The Problems and Promises of Early Modern Gender
Studies:
The Case of Spain
Lisa Vollendorf
Wayne State University
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In the past year, I have given more thought than
ever before to the state of early modern gender studies and, more specifically,
to the position of Spanish studies within the broader fields of women's
literature and history. Some of these
thoughts, as one might imagine, have not been particularly optimistic. At a time when we are seeing large
quantities of influential books, monographs, and articles on women in early
modern Spain, specialists in the Renaissance and Baroque periods of other
European countries continue to give short shrift to this research. This oversight has far-reaching
consequences, not the least of which is that peninsular scholarship tends to
exist in isolation from work on the rest of western Europe. I have heard colleagues in English, for
example, claim that European women only wrote closet drama and never wrote
anything that might have been destined for the stage in the early modern
period. Others proclaim late
seventeenth-century English writer Mary Astell the first European
feminist. Similar to discussions
about the invention of the novel in eighteenth-century England, these claims
do little to further our understanding of the development of feminist thought
or the scope of European women's literary history. Moreover, the slight attention paid to peninsular research
compounds the difficulties of publishing in the field, as the number of presses
interested in Spanish studies has diminished over the past two decades.[1] |
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To explore how we might influence future directions of
the field of research on early modern Hispanic women and deal with some
obstacles we currently face, I would like to be guided by the ideas about
friendship, equality, and market economies present in the following sonnet,
which was written by Sor Violante do Ceo (1601-93) for her friend Doña
Bernarda Ferreira: |
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Belisa, el amistad es un tesoro
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tan digno
de estimarse eternamente, |
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que a su
valor no es paga suficiente |
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de Arabia y
Potosí la plata y oro. |
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Es la amistad un lícito decoro
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que se
guarda en lo ausente y lo presente, |
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y con que
de un amigo el otro siente |
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la
tristeza, el pesar, la risa, el lloro. |
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No se llama amistad
la que es violenta, |
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si no la
que es conforme simpatía, |
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de quien
lealtad hasta la muerte ostenta: |
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Esta la amistad es
que hallar querría, |
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ésta la que
entre amigas se sustenta, |
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y ésta,
Belisa, en fin, la amistad mía.[2] |
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Sor Violante casts
friendship as the fruits of collaboration, as a meaningful end product of
emotional commitment; something not unlike, I would suggest, the relationship
of many critics to their research on early modern women. Indeed, in its exploration of mutual
reliance, economic markets, and ideological commitment, Sor Violante's sonnet
evokes factors directly related to research in the field of women's literary
history. |
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I.
Collaboration
and Readership |
3 |
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Es la amistad un lícito
decoro |
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que se guarda en lo
ausente, y lo presente [. . . ]. |
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Sor Violante's evocation of
absence and empathy speaks to our endeavors as scholars. Even though we tend to work in isolation,
we write for each other, united in the common endeavor of recovering women's
literary history. The decisions each
of us makes--about which article to write, whose texts to teach, and which
theories we find useful--impact the collective state of our field. |
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Indeed, the decisions we have made along the way now
have a history of their own. In the
early years of feminism, we saw a lot of work concentrated on a few women
authors. Recently we have seen a
wider variety of research informed by a broader range of methodologies. Zayas and Sor Juana are both good examples
of authors who have been studied heavily through many theoretical lenses
(i.e. various feminisms, Marxism, deconstruction, narratology), and now we
are seeing more comparative work done on them in conjunction with other
women.[3] As research on these women attests, the
broadening of the disciplines has progressed over the last three decades to
include many theoretical approaches to a diverse group of writers. |
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In spite of the boom in women's studies over the past few
decades, somehow work on Spanish women remains a little out of step with the
other early modern fields. Colleagues
putting together panels and books on Europe continue to overlook Spain. Often, one essay or presentation on Spain
suffices for coverage of the Hispanic world.
This tokenism raises an issue that scholars in women's studies have
been aware of for a long time: the division between peninsular and Latin
American studies often functions as an impediment to understanding the
pre-nineteenth century Hispanic world.
Efforts to break down this disciplinary boundary have only been slow
to make an impact. In fact, the
Asocación de Escritoras de España y América (1300-1800) did not adopt
interdisciplinarity as the organizing rubric of the annual conference until
2001.[4] |
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While the Latin American vs. Peninsular split keeps us
from studying early modern and colonial women's literary history as part of
one large, albeit complex, field, the existing divisions in Golden Age
studies impede the incorporation of women's writing into the larger
discussions about Spain's literary history.
Poetry experts, comediantes, cervantistas, and others meet annually to
discuss their particular genres and canonical authors, yet these
sub-divisions do not allow for a full integration of women's writing. How, for example, do letters, diaries, and
Inquisition trials fit into our existing organizational schema for Golden Age
scholars in this country? What
existing venues do we have for discussion about the dozens, if not hundreds,
of nuns whose biographies and autobiographies have yet to be studied? I would suggest that we need to break down
some of the disciplinary walls that keep us from talking to each other about
the cultural production of men and women in the period in question. Indeed, a serious re-evaluation of our
persistent commitment to small sub-disciplines is in order if we want to
continue to revitalize early modern Spanish studies.[5] |
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II. The Economics of
Writing: The Book Market |
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Sor Violante calls friendship "un tesoro tan
digno de estimarse que a su valor no es paga suficiente de Arabia y Potosí la
plata y oro." This reference to value within a market economy has
powerful connections to current concerns about the academic book market. With the increase in the pressure to
publish in the last two decades has also come, as we all know, a decrease not in the numbers of titles
published by university presses but, instead, a decrease in the numbers of
books purchased by libraries.
Publishers cannot count on a book selling 1,000 copies. With these diminished sales has come the
pressure to publish profitable books only.
Among those who have gotten squeezed are those of us working in
non-contemporary, non-English fields, particularly in a field seen as having
a readership as small as that of peninsular studies. |
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Everyone from highly accomplished senior scholars to
new assistant professors knows something about this. There are some problems that cut across
disciplines, of course: institutions undervalue translations and critical
editions, collaborative work receives little credit in the humanities, and
edited volumes garner few rewards vis-à-vis tenure and promotion. The problem is compounded within early
peninsular studies because work on early modern Spain gets lumped into the
general category of unmarketable books.
Thus many authors turn to smaller university presses or subsidized
publishing houses that, within the larger university community, carry less
prestige than the major university presses.
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Rather than bemoan the realities of the market-driven
publishing industry, it behooves us to take responsibility for the situation
by re-examining our own research topics and taking the initiative to eliminate
the problem. There is some
good news on this front. More and
more dissertations encompass transatlantic, multi-author, or thematic topics.
I think this will make for marketable books for pre-tenure professors. The appearance of the University of
Illinois's "Hispanisms" series adds another important venue to the
already extant romance language series and to the list of presses that have
supported work in the field over the past decade when others dropped
peninsular studies altogether.
Moreover, new translations and bilingual editions of Hispanic
women's writing have helped increase the accessibility of primary texts
beyond the Spanish speaking audience.[6]
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One way to think about the future of early modern
gender studies is in terms of what we can do to gain control over the
publishing situation. We need to
continue to incorporate more women's writing, and need to think more and more
about women as historical subjects.
Researchers have taken on this task, and recent books by Anne Cruz,
Mary Giles, Stephanie Merrim, and Sherry Velasco confirm that wide-reaching,
excellent research continues to emerge from the field.[7] We can continue to reach beyond the strictly
literary focus of our training to look more intensely at letters, diaries,
and Inquisition cases. This is being
done, too, and the rewards are plentiful, as it is helping us round out our
understanding of women's creative production and daily lives in the period. |
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The constraints on our research need to be considered,
though. Scarce training in
paleography, particularly among literary critics, threatens to adversely affect
the growth of early modern women's studies.
The renewal of the NEH Paleography Institute at the Newberry Library
should help make a dent in this problem, but universities need to take the
initiative to train literature and history students better in this
regard. Another major constraint is
that our work remains somewhat isolated from other fields. I believe that we have an obligation to
our students and to the field to direct marketable and publishable
dissertations, and to think and talk more about the marketability of our
projects. This might even mean simply
trying to publish in interdisciplinary journals more frequently. This path has been paved, as there are
many fine examples of crossover work--such as Untold Sisters by Electa
Arenal, Stacey Schlau, and Amanda Powell--that have become necessary reading
for anyone (not just Hispanists) interested in women's writing. |
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The future is not bleak, by any means. It is heartening to see the diversity of
dissertation topics. It is also
heartening to see so many peers continue to collaborate, translate, and edit
volumes in spite of the disincentives for such work. Plus, many jobs advertise for expertise in
gender studies, feminist theory, and cultural studies--areas that relate to
the research that many of us do. |
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We now stand at a crossroads. Those of us who study women in Spain are in a field that
remains marginal to the rest of early modern European studies. But we work
with amazing texts and study extraordinary life stories. We work on a country whose past is deeply
imbricated in the issues of diversity that so impact debates in our own
country today. Our challenge lies in
figuring out how to better communicate with those who work just beyond our
field. In this regard, perhaps a more
vibrant future lies in interdisciplinarity.
It certainly lies in scholarship that is both aware of the past
influences and open to a more expansive future. |
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I'd like to believe that the contours of that future
match Sor Violante's expression of contendedness at the end of her sonnet: |
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Esta la amistad es que
hallar querría, |
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ésta la
que entre amigas se sustenta, |
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y ésta,
Belisa, en fin, la amistad mía. |
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If we continue to brainstorm about how to better integrate
our research into related disciplines, I believe that our articles will find
a place in comparative volumes and journals, and our books will find homes
with more presses. We will continue
to build a larger readership beyond our immediate discipline. This integration will better allow the
Hispanic women we study to be read and considered in conjunction with their
contemporaries from across the continents.
It will help them be appreciated for the aspects that they share with
other women of their own period and for the unique qualities that
distinguish them from other writers. Ésta
es la amistad que hallar querría--because more balanced and better
integrated research on early modern gender studies will enrich everyone's
understanding of women's literature and history. |
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[1]Even the recent Oxford Press teaching volume on Feminism
and Renaissance Studies almost completely overlooks Spain and the New World
(Feminism and Renaissance Studies.
Ed. Lorna Hutson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Most obviously missing from the volume are
Spain and the New World, which appear only in Stephanie Jed's excellent
article, "The Tenth Muse: Gender, Rationality, and the Marketing of
Knowledge." Yet even Jed offers a
disclaimer about the breadth of her piece, indicating that hers is a
theoretical reflection on women writers and "not an essay on Anne
Bradstreet and Sor Juana" (120).
As to the diminishing numbers of presses interested in peninsular studies,
witness the demise of the Penn State series in romance languages and
literatures, as well as the dropping of peninsular studies from many university
press lists.
[2]Tras el espejo
la musa escribe: lírica femenina de los Siglos de Oro, ed. Julián Olivares
and Elizabeth Boyce (Madrid: Siglo Veintiuno, 1993), p. 271. The
dedication to Ferreira remains likely, but unconfirmed. While Sor Violante cannot be considered a
Spanish author strictly speaking, I include her here because she wrote both in
Castilian and Portuguese and because she was born during the period of Spain's
annexation of Portugal.
[3]Most comparative articles on Zayas place her alongside
Sor Juana, Ana Caro, or Mariana de Carvajal, although Josephine Donovan has
delineated a genealogy of European women novella writers that culminates with
Zayas ("Women
and the Framed-Novelle: A Tradition of Their Own," Signs 22.4
[1997], pp. 947-80).
[4]The theme for the 2001 AEEA conference at Georgetown
University was "Más allá de las fronteras." See http://www.gettysburg.edu/~rramos/aeea/ for more information on the organization.
[5]The energetic state of early modern Spanish studies
was hailed in The Chronicle of Higher Education (2 February 2001) in
a piece about "The New Geography of Classic Spanish Literature." In case we had any doubt as to the role of
women's studies in this new geography, the article featured an inset on Zayas
entitled "Rediscovering the Racy Fiction of a 17th-Century Spanish
Woman" (p. A15).
[6]Recent translations of women's texts include: Sor
Juana Inés de la Cruz's La respuesta/The Answer, ed. Electa Arenal and
trans. Amanda Powell (NY: Feminist Press, 1994); María de Zayas's The
Enchantments of Love, trans. H. Patsy Boyer (Berkeley: U California
P, 1989) and The Disenchantments of Love, trans. H. Patsy Boyer (Albany:
State University of New York P, 1997); Zayas's play, La traición en la
amistad/Friendship Betrayed, ed. Valerie Hegstrom and trans. Catherine
Larson (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 1999); Catalina de Erauso's Lieutenant
Nun: Memoir of a Basque Transvestite in the New World, trans. Michele Stepto
and Gabriel Stepto (Boston: Beacon, 1996); and Viva al Siglo, Muerta al
Mundo. Selected Works by María de
San Alberto, 1568-1640, ed. Stacey
Schlau (New Orleans: UP of the South, 1998).
[7]Excellent critical studies on Spanish women include:
Electa Arenal and Stacey Schlau, Untold Sisters: Hispanic Nuns in their own
Works (Albuquerque: U New Mexico P, 1989); Marina S. Brownlee, The
Cultural Labyrinth of María de Zayas (Philadelphia: U Pennsylvania P,
2000); Anne Cruz, Discourses of Poverty: Social Reform and the Picaresque
Novel in Early Modern Spain (Toronto: U Toronto P, 1999); Mary Giles, ed. Women
in the Inquisition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1999); Margaret R. Greer, María
de Zayas Tells Tales of Love and the Cruelty of Men (University Park, PA:
Penn State UP, 2000); Stephanie Merrim, Early Modern Women's Writing and Sor
Juana Inés de la Cruz (Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 1999); Mary Elizabeth
Perry, Gender and Disorder in Early Modern Seville (Princeton: Princeton
UP, 1990); and Sherry Velasco, The Lieutenant Nun (Austin: U of Texas P,
2000).