Gender and Disorder in Early Modern Seville / / Mary Elizabeth Perry.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Princeton University Press eBook-Package Archive 1927-1999
• VerfasserIn: Perry, Mary Elizabeth,
• Place / Publishing House: Princeton, NJ : : Princeton University Press, , [2021]; ©1990
• Year of Publication: 2021
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (216 p.)

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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- List of Illustrations -- List of Tables -- Acknowledgments -- Abbreviations -- INTRODUCTION Neither Broken Sword nor Wandering Woman -- CHAPTER 1 In the Hands of Women -- CHAPTER 2 Virgins, Martyrs, and the Necessary Evil -- CHAPTER 3 Perfect Wives and Profane Lovers -- CHAPTER 4 Walls without Windows -- CHAPTER 5 Chastity and Danger -- CHAPTER 6 Sexual Rebels -- CHAPTER 7 Prostitutes, Penitents, and Brothel Padres -- CHAPTER 8 Mothers of the Poor -- CONCLUSION Survivors and Subversives -- Glossary -- Bibliography -- Index