Virginia woolf wrote these words in her celebrated work A Room of One’s Own in 1929, expressing her frustration at the lack of women’s voices in history and literature. Yet, unrealized by Woolf, across Western Europe women were writing in all fields of literary endeavor and trying to make their voices heard, even in that “Elizabethan” era. We have only to think of Mary Wroth or Aphra Behn, in her own country; Louise Labé, in France; Gaspara Stampa or Moderata Fonte, in Italy; and Maria de Zayas, Ana Caro Mallén de Soto, or Mariana de Carvajal in Spain to see...

An important part of the funtioning of upper-class society in early modern Spain was the acquisition of suitable patronage. Class was fundamental to the client’s chances of success in the patronage systems that obtained in the greater and lesser courts of the Iberian nobility. The stratification of class was complex, including strands of nobility as well as an upwardly mobile merchant class. For example, in her study of the role of honor and class in the works of María de Zayas, Nieves Romero Díaz identifies in Zayas’s La burlada Aminta the blending of the antigua nobleza (old nobility) with the...

The family in early modern spain was the smallest element through which social control was exerted by the patriarchal establishments of Church and state. Seventeenth-century notions of the family stemmed partially from the Church Fathers and from post-Tridentine Church doctrine. These notions were supported by the many moralists who went into print in didactic literature, of whom the most widely known and respected were probably Juan Luis Vives, Luis de León, and Juan de Zabaleta. Also still current and a valuable source of education, in spite of their relative antiquity, were the precepts of Alfonso X el Sabio (Alfonso the...

Moralists and thinkers, drawing on the Church Fathers, had much to say about the appropriate education for children of both sexes, as well as about the relationship of fear and respect that ideally should exist between children and their parents. In the poetry of Ramírez, however, relationships within the family were not always as austere as the moralists would have us believe. Her poetry shows deep and reciprocal affection between all members of the family, humor, and often a complete lack of the formality prescribed for relations within the familial hierarchy.

A silence on the part of the moralists as...

The benefits women derived from the companionship and support of other women cannot be underestimated. If the patriarchal norm prevailed, then the only like-minded people who shared and understood women’s plight were other women. The intellectual and emotional benefits of friendship can be glimpsed through the poetry and other writings of those women whose works survive, providing a small but significant archive of seventeenth-century female thought both religious and secular. Unlike male-authored drama, women’s plays in the period incorporate female friendship as an integral part of the plot, as can be seen, for example, in the roles of the women...

Women who composed love poetry stepped into a masculine field, bound by tradition, where the female was the silent and idealized object of unrealized love, merely a rhetorical exercise carried forward from the courtly love mode. When Malón de Chaide discusses the ideal of a love that must be given freely, he is not talking of love in the modern, post-Romantic sense.¹ He describes that Neoplatonic ideal, a chimera of female excellence, where a woman’s perceived lack of intellect, coupled with her physical beauty, provides her with spiritual gifts above those of man, enabling her to rise above the masculine...

In 1601, luisa de carvajal y mendoza wrote a letter to a friend, a nun at the court of the archduchess of Flanders, from her small and impoverished, yet independent, home in Madrid. In it, she confided that “[t]odos estos días estoy deseando que me dejen tomar la pluma en la mano para aliviarme de las pesadumbres y ocupaciones que traigo” (Epistolario 109; every day I desire to be left to take up the pen in my hand to relieve myself of the pressures and occupations that I carry). Although the relief she sought in this instance was to be...

In recent decades, feminist scholarship has revealed a previously almost invisible body of work by women writers and intellectuals who wrote against or in spite of patriarchal restriction, dating back to the far reaches of the Christian era. In presenting this study of sonnets by women of the seventeenth century in the Iberian Peninsula, I have sought to add to this body of scholarship by drawing together women’s poems written at the very seat of power and at the periphery in both the secular and the religious fields. Such a broad approach provides a spectrum of women’s lived experience as...