Gender and Disorder in Early Modern Seville

Mary Elizabeth Perry

Princeton University Press, Aug 19, 1990 - History - 206 pages

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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On the syllabus for Jane Landers Gender class.

Contents

• In the Hands of Women: 14
• Virgins Martyrs and the Necessary Evil: 33
• Perfect Wives and Profane Lovers: 53
• Walls without Windows: 75
• Chastity and Danger: 97
• Sexual Rebels: 118
• Prostitutes Penitents and Brothel Padres: 137
• Mothers of the Poor: 153
• Survivors and Subversives: 177
• Glossary: 181
• Bibliography: 185
• Index: 203

Popular passages

Page 186 - Sevillana medicina, que trata el modo conservativo y curativo de los que habitan en la muy insigne ciudad de Sevilla, la cual sirve y aprovecha para cualquier otro lugar de estos reinos.

Page 186 - LIBRO del arte de las Comadres, o madrinas, y del regimiento de las preñadas y paridas, y de los niños.

Page 197 - ULLERSPERGER, JB La Historia de la Psicología y de la Psiquiatría en España desde los más remotos tiempos hasta la actualidad compuesta por...

Page 6 - Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Gender and Disorder in Early Modern Seville; Princeton Paperbacks. Women's Studies-History; Women's studies. History
• Author: Mary Elizabeth Perry
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: Princeton University Press, 1990
• ISBN: 069100854X, 9780691008547
• Length: 206 pages
• Subjects: History / Europe / Spain