Convents As Litigants: Dowry And Inheritance Disputes In Early-Modern Spain

Journal of Social History, Spring, 2000 by Elizabeth A. Lehfeldt

In 1631 Gomez de Mendoza Manrique appeared in court to oppose his sister, Ines de Velasco, a nun in the convent of Santa Maria de las Huelgas in Valladolid, Spain. Ines and the convent had filed a lawsuit to force Gomez to pay Ines' yearly maintenance allowance. In the course of the trial Gomez revealed that he was shouldering an immense burden on behalf of female monasticism in Valladolid. During a given year Gomez paid out 90,000 maravedis to his sisters who were professed nuns in the city's convents: 40,000 to his sister Maria at Santa Clara; 40,000 to Ana, also at Las Huelgas; and 10,000 to Juana who had entered San Quirce. Gomez claimed these payments, in addition to the financial support that he offered his daughters, made it impossible to meet Ines' demands. [1]

Gomez' circumstances mirrored the relationship between the citizens of Valladolid and its convents. By 1650 over twenty convents called Valladolid home, in comparison to only thirteen male foundations. Twelve of these female houses had been founded between 1545 and 1650, a period that saw the creation of only five monasteries. The creation and sustenance of these institutions would not have been possible without the support of the local citizenry. Vallisoletanos were generous in their support. In 1505, for example, a wealthy citizen requested burial in the convent church of Santa Isabel. In return he offered the community a substantial endowment of 47,500 maravedis and an additional 3000 maravedis for work on the church. [2] The founders of the Dominican convent of Madre de Dios amply endowed the houses with an annual rent of 800 ducados. [3] In the late sixteenth century Francisco Enriquez de Almansa and his wife, Mariana de Zuniga y Velasco, donated an annual rent of 200,000 mrs. to the convent of the Desc alzas Reales. [4] In an era of inflation and a growing tax burden, the willingness of these citizens to support female monasticism suggests that they found its presence in their city efficacious and desirable. [5]

As a result, female monasticism in Valladolid flourished in the early-modern era. Yet the picture was not always entirely rosy. Beneath the surface of this mutually beneficial relationship between convents and secular society lay a more complicated social matrix in which professed nuns, despite the constraints of the cloister, remained closely tied to their familial patrimonies. Daughters entered convents with dowries and maintenance allowances, and their families had a responsibility to meet these financial obligations. Nuns, for their part, seemed unwilling simply to assume that their families would honor these contracts. Instead, the protection of these property and inheritance interests required them to remain aware of their families' financial status and economic decisions. Even in the Tridentine world which demanded strict claustration of all solemnly professed religious women, these women monitored the finances of their families and insisted upon the prompt payment of various sums. In fact, this vigil ance seems to have been necessary. The records of Valladolid's convents reveal that especially from the mid-sixteenth century forward nuns, their convents initiating proceedings on their behalf, entered into oftentimes protracted secular lawsuits with their natal families over disputes involving dowry payments, the receipt of their yearly maintenance allowance, and their rights to familial inheritances subsequent to their profession.

This activity is significant for the social history of early-modem Spain for two reasons. First, in their battles to seek restitution, nuns demonstrated a profound sense of connection to family property. This "connectedness" greatly enhances our scholarly understanding of women and the exercise of property rights in the early-modern era. A growing body of scholarly literature has examined the legal position of secular women vis-a-vis the familial patrimony in medieval and early-modern Europe. [6] These studies have urged us to look beyond the prescriptive limits of legal codes to see that women, in practice, did sometimes administer considerable property interests as testators, heirs, and patrons. The examples to be outlined here of nuns who continued to identify with and stake claim to their family's property add a new twist to this literature. Nuns maintained a curious self-image by which they remained viscerally tied to their natal families despite the vows that presumably divorced them from these concern s. This study thus reveals that nuns used their religious dowries and maintenance allowances as an opportunity to exercise fiscal influence and autonomy. Second, these conflicts are significant for what they reveal about the clash of both legal and social expectations. Each side believed the law was on their side, but their arguments were also predicated on expectations, perhaps shaped by law but also by larger cultural forces, which defined the "proper" behavior of female religious and the care owed by family members to their own. As such, these disputes illuminate a complicated social world in which the lives and interests of professed religious, despite the physical and spiritual barriers of the cloister, continued to intersect with the calculations and preoccupations of their families.