1st Edition
Representing Women’s Political Identity in the Early Modern Iberian World
By exploring textual, visual and material culture, this volume presents a range of new research into the experiences, agencies and diverse political identities of Iberian women between the fifteenth and early-eighteenth century.
Representing Women’s Political Identity in the Early Modern Iberian World explores how the political identities of Iberian women were represented in various forms of visual culture including: religious paintings and portraiture; costume; and devotional and funerary sculpture. This study examines the transmission of Iberian culture and its concepts of identity to locations such as Peru, Goa and Mexico, providing a rich insight into Iberia’s complex history and legacy. The collection of essays explores the lives of protagonists, which vary from queens and members of the nobility to painters and nuns, allowing for a more nuanced understanding of both the elite and non-elite woman’s experience in Spain, Portugal and their overseas realms during the early modern period.
By addressing the significance of gender alongside the visual representation of political ideology and identity, this book is an invaluable source for students and researchers of early modern Iberia and the history of women.
Introduction by Jeremy Roe and Jean Andrews
Part I: The politics of non-elite devotional identities in textual, visual and material culture
1. Three willful characters in search for God: visionary action and political identity in seventeenth-century Portuguese women mystics
Joana Serrado
2. From spectatorship to sponsorship: female participation in the festivals of colonial Potosí
Lisa Voigt
3. The mirror-shield of Sor Juana Inéz de la Cruz
Diane H. Bodart
4. Female agency and the sculptural object in Agostinho de Santa Maria’s hagiography of Filipa Ferreira (?–1626), the Augustinian Soror Filipa da Trindade
Carla Alferes Pinto
5. Josefa de Ayala e Cabreira’s St Catherine of Alexandria altarpiece and female empowerment
Jean Andrews
Part II: Spaces and spectacles of the female courtier
6. The monastery I have built in this city of Madrid: mapping Juana of Austria’s royal spaces in the Descalzas Reales convent
Annemarie Jordan Gschwend
7. Ladies-in-waiting at the Spanish Habsburg palaces and convents, the Alcázar and the Descalzas Reales (1570–1603): spaces and representations of identity and agency
Vanessa de Cruz Medina
8. Ana de Mendoza y de la Cerda, Princess of Éboli: image, myth, and person
Trevor J. Dadson
9. The Relação do torneio que fizeram as damas da Rainha Nossa Senhora, a noite do Baptisado do Sr Infante D. Pedro…: identification and the spectacle of court culture
Jeremy Roe
10. The use, significance and projection of artistic objects in the life and exequies of the VI Duchess of Aveiro
Gema Rivas Gómez Calcerrada
Part III: Rethinking regal iconography: the materiality and ideology of symbolism
11. The Queen Consort in Castile and Portugal: María of Aragon (b. 1403–d. 1445), Queen of Castile and Leonor of Aragon (b. 1405/1408–d. 1445), Queen of Portugal
Ana Maria S.A. Rodrigues
12. Mariana de Austria: the ideal bride and saviour of the Habsburg Monarchy
Inmaculada Rodríguez Moya
13. Dresses, portraits and spaces: female identities at the Royal Alcázar (1621–1665)
Laura Oliván Santaliestra
14. Queen Catherine, a Bragança in seventeenth-century London: cultural legacy, identity and political ‘individuality’
Susana Varela Flor
Biography
Jeremy Roe is a translator and independent researcher affiliated with the Centro de Humanidades, Universidade Nova de Lisboa. He has published a range of articles and book chapters on the representation of political authority and the intersections of Iberian visual and literary culture.
Jean Andrews is Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies, University of Nottingham. She co-edited Writing Royal Entries in Early Modern Europe (2014) and Art and Painting, Vicente Carducho and Baroque Spain (2016). Her monograph Painting and Devotion in Golden Age Iberia: Luis de Morales was published in 2020.
