Entre la transgresión y la norma: pícaras y pecadoras penitentes en la narrativa española del Siglo de Oro (original) (raw)
Fictions of Containment in the Spanish Female Picaresque
Fictions of Containment in the Spanish Female Picaresque, 2019
This study examines the interdependence of gender, sexuality and space in the early modern period, which saw the inception of architecture as a discipline and gave rise to the first custodial institutions for women, including convents for reformed prostitutes. Meanwhile, conduct manuals established prescriptive mandates for female use of space, concentrating especially on the liminal spaces of the home. This work traces literary prostitution in the Spanish Mediterranean through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, from the rise of courtesan culture in several key areas through the shift from tolerance of prostitution toward repression. Kuffner’s analysis pairs canonical and noncanonical works of fiction with didactic writing, architectural treatises, and legal mandates, tying the literary practice of prostitution to increasing control over female sexuality during the Counter Reformation. By tracing erotic negotiations in the female picaresque novel from its origins through later...
Female Criminality and “Fake News” in Early Modern Spanish Pliegos Sueltos
2021
This book studies the early modern Spanish broadsheet, the tabloid newspaper of its day which functioned to educate, entertain, and indoctrinate its readers, much like today's "fake news." Parker Aronson incorporates a socio-historical approach in which she considers crime and deviance committed by women in early modern Spain and the correlation between crime and the growth of urban centers. She also considers female deviance more broadly to encompass sexual and religious deviance while investigating the relationship between these pliegos sueltos and the transgressive and disruptive nature of female criminality. In addition to an introduction to this fascinating subgenre of early modern Spanish literature, Parker Aronson analyzes the representations of women as bandits and highway robbers; as murderers; as prostitutes, libertines, and actors; as Christian renegades; as enslaved people; as witches; as miscegenationists; and as the recipients of punishment.
Saints Textual: Embodying Female Exemplarity in Spanish Literature
Gender and Exemplarity in Medieval and Early Modern Spain, 2020
The interplay between gender, sanctity, and exemplarity has received little attention in regard to literary production in the Iberian Peninsula. However, the way they intertwined was crucial not only for the evolution of spirituality and social values in the medieval and early modern period, but also for the construction of the female subject and a distinct women’s literary tradition. From Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) right up to the seventeenth century, these three vectors upheld a model of auctoritas and authorship that in large measure shaped the role and aspirations of both religious and lay women across Europe. Hence religious exemplary discourse in life-accounts mediated heavily in women’s conduct, experiences, and writings.
Journal of Women's History, 1998
to provide priests and other Spaniards with a detailed description of Nahua culture, especially its religious practices and beliefs, in order better to recognize "idolatry" in everyday colonial life and attempt to stamp it out forever. Toward that end, Sahagún prepared an outline of topics to examine, created a questionnaire and, with the help of the young Christianized Nahua noblemen in his employ, asked the elder noble leaders of the communities of Tepepulco and Tlatelolco how they lived before the Spaniards arrived in 1519. The text of each book was arranged in two columns: Náhuatl on the right, and Spanish translations and illustrations on the left. Throughout this process, Sahagún worked closely with the Nahua men he had trained and since the friar wrote only in Spanish the younger men played a crucial role in creating the codex.2 Book Ten is explicitly informed by a Christian emphasis on a good/ evil dualism; thus, for every category of person (niece, nobleman, sorcerer, weaver, etc.), she or he is described first in terms of "good" qualities and then in terms of "bad" qualities. As one may surmise from this brief review of its production, Book Ten, like the entire Historia, is far from a mere catalogue of the things of a dying world. Rather, it is a complex colonial document of a particular moment in the cultural evolution of New Spain. The gendered images of Book Ten on which I focus my analysis represent a cultural interplay that allows us to see two elite male perspectives, one Nahua and one Franciscan, of this moment. This collaborationÂin some cases, a conflictÂ-forms the backdrop to my examination. The threads I weave through my discussion of Book Ten specifically foreground the developing definition of a menacing woman constructed by Spanish and indigenous men as an element of Catholic ideology. This inimical woman was the nemesis of Sahagún and helped to represent, for him, the reason behind the failure of the Christian mission in New Spain. Her construction in Book Ten reveals the severe dualism of a
Queen's University Belfast , 2016
My aims in this dissertation are to discern the representations of masculinity, gender, and sexuality in the nineteenth century through the prism of the Don Juan legend and to assert what the use of such a virile character reveals about the nature and obsessions of the society that chose to use it so persistently. Does this literary proliferation reveal a crisis in nineteenth-century French masculinity? Is Don Juan presented as a model of virility which must be followed, or as an Orientalised symbol of hyper-masculinity, a ‘foreign vice’ to be avoided and set as an example of a cultural countertype against which French men must model their own masculinity? What do Don Juan’s numerous transgressions and his ultimate lack of punishment in the nineteenth-century rewritings tell us about the society which produced them? Taking Tirso de Molina's 'Burlador de Sevilla' and Molière's 'Dom Juan' as a starting point, I lead an interrogation of Balzac’s ‘L’Élixir de longue vie’ (1830), as well as a comparison of Mérimée’s ‘Les Âmes du purgatoire’ (1834) and Barbey d’Aurevilly’s ‘Le plus bel amour de Don Juan’ (1874). What emerges from this series of readings is a further re-imagination of Don Juan as an opponent of patriarchal, societal norms via both religious and sexual transgression in an attempt to assert his position within the hierarchy of power. These original analyses will turn our attention away from traditional tropes often associated with Don Juan such as performance and caricature of gender roles towards new ground, most notably that of religious transgression, which in the light of my readings, will emerge as a central concern of the Don Juan myth.
Sanctified Subversives: Nuns in Early Modern English and Spanish Literature
As chaste women devoted to God, nuns are viewed as the purest of the pure. Yet, as females who reject courtship, sex, marriage, child bearing, and materialism, they have been the anathema of how society has proscribed, expected, and regulated women: sex object, wife, mother, and capitalist consumer. They are perceived as otherworldly beings, yet revered for their salt-of-the-earth demeanor. This book illustrates how both English and Spanish Renaissance-era authors latched onto the figure of the nun as a way to evaluate the social construction of womanhood. This analysis of the nun s role in the popular imagination via literature explores how writers on both sides of the Catholic-Protestant divide employed the role of the nun to showcase the powerful potential these women possessed in acting out as sanctified subversives. The texts under consideration include William Shakespeare s Measure for Measure, Margaret Cavendish s The Convent of Pleasure, María de Zayas s The Disenchantments of Love, Aphra Behn s The History of the Nun, Catalina de Erauso s The Lieutenant Nun, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz s autobiographical and literary works. No other book addresses these issues through a concentrated study of these authors and their literary works, much less by offering an in-depth discussion of the literature and culture of seventeenth-century England, Spain, and Mexico.