Women, Texts and Authority in the Early Modern Spanish World (Women and Gender in the Early Modern World) 0754609502, 9780754609506

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W OM EN, TEXTS AND AUTHORITY IN TH E EARLY M ODERN SPANISH W ORLD

Women and Gender in the Early M odem World Series Editors: Allyson Poska and Abby Zanger In the past decade, the study of women and gender has offered some of the most vital and innovative challenges to scholarship on the early modem period. Ashgate’s new series of interdisciplinary and compararitive studies, ‘Woman and Gender in the Early Modern World’, takes up this challenge, reaching beyond geographical limitations to explore the experiences of early modern women and the nature of gender in Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Africa. Submissions of single-author studies and edited collections will be considered. Titles in this series include:

Maternal Measures Figuring caregiving in the early modern period Edited by Naomi J. Miller and Naomi Yavneh Marie Madeleine Jodin 1741-1790 Actress, philosophe and feminist Felicia Gordon and P.N. Furbank The Political Theory of Christine de Pizan Kate Langdon Forhan Poetic Resistance English women writers and the early modern lyric Pamela S. Hammons

W omen, Texts and Authority in the Early M odem Spanish World

Edited by MARTA V. VICENTE University o f Kansas, USA LUIS R. CORTEGUERA Univeristy o f Kansas, USA

First published 2003 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint ofthe Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright © Marta V. Vicente and Luis R. Corteguera 2003 The Editors have asserted their moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Editors of this work. 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. 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

Women, texts and authority in the early modem Spanish world. - (Women and gender in the early modem world) 1. Spanish literature - Classical period, 1500-1700 History and criticism 2. Spanish literature -To 1500 History and criticism 3. Spanish literature- 18th centuryHistory and criticism 4. Spanish literature - Women authors - History and criticism 5. Women and literature - Spain 6. Women in literature 7. Women- Spain- Social conditions I. Vicente, Marta V. II. Corteguera, Luis R. 860.9'352042'0903

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Women, texts and authority in the early modem Spanish world I edited by Marta V. Vicente and Luis R. Corteguera. p. em. - (Women and gender in the early modem world) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7546-0950-2 (alk. paper) 1. Spanish literature-Women authors-History and criticism. 2. Women and literature-Spain. 3. Feminism and literature-Spain. 4. Women-Spain-Social conditions. 5. Women-Language. 6. Authority. I. Vicente, Marta V. II. Corteguera, Luis R. III. Series. PQ6055.W63 2004 860.9'9287-dc21

ISBN 13: 978-0-7546-0950-6 (hbk)

2003045227

To Natalie Zemon Davis, in gratitude for being the first to imagine that the editors might share a common interest in the past.

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Contents

List of Illustrations Contributors Acknowledgments Abbreviations

ix xi xiii XV

1. Women in Texts: From Language to Representation Marta V. Vicente and Luis R. Corteguera 2.

Sclaves Molt Fortes, Senyors Invalts: Sex, Lies and Paternity Suits in Fifteenth-Century Spain Debra Blumenthal

17

3. The Gender of Shared Sovereignty: Texts and the

4.

Royal Marriage of Isabella and Ferdinand Elizabeth A. Lehfeldt

37

Writing (for) Her Life: Judeo-Conversas in Early Modem Spain Gretchen D. Starr-LeBeau

57

5. Representing Madness: Text, Gender and Authority

6.

in Early Habsburg Spain Bethany A ram

73

Patience and Pluck: Job's Wife, Conflict and Resistance in Morisco Manuscripts Hidden in the Sixteenth Century Mary Elizabeth Perry

91

7. The Three Lives of the Vida: The Uses of Convent Autobiography Alison Weber

107

Women, Texts and Authority

viii

8.

Visualizing Gender on the Page in Convent Literature Sherry M. Velasco

127

Forms of Authority: Women’s Legal Representations in Mid-Colonial Cuzco Kathryn Burns

149

The Making of a Visionary Woman: The Life of BeatrizAna Ruiz, 1666-1735 Luis R. Corteguera

165

Textual Uncertainties: The Written Legacy of Women Entrepreneurs in Eighteenth-Century Barcelona Marta V Vicente

183

9.

10.

11.

Index

197

List o f Illustrations

Cover illustration: Detail of emblem no.29, from Andrés Mendo, Principe Perfecto y ministros ajustados (Lyon, 1662). Courtsey of the Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas. 4.1

8.1

8.2

8.3

10.1

Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Guadalupe, Spain Photograph by Gretchen D. Starr-LeBeau.

56

Detail of letter from King Philip IV to Sor María de Agreda, 9 January 1647 (with her reply of 18 January 1647 on the left margin). Courtesy of the Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas.

138

Seventeenth-Century (?) engraving of Saint Teresa of Avila included in Los libros de la Madre Teresa de Jesús, ed. Luis de León (Salamanca, 1588). Courtesy of the Special Collections at the Georgetown University Library.

142

Isabel de Jesús, Tesoro del Carmelo (Madrid, 1685). Courtesy of the Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid.

144

Beatriz Ana Ruiz, from Tomás Pérez, Vida de la Venerable Madre Sor Beatriz Ana Ruiz (Valencia, 1744). Courtesy of the Biblioteca Universitária, University of Barcelona.

164

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Contributors

Bethany Aram teaches History and Western Civilization at the Institute of International Studies, Seville. She is the author of La Reina Juana: gobierno, piedad y dinastia (2002). She is currently working on a book manuscript titled Balboa and Pedraria: Black and Gold Legends in Spanish-American History. Debra Blumenthal is Assistant Professor of History at the University of California at Santa Barbara. She is the author of several articles and conference papers on slavery in the late medieval Crown of Aragon. She is completing her book titled Enemies and Familiars: Muslim, Eastern and Black African Slaves in Late Medieval Valencia. Kathryn Burns is Associate Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She is the author of Colonial Habits: Convents and the Spiritual Economy o f Cuzco, Peru (1999). Her second book project is Truth and Consequences: Scribes and the Colonization o f Spanish America. Luis R. Corteguera is Associate Professor of History at the University of Kansas. He is the author of For the Common Good: Popular Politics in Barcelona, 1580-1640 (2002). His next book project is Before God and King: Ordinary People in Politics in Early Modern Spain. Elizabeth A. Lehfeldt is Associate Professor of History at Cleveland State University. She is the author of several articles and conference papers on women and religiosity in early modem Spain. She is working on a book project entitled, Masculinity and Decline: Negotiating a Code o f Virtuous Virility in Seventeenth-Century Spain. Mary Elizabeth Perry is Adjunct Professor of History at Occidental College and Research Associate at the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies of the University of California, Los Angeles. Her published works include Crime and Society in Early Modern Spain (1980) and Gender and Disorder

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in Early Modern Seville (1990). She is presently working on a book on Moriscos, exploring the roles of women and children in preserving an outlawed culture. Gretchen D. Starr-LeBeau is Associate Professor o f History at the University of Kentucky. She is the author of several articles on conversos and the Spanish Inquisition. Her latest published work is In the Shadow o f the Virgin: Inquisitors, Friars, and Conversos in Guadalupe, Spain (2003). Sherry M. Velasco is Associate Professor o f Hispanic Studies at the University of Kentucky. She is the author of Demons, Nausea and Resistance in the Autobiography o f Isabel de Jesús (1611-1682) (1996) and The Lieutenant Nun: Transgenderism, Lesbian Desire, and Catalina de Erauso (2000). Her next book project is titled Male Delivery: Pregnant Men and the Politics o f Reproduction in Early Modern Spain. Marta V. Vicente is Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies and History at the University of Kansas. She is the author of several articles on women and family work in Early Modem Spain. She is completing a book titled Clothing the Spanish Empire: Families and the Calico Trade in the Atlantic World, 1700-1815. Alison Weber is Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Teresa o f Avila and the Rhetoric o f Femininity (1990). She has edited a translation (in collaboration with Amanda Powell) of For the Hour o f Recreation by Maria de San José Salazar (2002). Her next book project is entitled The Fortunes o f Ecstasy: Religious Culture in Early Modern Spain.

Acknowledgments

The editors are grateful to Professor Alyson Poska, Series Editor at Ashgate Publishers, for first proposing the present collection of essays. Tista Bagchi, Karen Carroll and Jodi Bilinkoff offered valuable suggestions. We also wish to acknowledge the friendly and professional assistance of Pam LeRow of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Word Processing Center at the University of Kansas. Erika Gaffney of Ashgate has made the production process extraordinarily simple and efficient.

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Abbreviations

Archives and Libraries ACA AGS AHCB AHN AHPB AHPZ APPV ARC ARV BC BN RAH

Arxiu de la Corona d ’Aragó (Barcelona) Archivo General de Simancas Arxiu Historic de la Ciutat de Barcelona Archivo Histórico Nacional (Madrid) Arxiu Historic de Protocols de Barcelona Archivo Histórico Provincial de Zaragoza Archivo de Protocolos del Patriarca de Valencia Archivo Regional del Cuzco (formerly Archivo Departmental del Cuzco) Archivo del Reino de Valencia Biblioteca de Catalunya (Barcelona) Biblioteca Nacional (Madrid) Real Academia de la Historia (Madrid)

Other Abbreviations cc CSR FC Inq JC leg. llig. MS PN PR RA Salazar VE

Cámara de Castilla Casa y Sitios Reales Fons Comercial Inquisition Junta de Cornea legajo (bundle) lligall (bundle) Manuscript Protocolos Notariales Patronato Real Reial Audiencia Colección de Salazar y Castro Varios Especiales

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Chapter 1

Women in Texts: From Language to Representation Marta V. Vicente and Luis R. Corteguera

If we keep on speaking the same language together, we are going to reproduce the same history. Begin the same old stories all over again. Luce Irigaray

Women’s Language, Women’s Authority To study women, texts and authority is to investigate questions about language. Was there a woman’s language in the past? Has that language survived in texts? How much control did women have over this language and its transmission? For decades such questions have been at the heart of the theoretical work of many feminists.1 In the last thirty-five years, as political and economic reforms advocated by feminists failed to end the long-standing inequality between the sexes, new movements within feminism concluded that the root of this inequality lay in the world of symbols created by men. Women’s lack of a language of their own in literature, politics, economics or even in their sexual and intimate relationships—the argument goes—continued to keep women in the position of the “second sex.”2 From Mary Daly in her 1968 Gyn/Ecology, to Luce Irigaray and the French feminists of the écriture fémmine of the 1970s and 1980s and the Third Wave feminists of the 1990s, the new political agenda for many feminists became the search for a distinctive language of women that could express a female identity and become a means of authority and independence from male domination.3 In search of women’s language, a number of scholars believed they found it in particular texts and contexts from the past. For instance, the writings of certain medieval and early modem nuns and women mystics allegedly created a language that was closer to the world of sentiment and emotions.4 What made their language distinct was the fact that these writers lived in communities of women and therefore had less contact with men. The writings of other

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laywomen such as the authors of the eighteenth-century French Journal de Dames, Olympe de Gouges and Mary Wollstonecraft—to mention a few of the most famous examples—allegedly revealed a particular language that linked motherhood to ideals of patriotism and the formation of a new republic.5In the texts of these and other groups of women, scholars found a distinctive language in sharp contrast to men’s. As often happens with stimulating and pioneering research, the search for women’s own language in the past uncovered new problems. First of all, it is not always easy to explain why certain words and symbols belonged to women’s language and others did not. We can certainly understand that symbols associated with motherhood are closer to women’s identity, but it is less obvious why this would not be true of symbols of military heroism when we know that women soldiers and pirates existed.6Likewise, it is well known that men could appropriate the language of motherhood. Whereas St. Francis of Assisi described himself as a mother, St. Clare adopted male models as her own.7 Secondly, since women more often than not did not write and had to dictate their words, does that mean those texts were not theirs? Even when women produced texts without male intervention they resorted to genres (such as scientific treatises and history) dominated by men. To a large extent, the principal motivation behind the present collection of essays was the search for ways to overcome the two problems outlined above in the context of the early modem Spanish World. First, rather than assume that women in the past used a predetermined (and universal) language to establish their authority, this collection proposes that the relationship between women and authority could vary from case to case. Consequently, whereas previous studies on Spanish women and texts have focused exclusively on women authors—usually nuns and women from the social elites8—the essays of this collection extend that list to women from different ethnic and social backgrounds: Old Christians and Moriscas, queens and merchants, peasants and nobles, heretics and visionaries.9 In addition, the essays cover a wide geography of the Spanish empire—Andalusia, Aragon, Castile, Catalonia, Pern and Valencia— from the fifteenth century through the eighteenth century. Second, this more open-ended approach has eliminated the need to restrict the type of texts under consideration to those written by women without the influence of men. Rather than presuppose that the intervention of men in the process of creating those texts inevitably reduced women’s authority, the contributors explore in each text whether that was in fact the case or not. This has made it possible to consider texts that women dictated to men, those where men interpreted women’s words and deeds, or even anonymous texts

Women in Texts

3

in which women appear as secondary characters. The range of sources discussed by the contributors is therefore broad and includes medical and therapeutic texts, court cases, inquisition trials, notarial documents, chronicles, biblical stories, convent narratives and even business records. Taken together, the essays propose that the relationship between women’s language and their authority has a history, and that this history can be revealed through the analysis of women’s representation in texts. There are several benefits to this attention to representation, among them, the possibility of examining a wide variety of phenomena. As Catherine Stimpson has pointed out “a representation can be an image— visual, verbal, or aural. ... A representation can also be a narrative, a sequence of images and ideas.... Or, a representation can be the production of ideology, that vast scheme for showing forth the world and justifying its dealings.”10 Forms of representation offer information about how and why a certain language was used, who used it and for what purpose. In addition, these forms of representation were the result of a process that can be studied historically. As the essays will reveal, representations changed over time and varied depending on political, social and cultural contexts. At the heart of this process of representation lie complex interrelations between women and contemporary models of femininity. In case after case we find women responding to those models in a variety of ways. Sometimes women passively accepted those models imposed on them by male authorities; other times, women actively assumed, transformed or rejected those models. In each example, the way in which women responded to those models depended in part on the kind of authority they sought—whether political, religious or moral authority—as well as on the individual circumstances in which these women lived. In other words, the process of representation involved a subject— women— acting on an object—models of femininity. We must therefore pay attention to three key elements in this process: the women, the types of action they undertook and the models women acted upon. Some of the essays focus more on the varieties and subtle forms of action, whereas others highlight the multiple layers and values assigned to women’s models.

Models and Possibilities Women found opportunities to claim authority by invoking models that may appear at first only to reinforce women’s subordination to their male relatives or authorities. For example, the ideals of the obedient wife and the devoted

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mother did not necessarily divest women of all authority. Several of the essays in this collection demonstrate that by “performing” these two models of femininity and adapting them to their circumstances, women found certain forms of authority privately and publicly Privately, the “good wife” and mother could claim moral authority that allowed her to have a say in the running of the household and the daily lives of its members. Such moral authority could extend beyond the home. For instance, some texts represented women in public activities as strong and virile individuals who overcame their feeble nature for the sake of their families. Mary Elizabeth Perry presents one such ideal in the story of the trials of Rhama, the wife of the biblical Job according to Morisco texts found in Aragon. This wife and mother acts as Job’s sole support under the protection of God, who forbade the Devil to hurt her. When the husband was forced into exile, with no place to live and nothing to eat, Rhama left the home to earn a living, built a house for Job to live in and begged for his food. The patience and dedication of Job and Rhama represented a symbol of endurance for the Morisco community faced with constant threats of extinction by their suspicious Christian neighbors, ecclesiastical and royal authorities. In Rhama’s divinely sanctioned transformation as the head of the household, Morisca wives found a model of traditional wifely duties that acted as a pivot o f resistance and cohesion in their community. Another example of women’s moral authority translating to other forms of public authority is that of the Valencian holy woman Beatriz Ana Ruiz discussed by Luis Corteguera. According to her biographers, Beatriz’s life was a perfect example of the humility and obedience expected of ordinary women, both married and widowed. She submitted to all male authorities to the point of surrendering her life to her abusive husband. Yet the lack of authority in the home and the community could endow women with extraordinary moral and spiritual authority. In fact, Corteguera argues that ordinary women could only succeed as visionaries by expressly rejecting all claims to earthly authority. Women were conscious of the authority conveyed by such models of wifely and motherly virtue, and sometimes used them to their advantage, as demonstrated by Kathryn Bums and Marta Vicente. According to Bums, women in mid-colonial Cuzco tried to secure legal protection by underscoring in notarial documents their position as dutiful mothers or abused wives. Spanish women in Peru resorted to those familiar types in order to protect their dowries and family property from what they described as illegal machinations by their male relatives. Although such self-representation acknowledged women’s lack of authority, the action of recording their husbands’ threats in notarial documents was part of these women’s strategy to secure their economic independence.

Women in Texts

5

Similarly, Vicente argues that women entrepreneurs in eighteenth-century Barcelona presented themselves in petitions and commercial documents as “virile mothers” or widows protecting the family property in order to enter the public sphere of business. These businesswomen had no other choice but to adopt these traditional models since there was not even a Spanish word for “businesswoman.” Lacking a professional identity of their own, these women could win official recognition for their activities by claiming those activities were an extension of their duties as women, wives and mothers. The good wife and loving mother were quintessentially positive models; but in some cases, even negative models of femininity recognized forms of authority that women may not have welcomed. Drawing upon paternity trials brought by female slaves against their masters in fifteenth-century Valencia, Debra Blumenthal explains that a number of masters proclaimed their impotence before their slaves’ powerful sexuality. Ironically, for the sake of preserving their manly honor, masters undervalued their own authority over what they described as uncontrollable women capable of seducing any man they set their eyes on. For their part, female slaves countered those accusations with self-portraits of submissive slaves forced by their masters into sexual bondage. Likewise, Gretchen Starr-LeBeau has found in late fifteenth-century Extremadura daughters of recently converted Jews (known as conversas) invoking their mothers’ role as transmitters of Jewish traditions in order to plead innocent to charges of heresy during Inquisition trials. The accused women blamed their mothers, who had been found guilty by the Inquisition or were dead, for introducing religious practices that the accused did not know were unchristian. By underscoring the authority of mothers as keepers of religious tradition in the home, the conversas tried to save their own lives.

Negotiable Scripts Early modem models of femininity were therefore polyvalent, their meanings varying depending on the context. But how did women choose among different models and their meanings? In her analysis of four chronicles of Isabella’s rise to the throne of Castile, Elizabeth Lehfeldt offers one explanation with the notion of a “negotiable script.” Upon the death of her brother, king Henry IV, in 1474, Isabella had to prove herself a capable ruling queen without emasculating her husband and future king of Aragon, Ferdinand. According to Lehfeldt, the queen had to negotiate between two models, each with its own “script”: the strong woman warrior capable of ruling and the learned but dutiful

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wife. Those scripts had a long history passed on in oral and written texts. It is not possible to establish with absolute precision how Isabella learned about these models, but she owned books that described them, such as a life of Joan of Arc and Christine de Pisan’s The Treasure o f the City o f Ladies. Yet Isabella’s negotiation was not textual but ceremonial. She demonstrated her strength by brandishing a sword during her acclamation ceremony, whereas on other occasions she offered “tender words” and gestures to Ferdinand that recognized his authority as her husband. In the histories of Isabella’s reign by four male chroniclers, Lehfeldt has found several versions o f how she succeeded in forging her own script of the capable female ruler who nonetheless did not threaten her country’s patriarchal traditions or Ferdinand’s masculinity. In contrast to Isabella’s successful negotiation, her daughter Joanna failed to establish herself as the ruling queen of Castile. According to Bethany Aram, Joanna’s behavior fitted contemporary representations of insane women, which excluded her from governing. Madwomen were weak and irrational, the opposite qualifications of a ruler. In sharp contrast to her mother, who asserted her virility in actions worthy of a warrior queen, Joanna’s madness underscored her femininity. Joanna showed symptoms of insanity following childbirth, apparently failing to control her bodily functions and temper. As happened to other women, once those with authority over Joanna declared her mad, her capacity to negotiate any other script for herself was compromised. Although she resisted being classified as mad by refusing to accept medical treatment or any religious practices to rid her of the possible influence of evil spirits, she remained confined to her residence for the rest of her life. Yet even within the constraints of the script imposed upon her, Joanna remained a queen. Moreover, her concern for decorum and modesty, as well as her expressions of devotion and strong self-will, assured her a certain degree of authority over her body. Negotiating or maneuvering among different models was possible because such models derived from a range of often contradictory characteristics assigned to women—what the historian Joan Scott has called the “internal tensions and incompatibilities” that each discourse bears in itself, its paradoxes.11 Women could be both the weaker sex and virile souls; they could not preach, but were more likely to be chosen by God as purer vessels of his will. Women also found room to maneuver by exploiting legal loopholes and special opportunities. Queen Isabella took advantage of the political crisis over the succession of her brother to present herself as the only one capable of restoring order. Likewise, in eighteenth-century B arcelona women entrepreneurs found opportunities in new, and therefore less regulated, economic activities to carve out their own niche in the business world. Even at the

Women in Texts

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lowest end of the social spectrum, the Valencian slave women found in the laws of the kingdom opportunities to negotiate their status. Although legally bound to their masters, female slaves learned that children of Christian fathers— and sometimes also the children’s slave mothers— could claim their freedom. This enabled slaves to appeal to the court of the governor as caring mothers, concerned above all about their children’s well-being, to demand that their masters recognize their children as their offspring.

Authors and Collaborators As implied in the notion of a negotiable script, the process of representation often involved more than one person. Texts could have one or more authors and editors, sometimes working over an extended period of time. Alison Weber explains how the text we know today as Teresa of Avila’s Life is in fact the result of three different “lives” written at different times: Teresa’s manuscript written under clerical direction (of which there was more than one version), the texts resulting from “semi-clandestine copying and circulation o f m anuscripts” and the life in print published after Teresa’s death. Her “collaborators”— a problematic term since the intervention of other persons was not always the saint’s choice— involved Teresa’s spiritual directors, the nuns of her convent of St. Joseph and others who venerated her as a holy woman. Similarly Corteguera describes several stages and collaborators in the process of representing Beatriz Ana Ruiz as a holy woman and a visionary. As in the case of Teresa, there are three “lives” of Beatriz that blur the distinctions between the genres of autobiography and hagiography. Sherry Velasco points to other interventions that altered women’s texts, sometimes in subtle ways that modem readers may not easily detect. For example, during the publication of original manuscripts, editors introduced quotation marks or italics to differentiate between a nun’s words, scriptural quotations and divine revelation. Even fray Luis de Leon’s seemingly innocuous editorial work of correcting colloquial expressions and spellings in the published edition o f Teresa’s Life suggests greater learning than Teresa may have had or wanted to convey. Consequently, the published version identifies several voices that were undistinguishable in the original manuscript. In Velasco’s words, such editorial alterations sought to erase the “hybrid nature” of spiritual life narratives. The existence of so-called collaborators raises the prickly issue of distinguishing between their role and that of the women protagonists. Sorting

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out the roles of each participant in the production of texts seems especially important if we seek to establish women’s relationship to their representations. One approach to addressing this concern is Velasco’s and Weber’s methods of comparing and contrasting manuscript and published versions of the texts to establish, as much as possible, a history of the texts. Such a history will take into account the relationship women authors had with the various individuals who intervened in the creation and transformation of the texts. In addition, by comparing manuscript copies and published versions one may search for differences in the physical appearance of texts— such as marginal notes on manuscripts or the introduction of italics in published texts. Such differences might offer hints to the interaction between a woman author and her confessors, censors, collaborators and editors. However, the opportunity to compare different versions of a manuscript is often confined to the texts of women authors who achieved some degree of fame, such as Teresa of Avila and Maria de Agreda. That approach is simply not possible for the writings of most women. In some cases, the absence of original manuscripts means that we cannot document the history of alterations in their texts. Even more difficult are the texts of women who did not write down their own words. The illiterate washerwoman Beatriz Ana Ruiz dictated her words to a male secretary; whereas the words of women slaves and conversas discussed in this collection come from declarations made during their trials. Isabella’s and Joanna’s actions come to us through chronicles or descriptions authored by men. In all of these cases, telling apart the voices of women from those of their collaborators requires that we use other methods. Bums spells out a second approach used in several essays: paying close attention to deviations in the style established for a document’s genre. For instance, throughout the Spanish world, notaries relied on manuals that described the accepted styles for all sorts of documents, from contracts and wills to simple declarations. These manuals even provided sample documents, which notaries could copy and alter according to each client’s needs. Even though such documents do not seem to offer any possibility for individual expression, occasionally variations in style may alert the researcher to moments that might allow for “reading between the lines.” Likewise, Vicente detected the stamp of individual women’s personalities on such seemingly straightforward and standard texts as official petitions and commercial correspondence. Other essays in this collection examine repetitions and variations in court depositions or in forms of self-representation. This approach cannot overcome the limitations imposed by the absence of texts written by women themselves, but

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it at least hints at where others intervened during the production of a given text. In some cases it is necessary to give up altogether the hope of identifying different authors, editors or collaborators, as in the story of Job’s wife Rhama. It is not clear that a search for this historical person, if she existed, would add much to our understanding of early modem Moriscas. Instead, following Perry, we can accept Rhama’s existence strictly within a Morisco text and then proceed to analyze what her representation tells us about the possibilities and limits for women’s behavior. Yet even in the case of Teresa of Avila or sor Maria de Agreda, where we can claim to have found a representation of women that is closer to their own intent, we still gain much from exploring the different representations of Teresa and sor Maria for what they reveal about the range of women’s models or possibilities for action. In fact, although the Teresa of the published Life may differ from that in the manuscripts drafted by the saint, numerous nuns in the Spanish world and throughout Christianity sought to model themselves after the one they read about in the published version. This is not to argue that all three “lives” of Teresa have equal value; rather, it is to recognize that all representations of women are worth studying for what they may contribute to answering different questions.

Performance The process of representation also implied some degree of performance and, as in a theatrical piece, performing did not rely solely on words. The stage design, the actors’ gestures, wardrobe and body language are also important. In representing themselves, women must have felt sometimes that they were literally on stage. The conversas of Guadalupe sometimes prepared their speeches backstage, aided by other women who knew what the Inquisitors would want to hear. Queen Isabella quite literally coordinated stage performances during her official acclamation as ruler of Castile, paying attention to such details as the use of a sword or public expressions of respect toward her husband. This performance became the basis for comment by four chroniclers, whose texts constitute a form of theatrical criticism. In addition, Velasco illustrates in her essay how written texts might also rely on visual techniques associated with a performance. In manuscripts, readers might look at the narrative and the spatial distribution of the writings for signs of the author’s personality. In the printed versions, the addition of a portrait of the protagonist preceding the narrative of a spiritual life, provided readers with a

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visual aid to imagine the actions narrated. The introduction of italics and quotation marks denotes the multiple characters in the narrative. Just as in a play, sometimes women’s representation went beyond the written text to incorporate their own bodies.12 As Judith Butler has argued, consciously or not, the body was an ultimate form of representation for women—a form that, combined with all the others, allowed them to create their own text and claims to authority.13The bodies of the women portrayed in these essays speak as loudly as their speech. Each bodily act or expression is culturally constructed. Thus when individuals act on their bodies they do it in a social context, confirming the rules or becoming subversive by defying those rules.14The changing bodies of Valencian slaves are a sign of their pregnancies and an attack on the honor of their master. For a nonslave woman the pregnancy would signify the loss of her honor, but for these slaves the unlikely contrast between the fierce sexualized bodies and the maternal aspect of pregnancy threatened men’s honor. The sword Isabella of Castile held during her acclamation ceremony inspired chroniclers to underscore the unexpected contrast between the female body of the new queen, and as her husband Ferdinand asserted, “this manly attribute.” Similarly, the readers of Rhama’s story could not have but marveled at the unsuspected strength of the body of this extraordinarily beautiful and delicate woman as she carried her sick husband from village to village in search of a place to live. In Aram’s essay, physicians and caregivers associated the madness of Queen Joanna and her lady-inwaiting, doña Isabel de Albornoz, with their disturbed and uncontrollable wombs. These women’s lack of control over their bodies was a reflection of the lack of control over their mental capacities. Precisely for this reason, for these two women control of their bodies became not only a struggle between their female bodies and their minds, but also, between them and their caretakers. Overall, the essays in this collection illustrate how the analysis of women’s representation in texts contributes to the study of women’s language in the past in three principal ways. First, to the question of whether such a language existed, the answer is a yes: women had a language of their own that drew on their physical, mental and social experiences as women. Flowever, what made that language a woman’s own was not so much that it contained something like a pure, female essence. To paraphrase Roger Chartier’s distinction between elite and popular cultures, what made a language women’s was not that it was opposed to that of men, but rather that it was “a repertory of themes and acts ready for use” by women of a “variety of social levels (not necessarily in like fashion).”15 This emphasis on the identity of the users would support the view that, for example, women could appropriate legal and notarial jargon, which

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originated in professions dominated by men, for their own intents and purposes, perhaps even giving certain words different meanings. Second, this more inclusive definition of a women’s language will necessarily redefine the notion of women’s texts to encompass a wider range of texts whose authorship is problematic. It remains desirable and necessary to locate and analyze texts authored by women in order to establish with greater certainty their use of language, the meaning of their words and the authors’ probable intentions. Perhaps it is not appropriate to ask those questions of texts in which the intervention of, say, male relatives or religious authorities altered women’s original words and intentions, or in which the participation of women in their creation is uncertain. Nevertheless, as several essays in this collection demonstrate, women found creative and subtle ways to let their voices be heard even in texts in which, to use Burns’s words, “the mediations are too significant, the scripts too obtrusive.” In a period in which even male authors had to resort to what the historian Perez Zagorin has described as “ways of lying,” it also remains important to learn how women resorted to all sorts of rhetorical skills to dissimulate or to deceive.16 But if different texts can help to answer different questions about the history of women’s language, it is equally necessary that scholars— even those in search of an authentic woman’s voice— study many kinds of texts by women and about women. Third, in considering the relationship between women’s language and authority, authenticity has not always translated into greater authority for women. Queen Isabella may have exercised “supreme sovereignty” over all of her subjects, yet she still had to watch her words and gestures to instill loyalty in her subjects and compel them to obey her commands. Teresa of Avila remained throughout her life subject to the authority of her confessors, the Inquisition and the church hierarchy. Still, she not only enjoyed considerable authority, spiritual and moral, but also command over the nuns in her new order. Teresa was savvy about the different kinds of authority that were necessary for different purposes. She courted bishops and aristocrats in an effort to carry on her religious reforms. Early modem women recognized that they needed to assume different voices and roles in order to lay claim to different forms of authority. Other times, women depended on male authorities to achieve their desired ends. Such compromising generally did little to change men’s attitudes about women in general; yet to individual women it might have meant the difference between recognition or oblivion, or in the case of conversas, between life and death.

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History of Women and the History of the Early Modern Spanish World In speaking their own language women also tell a different story about Spain, a story that is neither linear nor circular. It does not look back or ahead. It does not see Spain as the heir of its medieval past or look at its grandiosity before the fall of the empire. It is a story of daily survival, of the quotidian effort of constructing a society. The portrait of a world in which gender relations are more dynamic and less static than was once thought also helps us to know more about Spanish society. The study of women’s textual representation as flexible and versatile is also part of the recent scholarship that looks at the early modem Spanish world as stubbornly multicultural, a vibrant society in a state of constant change and adaptation.17 The lives of the women discussed in this collection force us to rethink how the structures of early modem Spanish society affected, and were in turn affected, by individual women’s actions. In the case ofValencian female slaves, the law and judicial institutions defended the interests of the rich and powerful, while occasionally offering protection for the weak and poor. However, these women at the lowest end of the social scale and without familial or social support dared to take their masters to court because they considered such legal action was worth the effort. Of course, the possibilities of success for slave women remained, at best, small, and as expected, in most cases those appeals to the court of the governor of Valencia had little chance of success. And yet, Valencian women slaves’ appeals forced king Ferdinand and the Valencian Corts to issue new laws to stop those appeals. Even the most vulnerable and powerless could represent challenges to the powerful. In another example, the conversas of Guadalupe desperately tried to share legal strategies and arguments to defend themselves before the tribunal of the Inquisition, and sometimes those strategies worked. By and large, historians contend that such activities are evidence of the wide variety of forms of resistance used by the lower classes in their constant strife against abuse and injustice. Recent studies for Castile and Catalonia have also found that peasants and artisans, men and women, somehow learned about the law and used the courts to defend their interests, sometimes successfully.18 And yet, all women studied in the collection’s essays, from the Spanish elite in colonial Pern or the aristocratic and royal women described by Aram to Barcelona’s business women, faced an uphill battle to defend their claims against those of their male relatives and authorities. Nevertheless, they too sought legal protection. We may ask ourselves whether through their use of the law these women were able to

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create a legal niche for themselves from where to make their claims and offer a particular form of resistance. The essays in this collection also point to how the actions of women in the realm of politics helped to shape the nature of politics in early modem Spain. Two decades after Sarah Hanley’s work forced historians to recognize that the French state had, in addition to political, religious, and economic foundations, gender foundations, few historians have undertaken similar studies for the Spanish monarchy.19 And yet by exploring the connections between gender and politics the essays in this collections demonstrate that, as in the case of France, we cannot understand the formation of politics in early modem Spain without looking at women. Moreover, these essays study women of the political elite as well as ordinary women who became political actors. Queens and humble nuns had crucial importance to shape notions of politics in early modem Spain. From above, Lehfeldt shows in her essay on Isabella that the masculinity of the state and the crown becomes apparent when the one bearing the crown is a woman. Ceremonies, symbols, actions: they all give the state a distinctly masculine nature that for women rulers was difficult to replicate— as the example of queen Joanna demonstrates. The other perspective is from below. As argued by Corteguera, the representation of visionary women responded to the definition of the political subject as a man of respectable social standing. Yet just as the gender of politics closed most avenues for the political participation of common women, it might inadvertently lead to other opportunities for women. The very powerlessness and ignorance of these women might occasionally make them more credible as purveyors of God’s message, and as such these women might become political subjects. Investigating further how politics in the early modem Spanish were “engendered” will not only contribute to women’s history, but will also expand the frontiers of Spanish political history as it has done for American, English, and French history. Religion is a third area where the contributors of this collection point to how, by adapting existing rules and symbols available, women could create new meanings. The essays document the dynamism and variety of early modem Spanish religiosity, but in the case of the conversas examined by Starr-LeBeau, also the unremitting suspicion and brutal repression of that diversity. Even within the constraints of orthodoxy and the control of a male ecclesiastical hierarchy, women struggled to find meaningful religious experiences in which they became the protagonists. Whether the authors studied by Velasco and Weber or the Moriscas in Perry’s chapter, women resorted to writing and storytelling to try to make sense of human existence and of God’s will. In a way, whether in their relationship to law, politics or religion, women never

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failed to find ways to make law, religion, and politics their own, just as they constructed a language of their own to create their own meanings, even when the words were not strictly theirs.

N otes 1

2

3

4

5

6

Feminist activists of the late nineteenth century such Elizabeth S. Canton, who with her collaborators, published the Women’s Bible, and Virginia Woolf in the early part of the twentieth century are the most direct influence on later scholars on women and language. Canton and Woolf, as well as early twentieth-century anthropologists, realized that women in different societies needed to construct their own physical and symbolic spaces—one of them being language. In 1929, Virginia Woolf in “A Room of One’s Own,” called for money and a physical space for her creative needs. As the century advanced it became clear that women also required a linguistic space. An influential book in that respect was Dale Spender, Man made language (London, 1980). There is nowadays an abundant literature on how language is the essence of understanding people’s ability to function in the world, and women’s place in it; see Deborah Cameron, Thefeminist critique o f language (London, 1990). Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. and ed. H. M. Parshley (New York, 1989 [1949]). There is great division among feminists on whether women’s status as “second citizens” in most societies has its causes in economic, political or linguistic grounds. And yet, the last four decades have seen an increase in focus on linguistics and semiotics in relation to women’s and feminist studies. On the disenchantment of 1970s feminist scholars who turned to linguistics and philosophy for answers, see Maria-Milagros Rivera, El fraude de la igualdad: Los grandes desafios del feminismo hoy (Barcelona, 1997). Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics o f Radical Feminism (Boston, 1990 [1968]). Other representatives of the écriture féminine include Hélèn Cioux and Elisabeth Bandinter; see French Feminism Reader, ed. Kelly Oliver (Oxford, 2000), 153-297: For an excellent analysis of the arguments of the écriture fémenine, see Mary Klages, “Post-Structuralist Feminist Theory” (October 30, 1997), available on-line at www.colorado.edu/English/ Engl2012Klages. On the Third Wave feminism, see Barbara Ameil, Politics and Feminism (Oxford, 1999), 186-223. For an analysis on language and feminism from a philosophical perspective, see Moira Gatens, Feminism and Philosophy: Perspectives on Difference and Equality (Bloomington, 1991), esp. 60-121. Electa Arenal and Stacey Schlau, Untold Sisters: Hispanic Nuns in Their Own Words (Alburquerque, 1989); Stephen Haliczer, Between exaltation and infamy: female mystics in the golden age o f Spain (Oxford, 2002). For example, see Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age o f the French Revolution (Ithaca, 1988) and Visualizing the Nation: Gender, Representation, and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca, 2001). Jo Stanley, Bold in Her Breeches: Women Pirates Across the Ages (San Francisco, 1995); Sherry Velasco, The Lieutenant Nun: Transgenderism, Lesbian Desire and Catalina de Erauso (Austin, 2000).

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8

9

10

11

12 13 14

15 16 17

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19

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Catherine M. Mooney, “Imitatio Christi or Imitatio Mariae?: Clare of Assisi and Her Interpreters,” in Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and Their Interpreters, ed. Catherine M. Mooney (Philadelphia, 1999), 52-77. In 1990, Maria-Milagros Rivera published a monograph on women’s texts in medieval Europe in which she analyzes the works of noble women authors—including Marie of France and Christine de Pisan—in order to argue that women could establish authority by constructing their own symbolic spaces; see Maria-Milagros Rivera Garretas, Textos y Espacios de Mujeres: Europa, Siglos IV-XV (Barcelona, 1990). For a list of Spanish women authors, many of whom were religious women or nuns, see Manuel Serrano y Sanz, Apuntes para una biblioteca de escritoras españolas: desde el año 1401 al 1833 (Madrid, 1989 [1903]). Catherine Stimpson, “Nancy Reagan Wears a Hat: Feminism and Its Cultural Consensus,” Critical Inquiry 14,2 (1988): 223; quoted in Linda Hutcheon, The Politics o f Postmodernism (London, 1989), 31. To Scott, who studies modem feminism, the paradox lies in the feminists’ need “to both accept and to refuse ‘sexual difference,’” to participate in the democratic society as human beings—equal to men—but to do it as women; Joan Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights o f Man (Cambridge, Mass., 1996), 16. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (New York, 1993); Scott, Only Paradoxes, chap. 2. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion o f Identity (New York, 1999). There is a lengthy literature on the subversive aspect of anorexia in history. Scholars have particularly studied this topic in religious women; see, among others, Carolyn Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance o f Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley, 1987) and Sherry M. Velasco, Demons, Nausea, and Resistance in the Autobiography o f Isabel de Jesús, 1611-1682 (Albuquerque, 1996). For cross-dressing as a form of resistance, see Velasco, Lieutenant Nun. See Roger Chartier, The Cultural Origins o f the French Revolution, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Durham, N.C., 1991), 142-43. Perez Zagorin, Ways o f Lying: Dissimulation, Persecution, and Conformity in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, Mass., 1990). On recent historical works that examine the complex multicultural nature of early modem Spanish society, see Magdalena Sánchez and Alain Saint-Saëns, eds., Spanish Women in the Golden Age: Images and Realities (Westport, Conn., 1996) and James Casey, Early Modern Spain: A Social History (London, 1999). Luis Corteguera, For the Common Good: Popular Politics in Barcelona, 1580-1640 (Ithaca, 2002); Ruth MacKay, Limits o f Royal Authority: Resistance and Obedience in SeventeenthCentury Castile (Cambridge, 1999); Helen Nader, Liberty in Absolutist Spain: The Habsburg Sale o f Towns, 1516-1700 (Baltimore, 1990). Sarah Hanley, “Engendering the State: Family Formation and State Building in Early Modem France,” French Historical Studies 16, 1 (Spring 1989): 4-27.

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Chapter 2

Sclaves Molt Fortes , Senyors Invalts: Sex, Lies and Paternity Suits in Fifteenth-Century Spain Debra Blumenthal

In 1461, a slave woman named Margalida gave birth to a baby boy whom she claimed was her master’s son. In a lawsuit filed on her behalf some four years later, Margalida noted how, at the time of the child’s birth, her master readily had acknowledged, if not embraced, her son Michalet as his own, coordinating the infant’s baptism, contracting the services of a wetnurse and “doing those things which a father does for his child.”1As soon as the infant was entrusted to the care of the wetnurse, however, Margalida complained, she had been cruelly and faithlessly repudiated. In flagrant violation of her newly won “freed” status as the mother of her master’s child, Margalida was cast out from her master’s household, secretly dispatched to the town of Lucena where she was resold, illicitly, to a new master.2 For his part, Margalida’s master, the nobleman Johan Ros, protested that, hardly greeting news of his slave’s pregnancy with joyful anticipation, he considered the slave’s condition an affront to the honor of his household. In response to Margalida’s allegations, Johan not only denied paternity but also represented his slave’s pregnancy as an act of rebellion. In stark contrast to Margalida’s description of a proud father caring for his son, Johan’s account emphasized how, immediately subsequent to the infant’s birth, he beat the slave severely as punishment for this “shameful act” she had committed in his household. Not satisfied that the aforementioned beating was sufficient enough chastisement, Johan maintained that it was completely within his rights to expel the unruly slave from his household. Indeed,“in order to cause her even greater distress,” he had seen to it that she would never again see her son.3 In opposition to Margalida’s claims that her resale was morally wrong and legally invalid, Johan Ros vigorously asserted the authority of a master over his slave.

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Nowhere is the ambivalent nature of the master-slave relationship more apparent than in the interaction between masters and their female slaves. Sexual relations between masters and their female slaves blurred distinctions between insider and outsider, free and slave. When a Russian female slave named Anna described her relationship with her master, she noted how for the past ten years they had slept together in the same bed each night “as if she was his wife ” {com si fos sa muller).4 Likewise, after pointing out how she and her master “ate together at one table” and “slept together in one bed,” a Russian slave woman named Rosa would contend that she was “[more] properly speaking, his concubine [than his slave].”5 The pregnancies that not so infrequently resulted from these relationships confused distinctions between kin and stranger still further, compromising the boundaries between free and slave. As a consequence of giving birth to her master’s child, master and slave were linked together by blood ties. The slave now was not only her master’s lover but also the mother of his child. When confronted with a slave claiming to be pregnant with his own child, a master seems to have felt particularly hard pressed in his efforts to balance the conflicting demands of profit and paternalism. In contrast with other slave­ holding societies in the late medieval Mediterranean world, in the Kingdom of Valencia, female slaves who bore their master’s children were entitled to an automatic manumission.6According to the kingdom’s legal code, the Furs de Valencia, a master who impregnated his female slave was obliged not only to acknowledge the child’s free-born status (status was inherited patrilineally in the Kingdom of Valencia) and to see to it that the child was baptized, but also to free the child’s mother. The statute reads, “if any Christian lies with his female slave and a son or daughter is produced from this union ... both the mother and the son or daughter shall be free.”7 Thus, when the Russian slave named Anna informed her master that she was pregnant with his child, her master allegedly instructed her to “take good care of the fetus, because through her you will have good fortune.”8 While historians of slavery quite rightly have pointed to sexual exploitation as a distinguishing feature of the female slave experience,9 this article, in contrast, examines how female slaves made use of their sexuality as a means to secure their liberation. Bearing their masters’ children offered female slaves a path to freedom not available to their male counterparts and if denied, they, like any other wrongfully detained slave, had recourse to the court of the governor, the court most accessible to the kingdom’s poor and miserable, where they could file a demanda de libertat, as the claims of freedom were called.

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My research in the civil court records of the Kingdom of Valencia has brought to light the efforts of female slaves of a variety of different ethnic origins to win their freedom (as well as that of their children) by means of filing what were in essence paternity suits against their masters. Securing recognition of their freed status on the basis of such claims proved to be a somewhat problematic endeavor—much trickier than, for instance, confirming their fulfillment of the terms of a contract of manumission or a clause promising freedom in their master’s or mistress’ last will and testament. In the absence of DNA testing, female slaves—to secure their freedom—had to establish not only that they had had a sexual relationship with their masters but also that their masters had acknowledged these children as their own, if not through their words then through their actions. In what is a fairly well-documented pattern, while masters, in general, refuted these allegations by distancing themselves both physically10 and emotionally from their slaves and their alleged offspring, female slaves invoked ties of kinship, presenting themselves as their masters’ loyal concubines and the mothers of their children. Skillfully manipulating to their own advantage the paternalistic rhetoric that, in other circumstances, legitimated their subjugation, female slaves were remarkably successful in these suits to win their freedom. Out of a total of twelve demandas de libertat filed before the court of the governor between 1450 and 1500 by female slaves claiming to have given birth to their masters’ child, four were successful and one case resolved by means of an arbitrated settlement. Four of the remaining seven cases were incomplete, making an evaluation of their overall success rate difficult, nevertheless, only two were unsuccessful. In the one case in which a Bui gar female slave named Johana withdrew her claims, admitting that she “had spoken falsely” {ha dita falsia ), and that her daughter’s “true” father was a household squire, it ought to be noted that she still managed to secure her child’s free-born status by maintaining that the father had been a free Christian.11 Although Johana herself would remain a slave, by claiming that the child’s father was a free Christian, she would at least assure her daughter’s liberty.12 While not always denying that they had sexual relations with their slaves, masters attempted to displace responsibility for these relations and cast doubt on claims that they were the child’s father by portraying female slaves as promiscuous creatures and formidable forces who could not be denied and who threatened the social order. In their efforts to dodge the obligations of

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paternity, masters, rather strikingly, cast themselves as the hapless victims of a female slave’s ravenous sexual appetite. This rather threatening portrayal of a female slave’s sexuality, however, must be considered in its contemporary context: a society in which female slaves had access to the kingdom’s courts to file paternity suits against their masters. Masters regarded the sexual activities of their female slaves with a considerable amount of anxiety because their pregnancies put them in an exceptionally vulnerable position. By making claims that she was bearing her master’s child, a slave might not only win her freedom, but also, at the very least, disrupt the order of the household by fomenting marital discord between master and mistress. What was even more disturbing, masters complained, if a slave protested loudly enough, she might tarnish her master’s reputation in the community by insinuating that he was a man who did not honor his obligations. Finally, by making claims that they were the abandoned and mistreated mothers of their masters’ children, female slaves exposed the disjuncture between the dictates of paternalism—what a good Christian master owed his slaves— and rights of ownership, the absolute authority, including sex-right, that masters enjoyed over their female slaves. Proven or disproven, such charges—more broadly speaking—called into question the very justifications that underpinned the institution of slavery’s legitimacy.

Domestic Enemies or Extended Family? Historian Sally McKee has lamented the failure of social historians to consider the role of “non-kin” members— i.e. servants and slaves— in the medieval household. Citing Aristotle, who envisioned the household “in its complete form” as including both slaves and freemen,13 McKee defines the household as “a group of people sharing a residence, whose reason for coresidence is the care and support of the family group and its property.”14 Although they may not always have been treated (much less considered) as equals, McKee argues that slaves and servants were as equally bound to the household as kin members. Certainly, in fifteenth-century Valencia, baptismal naming and testamentary practices all reveal how slaves were incorporated into and considered members of their masters’ households. As paterfamilias , masters were responsible for the welfare of all members of the household, including its slaves.15 Just as a parent was obliged to look after his child, masters and mistresses were expected to provide their slaves with the things necessary to

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their material sustenance and spiritual well-being. Particularly in cases when a slave had been bom in the household, masters assumed such “parental” responsibilities as coordinating their baptism,16 assigning them names and godparents as well as providing them food, clothing and other necessities. While it could be argued that such customary practices were purely symbolic, eagerly embraced by masters and mistresses only inasmuch as they served to naturalize and legitimate their authority,17 a slave’s membership in the household was expressed in more tangible ways as well. In last wills and testaments slaves appear alongside a master’s or mistress’ sons and daughters as the recipients of bequests of liberty, money, clothing, furniture and even sizable plots of land. A further indication of how slaves were regarded as members of their extended family was the fact that masters and mistresses considered assaults against their slaves as assaults against themselves and the honor of their households.18Thus, in addition to jealously guarding their wives and daughters, masters (and mistresses) took pains to protect the honor of the household by preserving the chastity of their slaves. In 1492, a female slave named Ysabel refuted imputations against her character by emphasizing how her master kept her as well as all his other female slaves “very well guarded” (tenia les sclaves molt guardades ) .19 The preoccupation o f slave m asters and mistresses with preserving their female slaves’ chastity is evident in the kindgom’s legal code as well as in the criminal court records of the period, where one encounters them filing lawsuits against men—both within and without of their households— for impregnating their slaves.20 In 1456, for example, dona Fevollosa sued a cobbler for impregnating her slave Anna.21 In 1458, a physician accused a former servant Pascual Vilanova with impregnating his slave Pavaria.22 The seduction and impregnation of someone else’s slave was considered a hostile act not only because a pregnancy would temporarily decrease the slave’s labor productivity and could significantly imperil her health (she could die in childbirth), but because a breach of a female slave’s chastity tarnished the reputation of her master’s household.23 The impregnation of a slave by a member of the household, moreover, was deemed a betrayal of serious enough magnitude to warrant the servant or squire’s immediate expulsion from the household.24 When nobleman Galceran Castellar de Borga found out that a squire of his had impregnated his female slave, he chased him out of the house with a knife.25

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“Disreputable Acts” ( T a c a n y e ria ) Although they might have actively defended their masters’ honor with their tongues and kitchen utensils, slaves, through both their actions and behavior, could threaten as well as enhance their masters’ honor. Since a female slave could significantly besmirch the honor of the household by committing “disreputable acts,” or tacanyeria, within its confines, masters regarded the sexual activities of their female slaves with special anxiety.26 Reflective of the fact that women were feared as “weak links in the chain of masculine virtue,”27 one of the “hidden defects and vices” which could be cited as grounds for the immediate rescission of a female slave’s sale was “whorishness”(vzc/0 de bagassa). When a Valencian tanner negotiated the sale of his slave Sperancia, he warned the slave’s buyer that the baptized Muslim female was sexually licentious. While the sale would still be covered by the standard sixty-day blanket warranty against “any hidden vices and defects,” the tanner stated that he did not wish to be held liable for the slave’s harlotry {de vicio de bagasa).28 In their testimony before the court of the governor, masters and mistresses explicitly linked a female slave’s sexual promiscuity with rebellion. When a buyer approached the aforementioned nobleman Johan Ros and expressed an interest in purchasing his slave Margalida, Johan reportedly urged his friend to reconsider, warning him that she was “very insolent and immoral.”29 Johan testified that Margalida frequently complained to him that he was committing “a grave sin by making her live without a man.”30 Completely unsuccessful in his efforts to control his slave’s libido, Johan lamented that a young male servant of his had already left his service as a result of Margalida’s incessant sexual advances. A squire named Anthonet allegedly fled his service because Margalida “did nothing but grab him by the neck demanding that he lie carnally with her.”31 Thus, when confronted with a paternity suit in which a female slave challenged her master’s right to retain her in servitude, masters retorted that their female slaves were willfully promiscuous. Rather than simply deny that they had sexual intercourse with their slaves, masters (and their heirs) pointed to their slaves’ irrepressible sexual appetites and complete lack of discretion in an effort both to disown responsibility and show that the chances that they were these children’s biological fathers were rather remote. Hence, when a female slave named Ysabel proclaimed her freed status for having given birth to two of her master’s children, her master’s heirs attempted to discredit her claim by describing her as nothing short of a “public whore.” It was ludicrous

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for Ysabel to state definitively that her master was the father of her children, they argued, for before, during and after each of her two pregnancies she had “lived very dishonestly, lying carnally with slaves as well as with free persons.” Ysabel, they insisted, had sex with “anyone who came to her, not saying no to anyone.”32 Likewise, when the daughter of a Russian slave named Maria filed a demand for her liberty, claiming that her master had been her biological father, the heirs of his estate responded by defaming her mother’s character. Noting how Maria was notorious for having “carnal relations with slaves both white and black,”33 they maintained that her master, in exasperation, had offered her freedom in exchange for a promise to abstain from sexual relations for a limited term of service of seven years. Maria reportedly had refused, stating that she would rather remain a perpetual slave than swear off sex.34 In opposition to this depiction of female slaves (regardless of ethnicity)35 as naturally libidinous creatures, unable to control their passions, masters presented a self-image of discipline and restraint. Masters denied having any feelings of lust or passion for their female slaves. Indeed, such an admission would imply a lack of control or mastery over their slaves. While some masters declared (as did the aforementioned nobleman Johan Ros) that “he was not accustomed to do such acts to the female slaves of his household,”36 others maintained that, although they occasionally did sleep with their female slaves, they did so only out of necessity— since their wives were away or for health reasons. The notary Bemat Johan, for instance, insisted that he slept with his wife’s female slave “more as a remedy for his kidney stones” than out of lust.37 Likewise, a widow would argue that it was highly unlikely that her husband was the father of his slave’s child since, at the time when the slave was impregnated, he had been a happily married man.38 Left to her own devices, in contrast, a female slave’s prodigious sexual appetite inevitably provoked disorder. The indiscriminate coupling of a Russian female slave named Maria caused such disorder in her master’s household that a black male slave named Diego had to be resold to avoid bloodshed. Having carnal relations with Diego at the same time that she was having them with a white squire in the household named Angelo, when Maria gave birth to a black child, Angelo allegedly became so enraged with jealousy that her master had had no choice but to sell Diego in order “to prevent the scandals that would have erupted between them.”39 Perhaps the most threatening portrayal of a female slave’s sexuality I have encountered, however, was in response to a demand for liberty filed by a mulatto slave called Johana Abarba, or “the Bearded.” Although her master,

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the notary Bemat Johan, admitted that he had, on more than one occasion, had sex with the slave (indeed, as noted earlier, he claimed that he had only lain with her as a remedy for his kidney stones), Bemat argued that it was unlikely that he was the child’s father because Johana was “a big whore.” At the time at which Johana had become pregnant Bemat contended that Johana had at least three “notorious friends or lovers with whom she habitually had carnal relations.”40 Indeed, Bemat argued, since she was “the sort who had carnal relations with many men,” there were likely to have been even more. In this instance, however, rather than simply describing Johana as someone who was “easy”— consenting to have sex with any man who asked her— Bemat alarmingly relates how his slave actively “goes out looking for men.” The residents of a neighboring household reportedly kept their side entrance locked since they “did not dare keep it open because of a mulatto female slave with painted lips who does nothing but come and go.” Bewailing how Johana was “always bringing rose water, sweets and many other things” to a male slave in their household named Johanet, Bemat’s neighbors allegedly told the nobleman’s wife “because we do not want her to enter we do not dare keep the door open!”41 Publicly reputed to be “a love-crazed woman” who had sex “incessantly, sometimes with certain men, other times with other men,” this mulatto female was depicted by her male “victims” as a strange and formidable force who could not be denied. “Those who are unwilling to lie with her,” her master contended, would be tricked into doing so, the “said slave ... playing so many games with them”42 that it could be said that she compelled them to sleep with her “by force.”43A cobbler living in the basement of the notary’s house related how “on the day of Saint Nicholas” he ended up having sexual intercourse with the slave on a daybed located in her master’s chamber. Not assuming any responsibility for his actions, however, the cobbler maintained that Johana had bewitched him, “making many alluring gestures in such a manner that he could not keep himself from sleeping with her.” Likewise, when he slept with her “on the day of the Virgin Mary of the Conception,” (this time in the master bedroom), he claimed that, once again, he was powerless in the face of the mulatto slave’s charms.44 On this occasion, Johana seduced him with fresh cheeses and white wine.45 A farmer named Domingo Granada also testified that he was “victimized” by the mulatta’s charms. Whenever he came to visit the notary’s household, Domingo claimed that he was subjected to a constant barrage of amorous overtures. On one occasion Johana assaulted him “so many times and so often” that he had “no other option but flee in order to avoid doing what the

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25

female slave wanted him to do.” Ultimately, however, the slave wore him down. Johana “teased” him so forcefully and played so many “pranks” on him that he had intercourse with her.46 In stark contrast with their sexually voracious female slaves, masters, on occasion, were described in these paternity suits as sexually impotent. The heirs of the baker Alfonso de la Barreda, for instance, argued that Alfonso could not possibly have fathered his slave’s (second) child since, during the time in which she had been impregnated, he had been “so sick and indisposed that he did not have the disposition to practice carnal intercourse with any woman.” Alfonso allegedly was so ill that he was “unable to work or even walk, except with great difficulty.”47 It is somewhat ironic that in a handful of these cases, a master’s continued domination over his slave was predicated on a declaration of his weakness and impotence. After sketching a portrait of his mulatta slave as an indomitable seductress, the notary Bemat Johan described himself as old and feeble, someone who had sex only to relieve the pain caused by his kidney stones. Bemat insisted that he could not possibly be the child’s father because he was “ill or unable to have an erection (per esser ell dit responent malalt o mva//).”48

“No li podia contradir a sa voluntat...” Female slaves appearing before the court of the governor, not surprisingly, represented their sexual relations with their masters in radically different terms. In a deposition presented on her behalf before the court of the governor in 1498, a black female slave named Leonor hardly characterized her sexual relations with her master as consensual. Rather, the black female slave testified that her master had forced himself on her, “seeing himself lord of the said Leonor and seeing that she could not contradict him or his will.”49 Similarly, the aforementioned Ysabel (described by her master’s heirs as a publica bagassa, or whore) related that she had lost her virginity to her master when she was only eleven years old.50 Rather than hold their masters’ sexual exploitation of them up for censure, femaje slaves instead highlighted how they had been specially treated, recounting, often in great detail, how masters recognized and occasionally fulfilled their obligations to both mother and child. Hence, in her demanda de libertat, Ysabel emphasized (in addition to her virginity) how well she had been treated by her master during her pregnancy.51 In the absence of an explicit statement in which a master declared that he was the child’s father,

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female slaves argued that certain acts when performed by their masters constituted an implicit acknowledgment of paternity. According to the Kingdom of Valencia’s legal code, masters were required to baptize their slaves only if they themselves were the child’s biological father. Theoretically, it was the biological father’s duty to arrange for a child’s baptism. If a Valencian Christian male impregnated someone else’s female slave, it was his responsibility, not the slave master’s, to coordinate the child’s baptism.52 Thus, when Ysabel’s former master, a baker, now deceased, was not available to confirm her allegations, she held up his participation in the child’s baptism as proof that he was the biological father. “Knowing and being completely certain that the baby girl to whom the said Ysabel had given birth was his,” Alfonso de la Barreda “named godparents [compare e comare] to baptize her and had her baptized.” In so doing, Alfonso effectively declared he was the child’s biological father, confirming both the free-born status of the child and the freed status of the child’s mother.53 Likewise, in 1498, a group of farmers’ wives were called upon to testify on the aforementioned Leonor’s behalf. Each individually recalled how their neighbor, Luis Almenara, celebrated the baptism of this black female’s child with a great deal of fanfare. One woman noted how Luis had the child baptized “with as much festivity as was done for legitimately-born children. Many ladies and gentlemen attended. He appointed good and honorable godparents (compares), served sweets and threw a big party.”54 While another woman noted that this slave’s daughter had been baptized “as if she were the daughter of his wife,”55 the local midwife described how she herself had carried the infant to the church and noted approvingly that at the party afterwards, Luis served “sweets and all which was customary.”56 While Leonor’s claims went uncontested, Ysabel’s were vigorously refuted. The executors of the deceased baker’s estate rej ected Y sabel’s line of argument out of hand, stating that Alfonso’s participation in the child’s baptism did not prove anything. Even though they were not legally obliged to do so, Alfonso’s heirs maintained that masters customarily coordinated the baptisms of slave children born in th eir household. R egardless o f who the c h ild ’s biological father was, they claimed that “to h im ... pertains [the responsibility of] having her baptized.” Thus, “if the said Alfonso de la Barreda solicited godparents to participate in the baptism of Ysabel’s children, he would have done so not because the child was his, but because Ysabel had given birth in his household. Whoever the child’s father was, he had no choice but to see to it that the child was baptized. Every master of a female slave who gives birth in his household is obliged to make sure the infant is baptized (puix la dita

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27

Ysabel paria en casa sua forgadament havia fe r batejar com cascun senyor de sclava que pareixca en casa sua la fa b a te ia r)”57 This discrepancy between law and customary practice had the potential for causing a great deal of confusion. Masters and mistresses charged that their slaves, cognizant of this fact, were capitalizing on it deliberately, misrepresenting these benevolent acts for their own personal gain.58

“A jurament ne dit de la dita cativa fe alguna no pot esser donada ...” In addition to decrying their sexual promiscuity, then, masters and mistresses affirmed a marked tendency among their female slaves towards lying and deceit.59 Not confident that a declaration of his impotency would suffice to rebut his slave’s charges, Bemat Johan attempted to further discredit Johana Abarba’s claims by smearing her reputation as a good Christian. Bemat charged Johana with being a serial renegade who abjured the Catholic faith once and had plans to do so again soon. Noting how several years ago, after her initial capture and enslavement on the island of Sicily, the mulatta, then named Fatima, had been baptized and given the name Bonaventura, Bemat charged that when she was transferred to Barcelona, she abjured her Christian faith and returned to Islam. What was especially contemptible, however, Bemat argued, was that upon her arrival in Valencia, she misled his wife into believing she was an unbaptized Muslim and fraudulently accepted a second baptism. Completing his portrait of Johana (a.k.a. Fatima, a.k.a. Bonaventura) as a faithless and untrustworthy apostate, Bemat charged Johana with secretly plotting an escape into Muslim territory. Contracting the services of a Morisca poultry reseller working in Valencia’s main marketplace as a guide and corrupting several other slaves to join her in flight—Johana allegedly was impelled forward by the knowledge that, upon entry into the sultanate of Granada, she “could renounce the Catholic faith.”60 Thus, after relating this scandalous tale in which Johana figured prominently both as a fugitive and an apostate, Bemat concluded, “no faith ought to be given to her oath nor to anything she says.”61 Such charges served only to bolster a master’s (or mistress’) assertion that his female slave’s claims regarding her child’s paternity were outright lies. After disparaging her Russian female slave’s habit of “delivering her person to many— indeed to everyone, as far as she could tell,” the widow of the nobleman Joffre d ’Anyo noted how, on one prior occasion, Maria had sworn a false oath on the four books of the evangelists that she was bearing

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her master’s child.62 When Maria subsequently gave birth to a black baby girl, the slave’s duplicity was made plain.63 To a certain extent, contemporaries seemed confident that the truth of the matter would be revealed at the time of the child’s birth. When na Castellona, the wife of the nobleman Amau Castello, expressed her uneasiness about her slave Rosa’s claims that she was carrying her master’s child, her neighbor endeavored to soothe her anxieties by assuring her that soon they would know for certain who the child’s true father was. For, if the father was (as they suspected) a freed black male, she affirmed that the child, would have “if a girl, ‘black’ features, and, if a boy, [‘black’] testicles.”64 Noting how the slave herself was white, the squire Angelo de Capoa likewise reasoned that the child would be white if, as Rosa claimed, she had been impregnated by her master.65 When Rosa gave birth to a daughter who was mulatta in skin tone and had “the mouth of a black nature,” Amau’s innocence was irrefutably proven. “It became known that she had spoken falsely” and order was finally restored within the household. After seven months of not speaking to one another and “not sleeping together in one bed,” Rosa’s master and mistress “made peace.”66 In this case, the child’s true origin was so glaringly obvious that the midwife immediately rebuked the slave, stating that “you could never say that you had been impregnated by your lord Amau Castello.”67 In cases in which the slave mother herself was black or the child bom was white, however, the matter remained obscure— hence a source of anxiety for all parties involved. While sexual dalliances with their female slaves in and of themselves do not seem to have tainted the masters’ reputations— indeed, the double standard with regard to male versus female sexual activity is welldocumented—the impregnation of their female slaves exposed masters to a potentially much more damaging situation. If the master acknowledged the child and he was married, his wife would regard this as a betrayal and produce a great deal of friction in the household. Witnesses appearing on behalf of na Castellona could attest to the tensions that developed in the household as a result of a slave’s allegations. One neighbor related how she overheard the nobleman and his wife arguing “many times, na Castellona saying that the child Rosa was carrying was her husband’s, and [Amau] saying that this was not true ... [and] thus it remained for a long time that they (Amau and his wife) were not speaking to one another.”68 Indeed, although the nobleman Joffre d’Anyo confessed that he was the father of his slave’s child in private, he would never acknowledge this publicly. When, upon hearing this confession, a farmer protested, “then Maria is free and her daughter as well,” Joffre responded that although this “certainly” was the case, “so as

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not to displease my wife I would not dare to say so.” Such an admission would cause his wife “to harbor ill will” not only towards him but also towards the slave— something which Joffre insisted had to be avoided at all costs because Maria was also the wetnurse to his children.69 Nevertheless, if he denied his own child and repudiated his former concubine, a master risked being dishonored in the eyes of the community as a man who did not fulfill his responsibilities.70 Some masters contended that their female slaves were filing these false paternity claims not only to win their freedom and to wreak havoc within the household, but also in a deliberate attempt to discredit them in the community. When the mulatta slave Johana Abarba, for instance, filed a demand for liberty in the court of the governor, Bemat chastized her for not trusting him to do the right thing and airing the household’s dirty laundry out in public. Outraged that his female slave was challenging his integrity, Bemat reportedly shouted, “Come here evil woman! You have defamed me and are defaming me in many places throughout the city, going around and saying to everyone that you are carrying my child! Don’t you think that I have a soul and that I fear God so that if you were pregnant with my child I would make you free?”71 Taken to the extreme, however, beyond shaming individual masters in the eyes of the community, slaves, in making these allegations, more broadly called into question the paternalistic ideology underpinning the institution of slavery. As a consequence of this threat—as well as in response to a flood of complaints by masters and mistresses who found themselves fighting off a stream of paternity suits—an amendment was added to the statute awarding an automatic enfranchisement to female slaves who gave birth to their masters’ children. Masters could dismiss these claims simply by swearing an oath denying his paternity. At the meeting of the Corts held in Orihuela in 1488, king Ferdinand issued the following decree: Since it often occurs that female slaves living in the Kingdom of Valencia, lying carnally with squires, male servants and other members of their masters’ household as well as with other men residing outside [their master’s] households and becoming impregnated, afterwards, when they give birth, claim that the child was their master’s and, for this reason [both mother and child] are free, we provide and ordain that these slaves shall not and cannot obtain freedom for this reason if their master swears an oath that the child is not his. She will have to remain [in his service] and shall not otherwise obtain her liberty.72 While this statute reasserted the moral authority of masters over their slaves by privileging a master’s testimony over his slave’s and assuming a

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more marked tendency among slaves to lie, it nevertheless maintained intact the notion that masters were obliged to take care of, and free, slaves who had given birth to their children.73Without the said oath, as long as a child’s paternity remained uncertain, masters and mistresses remained vulnerable to charges that they were neglecting their parental responsibilities. It was subsequent to her master’s death, then, in 1492, that the female slave named Ysabel appealed to the court o f the governor to secure her freedom. Successfully contesting the imputations against her character launched by her former master’s heirs, Ysabel steadfastly asserted that she was entitled to freedom as her master’s former concubine and the mother of his children. Her master had not only impregnated her twice but, in fact, had been the one who had “deflowered her” (haguda fadrina ) when she was only eleven years old. Turning the paternalistic rhetoric that had justified her subjugation to her own benefit, Ysabel assumed a morally superior position to her master. When her master’s heirs contended that Alfonso de la Barreda had been a “good Christian such that if he indeed had been the father of these children, he most certainly would have freed Ysabel,” this slave replied by declaring that her master’s failure to properly acknowledge her status and free her in his last will and testament revealed that he had been neither a good man nor a good Christian. Indeed, she boldly stated that because of this, she hoped that his soul was burning “in the infernal flames!”74

N otes 1 2 3 4 5

6

7

ARV Gobernación 2314: M. l:36v; M. 9:36r. ARV Gobernación 2314: M. 9:36r. ARV Gobernación 2314: M. 9:37r. ARV Gobernación 2317: M. 35:32r-33v. Rosa adduced as further proof of her special status the fact that her master owned another female slave who, presumably, was the one who did the heavy chores; ARV Gobernación 2344: M. 12:9r. For works examining slavery in the late medieval Mediterranean world, see the pioneering study by Jacques Heers, Esclaves et domestiques au Moyen Age dans le monde mediterranée (Paris, 1981), and more recently, Steven A. Epstein, Speaking o f Slavery: Color, Ethnicity, and Human Bondage in Italy (Ithaca, 2001). Furs de Valencia, ed. G. Colon and A. Garcia (Barcelona, 1990), 5:110 (Llibre 6, Rúbrica 1, 21).

8 9

ARV Gobernación 2317: M. 35:32r. See, among others, More than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas, eds. David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine (Bloomington, 1996).

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10 The notary Bemat Johan, for instance, argued that, inasmuch as the boy bore no physical resemblance to him, he could not possibly be the child’s biological father. Bemat noted how the midwife as well as several other persons “had said and say [to this day] that the said child of the said slave does not bear any resemblance [to him] but rather displays many disimilarities ... as can be demonstrated by observation”; ARV Gobernación 2311: M. 12:lr-17v; M. 17:lr. 11 ARV Gobernación 2291: M. 1:43v. 12 According to the Furs de Valencia, 5:110 (Llibre 6, Rúbrica 1,21): “E si [chrestiá] jau ab cativa que no sia sua e n’haurá fil o fila, que aquel fíl o filia sia aytantost batejat e que sia franch de tota servitut.” 13 While arguing that slaves were as much a part of the household or “family” as free relatives, Aristotle differentiated the relations between masters and slaves from those between kin members, discussing the three distinct relationships operating within the household separately: the “marriage relation” between husband and wife; “the procreative relation” between a father and his children and the “relation of master and servant”; Aristotle, Politics: book 1, chap. 3 (line 1253b). 14 Sally McKee, “Households in Fourteenth-Century Venetian Crete,” Speculum 70 (1995): 27-67. 15 According to David Herlihy, the paterfamilias “was master not only of the family property but of all family members.” This included his wife and children as well as anyone else living under his roof. According to the Furs de Valencia, “Persones domestiques son appellades mullers, servuus, homens qui staran a loguer, nebots, dexebles, scolans e tots homens e fembres qui son de la companyia d’alcu”; Furs de Valencia, 5: 105 (Llibre VI, Rúbrica I, XIV). While all household dependents were under the potestas of the pater familias and were obliged to show him proper obedience and respect, Herlihy emphasizes how he, in turn, was responsible for assuring their material and spiritual well-being; David Herlihy, Medieval Households (Cambridge, Mass., 1985). 16 While the Kingdom of Valencia’s legal code specified that masters were required to baptize their slaves only if they themselves were the child’s biological father, evidence indicates that, just as was the case in other slave-holding regions of late medieval Mediterranean Europe, most slaves living in Christian households in fifteenth-century Valencia had been baptized. My analysis of randomly selected notarial contracts of sale dating from between 1460 and 1480 reveals that at least 89 per cent of the slaves owned by Christians (whose religious identity was indicated) were baptized Christians, i.e. were either explicitly identified as jcristiá or had “Christian” names. It ought to be pointed out, however, that the rate of baptism does not seem to have been uniform for all slaves. Rather, it seems that the relative likelihood of receipt of baptism varied, to a significant degree, according to a slave’s ethnic identity. While slaves of Eastern (e.g., Greek, Russian, Tartar and Circassian) or West African origin seem to have been almost unilaterally baptized, slaves of Muslim origin generally seem to have persevered in their faith. Out of the 107 sales of slaves of explicitly “Moorish” origin I encountered in notarial records dating from between 1460 and 1480, only 37, or about 34 per cent, had been baptized. The remaining sixty-five percent (70) retained their Muslim identities. 17 Moreover, even after they had granted them freedom, contemporary notarial records show masters and mistresses acting “in loco parentis” for their former slaves: negotiating the terms of contracts of service and/or apprenticeships, contributing towards dowries and seeing to it that their former slaves were married off “well and honorably.”

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18 Fursde Valencia, 7:47 (Llibre 9, Rúbrica 5,3). 19 ARV Gobernación 2394: M. 4:18v; no. 2395: M. ll:37r-46r. 20 According to the kingdom’s legal code, a man guilty of impregnating another person’s slave was obliged to pay the slave’s owner twenty-five pounds. If he was unable to pay this monetary penalty, the impregnator would be forced to “run completely naked through the city and given a good lashing.” Moreover, if the slave died in labor, the emprenyador was obliged to “pay him the price of the slave”; Fursde Valencia, 5: 111-12 (Llibre 6, Rúbrica 1,23). 21 ARV Justicia Criminal 24: Clams: 26 April 1456 (non-paginated). 22 Emphasizing how Pascual had, at the time of the slave’s seduction, been “eating his bread and drinking his wine,” Gabriel Garcia likened his former servant’s offense to treason; ARV Justicia Criminal 54: M. 1:1 r. 23 Describing the sociological impact of the distinctly Mediterranean honor-shame system, David Gilmore has observed how “sexuality becomes a form of social power. Sex is a competitive idiom by which men jockey for control over women both as objects to achieve narcissistic gratifications and to attain dominance over other men”; David D. Gilmore, ed., Honor and Shame and the Unity o f the Mediterranean (Washington, D.C., 1987). In the context of fifteenth-century Valencia, such “competitive” feelings extended beyond one’s wives and daughters to embrace all women living in the household, including female servants and slaves. 24 According to the kingdom’s legal code, moreover, he could be fined 100 sous. In the event that he was unable to pay the fine, he would be forced to run naked through the streets; Furs de Valencia, 7:33 (Llibre 9, Rúbrica 2, 16). If a squire or some other male household dependent had sex with his master’s wife or daughter, in contrast, he would be punished by hanging!; Furs de Valencia, 7:26-27 (Llibre 9, Rúbrica 2, 5). The same penalty would be applied if he had sex with his master’s sister, niece or some other close female relative. 25 ARV Gobernación 2398: M. l:29v; 2399: M. 23:35r-43v. Likewise, the nobleman Johan Ros testified that he had ejected a Castilian squire from his household because he suspected him of impregnating his slave Margalida; ARV Gobernación 2314: M. 1:36v; M. 9:36r43 v. 26 The anthropologist John Davis expresses this notion in particularly concrete terms, noting that dishonor is “contagious through women”; see John Davis, People o f the Mediterranean (London, 1977), 160. Mary Douglas has shown how anxieties concerning group identity have been expressed through corporeal metaphors and how fears of pollution, penetration and corruption have tended to focus on the female body; see Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (New York, 1982), viii; and idem, Purity and Danger: An Analysis ofthe Concepts o f Pollution and Taboo (Boston, 1966), 122-28. David Gilmore has also emphasized how “male honor” in Mediterranean societies is “insecurely dependent” on the control of female chastity; Gilmore, Honor and Shame. For a discussion of how a woman’s “sinfulness, excessive behavior or demonic and diabolical acts” were presented as the cause of disease in works produced by fifteenth-century Iberian authors, see Michael Solomon, The Literature o f Misogyny in Medieval Spain: The Archipreste de Talavera and the Spill (Cambridge, 1997), especially his chapter entitled, “The Poetics of Infection,” 67-93. 27 Gilmore, Honor and Shame. 28 APPV Protocolos 26674 (Pere Palomar): 22 November 1477. 29 ARV Gobernación 2341: M. l:36v; M. 9:36r-43v. 30 Ibid.

Sclaves Molt Fortes, Senyors Invalts 31 32 33 34 35

36 37 38 39 40

41 42

43 44 45

46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53

33

Ibid. ARV Gobernación 2392: M. 4:18r; 2395: M. ll:37r-46v. ARV Gobernación 2304: M. 3:45r; 2305: M. 11:8r-23v; M. 20:13r-21 v; 2306: M. 25:16r17v; M. 26:36r-37v; 42r-43r; M. 29:19r-v. Ibid. For the image of the black woman in the American South as a person “governed almost entirely by her libido, a Jezebel character,” see Deborah Gray White, Ar ’n ’t IA Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York, 1985), especially chapter one: “Jezebel and Mammy: The Mythology of Female Slavery,” 27-46. ARV Gobernación 2314: M. 9:37r. ARV Gobernación 2310: M. 3:31r; 2311: M. 12:1 r-17v; M. 17:1 r. ARV Gobernación 2382: M. 3:43r; 2383: M. 20:lr-10r; 2384: M. 24:30r-35r. Ibid. These three “known” lovers included: a slave living in the household of nobleman Guillem Masco, a squire of the Centelles household named Anthoni and a chaplain, whom Bemat declined to name “[out of respect] for the holy orders”; ARV Gobernación 2310: M. 3:31r; 2311: M. 12:lr-17v; M. 17:lr. Ibid. This characterization of this mulatta slave’s sexual witchcraft (love magic) as “teasing” and “joking” {burlar) fits well into Ruth Behar’s model in which urban, Mediterranean or “Hispanic” images of women’s magical powers are distinguished from rural, northern European images. While secular judges in northern Europe were convinced that “witches did exist and did have dangerous powers,” something which, “fueled witch-hunts, as opposed to witchcraft beliefs, in northern Europe,” inquisitors in Spain and in Mexico “tended not to take these accusations seriously, viewing “women’s power as illegitimate in the sense that it was a delusion and therefore not really a form of power at all”; Ruth Behar, “Sexual Witchcraft, Colonialism, and Women’s Powers: Views from the Mexican Inquisition,” in Sexuality and Marriage in Colonial Latin America, ed. Asunción Lavrin, (Lincoln, Neb., 1989), 181-84. ARV Gobernación 2310: M. 3:31 r; 2311: M. 12:lr-17v; M. 17:lr. Ibid. On the significance of food as the medium through which women—particularly ethnically, culturally and socially marginalized women—“ensorcelled,” bewitched and polluted men, see Behar, “Sexual Witchcraft,” 178-206, esp. 179-80. Behar notes how “those at the margins ... were thought to hold dangerous powers.” While in Mexico, “magical powers were attributed to mulatto healers,” in southern Spain “magical powers were ascribed to morisco healers.” In her article, moreover, Behar posits “an implicit parallel between the attempts of women to attract, tame and harm men through sexual witchcraft and the magical, or in his terms, diabolical efforts of slaves to control their masters.” ARV Gobernación 2310: M. 3:31r; 2311: M. 12:1 r-17v; M. 17:1 r. ARV Gobernación 2392: M. 4:18r; 2395: M. 11:37r-46v. ARV Gobernación 2310: M. 3:31r; 2311: M. 12:lr-17v;M. 17:lr. ARV Gobernación 2403: M. 2:12r; 2405: M. 28:46r-52r. ARV Gobernación 2395: M. 11:37r. Ibid. Furs de Valencia, 5:110 (Llibre 6, Rúbrica 1,21): “E si jau ab cativa que no sia sua e n’haurá fil o fila, que aquel fil o filia sia aytantost batejat e que sia franch de tota servitut.” ARV Gobernación 2395: M. 11:37r.

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54 ARV Gobernación 2403: M. 2:12r; 2405: M. 28:46r-52r. 55 Ibid. 56 ARV Gobernación 2405: M. 28: 49v-50r. 57 ARV Gobernación 2395: M. 11:37r-46v. 58 Alfonso’s heirs charged that Ysabel’s new master, the baker NofFre Gay, had induced her to file these false allegations. Ysabel allegedly had promised Noffre sex in exchange for his assistance in helping her win her freedom; ARV Gobernación 2395: M. 11:38r. 59 According to the kingdom’s legal code, the testimony of slaves, in many instances, was inadmissible. See Furs de Valencia, 4: 48 (Llibre 4, Rúbrica 9, 1): “Just as slaves cannot testify against their masters, they also cannot testify on his behalf.” Similarly, see Furs de Valencia (Llibre 4, Rúbrica 9, 7): “In the drawing up of a will or in a criminal lawsuit, neither a woman, an insane person nor a slave can be witness.” 60 A royal official named Pere Julia testified that he was there when Bemat learned that Johana “avia de anar ensemps ab la sclava del dit en Man?avera e cinch altres les quals eren concordes passaren en terra de moros ab la dita revenedora per renegar.” Pere testified that upon being confronted with this information, Johana broke down and confessed; ARV Gobernación 2310: M. 3:31r; 2311: M. 12:1 r-17v; M. 17:1 r. 61 ARV Gobernación 2311: M. 12:1 r-17v. For comparison, see Kenneth S. Greenberg, Honor & Slavery: Lies, Duels, Noses, Masks, Dressing as a Woman, Gifts, Strangers, Death, Humanitarianism, Slave Rebellions, The Pro-Slavery Argument, Baseball, Hunting and Gambling in the Old South (Princeton, 1996), esp. 39-41, where he describes the widespread contempt for the words and speech of slaves in the Old South. 62 The widow noted that, even before they got married—when her husband and the slave Maria were still living in Sardinia—the slave had falsely claimed that she was carrying the local mustasafs child. After the mustasaf had shown that, given the date of the child’s birth, it was impossible for him to be the child’s father, Maria tried to pin responsibility on a local silversmith. Although the local silversmith accepted responsibility, Maria had been lying this time as well. The child, once grown, bore a striking resemblance to a local mason, who, subsequently, came forward and accepted paternity; ARV Gobernación 2305: M. ll:8r-23v; M. 20:13r-21v. 63 Francesqua testified that the slave subsequently admitted to her that the child had been fathered by one of two black male slaves living on their alquería, or rural estate; ibid. The widow claimed that Maria made these false allegations in a deliberate attempt to cause trouble between her and her husband. Immediately following the child’s birth, Francesqua related how she had sternly rebuked the slave, “Evil woman! Don’t you realize how upset you made me and your master all because of your child?” 64 ARV Gobernación 2382: M. 3:43r; 2383: M. 20:lr-10r; 2384: M. 24:30r-35r. 65 Ibid. 66 ARV Gobernación 23 83: M. 20:1 r-1Or. 67 ARV Gobernación 2384: M. 24:30r-35r. 68 ARV Gobernación 2383: M. 20:lr-10r. 69 ARV Gobernación 2304: M. 3:45r; 2305: M. 11:8r-23v; M. 20:13r-21v; 2306: M. 25:16r17v; M. 26:36r-37v; 42r-43r; M. 29:19r-v. 70 Turning once again to the work of anthropologists who have studied Mediterranean societies, we note that Julio Caro Baroja has pointed out that “dishonorable” men in Spain included not only cuckolds, but also cheats and frauds; Julio Caro Baroja, “Honor and Shame: A Historical Account of Several Conflicts,” in Honour and Shame, ed. J. G. Peristany (London, 1965), 118. Likewise David Gilmore has noted that male status in

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Mediterranean societies is founded on the possession of a whole range of virtues, “chief among them being the fulfillment of one’s obligations and living up to the expectations of one’s peers.” Hence, “dishonor stems not only from sexual shame but also from neglect of duty”; David D. Gilmore, “Honor, Honesty, Shame: Male Status in Contemporary Andalusia,” in Gilmore, Honor and Shame, 90-103. 71 ARV Gobernación 2310 M. 3:31 r; 2311: M. 12:lr-17v; M. 17:lr. 72 Furs de València, 5-111 (Llibre 6, Rúbrica 1,22): “Com sovint s’esdevinga que les catives dels habitants en lo régné de València se jaen camalment ab los scuders, moços e altres de la casa de lur senyor, e encara ab altres fora de la dita casa, e se emprenyen e après quan pareixen dien que lo part és de lur senyor e que per açô son franques, provehim e ordenam que les dites sclaves, per la dita rahó, no obtinguen o puixen obtenir franquea, si lur senyor jurará que la criatura no és sua ab jurament, al quai se haja a star e altrament no obtinga libertat.” 73 It was at this time (1488) that Ferdinand likewise issued a statute that no doubt made free men less willing to admit paternity of a female slave’s child by raising the penalty for impregnating someone else’s slave to a fine of twenty-five pounds payable to the slave’s master. If the slave died during child-birth, the emprenyador would be held liable for the full amount of the slave’s original purchase price; Furs de València, 5: 111-12 (Llibre 6, Rúbrica 1,23). 74 ARV Gobernación 2394: M. 4:18r; 2395: M. 11:37r-46v.

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Chapter 3

The Gender o f Shared Sovereignty: Texts and the Royal Marriage o f Isabella and Ferdinand Elizabeth A. Lehfeldt

The marriage of Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon in 1469 created an unusual system of royal government, forging what might be called a “companionate monarchy.” According to their marriage capitulations and subsequent modifications, although each retained some specific prerogatives in their respective kingdoms, they ruled jointly. Thus, historians have often hailed their reign as an exceptional example of royal responsibility and prerogative balanced between male and female monarch. This perception is underscored by the abiding and documented affection between the two. Yet the novelty of their joint rule and images of romantic devotion have obscured a close examination of how they exercised their shared sovereignty. Arevealing starting point for such an investigation is the chronicles produced during their reign. These chronicles created a textual tradition that painted a different and often ambivalent picture of the practice— as opposed to the ideal— of shared sovereignty. Taking as a case study the first year of their reign, this essay will explore specific examples of this ambivalence in the chronicles of Fernando del Pulgar, Alfonso de Palencia, Diego de Valera and Juan de Flores. In his representations of both episodes of high political drama and the daily demands of governing the realm, each chronicler wrestled with the political reality of joint rule. Questions of where authority lay within the royal court and the royal marriage hung in the balance. Could a woman exercise supreme sovereignty? Could her sovereign power extend to include power over her husband? Not surprisingly, the chroniclers’ answers to these questions frequently intersected with other medieval and Renaissance texts that engaged questions of gender and authority. Inspired in part by these discourses and by their own politics, the chroniclers

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communicate a surprising range of opinion, revealing a vigorous debate about gender roles.

Claiming the Throne The issue of shared sovereignty was thrown into sharp relief in December of 1474 when Isabella’s half-brother, Henry IV, died, leaving the throne of Castile contested. When Isabella and Ferdinand had married in 1469 neither yet held title to a kingdom. Henry, as the direct male heir of his and Isabella’s father, John II of Castile, had continued the Trastámara dynasty’s hold on the Castilian throne. Ferdinand’s father, another John II, ruled Aragon. By 1474 support for Henry had eroded to the point where many nobles refused to accept his daughter, Juana, as rightful heir. Rumored to be the illegitimate offspring of an affair between Henry’s wife, Juana, and one of his advisors, Beltrán de la Cueva, Juana “la Beltraneja” lived under a cloud of suspicion. Yet Juana had a core of loyal partisans that included many prominent members of the nobility who enlisted the support of the Portuguese in countering Isabella’s claims to the throne. To further complicate the succession, Henry had never definitively identified his own heir. His death, then, raised the prospect of civil war. News of Henry’s death reached Isabella in the city of Segovia. Ferdinand was several days’journey away. Rather than wait for him and risk giving the upper-hand to Juana’s faction, Isabella staged an acclamation ceremony in Segovia. After observing the proper mourning rites for Henry, the princess ordered the construction of a raised stage and the hanging of her banners. She then presided over a procession through the streets of the city. This ceremony sparked immediate commentary. The narratives offered by the chronicle accounts are quite conflicted. Some offer approval and a defense of her actions. Others, however, register a mood of skepticism, ambivalence and even outright disapproval.1 Diego de Valera presents the most unabashed of the accounts and he defends Isabella’s actions. First, Valera narrates the events. Upon receiving the news of her brother’s death, Isabella observed the appropriate mourning rites and then began orchestrating her acclamation. Richly adorned and seated on a raised staging area that displayed the royal coat of arms, she listened as officials proclaimed her the “only legitimate succeeding heir” of the realm of Castile and León. The sound of trumpets and tambourines signaled her accession. From there she led a procession to the city’s main church. Ahead

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of her walked a member of the nobility and a loyal partisan, Gutierre de Cárdenas, who carried in his right hand an unsheathed sword.2 At this point, Valera’s descriptive tone ends abruptly and he engages in a spirited defense of Isabella’s decision to identify herself with the male (and arguably, to modem readers, phallic) symbol of the sword.3 Some, Valera says, regarded this as a reprehensible gesture on the part of the young queen. Yet he associates the sword with the restoration of order, arguing that she employed it because she, as queen and señora natural (natural lady), displayed the supreme symbol of royal justice and had come to punish the wicked.4 Additionally, he contends that although customarily women were not allowed to exercise such powers of justice, queens, duchesses and other titled women were exempt from this rule if by hereditary right they held seignorial jurisdiction. In fact, Valera posits, Isabella should have done the same thing even if Ferdinand had been there, since she was the sovereign ruler of Castile. Valera concludes that Isabella had little choice in the matter since she did not know how long it would take Ferdinand to reach her and waiting would have only worked to Juana’s advantage. Valera further underscores Isabella’s pre-eminence by providing a reticent account of Ferdinand’s acclamation ceremony: the king was “received with much happiness” and Valera provides no other details.5 Valera presents Isabella as the natural and rightful sovereign who seizes power in Ferdinand’s absence. Ferdinand emerges as a king consort surrounded by very little pomp. The apprehensive and occasionally hostile account of Alfonso de Palencia provides a telling counter-point to Valera’s advocacy. Although generally adopting an innocuous descriptive tone, he lapses at various points into offhand criticisms. Perhaps suggesting her lack of decorum or proper piety, he notes that Isabella “suddenly” exchanged her black mourning clothes for the ornate and resplendent costume of her acclamation ceremony.6 He also recounts the story of the sword and clearly identifies it with royal justice. But he notes that some subjects grumbled or gossiped about the unusual nature of her decision to display it. The action seemed to them a foolish display of a wife ostentatiously taking on the attributes of her husband. Palencia’s discussion of the disapproval of some witnesses is distinct from Valera’s. While Valera also acknowledges the arguments of these skeptics, he casts their opinion in decidedly less hostile terms and makes it a legal question. Valera suggests that some questioned whether Isabella as a woman could lawfully exercise judicial powers.7 For Palencia, however, it is a matter of silly ostentation and hardly a legal conundrum. While he acknowledges that the inheritance of the realm of Castile did not belong to Ferdinand, he ominously hints in the same breath that her inappropriate

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behavior will open the door to future conflict with some of the nobility.8 For Palencia it is also an inversion of traditional gender roles. Isabella has assumed the authority that properly belongs to Ferdinand, both as husband and male monarch. The full weight of Palencia’s opinion becomes apparent when he recounts Ferdinand’s reaction to hearing that Isabella had already performed the ceremony in his absence. Palencia was traveling with Ferdinand at the time and offers his eyewitness account. While encamped along the way Ferdinand and his entourage received letters from Isabella and her followers describing the events in Segovia. When he heard the description of the unsheathed sword and its place in the procession, Ferdinand asked Palencia and another of his courtiers, “is there any precedent in antiquity for a queen to have been preceded by this symbol, threatening punishment to her vassals? We all know this has been conceded to kings; but I never knew of a queen that had usurped this manly attribute.”9 Palencia and the other courtiers responded that it was certainly a novelty to them, prompting Ferdinand to remark again upon this “unusual action.”10 Palencia then foreshadows trouble, saying that they all lamented Isabella’s action, sure that it would produce future rivalries and would supply the nobility with abundant fodder for new disturbances. For Palencia, then, shared sovereignty begins on a sour note. Ferdinand questioned Isabella’s decision to use the sword in her acclamation ceremony, arguing that it was the right of kings, and not queens, to wield this supreme symbol of justice. Palencia himself goes so far as to suggest that the seed of future discord is planted in Isabella’s inappropriate behavior. Joint rule begins surrounded by friction. The two do not act as one yet, and this fracture, Palencia tell us, may be exploited by members of the nobility who are looking for just such a political opportunity. The other chronicles are decidedly less expansive in their accounts. Femando del Pulgar says that after observing the proper mourning rites, Isabella had herself acclaimed queen of Castile and León. Banners were hung from scaffolding and the attending nobility and clergy made a pronouncement that is completely absent in Valera and Palencia’s accounts: “Castile, Castile, for the king don Ferdinand and for the Queen, doña Isabella his wife, proprietor of these kingdoms.”11The simple words of this acclamation are revealing. Pulgar puts Ferdinand’s name first on the lips of the crowd— and this despite his physical absence. Ferdinand receives first billing—an important issue for the practice of joint sovereignty and one that Isabella and Ferdinand would argue over subsequently. Yet at the same time, the feminine form of the word “proprietor” is simultaneously on the lips of the approving nobility and clergy.

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Though less directly, Pulgar makes a nod towards Valera’s assertion that Ferdinand rules Castile only as Isabella’s consort. Pulgar, however, tries to obscure this reality by creating a double hierarchy within the royal couple: Ferdinand’s name comes first, followed by Isabella, designated as his wife first and proprietor second. Pulgar then describes how various members of the nobility kissed Isabella’s hand and took an oath of fidelity to her. Then Pulgar fast forwards through the intervening two weeks and tells his readers that Ferdinand was greeted by the same ceremony of hand kissing and oath taking when he arrived in Segovia. Here, too, he acknowledges the fact that Ferdinand rules as “husband of the queen, his wife, the legitimate successor and proprietor of these kingdoms.”12 For Pulgar, shared sovereignty is problematic. Much as he wants to give Ferdinand the upper hand and to downplay Isabella’s role, he is continually forced to acknowledge that Ferdinand’s ties to the Castilian throne are indirect and that he enjoys his power in the kingdom solely as a result of Isabella’s inheritance. The Cronica incompleta of Juan de Flores is also measured in its account of the events in Segovia. According to him, very little ceremony took place before Ferdinand’s arrival. He indicates that while Isabella was waiting for Ferdinand to join her, the titled nobility came to kiss her hand. Otherwise, Isabella busied herself while waiting for Ferdinand, securing the allegiance and obedience of other key cities. For Flores her diligence is noteworthy since, he claims, the bodies of women are weak and not usually up to such demanding tasks.13After painting a picture of the patient and industrious Isabella, Flores moves to the most lengthy description among the chronicles of Ferdinand’s arrival and subsequent acclamation in Segovia.14 His account culminates with the elaborate festivities on the outskirts of the city where Ferdinand was met by the nobility who offered their obedience and loyalty through the customary kissing of his hand.15 He ultimately entered Segovia “triumphantly” and went to the main church where he prayed. Late that evening he was reunited with Isabella and the two dined together.16 In their accounts of the events surrounding Isabella’s acclamation, the four chroniclers provide hints of their own background and lay the ideological foundation for their opinions of shared sovereignty and gender roles. Diego de Valera was an intimate associate of the Trastamara dynasty. He had been educated at the court of Isabella and Henry’s father, John II, and had served the court of Henry IV in its early years. Yet he became an outspoken critic of the tumult of Henry IV’s reign (attributing much of the strife to a problematic nobility). He eventually retired from the court in disgust. He prized the

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restoration of order above all else and believed that Isabella could be its instrument. Thus, his chronicle champions Isabella’s sovereignty in Castile and extends it to include her right to administer justice. Performed against the backdrop of the perceived breakdown of law and order under the rule of Henry IVJustice was not simply an abstract principle to Valera and some of his fellow chroniclers.17 Frequently couched in near-messianic terms, many of Isabella’s supporters hailed her reign as the beginning of a golden age of prosperity and order. It was a theme taken up, for example, in fray Iñigo de M endoza’s Dechado a la muy escelente reina doña Isabel nuestra soberana señora, written in the months following Isabella’s assumption of the throne. Mendoza encourages Isabella to take up “a unique sword” and to restore stability to the disordered realm.18 Thus, Valera and Mendoza both communicate a sense of excited anticipation when they identify Isabella with the sword. Although he, too, was critical of Henry IV’s rule, Palencia regards the sword with less enthusiasm. Recognized as an accomplished Latin scholar (he had studied both in Spain and Italy), Palencia had initially served in the court of the Archbishop of Seville before Henry IV named him secretary of Latin letters and royal chronicler in 1456. Yet this did not ensure Palencia’s stalwart partisanship. During Henry’s reign he authored a series of political fables (which he later translated into Castilian) that obliquely criticized a corrupt nobility and hungered for the leadership of a strong ruler.19 Palencia made his sentiments abundantly clear when he sided with the faction that sought to bring Alfonso (who died in 1468), Isabella’s brother, to the throne and participated in the Farce of Avila, a ritualized and symbolic dethroning of Henry.20 Despite these misgivings and alliances, in his chronicle Palencia is not ready to embrace Isabella’s role as sovereign and probably doubts that Isabella, as a woman, can be the divinely ordained monarch he regards as fundamental to political stability in Castile.21 Rather, he increasingly sides with Ferdinand’s compromised role in the emerging hierarchy of their marriage and political sovereignty. Thus, not surprisingly, his telling of the acclamation ceremony is a political minefield. Palencia gives Ferdinand the opportunity to criticize openly Isabella’s ostentatious actions. Palencia also anchors future political dissent in the queen’s decision to process with the sword. In this he appeals to traditional gender roles. In the Jardín de las nobles doncellas, an advice manual prepared for Isabella in 1468, Martín de Cordoba argued for the complementary roles of husband and wife, king and queen, and makes reference to the place of the sword in this equation. The husband/king was father, judge and sword, while the queen was mother, advocate and shield.22 Finally, aside from his ideological rejection of

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Isabella’s sovereign claims he may also have been personally injured by his failure to receive the post of official royal chronicler, a position that went instead to Fernando del Pulgar. From the pens of Pulgar and Flores we have more judicious and cautious accounts. Like Valera, Pulgar was educated at the court of John II. Pulgar’s support of Isabella probably stemmed from his standing in her court. Named official royal chronicler in 1482, he is appropriately careful to uphold Isabella’s legal rights as sovereign proprietor of the kingdom. At the same time he repeatedly underscores Isabella’s role as Ferdinand’s wife and uses the words of the acclamation to create a space for Ferdinand within the new government. In this regard his work also echoes Cordoba’s Jardin. While Cordoba’s treatise supports the prospect of female rule and was offered in part as a kind of “mirror for princes,” it offers cautionary passages as well, warning against the potential excesses and vices of women. It also underscores the need for all women, but “especially queens” to be faithful to their husbands.23 Clearly, some who supported Isabella’s claims to sovereignty also expected her to exercise the role of the dutiful wife. About the chronicler Juan de Flores we know very little.24 Recent scholarship identifies him as the author of several sentimental romances that exult the behavior of strong female characters, which may, in part, explain his chronicle’s characterization of Isabella. He probably served as a knight in the service of the duke of Alba, an undertaking that placed him clearly on the side of the Catholic Monarchs in their early struggle for legitimacy and that led to his being rewarded with a court appointment.25 Perhaps to protect his privileged standing, he, too, strikes a cautious tone, offering no account of Isabella’s actual ceremony and procession. Rather than emphasize the hierarchy within marriage, he instead paints a picture of joint sovereignty as companionship. While waiting for Ferdinand’s arrival, Isabella was busy with the tasks of government; in this Flores upholds her right to exercise political power. At the same time, he wants to craft an image of marital harmony. When Ferdinand entered the city he was greeted by fanfare that in fact exceeded what Isabella had received, and the two dined together.

Who Rules? In the days and weeks following the events in Segovia, the monarchs were tested in finding ways to preserve this marital harmony beneath the banner of shared sovereignty. The chronicle accounts of the days following the

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acclamation in Segovia continue to betray an ambivalence characterized by a tension between marital gender roles and Isabella’s rights as sovereign ruler of Castile. At last united, the most immediate challenge facing the monarchs was the tremendous responsibility of consolidating their control of the realm amidst the threat of a civil war. Juana’s partisans had mounted an opposition and enlisted the support of the Portuguese king, Alfonso. In Palencia’s chronicle conflict between the two monarchs erupted immediately in the aftermath of Isabella’s acclamation ceremony in Segovia. Palencia claims that some of the queen’s advisors were suggesting that Ferdinand only be called a “regent” and not “king.”26 This prompts Palencia to engage the question of Ferdinand’s transversal lineage. According to some, the crown of Castile legitimately belonged to Ferdinand since it would pass through his father, John II of Aragon (still living), who, as John II of Castile’s cousin, was the next male heir to the throne. Even if these claims were not recognized, says Palencia, there existed an ancient law “promulgated and sanctioned by the ancient kings of Castile” that says “in the marriage of a female inheritor to the throne, although the husband is of inferior lineage, he has to enjoy jointly the scepter and name of King, with the other pre-eminences granted to men throughout the world.”27 Yet according to Palencia, the queen’s “flatterers” ignored these legal arguments, in turn bolstering the queen’s pride.28 Thus by the time Ferdinand reached Segovia, he was consumed by a “profound disgust” and announced his intentions to return immediately to Aragon.29 Disputes about the legitimacy of his sovereignty in Castile, Ferdinand said, offended him and had led to gossip among the people that threatened his masculinity.30 Isabella was surprised by his anger and tried to calm him down with tender words. Their advisors renegotiated the matter, but their proposal gave Isabella the upper hand. A furious Ferdinand once again threatened to leave. This time Isabella resorted to tears and laid the blame with her advisors and the two negotiated again— although Palencia does not specify the precise stipulations of this agreement.31 Palencia’s narration of this conflict is consistent with his account of the acclamation; he continues to highlight disorder and conflict. And he struggles with his portrayal of Isabella’s role—is she conniving or dutiful? He wants to present her as a female monarch deceived by her calculating and ambitious male advisors— a characterization that would be consistent with prevailing assumptions about the weakness of women.32 Yet at the same time, he plays on other stereotypes of women and eagerly suggests that she willingly plays along, perhaps pretending to be deceived, in order to bolster her own power. In the queen’s interactions with Ferdinand, Palencia also tries to craft the

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image of a devoted wife. Isabella employed the stereotypical strategies of the wife wishing to avoid any presumption of authority over her husband: gentle words and tears. Ferdinand, in Palencia’s telling, was fighting for his authority within the world of Isabella’s court. Although Palencia’s goal in narrating Ferdinand’s anger is to support Ferdinand’s claims, the chronicler risks at the same time highlighting Ferdinand’s petulance and weakness. By recounting Ferdinand’s confession of compromised masculinity, Palencia exposes a chink in Ferdinand’s armor. Chastising the queen simultaneously throws the king’s reputation into question.33 Pulgar’s chronicle of this early dispute echoes Palencia’s, but with a different resolution. His initial description of the business following Ferdinand’s arrival in Segovia paints a picture of the two monarchs acting in tandem. They named officers and restored law and order. The administration of justice is particularly noteworthy in this context since it was at the center of the controversy surrounding the use of the sword. Rather than mention the sword, however, Pulgar instead emphasizes Ferdinand and Isabella’s joint exercise of judicial powers.34 Yet in the next chapter, Pulgar introduces a note of discord. Like Palencia, he engages Ferdinand’s sovereign claims through his transversal lineage.35 Pulgar, however, counters this argument decisively. First, he says, there was nothing in the ancient constitutions of Spain that would deny the throne to a female heir, and he provides a list of medieval Spanish queens like Urraca and Berenguela who inherited their realms.36 Further, he contends, Isabella stood in a direct line of inheritance to the throne, whereas Ferdinand’s claims came through a transversal line. Thus, “although a woman,” Isabella’s claims were intact.37 Added to that, Pulgar argues, once married, Isabella continued to enjoy certain prerogatives as “proprietor” of the realm—prerogatives that could not be given as dowry in the marriage contract. Thus, according to the chronicler, “the king cannot govern that which by law he cannot receive.”38 These privileges included granting royal favors, commanding fortresses and administering the royal estate. Having offered his defense of Isabella’s rights, Pulgar then recounts her assertion of royal rights within this unusual contract of joint sovereignty. She wrestled, he says, with these complications and tried to soften the blow of direct inheritance by saying to Ferdinand that they would act in conformity with one another and that Ferdinand, as her husband, was king of Castile. According to Pulgar, she wanted the king to be secure in the honor and esteem of his office.39 Significantly, Pulgar’s description emphasizes Isabella’s comportment as a devoted and loving wife.

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In Pulgar’s account, this debate surrounding issues of inheritance prompted a re-negotiation of their marriage capitulations and some new rules for shared sovereignty: all royal letters would be signed by both of them; they would have one royal seal containing the coat of arms of Castile and Aragon; and the money they ordered minted would have both their pictures and names on it. Thus, in the unfolding picture of their shared sovereignty Pulgar is a conflicted chronicler. His earlier attempts to create a hierarchy within the acclamation that put Ferdinand first as monarch and husband, begin to crumble in the face of Isabella’s legal rights. He tries to downplay her ascendant power with descriptions of Isabella’s inner turmoil and her love and devotion, tempering her royal prerogative with an image of the dutiful wife. Ultimately, though, it is always an uneasy compromise for Pulgar who is never quite sure what to do with Isabella’s power. Like Pulgar, Flores presents a harmonious picture of the first weeks of their reign. They named officers. They particularly dedicated themselves to the task of punishing criminals and alleviating the lawlessness that many believed had plagued Castile during Henry’s rule.40Yet in Flores’s chronicle the monarchs hit a stumbling block over three questions: granting favors, managing fortresses and signing documents.41 Isabella appealed to her sovereign power in Castile, stating that she did not wish to give her power over her own vassals to someone else— adding that this was part of the original marriage agreement that she and Ferdinand had reached.42 Ferdinand responded that despite what he had promised in their original marriage capitulations, he did not believe that Isabella would make him abide by this agreement once they were married, since it was more fitting that he, as a man, exercise these powers.43 According to Flores, several days passed while various courtiers offered a range o f arguments, some in support of Isabella’s position, some in support of Ferdinand’s. In the meantime, however, the chronicler makes sure to point out that relations between the two monarchs continued to be quite devoted and friendly. They dined publicly together every day, having pleasant conversations, and slept together. Their will was one, held together by their deep love.44 Ultimately, they turned to a trusted and impartial advisor, Rodrigo Maldonado de Talavera, to resolve the disputes. He determined that they would sign all decisions jointly with Ferdinand’s name coming first. When they were apart, as need dictated, one could sign “as if both have signed.”45 The monarchs deemed the agreement satisfactory and everyone went away happy. Flores’s account, then, is one of fairly calm resolution of rather serious questions of sovereign prerogative. He briefly raises the specter of gender roles with Ferdinand’s suggestion that as a man he should be the ascendant

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royal power. Although potentially such questions could have driven a deep wedge between the monarchs, Flores celebrates their good will toward one another. And his account of Maldonado de Talavera’s resolution neatly glosses over the questions of actual administration. Despite how they would sign documents he leaves unanswered the central questions that sparked the dilemma in the first place: who has the power to make decisions about royal favors and commanding fortresses? In fact, the documentary evidence indicates that Ferdinand and Isabella did at this point in their reign come to a new agreement on just such issues of sovereign power, with Isabella retaining power over Castilian fortresses and maintaining the right to name officers— secular and ecclesiastic— in her realm.46 Rather than speak directly to Isabella’s maintenance of sovereign prerogative, however, Flores, as he did in his account of the acclamation ceremony, chooses to emphasize the monarchs’ smooth exercise of shared responsibilities and the preservation of marital harmony. Valera’s account of these disputes is telling in its brevity. According to him, there were some differences about the form of governance. These, however, were resolved by Rodrigo Maldonado de Talavera, and the king and queen were in agreement.47 Such reticence is surprising from the expansive Valera, who had previously offered a vigorous defense of Isabella’s sovereign rights in his narration of the acclamation ceremony. Perhaps Valera decides not to engage these disputes, however, because their ultimate resolution preserved Isabella’s prerogatives, and Valera has never questioned these anyway.

The Battle Joined Having resolved matters of internal administration, the monarchs had to address the brewing civil war. In the summer of 1474 the king of Portugal, Alfonso, now allied with Juana’s supporters, took the strategically vital city of Toro. While Isabella waited in Tordesillas, Ferdinand led the troops in an attack on the city. The results were disastrous. The Portuguese easily held their ground. To make matters worse, Alfonso refused to engage Ferdinand in direct combat, even though he had promised he would do so. Faced with an unraveling battle plan and dwindling supplies, especially food, Ferdinand’s troops refused to remain focused on Toro and began drifting away, making a slow return to Tordesillas. At Tordesillas they were met, according to Flores, by an irate Isabella. Using “the courageous words of a man rather than those of a fearful woman,”

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she gave Ferdinand and the troops a blistering harangue which Flores is the only chronicler to record.48 She dispensed quickly with any womanly modesty, arguing that while women might lack the discretion to know, the courage to dare and the tongue to speak, they nonetheless had eyes to see.49 She vividly described her torment in the face of such an empty outcome saying that she “had sat in the palace, with an angry heart, gritted teeth and clenched fists.”50 She berated their temerity, saying that the ruin of the people would thus come not from the cruelty of the enemy, but from the weakness of its defenders.51 The only hint of softening in her tirade came when she spoke of the risk that warfare posed to her marriage. As she put it, “if you say to me that women, since they do not have to meet the dangers [of battle], that they ought not to speak of them ... I say that there is no one who risks more than I do, since I put in danger the king, my lord, whom I love more than myself and all the things in the world.”52 Flores also provides the text of Ferdinand’s response. In the face of such unmitigated anger and frustration, he was cautious. He approached Isabella warily, initially praising the grace and sweetness with which she had presented her argument. Yet he asked her to rely not on the reports of others, but to hear his words and then make her judgment. He described the overwhelming odds against them. The Portuguese had the natural advantage of a position atop the city’s escarpment and better supplies. It was hardly a question of courage, he protested. He did not lack fortitude, but rather knew that prudence might be a better course of action. His exasperation showed through his attempt at a rational argument, however, when, addressing his wife, he proclaimed, “What trouble we will have with you from here on!”53 The aftermath of the attempted siege of Toro clearly strained the marital harmony idealized in Flores’s earlier passages. In his account, the role of husband and wife, male and female, were inverted. Isabella immediately claimed the moral high ground and appropriated the verbal and physical vocabulary o f masculinity: risks, danger, courage, clenched fists and gritted teeth. She took control of the situation and delivered a fiery critique. Though she had not been physically present on the battlefield, she presumed knowledge of the circumstances and chastised her husband and his troops. Ferdinand was doubly compromised—and even effeminized—by these events. He had already been humiliated on the battlefield when Alfonso refused to engage him in combat, thus losing a customary means of proving his virility. Then he returned to Tordesillas, where his wife berated him in front of his troops. This put Ferdinand on the defensive. At the end of his response Ferdinand’s anger and husbandly authority made a brief appearance. Like the chronicler Palencia,

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Ferdinand hinted that future conflict lay in the presumptuous behavior of his young wife who, he predicted, would be a troublesome element in her own right. Although more cautious in his portrayal of Isabella during the acclamation ceremony and subsequent legal negotiations, Flores throws caution to the wind in his bold portrayal of Isabella in the aftermath of the botched campaign at Toro. In this, he may best communicate his true intentions, or at least ones consistent with his other writings. As Joseph Gwara has noted, Flores’s romances also glorified strong women.54 In addition, earlier in the chronicle when he narrates the events of Henry’s reign, he describes another woman of determination and power, Beatriz de Bobadilla. Though her husband, Andrés de Cabrera, was mayordomo of the city of Segovia, it was Beatriz, Flores tells us, due to Cabrera’s illness, who administered the city “like a very discrete man and woman.”55 According to Flores, she governed with “a shrewdness more intense than women customarily possess.”56 He even includes the text of an entreaty that Beatriz made to Henry, in which she urged him to avoid being misled by his conspiring courtier, Juan Pacheco, and to reconcile with Isabella. She also questioned his decision to name Juana as his heir, arguing that it was a mistake.57 Beatriz emerges, then, as a formidable woman who also turned gender roles upside down, daring to offer advice to and question the decisions of a male monarch. She governed Segovia and chastised Henry, much as Isabella governed Castile and chastised Ferdinand. In creating portraits of strong women like Isabella and Beatriz, Flores added his voice to the debate about gender roles in fifteenth-century Castile. As Jacob Omstein and Ronald Surtz have ably demonstrated, the querelle de femmes was alive and well during this era, and writers such as Juan Rodriguez del Padrón, Alvaro de Luna and Martín de Córdoba defended the virtues of women.58 Isabella herself was personally surrounded by such examples of works that tried to counter the negative stereotypes of the misogynist discourse. Studies of her library and works dedicated to her indicate that the queen could draw on numerous models of strong women.59 Some of these are particularly significant. Isabella’s library included, for example, a copy of Christine de Pisan’s The Treasure o f the City o f Ladies.60 The work, written as a kind of sequel to The Book o f the City o f Ladies, is a practical advice manual for women of all ranks. While lacking the proto-feminist rhetoric of the City o f Ladies, the text nonetheless recognizes and seeks to direct the power of queens and noblewomen.61 The work offers them instruction in virtues like piety and prudence. But Pisan also knows that these women have powerful roles to play as peacemakers and overseers of finances. She allows them a place in

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military and diplomatic negotiations, for example, arguing that they should counsel their husbands to avoid warfare and its destruction whenever possible.62 She also cautions these women to pay close attention to their revenues and expenditures.63 Thus, we find in this work resonances of Flores’s description of Beatriz de Bobadilla, who ruled quietly and successfully in her husband’s stead and attempted to keep the peace between Henry and Isabella. Overall, however, Pisan’s text is relatively moderate, urging women to observe customary (and somewhat passive) virtues and to exercise their power mostly from behind the scenes. More bold in its approach is the work of an anonymous author who dedicated to Isabella an account of the life of Joan of Arc.64 Written between 1474 and 1491, Za poncella de Francia offers the queen the life and triumphs of Joan of Arc as a didactic model. The author draws parallels between the political turmoil in France during the Hundred Years’ War and the disorder of Castile that confronted Isabella upon her assumption of the throne. La poncella implicitly suggests that Isabella, too, can achieve tremendous things (though it does not address the more troubling question of Joan’s ultimate martyrdom). By drawing Isabella’s attention to the figure of Joan of Arc, the text engages the question of the role of the female monarch in warfare. As sovereign ruler in Castile, this was a particularly pressing issue for Isabella. Since women could not customarily do things like lead troops into battle, she tried to find other ways to assert a military presence. On the morning of the troops’ departure for Toro, for example, Isabella appeared before them.65 Yet clearly, Joan of Arc went well beyond Pisan’s advice of trying to indirectly influence warfare by counseling husbands to work towards peace. Thus, the anonymous text’s presentation of this controversial and dramatic figure, and its suggestion that Isabella draw inspiration from this model, is a bold statement. The customary stance of the pro-feminist debate of this period was to defend the virtues of women, not place them as cross-dressers on the battlefield. In this regard, Flores’s description of Isabella’s lecture at Tordesillas takes the Castilian thread of the querelle in a different direction. In the example of Joan of Arc—a woman who dressed as a man in order to presume authority— there are echoes of Flores’s depiction of Isabella’s self-fashioning at Tordesillas. Though in his account Isabella did not don military apparel, she nonetheless assumed a masculine vocabulary and stature. In his forthright discussion of the events following the fiasco at Toro, Flores stands alone among the chroniclers. The only other mention of this dispute comes from Palencia. Given his previous uneasiness with Isabella’s power and his penchant for chronicling disorder, his account is surprisingly

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measured. He writes that “profound sadness afflicted the soul of the Queen Isabella, who was waiting in Tordesillas for the result of such an important expedition. Her womanly nature did not allow her to reveal her pain, and she went out to her meeting with the King, showing more sadness for seeing the army return so much without glory than happiness for finding them unharmed.”66 Palencia is restrained because he is trying to make room for Ferdinand in the exercise of shared sovereignty. Recounting the full extent of Isabella’s dismay at his humiliation at Toro would do little to enhance Ferdinand’s stature at court. Further, Palencia has already allowed Ferdinand to confess once to compromised virility; he may be sidestepping another blow to Ferdinand’s masculinity. In keeping with his consistently vivid portrayal of the queen’s character, however, Palencia does allow Isabella the chance to express emotion. Yet by emphasizing sadness, rather than anger, he does so in more measured tones than Flores. Pulgar and Valera are even more restrained than Palencia, leaving this episode out of their accounts entirely. Pulgar, like Palencia, is trying to uphold Ferdinand’s place within the joint monarchy. Since the events at Toro and Tordesillas cast Ferdinand in a decidedly compromised light, Pulgar probably chooses not to draw attention to them. In addition, his portrayal of Isabella emphasizes her docility and internal turmoil. The fireworks of her harangue at Tordesillas have little appeal for Pulgar who is trying to portray her as a loyal wife, even as he is forced to uphold her legal claims to sovereignty. Valera, Isabella’s greatest champion on the subject of shared sovereignty in these early days of the reign, also gains little from over-emphasizing Isabella’s anger. He, as we saw in his laconic description of the disputes about governing the realm, does not engage questions that would throw Isabella’s power into question or that would cast her in an unfavorable light.

The Political Climate for Shared Sovereignty Running throughout the chroniclers’ accounts of the first year of Isabella and Ferdinand’s reign are two intertwining tensions that both threatened the existing patriarchal order. The first is the contest between Isabella and Ferdinand for sovereign prerogative. Linked inextricably to this tension is Isabella’s role as Ferdinand’s wife. As the most public wife in the kingdom, Isabella’s exercise of sovereign power and her portrayal as Ferdinand’s wife are clearly on the minds of the chroniclers who each offer their own commentary on the behavior, rights and roles of the young queen.

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In the battle for sovereignty the chroniclers move back and forth across a spectrum of opinion. At one end is Valera, who does not even question Isabella’s sovereign prerogative. He defends Isabella’s right to identify herself with the supreme symbol of royal might, the sword of justice. Valera bolsters his defense with legal arguments—Isabella retains sovereign power through the laws of inheritance and seignorial jurisdiction. In sharp contrast stands Palencia who portrays Isabella’s use of the sword as an inversion of patriarchy’s gender roles. Her action is ostentatious and presumptuous since it strips Ferdinand of his “pre-eminences” as a man.67 He also raises the specter of a contrary body of legal theory that would support Ferdinand’s use of his transversal lineage to claim the throne. Somewhere in the middle are Flores and Pulgar. Flores seemingly eschews any opportunities to assert Isabella’s sovereign rights. Instead, he removes any ceremonial significance from the events in Segovia and emphasizes the harmony between the young monarchs. Even when there was political and legal wrangling taking place, he maintains that there was “neither division nor anger between the king and queen.”68 Pulgar finds a different kind of balance within the practice of shared sovereignty. On the one hand, he acknowledges Isabella’s legal claims of proprietorship. On the other hand, he is careful to highlight her concomitant role as Ferdinand’s wife. And it is Isabella’s role as wife that stands at the heart of the debate about shared sovereignty. Valera’s is the most daring portrait; he is not preoccupied with Isabella’s wifely comportment. Convinced of her rights, he creates the image of a queen who does not necessarily answer to the demands of a husband. The uxorial portrayals of Flores and Pulgar most closely resemble prevailing legal norms that allowed women to inherit family property and recognized the joint administration of property by married couples. Palencia’s depiction of Isabella as wife is the harshest. He finds the seeds of political dissent in her blatant disregard for Ferdinand’s rights as a man and as her husband. And yet this attempt to arrange the chroniclers on a well-defined spectrum of opinion breaks down at certain points. Flores, for example, despite his attempts to communicate an image of marital harmony, is the chronicler who presents Isabella as a mujer varonil (manly woman) in the aftermath of the campaign at Toro. And Palencia, who impugns Isabella’s character and questions her sovereign claims, resists the opportunity to recount and embellish upon the same scene. Thus, the texts discussed in this essay demonstrate the lively discourse of gender politics in early modem Spain. This discourse offered Isabella a negotiable script. There were some limits; she could not be a cross-dressing

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martyr like Joan of Arc. This would have posed too great a threat to the prevailing order. But she could be a powerful, providential queen, boldly asserting her sovereign claims and even presuming authority over her husband. At the same time, depending upon the circumstances, she could conform more closely to the models of Christine de Pisan and Martin de Cordoba—favored by some of the chroniclers—projecting the image of a dutiful wife. Her ability to borrow and adapt, however, gave her considerable flexibility in crafting her image as a young queen who refused to fade quietly into the background while her husband ruled in her stead. The first year of their joint reign proved that the gender of shared sovereignty was controversial, and thus mutable.

N otes 1

2 3 4

5 6 7 8 9 10 11

12 13 14 15

For a comparative look at the place of these chronicles in modem accounts of Isabella and Ferdinand’sjoint rule see: José Manuel Nieto Soria, Ceremonias de la realeza: propaganda y legitimación en la Castilla Trastámara (Madrid, 1993); Tarsicio de Azcona, Isabel la Católica: estudio crítico de su vida y su reinado (Madrid, 1993); and Peggy Liss, Isabel the Queen: Life and Times (New York, 1992). Diego de Valera, Crónica de los Reyes Católicos, ed. Juan de Mata Carriazo (Madrid, 1927), 3-4. Valera, Crónica, 4. Andrés Bemáldez’s chronicle includes a description of the ceremony during which the “varas de justicia,” or staffs of justice, were conferred upon Isabella; cited in Nieto Soria, Ceremonias, 34. Valera, Crónica, 7. Alfonso de Palencia, Crónica de Enrique IV, ed. Antonio Paz y Melia (Madrid, 1975), 2:155. Valera, Crónica, 4. Palencia, Enrique IV, 2:155. Ibid., 2:162. Ibid. Fernando del Pulgar, Crónica de los Reyes Católicos, ed. Juan de Mata Carriazo (Madrid, 1943), 1:65. In the city records of Segovia the proclamation is inverted: “Castilla, Castilla, Castilla, por la reyna e señora nuestra, la reyna doña Isabel, e por el rey don Femando, como su legítmo marido” (Castile, Castile, Castile, for the queen and our lady, the queen doña Isabella, and for the king don Ferdinand, as her legitimate husband); cited in Azcona, Isabel, 244. Pulgar, Crónica, 1:66. Crónica incompleta délos Reyes Católicos (1469-1476), ed. Julio Puyol (Madrid, 1934), 131. Ibid., 132-34. Ibid., 132. Flores indicates that Ferdinand had to wait on the outskirts of Segovia in Turrégano while preparations for his entrance into the city were made. This created an awkward situation for the young king, whose triumphant acclamation had to be postponed

54

16 17

18 19 20

21 22 23 24

25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

34 35

36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

Women, Texts and Authority while he waited. Palencia notes this; see Crónica de Enrique IV, 2:165. Pulgar and Valera do not. The delay in Turrégano is documented by the Segovia archives; see Azcona, Isabel, 246. Crónica incompleta, 134. Flores, for example, characterized the later period of Henry’s reign as a time when sinners had no shame and were, in fact, praised for their wrongdoing; Crónica incompleta, 98. Valera himself believed that during Henry’s rule a state of lawlessness prevailed and men were robbed, churches were pillaged and women raped; Crónica, 5. Iñigo López de Mendoza, Cancionero, ed. Julio Rodríguez Puértolas (Madrid, 1968), 283. Brian Tate, “Alfonso de Palencia: An Interim Biography,” in Letters and Society in FifteenthCentury Spain, ed. Alan Deyermond and Jeremy Lawrance (Llangrannog, 1993), 178-79. For further evidence of Palencia’s critique of Henry, see Barbara Weissberger, ‘“A tierra, puto!’: Alfonso de Palencia’s Discourse of Effeminacy,” in Queer Iberia: Crossing Cultures, Crossing Sexualities, ed. Gregory Hutcheson and Josiah Blackmore (Durham, N.C., 1999), 291-324. Helen Nader, The Mendoza Family in the Spanish Renaissance, 1350 to 1550 (New Brunswick, N.J., 1979), 20. Martín de Córdoba, Jardín de las nobles doncellas, ed. Harriet Goldberg (Chapel Hill, 1974), 198-202. Martín de Córdoba, Jardín, 265. For the most comprehensive biography to date, see Joseph Gwara, “The Identity of Juan de Flores: The Evidence of the Crónica incompleta de los Reyes Católicos,” Journal o f Hispanic Philology 11/3 (1987). Ibid., 119. Palencia, Enrique IV, 2:166. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 2:167. Ibid. Ibid., 2:167-68. Córdoba, Jardín, 245. Weissberger analyzes how Palencia’s construction of Isabella as a strong ruler works to the ultimate detriment of Ferdinand; she also posits that Palencia, who lost the position of royal chronicler to Pulgar, empathizes with Ferdinand as a victim of “Isabelline emasculation”; “Palencia,” 307. Pulgar, Crónica, 1:67-68. Many of the chroniclers borrowed heavily from Palencia’s chronicles. In telling the story of shared sovereignty, however, I have found, and this essay demonstrates, that each chronicler stakes out his own individual ideological and political position. Pulgar, Crónica, 1:70-71. Ibid., 1:71. Ibid., 1:71-72. Ibid., 1:72. Crónica incompleta, 140-41. Ibid., 144. Ibid. Ibid., 145.

The Gender of Shared Sovereignty 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

59

60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67

68

55

Ibid. Ibid., 146. Azcona, Isabel, 249. Valera, Crónica, 7. Crónica incompleta, 239. Ibid. Ibid., 241-42. Ibid., 240. Ibid., 239-40. Ibid., 245. Gwara, “The Identity of Juan de Flores,” 121. Crónica incompleta, 111. Ibid. Ibid, 112-15. Jacob Omstein, “Misogyny and Pro-Feminism in Early Castilian Literature,” Modern Language Quarterly 3 (1942): 221-34; Ronald Surtz, Writing Women in Late Medieval and Early Modern Spain: The Mothers o f Saint Teresa o f Avila (Philadelphia, 1995), 17. Victoria Campo, “Modelos para una mujer ‘modelo’: los libros de Isabel la Católica,” in Actas del IX Simposio de la Sociedad Española de Literatura General y Comparada (Zaragoza, 1994), 85-94; María Gómez Molleda, “La cultura femenina en la época de Isabel la Católica: cortejo y estela de una reina,” Revista de Archivos, Bibliotecas y Museos 61 (1955): 137-95. Victoria Campo and Víctor Infantes, eds. La poncella de Francia: la “historia ”castellana de Juana de Arco (Madrid, 1997), 14. Christine de Pisan, The Treasure o f the City o f Ladies, trans. Sarah Lawson (London, 1985), 35-105. Pisan, Treasure, 50-52. Ibid, 76-77. See note 60. Liss, Isabel, 115. Palencia, Enrique IV, 2:215. Ibid, 2:166. Crónica incompleta, 145.

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Illustration 4.1 Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe

Chapter 4

Writing (for) Her Life: J u d e o -C o n v e r s a s in Early Modem Spain Gretchen D. Starr-LeBeau

Like many early modem women, Hispano-Jewish women and Hispano-Jewish converts to Christianity left behind little written record of their own thought. Yet this does not mean that we are incapable of recovering something of these women’s worlds. Indeed, we can leam much about Judeo-conversas (or Jewish converts to Christianity and their descendants), as well as their relationship to the written word, through their encounters with ecclesiastical and political authorities, particularly the Holy Office of the Inquisition. More specifically, we can hear their own voices through the confessions they dictated to the inquisitorial notaries, the testimony they offered for the prosecution and defense and the statements they made under threat of torture. It is these texts, with all their complexities and undercurrents of coercion, which form the heart of this essay. The women described here were all rough contemporaries, tried by the Inquisition at the end of the fifteenth century at the shrine site of Our Lady of Guadalupe, in Extremadura in western Spain (see Illustration 4.1). Their trials, read in conjunction with one another, reveal the ways in which, individually and collectively, Judeo-con versa women used their voices to protect themselves and others and to affirm their identity. Statements of reconciliation dictated to the Holy Office of the Inquisition reveal the multiple strategies that Judeo-conversa women employed to protect themselves and their families from prosecution. Judeo-conversas collectively crafted life narratives in their reconciliations and requests for penance that simultaneously affirmed their penitence for past misdeeds while arguing their present innocence; conformed to the inquisitors’ expectations of traditional gender roles in the home while at the same time suggesting their prominent place in leading covert Jewish observances; and shielded as many family members and friends as possible while also conceding to the inquisitors’

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demands to lay blame on family members by singling out the absent or deceased. Through such complicated narratives Judeo-conversas not only revealed tantalizingly coded glimpses of their lives, but also maintained some agency in a situation where they were afforded little opportunity to do so. Testimony offered for the prosecution and defense also bear the mark of multiple, sometimes conflicting strategies of self-preservation, as these women struggled to master the discourse demanded of them by their inquisitors. Once again, though, Judeo-conversas were somewhat successful in their attempts to protect their identity while meeting the demands of their interrogators. Some Judeo-conversas struggled to defend themselves while defending others; other women employed vague accusations of others to preserve all parties involved. Still others, who self-consciously identified as Christian, used the opportunity of prosecution testimony to voice, and thus make more real, their own vision of appropriate belief and behavior. Even under threat of torture, when coercion finally collapsed most attempts to stake out an independent voice, a few women still managed to maintain their independence. Out of this inquisitorial testimony, therefore, we can begin to understand the complex social dynamic of Judeoconversas in early modem Spain. Records from the Guadalupense inquisitorial trials of 1485 provide a particularly useful vantage point from which to examine these issues. These trials came early in the Inquisition’s history, at a high point of investigations into Judaizing practices. And although records for this early phase of activity are less extensive than in later periods (summaries of the trials were not kept until the mid-sixteenth century) Guadalupe’s records are more complete. Summaries exist for all 226 Judeo-conversos tried in Guadalupe in 1485, and documentation remains for 37 trials. The inquisitors in Guadalupe appear to have been broadly inclusive in their accusations: men and women were tried in roughly equal numbers, and it seems that essentially all Guadalupe’s Judeoconversos were brought before the Holy Office. Given the town’s population of approximately 5,000 and the fact that almost all those tried were adults, it appears that Judeo-conversos made up slightly less than ten percent of the population. Most of Guadalupe’s Judeo-conversas, therefore, found themselves in the inquisitorial prison at some point during 1485. Both the women and men who found themselves under suspicion by the Holy Office in Guadalupe had reason to be concerned. The inquisitors there meted out harsh sentences. Of the 193 trials for which we have specific documentation, 71 people were sentenced to death, with another 13 sentenced to death in absentia. Thirty-two more were found guilty in posthumous trials. Seventeen received sentences of perpetual imprisonment, and

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38—an unusually high number—were permanently exiled from the town and its environs. Only a few escaped these harsh punishments. Eighteen were given “spiritual penance,” three were reconciled and a mere four people were absolved of all wrongdoing.1 When these women began to compose their reconciliations, they could not have known these grim statistics, but they must have realized that their lives were at stake.

Reconciliation and Inquisitorial Autobiography On 17 January 1485, Juana González appeared before the inquisitorial authorities to reconcile and beg pardon for her sins and penitence from the inquisitors. Typically, her statement began with her early history: I say, Lords, my guilt that when I went to marry, in the house of my father I saw my mother order that the oil lamps be cleaned and order them to be lit Friday evenings, and that they not spin on Saturdays either and thus I did it in their house, and sometimes even after I married. ... I beg penitence; and I consented to it even in my home. ...2

In fact, Juana’s statement of reconciliation provides a kind of religious life history, one balanced precariously between admitting Jewish observances and affirming her ignorance of the significance of those observances; between acknowledging her guilt and insisting on her innocence. Her reconciliation led the inquisitors through the stages of her life, but in such a manner as to minimize her culpability. She asked pardon for observing Jewish fasts with her parents while living in their home; for observing rules of ritual purity (rules she claimed not to know had religious significance); for avoiding Christian feasts and fasts; for participating in readings of Scripture and other Jewish texts; and for observing Jewish mourning practices. At one level, Juana González’s statement of reconciliation depicts the life history of a Judeo-conversa secretly observing Judaism, just as the inquisitors might have imagined it. Her education in Judaizing began in her childhood home, with readings from religious texts and various Jewish observances, continued as an adult with the encouragement of her husband, and extended to almost every aspect of her adult life, up to and including rites of mourning. Yet Juana also attempted to insert an element of implied coercion into her narrative. She begins with the heretical behavior of her parents, which, she implies, they encouraged in her as well. Her husband also encouraged her in

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her observance of Judaism, as he too observed the Jewish Sabbath and read the scriptures. Later, under torture, Juana claimed that her husband was “a great Jew,” a charge he would have substantiated, she maintained, had he not already been executed by the Holy Office.3 Juana González was not the only woman to assign blame for her Judaizing actions to others in the family. Many Judeo-conversas used their reconciliations to accuse family members, probably in response to prompting by the inquisitors. Mencia Alfonso, wife of Diego González the shoemaker, said that she had been raised in a home where they lit oil lamps on Friday evenings; observed the dietary laws of kashrut; and participated in several Jewish fasts, particularly Yom Kippur. This was done at her father’s house, she carefully reminded the inquisitors, and her mother forced her to participate. Later, after she married, Mencia said that she and her husband observed Yom Kippur because her mother told her she had to. By implicating her (probably deceased) parents, she sated the inquisitors’ desire to learn the names of those “most responsible” for Judaizing in Guadalupe. After reviewing Mencia’s reconciliation and questioning her further, the scrivener added in the margin the names of Mencia’s parents, so as to call them before the Holy Office more easily. But at the same time, Mencia was also able to turn attention from herself somewhat.4 Inés González wife of Juan Esteban de la Barrera (no relation to Juana González) also implicated her parents, who had taught her at her childhood home in Zalamea, in an attempt to limit her own culpability.5 Yet the decision to submerge one’s own decisions and one’s own history in a claim of ignorant devotion to the wishes of one’s parents was not an easy or uncontroversial one. Mari Ruiz’s statement of reconciliation is notable for its lack of explicit condemnation of her parents. Instead, she told the inquisitors that her aunt forced her not to eat lard (a practice she continued until her marriage, when her husband forced her to consume it).6 Yet this rhetorical strategy, apparently, was not the one she had initially settled upon. Mari and her friends had talked over the content of their statements of reconciliation before submitting them to the Holy Office, and her friends had persuaded her to rewrite it after she testified in it against her mother.7 O f course, even this action reached the attention of the inquisitors, when in an attempt to protect herself Mari testified against one of the friends who had encouraged her to protect her mother. Mari Ruiz’s altered statement of reconciliation suggests that, when Judeoconversa women sat down to write their life histories for the Holy Office of the Inquisition, they did so in the context of a broader community. And indeed, women wrote or dictated their lives as, in some sense, collective

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documents. Women, more than men, seem to have engaged in inquisitorial self-defense, much as they lived their lives, as a communal project. Throughout the trial records, women in particular described their lives as collective enterprises, moving from shared activities with friends and neighbors in the home—kneading bread, spinning, cleaning and eating—to shared conversations over fences, at the public ovens, in church and in the street. Food preparation, in particular, was an opportunity for New and Old Christian women (Old Christians were those people not descended from converts) to pass the time together. Like much women’s work, food preparation involved long hours of work which was not necessarily intensive but which often benefitted from assistance from others (like kneading dough) and which allowed for extended conversations (as when women waited for their food to bake at the two public ovens in town). O f course, men’s lives were not devoid of collective actions, but in and out of the inquisitorial documents men of this period refer much less frequently to communitarian activities. Similarly, there is the odd reference to men conferring on their trials, but they are far outweighed by the evidence from their wives, sisters and mothers.8 Collective activity was an intrinsic part of women’s lives in Guadalupe, and they undertook their response to the Holy Office of the Inquisition in the same way. Explicit comment on the collective nature of women’s responses to the Inquisition is understandably more muted, but even so it appeared from time to time, when the inquisitors attempted to make sense of sudden reversals of attitude or of a sudden apparent willingness to cooperate—changes in behavior that often resulted from ex post facto consultations with fellow Judeoconversas, or fellow prisoners. Mari Ruiz’s experience, for example, suggests that the process of community consultation began with the Inquisition’s arrival, even before the start of the first trials. The response of these women emerged, it seems, not from deep legal knowledge. Rather, they chose to meet the inquisitors’ demands on their own terms, as they lived the rest of their lives— consulting together, seeking out the opinions of their friends and family and working to protect one another, in this case from possible avenues o f prosecution. Statements like Mari Ruiz’s, that explicitly testify to the consultation that produced these documents, are rare. But the common attitudes and strategies that fill these statements of reconciliation— the common recourse to a biographical mode, the vague accusations against family and the self-protective rhetorical stance— suggest at least a shared outlook, if not a shared production. And even when their statements were not written as part of an explicitly collective enterprise, the effects of Judeo-conversas’ words on the lives of

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others remained in women’s minds. Those facing potential accusations from the Holy Office of the Inquisition rarely forgot the uncertain fate of their husbands, their parents, their children. While many women—reluctantly or willingly—made accusatory statements about their parents, far fewer were persuaded to comment on the religious practices of their husbands or children. Such statements might be made, if at all, under threat of torture. Some women went so far as to shield actively family members from the inquisitorial gaze, arguing that their children, in particular, were unaware of family practices. The most notable example of protecting others in the family came in the reconciliation of Beatriz Núñez. Beatriz’s unusually forthright statement of reconciliation, possibly in her husband’s hand, was a bold statement of a variety of Judaizing practices, with little attempt to steer blame to others or to voice great penitence herself. Furthermore, like other conversas, Beatriz made a great effort to protect others in her family. Her early years were described in confident terms: I say, Lords, that living in Ciudad Real, where I was bom, that as a child I observed some Saturdays the best I could and furthermore observed some of the feasts of the Jews when I knew it as secretly as I could and sometimes I ate matzoh and I dressed in clean shirts on Saturdays, and this was for reason of the ceremony of the law of Moses by which I understood that I had to be saved; for which I ask penitence.9

In addition, Beatriz made it clear that once she moved to Guadalupe she hid her behavior, not only from her husband, but from her children as well: And after this I came here to Guadalupe married to my husband, and as I was an outsider and did not know anyone from this place I did not know who would discover me ... I did not do things as I had in Villareal [Ciudad Real], as I kept them in my heart and as I wished to do them, for fear that my little ones or my husband or any other person would not understand it of me.10

Here, the inquisitors’ expectations of a false and simulated Christianity are fulfilled to an almost improbable degree, as family members keep their practices secret even from one another. Yet in fulfilling the inquisitors’ expectations Beatriz certainly hoped to help her spouse and children avoid culpability as well. For her husband, Fernando González hereje (the heretic), who had been accused of Judaizing twenty years before, there was little she could do. The fate of her children is unknown, but based on the extensive testimony of others in town, Beatriz herself was “relaxed” to the secular arm to be executed.11

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Women like Beatriz not only bore in mind the effects on their families; they also could never forget their intended audience: the inquisitors. The element of coercion entered into each of these statements, as Judeo-conversa women struggled to provide a vision of past Judaizing practices and present penitence that would be intelligible to the inquisitors’ gaze. Judeo-conversas may not have known all the details of inquisitorial law, though some women may have had an understanding of legal practices through their families. Beatriz Núñez’s husband was a scrivener, for example. As families reconciled themselves before the Holy Office, though, the expectations of the inquisitors quickly became clear. In some cases, this seems to have included acknowledging men in the family as pre-eminent in determining the religious direction of family life. Recent research has demonstrated the centrality of women in Judaizing practices, and the women’s own testimony about their central role in maintaining rituals in the home confirms this.12 It was women who made sure that the household kept kosher, that the home was cleaned before the Sabbath and oil lamps lit Fridays at sunset and that the family dressed in clean clothes on Saturdays. These acts were central to Judaizing practices, since men’s roles in worship services were all but eliminated by the overwhelming need for secrecy. Yet in several cases women pointed to their husbands or fathers as essential to their own heretical behavior. Not only would this have turned attention once again to people perhaps out of reach of the inquisitors, but it may also have met the inquisitors’ expectations of male leadership of religious ritual activity. Juana González frequently mentioned her father as an influence in her own observance of Jewish practices.13 Her father, Martín Gutiérrez, was widely regarded as an active Judaizer in town; testimony against him suggested that he maintained a large number of specific Jewish ritual practices.14 Yet other women made similar claims, and at times, implicated their spouses, something it was nearly impossible for them to do on other occasions since spouses were not permitted to testify against each other in other European (or other Spanish) courts. But the implicit coercion on the part of the inquisitors, apparent in these women’s texts from their first contact with the Holy Office, was relatively diluted in these early, quasi-voluntary statements. In their first contacts with the inquisitors, Judeo-conversas were less likely to bow to the inquisitors’ preconceived notions of heretical religious practice. But as women increasingly were brought into the orbit of the inquisitors and moved more directly under their control, the pressure of implicit and explicit coercion deformed the statements of the accused to fit more nearly with the Holy Office’s expectations.

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Witnesses for the Defense, Witnesses for the Prosecution As the coercion of Judeo-conversas increased, their statements also changed to fit new circumstances. Whether speaking for the prosecution or the defense, women’s agency at this stage became more limited, as the threat of prosecution, torture and execution grew. The texts women composed as witnesses’ statements could vary considerably from those composed before the first formal accusations were made, and under threat of torture or execution conformed more nearly to inquisitors’ expectations. But some women managed to maintain a level of agency, participating in collective strategies of resistance that managed to protect some fellow Judeo-conversas from execution. As Guadalupe’s “inquisitorial year” of 1485 progressed, women learned from each other’s experiences with the Holy Office. Consultation even within the walls of the inquisitorial prison allowed Judeo-conversas tried by the Holy Office to reformulate strategies in light of one another’s experiences. Initially, several Judeo-conversas testified for the defense. They argued that Jewish rites intentionally maintained were not indicative of any profound attachment to Judaism, that the accused had a good Christian character, and that any Jewish practices inadvertently maintained by the accused were done “without ceremony,” that is, without intention of preserving what the inquisitors considered a heretical rite. Soon, though, Judeo-conversa women recognized that these statements required considerable justification and evidence to be considered plausible, and even then offered little chance of success in protecting each other from execution. Carefully supportive testimony not only failed to aid the accused, but also could serve to draw suspicion to themselves. Furthermore, as more and more Judeo-conversas were imprisoned by the Holy Office of the Inquisition, fewer and fewer were available as acceptable defense witnesses. Less than halfway into the inquisitors’ stay in Guadalupe in the year 1485, it appears that almost all women of Jewish ancestry in town had been imprisoned by the Holy Office. As Judeo-conversa defense w itnesses declined, Judeo-conversa prosecution witnesses began to appear more frequently. In part, this is because some descendants of Jewish converts were apparently assimilated into Christianity, and wished to participate in the reformation of their sometime friends and family. In other cases, it is possible that more assimilated children readily testified against their mothers as a result of personal conflicts that may have stretched back years before. Inés González, daughter of Mari Sánchez, happily testified against her own mother, as well as several of her mother’s friends. Inés detailed a number of Judaizing practices by several women brought

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before the Holy Office, and in each case made a distinct and specific set of claims (as opposed to merely repeating the same few charges against each defendant). Most of her accusations were also corroborated by other witnesses. In other words, Inés probably appeared to be a reliable witness in the eyes of the inquisitors. Inés González saved her worst accusations for her own mother, Mari Sánchez. When she lived in Guadalupe, Inés frequently told others that “Certainly my father is a good Christian, and I for one take him that way; but my mother Mari is not.”15 When called to testify for the prosecution against her mother, Inés repeated this claim, and then apparently began an additional statement. She said that her mother had done three particularly bad things: she had washed the chrism off her son’s head after his baptism, she had invited Jews to dine in her house and she had stamped on a drawing of the crucifixion and thrown it down the privy. When Inés herself informed her mother that the inquisitors knew these particularly damning incidents, Mari became hysterical, begging from the door of the prison for her lover and her attorney. But it was too late. The Holy Office tortured and executed Mari for not confessing and repenting of these deeds earlier.16Inés González’s motivation will most likely never be clear, but we do know that she escaped prosecution of any sort and returned to her adopted hometown and Old Christian husband. Certainly her apparently eager participation in the activities of the Holy Office, as well as her Old Christian husband and residence in a village devoid of Jews or Judeo-conversos, helped demonstrate her own innocence.17 Some women responded to the accusations against themselves by accusing others in turn. When the prosecutor drew up his accusation against Inés González wife of Juan Esteban de la Barrera (no relation to Inés González daughter of Mari Sánchez), he included the claim that she made fun of those who blessed their children. In her formal response to the accusation, and perhaps guessing its source, Inés defended herself by saying that she “had believed that Juana González [no relation] was a Jew and not a Christian and that she [Juana] did not have it in her heart to bless her said children, that in seeing them blessed like that she laughed.”18 In many ways it was easier to testify for the prosecution than for the defense. Not only might testifying for the defense cast suspicion upon oneself, but defense witnesses were limited to responding to specific questions about the accused’s behavior. Prosecution witnesses, on the other hand, were given free rein to speak at length on any topic. Furthermore, statements from other trials about other defendants could be easily imported into those trials, so that some women became almost involuntary witnesses for the prosecution. This

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was apparently the case with Juana González and Inés González wife of Juan Esteban de la Barrera, close neighbors in Guadalupe who seem to have been set against one another, perhaps unwittingly, to implicate the other as they attempted to defend themselves. As the year wore on, though, it became shatteringly clear to all the women in Guadalupe’s inquisitorial prison that their words could endanger others more easily than they could benefit themselves. Through their own experiences and their collective knowledge gained from consultation with one another, Judeo-conversas’ responses to the inquisitors changed. Not all prosecution witnesses were as apparently willing to participate as some of these women were. Most Judeo-conversa women testified after they themselves had been imprisoned and were immersed in their own trials. Some, like Mari Sánchez mentioned above, appear from the date of their statements to have testified after being tortured and while waiting for their final sentencing. Once in the inquisitorial prison, most women had little choice but to cooperate to some degree with the prosecution. Some seem to have hoped for leniency for themselves, while others seem defeated by the weight of events and their own impending execution. Mari Sánchez, for example, had been quite uncooperative with the Holy Office until she was threatened with torture. In a vain attempt to avoid being tortured, she did begin to testify against her friends, albeit in brief, vague terms. That vagueness may explain in part why Mari was tortured on 3 November.19 Similarly, most of the witnesses who testified against Inés González wife of Juan Esteban de la Barrera never specifically testified against her under oath. Rather, much of the case against Inés was culled from other statements of reconciliation. Each of her three stepdaughters—Aldonza, Leonor and Inés González—stated in their reconciliations that Inés had taught them to light oil lamps on Friday evenings, not to spin on Saturdays and to fast until sundown in the Jewish fashion. Juana González, whom Inés had testified against, did specifically testify against Inés, but only long after her own trial had begun, and possibly in an attempt to defend herself. At that time, Juana said that she lived across the street from Inés and her husband, and had noticed that Inés made fun of Juana when Juana blessed her children when they came home from school.20 As in so many cases, the initial accusation against one woman was made by another already under the threat of prosecution. Despite the benefits (and near inevitability) of testifying for the prosecution, some women continued to maintain a collective approach to defending themselves from charges of Judaizing. In fact, the physical structure of the prison facilitated this process, since the women were kept in one large room,

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as opposed to the men, who were contained in three very small rooms under heavy lock and key. In such a climate, where women could keep constantly updated on their own and others’ trials, it was possible for accused Judeoconversas to counsel one another in how best to speak to the inquisitors in a way that protected themselves. Mari Sánchez, whose own daughter testified so forcefully against her, provides one example. After her torture session, in which she admitted to the accusations made by her daughter, she returned to the prison to await final sentencing. During that time, another women, Catalina Sánchez (no relation) returned to the cell shaken by a visit with the defense counsel. The prosecution had learned about a particularly damning incident in the home, one that could only have been revealed by a servant or family member, and one which Catalina had not admitted or confessed to. In her conversation with her attorney, she had laughed off the accusation, but once back in her cell she turned to her fellow prisoners for advice. In no uncertain terms, Mari Sánchez urged Catalina to demand to speak to the defense counsel, admit the act and beg for mercy. Catalina followed her advice, and although the inquisitors found her sudden change of heart suspicious—they even called the bailiff and Mari Sánchez herself to testify about it in Catalina’s trial—the decision to repent may have saved Catalina’s life. Rather than receive a death sentence, Catalina was sentenced to perpetual punishment, a sentence waived a scant three years later.21 Even in prison, therefore, as the coercive power of the inquisitors became stronger, these women still maintained some individual and collective power to shape their own narratives of defense and resistance.

Torture and the Limits of Coercion The power of these women to structure their own narratives, and indeed to protect their own lives, was put to the test at the point where the inquisitors held the most coercive power over the women they tried—namely, in the torture chamber. In Guadalupe as elsewhere, not all defendants were tortured or threatened with torture. Rather, torture seems to have been reserved for those trials where the inquisitors were unable to reconcile strong evidence against a defendant with a defendant’s adamant denials of any wrongdoing.22 Once a woman entered the torture chamber, her body and her words were most subject to the power of the Holy Office. Because the inquisitors were aware that under torture defendants might say things that were untrue merely to end the torture session, the application

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of torture was carefully structured. In this way, the Holy Office reassured itself that defendants had been coerced to speak honestly, but not so pressured that they would say anything to end the torment. Inquisitors were permitted only one torture session per defendant, although inquisitors outside Guadalupe sometimes “suspended” a single session to permit it to run over more than one day. Furthermore, the inquisitors hoped to avoid false statements under torture by encouraging defendants to speak under threat of torture, before the torture itself had been administered. In Guadalupe, therefore, women were first asked to reveal all they knew at the door of the “house of torture,” before any force had been applied. Some women spoke there and thus avoided any further torment. If the defendant refused to speak, the inquisitors then led the woman into the room, tied her hands and asked her again to tell all she knew. If she still refused, her arms and legs were tightly bound to the escalera (ladder) and she was asked one last time to speak. If she continued to refuse, the escalera was turned so that the defendant’s feet were higher than her head, and water was poured into her mouth to simulate drowning. Torture sessions were measured by the number of jars of water (about a liter each) poured down the victim’s throat.23 Given such coercion, it is difficult to claim that the statements made by these women were authored by them in any simple or uncomplicated way. And the conclusion of some of these statements share a striking similarity, as the inquisitors obviously pressed their victims on detailed questions of Christian theology. Mencia Alfonso declared under torture her understanding that the body of Christ was in the Host, while Juana González claimed after being tied to the escalera that she did not accept that Jesus was the Messiah, that he was present in the consecrated Host or that the Virgin Mary was a virgin before, during and after the birth of Jesus.24 Since these kinds of theological arguments almost never appear in inquisitorial testimony, it is almost certain that these comments came in response to prompting from the inquisitors. Testimony given under torture also seems to match the inquisitors’ demands and desires most nearly, as women struggled to satisfy the Holy Office’s desire for information about Judaizing behavior in a way that the inquisitors would find acceptable. In the earlier stages of a trial women worked to meet the expectations of the inquisitors while protecting themselves; now, as the situation grew more grave, female (and male) defendants made fewer attempts to protect themselves and others, and more attempts to say whatever would convince the inquisitors to end the torture session. When she had been brought to the torture chamber and her hands tied, Juana González said: “that Lope de Herrera her husband is a great Jew because many times she had words with

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him saying to him that she did not want two laws in her house and this because he kept the law of Moses.”25 Of course, her husband was deceased, executed by the Holy Office months before. Whatever the truth of Juana’s claim, it could do little harm now to claim that her husband was the primary motivation behind any Judaizing behavior in the house, and might be considered plausible since he had already been found guilty and executed. Juana’s desperate claim, though, did not negate the numerous claims of Judaizing made against her by several eyewitnesses, including observing kashrut, providing alms to Judeoconversas and observing the Sabbath. No complete record of the torture of Mari Sánchez wife of Juan Sánchez Barzón shoemaker exists, but other surviving documentation suggests that she testified or agreed to testify against several other people during her torture session. Once again, though, that late cooperation did little good; Mari Sánchez was executed less than two months after her torture.26 Even in the torture chamber, some women clung to an independent identity, refusing to implicate others or to admit to Judaizing behaviors or heretical doctrines beyond what was already known. Despite a lengthy torture session, Mari Sánchez, mother ofinés González who testified against her, refused to admit to any of the charges laid against her.27 But this woman was unique, and even she seems never to have recovered from her torture, offering vague prosecution testimony before her execution. Given the coercive power of the Inquisition, it is hardly surprising that so many women’s voices were unrecognizably altered in that horrifying experience. Somewhat more women maintained a modicum of agency through the mandated process of confirming the testimony gained under torture. As further evidence that the inquisitors had discovered the truth, rather than merely what they wanted to hear, from testimony gained under torture, the defendant was required to come before the inquisitors at least 24 hours after the torture session to confirm or deny any statements made under torture. And indeed it was possible to repudiate much of what had been said at that time. O f course, an attempt to deny everything said under torture or threat of torture might occasion a return to the torture chamber, but there is no evidence in Guadalupe of any penalty for repudiating testimony gained under torture. Juana González, for example, who testified against her husband while under threat of torture, altered her confession greatly one week later. She confirmed and added some details about Jewish prayers she knew and about Hebrew books that had been shown to her husband. She also made additional accusations against her deceased parents. But Juana denied the words that seem most likely to have come from the inquisitors—those regarding her theological understanding of

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the consecrated Host and the Virgin Mary. She had never had any doubt about these doctrines, she claimed.28 Indeed, in one last attempt to shield herself from blame, she now argued that she had been raised to believe that Catholicism was true until one day when she saw her parents fasting during Yom Kippur, and her father blessed her at dusk. Here was the polar opposite of Beatriz Nunez’s attempt to protect her children from prosecution, but instead of protecting her children from her heretical behavior, Juana claimed childhood ignorance to protect herself.29To the last, then, women in Guadalupe struggled to maintain their autonomy and collective identity, even in the face of physical harm and the threat of execution. Judeo-conversa women in Guadalupe were not a monolithic bloc of Judaizers or assimilated Christians; yet their experiences before the Holy Office of the Inquisition demonstrate the commonalities of that experience. Women, in particular, responded to the challenges of the Inquisition as a common threat, to be handled best through consultation and the accumulation of collective wisdom. Not all these women understood Judaism, or Christianity, in the same way; but all of them took the opportunity afforded by the Holy Office to write about their lives in a way that responded to the inquisitors’ demands while also making a unique statement about themselves and their lives at the end of the fifteenth century in Spain. In so doing, they preserved a record of themselves that, if not of their own choosing, at least provides us with a glimpse of their lives and the lives of women like them at the beginning of the early modem era.

N otes 1

2

My thanks to Abigail Firey, Tammy Whitlock, the editors and the external reader for their comments on an earlier draft. On the numbers of those tried and sentenced by the Holy Office in Guadalupe, see Isabel Testón Núñez and Maria Angeles Hernández Bermejo, “La inquisición de Llerena en la centuria del quinientos,” in Actas del Congreso: Pedro Cieza de León y su época (Llerena, 1991), 101-24. See also Fidel Fita, “La Inquisición en Guadalupe,” Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia 23 (1893), 283-343. “Digo, señores, my culpa que mientras fui por casar, en casa de mi padre vi a mi madre mandar limpiar los candiles y mandarlos encender los viernes en las noches y no hilar ni en los sábados y yo así lo hice en su casa y aún después que [me] casé algunas veces ... demando penitencia, y lo consentí en mi casa ...”; AHN Inq leg. 154, expediente 20,1 v. A complete translation of this trial is available in Gretchen D. Starr-LeBeau, In the Shadow o f the Virgin: Inquisitors, Friars, and Conversos in Guadalupe, Spain (Princeton, 2003), Appendix.

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5 6 7

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On Juana González blaming her parents and husband for her behavior, see AHN Inq leg. 154, expediente 20, 1v. On Juana’s claims under torture about her husband, see AHN Inq leg. 154, expediente 20, lOr. For Mencia Alfonso’s reconciliation, see AHN Inq leg. 133, expediente 6, lr. For some reason this reconciliation was separated from the trial to which it pertained. By chance, the conclusion of the trial begun in this file is also extant and is contained in AHN Inq leg. 165, expediente 9. AHN Inq leg. 154, expediente 1,2r. AHN Inq leg. 181, expediente 16,2r. AHN Inq leg. 183, expediente 20, 15r. Trial of Mari Sánchez wife of Diego Jiménez the butcher. This trial is discussed at length in Gretchen Starr-LeBeau, “Mari Sánchez and Inés González: Conflict and Cooperation among Crypto-Jews,” in Women in the Inquisition, ed. Mary E. Giles (Baltimore, 1998), 19-41. See Starr-LeBeau, In the Shadow o f the Virgin, chapter three, for more on the differences between men’s and women’s activities in town. I do not intend to suggest that men never engaged in the kinds of practices I describe for Guadalupe’s female prisoners, but in the extant trials, evidence for this collective response is much more common among women than men. In one instance of male discussions in the inquisitorial prison, Manuel González del Mesón Blanco confers with his father regarding his possible circumcision; see AHN Inq leg. 154, expediente 24. This is not the same as the crafting of responses described by female prisoners, though. “Digo, señores, que viviendo en Ciudad Real donde soy natural, que [de] pequeña en guardaba algunos sábados lo mejor que podía y guardé otrosí algunos días de las pascuas de los judíos cuando lo sabía lo más secreto que podía y comí algunas veces pan cenceño; y me vestí [con] camisas lavadas los sábados. Y esto por ceremonia de la ley de Moisés por la cual entendía que me había de salvar; de lo cual pido penitencia”; AHN Inq leg. 169, expediente 2 ,2r. “Y después de esto yo vine aquí a Guadalupe casada con mi marido, y como yo era extranjera y no conocí a ninguno de esta tierra no sabía a quien me descubría.... No estuvo hacer las cosas así como en Villa Real según las tenía en el corazón y las deseaban hacer, por miedo [de] que mis mozos ni mi marido ni otra persona alguna no me lo entendasen”; AHN Inq leg. 169, expediente 2 ,2r. AHN Inq leg. 169, expediente 2, 2r. We do know that one stepson, Manuel González del Mesón Blanco, was executed by the Holy Office. He was accused of being circumcised (though apparently never officially examined), of running a kosher kitchen at his inn for visiting Jewish merchants and of keeping a Jewish prayer book, which is preserved in his file as evidence. See AHN Inq leg. 154, expediente 24. Both his file and that of his stepmother Beatriz Núñez were transcribed at the end of Fita, “La Inquisición en Guadalupe.” Renée Levine Melammed, Heretics or Daughters o f Israel? The Crypto-Jewish Women o f Castile (London, 1999). AHN Inq leg. 154, expediente 20, lv. Martín Gutiérrez’s trial is preserved in AHN Inq leg. 156, expediente 11. “Por cierto mi padre buen cristiano es, y yo por tal le tengo; pero mi madre Mari Sánchez no”; AHN Inq leg. 183, expediente 20, 6v. Mari Sánchez’s trial is preserved in AHN Inq leg. 183, expediente 20. See Starr-LeBeau, “Mari Sánchez and Inés González,” for more on the relationship between Inés and her parents.

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18 AHN Inq leg. 154, expediente 20, 7r. 19 Mari’s testimony for the prosecution appears in AHN Inq leg. 147, expediente 8; AHN Inq leg. 147, expediente 9; AHN Inq leg. 148, expediente 9; AHN Inq leg. 153, expediente 9; AHN Inq leg. 165, expediente 4; AHN Inq leg. 183, expediente 10; AHN Inq leg. 183, expediente 21. 20 AHN Inq leg. 154, expediente 1,6r. 21 The trial of Catalina Sánchez, wife of Gonzalo Fernández, is preserved in AHN Inq leg. 183, expediente 10. 22 For more on torture and how inquisitors made use of torture, see Starr-LeBeau, In the Shadow ofthe Virgin, chapter five. This may be comparable to earlier use of the ordeal. See Robert Bartlett, Trial by Fire and Water: The Medieval Judicial Ordeal (Oxford, 1986). 23 Henry Charles Lea remains the best general introduction to the methods of the Inquisition and torture in particular. See Lea, A History o f the Spanish Inquisition (New York, 1906); reprinted with an introduction by Edward Peters (New York, 1988); translated into Spanish with an introduction and revised footnotes by Angel Alcalá and Jesús Tobio, Historia de la Inquisición española (Madrid, 1983). 24 For Mencia Alfonso, see AHN Inq leg. 165, expediente 9, 3r; for Juana González, see AHN Inq leg. 154, expediente 20, lOv. 25 Dijo que Lope de Herrera su marido es un gran judío porque muchas veces había palabras con él diciendole que no quería dos leyes en su casa, y esto porque guardaba la ley de Moisés el dicho su marido”; AHN Inq leg. 154, expediente 20, lOr. 26 AHN Inq leg. 184, expediente 2. This Mari Sánchez is no relation to the Mari Sánchez mother ofinés González mentioned earlier. 27 AHN Inq leg. 183, expediente 20, 14r. 28 AHN Inq leg. 154, expediente 20, 1Ov. 29 AHN Inq leg. 154, expediente 20, 1Ir.

Chapter 5

Representing Madness: Text, Gender and Authority in Early Habsburg Spain Bethany Aram

Recent work has called attention to strategic uses of madness from the royal court to the Inquisition chambers. In a ground-breaking article, Magdalena S. Sánchez has shown how Philip Ill’s female relatives used illness, particularly melancholy, to assure contact with the monarch and to attract attention to their political demands. Sánchez suggests that the empress Maria and queen Margaret of Austria exercised and maintained authority at court by experiencing or producing maladies recorded in the correspondence of male ambassadors, attendants and relatives. An underlying assumption is that the royal women— like the duke of Lerma, who competed by adopting their “feminine” maladies— fomented and participated in the production of these reports about their health.1 The collaboration of a potentially infirm subject receives more explicit attention in Sara T. Nalle’s study, Mad for God: Bartolomé Sánchez, the Secret Messiah ofCardenete. Despite the reported omission of “mad behavior” from the transcript of the Inquisition trial examined, both the inquisitors and the accused invoked “madness” in order to excuse otherwise heretical words and acts.2 Bartolomé Sánchez, like the female relatives of Philip III, occupies a middle ground between complete incompetence and full responsibility. He is able, indeed, required, to participate in textual production and to seek or renounce authority precisely from that ambiguous terrain. The important studies of Sara T. Nalle and Magdalena Sánchez, along with the work of German historian H. C. Erik Midelfort, contribute to an emerging consensus that the early modem mad should not be subject to twentyfirst-century diagnoses.3 The authors’ careful attention to community norms and the language used to describe madness pushes us to consider madness as a process of representation involving the potentially mad as well as the

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willfully sane. Might we understand sanity as an ongoing, dynamic construction, rather than an objective condition? The following attempt to pursue such an understanding will explore representations of madness in legal and therapeutic texts. These documents testify to the struggles of sixteenth-century elites to assert authority over others’ “persons and goods.” Of four sets of documents examined, two emerge from legal disputes regarding the succession to the important Puñonrostro and Ribadavia estates. Although not devoid of juridical implications, texts regarding two other subjects, doña Isabel de Albornoz (d. 1531) and queen Joanna I of Castile (d. 1555), employ religious and moral rather than legal idioms. The therapeutic recommendations of a midwife and a cleric, among others, reveal contradictions in the application of humoral and uterine principles, further complicated by the persistence of demonic interpretations. Along with legal documents, these therapeutic texts point to the malleability of gender and madness in sixteenth-century Spain.

Madness on Trial The courtroom representations of madness analyzed below feature a conspicuous exclusion of the mad themselves. In the absence of the purportedly insane, their female and male relatives struggled for authority over them. In particular, these aspiring guardians of the mad sought the legal capacity to act on their behalf. They challenged authorities to recognize diverse gender roles and patterns of inheritance. In order to prove the incompetence of wealthy nobles in 1538 and 1543, respectively, their relatives and servants insisted that the men required continual physical restraint and experienced no periods of lucidity. The hopeful custodians of these nobles and their fortunes emphasized their own prudence, wisdom and abilities. Such potential caretakers nevertheless found themselves on trial as much as the would-be mad. Both cases entailed struggles for authority, staged and recorded precisely because of the interests at stake. These economic and political interests revolved around the concept of mayorazgo or entail. A medieval doctrine permitting the conservation of feudal property, the idea of mayorazgo became formalized in the Cortes, or parliamentary assembly, of Toro in 1505. Legal historian Bartolomé Clavero has seen the laws of Toro as a victory for the high nobility.4 If so, king Ferdinand the Catholic may have accepted such legislation in exchange for official recognition as “legitimate caretaker, administrator and governor” of Castile

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on behalf of his daughter, Joanna, due to her alleged madness.5 In any case, the laws of Toro left a number of questions about mayorazgos, particularly regarding the rights of women to inherit them.6As we shall see, the subject of female inheritance, royal and otherwise, remained murky in the early sixteenth century. Upon the death of don Juan Arias Dávila, the first count of Puñonrostro, in 1538, his widowed sister, doña Catalina Arias, claimed that the Puñonrostro estate pertained to her. She authorized her legal representative, Juan de Salmerón of Guadalajara, to take possession of the family mayorazgo in her name. Upon reaching the royal court in Toledo, however, Salmerón learned of the survival of doña Catalina’s younger brother, don Francisco, who was said to be insane (mentecapto). He joined one of doña Catalina’s nephews in demanding the “liberation” of don Francisco from the custody of the new count of Puñonrostro, don Arias Gonzalo.7 The count quickly rebutted his relatives. His representative at court, Pedro de Mena, responded to the nephew’s petition by declaring don Francisco “mad and out of his mind continually for 56 years” without experiencing “a lucid interval, but rather, continual madness.”8With respect to doña Catalina, Mena labeled her argument “uncertain, vague and dark” and claimed that she had no right to send a representative before the court, “for she is a woman, and women may not undertake legal action in matters of this kind.”9 On behalf of doña Catalina, Juan de Sandoval responded that she simply requested an impartial guardian for her brother, who had been bom in his right mind and had remained that way for many years.10 The royal council had heard enough. It appointed doctor Diego de Castillo y Villasante, alcalde de la casa y corte de sus magestades and potentially a specialist in such cases, to travel to Torrejón de Velasco, where don Francisco was confined. The alcalde would then evaluate don Francisco and assign him a custodian if necessary. After examining don Francisco, doctor Castillo selected Juan de Sandoval, resident of Toledo, for the noble’s new guardian. The lack of any specific record of Castillo’s inquiries and observations suggests his full authority and absence of doubt regarding don Francisco’s condition. The selection of a competent tutor, nevertheless, provoked more controversy. Castillo considered Sandoval, a first cousin through the female line, don Francisco’s “closest relative free of suspicion.” Precisely because they were related through the female line, Sandoval could not inherit the much-coveted mayorazgo.11 Six male relatives appealed the decision. Doña Catalina did not. Under certain circumstances, femininity, like madness, could exclude an individual from inheriting a mayorazgo or even from testifying in court.

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Nevertheless, in other instances, the lack of responsibility associated with either femininity or madness could entail certain advantages. A maternal connection, while disqualifying for the mayorazgo, enabled Juan de Sandoval to obtain custody of don Francisco. The protagonist in another case, doña Leonor de Castro, went a step further by turning femininity to her legal advantage and that of her daughters. In 1543 doña Leonor de Castro, wife of the count of Ribadavia and mother of four young children, appeared before doctor Castillo y Villasante in Valladolid without her husband’s authorization. She formally informed the alcalde of the count’s infirmity: How God, Our Lord, gave don Diego Sarmiento, adelantado of Galicia, my lord and husband, certain illness, from which he has been and is out of his mind and natural sense. I am obliged and, more than any other person, it pertains to me as his legitimate wife to procure the health and security of the said adelantado, my husband, to guard and secure his estate and to raise and to govern the legitimate children that God, Our Lord, has given us from the said marriage.12

Emphasizing her natural, divinely-sanctioned obligations as a wife and mother of dependent children, doña Leonor sought authorization to act on behalf of her husband without his knowledge or consent. Arguing that her husband could not govern himself, his property and goods or his family, the countess presented herself as a competent and able administrator. She requested legal sanction for an inversion of gender roles that she attributed to her husband’s illness. To demonstrate her compensatory competence, doña Leonor staged an impressive presentation involving four male servants as witnesses. One of these servants, who had accompanied don Diego to Algiers with the emperor Charles V in 1541, noted that the first signs of illness overcame his master at that time. Upon the count’s return to Valladolid, two other attendants, guarding don Diego day and night, had seen him “out of his mind and natural sense” for six to eight months. They agreed that don Diego required physical restraint and constant supervision in order to prevent him from striking himself. At times, the servants added, the count talked to himself, screamed, blasphemed and would not eat unless forced.13 Guided by doña Leonor’s questionnaire, the servants’remarkable consensus extended beyond their master’s capacities to those of their mistress. Since the onset of don Diego’s illness, his wife had cared for the count and governed the household to their servants’ purported delight. They unanimously labeled her “able,” “very prudent, “wise” and “diligent” in nearly-identical responses that seemed to rehearse the formula

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that doña Leonor had prepared.14 The countess proved capable of governing her servants before the judge. This successful performance in court enabled doña Leonor to obtain the authority that she sought. Taking an oath and providing financial guarantees, the countess became legal guardian of her children and her husband, “until God, Our Lord, restores his entire reason and natural sense.”15 In order to mitigate certain irregularities in the case—namely, that a woman had appeared before a judge without her husband’s permission {la dicha doña Leonor siendo muger e del dicho adelantado )— doña Leonor secured royal confirmation of the sentence in her favor.16 Having proven herself a capable administrator, doña Leonor, as a wife and mother, remained above any suspicion of maliciously confining her husband. The countess then used her new-found authority to protect her children’s inheritance. Again bolstered by servants’testimony, doña Leonor entered into arbitration regarding the possibility of female succession to the Ribadavia mayorazgo.17 In 1530, don Diego’s parents had attempted to exclude women from succession to the estate which they (indeed, even don Diego’s own mother) had inherited in the past. Doña Leonor successfully argued that the 1530 stipulation violated family tradition, her marriage accord and a royal license for the mayorazgo. In exchange for recognition of the right of female succession, doña Leonor agreed to pay each of don Diego’s brothers allowances stipulated in their mother’s will and promised that any of her three daughters who inherited the mayorazgo, if unmarried at the time, would wed the heir of one of don Diego’s siblings. This brilliant agreement, while maintaining the rights of her one son, made her three daughters potential heiresses and therefore more desirable brides. Thus doña Leonor used the assumption of female incompetence, permitting husbands to administer their wives’ property, to benefit her female offspring. Wives, like madmen, were generally (and, indeed, legally) considered incapable of governing their own estates.18 Once again, doña Leonor took advantage of basic assumptions about femininity to advance her own and her daughters’ interests. Would don Diego have supported the accord that doña Leonor arranged? We shall never know, for doña Leonor’s representations of her husband’s illness mainly reveal her own ambitions. Doña Leonor, like doña Catalina in the Puñonrostro case, sought authority over a relative and his estate. Unlike doña Catalina, doña Leonor demonstrated her skill in governing the relative’s estate. In neither case, however, was a medical doctor or a cleric required for “expert testimony.” Although doña Leonor’s witnesses all agreed that she had cared for {curado) her husband, none mentioned any specific remedy or

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therapy applied beyond forced feeding and physical restraint. Apotential conflict of interests lurked beneath the unanimous testimony that the countess marshaled, for doña Leonor’s authority depended upon her husband’s incompetence. In the same way and at the same time, Charles V ruled Castile, Aragon and the Americas due to his mother’s alleged infirmity.

Women, Gender and Therapy As with don Diego, relatives established the legal incompetence of queen Joanna in her absence. On 23 November 1504, queen Isabella of Castile added a codicil to her last will and testament stating that Ferdinand of Aragon should govern Castile on Joanna’s behalf if the daughter were absent at the moment of her mother’s death or otherwise unable or unwilling to rule.19 In 1505, king Ferdinand invoked this clause at the Cortes of Toro to claim that his daughter suffered an “illness that is such that the said queen, doña Joanna, our lady, cannot govern.”20 The following year, the queen’s husband and father agreed to prevent her from ruling, due to her “illnesses and passions,” although Ferdinand subsequently claimed that he had signed the accord under duress.21 Finally, in his last will and testament, the Aragonese king confirmed his belief in Joanna, “being very far from undertaking the government or rule of kingdoms,” and “lacking the disposition convenient for such a task.”22 These “vague and dark” phrases provided the legal basis for 50 years of government by Joanna’s relatives in her name. In the case of the queen’s lady-in-waiting, doña Isabel de Albornoz, her husband recorded her suffering in attempts to alleviate it. Appointed by king Ferdinand in 1510, doña Isabel served queen Joanna for 20 years before the apparent onset of her infirmity. The crisis, which surfaced in 1530, led doña Isabel’s husband, Ochoa de Landa, treasurer of the royal household, to consult a cleric and a midwife about his w ife’s ailment. These practitioners’ prescriptions, combined with medical and religious therapies for the queen, provide evidence of the gendering of sixteenth-century madness. While the infirmities of don Francisco and don Diego required legal proof, those of doña Joanna and doña Isabel may have been accepted as part of a “natural”— although variable—condition. Scholars agree that sixteenth-century healers applied Galenic and Hippocratic understandings of the human body as composed of four primary substances, or humors. The four humors, blood, yellow bile, black bile and phlegm, corresponded to four elements believed to constitute the universe: air,

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fire, earth, water. Not surprisingly, the humors shared the attributes of their corresponding elements, making blood hot and moist (like air), yellow bile hot and dry (like fire), black bile cold and dry (like earth) and phlegm cold and wet (like water).23 This theoretical framework both reflected and sanctioned long­ standing tenets of sexual dimorphism and female inferiority. A preponderance of cold and moist humors allegedly rendered women more emotional and less able to generate rational thought.24 For men as well as women, health consisted of a balance among the four humors. Medical practitioners consequently attributed disease to humoral disharmony and prescribed remedies designed to restore equilibrium.25 However clear in theory, in practice humoral medicine embodied certain contradictions, especially with respect to women. Although women were supposed to be colder than men, when Isabel de Albornoz began experiencing attacks of “frenzy” (frenesia), including spasms and numbness, humoral principles suggested the need to extract and counteract the surges of hot humors overpowering her brain. Aciérie of the village of Contrasta, Ruy López, recommended shaving Isabel’s head and draining blood from her “frenetic” five or six times. Upon further reflection, however, López stated that the same vein could be tapped through Isabel’s back and neck.26 Such bloodletting, a standard treatment for fury, would at least weaken the patient and enable others to dominate her.27 Although practitioners frequently treated humoral imbalance through dietary modification, López directly targeted Isabel’s head. To stabilize her raging hot humors, he recommended cooking three male puppies in their mother’s milk and applying one to her shaven cranium for each of three consecutive nights— a recipe potentially designed to violate kosher prohibitions against serving animals with their m other’s milk and to emphasize the Trinity, thereby confirming the Catholic faith of recent converts. If puppies were unavailable, López noted that an old rooster might be placed upon Isabel’s scalp for only one night, since it would be more robust and lend her greater strength than the puppies. Whether puppies or a rooster, these male animals would absorb some of the excess heat that Isabel’s head could not contain. To enhance the cooling effects of such culinary concoctions, the cleric recommended subsequent application of “an herb known as that of Our Lady,” known for its serene properties, like the tranquil Virgin herself. Quoting a Latin refrain, calida frigidis, frígida calidis curantur, López evoked the centuries-old therapeutic use of “similars” and “contraries” embodied in humoral medicine.28 Of all of the humors, sixteenth-century medical theorist Juan Huarte de San Juan labeled melancholy black bile the coldest and driest.29 Although

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dryness could make the understanding sharper and more perceptive, Huarte found coldness, especially predominant in women, “useless for all of the works of the rational soul.”30 Thus melancholy humors, which the Renaissance linked to Saturn, could produce artistic genius in the case of certain men, or dejection and despair among certain women, including queen Joanna. During Joanna’s first bout with melancholy in 1503, her mother’s doctors expressed sorrow: “Because she sleeps poorly and eats little or nothing. She is very sad and quite weak.” The doctors noted that Joanna’s resistance to food and medicine, whether administered by force or by persuasion, made it difficult to rectify her humoral imbalance.31 Joanna, unlike Isabel, refused to submit to treatment for a condition perceived as disordered or imbalanced. While sixteenth-century women’s supposed humoral composition placed them at a disadvantage with respect to men, their greatest physical liability was considered the womb. Far from a new development, uterocentric approaches to female illness had been practiced since ancient Egypt. In the second century A.D., Aretaeus of Cappadocia described the womb’s attraction toward fragrant smells and repulsion from fetid odors, characterizing the migratory organ as “an animal within an animal.”32 While, as we have seen, humoral therapies still persisted, Evelyne Berriot-Salvadore has located a shift from humoral explanations to the idea of the uterus as “the organ constituting all femininity” in the sixteenth-century.33 Women were thought particularly vulnerable during pregnancy or menopause, when the womb supposedly suffered a retention of the menses. Queen Joanna’s pregnancies, which might have increased her status, in fact allowed contemporaries to undermine her authority. First of all, pregnancies limited Joanna’s mobility—delaying her first voyage from the Low Countries to Spain until November 1501, and preventing her from returning to the Low Countries with her husband in 1503. According to the court humanist and gossip Peter Martyr d ’Anghiera (known in Spanish as Pedro Mártir de Angleria), Joanna felt great sadness and “ardor for her husband” following his departure. Noting that Joanna would soon give birth, Pedro Mártir pronounced: “If she does it well, perhaps the new offspring will alleviate her pain and her mind will not be disturbed [nec turbine mentis obibitY —the first allusion to Joanna’s supposed madness.34 During a subsequent pregnancy, in 1505, queen Joanna dismissed her treasurer and banished him from the Low Countries. Countermanding Joanna’s orders, her husband wrote the same servant, “as you know, when pregnant [the queen] sometimes becomes annoyed without cause,” and ordered the servant to remain at his post.35 If pregnancy limited Joanna’s mobility and authority, childbirth promised potential relief. Fray

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Francisco Ruiz, who met with queen Joanna in March of 1507, following the delivery of her sixth child, described the queen’s health as better than ever since the birth had purged her.36Nevertheless, the following year, royal chaplain and bishop Diego Ramírez de Villaescusa, informed Joanna’s father of rumors that the queen urinated often and profusely— “so much that such a thing has never been seen in any other person”—emphasizing Joanna’s inability to control basic bodily functions, much less her kingdoms.37According to Cornelius Celsus, an author rediscovered and widely admired in the Renaissance, hysterical women “tended to void frequent and copious quantities of limpid urine,”38 suggesting, in agreement with humoral notions, an excess of noxious substances demanding evacuation. The queen allegedly remained at the mercy of her internal organs. Like queen Joanna, doña Isabel supposedly suffered uterine troubles. In an illustrious line of real and fictional female practitioners from Trotula of Salerno to the fictional protagonist of the Celestina, a midwife of Simancas identified Isabel’s malady as “entirely of the mother”—the uterus. The midwife recommended that Isabel swallow a mixture of incense, pippins, dill oil, sweet gum and cow butter, substances that would presumably attract the womb. After consuming the fragrant concoction, Isabel should dine on sheep heads cooked in egg yolks in order to purge the womb. Having received the midwife’s prescription, Isabel’s husband, Ochoa, carefully avoided infringing on the domain of the kitchen staff. Submitting the midwife’s recipe to the chief cook, Ochoa suggested that the treatment might take place on a Thursday, since his wife abstained from meat on Wednesdays, and presumably, Fridays as well.39 Together, the cleric’s and the midwife’s prescriptions for Isabel’s ailment drew upon an intimate relationship between the head and the womb, in which the womb threatened to overwhelm the head. Both organs were conceived as sites where female desire became pathological. In terms of the organs’ homology, an absence or lack characterized the disordered mind as well as the lusty uterus. This negativity or emptiness partially constituted the sixteenthcentury condition of femininity. The woman’s cavernous body appeared particularly hospitable to madness, and, as we shall see, to demonic intruders. At least one sixteenth-century theorist attempted to reconcile humoral, uterine and demonic approaches to female infirmities. Juan Huarte de San Juan argued that the human body contained certain humors that appealed to the Devil, who would enter it to enjoy them. Comparing women’s bodies to empty houses, Huarte suggested that those without merry visitors became particularly susceptible to demonic penetration.40Not surprisingly, doctors often recommended walking, dancing, riding and frequent marital intercourse as a

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cure for uterine troubles.41 Such activities supposedly rendered the body less receptive to demons. Nevertheless, in conjunction with efforts to stabilize the humors and the uterus, sixteenth-century practitioners could attack the demons directly. Although Isabel reportedly experienced fits of frenzy and Joanna supposedly suffered from melancholy, the therapies designed for both women drew upon supernatural forces. Since Isabel’s first frenetic episode, her husband had suspected diabolical influence. The priest, Ruy López, agreed: “In that the malign spirit is thought to tempt her, that could very well be, for he has that instrument in order to tempt persons, especially those who are devoted to God and Our Lady the Virgin Mary.”42 To counteract Satan’s pernicious influence, Ruy López provided Isabel with a list of words from the Psalms guarded in a silver box. He also supplied an incantation for a priest, holding the verse from the smallest finger of his left hand, to “pass” over Isabel’s body three times a day for three consecutive days, again invoking the Trinity.43 Whether or not the words were repeated aloud, the paper still bears them today. The exorcism addressed the Devil as “damned,” “defeated and fallen,” “Satan” and “a very filthy devil.” By contrast, the verse described Isabel as “a servant of God the Redeemer” and “this image of Our Lord Jesus Christ”—a remarkable allusion that transcended her gender.44 Isabel’s incantation holds particular interest because similar verses have not been preserved for Joanna’s case. Notwithstanding the absence of such texts, other documents note at least two attempts to exorcise the queen.45 In 1516, following the death of Joanna’s father, two of the queen’s male attendants brought a man they described as “a very honorable cleric” into the royal palace to exorcise the queen.46 Challenging the belief in female credulity, another servant, Joanna’s first lady, doña María de Ulloa, labeled the cleric a “witch” and declared herself skeptical about his methods. While declaring, “God will never grant us favor by the Devil’s hand,” doña María took consolation in the fact that the exorcist would keep his distance from the queen— “that he would not give her anything through the mouth nor touch her with anything but prayers.”47 In conjunction with their efforts to counteract demonic influence, spiritual therapists shared the primary goal of extracting a confession from the queen. In particular, they sought, but never received, Joanna’s admission of traffic with the Devil. Rather than a Spanish inquisitorial obsession, the suspicion that women typically acceded to Satan spread throughout Europe with the diffusion of a late fifteenth-century witch-hunting manual, the Malleus Maleficarum, or Hammer o f Witches:48 Yet Joanna resisted the suggestion that she might

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have entered a pact with Satan, and turned the nefarious accusation against her ladies-in-waiting, once including Isabel de Albomoz, by claiming that they impeded her devotions.49 The pious female attendant and the passionate queen embodied polar stereotypes of femininity. Notwithstanding the women’s contrary dispositions— one frenetic, the other melancholic— female sexuality made both of them susceptible to Satanic influence. The multiple, confusing interpretations of their maladies tell us more about sixteenth-century Spain than about the madwomen themselves. Dona Isabel and queen Joanna remain elusive in spite of the humoral, uterine and demonic theories applied to them.

Abjection and Redemption In the cases of doña Isabel, queen Joanna, don Diego and don Francisco, exposing madness paradoxically entailed a measure of concealment. None of our potentially infirm elites appeared in court, before the midwife or close to the cleric. While the count of Puñonrostro had no compunction about declaring his uncle “mad, furious and insane” in court, the possibility that don Francisco might leave the family’s fortress horrified him. According to the count’s representative, don Francisco could “commit much craziness and immorality, from which my party and his relatives, given their quality, would receive great dishonor and offense.” The count found himself obliged to represent his uncle’s madness in court to prevent its even more public exposition. Modesty and honor also justified a purported reticence about queen Joanna’s infirmity on the part of those individuals who publicized and benefitted from it. The 1506 pact between Joanna’s father and her husband vaguely referred to the queen’s “sicknesses and passions that are not expressed here for modesty.”50 Six months later, Ferdinand termed himself custodian of “the honor and royal person and estate of the said most serene queen, my daughter.”51 Nevertheless, the governor Ferdinand appointed for his daughter, mosén Luis Ferrer, allegedly denigrated the queen: He clearly and publicly, for there are thousands of witnesses to this, said the greatest anomies that had ever been said of a woman against the Queen. When asked for food for the Queen, he said, ‘Give this beast hay and oats and nothing else.’52

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Accusations that Ferrer scorned the queen rather than protecting her honor led to his dismissal. Attempts at honor and debasement in alternating concealment and exposition of madness reflected particular anxieties about the mad. While supposedly innocent, irresponsible and free of sin, mad individuals could nevertheless be suspected of contact with the Devil. Notwithstanding the occasional exorcism, a relative abundance of surviving texts suggest that potentially mad elites received the closest scrutiny and the most intensive medical and spiritual attention upon their deathbeds. These accounts, like others, incorporate conflicting tendencies to represent yet conceal “craziness and immorality.”53 The mad become most visible precisely when least able to represent themselves. Once again, depictions of the would-be mad reflect struggles for interpretive, political and economic authority. The final illnesses and deaths of two of our elites, don Francisco and queen Joanna, accompanied an outpouring of texts as authorities competed for the “last words” about them. In the case of don Francisco, his custodian, Juan de Sandoval, assembled witnesses, including two physicians, to represent don Francisco’s final days. This testimony, like that regarding the queen, reveals obsessive attention to eating and sleeping patterns. To their doctors’ dismay, don Francisco and queen Joanna refused food, medicine and other remedies until their very last moments. Increasingly abject representations of their infirm bodies preceded these individuals’ supposedly miraculous final reconciliation with God. Death enabled don Francisco and queen Joanna to transcend their gender and even their madness, or more precisely, freed spectators from the burden of representing either. Suffering from fever and diarrhea (