Spiritual Motherhood: Gendered Interpretations of the Spanish Laity's Religious Authority (1580-1730)

Abstract

This research project delves into the question of the role of women in cities and towns across Spain and its empire in the early modern period. It focuses on women who gained prominence as visionaries and thus became targets of inquisitorial scrutiny, because Inquisition documents are the traditional source base for historians to reach these otherwise (typically) voiceless individuals and communities. The field has traditionally argued that the power, number, and presence of these visionary women slowly declined throughout the early modern period owing to the pressures of the Counter-Reformation. Catholic reformers at the Council of Trent (1545–1563) specifically identified female lay and religious visionaries—who had grown rampant after Catherine of Siena became a famous visionary and religious leader in the fourteenth century— as threats to the Catholic canon. Historians have argued that the Counter-Reformation succeeded in breaking the power of these women, marginalizing them, and placing them under male church authority. I disagree. My research has discovered that these women visionaries continued to exist even in the late seventeenth and early to mid-eighteenth centuries throughout the Iberian Catholic world, and that they held religious power and authority through adaptation, not surrender. My research focuses on four women from 1580 to 1730, two from Spain and two from Peru. In examining their lives, their actions, their communities, and their inquisitorial trials, I analyze the means and methods these women used to foster their authority, and the language they employed to explain their growing roles and responsibilities within their communities. I compare the women’s own interpretations of their lives and actions to those of the community, studying the language that supporters and detractors used to proclaim or undermine the visionaries’ authority. These women, their supporters, and their detractors explained their actions through the language of a “spiritual family.” These women, and those around them, viewed their positions as teachers, advisers, and leaders as an extension of their roles as women: wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters. Centrally, the role of mother has proven the most potent explanation, as the role of a teacher, nurturer, and adviser in the home was extended to the broader spiritual family of the Catholic Church in the immediate and broader communities over which these women came to preside. This research demonstrates that the women of Spain and its empire were a significantly larger force than has previously been supposed. These “spiritual mothers” were cornerstones of the religious lives of those around them. They actively shaped their fellow men and women in their faith and understanding of religion and did so with the approval of many male members of the Catholic Church.