The Ladies of Zamora tells the remarkable story of a scandal
that occurred in a Spanish convent during the thirteenth century.
Peter Linehan, the foremost expert on medieval Spain, expertly sets
forth the details of the affair and shows how the effects were felt
not just in Spain but throughout Europe, even as far as the papal
curia.
Established in 1264 by two wealthy sisters, the convent of Las
Duenas soon became the focus of a bitter jurisdictional struggle
between the bishop of Zamora and the local Dominican friars to
whose order a faction of the sisters hoped to have their convent
incorporated. In 1279, the bishop visited the convent and
interrogated thirty of the sisters. The records of this inquiry,
hitherto unpublished, provide the documentary basis for this book,
and they reveal startling discrepancies between the stern precepts
of their rule and the relaxed realities of life behind the convent
grille. They speak of sisters in "love nests" with friars at the
convent gate, giving their prioress the evil eye, and threatening
their bishop with sticks.
At one level, the book can be read as an entertaining story--a
saga of copulation, cross-dressing, and general mayhem. But Linehan
uses the story to bring into sharp focus a number of usually
unrelated aspects of the age: tensions between the mendicant orders
and the local ecclesiastical authorities, thirteenth-century
religiosity (female religiosity in particular), and collusion in
high places, both in Castile and in Rome. One of the friars
involved in the scandal eventually became Master-General of the
Dominican Order until he was dismissed by Pope Nicholas IV in 1291.
Finally, in 1300 Boniface VIII enacted a series of measures
designed to bring under stricter control "those damned friars" (as
he called them) and convents such as that of Las Duenas.
The Ladies of Zamora provides novel insight into the century
that began with Pope Innocent III's approval of the foundation of
Saint Dominic's Order of Preachers and ended with a Dominican Order
that had lost its innocence and fatally compromised the ideals that
had already so profoundly affected Western society. We also see the
social realities of a frontier society where the rule of law--canon
law in particular--remained subject to the whim of willful men--not
to mention women, of course.
General
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