Religious Women in Golden Age Spain: The Permeable Cloister.

Elizabeth A. Lehfeldt. Religious Women in Golden Age Spain: The Permeable Cloister.

Women and Gender in the Early Modern World. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2005. x + 241 pp. index. bibl. $89.95. ISBN: 0-7546-5023-5.

The twenty-fifth session of the Council of Trent in 1563, which mandated claustration for all solemnly professed nuns, is often represented as a watershed moment for female monasticism. Tridentine enclosure appears to support the "spatial discipline" theory in early modern history, according to which church and state combined forces to segregate women into private, powerless spaces. With rich and persuasive detail, Elizabeth Lehfeldt challenges this paradigm, arguing that Spanish nuns were active participants in the financial, social, and religious lives of their communities. The cloister was permeable, both before and after Trent; although the physical separation of nuns from secular society was a widely-acknowledged ideal, nuns and their patrons continued to adapt prescriptive demands to their particular needs and circumstances.

Drawing on extensive research in Spanish archives, Lehfeldt focuses on the religious life of Valladolid between 1450-1650 in order to examine how religious reform was negotiated within a civic microclimate. The citizens of Valladolid were generous patrons of female monasticism, supporting twenty-three convents. In chapter 1, Lehfeldt describes how nuns and patrons were bound together through complex ties. In exchange for financial support, the laity could expect a variety of rewards: intercessory prayers, companionship in time of crisis, a home for widows, and the prestige of association with a holy enterprise. Lehfeldt does not believe that Valladolid families used convents as dumping grounds for extra daughters--monastic dowries were not significantly lower than marriage dowries. Rather, she argues that a complex matrix of practical and pious motivations tied families to religious foundations.

In chapters 2 and 3, Lehfeldt describes the role of early modern convents as financial institutions. Abbesses not only managed property; they acted as lending institutions and, evading prohibitions against usury, fulfilled a critical role in the local economy. Despite requirements to renounce future inheritance, some nuns used the renuncia as a kind of will, thus maintaining a degree of control over family wealth. Disputes over dowry payments and renuncias could lead to litigation.

The Tridentine mandate for enclosure was only one chapter in continuing debates over female monastic discipline. As Lehfeldt explains in chapter 4, the papal directive Pericoloso (1298), which demanded enclosure of all solemnly professed nuns, had been unevenly enforced in Valladolid and even challenged as unworkable. Nuns resisted restrictions on the mobility they needed for their activities as estate managers and, furthermore, families and patrons demanded access to the nuns, who provided solace in times of crisis. Lehfeldt takes a moderate stance on the question of laxity in monastic life. Scandalous events did occur; Lehfeldt argues, nevertheless, that it is a mistake to assume that monastic communities resisted reform in order to protect a lax lifestyle. In some cases, reforms were willingly embraced; scandal, after all, was bad for attracting patronage. Overall, during the second half of the fifteenth century, the trend was toward a greater acceptance of the need to separate sacred and secular spaces. Juan I went so far as to recommend enclosure for male monastics, a unisex model that was abandoned by the end of the century.

Chapter 5 addresses the climate of religious ferment and renewal during the reign of Ferdinand and Isabel. Lehfeldt argues that monastic reform was a particularly urgent concern for the Catholic monarchs, who linked it to their goal of restoring order and asserting legitimacy after the civil war that had placed Isabel on the throne. In Valladolid, active enclosure (prohibitions against leaving the convent) proved more acceptable than passive enclosure (prohibitions against visitors' entrance into the cloister), as patrons continued to expect entree to the foundations they had bankrolled. Although enclosure became the ideal feature defining female monasticism during what is sometimes called the Catholic Pre-Reform, the ecclesiastical elites proved to be surprisingly tolerant of non-cloistered tertiaries and female visionaries.

Given royal support for enclosure and the success of the observant monastic movements in Spain, one would expect Valladolid to have accepted Tridentine enclosure quickly and completely. In her final chapter, Lehfeldt demonstrates that local needs, customs, and pressures once again resulted in uneven implementation of prescription from above. In particular, the papal bull Circa Pastoralis (1566), which extended enclosure to beatas (women who took informal vows of celibacy) and tertiaries, was enforced irregularly at best. As Lehfeldt astutely observes, the post-Tridentine Church sent mixed messages to women; on the one hand, it extolled the virtues of reclusion, but on the other hand, it beckoned the faithful to a life of active service. Some religious women, notably Teresa of Avila, accepted enclosure and accommodated themselves to an apostolate of prayer. Valladolid witnessed the inquisitorial trials of a number of women condemned for the visible leadership roles in heterodox movements. But there were counterexamples--women who successfully forged an active apostolate while living in the world. In fact, the citizens of Valladolid supported an influential circle of pious laywomen who were actively involved in a variety of charitable and reform ventures. This chapter provides a fascinating panorama of the variety of religious roles--some dangerous, others less so--available to women who responded to the religious ferment of the sixteenth century.

Lehfeldt's meticulously researched study places female monasticism within a chronological framework broad enough to reveal the perennial tensions between societies' desire for hermetic sacred spaces and access to them. Religious Women in Golden Age Spain instructively transcends the temptation to equate spatial segregation with powerlessness. Enclosure constrained but did not cut off nuns' economic, creative, and administrative activity, nor did it sever their multilayered bonds with secular society. As Lehfeldt demonstrates with illuminating detail, Golden Age convents were spaces that blurred the distinction between the public and private, the profane and sacred. The Tridentine demands for enclosure reenacted a well-rehearsed drama, albeit one implemented with the enhanced urgency of confronting schism. But the boundary separating the cloister from the world remained negotiable and permeable.

ALISON WEBER

University of Virginia