Anne Cruz - Böcker

Contemporary cultural historians have located the Counter-Reformation as the most significant point in the material, intellectual, and spiritual development of Spain. Robust and full of productive contradictions, Spanish culture took a critical turn in 1492 when Ferdinand II, in his quest for purity and orthodoxy, expelled the Jews and Arabs from Spain.Culture and Control in Counter-Reformation Spain examines the various modes of repression and social control exerted by Spanish institutions during the Counter-Reformation as they attempted to coerce marginalized groups (women and religious minorities - the moriscos and conversos) into political and cultural integration. This penetrating exploration demonstrates how the Catholic Church - mainly through the disciplinary technology of the Inquisition - assumed and exerted its authority as the “official” guardian of cultural and literary production. Culture and Control in Counter-Reformation Spain details the ways in which marginalized groups, through the communal linkage of their diverse social practices, were nonetheless able to resist repression and preserve cultural heterogeneity within the dominant society.

The new parameters of a global world in the early modern period gave rise to an expansion of movement that facilitated spatial and social mobility for women of different social ranks. Through their reexamination of archival documents and travel narratives, these essays investigate the opportunities for female mobility across the Spanish Empire, narrating the journeys of women who assumed new and unpredictable roles in distant environments. Some risked transoceanic journeys to hold positions of colonial power, while nuns traveled to found convents. Portuguese and Genoese women financiers and merchants traversed the Mediterranean to command enterprises in different cities. Breaking with tradition, the noblewomen considered in these essays exercised political agency as ambassadresses and diplomatic spies at various European courts. Still other women fled across borders from oppressive marriages or cross-dressed as soldiers to perform adventurous feats in support of imperial causes. Their frequently distorted histories, authored by men, have been revised and rectified by the authors of this volume.