Women's poetry of the Spanish early modern period. This collection of fourteen scholarly essays on women's poetry from Spain's early modern period shows that women did indeed have a Golden Age, and that they were significant cultural actors in the realms of poetic production. Thestudies of secular verse demonstrate how female poets of this period devised strategies to confront the dominant masculine poetic discourse, while the essays on sacred poetry explore the multiple manifestations of female piety andmysticism. The women's words are brought to life and modern readers helped to understand the socio-cultural, interpersonal, and aesthetic components of the poets' oeuvre. The volume, a companion to Julian Olivares' and ElizabethBoyce's revised anthology "Tras el espejo la musa escribe": Lirica femenina de los Siglos de Oro, constitutes an authoritative critical enterprise focused on the recuperation of the female literary voice, and marks an important step forward in the battle to include women's writing as part of Spain's literary canon. Contributors: Electa Arenal, Aranzazu Borrachero Mendibil, Anne J. Cruz, Adrienne L. Martin, Rosa Navarro Duran, Julian Olivares, Inmaculada Osuna, Amanda Powell, Elizabeth Rhodes, Stacey Schlau, Lia Schwartz, Alison Weber, Judith Whitenack. JULIAN OLIVARES is Professor of Spanish at the University of Houston and editor of Caliope, Journal ofthe Society for Renaissance and Baroque Hispanic Poetry.

Devout laywomen raise a number of provocative questions about gender and religion in the early modern world. How did some groups or individuals evade the Tridentine legislation that required third order women to take solemn vows and observe active and passive enclosure? How did their attempts to exercise a female apostolate (albeit with varying degrees of success and assertiveness) destabilize hierarchies of class and gender? To the extent that their beliefs and practices diverged from approved doctrine and rituals, what insights can they provide into the tensions between official religion and lay religiosity? Addressing these and many other questions, Devout Laywomen in the Early Modern World reflects new directions in gender history, offering a more nuanced approach to the paradigm of woman as the prototypical "disciplined" subject of church-state power.

Mar da de San Jos 9 Salazar (1548-1603) took the veil as a Discalced ("barefoot") Carmelite nun in 1571, becoming one of Teresa of Avila's most important collaborators in religious reform and serving as prioress of the Seville and Lisbon convents. Within the parameters of the strict Catholic Reformation in Spain, Mar da fiercely defended women's rights to define their own spiritual experience and to teach, inspire, and lead other women in reforming their church.
Mar da wrote this book as a defense of the Discalced practice of setting aside two hours each day for conversation, music, and staging of religious plays. Casting the book in the form of a dialogue, Mar da demonstrates through fictional conversations among a group of nuns during their hours of recreation how women could serve as very effective spiritual teachers for each other. The book includes one of the first biographical portraits of Teresa and Maria's personal account of the troubled founding of the Discalced convent at Seville, as well as her tribulations as an Inquisitional suspect. Rich in allusions to women's affective relationships in the early modern convent, "Book for the Hour of Recreation also serves as an example of how a woman might write when relatively free of clerical censorship and expectations.
A detailed introduction and notes by Alison Weber provide historical and biographical context for Amanda Powell's fluid translation.

Celebrated as a visionary chronicler of spirituality, Teresa of Avila (1515-1582) suffered persecution by the Counter-Reformation clergy in Spain, who denounced her for her "diabolical illusions" and "dangerous propaganda." Confronting the historical irony of Teresa's transformation from a figure of questionable orthodoxy to a national saint, Alison Weber shows how this teacher and reformer used exceptional rhetorical skills to defend her ideas at a time when women were denied participation in theological discourse. In a close examination of Teresa's major writings, Weber correlates the stylistic techniques of humility, irony, obfuscation, and humor with social variables such as the marginalized status of pietistic groups and demonstrates how Teresa strategically adopted linguistic features associated with women--affectivity, spontaneity, colloquialism--in order to gain access to the realm of power associated with men.