Power and Gender in Renaissance Spain: Eight Women of the Mendoza Family, 1450-1650

Renaissance Quarterly, Spring, 2005 by Theresa Earenfight

Helen Nader, ed. Power and Gender in Renaissance Spain: Eight Women of the Mendoza Family, 1450-1650.

Hispanisms. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004. xii 208 pp. index. append. illus. tbls. $44.95 (cl), $21.95 (pbk). ISBN: 0-252-02868 (cl), 0-252-07145-X (pbk).

The thesis of this compelling and important new book is certain to be controversial, and as such it should be essential reading for scholars wishing to better understand the complex dynamics of men and women, aristocratic or bourgeois, in Golden Age Spain. Wasting no time, Nader makes it clear that she and her eight fellow authors intend to challenge many scholars' long-held assumptions about what we call patriarchy. In the introduction, Nader expresses deep skepticism about both our definitions of this notion and the potency of its "strict application" in actual practice. She proposes instead that "Spanish women lived in a dual system, one in which patriarchy coexisted with matriarchy" (3), thus situating her work within a theoretical framework that emphasizes the dynamic operation of gender difference. In this, her work complements and augments recent work on Renaissance and Golden Age Spain by Magdalena Sanchez, Lisa Vollendorf, and the authors of the essays in this collection. By highlighting the dynamic relationship between patriarchal and matriarchal practices in terms of law, landholding, and inheritance strategies, and demonstrating how matriarchy empowered aristocratic women, these essays provide an important empirical counterbalance to the preponderance of evidence drawn from deeply misogynistic, and, these authors argue, misleading Golden Age literature. Themes such as the personal nature of political engagement, public and private space, language and voice, and the prominence of property (including dower and dowry, houses and villas, and entire towns) in the Mendoza family success link the entire collection together.

It is, in fact, a collection that must be read as a whole, not sampled randomly. The lives of these women--Juana Pimental, Juana de Mendoza, Maria Pacheco, Maria de Mendoza y de la Cerda, Luisa de la Cerda, Maria de San Jose, Magdalena de Bobadilla, Ana de Mendoza, and Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza--intersected in ways that make this collection more than just discrete essays. Their lives and works create "complex, multigenerational family networks" (132) that crisscross early modern Spanish politics and culture in often surprising ways. The Mendoza women, whether daughters or distant cousins, were relentless and successful practitioners of marital strategies designed to enrich and empower the family. Their influence spans the several generations discussed in this book, and points emphasized by one author are elaborated upon later. The genealogical appendices make visible the many connections among these women. The learned and pious Maria de Mendoza serves as a good case in point. The aunt of both Ana, the princess of Eboli and reputed lover of the infamous Antonio Perez, and Isabel, the illegitimate daughter of Diego Hurtado de Mendoza and Luisa de la Cerda, Maria was herself the granddaughter of Pedro Gonzalez de Mendoza, the Archbishop of Toledo. As Maria del Carmen Vaquero Serrano shows, her life illuminates the importance of studying the female relatives who sheltered orphans and embarrassing illegitimate daughters while promoting Renaissance humanism through their poetry, letters, and the education of women. Some women, such as Magdalena de Bobadilla in Grace Coolidge's essay and Ana Mendoza in Helen Reed's, are among the most vibrant, strong-willed, and influential women of the age, and they belie the conventional understanding of Spanish women as objects rather than subjects of their own lives.

Some will quibble about the use of the Mendoza women as exemplars of women's power, but by the end of the book, the thesis does stand up to scrutiny. Nader is disarmingly honest and self-critical, admitting that in her influential 1979 book, The Mendoza Family in the Spanish Renaissance, 1350-1550, she completely overlooked the Mendoza women in her analysis of humanist culture in Spain. In fact, much of the most convincing evidence presented in this collection concerns the substantial contributions these women made to the culture of the Renaissance in Spain. The research is grounded in an understanding of the law as it pertained to women and, in particular, landholding and the intricate system of mayorazgo. How much a reader is willing to accept the book's larger implication, that the power of these women had a genuine influence on the agency of women of other social ranks remains, in my mind, yet to be proved. It is a challenge well worth taking up, however, for it forces scholars to challenge their own presumptions about women, men, and the dynamics of personal and political power. Not all scholars are comfortable with arguments from silence, but I am inclined to agree with Coolidge when she argues that it is hard to believe that women such as Magdalena de Bobadilla were exceptions. They could not do everything men of their rank could do, but neither were they powerless in the face of patriarchal laws and customs. Rather, they skillfully used the power of matriarchal institutions to gain a substantial measure of power, and in some cases legitimate authority, to enrich and empower themselves, culturally as well as financially, and their families.