In this exploration of crisis in Counter-Reformation Spain, Mary
Elizabeth Perry reveals the significance of gender for social order
by portraying the lives of women who lived on the margins of
respectability--prostitutes, healers, visionaries, and other
deviants who provoked the concern of a growing central government
linked closely to the church. Focusing on Seville, the commercial
capital of Habsburg Spain, Perry uses rich archival sources to
document the economic and spiritual activity of women, and efforts
made by civil and church authorities to control this activity,
during a period of local economic change and religious turmoil.
In analyzing such sources as art and literature from the period,
women's writings, Inquisition records, and laws and regulations,
Perry finds that social definitions of what it meant to be a woman
or a man persisted due to their sanctification by religious ideas
and their adaptation into political order. She describes the
tension between gender ideals and actual conditions in women's
lives, and shows how some women subverted the gender order by using
a surprisingly wide variety of intellectual and physical
strategies.
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