Religious Women in Golden Age Spain: The Permeable Cloister

Faculty of Theology and Philosophy

School of Theology

Elizabeth A. Lehfeldt, Aldershot, Hampshire UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2005.

Reviewed by Rosa MacGinley PBVM who is a founding member of the Golding Centre for Research in Women's History, Theology & Spirituality at Australian Catholic University.

This book appears in Ashgate's new series of interdisciplinary and comparative studies, 'Women and Gender in the Early Modern World' and, like a number of Ashgate's other current titles, seeks to explore lines of continuity as well as underlying social shifts in what can seem the sudden development of new frontiers in macro-historical evolution. The author, Elizabeth Lehfeldt, is Associate Professor of History at Cleveland State University in the USA. Like other contemporary writers now emerging in the historical field of tracing origins and development of movements of religious women, she is familiar with the relevant languages and social context of the era and setting of her research, in this case Spain over the years 1450-1650.

This study evidences in-depth research in both manuscript and printed sources, as it focuses especially on Valladolid as a telling case study over this period, though the wider context of the Iberian peninsula and its changing political alignments is kept in view. The author deals with 'religious women' rather than solely with those canonically recognised as nuns, though these latter occupy most of her discussion. For outside the canonical cloister were the beatas, living either singly or in community, and of a piece with the beguines of the Low Countries or bizzoche of Italy, though each in their differing cultural contexts evolved distinctive features. Celibate, religiously committed and frequently involved in specific good works, these women – basically considered both legally and canonically as lay – were a familiar and accepted part of medieval societies. In fact, as Lehfeldt notes, many later cloistered communities of nuns began as a beaterio, or community of beatas, which then sought acceptance from a recognised religious order – Benedictine, Cistercian, Franciscan – for incorporation. Many in the earlier period of the time span taken here retained features of their beaterio origin, in particular, a 'permeable cloister'. One such was the Carmelite community Teresa of Avila initially joined in her native city.

Lehfeldt next traces the movement of religious reform dating in Spain from early in the 15th century and later given application, as specific royal policy, across the expanded dominions of the united monarchy of Isabella and Ferdinand. In her overall tracing of this reform movement, the author explores in detail the reactions within a range of cloistered communities, many of which administered large estates and whose solemnly professed nuns came from local aristocratic and upper gentry families. That these women were capable, articulate and prepared to defend what they saw as historic rights, both of their communal estates and their personal situations, is well documented.

Instances are given of concerted and successful resistance to over-zealous and perceived-as-officious male agents of reform. These women, with their permeable cloister, had hitherto lived in active interaction with their families and local urban communities. They were well aware of legal rights and capable of appealing to the highest ecclesiastical and secular authorities as they initiated legislation to defend their positions, as in the quoted cases of disputed family patrimony to which they claimed a right. In these documented cases and those of the conflicts incidental to the spreading reform campaign, which sought to impose unmitigated enclosure on those communities affiliated with recognised religious orders, little evidence given in this book of sexual misconduct.

The fortunes of the reform movement take us next to the Council of Trent which, in its final session in 1563, re-affirmed the canonical requirement of strict enclosure, long associated with female monasticism and first mandated at papal level by Boniface VIII in 1298. But the reform movement in Spain, as the writer points out, had long predated Trent. As the Golden Age drew to its zenith in the 16th century, the broad tide of reform, under leaders of the calibre of Ximenez de Cisneros, had largely carried the day. Women, such as Teresa of Avila, initiater of Carmelite reform, and Beatriz de Silva, foundress of a reformed branch of Poor Clares, created their own impetus of renewal which was soon to spread, carrying with it a more personalised spirituality characteristic of the new devotional currents of the 16th century.

Lehfeldt sees as an inconsistency – an anomaly almost – that so many uncloistered 'holy women' – essentially in the beata tradition – were influential and honoured in Spain at this same time. She wonders how they escaped the drive towards full monastic enclosure. This seems to lie in a failure to distinguish that the legislation of Trent, as the earlier decree of Boneface VIII, was directed to legal demarcation. Communities of canonically approved orders of nuns were obliged to observe enclosure but this did not apply to women, however religiously committed, who were not in this publicly recognised category. However, the challenge of Trent and the following 1566 legislation on enclosure of Pius V were directed, in the interests of clear-cut reform, towards establishing boundaries: the latter 'holy women', in dress and terminology, were to be unmistakeably lay.

The above is an overview. Readers will find much of interest, as well as informative value, in this careful study of a specific and defining historical period in its particular national setting. It invites further complementary research of the same quality.