are not solemn, as are those of nuns and friars, and their estate does not have the same timbre of perfection, . . . they consecrate themselves to God with vows as the first religious did, and those of the ancient law; for religious means tied to [religado] and obligated and consecrated to God . . . and these persons, although they live outside the cloister, are obligated and consecrated to God through their vows, and therefore they most justly deserve the honorable title of religious.41

Interestingly, although Andrade does use the word “beatas” in his chapter heading, in the body of his text he employs an alternative appellation—religiosas or

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religiosas beatas, an indication perhaps of how far the semantic field of beata had drifted toward the negative. For Andrade, the vow of perpetual virginity makes the via media an “angelic estate.” In a creative expansion of the doctrine of marriage elaborated in the twenty-fourth session of the Council of Trent, the Jesuit clearly affirms that beatas occupy a doctrinally approved middle estate: The Sacred Council of Trent dealt with this matter [of the spiritual perfection of the estates] . . . and after examining it with mature counsel and the aid of the Holy Spirit determined that the estate of virgins and the continent who refuse marriage . . . and consecrate themselves to God, to live all their lives in chastity and continence is . . . of greater perfection than the estate of marriage; granted, it gives first place to the estate of Monasticism . . . but after this it gives second place to that of the virginity that Beatas, whom we call religious, profess.42

Although Andrade concedes that the Council defines monasticism as the most spiritual vocation, he undermines this assertion with an argument that is strikingly close to Erasmus’s “monachatus non est pietas”: He is a religious before God who lives like a religious, although he dwells in public plazas or the palaces of kings and dresses in purple and silk. He is layman in God’s eyes who lives like a layman in his customs, without virtue or religious observance, even though he dwells in the most sacred cloisters and the most isolated places, and although he wears a holy habit, a coarse robe, cowl, and religious mantle.43

Furthermore, he continues, the beata who complements a vow of virginity with a vow of obedience to a confessor can actually “compete with if not equal the most perfect estates in the church.”44 In this Jesuit’s eyes, to reject the lifestyle of the beatas would be equivalent to rejecting an essential Tridentine doctrine—one inspired by no less an authority than the Holy Spirit: that virginity is spiritually superior to marriage. Proclaiming that he has observed more than 20,000 pious laymen and-women in his lifetime, Andrade goes on to describe the daily routine of the beata as the perfect synthesis of the active and contemplative life: Whether they work or rest, keep vigil or sleep, live in seclusion or leave their homes, . . . go to the hospital, visit the healthy or the sick, in all they strive to please God. . . . To do this they rise early, spend many hours in prayer, and although they work they do not stop praying, because they are always in prayer, working with their hands and speaking to God in their hearts.45

Beatas, as Andrade depicts them, are not disorderly women who live outside the bounds of male supervision but rather models of obedience to clerical authority: “How shall I praise their obedience to their confessors, without whose permission and express order they do not take one step, take a sip of water, attend to a festival, however holy it may be, or spend a moment in prayer with God?”46 The Jesuit

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also praises the beatas’ public participation in the life of the parish: “They talk to male religious, hear sermons, celebrate holy days, walk the stations of the cross, accompany processions, honor churchmen, visit churches, adorn religious images, pray for the dead, give many alms, visit hospitals, care for the sick, and help the shame-faced poor.”47 They perform harsh penances, duly supervised by their confessors, and suffer insults patiently: “They never seek vengeance, but rather pray to God for those who insult them.”48 In sum, beatas would appear to represent a success story for the Counter-Reformation disciplinary program: they are exemplary parishioners—obedient, ritually observant, hard-working, charitable, and docile. Andrade concedes an even more important role for beatas: some have earned renown as evangelizers. Catalina de Herrera taught children and the poor in public plazas, engendering devotion in her audience. Others have reached still greater heights: Some have gone to the lands of heretics and infidels, out of zeal for their conversion and desire for martyrdom, as was seen with Saint Luisa de Carvajal, who went to England and brought many who dwelled in the shadows of heresy into the light of our Holy Catholic Faith, and with her fervor put to shame those lukewarm men who, by reason of their office, should have been more zealous.49

It bears noting that Luisa de Carvajal, whose beatification process was initiated in 1625, has yet to be raised to the altars.50 At this point, Andrade shifts into high gear: “Thus those who profess this way of life were called Beatas in the Law of Grace, which is the same as fortunate, blessed, predestined, saints, and chosen by God; a name that has not been given to any other religious orders, although they are more perfect, as has been said.”51 Andrade passes review of the multitudes of “religiosas beatas” in Brussels, Antwerp, Liege, Germany, Poland, and the Italian states, noting the variety in their living arrangements and pious activities: the Ursulines, who dedicate themselves to teaching girls; women who live in small groups within large communities, observe semi-enclosure, and work with their hands; and canonizas, noble maidens who live with their parents and devote themselves to sewing priestly vestments and altar cloths.52 He reprimands those who, swayed by the opinion of the vulgo (the uneducated masses), condemn all beatas for the slightest fault of one of them. They should remember, he warns, that their way of life is such a “perfect estate” that it was honored by the “Queen of Angels,” who was the first to institute and profess it, by making a vow of virginity and keeping this vow, wearing a lay habit, and living among the laity, as these “religiosas” do today.”53 Still, Andrade concedes that some have fallen and been punished—after all, they are women of flesh and blood, and weak and fickle by nature. But it is important to remember that there are many more beatas than nuns and friars together; the fall of a few should not discredit the virtue of “the infinite number” of very holy virgins. To slander beatas, Andrade implies, is to disrespect the Virgin Mary and align oneself with the ignorant masses.

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Andrade follows up on this apologetic section with hagiographic portraits of four famous beatas: Doña Catalina de Mendoza, an illegitimate daughter of the Marquis of Mondejar; Estefanía Manrique de Castilla, a member of the family of the Duke of Najar; Marina de Escobar, a noblewoman from Valladolid who introduced the rule of Saint Bridget into Spain; and Mariana de Jesús, a famous holy woman from Madrid revered for her spiritual counsel and thaumaturgical powers.54 Although Andrade mentions their works of charity, his emphasis definitely lies in their penitential practices and corporeal suffering. Doña Catalina whipped herself with iron chains and wore a shirt woven of thistles and thorns next to her skin. Doña Estefanía was known to flagellate herself until she bled. Doña Marina suffered from demonic torments and bore interior and exterior stigmata. Mariana tortured her body rolling in thorns or in snow, and suffered intense pains every Friday during the hours of Christ’s agony. Andrade attributes charismata to his beatas: Catalina had many revelations and ecstasies (which he declines to describe), Marina “miraculously multiplied the alms she received,” and Mariana was said to heal weeping wounds with the medicine of her prayers. It is notable that three out of four of these hagiographic portraits are of noble women, and the plebian, Mariana de Jesús, had many devotees in the Hapsburg court. Ignatius, as Ulrike Strasser has written, held a “class-based view of women, which had him distinguish between trustworthy upper-class women and potential patrons on the one hand, and women who posed a risk to him and his society on the other.”55 Other Jesuits, including Andrade, seem to have shared this view. But Andrade’s remarks on the “thousands” of beatas he has witnessed throughout Catholic Europe suggest that he, like Álvarez and Ribadeneyra, accepted the possibility that lower-class women were worthy subjects for a spiritual ministry. Although all three Jesuit texts described here make room for laywomen’s spirituality, there are marked differences. Álvarez does not praise chastity and virginity as singular spiritual states. He affirms the spiritual legitimacy of consolations and temptations of those who pursue a life of mental prayer, but has nothing to say about prophetic or thaumaturgical powers achieved through it. He promotes interior mortification—the subjection of one’s whims to God’s will—over exterior penances, and underscores the need for women to be directed by wise and experienced men. Despite writing in response to a scandal involving scores of beatas, Álvarez subsumes beatas into a genderless laity, capable of “friendship and communication” with God, but far from singular in their piety. For Ribadeneyra, beatas would appear to conform to misogynist stereotypes as vain and silly women, but he sees more harm in the repression of spirituality than in the scandal of false miracles. Andrade’s beatas, in contrast, are heroic—in their vows of virginity, their tireless service, their endurance of demonic torments, and their embrace of suffering. Their ranks include stigmatics, thaumaturges, and martyrs. I can only speculate as to the reasons for Andrade’s enthusiastic apologia. He seems to have had a more international perspective on laywomen than his predecessors and more familiarity with semi-enclosed communities. When he was writing, in the 1640s, the major outbreaks of alumbradismo lay in the past

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and the next big scandal—the downfall of Miguel de Molinos, condemned as an antinomian heretic and seducer—lay twenty-five years in the future. The pious laywomen who died in the 1620s and 1630s were subjects of emerging cults. Finally, Philip IV (reigned 1621–1665) and some of his ministers were fervent devotees of female mystics and visionaries.56 In other words, the 1640s may have represented a propitious decade for the celebration of laywomen’s spirituality. A more complete picture of how the Jesuits’ attitudes toward laywomen evolved in different moments and locations of the early modern Catholic world lies outside the scope of this essay. I hope, nevertheless, to have demonstrated that there was no single Jesuit perception of women and, indeed, individual Jesuits sometimes expressed highly ambivalent opinions about women’s spiritual inclinations. As they pondered how beatas could be incorporated into their mission, they came to different conclusions. In a larger sense, the Jesuits’ “woman problem” was an inevitable symptom of the tension between their commitment to the inclusiveness of their original charism—that is, their belief that all Christians, regardless of sex, status, or lineage, were capable of spiritual transformation—and their determination to “think with” and serve a church militant. The possible relation between the Jesuits’ “gender ambivalence” and their “race ambivalence” also deserves further consideration. Increasingly, the ideal of universal brotherhood, which had led the first companions to reject purity of blood requirements, yielded to concerns that the presence of “New Christians” in their ranks would compromise the effectiveness of their mission.57 The Jesuits analyzed here were aware of the potential threat to priestly authority and social order that beatas represented, but this did not blind them to how women’s piety might support the goals of Catholic reform or negate their sympathy and admiration for pious women. Their attitudes, despite the differences in their models of female sanctity, underscore the fact that the Society’s withdrawal from the apostolate to women in the 1550s and its turn from contemplative prayer in the 1570s were partial retreats. To affirm, as did Andrade, that God values and rewards suffering was to sanctify the power of women who embraced suffering to a heroic degree. To acknowledge, as did Álvarez and Ribadeneyra, that God promises “delights and consolation” to genderless souls was to leave the world open for manifestations of female ecstasy, which Jesuits found time and again among the pious laywomen in their midst. Notes 1. Mujer en hábito religioso, que fuera de la comunidad, en su casa particular, profesa el celibato y vive con recogimiento, ocupándose en oración y en obras de caridad. . . . El nombre parece en sí arrogante, pero está muy bien recibido, no embargante que en rigor, ‘nemo in hac vita dici potest beatus,’ como lo afirma Santo Tomás. . . . Y así se ha de entender largo modo considerando el recogimiento de su vida y tranquilidad de ánimo y el aparejo para alcanzar la bienaventuranza”; Sebastián Covarrubias Orozco, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, ed. Felipe Maldonado and Manuel Camarero (Madrid: Castalia, 1995).

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 2. For the circular letter from the Supreme Council and responses from regional tribunals, see Álvaro Huerga, Historia de los Alumbrados (1570–1630), 5 vols (Madrid: FUE, 1978–1994), 4: 98–102. For studies on beatas before the Inquisition, see my introduction and the essays by Maria Laura Giordano, Stacey Schlau, and Jessica Fowler in this volume.  3. Luis Fernández Martínez, “Íñigo de Loyola y los alumbrados,” Hispania Sacra 35.72 (1983): 585–680.  4. Elizabeth Rhodes, “Join the Jesuits, See the World: Women and the Society of Jesus,” in The Jesuits II. Cultures, Sciences and the Arts, 1540–1773, ed. John W. O’Malley, et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 33–47, esp. 42–43; Alison Weber, Teresa of Ávila and the Rhetoric of Femininity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), Chapter 1. The Dominican theologian Melchior Cano, a staunch opponent of female spirituality, ferociously attacked the Jesuits for their familiarity with women; John O’Malley, The First Jesuits (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 293.  5. O’Malley describes the Jesuits’ understanding of the “help of souls” as follows: “They sought to be mediators of an immediate experience of God that would lead to an inner change of heart or a deepening of religious sensibilities already present”; The First Jesuits, 19.  6. Studies selected from an ample list include Olwen Hufton, “Altruism and Reciprocity: The Early Jesuits and Their Female Patrons,” Renaissance Studies 15.3 (2001): 228–53; Javier Burrieza Sánchez, “La percepción jesuítica de la mujer (siglos XVI–XVII),” Investigaciones históricas 25 (2005): 85–116; Gemma Simmonds, “Women Jesuits?,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Jesuits, ed. Thomas Worcester (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 120–35; and Silvia Mostaccio, Early Modern Jesuits between Obedience and Conscience during the Generalate of Claudio Acquaviva (1581– 1615) (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2014), esp. Chapter 4. Burrieza Sánchez’s essay provides an extensive bibliography of studies in Spanish.  7. On objections to frequent communion, see Jodi Bilinkoff, Related Lives: Confessors, Female Penitents, and Catholic Culture, 1450–1759 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 92–95.  8. This democratic attitude toward mental prayer, whether methodical meditation or contemplation, has been traced to García de Cisneros’s Exercitatorio de la vida espiritual (1500) and to the enormously popular Libro de la oración by Luis de Granada (1554, and multiple subsequent editions). Some scholastics, notably the Dominican Melchor Cano (1509?–1560), vigorously protested teaching this form of prayer to anyone other than a learned theologian. See Antonio Rico Seco, “Una gran batalla en torno a la mística (Melchor Cano contra Fr. Luis de Granada),” Revista de Espiritualidad 34 (1975): 408–27.  9. For the texts of Fuente’s diatribes against the alumbrados, see volume 1 of Huerga, Historia de los alumbrados. On confessional solicitation, see Stephen Haliczer, Sexuality in the Confessional: A Sacrament Profaned (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). On the inquisitors’ relative demonological skepticism, see Alison Weber, “Demonizing Ecstasy: Alonso de la Fuente and the Alumbrados of Extremadura,” in The Mystical Gesture: Essays on Medieval and Early Modern Spiritual Culture in Honor of Mary E. Giles, ed. Robert Boenig (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2000), 147–65. 10. Mercurian emphasized the ministerial, non-mystical character of the Jesuit charism. He forbade the reading of medieval mystics like John Tauler and Henry Suso without permission and took measures against Jesuits who advocated forms of prayer that seemed too affective or contemplative. Mercurian is a controversial figure in Jesuit historiography. For two contrasting views, the first negative, the second more positive, see Stefania Pastore, “La

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‘svolta antimistica’ di Mercuriano: i retroscena spagnoli,” Dimensioni e problemi della ricerca storica 1 (2005): 81–93; Philip Endean, “ ‘The Strange Style of Prayer’: Mercurian, Cordeses, and Alvarez,” in The Mercurian Project: Forming Jesuit Culture 1573–1580, ed. Thomas M. McCoog (St. Louis: Jesuit Historical Institute, 2004), 351–97. Accusations of alumbradismo had long dogged the Jesuits. In the 1550s, the Dominican theologian Melchior Cano attacked the Jesuits for teaching mystical contemplation to all, irrespective of station or temperament, and for improper relations with women; O’Malley, The First Jesuits, 292–93. See also Stefania Pastore, “Gesuiti, Spagna,” in Dizionario storico dell’Inquisizione, ed. Adriano Prosperi, Vincenzo Lavenia, and John Tedeschi (Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, 2010), 2: 673–77. 11. None of Álvarez’s works was published in his lifetime. The guidelines were first published in 1611 as Chapter 33 of Luis de la Puente’s biography of Álvarez under the heading “Avisos que dio para el modo de hablar en las cosas espirituales, contra los malos lenguajes de los alumbrados que se levantaron en este tiempo”; citations are to Luis de la Puente, Vida del Padre Baltasar Álvarez, Biblioteca de autores españoles, ed. Camilo María Abad (Madrid: Atlas, 1958), 156–62. The text is also included with other writings and an extensive biographical introduction in Baltasar Álvarez, Escritos espirituales, ed. Camilo Abad and Faustino Boado (Barcelona: Juan Flores, 1961). 12. On Álvarez’s relation with Teresa, see Jodi Bilinkoff, The Avila of Saint Teresa: Religious Reform in a Sixteenth-Century City (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), esp. 92–93; Alison Weber, “Teresa d’Avila e i rapporti con i confessori,” trans. Giulio Colombi, in Storia della direzione spirituale, III, L’età moderna, ed. Gabriella Zarri (Morcelliana: Brescia, 2008), 289–309. 13. Endean, “The Strange Style,” 32. Ignatius’s guidelines, appended to the Spiritual Exercises, are believed to date from 1539–1541. According to Juan de Polanco, Ignatius’s secretary, they were intended as antidotes “to those things which the heretics of our time . . . are prone to attack or scorn”; qtd. in Saint Ignatius of Loyola, Ignatius of Loyola: Spiritual Exercises and Selected Works, ed. George E. Ganss, et al. (New York: Paulist, 1991), 430. 14. “Como todos los errores se apartan de la verdad por algún extremo, guardando la verdad el medio, conviene que no solo en el sentir sino también en el hablar, haya mediocridad”; Puente, Vida del Padre Baltasar Álvarez, 156. 15. “Ni tampoco se les esconda la verdad de lo que Dios promete en su Escritura, de los gustos y consuelos que Dios comunica a las almas, y suelen experimentar los que con verdad y humildad buscan a Dios y perseveran en su trato y comunicación”; ibid., 157. Notable is the use of “suelen” from soler, meaning “to be in the habit of, or accustomed to.” Álvarez does admit that contemplation—the highest form of mental prayer—is for those without mortal sin. 16. “y que [enseñen que] el cumplimiento de las obediencias . . . que todos tienen según sus estados se deben preferir a los ratos de oración, especialmente a los largos”; ibid., 160. 17. “que sean enseñados y instruidos de enderezar lo que meditaren a la reformación de sus vidas y costumbres; no se contentando con aprender solamente modo de pensar cosas espirituales, sino aprender juntamente modo de alcanzar espíritu y puridad de sus conciencias, con la meditación de las tales cosas, esforzándose a ser cada día mejores, mediante la gracia del Señor y la enseñanza de la oración y lumbre suya; más obedientes a sus mayores; más sufridores de sus prójimos; más caritativos con los suyos y con los ajenos; más amadores de puestos humildes y bajos, templando sus apetitos de subir y valer, y la tristeza de verse olvidar, y no estimar como desean; más quebrantadores de sus propios quereres . . .”; ibid., 158.

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18. “Advertir que, cuanto el demonio más aborrece el ejercicio de la oración, tanto allí acude con mayor número de tentaciones más graves, tomando mil figuras y colores para apartarnos della. . . . Y por eso no se debe dejar este ejercicio, ni tenerle por supersticioso; pero hase de enseñar el modo como se ha de haber en estas tentaciones, de suerte que no dejen sus ejercicios . . .  y de tal manera se prevenga la gente a padecer estas tribulaciones, que no entiendan se les prometen apariencias sensibles de los demonios; aunque no se les niegue la verdad, de que nuestro Señor suele algunas veces permitirlas por muchos fines, en bien de sus escogidos, dándoles juntamente ayudas y luz interior para poder sufrirlas y vencerlas”; ibid. 19. “que esta comunicación de Dios y su presencia, no consiste principal y esencialmente en cosas sensibles, aunque es verdad que de la interior comunicación de Dios nuestro Señor se suelen seguir estos efectos sensibles, consolaciones y otros buenos movimientos; y por eso no se han de despreciar universalmente todos estos sentimientos sensibles como ilusiones del demonio, que sería grande engaño, sino mirarlos bien y examinarlos con discreción, según el consejo de hombres doctos y experimentados, y las reglas que han dejado los Santos de discernir espíritus; ibid. 20. Ignatius of Loyola, Spiritual Exercises, #316, 202. 21. “Que se procure, cuanto fuere possible, no dar muestra en lo de fuera de los sentimientos interiors, con meneos, etc. y que, ordinariamente, el movimiento de Dios atrae a lo interior, aunque no es contra él que algunas veces salga en muestras exteriores”; La Puente, Vida del Padre Baltasar Álvarez, 159. Covarrubias defines “meneo” as “el movimiento del cuerpo con donaire o sin él” (“the movement of the body with or without grace”). Given that Alonso de la Fuente identified alumbradismo with converso Jesuits, it is possible that such physical movements were also viewed as suspiciously similar to the swaying motion associated with Jewish prayer. 22. “[E]s gran disparate, debajo de título de mortificación, fingir por seguros dares y tomares amorosos; y mucho más, todos tocamientos ajenos de limpieza”; ibid. 23. See articles 5, 8, and 20 of the 1574 edict; Huerga, Historia de los alumbrados, 5: 402. 24. “aunque el afecto del amor no se puede negar que cause este buen deseo, que se puede llamar hambre”; Puente, Vida del Padre Baltasar Álvarez, 161. 25. “que por ninguna vía puedan tomar occasion de pensar que nos queremos atribuir el espíritu y levantar con la santidad y con el magisterio della”; ibid., 162. 26. “Que enseñan y practican un fundamento general, raíz de grandísimas herejías: y es que la gracia viene al alma con señales sensibles”; “Que también el demonio . . . viene a las Alumbradas y tiene parte con ellas y las ensucia en dos mil poluciones, y que sus Alumbradas califican aquello por tentaciones de los justos; y entrándose en los aposentos secretos para hacer exorcismos contra los dichos demonios, tienen parte con las dichas Alumbradas; Huerga, Historia de los alumbrados, 1: 374. The notion of the temptations of the just, which probably can be traced back to the temptation of Christ in the desert, was an important aspect of Franciscan and Dominican spirituality in the first decades of the sixteenth century in Spain, propagated by Castilian translations of the Life (1511) and Letters (1512) of Catherine of Siena. A similarly compassionate attitude toward those suffering from sexual temptations can be found in Juan de Ávila’s letters to women. 27. The edict of November 19, 1574, does not explicitly mention the “temptations of the just,” but an addendum published later that year requires the faithful to denounce those who have made a tacit or expressed pact with the devil or who suffer from the compulsion to blaspheme; ibid., 5: 401–5.

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28. We cannot be certain that Puente’s text corresponds exactly to Álvarez’s first version. Nevertheless, a comparison of the 1574 edict against the alumbrados with the version of “Advice” that appears in Puente’s biography is sufficient to explain Suárez’s dissatisfaction with the treatise. 29. Cited in Endean, “The Strange Style,” at 362 and 365. The severity of Álvarez’s punishment is still a matter of some controversy. 30. Ribadeneyra (alternate spelling Rivadeneira) was born into the lower nobility of Toledo and entered the Society of Jesus at the age of fourteen. He served in Jesuit missions to Belgium, England, Italy, and the Low Countries. A prolific author, his works include a biography of Loyola (1572), the enormously popular Flos Sanctorum (1599–1610), and a collection of saints’ lives; Jodi Bilinkoff, “The Many ‘Lives’ of Pedro de Ribadeneyra,” Renaissance Quarterly 52.1 (1999): 180–96. 31. Freddy Domínguez, “From Saint to Sinner: Sixteenth-Century Perceptions of ‘La monja de Lisboa,’ ” in A New Companion to Hispanic Mysticism, ed. Hilaire Kallendorf (London: Brill, 2010), 297–320; Álvaro Huerga, “La vida seudomística y el proceso inquisitorial de Sor María de la Visitación (‘La Monja de Lisboa’),” Hispania Sacra 12.23 (1959): 35–130. 32. “Porque cierto ha sido cosa lastimosa la muchedumbre de mujercillas engañadas que se ha visto en nuestros días en muchas y de las más ilustres ciudades de España, las cuales con sus arrobamientos, revelaciones y llagas de tan manera tenían movida y embaucada la gente que trataban de oración y cosas de espíritu, que parecía que no tenía ninguno la que no se no se arrobaba y tenía estos dones extraordinarios . . ., y que a la medida de lo uno había de ir lo otro, y que andan al mismo paso espíritu y revelaciones de Dios; Pedro de Ribadeneyra [alternate spelling Rivadeneira], “Tratado de la tribulación,” in Obras escogidas del Padre Pedro de Rivadeneira, Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, ed. Vicente de la Fuente (Madrid: Cátolica, 1899), 358–448, qtd. at 439. 33. “Esto es lo que nos quiere enseñar Dios . . . poner freno a la demasiada facilidad de muchas personas que en varias partes aparecían con llagas, y daban ocasión a que otras mujeres livianas y tenidas por espirituales las deseasen tener, y se persuadiesen que a lo menos interiores ya las tenían, y aun que algunas imitasen y contrahiciesen aquella vana representación”; ibid. 34. “[L]a oración en sí, santísima cosa es, y utilísima y necesaria para tener vida espiritual, para vencer sus pasiones, para resistir al demonio y triunfar del infierno, para resistir al demonio y triunfar del infierno y conquistar el cielo . . . ”; ibid., 438. 35. “Él la quería probar y afinar, y para esto dió licencia a los demonios para que empleasen su malicia en combatir a la santa virgen con tentaciones torpes, y en cuerpos visibles ejercitasen delante della actos sucios . . . y cuando ella se volvia a Dios, Él se le escondía. . . . Esta cruz es pesadísima y terribilísima . . .  y así, el Señor no la suele dar sino a personas muy ejercitadas y robustas en la virtud”; ibid., 399. 36. “Pues ¿qué diré de la bienaventurada virgen santa Catalina de Sena, la cual, después de haber padecido y vencido tan feas y abominables tentaciones, que para su purísima anima eran más grave tormento que el mismo infierno . . .? [S]e volvió a su dulcísimo Esposo y le dijo . . . ‘Señor mío, ¿dónde habéis estado? ¿Por qué me dejastes sola?’ ‘Sola no,’ respondió el Señor; ‘que yo aquí estaba mirando cómo peleabas, y me gozaba de tus victorias.’ . . . Después el Señor la regaló tan por extremo, que se tendrían por increíbles los favores y regalos que le hizo . . .”; ibid., 400. Catherine was a Dominican tertiary who, as Ribadeneyra explains, out of humility begged Christ to give her interior stigmata; ibid., 442.

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37. “[N]os declara Dios con esto la flaqueza y miseria de nuestra naturaleza humana, y que los más de los hombres nos regimos por el sentido y apariencia exterior de las cosas . . ., pues tanto caso hacemos de unas llagas y señales que vemos, y tan poco de las virtudes sólidas y macizas de muchos siervos . . .”; ibid., 438. 38. Space does not permit discussion of Ribadeneyra’s biography, composed around 1606, of Estefanía Manrique de Castilla, a noblewoman who defied her family to claim a vocation as a celibate laywoman. As Bilinkoff suggests, Manrique may have served as the aristocratic counter-model to the “prideful and flamboyant beatas of [Ribadeneyra’s] day . . .”; Bilinkoff, “The Many ‘Lives,’ ” esp. 185–88, qtd. at 186. 39. “la enmienda de vida, corrección de costumbres, reformación de la república”; Ribadeneyra, “Tratado de la tribulación,” 442. 40. All three editions of this guide (1642, 1644, and 1646) were published in Madrid by Francisco Maroto. I cite from the 1644 edition. Andrade published nine devotional works in Spanish and one in Latin. His most popular work, Avisos espirituales de la gloriosa Madre Santa Teresa de Jesús, appeared in multiple Spanish and Italian editions between 1647 and 1737. 41. “[L]lamo Religiosas a las personas que en la vida y profession siguen las pisadas de aquellos primeros religiosos, y imitan la virtud de los de estos tiempos; porque aunque sus votos no son solemnes, como los de los religiosos, ni su estado tiene aquel timbre de perfeccion . . . consagranse a Dios con votos, como se consagran los Religiosos al principio, y los de la Ley antigua; y porque religioso, quiere dezir religado y obligado y consagrado a Dios, . . . y estas personas, aunque fuera de los claustros se obligan y se consagran a Dios con votos, por esta causa merecen justissamemente el honroso titulo de Religiosos”; ibid., 128. I have preserved original spelling and diacritics but resolved abbreviations. 42. Desta materia trató el Sagrado Concilio Tridentino, . . . y despues de averlo mirado con maduro consejo, con la assistencia del Espiritu Santo, determinaron, que el estado de las virgenes, y continentes, que dexando las bodas . . . se consagran a Dios, para vivir toda su vida en honestidad, y continencia, es . . . de mayor perfeccion que el estado del matrimonio; si bien da el primer lugar en todo al estado de Religion, . . . pero despues deste da el segundo lugar al de la virginidad que profesan las Beatas, a quien llamamos religiosas”; ibid., 125. Canon 10 of the twenty-fourth session simply states, “If anyone says that the married state excels the state of virginity or celibacy, and that it is better and happier to be united in matrimony than to remain in virginity or celibacy, let him be anathema”; Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, trans. H.J. Schroeder (Charlotte: Tan, 1978), 184. Although the Council called for nuns to observe strict enclosure, it did not directly address the situation of women who had taken a vow of virginity but were not members of religious orders, much less ascribe to them an official spiritual estate. 43. “[A]quel es Religioso delante de Dios, que vive como Religioso, aunque habite en medio de las plaças, y en los Palacios de los Reyes, y vista purpura y sedas: y aquel es seglar en sus ojos, q vive como seglar en sus costumbres, sin virtud, ni observancia religiosa, aunque habite en los claustros mas sagrados y en los desiertos mas retirados, y aunque vista el Habito bendito, y la tunica grosera, y la cogulla, y manto Religioso”; Libro de la guía de la virtud, 129. It is not clear why Andrade makes this argument using the pious layman instead of the laywoman as an example. Perhaps he wished to recall the popular saying “el hábito no hace al monje” (“the habit doesn’t make the monk”). 44. “llega a tan grande perfeccion la de su estado, que compite, sino iguala con los mas perfectos de la Iglesia”; ibid., 127.

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45. “Si trabajan, si descansan, si velan, si duermen, si ayunan, si comen, si hablan, si callan, si guardan el recogimiento, si salen de casa, si van a la iglesia, . . . si van al Hospital, si a los sanos, si a los enfermos, en todo pretenden agradar a Dios: . . . y para cumplir esto madrugan temprano, levantanse presto, gastan muchas horas en oracion, y aunque van al trabajo no por esso la dexan; porque siempre oran, trabajando con las manos, y hablando con Dios en el coraçon”; ibid., 131. 46. “Que diré de la obediencia que tienen a sus confessores sin cuya voluntad, y expresso mandamiento, ni dan un passo, ni beben un trago de agua, ni van a una fiesta, por santa que sea, ni tienen un rato de oracion con Dios”; ibid. 47. “[T]ratan con religiosos, oyen muchos sermones, assisten a las Fiestas de Dios y de sus santos, visitan las estaciones, acompañan las procesiones, honran a los ecclesiásticos, pueblan los Templos, adornan los Altares, componen las Imágenes, oran por los difuntos, hazen muchas limosnas, visitan los hospitales, curan los enfermos, socorren los vergonçantes . . .”; ibid., 132. 48. “[N]unca se vengan, antes ruegan a Dios por quien las injurian”; ibid. 49. “[A]lgunas que han pasado a tierras de ereges, y de Infieles, con zelo de su conversion, y con ansias de martirio, como se vio en la Santa doña Luisa de Carvajal, que pasó a Inglaterra, y reduxo a muchos de las tinieblas de la Heregia a la luz de nuestra santa Fe Catolica, avergonçando con el fervor de su espiritu la tibieza de los que devieran tener por razon su oficio”; Andrade, Libro de la guía de la virtud, 134. 50. Carvajal is recognized as “venerable,” that is, as having lived a life that was “heroic” in the theological virtues. Efforts to advance her cause, resumed at the beginning of the twentieth century, have not met with success; Anne J. Cruz, ed. and trans., The Life and Writings of Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza (Toronto: ITER and Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2014), esp. 103–8. See also the essay by Pando-Canteli in this volume. Andrade refers to her as “Saint” Luisa (capitalized); the censors either understood this to mean “the saintly woman” or had nodded off. 51. “[A]si a las que profesan este modo de vida, llamaron en la Ley de Gracia Beatas, que es lo mismo que bienaventuradas, benditas, y predestinadas, santas, y escogidas de Dios; nombre que no se ha dado a ningunas otras religiones, aunque son de estado mas perfectos, como queda dicho”; Andrade, Libro de la guía de la virtud, 135. Andrade’s hyperbolic praise makes one wonder if the censors had not simply nodded off but fallen into a deep sleep at this point. In 1625, the Roman Inquisition promulgated decrees limiting attributions of holiness to persons not yet recognized as saints by the Holy See. See the essay by Schutte in this volume, notes 7 and 8. 52. Although he does not name the institution, his description of large, semi-enclosed communities suggests the Florentine lay congregations described in Jennifer Haraguchi’s essay in this volume. 53. “estado tan perfecto [que fue] honrado por la Reyna de los Angeles: la qual fue la primera que le instituyó y le profirió, haziendo voto de virginidad, y guardandola en habito comun, y en casa de seglares, como le guardan oy estas religiosas”; Andrade, Libro de la guía de la virtud, 139. 54. Catalina de Mendoza (1542–1602), after her marriage was annulled, made a vow of celibacy. As administrator for her father’s estates during his absence as viceroy of Valencia, she dedicated herself to poor relief. Later she founded the Jesuit College at the University of Alcalá de Henares. See José Martínez de la Escalera, “Mujeres Jesuiticas y Mujeres Jesuitas,” in A Companhia de Jesus na Península Ibérica nos sécs. XVI e XVII: espiritualidade e cultura. Actas do colóquio internacional, maio 2004, ed. José Adriano

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Fritas Carvalho (2004), 369–83. Bilinkoff analyzes Ribadeneyra’s biography of Estefanía Manrique de Castilla (d. 1606) and notes that he also wrote an unpublished biography of Catalina de Mendoza; Bilinkoff, “The Many ‘Lives,’ ” 185–89. On Marina de Escobar (1554–1633), the founder of the Order of Saint Bridget in Spain, see Elizabeth Lehfeldt, Religious Women in Golden Age Spain: The Permeable Cloister (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005), 174–208. Mariana de Jesús (1565–1624; beatified 1782) was the daughter of a furrier to Philip II and III. For her significance as an urban living saint, see Jodi Bilinkoff, “A Saint for a City: Mariana de Jesús and Madrid, 1565–1624,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 88 (1997): 322–37. 55. Ulrike Strasser, “The First Form and Grace. Ignatius of Loyola and the Reformation of Masculinity,” in Masculinity in the Reformation Era, ed. Scott H. Hendrix and Susan C. Karant-Nunn (Kirksville: Truman State University Press, 2008), 45–70. 56. Philip IV relied in particular on a Franciscan nun, María de Jesús de Ágreda, for political and spiritual guidance; Stephen Haliczer, Between Exaltation and Infamy: Female Mystics in the Golden Age of Spain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 23–27. 57. Despite significant opposition—notably from Ribadeneyra—the order adopted purity of blood statutes in 1593. See Robert A. Maryks, The Jesuit Order as a Synagogue of Jews: Jesuits of Jewish Ancestry and Purity-of-Blood Laws in the Early Society of Jesus (Leiden: Brill, 2010), esp. 41–45, 187–88. See also Mostaccio, who relates Jesuit ambivalence toward women to the tensions between obedience and the imperative to listen to God’s will as revealed to the individual through the Spiritual Exercises; Early Modern Jesuits, esp. 11, 128.

Works Cited Álvarez, Baltasar. Escritos espirituales. Edited by Camilo Abad and Faustino Boado. Barcelona: Juan Flores, 1961. Andrade, Alonso de. Libro de la guía de la virtud y de la imitación de Nuestra Señora. Segundo Libro: para religiosas, beatas, terceros, religiosos y religiosas. Madrid: Francisco Maroto, 1644. Bilinkoff, Jodi. The Ávila of Saint Teresa: Religious Reform in a Sixteenth-Century City. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989. ———. “The Many ‘Lives’ of Pedro de Ribadeneyra.” Renaissance Quarterly 52, no. 1 (1999): 180–96. ———. Related Lives: Confessors, Female Penitents, and Catholic Culture, 1450–1759. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005. ———. “A Saint for a City: Mariana de Jesús and Madrid, 1565–1624.” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 88 (1997): 322–37. Burrieza Sánchez, Javier. “La percepción jesuítica de la mujer (siglos XVI– XVII).” Investigaciones históricas 25 (2005): 85–116. Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent. Translated by H.J. Schroeder. Charlotte: Tan, 1978. Covarrubias Orozco, Sebastián. Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española. Edited by Felipe Maldonado and Manuel Camarero. Madrid: Castalia, 1995. 1611.

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Cruz, Anne J., ed. and trans. The Life and Writings of Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza. Toronto: ITER and Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2014. Domínguez, Freddy. “From Saint to Sinner: Sixteenth-Century Perceptions of ‘La monja de Lisboa.’” In A New Companion to Hispanic Mysticism, edited by Hilaire Kallendorf, 297–320. London: Brill, 2010. Endean, Philip. “ ‘The Strange Style of Prayer’: Mercurian, Cordeses, and Alvarez.” In The Mercurian Project: Forming Jesuit Culture 1573–1580, edited by Thomas M. McCoog, 351–97. St. Louis: Jesuit Historical Institute, 2004. Fernández Martínez, Luis. “Íñigo de Loyola y los alumbrados.” Hispania Sacra 35, no. 72 (1983): 585–680. Haliczer, Stephen. Between Exaltation and Infamy: Female Mystics in the Golden Age of Spain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. ———. Sexuality in the Confessional: A Sacrament Profaned. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Huerga, Álvaro. Historia de los Alumbrados (1570–1630). 5 vols. Madrid: FUE, 1978–1994. ———. “La vida seudomística y el proceso inquisitorial de Sor María de la Visitación (‘La Monja de Lisboa’).” Hispania Sacra 12, no. 23 (1959): 35–130. Hufton, Olwen. “Altruism and Reciprocity: The Early Jesuits and Their Female Patrons.” Renaissance Studies 15, no. 3 (2001): 228–53. Ignatius of Loyola, Saint. Ignatius of Loyola: Spiritual Exercises and Selected Works. Edited by George E. Ganss, et al. New York: Paulist, 1991. Keitt, Andrew. Inventing the Sacred: Imposture, Inquisition, and the Boundaries of the Supernatural in Golden Age Spain. Leiden: Brill, 2005. Lehfeldt, Elizabeth. Religious Women in Golden Age Spain: The Permeable Cloister. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005. Martínez de la Escalera, José. “Mujeres Jesuiticas y Mujeres Jesuitas.” In A Companhia de Jesus na Península Ibérica nos sécs. XVI e XVII: espiritualidade e cultura. Actas do colóquio internacional, maio 2004, edited by José Adriano Fritas Carvalho, 369–83, 2004. Maryks, Robert A. The Jesuit Order as a Synagogue of Jews: Jesuits of Jewish Ancestry and Purity-of-Blood Laws in the Early Society of Jesus. Leiden: Brill, 2010. Mostaccio, Silvia. Early Modern Jesuits between Obedience and Conscience during the Generalate of Claudio Acquaviva (1581–1615). Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2014. O’Malley, John. The First Jesuits. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Pastore, Stefania. “Gesuiti, Spagna.” In Dizionario storico dell’Inquisizione, edited by Adriano Prosperi, Vincenzo Lavenia, and John Tedeschi, 2: 673–77. Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, 2010. ———. “La ‘svolta antimistica’ di Mercuriano: i retroscena spagnoli.” Dimensioni e problemi della ricerca storica 1 (2005): 81–93.

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Puente, Luis de la. Vida del Padre Baltasar Álvarez. Biblioteca de autores españoles. Edited by Camilo María Abad. Madrid: Atlas, 1958. 1615. Rhodes, Elizabeth. “Join the Jesuits, See the World: Women and the Society of Jesus.” In The Jesuits II. Cultures, Sciences and the Arts, 1540–1773, edited by John W. O’Malley, et al, 33–47. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. Ribadeneyra, Pedro de [alternate spelling: Rivadeneira]. “Tratado de la tribulación.” In Obras escogidas del Padre Pedro de Rivadeneira, Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, edited by Vicente de la Fuente, 358–448. Madrid: Cátolica, 1899. Rico Seco, Antonio. “Una gran batalla en torno a la mística (Melchor Cano contra Fr. Luis de Granada).” Revista de Espiritualidad 34 (1975): 408–27. Simmonds, Gemma. “Women Jesuits?” In The Cambridge Companion to the Jesuits, edited by Thomas Worcester, 120–35. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Strasser, Ulrike. “The First Form and Grace. Ignatius of Loyola and the Reformation of Masculinity.” In Masculinity in the Reformation Era, edited by Scott H. Hendrix and Susan C. Karant-Nunn, 45–70. Kirksville: Truman State University Press, 2008. Weber, Alison. “Demonizing Ecstasy: Alonso de la Fuente and the Alumbrados of Extremadura.” In The Mystical Gesture: Essays on Medieval and Early Modern Spiritual Culture in Honor of Mary E. Giles, edited by Robert Boenig, 147–65. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2000. ———. “Teresa d’Avila e i rapporti con i confessori.” Translated by Giulio Colombi. In Storia della direzione spirituale, III, L’età moderna, edited by Gabriella Zarri, 289–309. Morcelliana: Brescia, 2008. ———. Teresa of Ávila and the Rhetoric of Femininity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.

Glossary

Äbtissin (Ger.; abbess): The common term used to designate the female head of a convent, abbey, or religious house from the Middle Ages onward. Some congregations of nuns retained the use of the term after their religious houses adopted Lutheran church and convent regulations. Alumbradismo (Span.; illuminism): Refers to a loosely defined complex of philo-Protestant beliefs condemned as heretical by the Inquisition in 1525. The early adherents espoused an interior spirituality and disdained the rituals and ceremonies of the church. By the late sixteenth century, alumbradismo was increasingly identified with antinomian heresy, sexual license, and pretense of sanctity. Ancille (Ital.): Literally, “handmaidens,” the familiar name for the young women of the lay conservatories founded by the seventeenth-century Florentine educator Eleonora Ramirez di Montalvo. Antinomianism: The rejection of moral law in the belief that salvation comes through God alone. Augsburg Confession: The doctrinal position held by followers of Martin Luther in response to a list of twenty-eight theological articles. First published by Philipp Melanchthon at the Diet of Augsburg in 1530, these articles became the basis of the confession of faith, or what it meant to be Lutheran, during the mid- to late sixteenth century. The term was used to differentiate between followers of the traditional medieval church and the newly legalized religious identity after the Peace of Augsburg in 1555. Avvisatrice (Ital.): The lowest figure in the government of the Ursuline Companies, who acted as an intermediary between the lady-governors and the other members of the congregation. Beata (Span.): An umbrella term for a laywoman in Iberia who took informal vows of virginity or chastity and devoted herself to prayer and works of charity. In

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Glossary

general, beatas followed two lifestyles: beatas seorsum lived alone or with their families; beatas collegialiter lived in communal houses, or beaterios. Beguines: An umbrella term for pious laywomen, primarily from the Low Countries and German-speaking lands, who formed sisterhoods, taking simple rather than solemn oaths and devoting themselves to prayer and works of charity. They sometimes lived together in a cluster of houses surrounding a church and separated from the outside world by a wall. Although their origins can be traced to thirteenth-century Low Countries, various forms of this lifestyle continued into the early modern period. Benefice: A church office that provided its holder with a specified income. Most benefices were tied to pastoral services rendered to the church, though certain benefices (called sinecures) did not carry such an obligation. Parish churches had a set number of beneficed positions; however, benefices could be held in absentia or shared by more than one person. A benefice also may refer to the income derived from holding one of these appointments. Bizzoche (Ital.) (alternate spelling: bizoche): Devout women who pursued a life of prayer, charity, and penance in their own houses or in small communities. Canoness: Usually a noblewoman who entered a religious house but did not adhere fully to the monastic rules. Canonesses following aspects of the Augustinian Rule were regular canonesses. Some communities of canonesses did not swear binding formal monastic vows or sing the divine offices; their houses typically were not enclosed and did not follow clausatration. Secular canonesses technically were free to leave the religious house to marry, although they were expected to observe chastity and obedience while in the convent. Claustration: The enclosure of a community of nuns in a convent with restricted or no contact with the outside world. After the Council of Trent, the Catholic Church sought full enclosure of all convents under its jurisdiction to prevent nuns from leaving the convent or falling under outside influence. Colonelle (Ital.): In Ursuline congregations, women venerated for their wisdom who acted as spiritual guides. Confraternity: Associations of Christians dedicated to promoting piety, mutual support, and charitable service to the parish. Most, but not all, were segregated by sex. Conventen (Ital.): Shared homes where beguines took their meals together and practiced a contemplative way of life. Conventuals (Ger., Konventualen/Konventualinnen): Traditionally members of the Franciscan order and thus not enclosed in a monastery. After the adoption

Glossary

355

of the Augsburg Confession, rulers in Braunschweig-Lüneburg used the term Konventualinnen (female conventuals) to replace the usage of the term “nuns.” This switch was to differentiate the inhabitants of the new Lutheran religious houses from the women inhabiting traditional convents. Criollos: Individuals of Spanish parentage born in the new world. Damenstift (Ger.): Female religious houses, or foundations, where the women did not make formal vows. The term was adopted in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to describe the institutions housing Protestant canonesses. Daughters of Charity: A religious confraternity for women founded by Louise de Marillac and Vincent de Paul in 1633. Wealthy Ladies of Charity funded the work of Daughters of Charity from more modest families. Daughters served the poor in parishes in Paris and northern France, where they cared for the poor, educated girls, and provided nursing services in hospitals and homes. Divine Office (or the Liturgy of the Hours): The official prayer of the Catholic Church, said at different times during the day and night by clergy, monastics, and some laity. Domina: A Latin term designating a female householder, often used for noblewomen. The term was adopted by secular authorities to address the female head of a Lutheran female religious institution. Dowry: The property or money given by a woman’s family to her husband. It was also the property or money given to a convent at the formal profession of a nun when entering a convent. In both cases, the women generally foreswore other forms of inheritance from family, but retained rights to their marriage portion within the household. Edict of Faith: A document published by the Inquisition listing heretical behaviors and beliefs and read aloud in churches at the beginning of an inquisitorial visit. Parishioners were urged to denounce themselves and others who had committed the listed offenses. Educande (Ital.): Young girls who lived in convents temporarily and paid an annual fee for their board and education. Ember Days: Quarterly or seasonal sets of three days in the Catholic liturgical calendar devoted to fasting and prayer. English Ladies: One of the titles given to Mary Ward’s Catholic congregation of Englishwomen that sought official recognition in the early seventeenth century to work in the secular world, especially in education. Ward and her followers

356

Glossary

established a number of houses on the Continent and had influential patrons as well as a number of opponents, including Jesuits, whose model of apostolic life Ward sought to emulate. After the papal suppression of the congregation in 1631, Ward returned to England, where she died in 1645. Her congregation survives today as the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Equivocation: An ambiguous statement that appears to state one thing but actually means another, often through a mental reservation on the part of the speaker. Some early modern Catholic moralists allowed for the use of equivocation in certain situations, such as when English recusants were asked by legal authorities to identify a Catholic priest active in the English Mission. Jesuit instruction on the use of equivocation strictly limited how and when such statements could be used. Eremi (Ital.): “Hermitages” or micro-communities composed of a group of (between three and seven) laywomen who lived, worked, and worshipped together at La Quiete, a lay conservatory for elite young women founded in the seventeenth century by the Florentine educator Eleonora Ramirez di Montalvo. Evangelical movement: The theological shift among the clergy and laity seen during the early German Reformation. In the decades before the formal establishment of the Lutheran Church, followers of Luther’s ideas considered themselves evangelical [evangelisch] because they were strictly teaching and preaching according to scripture. Examination of Conscience: A review of one’s sins, often done daily and in preparation for confession. Formal vows: A legally and religiously binding commitment made in front of God and man to devote oneself to the religious life. For nuns, formal vows usually consisted of a triple vow of chastity, obedience, and poverty, though they sometimes included a fourth vow of stability, or a pledge to never leave the convent or monastic cell to which they were pledged. General Confession: A practice of devout Catholics who recalled and confessed again significant past sins, usually during a retreat or at some important turning point in their lives. Ghostly Fathers: A term used by English Catholic women for their spiritual directors or confessors during the early modern era. Ilusa (Span.): A woman accused by ecclesiastic officials of having false visions, of being deceived or deceiving others into believing that her ecstatic or visionary experiences originated from God.

Glossary

357

Impeccability: The belief that a person in a state of grace is incapable of sin. Judaizer: A term used by the Holy Office of the Inquisition to refer to those who were charged with secretly engaging in Jewish rites or practices, e.g., refraining from eating pork or resting on Saturday. Lay brother: A member of a male religious order who is a full member of his religious institute through the taking of vows, but who is not ordained and therefore not a member of the clergy. Traditionally, lay brothers were less educated and normally engaged in manual labor for the benefit of their religious communities. Lay conservatory: A religious institution for young women who did not wish to take solemn vows or observe enclosure. The name derives from the Italian verb conservare, which means to conserve or preserve (in this case, to preserve a young woman’s honor and virtue). The post-Tridentine Church sanctioned these institutions as alternatives to the convent and referred to them as congregations. Litany: A series of prayers and responses repeated in public or private in honor of Jesus, the Virgin Mary, or the saints. Matrone (Ital.): Lady-governors, also known as Governatrici; aristocratic women who had the duty to manage the Ursuline Companies and provide for their material needs. Mendicants: Literally, “those who beg,” to indicate Catholic orders, such as Franciscans and Dominicans, which emerged in thirteenth-century European urban contexts. These orders upheld apostolic poverty, public preaching, and collection of alms for the poor, in contrast to the traditional enclosed monastic orders, such as Benedictines. Miyaco no bicuni (Jap.): Literally, “nuns of Kyoto.” Founded by Naitō Julia ca. 1600, the Miyaco no bicuni was a society of women catechists who took three solemn vows under the supervision of the Jesuits and followed the model of active apostolate of the Society of Jesus in Japan. The Japanese government arrested and tortured these women in 1612 and expelled them from Japan in 1614. The women settled in San Miguel, Philippines, and became enclosed beatas. The society closed in 1656 with the deaths of their last two members. Monachization (forced): The act of coercing young women to enter the convent and become professed nuns. Oratory: A private chapel or place of prayer. Periculoso: The decree published by Pope Boniface VIII (1294–1303) in 1298 that required all nuns to be perpetually cloistered. Except in case of fire or contagious

358

Glossary

illness, nuns were prohibited from leaving the cloister. In 1563 the Council of Trent reiterated Boniface’s decree and applied it to third-order convents. However, subsequent legislation, such as Pius V’s Circa Pastoralis (1566), was enforced irregularly across Catholic Europe. Poor Clares (also known as Clarisses or Poor Ladies): Contemplative nuns of the Order of Saint Clare, or the Second Order of Saint Francis, founded in the thirteenth century by Chiara di Favarone, following the advice of Francis of Assisi. Priest hole: A hiding place, usually in the home or mansion of an English Catholic aristocrat or member of the gentry, built for the protection of Catholic clergy and religious who either lived in or visited the houses of Catholic recusant families. As anti-Catholic laws increased in severity, especially during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, priest holes tended to become larger and more ingenious in order to protect both the pursued priests and those who collaborated with them. Propositions: Theological statements or beliefs whose orthodoxy was determined by legal consultants to the Inquisition. Pursuivants: English law officers who hunted down recusants in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Recusancy laws: Increasingly severe penalties, especially in the Elizabethan and early Jacobean eras, that were designed to discourage and punish individuals, Catholics in particular, whose faith was not in conformity with the Church of England. These penal laws included potentially crippling fines and possible imprisonment or even death for those who refused to attend the religious services of the established church. Recusants: Roman Catholics in late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England who refused to attend the Church of England’s services, followed traditional Catholic practices, and often hosted priests who said Mass and provided the sacraments. Recusants were subject to harsh laws and faced fines, imprisonment, and sometimes death for their actions. Ruota (Ital.): The “service wheel,” a turn-box in the wall of a convent or lay conservatory where goods and messages were exchanged between women who observed the rules of enclosure and the outside public. Sacristan: A layman employed by a church to assist the priest and help maintain the church and its property. Safe houses: Places of refuge and centers of ministry for English and Welsh Catholics, especially clergy, during periods of persecution in the late sixteenth and

Glossary

359

seventeenth centuries. These could be found in urban areas, but more often were the country estates of Catholic recusant noble and gentry families, which tended to afford greater safety. Serora (Basque): A Basque laywoman hired by her parish to assist with the care of the village church or shrine. All seroras, whether widowed or single, were expected to remain chaste and their appointments were meant to be for life. However, unlike traditional nuns, seroras could legally and did occasionally leave the service to marry, though doing so was considered scandalous. Spiritual Exercises: Composed 1522–1524 by St. Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits in the sixteenth century, these prayers and meditations were designed for his followers to contemplate their lives in relationship to Jesus. Performed under a trained director in a retreat atmosphere, they lasted approximately four weeks, often leading to a religious vocation. The Exercises also attracted practitioners among laymen and-women seeking to live a more devout life, and were sometimes modified to meet the needs of the less-educated, such as women. Superiora (Ital.): The title for the governing head (similar to abbess or prioress in a convent) of the lay conservatories of the seventeenth-century Florentine educator Eleonora Ramirez di Montalvo. The Jesuits in Japan and the Philippines applied the same Spanish term to the heads of societies of Christian women, such as the Miyaco no bicuni, which did not receive papal approval as a religious order. Third orders: Associations of lay people affiliated with religious orders. Members of third orders did not make formal vows and continued to live in the secular world. Visitations: Inspection tours of clerical households and parishes, first undertaken by ecclesiastical authorities in the Middle Ages. By the late 1520s, evangelical [Lutheran] secular authorities and church superintendents began visiting regions to establish whether local clergy, schoolmasters, and communities were adhering to doctrines and practices outlined in evangelical church ordinances. Virgens (singular virgem): Japanized Portuguese term for Christian women who took the vow of perpetual sexual renunciation. Vergine (Ital., virgin): A term used in the rules of Ursuline communities to refer to their members as never-married women.

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Index

äbtissin 200, 353 Acarie, Barbe 11, 23n Aguirre Sorondo, Antxon 44n, 46 Ahlgren, Gillian T.W. 21n, 23, 108 Aiello, Lucia 62n, 65 Ajofrín, María de 93 – 4, 102, 104n Alligood, Martha Raile 85n, 85 Almenara, Miquel 229n, 232 almsgiving 9, 39, 56, 64, 69, 76, 78, 81, 82, 117, 122, 160 – 2, 175, 323, 341, 342, 357 Alumbradismo/Alumbrados 10, 13, 22n, 91, 94 – 100, 102, 103n, 104n, 133 – 6; 152 – 71; 219 – 22, 227, 232n, 333, 336 – 8, 342, 344n, 345n, 346n, 347n, 353 Álvarez, Baltasar 333 – 7, 342, 343, 345n, 347n, 350 Amussen, Susan 86, 289n, 291 ancille 15, 353: dress 257, 262, 265; education 275 – 60; enclosure 257, 260 – 2, 266; freedom of vocation 257, 258 – 60; in La Quiete and Il Conventino 255 – 66; treatment of servants 262 – 6; worship 263 – 4 Anderson, Benedict 308n, 309 Andrade, Alonso de 18n, 20n, 23n, 339 – 43, 348n, 349n, 350 Angela Merici, Saint 7, 48 – 68; see also Ursulines Anne Line, Saint 15, 276 – 93; aid to recusants 278, 281 – 2; girlhood 276 – 7; spiritual life 278 – 9, 281; trial and martyrdom 282 – 7 Anstruther, Godfrey 241, 242, 248n, 249n, 250n, 250, 291 Antignani, Gerardo 267n, 273 antinomianism 22n, 161, 168n, 343, 353 Appuhn, Horst 214n, 215n, 217

Arana, María J. 106n, 108 Arcangeli, Arcangelo 129n, 131 Ardit, Manuel 229n, 232 Arias de Saavedra, Inmaculada 230n, 232n, 232 asceticism 13, 17, 55 – 6, 61n, 63n, 133, 135, 138 – 40, 147 Atienza López, Ángela 18n, 20n, 21n, 23, 103n, 104n, 106n, 108, 230n, 232 Augsburg Confession 14, 198, 199, 204, 210, 247n, 353, 355 August of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel 196, 197, 205, 210, 211 Augustinians: friars 69, 95, 153, 154, 159, 313, 315, 323; canonesses 203, 353; nuns 69, 70, 307n; tertiaries 323 autobiographies 281, 287, 296, 297, 301 – 2, 306n, 308n; see also Gerard, John auto de fe 8, 10, 106n, 136, 152, 156, 157, 158, 227, 228, 333 Aveling, J.C.H. 246n, 250 Ávila Girón, Bernardino de 326n, 329 avvisatrice 55, 57, 64n, 353 Azpiazu, José Antonio 46 Baernstein, René 268n, 173 Baly, Monica E. 82n, 86 Bandini Buti, Maria 267n, 273 Barbieri, Carlo 130n, 131 Barkworth, Mark 285 Barnabites 55, 124 Basque Country, Spain 12, 21n, 31 – 48, 97, 105n, 359; see also Navarre, Spain Bataillon, Marcel 104n, 108, 220, 229n, 232 beatas: 1, 7, 8: and Alumbradismo 97 – 8, 156, 333; ambivalence toward enclosure 95 – 7; and anti-converso policies 93 – 4;

362

Index

collegialiter 101 – 2; in Japan 312, 315, 319, 354, 357; in Lima, Peru 133 – 47, 147n; and monastic reform 5, 92 – 3; in New Spain 22n, 157 – 8; repression of 12, 20n, 22n, 96 – 7, 100 – 2; seorsum 92, 96 – 7, 101 – 2, 353; suspicions regarding 5 – 6, 9 – 10, 20n, 155 – 6, 331; see also De los Reyes, Luisa; Jesuits, apologias for laywomen’s spirituality; Pérez de Valdivia, Diego; Rose of Lima; sanctity, feigned beaterios 91, 96, 97, 102, 103, 107n, 147, 222, 225, 226, 336, 354 beatification 102, 112 – 15, 117, 122, 124, 136, 139, 140, 141, 258, 315, 323, 326n, 327, 329, 341 Beck, Anton 175, 176, 181, 188 beggars 77, 79, 177 béguinages 13, 14 beguines 1, 17n, 49, 51, 69, 71, 354; care work 183 – 5, 191n; chronology 177 – 83, 185, 188; clothing 175, 184; confessional flexibility 180, 185; cross-confessional communities 185 – 7, 190n; expectations for 178, 180, 182 – 4, 186, 187, 197; historiographical assumptions 175 – 80, 187 – 8; hostile representations of 177 – 9; and Protestant Reformation 175 – 6, 178 – 80, 185 – 6, 188; sacral service 182; 183, 184, 186; statutes governing 182 – 6, 189n, 190n Beinart, Haim 104n, 108 Bellarmino, Roberto 264, 272n Bell, Rudolph M. 272n, 273 Belotti, Gianpietro 61n, 62n, 63n, 65 Belschner, Marlo 268n, 273 Beltrán de Heredia, Vicente 106n, 108 Benedictines 70, 129n, 243, 244, 245, 247n, 250n, 285, 357 benefice 33, 35, 39, 40, 41, 44n, 228, 354 Bennassar, Bartolomé 230n, 232 Bennett, Judith 192 Bianchini, Francesca 269n, 273 bicuni see Miyaco no bicuni Bilinkoff, Jodi 18n, 19n, 21n, 23, 24, 92 – 3, 103n, 108, 166n, 169, 230n, 231n, 232, 288n, 290n, 291, 301, 308n, 309, 344n, 345n, 347n, 348n, 350n, 350 biographies, spiritual see vite Biondi, Albano 108 bizzoche (alternate spelling, bizoche) 1, 49, 51, 53, 59, 118, 354 Black, Nick 78, 84n, 86

Blaisdell, Charmarie J. 268n, 274, 289n, 291 Blauel, August. 213n, 217 Blosius, Lewis 244, 245, 250n, 250 Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Renate 177, 189n, 192 Boaga, Emanuele 63n, 66 Boeglin 106n, 108, 220, 229n, 232 Boettcher, Susan 212n, 213n, 217 Böhme, Ernst 213n, 217 Böhringer, Letha 175, 183, 190n, 191n, 193 Boniface VIII, Pope 70, 260, 261, 357 – 8 Böse, Monika 192n, 193 Bossy, John 290n, 306n, 309 Bourdieu, Pierre 308n, 309 Brandis, Wolfgang 215n, 217 Brant, Sebastian 178, 189n, 193 Braunschweig, Duchy of 175 – 95 Brigden, Susan 288n, 291 Brigettines (alternate spelling: Brigittines) 7, 342, 350n; see also Escobar, Marina de Brown, Nancy Pollard 236, 247n, 250, 252 Brunet, Serge 46 Buddhism 312, 313, 316 – 18, 324, 325n Bullough, Bonnie 82n, 86 Bullough, Vern L. 82n, 86 Burke, Peter 307n, 309 Burrieza Sánchez, Javier 344n, 350 Buzzi, Franco 63n, 66 Bynum, Caroline Walker 62n, 66 Cacho Nazabal, Ignacio 168n, 169 Caffiero, Marina 18n, 23 Calderón, Rodrigo 296, 299, 300, 302, 308n Callahan, William 230n, 233 Campion, Edmund 301 Campos Santacana, Miren Koro 43n, 46 Cancellotti, Giovanni Battista 112, 115, 123 – 4, 130n, 131 Cano, Melchor 344n, 345n canoness 8, 199, 202, 203, 209, 341, 354, 366 canoniza see canoness canonization 11, 23n, 112, 114, 127n, 132, 137, 143, 146, 291n, 301 Caraman, Philip 243, 248n, 249n, 250, 287n, 290n, 291 Caravale, Giorgio 64n, 66 care work 1, 11, 12, 91: aid to the poor 33, 41; care for churches and shrines 32, 33, 35, 41; teaching 4, 12, 18n, 48, 56 – 60, 71, 72, 76, 83n, 87, 88, 94, 95, 97 – 8, 103, 134, 154, 265, 316, 341; see also hospitals

Index Carlo Borromeo, Saint 6, 7, 21n, 51 – 7, 62n, 63n, 64n, 261 Carmelites, Discalced 7, 118, 122, 299, 302, 305n, 306n, 307n; see also Teresa of Ávila, Saint Caro Baroja, Julio 44n, 46 Carranza, Bartolomé de 221, 224, 228, 229n Carrete Parrondo, Carlos 104n, 108 Carretero Zamora, José María 230n, 233 Carvajal, Luisa de 11, 15, 23n, 25, 294 – 311, 340, 349n Cary, Elizabeth Tanfield, Lady Falkland 243 – 6, 249n, 250n, 250 Cassiani, Gennaro 64n, 66 Castañeda Delgado, Paulino 149n, 150 Castillo Gómez, Antonio 231n, 233 Catalina de Jesús 9 – 10 Catherine of Siena, Saint 10, 13, 17, 22n, 55, 122, 154, 162, 338, 346n Catholic Monarchs 71, 93, 102 Catholic Reformation see Counter Reformation Cazalla, Agustín 224, 229n Cazalla, María de 94, 97, 98, 220, 229n Cazalla, Pedro de 220, 224 Cazzaniga, Pino 327n, 329 censorship 153, 257, 296, 297, 299, 300, 349n; self-censorship 115; see also Index of Prohibited Books Cerretti, Luigi 129n, 132 Challoner, Richard 278, 288n, 289n, 290n, 291 charismata (spiritual favors or graces) 2, 13, 113, 114, 120, 123, 124, 134, 137, 140, 154, 342; see also ecstasy; revelations charity see almsgiving chastity 1, 6, 9, 178, 182, 184, 186, 187, 198, 211, 242, 260, 295, 317, 336, 340, 342, 354, 356; see also virginity; vows, of virginity or chastity Christensen, Kirsten Marie 190n, 193 Christian Century (in Japan) 15, 312, 315, 328n Christian, William A. 46, 223, 230n, 233 Church of England 235, 296; see also Protestantism, in England; recusancy  laws Circa pastoralis 5, 7, 21n, 52, 59, 95 – 6, 101, 279, 325n, 358 Cisneros, Francisco Jiménez de 92 – 3, 103n Cisneros, García de 344n

363

Claustration see enclosure Clement XII, Pope 101 Coello de la Rosa, Alexandre 167n, 169n, 170 Colín, Francisco 319, 327n Collado, Diego 327n, 329 Colonelle 54, 55, 354 communion, frequent 10, 166n, 238, 278, 344, 33 Company of St. Ursula see Ursulines confessionalization 2 – 3, 19n, 60 confession/confessors 1, 4, 9, 15, 50, 51 – 6, 60, 63n, 64n, 66n, 74, 93 – 6, 98 – 102, 107n, 113, 117 – 24, 134 – 8, 144, 146, 153 – 7, 161, 164, 201, 223, 225, 226, 236, 257, 317, 324, 356, 261, 262, 278, 285, 289n, 301, 308n, 313, 319, 331, 332, 336 – 7, 340 – 1; see also confession, general; directors, spiritual; and ghostly fathers confession, general 74, 120, 236, 238, 239, 336, 356 confraternities 15, 53, 71, 72, 222 – 3, 225, 228, 245, 312 – 14, 320, 322, 323 – 4, 328, 354, 355 Confucianism 315, 318, 321 Congregation of Rites 13, 23n, 112 – 14, 117, 123, 326n Congregation of the Oratory see Oratorians Connelly, Roland 287n, 288n, 291 Conrad, Anne 189n, 193, 325n, 330 conservatories, lay (congregations, lay) 2, 4, 6, 7, 9 – 13, 15, 17, 18, 21n, 60, 63n, 101, 102, 129n, 154, 203, 204, 211n, 255 – 75, 319, 349, 353, 357, 358, 359; see also ancille; Ursulines consolations, spiritual 58, 284, 334 – 8, 343 Conti, Giuseppe 269n, 274 conventen 354 conventuals 192n, 201, 210, 354 conversion: to Catholicism from Protestantism 74 – 5, 229, 239, 243 – 5, 297, 341; to Christianity from indigenous religions 1, 11, 128n, 314 – 17, 239; heightened spiritual devotion 12, 16, 52, 55 – 6, 60, 63n, 121, 227, 332, 335 Conversos 91 – 4, 102, 104n, 105n, 108, 109, 156, 213n, 333, 343, 346n Corthell, Ronald 306n, 309 Costa, Horacio de la 169n, 170 Cotten, Mathilde 107n, 108 Couchman, Jane 19n, 26

364

Index

Council of Trent 1, 5, 25, 44n, 48, 49, 52 – 4, 59, 63n, 70 – 2, 83n, 87, 88, 95, 97, 101, 155, 188, 223, 246, 261, 279, 288n, 289n, 313, 321, 325n, 327n, 340, 348n, 354; see also enclosure Counter Reformation 1, 3 – 4, 12, 16, 331; doctrine on miracles 10, 17, 100, 114, 117, 134, 141, 338, 342; episcopal reform 7, 48 – 55; notions of gender roles; 3 – 4, 10, 31, 53, 57 – 60, 70, 136, 146, 148n, 156, 332, 334 – 3; see also Circa pastoralis; confessionalization; Council of Trent; discipline, social; and virginity Coussemacker, Sophie 104n, 108 Covarrubias, Sebastián de 18n, 23, 331, 346n, 350 Crawfold, Patricia 287n, 290n, 291 Creswell, Joseph 294 – 9, 300, 302, 306n Creytens, Raymond 63n, 66, 105n, 108 criollo 164, 355 Cruz, Anne J. 23n, 23, 305n, 309, 310, 349n, 351 crypto-Judaism (judaizing) 93, 98, 104n, 139, 149, 357 Culpepper, Danielle 66, 72n

Dimesse 21n, 49n, 55, 63n Dinan, Susan E. 12, 20n, 21n, 24, 65n, 66, 269n, 279 directors, spiritual 14, 113, 116, 118, 121, 122, 124, 161, 239, 246, 247n, 248n, 278n, 280, 284, 288, 301, 333; see also confessors; ghostly fathers discernment of spirits 100, 286, 335, 336 discipline, social 2 – 3, 16, 17, 19n, 20n, 28, 63n, 341 Divine Office 354, 355 Dodwell, Martin 287n, 289n, 291 Dolan, Frances E. 247n, 248n, 249n, 250n, 251, 289n, 292, 307n, 308n, 309, 310 Dolan, John 81n, 83n, 86 Dolan, Josephine A. 82n, 86 domina 200, 202, 208, 210, 213n, 355 Domínguez, Freddy 347n, 351 Dominicans 8, 92 – 3, 99, 153, 225, 313, 315, 323 – 4, 357 Dose, Hanna 212n, 217 Dösinger, Franziska 213n, 217 dowries, convent 6, 69, 128, 202, 206, 263; marital 6, 50, 51, 76, 128, 221, 228, 277, 280, 355; for seroras 34 Durante, Simona 127n

Damenstift 199, 355 Daughters of Charity (Sisters of Charity) 7, 12, 71 – 5, 269n, 355; as agents of conversion 74 – 5; avoidance of cloister 72 – 3; hospital work 73 – 5; rules 72, 75; teaching 73 Deane, Jennifer Kolpacoff 13, 16, 190n, 193 De Boer, Wietse 63n, 66 Delor Angeles, F. 165n, 168n, 170 de Lorris, Guillaume 189n, 193 De los Reyes, Luisa 13, 152 – 71 de Marillac, Louise 71, 74 – 5, 83n, 84n, 85, 335 demons: demonic delusion 3, 100, 102, 128, 158, 335, 338 – 9; demonic possession 344n; demonic torment and temptation 8, 10, 146, 162, 331, 333 – 8, 337, 342, 346n; see also devil Deslandres, Dominique 11, 23n, 24 devil 58, 120, 123, 158, 178 – 9, 333 – 8, 345n; see also demons devotio moderna 49, 53, 61, 61n Diefendorf, Barbara B. 18n, 19n, 23n, 24, 61n, 64n, 65n, 66 Diez de Salazar, Luis Miguel 46 Dillon, Anne 303, 308n, 310

ecstasy 13, 16, 92, 103n, 111, 116, 134 – 45, 154 – 7, 159, 161, 331, 332, 335, 337, 338, 342, 343, 344n, 356; see also charismata edicts of Faith 153, 156, 157, 163, 165n, 333, 355 educande 9, 50, 72, 207, 256, 355 Edwards, Francis 287n, 289n, 290n, 292 Ehlers, Benjamin 21n, 24 Elizabeth I, Queen of England 80, 276, 288, 290n, 301 Elton, G.R. 80, 85n, 86 Ember Days 238, 355 enclosure, monastic 3 – 9, 11, 12, 15, 48, 50, 52 – 3, 70, 72, 91, 95 – 7, 100 – 1, 155, 179, 201, 256 – 7, 260 – 2, 268n, 270n, 279, 281, 314, 318, 320, 341, 348n, 354, 357, 358; see also ancille; religious houses for women, Lutheran Endean, Philip 333, 345n, 347n, 351 England 8 – 9, 12, 14 – 15, 18n, 69 – 70, 75 – 82, 235 – 52, 256, 276 – 93, 294 – 311, 314, 341, 356, 358; see also recusants English Ladies (Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary) 9, 18n, 235, 242, 298, 355 Enríquez, Ana 220, 224, 228

Index equivocation 232 – 43 Erasmism 98, 220, 229n Erasmus of Rotterdam 61n, 97, 220, 340 eremi 15, 257 – 9, 270n, 356 Esarte Muniain, Pedro 44n, 46 Escobar, Marina de 7, 342 – 3, 350n Eucharist 226, 236, 239, 303; Eucharistic enthusiasm 156, 333, 335 – 6, 337 Evangelical movement 185, 186, 196 – 8, 206, 209, 356, 359; houses for women 14, 185, 208, 213n Evangelisti, Silvia 18n, 22n, 23, 264, 269n, 270n, 271n, 272n, 274, 288n, 292 examination of conscience 55, 236, 238, 239, 356 false saints see sanctity, feigned Fantozzi Micali, Osanna 269n, 274 Fantuzzi, Giovanni 130n, 131 fasting 56, 113, 115, 116, 122, 141, 201, 238, 263 Fee, Elizabeth 79, 85n, 86 Ferdinand, King of Aragón 92, 97; see also Catholic Monarchs Fernández Duro, Cesáreo 230n, 233 Fernández Martínez, Luis 344n, 351 Fernández, Manuel 153 – 5, 157, 159 – 63 Ferrazzi, Cecilia 21n, 27 Filcock, Roger 285, 286 Filles de la Croix 72 Firpo, Massimo 105n, 108 Fita, Fidel 104n, 109 Flanders 224, 277, 278, 295, 299 – 301, 303, 305n, 307n Florea, Carmen 288n, 292 Florence, Italy 118, 119, 222, 255 – 75 Flores Espinoza, Javier F. 150 Flors Sanctorum or the Lives of Saintes 299 Flynn, Maureen M. 230n, 233 Foglia, Andrea 63n, 66 Foley, Henry 287n, 288n, 290n, 292 Foucault, Michel 83n, 86 Fowler, Jessica 13, 104, 167n, 170, 344n France 1, 5, 11, 12, 18n, 48, 61n, 69 – 88, 246n, 269n, 279, 301, 314, 355 Francesca del Serrone 112, 122 – 4, 127n, 129n Francisca de los Apóstoles 8 Franciscans: friars 9, 52, 94, 128n, 153, 182, 313, 323, 324, 332, 346n, 354, 357; nuns 350n; tertiaries 48, 91, 92, 93, 95, 97, 116, 123, 313, 323

365

François de Sales, Saint 6, 21n, 65n fraud, religious see sanctity, feigned Froide, Amy 192n, 192, 193 Fuente, Alonso de la 332, 337, 338, 344n, 345n Fundación José Ignacio Tellechea Idígoras 230n, 233 Furdson, Cuthbert 244, 245, 250n Galluzzi, Jacopo Riguccio 269n, 274 García de Oro, José 109 García Hernán, Enrique 168n, 170 Garin, Eugenio 268n, 274 Garmendia Larrañaga, Juan 43n, 44n, 46 Garnet, Henry 236, 240 – 5, 249n, 251, 277 – 9, 282 – 6, 287n, 290, 292, 303, 306n, 309n Garofalo, Mary E. 79, 85n, 86 Gelser, Erica 177, 182, 185, 188, 189n, 191n, 192n, 193 Gerard, John 15, 240 – 2, 249n, 251, 277 – 9, 281 – 2, 284 – 6, 287n, 288n, 289n, 290n, 291n, 292 Germany, early modern 8, 13 – 14, 21n, 79, 175 – 95, 196 – 219, 341 ghostly fathers 235, 237, 246, 280, 346, 356; see also directors, spiritual Gibbs, Gary 79, 85n, 86 Giles, Mary E. 103n, 104n, 109 Gill, Katherine 179, 189n, 190n, 194 Giolito, Giovanni 50, 66 Giordano, Maria Laura 12, 17n, 65n, 66, 104n, 105n, 106n, 109, 344n Givens, Bryan 22n, 24 Glave, Luis Miguel 133, 147n, 148n, 150 Goetting, Hans 213n, 214n, 215n, 217 Goñi Gaztambide, José 46 Görnandt, Ruth 211n, 217 Gotor, Miguel 114, 115, 127n, 132 Graf, Sabine 214n, 217 Granada, Luis de 55, 299, 344n Graziano, Frank 134, 140, 147n, 148n, 149n, 150 Gregory, Brad S. 288n, 292 Grisar, Joseph 325n, 330 Guedré, Marie de Chantal 61n, 67 Guidera, Christine 191n, 194 Gunnarsdóttir, Ellen 22n, 24, 107n, 109 Gunpowder Plot (1605) 241, 242, 294, 297, 306n Haagensen, D.C. 84n, 86 Haberle, E. 191n, 195

366

Index

habit (worn by beguines, devout laywomen, or tertiaries) 1, 4 – 5, 37, 49, 56, 95 – 6, 99, 101, 105n, 116, 123, 131n, 142, 198, 199, 201, 257, 265, 270n, 316, 323, 332, 336, 341; habit (worn by nuns) 71, 122, 184, 198 – 9, 201, 256, 262, 265 hagiography 13, 119, 134, 138, 235, 238, 258, 285, 296, 301 – 2, 307n, 318, 326n, 342; see also vite Haliczer, Stephen 103n, 106n, 109, 344n, 351 Hamilton, Alastair 22n, 24, 167n, 170 Hampe Martínez, Teodoro 139, 148n, 149n, 150 Haraguchi, Jennifer 15, 20n, 267n, 274, 348n Hardman, Anne 308n, 310 Harrison, Brian A. 289n, 292 Hayashida Magdalena, Blessed 313, 324 Henry VIII, King of England 75 – 7 Henstock, Chris 304n, 305n, 311 Hernández Aparicio, Pilar 149n, 150 Hernández, Francisca 94, 96, 97, 102, 220 Herrera, Catalina de 341 Hieronymites (Order of St. Jerome) 93, 104n, 225 Highley, Christopher 306n, 310 Hilz, Anneliese 191n, 194 Hodenberg, Wilhelm von 214n, 217 Holler, Jacqueline 165n, 170 Holy Office see Inquisition Hoogeweg, Hermann 191n, 194 Horst, Irvin Buckwalter 190n, 194 hospitals 2, 7, 12; and beguines 182 – 5; in England 76 – 9, 81 – 2; in France 69, 71 – 7, 79, 82; in Italy 53, 116; in Lutheran territories 207, 208, 210; in Spain 31, 32, 41, 42, 95, 96, 221, 224 – 5, 228, 340, 341, 355; see also Daughters of Charity Howard, Anne Dacre, Countess of Arundel 236 – 7 Hsia, R. Po-chia 19n, 23 Huerga, Álvaro 20n, 22n, 24, 104n, 105n, 109, 165n, 167n, 170, 344n, 346n, 347n, 351 Hufton, Olwen 344n, 351 hypocrisy, religious see sanctity, feigned Ignatius of Loyola 236, 277, 286, 313, 316, 329, 332, 333, 335, 336, 342, 345n, 351, 359; see also Spiritual Exercises Il Conventino see ancille

Iluminismo see Alumbrados ilusa (deluded visionary) 102, 134, 156 images, religious 113, 118, 127n, 156, 226, 256, 302 – 3, 318, 334, 341 Imbert, Gaetano 269n, 274 imitatio Christi 140, 141, 223 Imitation of Christ, by Thomas à Kempis 55, 61n, 239 Imízcoz Beunza, José María 44n, 46, 47 impeccability 164, 357; see also antinomianism Index of Prohibited Books: Spanish 95; Roman 115 indigenous peoples: in Philippines 13, 152 – 5, 160, 162, 164, 166n; in New World 136, 160, 192n Inquisition, Iberian 2, 5, 10, 13, 14, 18n, 22n, 93 – 100, 102, 103, 104n, 331, 332, 337; see also auto de fe; edicts of faith; Saavedra, Marina de, inquisitorial trial Inquisition, in Spanish colonies 133 – 51, 152 – 63 Inquisition, Roman 2, 56, 113 – 14, 349n Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary see English Ladies Isabel de Aragón 97, 98 Isabel, Queen of Spain (alternate spelling: Isabella) 92; see also Catholic Monarchs Isolani, Enrico Maria Giuseppe 113, 122, 126, 131 Iwasaki Cauti, Fernando 107n, 109, 135, 148n, 150 Jacinto Orfante, Blessed 320, 321, 327n, 328n, 329 Jacobilli, Ludovico 117, 131 Jaffary, Nora E. 20n, 22n, 24, 107n, 109, 165n, 168n, 169n, 170 Jaka Legoruru, Ángel Cruz 47 Japan 15 – 16, 154, 167n, 312 – 30; bans on Christianity 315, 318; Japanese Christian martyrs; Japanese women as evangelists and catechists 314, 316 – 17 Jardine, David 249n, 252 Jedin, Hubert 83n, 86 jennhonin 312, 322, 325n, 328n Jesuits (Society of Jesus) 4, 9, 52, 356: apologias for laywomen’s spirituality 331 – 53; as authors of women’s vite 118 – 19, 121, 122, 124; collaboration with Anne Line 276 – 93; collaboration with Luisa de Carvajal 11, 294 – 311; in Lima, Peru 13, 133 – 9, 144 – 7, 148n;

Index mission in England 276 – 86, 286n, 288n; mission in Japan 15, 357, 359; mission in Philippines 13, 152 – 70, 359; in New Spain 152 – 65; relations with devout laywomen 16, 17, 97 – 8, 118, 102; spiritual directors to recusant women 235 – 45; see also Anne Line, Saint; equivocation; examination of conscience; Garnet, Henry; Gerard, John; Southwell, Robert; Spiritual Exercises; spirituality, Ignatian Jiménez Salas, Hernán 149n, 150 Joerger, Muriel 83n, 86 John of the Cross, Saint 143 Jones, Colin 83n, 86 Juana de la Cruz 93 – 4, 102 Juan de Ávila, Saint 6, 21n, 221, 224, 230, 299, 332, 346n Juan de los Ángeles 9, 22, 24 Juan de Ribera, Saint 6, 21n Judaizers see crypto-Judaism Julia of Kami 313, 315, 322 – 3, 324 Jutte, Robert 86 Kagan, Richard L. 106n, 109 Kamen, Henry 109 Karant-Nunn, Susan 104 Keitt, Andrew 22n, 24, 106n, 110, 158, 166n, 168n, 170, 351 Knowles, Dom David 84n, 86 Kohl, Wilhelm 191n, 194 Koller, Heinrich 189n, 194 Koren, Sharon Faye 104n, 110 Krumwiede, Hans-Walter 211n, 217 Kugler, Annette 213n, 218 lady-governor 51, 55, 62n, 64n, 353, 357 Lappenberg, Johann Martin 192n, 194 La Quiete see ancille Larramendi, Manuel de 47 Lateran Canons 52, 61n, 64n Laughlin, M.F. 272n, 274 Laven, Mary 19n, 20n, 24 Lawson, Dorothy Constable 236, 238 – 40 lay brother 113, 128n, 178, 277, 357 lay sister see servants, monastic Lea, Henry Charles 153, 165n, 168n, 170 Legazpi, Miguel López de 153 Lehfeldt, Elizabeth 20n, 21n, 23, 24, 25, 65n, 67, 82n, 87, 105n, 110, 288n, 292, 350n, 351 Leonard, Amy 8, 19n, 21n, 25, 65n, 67, 212n, 218

367

Leonard, Ellen Marianne 84n, 87 León, Luis de 95 Letter-writing, by women 11, 15, 72, 207, 241, 244, 283, 284, 294 – 311, 346n Levy-Navarro, Elena 23n, 25 Lightfoot, Thomas 84n, 87 Lindemann, Mary 215n, 218 Line, Anne Heigham see Anne Line, Saint Line, Roger 277, 291n litany 117, 235, 237, 238, 239, 316, 320, 357 literacy, female 43n, 55 – 8, 94, 123, 134, 138, 147n, 164, 196, 201 – 2, 207 – 8, 220, 225, 231n, 236 – 8, 259, 264, 280, 296, 299; miraculous 123; see also letter-writing, by women Littlehales, Margaret Mary 269n, 274 Lives of the Saints see Flors Sanctorum or the Lives of Saintes Lizarralde Elberdin, Koldo 44n, 46 Lloyd, Wyndham E.B. 84n, 86 London 11, 77 – 82, 242, 277, 278, 282, 284, 294 – 8 Longhurst, John 104n, 110 Loomie, Albert 306n, 310 López-Guadalupe, Miguel 230n, 232 Lorentzen, Tom 212n, 218 Lorenzo Pinar, Francisco Javier 230n, 233 Lotz-Heumann, Ute 19n, 25 Lucía de Freitas, Blessed 323 – 4 Luebke, David M. 19n, 25 Lundberg, Magnus 166n, 170 Luria, Keith P. 19n, 25 Lutherans/Lutheranism 14, 95, 97, 196 – 219, 353, 355, 356, 359: in Spain 97, 106n, 206, 219 – 24, 231n Luther, Martin 8, 69, 156, 178, 196, 197, 211n, 216, 224, 353 Luttikhuizen, Frances 229n, 233 Lux-Sterritt, Laurence 18n, 22n, 25, 61n, 65n, 67, 194, 235, 247n, 251 Macchietti, Siri Serenella 267n, 274 Macek, Ellen 14, 247n, 248n, 251, 289n, 290n Magdalena de San Jerónimo 296, 300, 303, 306n, 308n Magdalena of Nagasaki, Saint 323 Magdalen Viscountesse Montague 237 – 8 Mager, Inge 211n, 212n, 218 Makowski, Elizabeth M. 17n, 25, 83n, 87, 191n, 194 Malloch, A.E. 249n, 251

368

Index

Mangion, Carmen K. 18n, 25 Mangolt, Gregor 179, 190n, 194 Manila, Philippines 152 – 71, 315, 318 – 20 Manning, Ruth 65n, 67 Manrique de Castilla, Estefanía 342 – 3, 348n, 350n Marcelli, Michelangelo 63n, 67 mardomas 312, 323 María Bautista 98 – 100, 102 María de la Visitación (nun of Lisbon) 337, 339 María de Santo Domingo 92, 102 Mariana de Jesús, Blessed 167n, 170, 342 – 3, 350n Mariani, Luciana 61n, 67 Marcocchi, Massimo 268n, 275 Marotti, Arthur F. 290n, 292, 306n, 307n, 309, 310 Márquez, Antonio 167n, 170 Marriage, secular: refusal to marry 1, 6, 11, 239, 313, 321 – 2, 340; Tridentine doctrine 340; see also dowries, marital Martínez de la Escalera, José 349n, 351 Martini, Rosa Maria 112, 119 – 20, 125 Martín, Luis 148n, 150 Martin, Victor 83n, 87 Martyrdom 15, 244, 277 – 93, 295 – 7, 301 – 3, 305n, 308n, 309n, 313, 315, 317, 320 – 2 Maryks, Robert A. 166n, 167n, 170, 350n, 351 Mass 32, 40, 50, 64n, 76, 119, 137, 144, 225, 226, 227, 236, 237, 238, 239, 256, 262, 282, 320, 321, 358 Matrone 51, 54, 55, 62n, 357 Mazzonis, Querciolo 7, 12, 21n, 25 McClain, Lisa 247n, 248n, 250n, 251 McCoog, Thomas M. 246n, 287n, 290n, 292 McIntosh, Marjorie K. 77, 80, 84n, 85n, 87 McIver, Katherine A. 19n, 26 McManners, John 84n, 87 McNamara, Jo Ann Kay 83n, 87, 288n, 292 Medioli, Francesca 20n, 25, 63n, 67, 83n, 87 meditation 55, 97, 122, 123, 223, 235, 236, 239, 242, 244, 316, 334, 344, 359; see also prayer, mental; Spiritual Exercises Melgarejo de Soto, Luisa de 13; inquisitorial trial 134 – 47, 150; relations with Jesuits 133 – 9, 144 – 7; visions 134, 136, 141 – 6

mendicant orders/mendicant friars 1, 14, 112, 182, 288n, 312, 315, 320, 323, 324, 357 Mendoza, Catalina de 342, 349n, 350n Menegon, Eugenio 23n, 25 Mercurian, Everard 333, 337, 344 – 5n Merici, Angela see Angela Merici, Saint Meun, Jean de 189n, 192 Mexico, colonial see New Spain Milan 7, 49, 50 – 5, 62n, 64n, 256, 261, 268n Millar Carvacho, René 150 Miller, Tanya Stabler 190n, 194 miracles 9, 10, 17, 100, 114, 117, 133 – 4, 141, 158, 161 – 2, 309n, 343, 338, 342; cessation of miracles, Protestant doctrine of 10, 17, 100; see also charismata misogyny 57, 60 – 1, 98, 339, 342 Miyaco no bicuni 312 – 15, 316, 320, 324, 326n, 352n, 357, 359 Mizobe, Osumu 330, 337n Mlynek, Klaus 191n, 194 Molina, Michelle 166n, 170 monachization, forced 259, 270n, 357 monasteries, dissolution of 8, 76 – 8, 196 Montalvo, Eleonora Ramirez di 15, 256 – 75; see also La Quiete and Il Conventino Monta, Susannah 247n, 251 Monteiro, Marit 18n, 25 Mooney, Catherine 62n, 67 More, Alison 17n, 26 Moreno Martínez, Doris 14, 20n Moriscos 95 mortification 94, 138, 140, 141, 257, 316, 335 – 6, 342; see also penitential practices Mostaccio, Silvia 18n, 26, 341n, 350n, 351 Mujica Pinilla, Ramón 139, 140, 148n, 149n, 151 Munkhoff, Richelle 80, 81, 85n, 87 Muñoz Fernández, Ángela 18n, 20n, 26, 104n, 110 Murner, Thomas 178, 189n, 194 Myers, Anne M. 290n, 292 Myers, Kathleen Anne 166n, 171 mysticism/mystics 95, 98 – 100, 133 – 51, 295, 297, 337, 343, 344n, 345n; see also charistama; ecstasy; prayer, mental and contemplative; revelations; visions Nader, Helen 310 Naitō, Julia 313 – 20, 326n, 357 Nalle, Sara T. 21n, 26

Index Navarre, Spain 12, 31, 32, 34, 36, 43n, 44 negotiation paradigm 3, 19n Nelson, Sioban 85n, 87 Netherlands (Low Countries) 18n, 22n, 69, 300, 306, 347n, 353, 354 Netzloff, Mark 306n, 310 Neumeister, A. 191n, 195 New Christians see Conversos Newdigate, C.A. 247n, 248n, 251 New France 11 Newman, Barbara 65n, 67 New Spain (colonial Mexico) 20n, 22n, 107n, 165n, 326n; see also Jesuits, in New Spain Nieto, José C. 105n, 220, 229n, 233 Nightingale, Florence 79, 82, 84n, 87 Norberg, Kathryn 314, 325n, 330 Nun of Lisbon see María de la Visitación nuns, Bhuddhist see Miyaco no bicuni nuns, Catholic 6, 8, 11, 13, 21n, 22n, 59, 60, 69, 72, 75, 112, 120, 123, 129n, 131n, 220, 243, 258, 263 – 4, 289n, 301, 324, 339, 341, 358; dowries monastic 6, 51, 69, 76, 202, 355; in Lutheran territories 196 – 218, 353, 355, 358; in medieval period 70, 260, 261; servant nuns 69, 263; see also Circa pastoralis, enclosure; dowries monastic; habit; monachization, forced; monasteries, dissolution; Periculoso; religious houses for women, Lutheran; vows nursing see care work; hospitals Oddi, Jacopo 130n, 131n, 132 Ohainski, Uwe 212n, 213n, 218 Oiwa Monica 313, 315, 321 – 2, 324 Oldermann, Renate 212n, 218 Oliva, Marilyn 76, 84n, 87 Olivares Gullón, Ángela 147n, 150 Oliveri Korta, Oihane 44n, 47 O’Malley, John 288n, 289n, 293, 344n, 345n, 351 Oratorians (Congregation of the Oratory) 52, 64n, 123, 129n oratory 116, 223, 255, 261, 262, 268n, 318, 357 Order of St. Jerome see Hieronymites Order of the Clerics Regular of St. Paul see Barnabites orphanages 78, 96 orphans 64n, 73, 77, 79, 118, 207, 208, 263 Ortega Costa, Milagros 106n, 110 Ortiz, Francisco 94

369

Ortiz, Isabel 97 – 9, 102 Otte, Hans 212n, 213n, 218 Paciaroni, Raoul 130n, 131n, 132 Padilla, Cristóbal de 220, 224 – 7 Palacios Alcalde, María 103n, 110 Palau y Dulcet, Antonio 310 Palmes, William 239, 248n, 250n, 251 Pando-Canteli, María J. 15, 23n, 305n, 310, 349n papists 206, 235, 300, 306n, 307n Pastore, Stefania 104n, 105n, 106n, 110, 220, 229n, 230n, 232n, 233, 234n, 344n, 345n, 351 Paul III, Pope 51, 70 peasants, female 92, 112, 121 – 4, 131n, 333 Pellicia, Giancarlo 17n, 26 Penal Laws see Recusancy Laws Peña, Manuel 231n, 233 Peñaranda García, Pilar 43n, 47 penitential practices 1, 2, 6, 8, 9, 12, 13, 49, 51, 56, 60, 113, 115 – 16, 118, 120, 137, 140 – 1, 226, 316, 342; see also asceticism; and fasting; mortification penitents: as confessional daughters 4, 15, 18n, 93, 113, 164, 166n, 169n, 288n, 290n, 331, 333, 336; medieval meaning 1, 18n; see also directors, spiritual Pérez de Valdivia, Diego 5 – 6, 26, 140, 149n Pérez Ollo, Fernando 47 Periculoso 70 – 1, 191, 337 Perry, Mary Elizabeth 18n, 19n, 22n, 26, 103n, 110, 167n, 171 Persons, Robert 235, 246n, 251, 280, 289n, 293, 297, 298, 301, 306n Peru 13, 102, 133 – 51, 222 Pescador, Juan Javier 44n, 47 Peters, Christine 65n, 67 Peters, Günter 175, 195 Pezzella, Sosio 131, 132 Philip II, King of Spain 4, 95, 277, 294, 337 Philip III, King of Spain 11, 298 Philip IV, King of Spain 99, 343, 350n philo-protestantism 22n, 99, 353; see also Alumbrados Pietro da Palermo 116 – 17, 127n, 128n, 132 Pinto Crespo, Virgilio 106n, 110 pinzochere 1, 17n, 179, 312 plague 73, 80 – 1 Plummer, Marjorie 14, 22n Ponce de la Fuente, Constatino 97, 106n, 220

370

Index

Pons Fuster, Francisco 18n, 26 Poor Clares (Clarisses) 9, 255, 358 poor relief 1 – 2, 4, 7, 33, 41, 56, 70, 73, 76, 79 – 82, 181, 203, 224, 235, 237, 255, 257, 258, 349; see also confraternities; Daughters of Charity Portugal 10, 17n, 99, 213n, 337; see also Jesuits Poska, Allyson 19n, 26 prayer, contemplative 48, 53, 69, 98, 99, 106n, 203, 276, 286, 313, 315, 319, 320, 324, 332, 333, 340, 344n, 345n prayer, intercessory 134, 141, 142, 159, 162, 186, 318, 319, 320 prayer, mental 9, 55, 64n, 98, 156, 164, 264, 316, 333, 334, 337, 338, 342, 343, 345; see also meditation prayer, vocal 55, 98, 106n, 156, 334, 337 pretense of sanctity 10, 22n, 100 – 2, 337, 353; see also sanctity, feigned priest hole 282 – 3, 358 processions, religious 37, 145, 320, 341 Prodi, Paolo 19n, 26 prophecy/prophets, female 2, 3, 7, 9, 60, 92, 106n Prosperi, Adriano 17n, 26, 67, 110, 230n, 233, 234 prostitutes/prostitution 7, 17, 64n, 99, 332 Protestant Reformation/Protestantism 3, 8 – 17, 19n, 65n, 332: in Early Modern Germany 175 – 95; in England 9, 70, 76 – 82, 237 – 8, 240, 243, 247n, 276, 279, 285, 290n, 294 – 9, 307n; France 3, 8, 10, 11, 74 – 5; in Spain 99 – 100, 219 – 34; see also Evangelical Movement, Lutheranism, religious houses for women, Lutheran Puente, Luis de la 26, 299, 300, 307n, 350, 333, 345n, 352 Pujo, Bernard 83n, 87 Pulido Serrano, Juan Ignacio 218 purgatory 13, 100, 142, 154, 159, 161, 162, 225 – 6 purity of blood statutes 93, 102, 343, 350n pursuivant 241, 278, 282, 358 Questier, Michael C. 238, 248n, 249n, 251 Rafferty, Anne Marie 85n, 87 Rahner, Hugo 325n, 330 Ramírez Leiva, Eldemira 107n, 111 Ramos, Demetrio 230n, 233

Rapley, Elizabeth 3, 18n, 19n, 21n, 26, 71, 83n, 87 rapture see ecstasy Raymond of Capua 10, 22n, 26 reclusion 10, 32, 92, 332 recusancy laws 277, 297, 302, 304, 306n, 357 recusants 11, 14, 15, 235 – 52, 276 – 94, 356 Redworth, Glyn 304n, 305n, 307n, 308n, 310, 311 Reichstein, Fran-Michael 176, 177, 181, 189n, 190n, 191n, 192n, 195 Reinhard, Wolfgang 2, 19n, 26 relics 15, 116, 119, 122, 123, 284, 285, 290n, 294 – 311, 312, 322 religious houses for women, Lutheran: as educational institutions 199, 201, 202, 204 – 7; and enclosure 197, 210; and noble families 198, 199, 203 – 7; plural religious identities 197, 200, 201 – 2, 213n; reform policies 198 – 204; as refuges for sick and disabled women 207 – 10; resistance to reforms 198, 200 – 5, 211; spiritual life 201 – 3; and vows 196, 197, 199, 210, 211 revelations 99, 114, 134, 136, 138, 142, 147n, 154, 157 – 63, 338, 342 Rhodes, Elizabeth 166n, 171, 248n, 251, 305n, 311, 344n, 352 Ribadeneyra, Pedro de (alternate spelling: Rivadeneira) 300, 301, 337 – 9, 342, 343, 347n, 348n, 350n, 352 Ribera, Juan de see Juan de Ribera, Saint Rico Seco, Antonio 344n, 352 Riggert, Ida-Christine 212n, 214n, 218 Riquelme, Javier 154 – 5, 157, 159 – 63 Rizzo Grimaldi, Innocenza 112, 115 – 17, 128n, 129n, 131n Rocca, Guerrino 17n, 29 Rogers, D.M. 305n, 311 Rojas, Elvira de, Marquise of Alcañices 220, 224 Roldán-Figueroa, Rady 21n, 27 Rome (Holy See) 4, 5, 8, 16, 112, 117, 118, 119, 123, 124, 178, 228, 306n Roper, Lyndal 191n, 195, 247n, 252 Rosa de Santa María see Rose of Lima, Saint rosary, recitation of 64n, 115, 117, 236, 258, 264, 272n Rose of Lima, Saint (Rosa de Santa María) 11, 13, 102, 133 – 47 Roselli, Pietro 269n, 274 Roux, Sister Marie-Genevieve 84n, 87

Index Rovere, Vittoria della, Grand Duchess of Florence 15, 255, 257 – 9, 262, 266, 267n Rowland, Marie B. 246n, 247n, 252, 287n, 291, 293 Rubial García, Antonio 107n, 111 Ruiz de Alcaraz, Pedro 94, 104n Ruiz de Medina, Juan G. 328n, 330 ruota 261, 262, 358 Ryan, Frances 83n, 88 Rybolt, John E. 83n, 88 Saavedra, Marina de 14, 219 – 32: family background 221 – 2; inquisitorial trial 227 – 8; literacy 221 – 25; Protestant beliefs 226 – 7; spiritual itinerary 223 – 6 safe houses 278, 285, 358 sainthood see beatification; canonization saints: “living saints,” 3, 60, 100, 102, 153; “potential saints,” 9, 4, 10, 331 Sales Tirapu, José Luis 45n, 47 Salmon, John Hearsey McMillan 84n, 88 Sánchez, Ana 147n, 150 sanctity, feigned (pretense of sanctity) 2, 10, 100, 139, 147, 157, 158, 159, 164, 178, 331, 332; see also ilusas; pretense of sanctity Sanok, Catherine 290n, 293 Sarrión, Adelina 18n, 22n, 27, 168n, 169n, 171 Sastre Santos, Eutimio 103n, 106n, 107n, 110 Scalompi, Virgilio see Scampoli, Giulio Scampoli, Giulio 124, 130n, 131n, 132 Schen, Claire S. 82, 85n, 88 Schilling, Heinz 2 Schlau, Stacey 13, 16, 22n, 27, 107n, 149n, 151, 344n Scholz, Michael 213n, 217 Schroeder, Friedrick 189n, 195 Schroeder, Henry Joseph 83n, 88, 288n, 293 Schutte, Anne J. 10, 12, 20n, 21n, 22n, 27, 111, 127n, 132, 147, 229, 270, 275, 349n Scott, Amanda L. 12 scripture 94, 95, 196, 199, 201, 208, 356 Scully, Robert E. 15, 246n, 250n, 287n, 288n, 289n, 293 Searchers (plague relief workers) 80 – 2 Sehling, Emil 212n, 217 Selke, Ángela 104n, 111 semi-religious, female 11, 12, 18n, 71, 281, 313, 323

371

Sensi, Mario 18n, 27 Seroras 12, 31 – 45, 359 Serraino, Mario 127n, 132 servant of God (serva di Dio) 112, 163, 326n servants, monastic (lay sisters) 69, 113, 262, 281; see also ancille, treatment of servants Seynaeve, Marie 61n, 67 Shell, Alison 305n, 311 Shepard, Alexandra 195 shrines, religious 31, 32, 33, 35, 36, 37, 40 Signorotto, Gianvittorio 63n, 68 Simmonds, Gemma 325n, 330, 341n, 344n, 352 Simons, Walter 17n, 27 Sluhovsky, Moshe 19n, 27, 64n, 65n, 68 Smith, Richard 238, 248n, 252 Society of Jesus see Jesuits solicitation, confessional 164, 333, 344n, 351 Sommervogel, Carlos 129n, 132 Soto, Isabel de 135, 140, 141, 146 Soto, Juan de 135, 140 Southwell, Robert 236 – 42, 247n, 248n, 249n, 252 Spinnenweber, Kathleen 306n, 311 spiritual adviser see director, spiritual Spiritual Exercises 239, 246, 286, 291n, 292, 316, 332, 335, 337, 345n, 346n, 350n, 351 spirituality: affective or interior 221, 227, 231n, 332, 346; Ignatian 55, 235, 248n, 278, 288n; Pauline 16, 94 – 5, 98, 102, 104n, 231n, 339; recusant 243, 245; see also Jesuits, apologias for laywomen’s spirituality; prayer, contemplative; prayer, mental; Ursulines, spirituality Sprenger-Ruppenthal, Annaliese 212n, 218 Steen, Sara Jane 295, 305n, 311 Steinberg, Geltrude 267n, 269n, 271n, 275 Steinen, Johann Diederich 19n, 195 stigmata 338, 339, 342, 347n Strasser, Ulrike 19n, 27, 166n, 167n, 170, 211n, 218, 342, 350n, 352 Suárez, Juan 333, 337, 347n superiora 255, 256, 257, 261, 264, 312, 314, 326n, 359 Surero, Juan Bautista 154 – 5, 159 – 60 Surtz, Ron 104n, 111, 325 Taddey, Gerhand 212n, 218 Tallon, Alain 83n, 88

372

Index

Tarolli, Elisa 61n, 67 Tassoni, Francesco 115, 119, 132 Tavares, Vilas Boas 17n Taylor, Judith Combes 83n, 88 Taylor, Scott 45n, 47 Tellechea Idígoras, Juan Antonio 105n, 111, 219, 220, 229n, 230, 233, 234 Teresa of Ávila, Saint 7, 21, 99, 137, 138, 154, 159, 162, 231, 301, 308, 333 Terpstra, Nicholas 20n, 27, 230n, 234 tertiaries (terz’ ordine secolare): 1, 5, 7, 48, 49, 51, 52, 53, 59, 71, 91 – 6, 101, 112, 114, 115 – 16, 118, 123, 312 – 15, 183, 261, 279, 288n, 312 – 15, 323 – 4, 347n Theatines 50, 56 third status (il terzo stato) 1, 5 – 7, 12, 16, 17, 18n, 20n, 21n, 52, 60, 92, 101, 339 Thomas, Werner 229n, 233 Tiemann, Katrin 192n, 193 Tobío, Luis 306n, 311 Todd, Barbara 287n, 293 Toledo, María de 93, 94, 102 Tomey, Anne Marriner 85n, 85 Torres Sánchez, Concha 20n, 27 Toscani, Xenio 61n, 62n, 63n, 66 Tribesco, Giancomo 64n, 68 Turrini, Miriam 62n, 63n, 68 Urban VIII, Pope 7, 9, 112 – 14, 256, 261 Urkiza, Julián 307n, 311 Ursua Irigoyen, Isidoro 45n, 47 Ursulines (Company of St. Ursula): 7, 12, 341, 61n; governance 50 – 5; growth of order 48 – 9; response to Tridentine reforms 51 – 4; spirituality 55 – 7 Valdés, Juan de 94, 111, 219 – 20, 224, 227, 229n Valier, Agostino 55, 59, 64n, 68 Valls, J. Martínez 105n, 111 Van Deusen, Nancy E. 147n, 148n, 149n, 150 Vaux, Anne 240 – 1 Vaux, Eleanor 240 – 1 Vaux, Elizabeth Roper 242 – 1 Veramonti, Girolama 112, 117 – 19 Villalpando, Juan de 9 – 10 Villegas, Alfonso de 299, 301, 307n, 311 Vincent de Paul, Saint 6, 71, 72, 83n, 87, 88, 355

virgens (Japanese Christian nuns) 312, 313, 319, 320 – 2, 324, 327n, 359 virginity, Catholic doctrine of 2, 16, 348n; Counter-Reformation esteem for 16, 17, 50, 56 – 8, 61, 65n, 113, 117, 121, 140, 143, 256, 340, 342; see also vows, of virginity/chastity Virgins see Ursulines Virgin Mary 4, 6, 99, 122, 143, 162, 256 – 8, 266, 269n, 321, 341, 357 visions/visionaries 8, 13, 91, 99, 100, 102, 134, 136 – 8, 141 – 2, 144, 145 – 6, 151, 152, 157, 161 – 3, 269n, 319, 327, 343, 356 Visitandines 71, 269n vite (spiritual biographies) 2, 11, 13, 55, 57, 112 – 32, 139, 147n, 154, 166n, 237 – 9, 243, 245 – 6, 257, 285 – 7, 301, 308n, 312, 239, 347n, 348n, 350n Vógeli, Alfred 190n, 194 Voigt, Jörg 175, 195 vows: of obedience 1, 101, 289, 341; of poverty 101, 211, 279, 280, 281; solemn 5, 50, 52, 69, 95, 101, 102, 114, 117, 177, 178, 199, 210, 211, 255, 256, 259, 262, 267n, 279, 314, 339, 354, 357; of virginity or chastity 1, 6, 17, 54, 118, 161, 267, 279, 280, 288, 313, 315, 320, 321, 324, 336, 340, 342, 348n, 349n, 353 Walker, Claire 35, 246n Walker, Garthine 194 Walpole, Henry 295, 297, 301, 308 Walpole, Michael 297, 301, 308 Walsham, Alexandra 246n, 250n, 252 Ward, Haruko 15, 23n, 27, 167n, 325n, 326n, 330 Ward, Mary 9, 22n, 235, 242, 256, 268n, 314, 325n, 355 Weaver, Elissa 267n, 275 Weber, Alison 19n, 20n, 27, 103, 103n, 106n, 111, 149, 169n, 171, 229, 267n, 279, 344n, 345n, 352 Webster, Wentworth 43n, 47 Wehner, Jens 213n, 217 Weston, William 287n, 289n, 293 Wetter, Madre Immolata 268n, 275 widows 21n, 33, 39, 54, 55, 80, 99, 118, 129n, 143, 203, 206, 222, 240, 245, 256, 277, 280, 281, 285 – 6, 287n, 323, 359

Index Wiesner-Hanks, Merry E. 19n, 21n, 27, 112, 129n, 139, 186, 192n, 195, 212n, 218 Wilkens, Frances 84n, 88 Wilts, Andreas 175, 190n, 195 Wolter, Christina 185, 191n, 192n, 195 Woodward, George William Otway 76, 84n, 88 Worcester, Thomas 18n, 27

373

Zarri, Gabriella 1, 18n, 20n, 21, 28, 61n, 62n, 63n, 64n, 68, 107n, 111, 130, 268n, 271n, 272n, 275 zitelle 49, 63n, 256 Zucchini, Anna Maria Calegari 112, 113, 121 – 2, 126, 131 Zudaire, Claudio 47