Spanish Women in the Golden Age: Images and Realities.

Magdalena S. Sanchez and Alain Saint-Saens, eds. (Contributions in Women's Studies, 155.) Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press. 229 pp. $55. ISBN: 0-3132-9481-X.

The articles in this collection enrich our understanding of women's history in Golden Age Spain in three general areas: religion and society; the political realm; and female identity.

Maria Echaniz opens the first section with a good article that brings to light the history of women's participation in the Order of Santiago founded in 1170 for laity and clergy, men and women, married and single, dedicated to the crusade against Muslim Spain. Despite their exclusion from its military role, women were allowed varied forms of association, either in communities of freilas of the order or living with their husbands under a vow of conjugal chastity. In accord with Joan Kelly's thesis that the Renaissance brought greater restriction for women, Echaniz shows how that latitude was gradually curtailed and ended by the fifteenth century as the Catholic Monarchs incorporated the order to the Crown and required that women members accept enclosure in convents. Jodi Bilinkoff analyzes the challenge to the dominant view of Dominican spirituality based on order, hierarchy and authority - gendered male - posed by the controversial charismatic Dominican tertiary, Maria de Santo Domingo, the Beata of Piedrahita, who rose to become prioress of a convent founded for her by the Duke of Alba. Mary Elizabeth Perry draws back the veil of silence and seclusion to show how morisca women survived and resisted Christian efforts to obliterate their culture, and Alain Saint-Saens examines the gender-based suspicions confronted by women hermits who pursued a solitary path of piety outside convent walls.

Exploration of women in political realms opens with an excellent article by Anne Cruz on the female figure in "Pedro el Cruel" ballads that demonstrates how rival political factions effected a political agenda at women's expense through their dualistic figuration of that ruler's wife and mistress either as martyr, adultress, or castrating seductress. Magdalena Sanchez reviews the one-sided didactic presentation in funeral eulogies and biographies of Philip II's wife, Margaret of Austria, as a model of piety, wifely submission, and maternal devotion, masking the limited but real political and diplomatic influence she and other powerful Austrian Habsburg women in fact exercised in court. JoEllen Campbell proposes that whereas Margaret could only exercise influence in the private sphere, Mariana de Austria enjoyed a public role as Queen regent during the minority of Charles II and that she, like Charles's wife, Maria Ana of Neoburg, used her influence to promote the interests of the Austrian faction at court.

In the third section, Marta Vicente recovers the multiple, poorly-documented reality of women's work, particularly in the textile industries in Barcelona in which guilds strove to restrict or exclude women's production, while royal officials recognized their contribution to the economy and protected the right of poor women to support their households. Mary Lorene Thomas investigates Calderon's presentation of female identity in an auto and comedia on Queen Christina of Sweden: her conversion from imperfection to perfection, in the one to the Catholic faith, in the other, from an arrogant assertion of feminine independence and equality to acceptance of the "natural law" of love and female subordination in marriage. Sylvia Trelles takes on a rich topic, the importance of rhetorical prescriptions for portraiture in the figuration of women in pastoral romances of Gil Polo and Galvez de Montalvo, but her treatment is overly condensed and confusing. Teresa Soufas concludes the collection with an interesting, appropriately situated consideration of the association of women with melancholy in terms of weakness, passivity and irrationality, and women writers' attempts to redirect the humoral and literary tradition of the pain - and creative power - of this obsessive melancholic thought to articulate feelings of unresolved identity and create outlets for scholarly creativity.

MARGARET R. GREER Princeton University