Women’s Literacy in Early Modern Spain and the New Worldстатья из журнала
Аннотация: This new title in Ashgate’s series Women and Gender in the Early Modern World builds on earlier studies of the education of young girls, including Elizabeth Howe’s volume in the same series. Beginning from Garrett Mattingly’s assertion that Spain’s Renaissance was unique in Europe due to the greater participation of women, these 13 essays explore “ways in which women expanded their knowledge in both Spain and the New World and how their societies simultaneously commented on and reflected this learning on the stage, in literature, and through the visual arts” (p. 7).The collection’s organization gives it a tight thematic coherence. Four essays in part 1 explore the relationship of women to reading and writing, particularly among the Spanish nobility. Two writers examine the personal libraries of female members of the powerful Mendoza family, in each case shedding light on how they acquired and employed these unusual collections. Challenging the common assumption that women’s libraries were “mere repositories of the books of a father or husband” (p. 91), Trevor J. Dadson is able to show how, and to what ends, one noblewoman built her own library. Nieves Baranda Leturio examines book dedications to female patrons. Rather than dismiss such paratextual apparati for their “narrow rhetorical conventions,” she models a close reading of 117 book dedications. Borrowing from reception theory and the history of reading, she attempts to identify a “hybrid reader,” a blend of the “real” reader and the archetypal reader portrayed by the author of the book or dedication (pp. 21 – 23). Montserrat Pérez-Toribio’s study of the correspondence between mother and daughter in an influential Catalan family shows the gulf that existed between the subordination of women as readers and writers proposed by moralists and “a very different female experience not accounted for by these normative discourses” (p. 64).Another four essays (part 2) consider practices in convents, “by far the most democratic and the principle sources of literacy instruction for early modern women” (p. 9). Darcy R. Donahue, whose work has been so influential in the field of religious women’s writing, portrays the acquisition and practice of literacy among Spain’s Discalced Carmelites “as inseparable from self-concept and a sense of group solidarity” (p. 106). This section offers the volume’s main attention to the New World context. Stephanie L. Kirk highlights the intertextuality of the intellectual rivalry between Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and the Jesuit Antonio Núñez de Miranda through a comparative reading of her Autodefensa Espiritual and his less well-known Distribución de las obras ordinarias y extraordinarias . . . de las señoras espirituales. While seventeenth-century education in Mexico was characterized by “a territorialization of knowledge, creating forbidden zones to which women were denied access” (p. 141), Sor Juana and Núñez de Miranda never agreed “on the constitution of public and private space and women’s role therein” (p. 152). For Nueva Granada (modern Colombia), Clara E. Herrera challenges the “canonical histories” of the region, convincingly showing that La Encarnación de Popayán (f. 1591) and the Beaterio de Cali (f. 1741) were more than mere antecedents to the formal educational centers that arrived in the period of Bourbon reform.As Anne J. Cruz observes in the book’s introduction, “Because women’s literacy stirred so much controversy and opposition, it assumed a significant role in early modern Spain’s cultural imaginary” (p. 11). From the stage to the walls of convent chapels, essays in part 3 highlight this variegated gender discourse. Building on Platonic notions of love and the Aristotelian principle of human potential, dramatist Lope de Vega created women who, through the ameliorative influence of love and marriage, are transformed from wild beasts to domesticated beings (Adrienne L. Martín). Alicia R. Zuese and Yolanda Gamboa-Tusquets seek in separate essays to enrich scholars’ understanding of the roles women played in the elite literary academies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The career of Ana Caro (Zuese) reveals these gatherings as “sociocultural spaces of alternative and collaborative learning” (p. 191), while that of María de Zayas (Gamboa-Tusquets) illustrates how participation in such gatherings, whether as active participants or passive audience members, allowed women to create “memory chains,” that is, the sorts of catalogues of great women characteristic of the querelle des femmes tradition. Rosalie Hernández analyzes the links between the text of Martín Carrillo’s Elogios de mujeres insignes and the Marian chapel of Madrid’s Convent of the Descalzas Reales, noting how male painter and female patron framed the lives of biblical women in ways that both reflected and authorized the political roles that nuns of this elite community already played. Finally, as Emilie L. Bergmann demonstrates in her study of the iconography of St. Anne and the Virgin Mary, paintings and sculptures of “The Education of the Virgin” proliferated in early modern Spain despite the ambivalence of ecclesiastical authorities in the post-Tridentine period, tolerated to large degree because the motif conveyed socially valuable messages about filial piety and domestic propriety. Women patrons and viewers, however, would have interpreted such images in keeping with their own experience of books and learning.As Richard Kagan argued, our understanding of education in early modern Spain — and particularly the attainments of women — remains limited. Even so, through presentations of a variety of social contexts and literary genres, and undergirded by clear methodologies, this collection takes us closer to a deeper comprehension of the historical reality.
Год издания: 2012
Авторы: Ronald J. Morgan
Издательство: Duke University Press
Источник: Hispanic American Historical Review
Ключевые слова: Early Modern Women Writers
Открытый доступ: closed
Том: 92
Выпуск: 4
Страницы: 753–755