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Call for papers #37

Nader, Helen, ed. Power and Gender in Renaissance Spain. Eight Women of the Mendoza Family, 1450-1650. University of Illinois Press, 2004. pp. 208.

A variety of female experiences and approaches to them make this volume of collected essays a treasure chest. As Helen Nader notes in the introduction, her 1979 study, The Mendoza Family in the Spanish Renaissance, focused mainly on the contributions of its men. Complementing what has become a classic work, eight scholars now consider nine women belonging (or at least linked) to the same prestigious and powerful clan. The relations among them over two centuries can be traced through a series of family trees provided as appendices.
The subject of each study guides its focus and methodology. Thus Cristian Berco highlights the importance of family rivalries and relations with the crown in the patrimonial and matrimonial struggles of Juana Pimental (a cousin of the first duke of Infantado) after the execution of her husband, Alvaro de Luna. In the second essay, Ronald E. Surtz gleans insights into Juana de Mendoza from a brilliant reading of difficult sources: the poetry and last will and testament of Juana's husband, Gómez Manrique, as well as the appraisal of chronicler Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo. By examining the marriage of María Pacheco (mainly through the correspondence of her father, the count of Tendilla), Stephanie Fink De Backer draws attention to Pacheco's practical and political opportunities before she became a Comunero leader. María del Carmen Vaquero Serrano uses the poetry of Álvar Gómez to approach his pupil, María de Mendoza y de la Cerda, and then considers María's last will and testament.
The later essays predictably draw upon more direct surviving evidence from the women themselves. In one of these studies, María Pilar Manero Sorolla examines the Carmelite nun, María de San José, alongside Luisa de la Cerda, whose patronage brought San José in contact with the future Saint Teresa of Ávila. Grace E. Coolidge then uses forty-nine letters from Magdalena de Bobadilla to her guardian, Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, to illuminate Bobadilla's love of learning, reluctance to consent to an arranged marriage, and motives for suing her guardian, once widowed. Unpublished sources emerge, most notably, in Helen H. Reed's analysis of thirty-four letters from the Princess of Eboli, Ana de Mendoza, to her favorite son, Diego de Silva y Mendoza. Finally, Anne J. Cruz interprets the relatively abundant corpus left by the aspiring Catholic martyr, Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza, in terms of a search for "subjectivity."
A number of themes highlighted in the introduction lend cohesion. The Mendoza women received the support of male relatives (with some possible exceptions, like María Pacheco, although, under normal circumstances, one wonders how they could they have acted without the support of powerful males), but husbands could be more of an impediment than an asset for las Mendozas. Some of the most accomplished, such as María de Mendoza y de la Cerda, María de San José, and Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza, never married. Others, such as Juana Pimentel, Luisa de la Cerda, and Magdalena de Bobadilla visibly asserted themselves as widows. Children could be either opponents - like María de Mendoza y de la Cerda, estranged from her own mother - or allies, as in the case of Ana de Mendoza's favorite son. Whether or not they had children, many of las Mendozas mothered their servants, female relatives, and the religious orders they patronized, a subject that merits fuller treatment.
Without exception the Mendoza women were exceptionally literate and learned, as befitted their privileged position. They were also, sometimes perilously, close to power: Juana de Mendoza served the eldest daughter of Queen Isabel and King Ferdinand as principal attendant; María de Mendoza filled the same position alongside Leonor, the sister of Charles V, when she married the King of France; and Magdalena de Bobadilla served Juana, the princess of Portugal, as a lady-in-waiting. Juana Pimentel and the Princess of Eboli exercised political influence through their marriages and subsequent alliances. In other words, the book contains treasures for political and intellectual historians. Scholars with an interest in women's studies will find a volume that refines analytical tools such as gender, patriarchy, and subversion. The best of its essays, to their credit, reveal that such concepts remain flexible, sensitive, and sophisticated.

Bethany Aram Worzella
Institute of International Studies, Seville