Religious Women in Golden Age Spain

The Permeable Cloister

Elizabeth A. Lehfeldt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351904544
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Through an examination of the role of nuns and the place of convents in both the spiritual and social landscape, this book analyzes the interaction of gender, religion and society in late medieval and early modern Spain. Author Elizabeth Lehfeldt here examines the tension between religious reform, which demanded that all nuns observe strict enclosure, and the traditional identity of Spanish nuns and their institutions, in which they were spiritually and temporally powerful women. Lehfeldt's work is based on the archival records of twenty-three convents in the city of Valladolid, and peninsula-wide documents that include visitation records, the constitutions of religious orders, and spiritual biographies. Religious Women in Golden Age Spain is the first book-length study in English to pose this chronological and conceptual framework for identifying and analyzing the role of nuns and convents in late-medieval and early-modern Spanish society.

Chapter 1

Bound Together in Community: Convents and Their Patrons

A stroll through a medieval or early modern convent would overwhelm the modern observer with the palpable traces of the presence of secular individuals. Buried beneath the stones of the church, memorialized in a side chapel, and remembered through the display of a family coat of arms (escudo) in the cloister, patio, or other parts of the convent, temporal society was omnipresent. For the nuns who inhabited these buildings this would have imparted a daily sense of their relationships to the world beyond the cloister, underscoring their defining mission: offering intercessory prayers for the very individuals and world whose presence constantly confronted them. Patronage in its many forms forged the fundamental links between the cloister and the secular world. Whether through founding a convent, offering an endowment to an existing one, or pledging a dowry when a female relative made her profession, these gestures and gifts offered secular society the opportunity to create powerful, enduring ties to female monasticism. The investments of secular citizens made significant statements about their piety, communal values, and a yearning for salvation. Convents, for their part, depended heavily on the beneficence of temporal society for their survival and saw their own place in the city’s social landscape enhanced by the recognition of their patrons.

Yet a fundamental tension characterized these mutually beneficial relationships. The pious and charitable impulses of secular patrons brought both resources and worldly preoccupations into the cloister. When patrons founded convents and then adorned some portion of it with their escudos, for example, the gesture encompassed a host of concerns. Certainly this was an act of charitable generosity. The patrons also undoubtedly believed that they were forging a spiritual link; their association with a pious institution and the prayers of its inhabitants shortened the distance between themselves and the divine. These kinds of ties also brought greater assurances of salvation. But their decision to hang their families’ escudos on the convent walls speaks to the overlap of sacred and secular motives. Their charity and link to the divine were not silent or modest. Rather, the escudo created an unmistakable and prominent declaration of their generosity and piety to human observers as well as God. Their patrons’ preoccupations in turn drew convents into this world of temporal concerns. Gifts led to estates that they had to manage. Dowries entangled them in legal questions of inheritance strategies. For both parties, then, these relationships by definition blurred distinctions between the spiritual and temporal. This chapter will examine the variety of patronage relationships in Valladolid and their impact on the institutions of female monasticism in the city.

Bricks and mortar: making a foundation

A study of the convents founded in Valladolid from the Middle Ages until the mid-seventeenth century reveals steady support for female monasticism. Seven convents called the city home before 1500. Between 1500 and 1563 (the last year that the Council of Trent met), six new convents had appeared in the city. By 1650 there were ten more, raising the total number to twenty-three. While support for male religious foundations was also strong, it paled in comparison to the support for female institutions; by 1650 there were thirteen male monasteries— only a little more than half the number of convents—and four seminaries. A careful examination of the forces behind this generous and consistent support of female monasticism reveals several noteworthy trends and patterns. The first is that this patronage came primarily from the upper classes but was not always restricted to the nobility; even members of the lower orders made modest gifts to convents to secure a relationship with them. Secondly, the motives informing patronage decisions reflected a host of concerns shaped by both local circumstances and larger peninsula-wide religious currents. Patronage of female monasticism functioned within a specific and complex matrix of piety, prestige, finances, monastic discipline, and gender.

Secular society prized female monasticism for a variety of reasons. Convents were sacred spaces wholly dedicated to spiritual and pious goals. Their secular contemporaries prized convents for the intercessory powers of their inhabitants. Nuns were entrusted with the awe-inspiring and critical responsibility of praying for the salvation of secular society. In this, convents served functions similar to those of their male counterparts. Convents, however, were spiritually distinct institutions in that they were also intended to be enclosed spaces that protected female virginity and chastity, two qualities that represented the feminine ideal in Spanish society, whether secular or religious. Nuns, the embodiment of these spiritually and socially valuable virtues, acquired a spiritual worth different from that possessed by monks. Finally, patrons also expected nuns to perform certain services beyond the cloister—ones that they did not necessarily expect of monks. It was not unheard of, for example, for nuns to visit laywomen in times of crisis like the death of a child.

As institutions, convents were also socially significant entities. Prestige and sanctity emanated from convents that could boast royal founders or enticing foundation legends. Convents were a showcase for the complex statements that vallisoletanos chose to make about their piety and their wealth. Patronage or a familial attachment to convents brought secular society one step closer to the divine. They became associated with institutions dedicated to piety and spirituality. Yet these ties simultaneously served temporal interests. Patronage and other means of participation in the lives of these sacred communities made important statements about secular prestige and social standing. Families used endowments, gifts, and their connections to religious houses as avenues for displaying their wealth. Finally, patrons could mark their goals in tangible ways: the visible display of a family coat of arms; the gravestone marking burial onconvent grounds; the recitation of memorial masses; the presence of a female relative offering intercessory prayers. In a world subject to overwhelming social and economic upheaval, patronage of female monasticism was a steady and attractive avenue for forging a distinct social identity that could simultaneously mark the patron as pious and prestigious.

Patrons and convents were thus bound together in close community.¹ For their part, convents clearly stood to gain by forging these relationships with their patrons and the families of their nuns. The economic support of patrons could augment their estates and insure their financial stability. In addition, the attention of wealthy and prestigious members of society enhanced their own reputations as institutions worthy of such attention. Though the networks of endowments and gift-giving that pulled them closer appear as a kind of quid pro quo of money exchanged for prayer or endowments exchanged for the opportunity to display a family coat of arms, it is important to recognize the larger significance of these relationships that deliberately created and sustained institutions that upheld specific communal values. When patrons requested burial in convents or supported the religious professions of their daughters as nuns, they also affirmed the enduring ties of a particular kind of community that joined convents and secular society. Monetary gifts were not isolated acts performed with a limited, one-time value, but rather gestures that created long-term relationships.

The first discernible pattern in the patronage of female monasticism was the significant role played by the royal family in founding and bolstering female convents in the medieval period. In the high and late Middle Ages, the Spanish monarchs displayed their deep devotion to the endowment of Valladolid’s convents. This patronage grew out of two traditions. The first was the European-wide earlier medieval precedent of royal families creating monastic foundations.² In Spain the institution of the monastic encomienda gave these bonds a particular character.³ Rooted in early medieval practice and modeled on patron-client relationships like those between towns and monarchs, for example, the encomienda was a relationship forged between Spanish kings and monastic foundations through which these kings often assumed the protection and defense of monasteries. This protection could take a number of forms, including outright financial support, the military defense of property, or simply the status and prestigeconferred by royal attention.⁴ For their part, as a prerogative of this type of patronage, the monarchs gained influence in monastic life (the appointment of abbots, the management of resources) and also facilitated their ties to the divine and thus the assurance of salvation. Over time the monastic encomienda evolved and the nobility assumed these protective powers and prerogatives. By the late fourteenth century, the institution had come under attack for widespread corruption.⁵ Abuses in the system included the nobility rewarding secular, non-professed family and friends with appointments as abbots. These abbots often did not reside in their foundations and simply benefited from the foundations’ income. What had begun as a relationship built on protection had become one that violated the distinction between lay and religious prerogative.

Nonetheless, the relationship fostered by the encomienda set the tone for royal patronage of monasticism in the Middle Ages. Santa María de las Huelgas is a notable example of royal patronage for convents in Valladolid.⁶ The origins of this female community are unclear, but by the thirteenth century it was recognized as a local beaterio associated with the Cistercian Order and located outside the city walls.⁷ In 1282 fire destroyed the community’s buildings and the queen of Castile, María de Molina, wife of King Sancho IV, came to the rescue by offering new lodgings. Her generosity served her own ends and ultimately transformed the institutional character of this beaterio. When she intervened in its affairs, María intended to create a community on a grander scale and chose the appellation of Santa María de las Huelgas for the convent in conscious imitation of the venerable Cistercian convent of the same name in Burgos. It brought her and the royal family one step closer to the divine and affirmed in the eyes of secular society their support of these religious institutions and the ideals they embodied. Finally, as an expression of piety and concern for her salvation and to cement her ties to the foundation, she also requested burial in the convent and the recitation of ten thousand masses to be said for her by five perpetual chaplains.

Such a decision elevated the more modest beaterio to a different level of monastic prestige—it received the appellation “la Real” just as its namesake in Burgos had—and it also enhanced its power and authority. María endowed the community richly and vested much of the administration of this wealth in the person of the abbess. In her will of 1321 she granted Las Huelgas an annual rent of 50,000 ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: A Convent, a Bishop, and a Town
• 1 Bound Together in Community: Convents and Their Patrons
• 2 Blurring the Boundaries: The Significance of Convents as Estate Managers
• 3 Litigious Behavior: Convents and Lawsuits
• 4 A Carpenter Resisted: Convents and Late Medieval Monastic Reform
• 5 Habits of Reform: Religious Women Before Trent
• 6 The Cloister and the World
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index