Power and Gender in Renaissance Spain

Power and Gender in Renaissance Spain PDF Author: Helen Nader
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252028687
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
A collection of essays which provide portraits of eight of the Mendoza family's female members. It explores the lives of powerful women whose lineage gave them status within a patriarchal society designed to keep women from public life.

Power and Gender in Renaissance Spain

Power and Gender in Renaissance Spain PDF Author: Helen Nader
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252028687
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 160

Get Book Here

Book Description
A collection of essays which provide portraits of eight of the Mendoza family's female members. It explores the lives of powerful women whose lineage gave them status within a patriarchal society designed to keep women from public life.

Guardianship, Gender, and the Nobility in Early Modern Spain

Guardianship, Gender, and the Nobility in Early Modern Spain PDF Author: Grace E. Coolidge
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351931997
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
Contrary to early modern patriarchal assumptions, this study argues that rather trying to impose obedience or enclosure on women of their own rank and status, noblemen in early modern Spain depended on the active collaboration of noblewomen to maintain and expand their authority, wealth, and influence. While the image of virtuous, secluded, silent, and chaste women did bolster male authority in general and help to assure individual noblemen that their children were their own, the presence of active, vocal, and political women helped these same men move up the social ladder, guard their property and wealth, gain political influence, win legal battles, and protect their minor heirs. Drawing on a variety of documents-guardianships, wills, dowry and marriage contracts, lawsuits, genealogies, and a few letters-from the family archives of the nine noble families housed in the Osuna and Frías collections in Toledo, Guardianship, Gender and the Nobility in Early Modern Spain explores the lives and roles of female guardians. Grace Coolidge examines in detail the legal status of these women, their role within their families, and their responsibilities for the children and property in their care. To Spanish noblemen, Coolidge argues, the preservation of family, power, and lineage was more important than the prescriptive gender roles of their time, and faced with the emergency generated by the premature death of the male title holder, they consistently turned to the adult women in their families for help. Their need for support and for allies against their own mortality meant, in turn, that they expected and trained their female relatives to take an active part in the economic and political affairs of the family.

Gendering the Crown in the Spanish Baroque Comedia

Gendering the Crown in the Spanish Baroque Comedia PDF Author: María Cristina Quintero
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317129601
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
The Baroque Spanish stage is populated with virile queens and feminized kings. This study examines the diverse ways in which seventeenth-century comedias engage with the discourse of power and rulership and how it relates to gender. A privileged place for ideological negotiation, the comedia provided negative and positive reflections of kingship at a time when there was a perceived crisis of monarchical authority in the Habsburg court. Author María Cristina Quintero explores how playwrights such as Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Tirso de Molina, Antonio Coello, and Francisco Bances Candamo--taking inspiration from legend, myth, and history--repeatedly staged fantasies of feminine rule, at a time when there was a concerted effort to contain women's visibility and agency in the public sphere. The comedia's preoccupation with kingship together with its obsession with the representation of women (and women's bodies) renders the question of royal subjectivity inseparable from issues surrounding masculinity and femininity. Taking into account theories of performance and performativity within a historical context, this study investigates how the themes, imagery, and language in plays by Calderón and his contemporaries reveal a richly paradoxical presentation of gendered monarchical power.

Portraiture, Gender, and Power in Sixteenth-Century Art

Portraiture, Gender, and Power in Sixteenth-Century Art PDF Author: Noelia García Pérez
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1003856519
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
This exciting and wide-ranging volume examines the construction and dissemination of the image of female power during the Renaissance. Chapters examine the creation, promotion, and display of the image of women in power, and how the artistic and cultural patronage they developed helped them craft a self-image that greatly contributed to strengthening their power, consolidating their political legitimacy, and promoting their authority. Contributors cover diverse models of sixteenth-century female power: from ruling queens, regents, and governors, to consorts of sovereigns and noblewomen outside the court. The women selected were key political figures and patrons of art in England, France, Castile, the Low Countries, the Holy Roman Empire, and Italian city states. The volume engages with crucial and controversial debates regarding the nature and use of portraiture as well as the changing patterns of how portraits were displayed, building a picture of the principal iconographic solutions and representational strategies that artists used. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, gender studies, women’s studies, and Renaissance studies.

Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe

Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe PDF Author: Merry E. Wiesner
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 052187372X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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Book Description
The third edition of Merry Wiesner-Hanks' prize-winning book incorporates the newest scholarship and features a new chapter on gender and race in the colonial world; expanded coverage of eighteenth century developments including the Enlightenment; and enhanced discussions of masculinity, single women, same-sex relations, humanism, and women's religious roles.

The Routledge Research Companion to Early Modern Spanish Women Writers

The Routledge Research Companion to Early Modern Spanish Women Writers PDF Author: Nieves Baranda
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317043626
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 787

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Book Description
In Spain, the two hundred years that elapsed between the beginning of the early modern period and the final years of the Habsburg Empire saw a profusion of works written by women. Whether secular or religious, noble or middle class, early modern Spanish women actively composed creative works such as poetry, prose narratives, and plays. The Routledge Research Companion to Early Modern Spanish Women Writers covers the broad array of different kinds of writings – literary as well as extra-literary – that these women wrote, taking into consideration their subject positions and the cultural and historical contexts that influenced and were influenced by them. Beyond merely recognizing the individual women authors who had influence in literary, religious, and intellectual circles, this Research Companion investigates their participation in these circles through their writings, as well as the ways in which their texts informed Spain’s cultural production during the early modern period. In order to contextualize women’s writings across the historical and cultural spectrum of early modern Spain, the Research Companion is divided into six sections of general thematic interest: Women’s Worlds; Conventual Spaces; Secular Literature; Women in the Public Sphere; Private Circles; Women Travelers. Each section is subdivided into chapters that focus on specific issues or topics.

Women's Literacy in Early Modern Spain and the New World

Women's Literacy in Early Modern Spain and the New World PDF Author: Anne J. Cruz
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 1409427145
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
This volume presents writings pertaining to women's rich and diverse participation--despite male cultural domination--in the realms of both reading and writing. Arrangement is in sections on the practices of women's literacy, the role of women in convents, and exemplary women and their works--Lope de Vega, Ana Caro, and Maria de Zayas, among others.

The Lives of Women

The Lives of Women PDF Author: Lisa Vollendorf
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
ISBN: 9780826514813
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Recovering voices long relegated to silence, this work deciphers the responses of women to the culture of control in seventeenth-century Spain. It incorporates convent texts, Inquisition cases, biographies, and women's literature to reveal a previously unrecognized boom in women's writing between 1580 and 1700.

Sex, Gender, and Illegitimacy in the Castilian Noble Family, 1400-1600

Sex, Gender, and Illegitimacy in the Castilian Noble Family, 1400-1600 PDF Author: Grace E. Coolidge
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 149623362X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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Book Description
Sex, Gender, and Illegitimacy in the Castilian Noble Family, 1400-1600 looks at illegitimacy across the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and analyzes its implications for gender and family structure in the Spanish nobility, a class whose actions, structure, and power had immense implications for the future of the country and empire. Grace E. Coolidge demonstrates that women and men were able to challenge traditional honor codes, repair damaged reputations, and manipulate ideals of marriage and sexuality to encompass extramarital sexuality and the nearly constant presence of illegitimate children. This flexibility and creativity in their sexual lives enabled members of the nobility to repair, strengthen, and maintain their otherwise fragile concept of dynasty and lineage, using illegitimate children and their mothers to successfully project the noble dynasty into the future--even in an age of rampant infant mortality that contributed to the frequent absence of male heirs. While benefiting the nobility as a whole, the presence of illegitimate children could also be disruptive to the inheritance process, and the entire system privileged noblemen and their aims and goals over the lives of women and children. This book enriches our understanding of the complex households and families of the Spanish nobility, challenging traditional images of a strict patriarchal system by uncovering the hidden lives that made that system function.

The King's Other Body

The King's Other Body PDF Author: Theresa Earenfight
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812201833
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Queen María of Castile, wife of Alfonso V, "the Magnanimous," king of the Crown of Aragon, governed Catalunya in the mid-fifteenth century while her husband conquered and governed the kingdom of Naples. For twenty-six years, she maintained a royal court and council separate from and roughly equivalent to those of Alfonso in Naples. Such legitimately sanctioned political authority is remarkable given that she ruled not as queen in her own right but rather as Lieutenant-General of Catalunya with powers equivalent to the king's. María does not fit conventional images of a queen as wife and mother; indeed, she had no children and so never served as queen-regent for any royal heirs in their minorities or exercised a queen-mother's privilege to act as diplomat when arranging the marriages of her children and grandchildren. But she was clearly more than just a wife offering advice: she embodied the king's personal authority and was second only to the king himself. She was his alter ego, the other royal body fully empowered to govern. For a medieval queen, this official form of corulership, combining exalted royal status with official political appointment, was rare and striking. The King's Other Body is both a biography of María and an analysis of her political partnership with Alfonso. María's long, busy tenure as lieutenant prompts a reconsideration of long-held notions of power, statecraft, personalities, and institutions. It is also a study of the institution of monarchy and a theoretical reconsideration of the operations of gender within it. If the practice of monarchy is conventionally understood as strictly a man's job, María's reign presents a compelling argument for a more complex model, one attentive to the dynamic relationship of queenship and kingship and the circumstances and theories that shaped the institution she inhabited.