Magdalena S. Sánchez - Böcker

The first full biography of Catalina Micaela, infanta of Spain and duchess of Savoy  Catalina Micaela was the younger daughter of Philip II and granddaughter of Catherine de Medici. Aged just seventeen, Catalina married Carlo I, duke of Savoy, and moved from the royal court in Madrid to Turin to begin a new life as a duchess.  Overlooked by historians and little known today, Catalina was nonetheless a key figure in sixteenth-century Europe. A woman of intelligence, forceful personality, and strong feeling, she energetically and effectively governed her husband’s dukedom during his long absences from Turin on military campaigns. In this widely researched account, Magdalena Sánchez traces Catalina’s life from her childhood to her early death shortly after giving birth to her tenth child. Drawing on thousands of letters Catalina exchanged with her husband, Sánchez paints an intimate portrait of a young Spanish woman adapting to a new husband, a new land, and the demands of governance.

The history of women in early modern Spain is a largely untapped field. This book opens the field substantially by examining the position of women in religious, political, literary, and economic life. Drawing on both historical and literary approaches, the contributors challenge the portrait of Spanish women as passive and marginalized, showing that despite forces working to exclude them, women in Golden Age Spain influenced religious life and politics and made vital contributions to economic and cultural life.The contributors seek to incorporate the study of Spanish women into the current work on literary criticism and on the intersection of private and public spheres. The authors integrate women into subfields of Spanish history and literature, such as Inquisition studies, the Spanish monarchy, Spain's economic and political decline, and Golden Age drama. The essays demonstrate the necessity and value of incorporating women into the study of Golden Age Spain.

In the early seventeenth-century, when Spanish interests often competed with those of the House of Austria, three women in the court of Philip III of Spain-Empress Maria, Philip's grandmother; Margaret of Austria, Philip's wife; and Margaret of the Cross, Philip's aunt-worked behind the scenes to win favor for the causes of the Austrian Habsburgs. In The Empress, the Queen, and the Nun, historian Magdalena Sanchez offers an intriguing examination of the political power wielded by these three women. Sanchez examines the ways that women used religious piety, childbearing, illnesses such as melancholy, and marriage arrangements to sway political decisions. They employed distinct strategies and languages at informal occasions such as meals, masquerade celebrations, and religious ceremonies to influence the political scene. By incorporating women into informal political networks, this work breaks new ground in the study of early modern European politics.

Toward the end of the fifteenth century, the Habsburg family began to rely on dynastic marriage to unite an array of territories, eventually creating an empire as had not been seen in Europe since the Romans. Other European rulers followed the Habsburgs' lead in forging ties through dynastic marriages. Because of these marriages, many more aristocrats (especially women) left their homelands to reside elsewhere. Until now, historians have viewed these unions from a primarily political viewpoint and have paid scant attention to the personal dimensions of these relocations. Separated from their family and thrust into a strange new land in which language, attire, religion, food, and cultural practices were often different, these young aristocrats were forced to conform to new customs or adapt their own customs to a new cultural setting. Early Modern Dynastic Marriages and Cultural Transfer examines these marriages as important agents of cultural transfer, emphasizing how marriages could lead to the creation of a cosmopolitan culture, common to the elites of Europe. These essays focus on the personal and domestic dimensions of early modern European court life, examining such areas as women's devotional practices, fashion, patronage, and culinary traditions.