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Call for papers #37

Barahona, Renato. Sex Crimes, Honour, and the Law in Early Modern Spain: Vizcaya, 1528-1735. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. Pp. 274, $63.00, cloth.

The literary scholar Maria Tatar recently noted that the purpose of popular folktales such as Cinderella is "to manage our cultural anxieties and conflicts about courtship and marriage;" or, put more succinctly, to create dialogues "about what is at stake in romance" (The Annotated Brothers Grimm [New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004], 115). Renato Barahona's contribution to the larger discussion of what can happen legally when these things go wrong is an excellent and welcome addition to the growing scholarship on Iberian and Ibero-American sexual life. Acknowledging the work of previous authors such as Mary Elizabeth Perry, Bartolomé Bennassar, Isabel Testón Núñez, Allyson Poska, and Rafael Narbona Vizcaíno, Barahona has blazed a singularly clear trail through the complex juridical files of over 350 cases involving sexual misconduct. His findings fit nicely into not only what we know of Baroque Peninsular societies but also into the context of European sexual norms. His book increases our conviction that Spanish sex litigation was solidly placed within the larger field of Romano-canonical law. Though varying regionally, its application formed the essential theme on which communities throughout the continent choreographed their own legal music, organizing the social dance of courtship, marriage, and romance, or, on occasion, simply constraining sex itself or punishing sexual abuse.
Barahona's superb case-driven analysis benefits from clear contextualizations and a careful, light-handed use of statistics. The book is constructed along sequential lines, flowing from "courtship, seduction and abandonment," through a discussion of "the language of sex" (a significant clarification to previous discussions), to a consideration of violence and cohabitation in sexual crime. It finishes with a critically adroit revision of commonplaces about Spanish "honor" based on how the Vizcayan cases illustrate that honor was not a "zero-sum game" (119) or gendered into a male honor of "social considerations" versus a female one of "sexual virtue" (121). Women typically claimed in their depositions that their victimization constituted "irreparable" damage, but by successfully pressing charges against [their] victimizer," they proved they were "far from powerless" (154-55). Barahona argues that many women's recourse to determined prosecution (of the crime of estupro particularly, a multivalent term, mostly meaning the non-compliance of betrothals but also encompassing rape) proves that the simple dichotomy of the honorable versus the dishonored women was more true in theater than in the law courts. Though lost honor might never be regained, "a monetary award obtained through the courts would enable a woman to marry and thereby regain a good measure of social respectability and honourableness" (122). Furthermore, the Baroque literary topos of family honor was almost never at stake in the lawsuits; rather, male defendants, usually of a higher social rank than their female accusers, struggled to undermine women's reputations while women sought in their prosecution to increase the damages claimed. This seems to hold for cohabitation cases as well. Honor, concludes Barahona, was "a commodity that could be recovered pragmatically without violence" (165). Generally speaking, the critical factor linking cohabitation, estupro, and most of the other crimes Barahona discusses was their private, secretive nature, which the public institution of marriage was intended to forestall. We can now add seventeenth-century Vizcaya to the list of places where the Tridentine sex-law reforms aimed precisely at preventing such private marriages and cohabitations were applied only slowly and ambiguously.
The principal stakes, then, in failed and forced sexual relations seem to have been money as compensation for lost honor. Few of those convicted of estupro, for example, chose the punishment of marriage, and opted instead for a payment of damages to their ex-fiancées. From Barahona's evidence it is clear that prosecution resulted in "the vast majority" of plaintiffs, 82.4 per cent, receiving less than half of the damages they had sued for (147). Nevertheless, "few accusers failed to secure something from their victimizers, a significant achievement in light of the social disparity between the parties" (155). Perhaps, in view of this prosecutorial effectiveness, Barahona might have reconsidered how chapter 5's discussion of women's second victimization in the courtroom prematurely attributes guilt to the defendants, some of whom were innocent and thus themselves victims of calumny, a serious crime in reputation-sensitive societies.
Significantly, Barahona contends that people and institutions failed to clearly distinguish between consensual and coerced sex, suggesting "significant levels of violence in sex" in early modern Spain (162). This impression, however, might be due to any combination of three factors which require further exploration (as Barahona himself admits). First, specific details of the sex acts perpetrated are conspicuously absent in Spanish criminal cases; second, the archival records on the whole are incomplete; and, finally, our knowledge of the process of reasoned judicial decision-making is defective. But it is clear that the Vizcayan evidence conforms to what we know of Castilian sex crime. In fact, Barahona's reader is left wondering whether we are not now prepared to take on the more comprehensive task of constructing an understanding of this malleable though judiciously consistent set of legal systems. The literature seems to prove that it operated with regional variation but was based on a common-law construct of Roman and medieval ecclesiastical principles, constituting a whole that stretched from the Spanish courts in the Philippines through New Spain to the Italian courts in Naples and beyond. There were Cinderellas needing legal recourse everywhere.
Fabio López-Lázaro
Santa Clara University