Women and Authority in Early Modern Spain: The Peasants of Galicia

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WOMEN AND AUTHORITY IN EARLY MODERN SPAIN

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Women and Authority in Early Modern Spain The Peasants of Galicia ALLYSON M. POSKA

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York # Allyson M. Poska The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) Crown copyright material is reproduced under Class Licence Number C01P0000148 with the permission of OPSI and the Queen’s Printer for Scotland First published 2005 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 0–19–926531–3 978–0–19–926531–2 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Acknowledgements When I reﬂect back over the past seven years, I am struck by the generosity of the many people who helped bring this work to fruition. I hope that I have done justice to the insightful comments of those who read versions of the manuscript, including Katherine French, Elizabeth Lehfeldt, Monica Chojnacka, Mary Elizabeth Perry, Sara T. Nalle, and Alison Weber. I appreciate the time and energy that they spent, and their ideas helped me bring depth and breadth to Galegas’ lives. Many other people helped me ﬁll in missing details or patiently consulted with me on speciﬁc issues, among them Merry Wiesner, Marta Vicente, James Amelang, James D’Emilio, Carla Rahn Phillips, Kristin Valentine, Angela Pitts, Karen Winstead, and Jean Ann Dabb. Katherine French is my closest friend and collaborator. She was a continual source of ideas and emotional support. My heartfelt thanks and apologies go out to anyone whom I have not named. I appreciate their expertise none the less. I want to acknowledge the institutions that made this book possible. My trips to the archives in Spain were ﬁnanced by a number of Faculty Development Grants from the University of Mary Washington. In 2000–1, I received a Fellowship for College Teachers and Independent Scholars from the National Endowment for the Humanities that allowed me to take a year off from my teaching and dedicate myself to writing and thinking about Spanish peasant women. During that year, David Carrico Wood and Elizabeth Ferry became great friends and colleagues, reading my work and talking Spanish history over great food and wine. In the spring of 2004, I was named a senior fellow at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis. I want to thank the faculty, staff, and graduate students associated with the Center for their assistance. The staff at the Center, Lynn Shanko and Tim Alves, made my stay in New Jersey particularly enjoyable. Over the course of the semester, Amy Froide, the other senior fellow at the Center, patiently answered my unremitting barrage of questions about single women. In 1990, during my ﬁrst visit to Galicia, I was fortunate enough to meet Aser Angel Ferna´ndez Rey and Ana Bande Bande. Since then, they

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and their daughter Alma have entertained me and lovingly toured me through the Galician countryside. They also took beautiful photographs of cruceiros from around the region, one of which appears in this text. Their friendship means the world to me. I appreciate the support of my friends and colleagues at Mary Washington. My weekly runs with Mary Rigsby and Claudia Emerson helped to sustain me mentally and physically. In particular, I want to thank Stephen Hanna, who created the maps for this book. He is a skilled cartographer and a great friend. Without the help of Carla Bailey, interlibrary loan librarian at Mary Washington, I could never have ﬁnished this project. She tracked down a library’s worth of obscure titles. Finally, all my love and appreciation goes to Christopher Kilmartin. Our travels together have included treacherous drives in tiny rental cars up poorly marked Galician mountainsides and through labyrinthine ﬁshing villages. While I worked in archives and libraries on both sides of the Atlantic, he kept the home ﬁres burning and the dogs happy and healthy. Our discussions of gender issues and life in general have made me smarter and a better person. His support for me has been unwavering. I dedicate this book to him.

Contents List of Maps and Illustration A Note on Currency and Measures

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Introduction: Gendering Peasant Society Women without Men Single Women and Property Sex and the Single Woman ‘A married man is a woman’: Gender Tensions in Galician Marriages Widowhood Modelling Female Authority Beyond Finisterre

Bibliography Index

viii ix 1 22 41 75 112 163 193 228 247 267

List of Maps and Illustration Map 1. Early Modern Spain Map 2. Ratio of Women to Men (ages 16–40) by municipality, 1787 Illustration. The cruceiro at Allariz (Ourense)

33 37 196

A Note on Currency and Measures During the early modern period, Galicia, like the rest of the kingdom of Castile, used maravedı´s as the primary money of account. A ducado was equal to 375 maravedı´s and a real was worth 34 maravedı´s. Understanding the true value of these coins is much more complicated. The Spanish economy ﬂuctuated wildly between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, with some periods of very high inﬂation. Moreover, the cost of goods varied signiﬁcantly from one part of Galicia to the next. Grain was generally measured by the fanega, or bushel. A ferrado was equal to one-quarter fanega.

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Introduction: Gendering Peasant Society During the reign of Augustus (27 bce–14 ce), the Greek geographer Strabo made an astounding assertion about the gender norms of the native peoples of north-western Spain: ‘it is the custom among the Cantabrians for the husbands to give dowries to their wives, for the daughters to be left as heirs, and the brothers to be married off by their sisters. The custom involves, in fact, a sort of gynaecocracy.’1 Strabo went on to note that the female members of the Callaı¨ci (or Gallaecians), Astures, and Cantabri, ferocious tribes that had recently been conquered by Rome, were remarkably courageous, killing their children rather than allowing them to be taken captive by the Romans, and hard-working, giving birth while toiling in the ﬁelds.2 Historians know little about gender norms in ancient Spain, but it appears that, far from characterizing tribal cultures, Strabo may have had his own reasons for portraying the people of north-western Spain in these highly gendered terms. Classicists have long since demonstrated that tribes ruled by women were a common trope in ancient literature and that the Greeks insulted conquered peoples by describing them as having been ruled by women. In fact, Strabo goes on to say that the power of women in these tribes ‘is not at all a mark of civilization’.3 Certainly, his depiction has not held up to historical scrutiny. There is no evidence of a 1 Strabo, The Geography of Strabo, III-4.18, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1949). Scholars disagree on the meaning of the term gynaecocracy. Although Simon Pembroke acknowledges the essential validity of Strabo’s statements on female inheritance, he also argues, on the basis of Aristotle’s deﬁnition of gynaecocracy, this was ‘more of an evaluative than a descriptive term’ and that Strabo did not mean ‘anything more technical than women getting out of hand’. Simon Pembroke, ‘Women in Charge: The Function of Alternatives in Early Greek Tradition and the Ancient Idea of Matriarchy’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 2 Strabo, III-4.17. 30 (1967), 20, 22. 3 Strabo, III-4.18. Classicists have ascertained that Strabo acquired his knowledge of northern Spain not from an actual visit, but from the commentaries of earlier Greek writers, including Posidonius. Alain Tranoy offers an analysis of Strabo’s commentary in

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truly matriarchal society in Iberia or anywhere else in the Western past, despite tenacious investigations by scholars from a variety of disciplines.4 Nevertheless, Strabo’s words struck a chord with me as I completed my ﬁrst book on the religious beliefs of early modern peasants in Galicia, the descendants of the Gallaecians whose customs he so provocatively described. Paging through tattered books in dank archives, I found early modern Galician husbands bringing dowries to their wives, parents choosing daughters as heirs, and mothers and sisters marrying off sons and brothers more than a millennium and a half after the Greek geographer made his remarkable observations. With every testament and dowry contract, I was coming to an understanding of Galician peasant women that had more in common with Strabo’s attempt at a cultural insult than with traditional portrayals of Spanish women. In sharp contrast to Strabo’s vision of courageous, hard-working women in control of familial inheritance, scholars have formulated their understanding of gender in early modern Spain around the seemingly univocal depiction of women presented by the theological and prescriptive literature of the period, Golden Age drama, and modern anthropological studies. According to these sources, Spanish society viewed women as inherently weak, easily deceived by the devil, and prone to religious excess. They were vulnerable to sexual temptation and in need of constant protection. As a result, Spanish society demanded that women live according to an unyielding culture of honour based on strict chastity and modesty. Transgressions of the culture of honour, whether real or imagined, harmed not only the reputation of the woman involved, but also that of her family. In order to prevent humiliation, men had to supervise women carefully, even to the point of complete seclusion. Early modern moralists promoted this highly sexualized and deeply distrustful view of Spanish women. Although Spanish defenders of women existed, the ideas of authors whose works echoed the conservative political and religious discourse of the period proved to be much more La Galice Romaine: Recherches sur le nord-ouest de la pe´ninsule ibe´rique dans l’Antiquite´ (Paris: Diffusion de Boccard, 1981), 106–7. 4 For more on the historical search for matriarchal societies, see Joan Bamberger, ‘The Myth of Matriarchy: Why Men Rule in Primitive Society’, in Women, Culture and Society, ed. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974), 263–80. A good discussion of the issue of matriarchy in the West is Cynthia Eller, The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory: Why an Invented Past Won’t Give Women a Future (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000).

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pervasive. Indeed, Spaniards composed two of the most frequently cited prescriptive texts of the early modern period, The Education of a Christian Woman by Juan Luis Vives (1523) and The Perfect Wife (1583) by Fray Luis de Leo´n. Fundamental to nearly all discussions of gender in Spanish society, these works provide vivid examples of this restrictive vision of women. According to Fray Luis, ‘woman is by nature weaker and more fragile than any other creature, and by inclination and habit frail and ﬁnicky’.5 According to both men, women were easily overcome by a desire to dominate, possessed by a tendency to anger, pride, and idleness, and having a propensity to sin and lust. As a result, the social and behavioural standards advocated by these authors were uncompromising. They emphasized complete female submission to male authority.6 Chastity was the highest virtue, and without it a woman faced social ostracization. According to Vives, a girl who has lost her chastity will find through her own fault everything sad, unhappy, mournful, hateful, and hostile to her. What will be the sorrow of her relatives when they sense that they are all dishonored because of the base conduct of one girl? What will be their grief ? What tears will be shed by parents and those who nurtured her? . . . What hatred will this arouse in the members of your household! What will be the talk of neighbors, friends, and acquaintances in denunciation of this wicked girl, what derision! What gossip there will be among girls of her own age, what loathing her girl friends will have for her! How she will be avoided wherever she goes!7

Fray Luis went further, stating that ‘a woman’s chastity . . . is the basis upon which the whole ediﬁce [of the perfect wife] is founded and, in short, it is the very being and substance of the wife, because, if she does not possess this, she is no longer a married woman but a perﬁdious harlot and the dirtiest mud, and the most foul-smelling and repulsive dirt’.8 According to this discourse, sexual purity was the deﬁning characteristic of a Spanish woman; the loss of it meant the loss of her very humanity. 5 A Bilingual Edition of Fray Luis de Leo ´n’s La Perfecta Casada: The Role of Married Women in Sixteenth-Century Spain, ed. and trans. John A. Jones and Javier San Jose´ Lera (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellon Press, 1999), 31, 33. 6 Mary E. Giles (ed.), Women in the Inquisition: Spain and the New World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 10. 7 Juan Luis Vives, The Education of a Christian Woman: A Sixteenth-Century Manual, ed. and trans. Charles Fantazzi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 83. 8 Luis de Le ´on, A Bilingual Edition of Fray Luis de Leo´n’s La Perfecta Casada, 41.

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Since women were feeble by nature, they were to be subordinated in marriage in order to protect both their own virtue and male honour. According to Vives, within marriage, women were to submit completely to the will of their husbands: ‘Not only the tradition and institutions of our ancestors but all laws, human and divine, and nature itself, proclaim that a woman must be subject to a man and obey him.’9 Marriage was so important to the control of women that Vives praised the widows of antiquity and myth who committed suicide at the death of their husbands.10 This negative view of women was perpetuated by portrayals of women in early modern Spanish drama. Pedro Caldero´n de la Barca’s The Surgeon of His Honour (1629) is probably the most famous of the Golden Age plays in which a man restores his honour by killing his wife over her rumoured inﬁdelity. In the play, prior to Don˜a Mencı´a’s marriage to Don Gutierre, the King’s brother, Prince Enrique, had eagerly pursued her. When Prince Enrique attempts to rekindle his relationship with Don˜a Mencı´a, she steadfastly rejects him. However, Don Gutierre believes that he has found evidence of their encounters and is gradually overcome by rage and jealousy. Finally, in order to restore the perceived loss of honour from her supposed intimacies with Prince Enrique, Don Gutierre has Don˜a Mencı´a murdered by a bloodletter. In his ﬁnal speech before carrying out the murder, Don Gutierre lays out the social imperative that he faced according to the most stringent application of the Spanish code of honour. ‘I am the surgeon of my honour j called upon to bleed my wife to death j If honour’s life’s to be restored. j For honour asks of us this price: j That precious blood be sacriﬁced.’11 The message was clear. For all concerned, a woman with a compromised reputation was better off dead. In addition to the texts of early modern elites, scholarly work on gender in early modern Spain has been deeply inﬂuenced by the research of Mediterranean anthropologists, whose descriptions of the Spanish honour code have become almost sacrosanct. Although 9

10 Ibid. 189. Vives, The Education of a Christian Woman, 193. Pedro Caldero´n de la Barca, The Surgeon of Honour, in Calderon. Plays: One, trans. by Gwynne Edwards (London: Methuen Drama, 1991), 90. In Spanish, Don Gutierre says, ‘Me´dico soy de mi honor, j la vida pretendo darle j con una sangrı´a; que todos j curan a costa de sangre.’ 11

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the notion dates back to the mid 1960s, the work of Julian Pitt-Rivers12 in particular encouraged scholars to view gender relations in Spanish society through a paradigm of honour and shame in which women derived their honour from their chastity and men derived theirs from the maintenance of the chastity of the women in their care.13 This set of social norms helped men ensure the paternity of their children and thus the continuation of their lineage. In ﬁeldwork in one village after another, anthropologists found concerns about honour integral to a broad array of interpersonal interactions. When one juxtaposed the anthropological research with early modern texts, the social and sexual subordination of Spanish women seemed complete. This construction of gender roles based on sexual honour has become so central to the historical research on gender in early modern Spain and its American colonies that the historians Lyman Johnson and Sonya Lipsett-Rivera recently claimed that, in colonial Latin America, ‘The culture of honor provided a bedrock set of values that organized their society and their individual lives.’14 However, many scholars, myself included, are less convinced by the pervasiveness of that culture of honour. In fact, the neatly packaged set of social norms that seemed to clearly express the gender expectations of early modern Spanish society have recently undergone signiﬁcant revision as scholars have reconsidered the relationship between the texts, early modern society, and the theoretical construct of honour. Rather than being descriptive of broader social norms, most scholars now read early modern theological and moral texts as reﬂective of the centralizing impetus of the Spanish monarchy and the unifying programme of the Catholic Reformation, both of which relied on the rhetoric of social discipline to consolidate authority among Iberian and conquered populations.15 Promoting the dangers of women and female 12 Julian Pitt-Rivers, The Fate of Shechem or the Politics of Sex: Essays in the Anthropology of the Mediterranean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). 13 For an excellent overview of the research on honour and shame, see Abigail Dyer, ‘Heresy and Dishonor: Sexual Crimes before the Courts of Early Modern Spain’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 2000), 13–17. 14 Lyman L. Johnson and Sonya Lipsett-Rivera (eds.), The Faces of Honor: Sex, Shame, and Violence in Colonial Latin America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998), 3. 15 I have discussed the issue of social discipline more extensively in ‘Confessionalization and Social Discipline in the Iberian World’, Archiv fu¨r Reformationsgeschichte, 94 (2003), 308–18.

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sexuality helped to reinforce the hierarchy that both secular and ecclesiastical authorities saw as the ‘natural order’ of society—God, Man, and Woman. As Mary Elizabeth Perry has pointed out, this anti-female discourse presented a framework for the implementation of a variety of ‘order-restoring’ measures that increased central authority at the expense of individual autonomy and local culture.16 Scholars have also reassessed the place of prescriptive literature in early modern culture and the pervasiveness of the patriarchal and often misogynist ideas espoused by those authors. First, these men did not write their works for broad consumption and implementation. Both Vives and Fray Luis composed their texts for particular women to address issues speciﬁc to those women’s classes and circumstances. As humanists and clerics, they conceptualized their works within paradigms that had little to do with actual women.17 Instead, their sources were the great thinkers and clerics of antiquity and early Christianity, part of a long tradition of scholarly and religious treatises that were decidedly anti-feminine in both tone and content. They did not base their discussions on Spanish social norms or even Spanish law. Moreover, Vives left Spain as a young man and never returned. He composed The Education of a Christian Woman for Catherine of Arago´n as a guidebook for her young daughter, Mary Tudor, both of whom lived in England.18 Fray Luis’s reputation as a scholar and theologian was tarnished by his notorious run-ins with the Inquisition. As a result, there is little to indicate that the authors’ misogyny necessarily reﬂected broader anti-female sentiment in Spanish society. Certainly some women, particularly aristocratic women, were not only held to these expectations but willingly subscribed to them and cultivated them within their social circles. However, the fact that some 16 Mary Elizabeth Perry, Gender and Disorder in Early Modern Seville (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 177. 17 For an excellent and much more extensive discussion of humanist views of women and marriage, see Isabel Morant, Discursos de la vida buena: Matrimonio, mujer y sexualidad en la literature humanista (Madrid: Ediciones Ca´tedra, 2002). For more on the views of Spanish moralists, see Marie-Catherine Barbazza, ‘L’E´pouse chre´tienne et les moralists espagnols des XVIe et XVIIe sie`cles’, Me´langes de la Casa de Vela´zquez, 24 (1988), 99–137. 18 The translation of Vives’s text into English in 1529 by Richard Hyrde under the title Instruction of a Christian Woman greatly expanded its audience. For a discussion of Vives’s text in England, see Betty S. Travitsky, ‘Reprinting Tudor History: The Case of Catherine of Aragon’, Renaissance Quarterly, 50/1 (Spring 1997), 164–74.

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men and women willingly embraced these restrictive notions of female behaviour does not indicate that the Spanish population or even the Castilian aristocracy generally accepted such notions. This gap between prescriptive literature and individual behaviour was not a uniquely Spanish phenomenon. Feminist historians have revealed similar discrepancies between the prescriptive literature of the period and women’s lives across the continent and in England.19 The exact reasons for this gap are difﬁcult to unravel. It is not clear whether few people actually knew about the prescriptions or whether they were common knowledge but largely ignored by the populace.20 Whatever the case, with increasing frequency historians have exposed signiﬁcant differences between the ideal woman championed by men like Vives and Fray Luis and the lives of actual Spanish women. As we will see, recent research reveals that although sexual purity might have been applauded by clerics, intellectuals, and the male members of aristocratic families, for many women it was only haphazardly pursued. In fact, even the archetype of the macho Spanish male who would rather kill his wife than suffer a loss of honour seems to have been more prevalent in literature than in reality. While the murder of Don˜a Mencı´a still leaves audiences shocked, in reality such harsh acts, while not unknown, seem to have been rare. As I will explore in more detail later, the Castilian legal system provided women and their families with a variety of mechanisms to restore their impugned reputations, none of which involved murder. Indeed, the violent responses to transgressions of male honour depicted on stage and in literature may have been popular exactly because they presented the extreme consequences of inﬂexible sexual standards. They fed early modern imaginations much like Hollywood movies feed modern minds with unrealistic and often unappealing portrayals of sex and violence in American society.21 Historians’ understanding of the role of honour in Spanish society is further complicated by the issue of class. To whatever degree they found 19 Tim Stretton, Women Waging Law in Elizabethan England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 10–11, 68. See also Amy L. Erickson, Women and Property in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 1993). 20 Stretton, Women Waging Law, 10. 21 Richard Boyer has come to a similar conclusion about the relationship between literature and society in ‘Honor among Plebeians: Mala Sangre and Social Reputation’, in Johnson and Lipsett-Rivera (eds.), The Faces of Honor, 153–4.

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an audience, early modern prescriptive literature and drama spoke almost exclusively to and about aristocratic Spanish women. Despite the fact that 75–80 per cent of early modern Spaniards were peasants and that Spanish society was rigidly divided along class lines, we know little or nothing about the gender norms of the Spanish peasantry.22 For more than three decades, scholars have painstakingly teased out the distinguishing features of Europe’s diverse agricultural communities. Their work has revealed the complex interplay of family structures, land tenure, and labour systems under which the majority of the European population lived.23 Nevertheless, the scholarly assumption has generally been that Spanish peasant families, like their upper-class counterparts, were patriarchal, hierarchical, and structured around the maintenance of female honour. In addition, cultural misogyny and a lack of rights and resources severely limited peasant women’s social and economic opportunities.24 These assumptions fail to acknowledge not only the signiﬁcantly different social and economic conditions facing peasant women in Spain and across Europe, but also the varying kinship structures and traditions among European ethnic groups and the ways that those structures affected gender relations.25 Quite unwittingly, 22 I have based these ﬁgures on the Catastro of 1752. For more on the extent of the peasantry, see Teo´ﬁlo F. Ruiz, ‘The Peasantries of Iberia, 1400–1800’, in The Peasantries of Europe from the Fourteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries, ed. Tom Scott (London: Longman, 1998), 53. 23 Certainly the most important works on the early modern peasantry have been produced by French scholars, including Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, The Peasants of Languedoc, trans. John Day (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974), Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, The French Peasantry, 1450–1660, trans. Alan Sheridan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), and Pierre Goubert, The French Peasantry in the Seventeenth Century, trans. Ian Patterson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). The contributors to Scott, The Peasantries of Europe provide good overviews of the current research. 24 Exceptions to this trend have been the works of Barbara Hanawalt, The Ties that Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), and Judith Bennett, Women in the Medieval English Countryside: Gender and Household in Brigstock before the Plague (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), both of which have made substantial contributions to our understanding of medieval peasants and gender relations. 25 For excellent examples of and reﬂections on the heterogeneity of household systems in the Italian peninsula, see Marzio Barbagli, ‘Three Household Formation Systems in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Italy’, and William A. Douglass, ‘The JointFamily Household in Eighteenth-Century Southern Italian Society’, in The Family in Italy from Antiquity to the Present, ed. David I. Kertzer and Richard P. Saller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991).

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historians have introjected the classist views of peasant society expressed by their early modern counterparts. A striking example is the way that modern scholars, like early modern intellectuals, frequently describe powerful women in peasant culture (witches, healers, holy women) as marginalized from the rest of society and as aberrations in need of repression by patriarchal authorities—a view of peasant women which, as we will see, was not necessarily held by peasants themselves. Finally, for more than a decade, the honour and shame paradigm has come under intense scrutiny by some scholars, especially feminist anthropologists who have described it as the product of Anglo-Saxon ethnocentrism and anthropological androcentrism.26 These critics emphasize the fact that during the 1960s, mainly English-speaking anthropologists used this framework to explain what they viewed as the deviant sexual norms of Mediterranean societies. Moreover, many scholars have fallen into the same error when discussing northern European women. In her research on early modern English women, Laura Gowing has also noted that scholars have tended to ignore more complex understandings of honour employed by early modern people.27 Although many anthropologists have moved beyond such an essentializing description of social behaviour, for the most part historians have remained narrowly focused on honour based on female chastity, ignoring the other possible social and cultural norms that might have structured gender relations. Early modern Spain was not a uniﬁed society, but instead a patchwork of many social classes and regional cultures. Honour may have been only one of many factors that deﬁned the actions and interactions of Spanish men and women.

GENDER RELATIONS IN PEASANT SOCIETY Focusing on the peasant women of Galicia, this study examines how other factors, including demography, economy, inheritance, and local 26 Sally Cole provides an excellent discussion of this issue in Women of the Praia: Work and Lives in a Portuguese Coastal Community (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 77–9. For a brief explication of this critique, see Sharon R. Roseman and Heidi Kelley, ‘Introduction’, Anthropologica, 41/2 (1999), 92. 27 Laura Gowing, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words, and Sex in Early Modern London (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 113.

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cultural norms, may have been more important to deﬁning gender norms than honour based on female chastity. In formulating my analysis, I have based my understanding of alternative constructions of gender roles on the work of theorists and feminist anthropologists who have reconceptualized traditional notions of power and authority, in particular female authority.28 An analysis of power is not outside the scope of peasant studies. Certainly, peasants in early modern European society had less power than their aristocratic counterparts, they were exploited economically, and they were excluded from all but local decision-making processes. Yet anthropologists have demonstrated that if one narrows the analytical focus to the household as the primary social and economic unit in peasant societies, it is much easier to examine how peasants exercised authority over themselves, their families, their friends and neighbours, and their property. Of course, within varying cultural and economic frameworks, peasants exercised different forms and degrees of agency. For instance, household authority may have played a more central role in the lives of peasants in peripheral areas of Europe, where secular and ecclesiastical institutions were weak. Those peasants may have had more opportunities for independent decision-making than their peers living in central areas where the nobility and/or the clergy exerted more effective authority over village and household decisions. Similarly, wealthier peasants had a wider array of choices than landless labourers. Nevertheless, on a daily basis, each peasant and peasant family exercised some power and authority as they made decisions about their interpersonal relationships, their social and economic circumstances, their futures, and the futures of their children. In the context of analysing peasant authority, anthropologists have argued that in many societies, peasant women wielded signiﬁcant ‘domestic power’ that was often masked by the social prestige afforded to men’s activities by scholars and other outsiders.29 Women with ‘domestic power’ have some autonomy in key decisions concerning sexual relations, marriage, residence, divorce, and the lives of children.30 They do not 28 For a discussion of the deﬁnitions of power, authority, and inﬂuence, see Jill Dubisch (ed.), Gender and Power in Rural Greece (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 16–20. 29 Ernestine Friedl, Women and Men: An Anthropologist’s View (Prospect Heights, Ill.: 30 Ibid. 7. Waveland Press, 1984), 4.

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make all decisions or even dominate the decision-making process; however, they have enough authority within the family to have a reasonable possibility of prevailing in domestic decision-making.31 In addition, women’s domestic power that allows them to interact on a relatively egalitarian basis with their husbands and other family members may have implications for relationships and decisions made outside of the home. For instance, the anthropologist Joyce Riegelhaupt’s research demonstrated the degree to which Portuguese women’s domestic power inﬂuenced local politics despite their ofﬁcial exclusion from formal political participation.32 Women’s domestic power derives from a variety of sources, the most important of which is access to and control of economic resources.33 Indeed, anthropologists have demonstrated that the household’s reliance on land, livestock, or other resources brought to the family by the woman through dowry, inheritance, or independent accumulation increases women’s domestic authority.34 However, in terms of the exercise of authority, merely having resources is insufﬁcient. Cultural norms must exist that support and value women’s independence and their ability to use those resources to inﬂuence their own futures and those of other people. In this way, access to resources encourages female economic independence and creates scenarios in which women and men must negotiate household decisions.35 Women do not necessarily 31 David D. Gilmore, ‘Men and Women in Southern Spain: ‘‘Domestic Power’’ Revisited’, American Anthropologist, 92 (1990), 955. 32 Joyce Riegelhaupt, ‘Saloio Women: An Analysis of Informal and Formal Political and Economic Roles of Portuguese Peasant Women’, Anthropological Quarterly, 40 33 Friedl, Women and Men, 7. (1967), 122–5. 34 Scholars like Peggy Sanday who have studied female status in non-European societies found that women ‘achieve economic and political power and authority when environmental or historical circumstances grant them economic autonomy and make men dependent on female activities’. Sanday, Female Power and Male Dominance: On the Origins of Sexual Inequality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 114. For an overview of the relationship between women and property, see Jack Goody, ‘Inheritance, Property, and Women: Some Comparative Considerations’, in Family and Inheritance: Rural Society in Western Europe, 1200–1800, ed. Jack Goody, Joan Thirsk, and E. P. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 10–36. For a discussion of French inheritance practices and gender, see Julie Hardwick, The Practice of Patriarchy. Gender and the Politics of Household Authority in Early Modern France (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), esp. ch. 3. For England, see Erickson, Women and Property in Early Modern England. 35 Nancy Tanner, ‘Matrifocality in Indonesia and Africa and among Black Americans’, in Women, Culture, and Society, ed. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere

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Introduction

consciously seek out these points of negotiation nor do they engage in them merely for self-advancement, but their control of resources implicates women in these interactions none the less.36 Anthropologists often refer to societies in which women have considerable domestic power as matricentric (woman-centred) or matrifocal (woman-focused), but such descriptions of women’s authority in north-western Spain have engendered considerable controversy.37 The anthropologist Carmelo Liso´n-Tolosana has called women’s authority in Galicia ‘absolute’, noting that ‘Not only does the woman dominate in social life and social relations, but the submission of the husband to his wife and/or mother in economic, agricultural, and family decisions is absolute.’38 Liso´n-Tolosana goes on to say that the marriage and inheritance customs of the area created what he called a ‘semiamazonian regime’ in which mothers and daughters dominated sons-in-law and (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974), 131–2. For a related discussion, see Marsha Prior, ‘Matrifocality, Power, and Gender Relations in Jamaica’, in Gender in CrossCultural Perspective, ed. Caroline B. Brettell and Carolyn F. Sargent, 2nd edn. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1997), 331. 36 Dubisch, Gender and Power, 27. 37 Although I have chosen not to refer to early modern Galicia as matrifocal, the research on matrifocal societies is also highly relevant to this discussion. The term matrifocal, mother-focused, was originally used by R. T. Smith in 1956 to describe the kinship structure of lower-class families in British Guiana. On the basis of their economic relations, he concentrated on the central role of mothers and the marginal role of fathers in the families that he studied. The Negro Family in British Guiana (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1956). In 1961, Hildred Geertz made an attempt to broaden the deﬁnition beyond economics in order to describe the familial relationships that she encountered in Java. According to Geertz, ‘For kindred to be matrifocal means that the persons of greatest inﬂuence are women, and that relationships of greatest solidarity are those between women, or those between persons linked by a woman.’ The Javanese Family: A Study of Kinship and Socialization (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1961), 79. This deﬁnition moved signiﬁcantly away from Smith as it explored the possibilities of female power outside of the domestic setting and the family. Then, in 1974, Nancy Tanner proposed an even more inclusive deﬁnition of matrifocality. She expressed interest in ‘(1) kinship systems in which (a) the role of the mother is structurally, culturally, and affectively central and (b) this multidimensional centrality is legitimate; and (2) the societies in which these features coexist where (a) relationship between the sexes is relatively egalitarian and (b) both women and men are important actors in economic and ritual spheres’. This deﬁnition allowed scholars to examine the breadth of gender relations in a community, studying the different contexts in which men and women interact, and analysing the ways that those contexts interrelate. Tanner, ‘Matrifocality in Indonesia and Africa’, in Rosaldo and Lamphere (eds.), Women, Culture, and Society, 132–3. 38 Carmelo Liso ´ n-Tolosana, Antropologı´a cultural de Galicia (Madrid: Akal, 1979), 249.

Introduction

13

husbands.39 David Gilmore and Jan Brøgger echoed Liso´n-Tolosana’s assurance, stating, ‘the power and independence of women is more than pronounced, it is absolute’.40 However, as Sharon Roseman, Heidi Kelley, and others working in the region have shown, female authority is rarely absolute. Rather, it is a product of relationships and subject to constant negotiation. Terms like matrifocal overly homogenize what is a more complex array of interpersonal interactions.41 Contributing to the complexity of gender expectations in peasant societies, villagers often present the appearance of male control. Many peasants perpetuate what the anthropologist Susan Carol Rogers has referred to as ‘the myth of male dominance’. This myth ‘gives [men] the appearance of power and control over all sectors of village life, while at the same time giving to [women] actual power over those sectors of life in the community which may be controlled by villagers’.42 The need for an appearance of male authority might be the result of gender tensions within the community or may be a product of the interaction between local culture and broader European norms that refused to acknowledge either egalitarianism or female authority. This difference between the appearance of male power and an actual or desired egalitarianism often creates tensions in peasant society. As Heidi Kelley has shown, peasants can both believe that women can do anything that men can do and value women’s contributions and decision-making as much as men’s, while still expressing traditional hierarchical notions of masculine superiority.43 In fact, Sharon Roseman’s ﬁeldwork in the region has demonstrated that ‘discourses of hierarchy and egalitarianism are both mobilized as strategic resources by household members of both genders and all ages’.44 Different villages and Ibid. 255. Jan Brøgger and David Gilmore, ‘The Matrifocal Family in Iberia: Spain and Portugal Compared’, Ethnology, 36/1 (Winter 1997), 15. 41 Sharon R. Roseman and Heidi Kelley, ‘Introduction’, and Heidi Kelley, ‘ ‘‘If I Really Were a Witch’’: Narratives of Female Power in a Coastal Galician Community’, Anthropologica, 41/2 (1999), 134–5. 42 Susan Carol Rogers, ‘Female Forms of Power and the Myth of Male Dominance: A Model of Female/Male Interaction in Peasant Society’, American Ethnologist, 2 (1975), 728–9. 43 Heidi Kelley, ‘Unwed Mothers and Household Reputation in a Spanish Galician Community’, American Ethnologist, 18 (1991), 573. 44 Sharon R. Roseman, ‘ Quen Manda? (Who’s in Charge?): Household Authority Politics in Rural Galicia’, Anthropologica, 41/2 (1999), 118. 39 40

?

14

Introduction

even families negotiate these issues differently. Indeed, Rogers’s subsequent test of her hypothesis on another village revealed that the ‘myth’ of male dominance did not hold true of gender relations in all peasant families. Nevertheless, her work highlights some of the ways that gender hierarchies and norms play themselves out differently in seemingly identical communities.45 Thus, these works encourage historians to explore the many ways that gender expectations are constructed in different communities, rather than merely projecting the norms of one class, region, or community onto another.

METHODOLOGY AND SOURCES Such a study of peasant women’s lives requires a broad-minded, multidisciplinary approach. The sources are disparate, uneven in quality, and rarely, if ever, produced by the women themselves. Thus, social history’s traditional reliance on documentary evidence provides only partial access to these women’s experiences. However, feminist scholars, particularly those working on Native American and African women, have successfully used the methods and sources of ethnohistory to explore the lives of non-European women. In order to better understand women in societies for whom the documentary record is weak and/ or created by outsiders, they have expertly mined a variety of nondocumentary sources, including oral histories, folklore, and origin myths. They have also relied on anthropology to help them assess historical structures and relationships and formulate questions about gender norms in those societies. As the historian Nancy Shoemaker has noted, scholars of Native American women have used ethnohistory to examine not only the complementary and relatively egalitarian nature of indigenous women’s power, but also the sources of that power, including differing kinship systems, women’s economic contribution, and women’s reproductive capability.46 Ethnohistorical analysis provides 45 Susan Carol Rogers, ‘Gender in Southern France: The Myth of Male Dominance Revisited’, Anthropology, 9 (1985), 65–86. 46 Nancy Shoemaker, Negotiators of Change: Historical Perspectives on Native American Women (New York: Routledge, 1995), Introduction. In my opinion, one of the best examples of the use of ethnohistory to examine women’s lives is Theda Perdue, Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700–1835 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,

Introduction

15

depth as well as breadth to our understanding of women’s experiences worldwide. In many ways, the people of Galicia are ideal subjects for ethnohistorical study. Although ethnohistory has generally been conﬁned to the study of non-Western peoples, most of whose extant documentation was created as a result of European and/or American conquest, Eric Wolf ’s ‘people without history’ were not exclusively non-Europeans. Much like other colonized peoples, Galician peasants were economically and culturally subordinated by members of the Castilian upper classes. Although extensive documentation for the lives of peasant women exists, male scribes and functionaries of non-Galician institutions, especially the Catholic Church and the Castilian legal system, produced nearly all of those records. During the seventeenth century, and until recently, literacy rates in the region were very low;47 however, the Spanish system of notaries provided women with regular access to literate culture. Spanish peasants, both male and female, used notaries to record some of the most important decisions of their lives: whom they would marry and under what conditions, who would care for their ill or ageing bodies and their belongings, and how those things would be dispersed at their deaths. Spanish notarial archives are ﬁlled with testaments, dowries, wills, and other mechanisms of property transference, all manifestations of the social and economic connections between people and property. These legal documents are multivocal. They are both executions of the Castilian legal code as well as vivid explications of the priorities and 1998). Edna G. Bay has done groundbreaking ethnohistorical work on women in Dahomey in Wives of the Leopard: Gender, Politics, and Culture in the Kingdom of Dahomey (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998). Latin Americanists have also used ethnohistory as a fruitful approach to understanding the issues facing women. One excellent example is Indian Women of Early Mexico, ed. Susan Schroeder, Stephanie Wood, and Robert Haskett (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997). 47 Gelabert Gonza ´lez found that in the sixteenth century whereas nearly 53% of men could sign their names, fewer than 3% of women in Galicia’s primary city, Santiago de Compostela, could do likewise. Juan Eloy Gelabert Gonza´lez, ‘Lectura y escritura en una ciudad provinciana del siglo XVI: Santiago de Compostela’, Bulletin Hispanique, 84/3–4 ( Juillet-Decembre 1982), 268–9. My investigation of literacy rates based on Galician testaments from the seventeenth century produced only slightly different results: 9% of female testators could sign their names and 35% of the men. Based only on signatures, both Gelabert Gonza´lez’s work and my own do not take into account literacy that included reading only.

16

Introduction

decisions of early modern people. While it is important to remember that dowry contracts, marriage contracts, property transfers, and wills are all formulaic documents, historians generally agree that despite the constraints of the notarial formulas, those employing the notaries made clear expressions of their beliefs, affections, and desires. Moreover, many documents include stories and other autobiographical information that provide insight into the daily lives of quite ordinary people. They contain not only a variety of essential demographic information, including the place of origin of the parties and often the ages of the participants, but also discussions of familial relationships, occupations, living situations, and the ownership and prioritization of goods. Within certain legal parameters, Spaniards had signiﬁcant freedom to dispose of real estate, family wealth, and personal items, and those decisions provide considerable insight into gender expectations. Of course, there is no doubt that not all the provisions of every document were carried out as the individual or individuals might have wished, an aspect of the documentary record that can be particularly problematic for the social historian. Parties renegotiated, altered, and even reneged on contracts, and the complexity of the Castilian judicial systems and the litigiousness of early modern Spaniards makes it nearly impossible to know with any certainty the ﬁnal outcomes of these interactions. However, for my purposes, the actual fulﬁlment of each contract as written is signiﬁcantly less important than the priorities and expectations that it conveys. As descriptive as notarial records may be, they are limited in scope. First, as notaries charged for their services, they were unavailable to the poorest members of society. In addition, the majority of transactions delineated in notarial records involve property, and the poorest members of society did not own signiﬁcant pieces of moveable property to lease, sell, or pass down to their descendants. Of course, legal norms and interpersonal relationships both worked to ensure that many transactions were not ofﬁcially recorded by notaries. For instance, as Castilian law delineated the basic division of property post-mortem, not everyone made testaments and some contracts may have been sealed with a handshake rather than the signature of a notary. In contrast, the extant summaries of trials, the relaciones de causas, from the Inquisition in Galicia offer the opportunity to glimpse expressions of feeling from even the poorest Spanish peasant who came into its orbit.

Introduction

17

Although I will discuss the role of the Inquisition in Galicia more in Chapter 3, for now I would merely like to address some of the basic issues involved in using Inquisition documentation. In their pursuit of heresy, Inquisitors were as interested in an individual’s motivations and beliefs as they were in the commission of the heretical act. Inquisitors used intense interrogations to probe the accused’s knowledge and mindset at the time of the heretical act, thought, or conversation. However, the desired result of the interaction between the Inquisitor and the accused was not merely to dispense justice or punish inappropriate thoughts and deeds. Instead, Inquisitors sought the accused’s confession and eventual reconciliation with the Church. Although it was rare, Inquisitors used torture purely as a means to elicit a confession, without which a person could not be reconciled.48 As a result, the relaciones often include relatively detailed explorations of the accused’s thoughts and feelings as the Church probed the inner workings of Spaniards’ minds. In Galicia, the full trials records do not remain extant, only the summaries of each case, known as relaciones de causas. The relaciones are of varying lengths, yet all provide some basic information: the name of the accused, his or her place of origin, usually some record of the accused’s age and occupation, and the charge. From that point, the record varies depending on the complexity of the case. Sometimes, the summary just states the charge, that the accused was repentant, and the punishment. In other cases, in addition to the basic information, the relacio´n includes summaries of the witnesses’ testimonies, the defence of the accused, the results of Inquisitional enquiries, and even comments on the health and intellect of the accused. These records can be quite problematic. As the prodigious literature on the Inquisition has demonstrated, in addition to the acute power differential, the accused often differed from the ofﬁcers of the Inquisition in terms of class and language.49 In the Galician tribunal, the class difference between Inquisitors and defendants was acute. The historian 48 Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), chs. 8, 9. This is not to say that the Inquisition was completely benign. Prosecutions were often processed very slowly and many died during the cumbersome, yet methodical, investigations. 49 Many scholars have addressed this issue. For an excellent discussion of the problems with court documentation, see Gowing, Domestic Dangers, 45–8.

18

Introduction

Jaime Contreras has classiﬁed approximately one-third of those brought before the Galician tribunal as peasants, another 9.3 per cent as artisans, 2.7 per cent as ‘poor’, and 1.9 per cent as servants. The majority of those Contreras classiﬁed as artisans would also have been engaged in agricultural production and were socially and economically identiﬁable as peasants.50 (Clergy, businessmen, bureaucrats, and those involved in the maritime industries made up most of the rest of the accused.) Language also may affect our reading of Inquisitorial documentation. All of the relaciones are in Castilian, although most of the accused probably made their statements in the local language, Galego, which is more closely related to Portuguese. Although it is difﬁcult to know exactly how these linguistic differences may have altered the information conveyed in the relaciones, one must be mindful of the distortions, misunderstandings, and misinformation that may have resulted from both the conversations themselves and the transcription of those conversations. In addition, Inquisition records are problematic in much the same ways as most legal documentation. There were certain formulas involved in their creation. The accused worked to produce a narrative that would exonerate him or her rather than give an undistorted account of either feelings or actions. Scribes often did not provide word-for-word transcriptions of the proceedings, but instead schematic descriptions of testimonies. And, ﬁnally, there is the nagging question of using trial records of accused heretics to understand broader societal norms. Nevertheless, as illiterate peasants attempted to explain their words and deeds to men who had the power to dramatically change their lives or even end them, witnesses and defendants seem to have spoken with remarkable candour about their lives and opinions. However problematic, thus far historians have no other documentary record of ordinary people’s words, making Inquisition records an important, if imperfect, window into the mentalities of early modern peasant women. Finally, the Catholic Church was the primary creator and collector of documentation about Galician peasant women. The Catholic Reformation Church’s attempt to force all parish priests to keep good, clear records of parishioners’ participation in the sacraments of baptism, 50 Jaime Contreras, El Santo Oﬁcio de la Inquisicio ´n en Galicia, 1560–1700 (poder, sociedad y cultura) (Madrid: Akal, 1982), 582–3.

Introduction

19

conﬁrmation, marriage, and last rites met with only sporadic success, as I have shown elsewhere.51 Nevertheless, the institution produced a substantial amount of documentation. These records are useful for a study of women’s lives because, at the moment of the administration of the sacrament, the Church cared almost exclusively about the state of the soul of the person involved, not his or her gender. In that respect, it is difﬁcult to detect any particular gender bias in the parish documentation. Parish priests recorded the births, deaths, and marriages of both men and women with equal conscientiousness, or lack thereof. That being said, parish records in Galicia have a chequered past. As Galicia was the most densely populated region in Spain, and one of the longest continually Christian areas, there are thousands of tiny parishes. Over the centuries, the damp Galician weather, wars with Portugal, the Napoleonic War, and the Spanish Civil War all took their tolls on the documentary record. In addition, the continued isolation of many parts of Galicia meant that, as recently as 1990, episcopal archivists were still ﬁnding early modern parish books scattered among the ruins of old churches and in the chicken coops of poor rural rectories. Beyond their tattered state, parish records often suffer from the inconsistencies of only semiliterate priests, thus making large-scale statistical analysis nearly impossible. Moreover, parish records are also problematic in that they do not normally convey much in terms of the feelings and direct expressions of parishioners. The Catholic Church avidly collected information about the physical and spiritually created relationships between parishioners, not their emotions. To complement the documentary record, ethnohistory encourages the use of non-documentary sources taken from living members of that culture and the technique of direct historical analogy in which scholars use information collected from a modern culture to understand past cultures.52 The idea of historical analogy often makes historians, with their dependence on the written record and emphasis on the speciﬁc historical context, uncomfortable. However, it has been used quite successfully by many historians, especially those studying Native 51 See my Regulating the People: The Catholic Reformation in Seventeenth-Century Spain (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1998). 52 According to one ethnohistory textbook, direct historical analogy draws ‘an analogy from a group that is the direct historical descendant of the group in question’. Russell J. Barber and Frances F. Berdan, The Emperor’s Mirror: Understanding Cultures through Primary Sources (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1998), 265.

20

Introduction

American peoples, and offers another tool for scholars to bring depth and meaning to the experience of early modern Galician women. Since the early twentieth century, the inhabitants of Galicia and northern Portugal have been the subjects of extensive anthropological study. Scholars have identiﬁed these two regions as culturally connected. According to the anthropologist Caroline Brettell, ‘northwestern Portugal and the coastal regions of the province of Galicia in Spain should be considered together as a single demographic region. Not only are they alike geographically, but they also share similar socioeconomic conditions and migration traditions. The roles of women in these two regions are also somewhat similar.’53 I would extend that region to include most of the interior of Galicia as well (with certain exceptions that I will indicate as necessary). These anthropologists have bequeathed a wealth of interviews with Galegos, especially women, whose lives were often minimally impacted by the economic modernization that transformed many peasant societies during the twentieth century. Although they clearly present a perspective from the recent past on female roles in the region, they lived in a world that bore some critical similarities to early modern Galicia. In particular, Galicia’s demographic situation, which I will outline in Chapter 1, only intensiﬁed over the next two centuries. Thus, until quite recently, modern Galegas shared much in common with their early modern counterparts. In addition, anthropological and ethnographic study has also compiled a rich collection of songs, legends, and folklore upon which the historian can draw. Although neither I nor other ethnohistorians argue that gender norms in the region remained unaltered over the centuries, the evidence does suggest that many of the broader aspects of Galician culture, including gender expectations, have shown remarkable permanence as deep structures of society.54 With care and consideration for differing historical circumstances, we can use materials from the recent past to help reﬁne, validate, or even reject our interpretations of the past.55 53 Caroline B. Brettell, Men who Migrate, Women who Wait: Population and History in a Portuguese Parish (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 265. 54 Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973). 55 Anthony H. Galt, ‘Marital Property in an Apulian Town during the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries’, in The Family in Italy from Antiquity to the Present, ed. David I. Kertzer and Richard P. Saller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 320.

Introduction

21

This ethnohistorical examination of women in early modern Galicia explores the complex interactions of gender, demography, sexuality, economy, and family structures in the formulation of gender norms in Galician society. The single most important factor in the lives of women in early modern Galicia was the very high rate of male migration from the region. Chapter 1 sets the stage for this study by describing the reasons behind that migration and its role in determining family structures and gender norms. Chapter 2 analyses the lives of the large numbers of single women and their access to property. Chapter 3 explores how single women’s economic viability affected their notions of love and sexuality and their status in the community. As the majority of Galician women eventually found spouses, Chapter 4 discusses women’s transition from singleness to married life, relations between parents and adult children, the role of the husband in his bride’s family home, and married women’s use of property. Widowhood in Galicia came in two forms, spousal death and spousal abandonment. Chapter 5 examines this stage in peasant women’s lives and how they used their age, experience, and possessions to care for others and to protect themselves as they aged. Chapter 6 describes the rich array of cultural models that Galegos could draw upon when socializing their daughters to regional gender expectations. The ﬁnal chapter discusses the ways in which the experience of Galician women may or may not have been unique in early modern Spain and the implications of this analysis for our understanding of gender norms in early modern society more broadly. Let me be clear. I am not arguing for the existence of a matriarchal society in north-western Spain or saying that women in any way ruled men. This was not an ideal world of sexual harmony or gender equality. Men, even these women’s husbands, did not always approve of or feel comfortable with the authority of women in Galician society. Nevertheless, the convergence of a number of factors, including demography, economy, and cultural traditions, produced gender norms and relationships that made women central to Galician society, and women recognized the degree to which Galician culture revolved around them. As one Galician folksong succinctly asserts, ‘the men count for nothing where we women are’.56 56 Marisa Rey-Henningsen, The World of the Ploughwoman: Folklore and Reality in Matriarchal Northwest Spain (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1994), 140.

1 Women without Men This has not been a land of men. esto non ha sido terra de homes.1

The stories have a familiar ring to them. Women, old and young, tell of loved ones who had long since left them. Ine´s de Souto’s had left for Andalusia four months before and she had not heard from him.2 Dominga Gonza´lez’s husband had been gone for twenty years when she heard that he had died in a hospital in Seville.3 Sixty-year-old Ana Martinez’s husband had been gone for more than four decades. He had abandoned his bride after less than one year of marriage to seek a better life in Castile.4 These are only a few of the tens of thousands of life stories of peasant women whose lives were shaped by early modern Spanish migration. Ine´s, Dominga, and Ana are only unique in that, by dint of fortune, these snippets of their lives have survived in the archives. From the middle of the sixteenth century, innumerable other mothers, wives, and daughters from Spain’s north-western region of Galicia would tell similar tales of migration and often abandonment. By the middle of the eighteenth century, half of all the parishes in Galicia suffered from some dearth of men, and more than half of those had fewer than 90 men for every 100 women.5 In some Liso´n-Tolosana, Antropologı´a cultural, 353. Archivo Histo´rico Universidad de Santiago (AHUS), protocolo 5615, fo. 36 (1746). 3 Archivo Histo ´ rico Nacional (AHN), Seccio´n Inquisicio´n, legajo 2042, no. 72, fo. 1r–v (1633). 4 AHN, Sec. Inq., legajo 2042, no. 83, fos. 4v–10 (1642). 5 Isidro Dubert Garcı ´a, Historia de la familia en Galicia durante la ´epoca moderna, 1550–1830 (Estructura, modelos hereditarios y conﬂictividad) (A Corun˜a: Edicios do Castro, 1992), 19–20. 1 2

Women without Men

23

places, women outnumbered men by nearly two to one. However, the stories of the women who stayed at home have remained untold. They have been overshadowed by history’s fascination with the adventures of their sons, husbands, and brothers, who became part of the complex processes of migration to and settlement of the Spanish empire. Even as we understand more fully the high degree of mobility among the European peasantry, Galegos (the people of Galicia) stand out for their almost constant moves away from their homeland.6 Their peripatetic culture seems to have originated with the reconquest of Granada from the Muslims in 1492 when small numbers of Galegos moved south to start new lives.7 The numbers increased as others answered the call to repopulate the Alpujarras after the repression of the Moriscos in the 1570s.8 However, most Galegos left their homes under less structured circumstances. On their own initiative, they ﬂocked to the booming cities of Andalusia, the opportunities in the capital city of Madrid, the grain harvests of central Castile, the jobs left empty in Portugal, and, slightly later, the promise of the Americas. All sought better lives and secure livings. This wanderlust forever changed the countryside of north-west Spain. From the beginning, the large-scale migration of Galegos was almost exclusively male. Although this is a study of women, paradoxically it must begin with a discussion of men and male migration. At ﬁrst glance, it is difﬁcult to understand why Galician men would leave their homes. Galegos pride themselves on the uniqueness of their culture and language. Migrants express their longing, their morrin˜a, for the region’s green fertile valleys, its dramatic coastlines, and its rias, Galicia’s own fjords. Yet, by the early nineteenth century, Galician immigration was so widespread that Gallego (the Castilian spelling) had already become a derogatory term 6 For an excellent discussion of peasant mobility, see David E. Vassberg, The Village and the Outside World in Golden Age Castile: Mobility and Migration in Everyday Rural Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 7 Roberto J. Lo ´ pez Lo´pez, ‘Gentes del norte peninsular en Andalucia durante la edad moderna: Notas sobre una corriente migratoria’, in Migraciones internas y mediumdistance en la Penı´nsula Ibe´rica, 1500–1900, vol. 2, ed. Antonio Eiras Roel and Ofelia Rey Castelao (Santiago de Compostela: Xunta de Galicia, 1994), 467–98. 8 Faustino Rodrı ´guez Monteoliva, ‘Los pobladores gallegos en la repoblacio´n de la Alpujarra de Granada (1572–1577)’, ibid. 811–28.

24

Women without Men

for all Spanish emigrants to South America.9 If Galicia was their beautiful patria, why did Galician men leave? Scholars often discuss migration as the result of a combination of factors that push the migrant from home and factors that pull the migrant to a new place; however, the reality of the migratory process is more complex.10 Galegos based the decision to emigrate on a highly personal combination of economic and cultural factors. Thus, it is important to spend some time examining the reasons behind Galician emigration, as it sets the context of the lives of the women (and men) who remained behind. Without a doubt, most Galician men left because they believed that they could not make a living from the land.11 Early modern Galegos were strikingly vocal about their poverty. In response to Philip II’s 1571 questionnaire asking how many Moriscos (newly converted Muslims) it might accept, the tiny village of Villa de Ares (Corun˜a) replied that although most of the inhabitants were ﬁshermen and the rest worked in vineyards and grew wheat and rye, ‘the majority of [the inhabitants] are so poor that the wheat that they cultivate is not enough for them’.12 The villagers of Larin (Corun˜a) responded that all the inhabitants are ‘farmers and poor people’ who grow grain and nothing else. Response after response reiterated the poverty of the land and its inhabitants and that only Moriscos who could support themselves with a trade like shoemaking or tailoring would be welcome.13 While some municipalities may have exaggerated their poverty in order to prevent the resettlement of Moriscos, there was no doubt about the economic distress that most inhabitants suffered. In fact, the situation only worsened over the next two centuries. By 1769, the governing council in charge of the region, the Junta of the Kingdom of Galicia, was prompted to write to the Crown that Galegos ‘certainly are the most enslaved of the Spanish world, there is no comparison between their misery and suffering and 9 Jose ´ C. Moya, Cousins and Strangers: Spanish Immigrants in Buenos Aires, 1850– 1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 429 n. 14. 10 See ibid. 13 and ch. 1 n. 2. 11 Jose ´ Moya has argued that by the nineteenth century the relationship been poverty and emigration was weak. However, he sees poverty as destitution and landlessness rather than as economic distress and insecurity: ibid. 26–7. 12 Marı ´a del Carmen Gonza´lez Mun˜oz, Galicia en 1571: Poblacio´n y economı´a 13 Ibid. 146. (A Corun˜a: Edicio´s do Castro, 1982), 161.

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25

that of both Castiles’.14 As decidedly desperate as this description sounds, understanding the causes and relative depth of Galicia’s poverty is more intricate. A complex combination of property rights, population density, and low rates of cultivation made it difﬁcult for Galegos to earn more than a subsistence living from year to year. As was true throughout early modern Europe, social and economic relations in the countryside were largely determined by access to land, and early modern land distribution in the north-west had its roots in the Middle Ages when the Christian kingdom of Galicia quickly expelled the Muslim invaders. In the wake of their success, the warrior nobility divided most of the land among themselves. However, by the early modern period the power of the Galician aristocracy was long past its peak, weakened by a series of anti-aristocratic uprisings during the late ﬁfteenth century known as the Irmandin˜os. Only a few powerful families continued to exert authority over the region, among them the Marquises of Sarria, Astorga, and Altamira, and the Counts of Lemos and Monterrey. These noble families demonstrated little interest in their charges. They diligently collected annual rents from their peasant tenants but preferred to spend most of their time in Castile, close to the court and the rest of the Castilian nobility. The lower nobility, the hidalguı´a, was often hard to distinguish from well-to-do peasants. In San Pedro de Viveiro (Mondon˜edo), one of the hidalgos was a part-time carpenter; in Vilanova de Lourenza´ (Mondon˜edo) a sculptor and two surgeons were hidalgos. Some members of the lower nobility were even merchants of a variety of sorts, including sellers of cloth and pots.15 Although the aristocracy and clergy actually owned the land, traditions of land tenure in the region allowed the Galician peasantry (more than 90 per cent of the region’s population) greater independence from seigniorial control than peasants experienced on the large latifundia of southern Spain.16 Most Galegos rented their lands through long-term leases known as foros. These leases generally provided the owner with ﬁxed rents for the lives of three kings. Only in wine-growing areas were 14 Cited in Antonio Meijide Pardo, ‘La emigracio ´ n gallega intrapenı´nsular en el siglo XVIII’, in Estudios de Historia Social de Espan˜a, 4/2, ed. Carmelo Vin˜as y Mey (Madrid: CSIC, 1960), 481. 15 Pegerto Saavedra, Economı ´a, polı´tica y sociedad en Galicia: La provincia de Mondon˜edo, 1480–1830 (Madrid: Xunta de Galicia, 1985), 567. 16 For an overview of the Spanish peasantry, see Ruiz, ‘The Peasantries of Iberia, 1400–1800’.

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rents proportional to the harvest.17 Under the foral system, peasants could work, pass down, and sublease the land as if it were their own. Moreover, whatever the land produced (the usufruct) was often constituted as separate from both the ownership and the actual control of the land. Foro-owning peasants could pass the land to one heir and the usufruct to another. As a result, one person might own the land, another might be the signatory on the foro, and a third person might have the rights to whatever that land produced. The foral system allowed peasants indirect ownership of the land, and those property rights brought with them certain customary and legal requirements. Castilian law required partible inheritance, the equal division of property among all legitimate heirs. While I will discuss the impact of Castilian inheritance law and Galician custom on Galician women extensively throughout the book, for now I want to consider the degree to which partible inheritance may have inﬂuenced Galician men’s decisions to emigrate. From one generation to the next, as the parcels were divided up among heirs, family estates became smaller and smaller. It has been said that Galegos till handkerchiefs, and this was not far from the truth. Minifundia dominated the region, and by the eighteenth century more than half of the peasants of western Galicia cultivated plots that were only about half a hectare (slightly more than an acre). Another 30 per cent of peasants were lucky enough to have 2 hectares with which to scrape together a living.18 On average, Galegos cultivated less than 1.5 hectares per inhabitant in 1750 (slightly more than 3.5 acres).19 As one might imagine, many Galegos found it difﬁcult to provide for their families with such tiny plots. Not only were Galegos’ plots barely large enough to sustain a family, but other factors made it difﬁcult to eke out a living. Galicia was already one of the most densely populated regions in Spain when, after the epidemics of the late sixteenth century, its population boomed, nearly doubling between 1630 and 1787.20 Not surprisingly, this dramatic increase took its toll on the standard of living of most rural Galegos 17 For a complete explanation of the foro system, see Pegerto Saavedra, La vida cotidiana en la Galicia del antiguo re´gimen (Barcelona: Crı´tica, 1994), 28–34. 18 Ibid. 23. 19 Ibid. 102. 20 Antonio Eiras Roel, La poblacio ´n de Galicia, 1700–1860: Crecimiento, distribucio´n espacial y estructura de la poblacio´n de Galicia en los siglos XVIII y XIX (Santiago de Compostela: Fundacio´n CaixaGalicia, 1996), 103–7.

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because the amount of land in cultivation did not increase substantially over the same period. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, no more than 15 per cent of the land in Galicia was under cultivation.21 Thousands of otherwise arable hectares lay fallow due to poor land management and inadequate farming methods. The combination of inefﬁcient cultivation, constant division of parcels, and many mouths to feed left Galegos always teetering just above subsistence. With a growing population and a weak agricultural system, the people of Galicia grew increasingly poorer over the period from 1650 to 1750.22 However, although the economic situation in Galicia gradually worsened, it is difﬁcult to correlate it directly with Galician emigration. Although Galegos considered themselves poor and outsiders regularly noted their poverty, rural Galegos experienced different types of poverty. One Galician scholar has noted that in early modern Galicia, ‘in the face of social homogeneity exist[ed] a strong economic heterogeneity’.23 In fact, differentiating among peasants provides a clearer context for male migration. For some peasant men, emigration was either less appealing or economically unfeasible. For instance, a few wealthy peasants owned their land outright and that land was extensive enough to provide a sufﬁcient and regular income. For them, remaining at home to expand the family estate would have provided a more stable future than emigration. For the chronically poor, emigration was economically impossible. Men at the very bottom of the economic hierarchy, from Galicia or anywhere else for that matter, could not afford to migrate and lacked the skills to make migration more proﬁtable than remaining at home. The majority of Galician men would have found emigration an attractive option. Certainly, xornaleiros, landless day labourers, would have been drawn by the possibilities of regular wage labour available in other parts of the peninsula. Their erratic incomes may have made it difﬁcult to travel very far, but their options were better in sparsely Meijide Pardo, ‘La emigracio´n gallega intrapeninsular’, 479. Marı´a Concepcio´n Burgo Lo´pez, ‘Niveles sociales y relaciones matrimoniales en Santiago y su comarca (1640–1750), a trave´s de las escrituras de dote’, in La documentacio´n notarial y la historia: Actos de II coloquio de metodologı´a histo´rica aplicada, vol. 1 (Santiago de Compostela: Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, 1984), 185–6. 23 Ibid. 186. 21 22

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populated Castile. Indeed, a nineteenth-century folksong clearly articulated the allure of a journey eastward: A´ Castilla van os homes a´ Castilla por ganar Castilla queda n-a terra para quen quer traballar.

To Castile go the men To Castile to earn a living In Castile there still is land For whoever wants to work.24

The majority of Galician peasants were farmers of a variety of sorts. Labradores leased lands either from the aristocracy or from other peasants and worked in a combination of agriculture and livestock or, less frequently, exclusively in agriculture. Other peasants supplemented their farming incomes by engaging in some other complementary activity; they are known in Galego as bodegueiros. In addition, many urban dwellers remained intimately connected to rural life and were indistinguishable from other peasants. With the exception of the pilgrimage centre of Santiago de Compostela, which had a population of 15,500 in 1787 (and which had grown tremendously over the course of the eighteenth century), Galicia’s urban areas were small even by early modern standards. Early modern A Corun˜a had only 3,500 inhabitants and Ourense merely 3,000. Only fourteen towns had populations of more than 2,000 people.25 Many of these inhabitants owned or leased land just outside of the city, making a living as part-time tradespeople and part-time farmers. Indeed, although the distinctions between city and rural life may have been important in many parts of early modern Europe, in Spain, and most certainly in Galicia, the rural–urban dichotomy was less accentuated.26 These men from the middle of the peasant hierarchy made up the majority of emigrants. The Galegos who migrated were neither destitute nor landless.27 Instead, they were tenant farmers and artisans, men with skills and initiative that they believed could be put to more proﬁtable 24 Jose ´ Pe´rez Ballesteros, Cancionero Popular Gallego, vol. 1 (1886; reprint, Madrid: 25 Eiras Roel, La poblacio ´n de Galicia, 98. Akal Editor, 1979), 27. 26 William A. Christian, Jr., Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 8, and Enrique Martı´nez Rodrı´guez, ‘El Artesanado urbano de una ciudad tradicional: Santiago de Compostela a mediados del siglo XVIII’, in La documentacio´n notarial, 155. As a result, I have considered all of these part-time and full-time farmers as members of the peasantry. 27 Moya has found this to be true of nineteenth-century migrants: Cousins and Strangers, 26–7.

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use elsewhere. Many were prompted to leave by the perception that their properties were too small to support their families without supplementary income. Outsiders saw the migration of Galegos differently. At least one eighteenth-century traveller believed that Galegos emigrated only in order to ensure a leisurely retirement. Speaking of the Galegos he saw working in Portugal, James Murphy noted, ‘Many of them possess lands and houses in their own country, whither they return at stated periods to divide their hard earned pittance with their families and ﬁnally retire, as soon as they have made sufﬁcient to live independent of labors, to spend the evening of life in the simple enjoyment of domestic felicity.’28 While Murphy probably overstated Galegos’ desire for a life of leisure, there is a grain of truth in his description. Although poor in comparison with many early modern Europeans, most Galegos experienced economic insecurity more than absolute poverty. Peasant fortunes could change dramatically from year to year. When harvests were good, peasants kept the surplus; however, when crops failed, as they often did during the early modern period, the inﬂexibility of rents pushed an already poor and miserable peasantry over the edge into extreme need.29 Anthropological work in the region indicates that men continue to demonstrate a preference for wage labour over agricultural work. Those who migrated were struggling men, looking for better lives and livelihoods, not Galicia’s most impoverished searching for basic sustenance.30 The historians Antonio Eiras Roel and Jose´ Moya have argued that there is no direct correlation between any one factor, such as poverty, inheritance patterns, or population density, and emigration. Instead, they are all elements of what Eiras Roel has called ‘a social and demographic dynamic’ whose outcome often led to male migration.31 Cited in Brettell, Men who Migrate, Women who Wait, 288 n. 12. See Saavedra, La vida cotidiana, ch. 1 and his A facenda real na Galicia do antigo re´xime (Santiago de Compostela: Xunta de Galicia, 1993) for more extensive explanations of the rents and dues owed by Galegos. 30 For a more extensive discussion of the reasons for male migration, see Moya, Cousins and Strangers, 92–3. 31 Antonio Eiras Roel, ‘Migraciones internas y medium-distance en Espan ˜ a en la edad moderna’, in Eiras Roel and Rey Castelao (eds.), Migraciones internas y medium-distance, 73. For an interesting overview of the various scholarly views of Galician migration, see Ramo´n Villares, Historia da emigracio´n galega a Ame´rica (Santiago de Compostela: To´rculo, 1996), 24–33. 28 29

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That ‘social and demographic’ dynamic is critical to our understanding of emigration because, faced with more or less the same set of economic circumstances, some Iberians emigrated in large numbers during the early modern period while others did not. The decision to emigrate was informed by a variety of non-economic factors including connections to men who had already emigrated and access to information about potential sites for migration.32 Those connections among Galegos were already evident by the seventeenth century, as new Galician migrants joined other Galegos in neighbourhoods and inns in Madrid, and later, in Ca´diz.33 In addition to economic motivations, many scholars have pointed to cultural norms that encouraged migration.34 At some point, Galician culture began to associate migration with masculinity. The anthropologist Susana de la Gala Gonza´lez has found that as women did much of the subsistence agriculture, some men decided to migrate because they felt that they contributed little to the household.35 One informant told Marisa Rey-Henningsen, ‘Here, a man who wants to feel he is something has to go away and not come back. But if he does come back, he must have money in his pocket, or else he’s nothing.’36 Other migrants made even more explicit connections between migration and masculinity. In his study of nineteenth-century Galego migrants to Argentina, Jose´ Moya has noted that migrant men feminized their non-migrating counterparts, referring to them as ‘too homey’. According to Moya, ‘Too homey did not imply here the ideal of patriarchal security . . . but a lack of drive.’ Again according to Moya, ‘The rite of emigration in 32 Jose ´ Moya has done an excellent study of these networks during the nineteenth century in Cousins and Strangers, ch. 3. 33 Janine Fayard and Claude Larquie ´, ‘Hoˆtels madrile`nes et de´mographie urbaine au XVIIe sie`cle’, Me´langes de la Casa de Vela´zquez, 6 (1968), 229–58, and Marı´a Jose´ de la Pascua Sa´nchez, ‘Los gallegos en el Ca´diz de la Carrera de Indias: Balance secular de un proceso migratorio (1675–1778)’, in Eiras Roel and Rey Castelao (eds.), Migraciones internas y medium-distance, 849. 34 David Reher discusses the role of culture in migration in Town and Country in Preindustrial Spain: Cuenca, 1550–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 246. For a complementary discussion of the inﬂuence of Galician migration on recent identity, see Xose´-Manoel Nu´n˜ez, ‘History and Collective Memories of Migration in a Land of Migrants: The Case of Iberian Galicia’, History and Memory, 14/1-2 (2002), 229–58. 35 Susana de la Gala Gonza ´lez, ‘Day Workers, Main Heirs: Gender and Class Domination in the Parishes of Mourisca and Beba’, Anthropologica, 41/2 (1999), 147. 36 Rey-Henningsen, The World of the Ploughwoman, 96.

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Galicia . . . reafﬁrmed a certain deﬁnition of masculinity: man, not only as provider, but as wanderer, explorer, adventurer.’37 I have found evidence of the association between masculinity and migration as far back as the mid-nineteenth century. In one folksong, women ridiculed the men who remained in their village: La aldeina de Mandayo E aldea de poucos homes; Aqueles poucos que hai Chamanse remendafoles

The little village of Mandayo is a village of few men; Those few that there are they call ‘remendafoles’.38

The Galego word ‘remendafoles’ refers to men without spirit or personality. Clearly, women of the village of Mandayo found the men who did not migrate undesirable compared to those who left. As we will see, other aspects of interpersonal relations and gender expectations in Galicia probably added to the pressure on men to leave. Pushed by economic and cultural factors, Galician men found no shortage of possibilities for work and personal achievement elsewhere. During the sixteenth century, there was little incentive for Galegos to travel very far. Before the population boom of the seventeenth century, many men travelled to Old Castile to harvest wheat. The number of seasonal migrants is difﬁcult to estimate, but hospital records from Medina del Campo from the last quarter of the sixteenth century show that men from the interior provinces of Ourense and Lugo made up one-ﬁfth to one-quarter of those admitted. By the mid-seventeenth century, they constituted approximately half of the hospital’s annual admissions.39 Many others travelled to Talavera de la Reina. Although certainly closer than many other destinations, both treks through Castile were long—the journey from Ourense to Medina del Campo is 344 kilometres. Under the best of conditions, at 50 kilometres per day, the journey would take a person approximately one week. The typical trip from Lugo to Talavera de la Reina would take a man more than 10 days. When one combines the perils of early modern travel with the hard labour of the harvest, it is no wonder that so many Galegos landed in Castilian hospitals. 37

Moya, Cousins and Strangers, 95. Pe´rez Ballesteros, Cancionero popular gallego, 3. 43. 39 Ofelia Rey Castelao, ‘Movimientos migratorios en Galicia, siglos XVI–XIX’, in Eiras Roel and Rey Castelao (eds.), Migraciones internas y medium-distance, 96. 38

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Many Galegos, particularly those living near the border, chose to migrate to Portugal. Although northern Portugal suffered many of the same economic problems as Galicia, occasionally migrants could ﬁnd work harvesting crops.40 During most of the second half of the seventeenth century, war between Spain and Portugal thwarted the plans of many who might have hoped to travel to the more prosperous Portuguese cities to the south. However, after the conﬂict ended, the cities of Lisbon and Oporto attracted thousands of Galegos, as Portuguese labourers left their homes for Brazil and other parts of the Portuguese empire. Indeed, by the end of the eighteenth century, one English traveller to northern Portugal noted, ‘The laborers chieﬂy employed here are natives of Galicia, a province of Spain: hence, they are called galegos. Their number is computed at eight thousand in Oporto alone and the whole kingdom is thought to contain not less than ﬁfty thousand of these industrious adventurers.’41 The cities of the south of Spain offered Galegos a wealth of opportunities as their economies ﬂourished with the expanding trade with the Americas. Galegos who arrived in Ca´diz worked predominantly as servants and in the transportation of goods.42 Despite the fact that Ca´diz is approximately 1,000 kilometres from Galicia, a trek of nearly 20 days, the Galego presence was substantial. By 1773, they made up slightly more than 6 per cent of the city’s male population.43 Galegos also went to Granada in large numbers.44 These migrants were overwhelmingly male. Eighteenth-century tax registers from the city of Ca´diz document 2,251 Galegos living there, yet only nine were women.45 Similarly, records from early modern Granada indicate that 95 per cent of the immigrants from Galicia were men.46 Madrid was brimming with opportunities as the royal court expanded during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Stonecutters and other tradesmen hoped to ﬁnd work as the city was transformed into a major European capital. In addition to the construction of the Palace of the Buen Retiro and the extensive renovations made to the Plaza Mayor, Meijide Pardo, ‘La emigracio´n gallega intrapeninsular’, 549. Brettell, Men who Migrate, Women who Wait, 288–9 n. 12. 42 Pascua Sa ´nchez, ‘Los gallegos en el Ca´diz’, in Eiras Roel and Rey Castelao (eds.), 43 Ibid. 848. Migraciones internas y medium-distance, 852. 44 Rey Castelao, ‘Movimientos migratorios’, 94. 45 Pascua Sa ´nchez, ‘Los gallegos en el Ca´diz’, 848. 46 Rey Castelao, ‘Movimientos migratorios’, 94. 40 41

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BASQUE PROVINCES ASTURIAS

FRANCE 1

GALICIA

2 3

LEON

OLD CASTILE

N LO TA CA

ARAGON

NEW CASTILE EXTREMADURA

VAL EN CI A

POR

OCEAN

TUG

AL

ATLANTIC

NAVARRE

IA

MEDITERRANEAN SEA

BASQUE PROVINCES

MURCIA

1. VIZCAYA 2. GUIPUZCOA 3. ALAVA

ANDALUSIA 0

300 kilometres

Map 1. Early Modern Spain

during the ﬁrst half of the seventeenth century alone, 35 convents were built in Madrid.47 One did not have to be a construction worker to beneﬁt from the building boom. In fact, Madrid’s population swelled even as much of the rest of the country suffered from a demographic decline. Like many others, Sebastia´n Mendez, a tailor from Romariz (Lugo), believed that he could make his fortune in the capital. Sebastia´n was typical in more ways than one. Not only did he leave Galicia hoping to ﬁnd a better life in Madrid, but, like a number of others, he also decided to marry for a second time while he was in Madrid, attracting ﬁrst the attention of his neighbours at home and then the Inquisition in 1602.48 Sebastia´n was only the tip of the iceberg. During the second half of the seventeenth century, Galegos ﬁlled a Madrid inn and made up 20 per cent of the foreign population of the city.49 The Crown encouraged recruitment of migrants from the north of Spain to the Americas as early as 1511, but initially few Galegos took up the offer.50 The exact numbers are difﬁcult to obtain as licences to travel 47 Jesu ´ s Escobar, The Plaza Mayor and the Shaping of Baroque Madrid (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 34. 48 AHN, Sec. Inq., legajo 2042, no. 39, fo. 6 (1602). 49 Vassberg, The Village and the Outside World, 155, and Rey Castelao, ‘Movimientos 50 Villares, Historia da emigracio ´n galega a Ame´rica, 61. migratorios’, 98.

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to the Americas registered migrants based on their place of residence at the time of application, not their place of origin. Thus, although statistics indicate that fewer than 2 per cent of early migrants were Galegos, historians have probably underestimated their total numbers. Most Galegos who travelled to the Americas ﬁrst settled in Andalusia and thus were registered as residents of those towns.51 Moreover, this process may have taken Galegos longer than other migrants. The ﬁrst phase of their migration would have been costly. They would then have had to rebuild their savings by working in Seville or Ca´diz for months or even years before earning enough for the passage across the ocean. By the middle of the eighteenth century, changes in Spanish policy led to an increase in the numbers of Galegos bound for the Americas. In 1764 the monarchy opened the port at A Corun˜a to monthly mail trade with Havana and direct trade with American ports the following year. This decision decreased the numbers of migrants to the south and opened the way for tens of thousands of Galegos to emigrate directly to the Americas over the next century and a half.52 We know as little about the possibilities of return migration as did the Galician women who eagerly awaited their husbands’ return. Although many men may have intended to return sooner or later, many clearly died on the way to or once they arrived at their destinations. Of course, information about these unfortunate men was slow to ﬁnd its way home. Indeed, abandoned wives like Dominga Gonza´lez often had to send friends or hire men to ﬁnd out if their husbands were alive. Intermediaries returning with bad news must have been a regular occurrence. To give just one example of the high mortality rates of immigrant workers, between 1620 and 1660, 70 to 80 per cent of the foreigners who died in Talavera de la Reina were Galegos.53 Of course, from the available archival documentation, men who returned under normal circumstances and led upstanding lives would be difﬁcult to distinguish from the men who never left. I have encountered only one description of a man’s emigration and return. As he responded to Inquisitors’ questions about his bigamous marriages, Antonio Ferna´ndez, a 22-year-old blacksmith from Ourense, told how he Villares, Historia da emigracio´n galega a Ame´rica, 62–3. Although it is outside the scope of this work, it is important to note that by the ﬁrst decades of the twentieth century, upwards of 40,000 Galegos emigrated annually to the 53 Rey Castelao, ‘Movimientos migratorios’, 97. Americas. 51 52

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travelled to Toledo and worked in the blacksmith’s shop of Miguel Brabo. When Brabo died, Antonio married Brabo’s wife, Ursula de Cortes. Shortly afterwards, they had some type of conﬂict and he returned to Ourense, where his father made him marry Francesca Sotelo.54 That is not to say that many others did not happily reunite with their families, but until the late nineteenth century we do not have the evidence to estimate what percentage of emigrants made it home. Unlike many other migrating peoples, Galegos rarely sent for their families once they settled in the new lands.55 Galician men may have truly believed that their migration was only temporary. No doubt, many men intended to make their fortunes and return to their families. However, as we have seen, the realities of early modern migration did little to allow for the long-awaited reunions. Migrants either settled easily into their new lives in faraway places, spent the money before it was made, never earned enough for the return voyage, or fell victim to one of the many possible causes of premature mortality. Thus, Galicia’s women remained at home, their lives indelibly altered by the increasing numbers of migrating men. Of course, the impact of male migration varied from village to village and family to family.56 In demographic terms, one tiny Galician hamlet might look more or less like its counterpart in Castile, while the abundance of women might be visually striking in the next. Relying on the extensive demographic research of the region, I have divided the region into three common scenarios for early modern Galician migration as indicated by the ratio of women to men in the community.57 A typical community has AHN, Sec. Inq., legajo 2042, no. 67, fo. 11 (1628). For a discussion of emigrants who did send for their families, see Ida Altman, Transatlantic Ties in the Spanish Empire: Brihuega, Spain and Puebla, Mexico, 1560–1620 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 27–9. 56 See, for example, Saavedra, Economı ´a, polı´tica y sociedad, 121. The exact rates of emigration from one parish or another also vary according to the documentation that historians use to do their analyses. Without a complete population census, studies of migration during the seventeenth century tend to rely on analyses of death records. More reliable, albeit slightly later, are Spain’s two late eighteenth-century censuses, the Catastro de Ensenada of 1752 and the Census of Floridablanca (1787). The censuses offer scholars the ability to analyse Galician migration in full swing. Using these documents, historians have produced an array of detailed studies of both urban and rural areas of Galicia. 57 These formulations rely heavily on the demographic work of Eiras Roel, La poblacio´n de Galicia, especially his six demographic models, pp. 255–88. 54 55

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relatively equal numbers of men and women. High ratios of women to men are a prime indicator of the intensity of male migration. 1. Women who lived in the mountainous interior province of Lugo and the eastern areas of the province of Ourense were the least affected by male migration. Indeed, men outnumbered women in some parts of the region until the ﬁrst part of the eighteenth century, when migration from the area began to intensify.58 The majority of these Lucense migrants were single men who supplemented their meagre agricultural incomes by migrating temporarily to harvest grain in Castile. Lugo also had the highest rates of female migration. In ﬁrst half of eighteenth century, approximately 13 per cent of those absent were women compared with less than 5 per cent in most of the rest of Galicia.59 Presumably, those female migrants also engaged in seasonal agricultural labour. 2. Women in the Atlantic coastal communities of the province of A Corun˜a and the peninsulas to the south experienced the highest rates of male migration. By the second half of the eighteenth century, there were only 60 men for every 100 women in 41 of 50 communities studied by regional demographers.60 In some parishes, women of marriageable age outnumbered men by two to one.61 Even where migration was relatively less intense in 1700, we see a dramatic increase over the course of the eighteenth century. For instance, on the peninsula of Salne´s, the ratio of women to men increased from 1.10 in 1708 to 1.46 in 1752.62 In 1787, some 20 per cent of the adult men between 16 and 40 years of age were reported absent.63 3. The other area of intense male migration was the Cantabrian coast. Over the course of the seventeenth century, men left in such large 58 An analysis of the 1709 data found the rates of relative masculinity in this part of the region to be as high as 110.4 per 100 women. Estimates taken from death records from the ﬁrst decade of the eighteenth century indicate slightly higher rates of male absence, about 95.4 men for every 100 women. This lower ﬁgure may better account for the seasonal migration that was typical of the region. However, by 1787, this ﬁgure had decreased to 92 men per 100 women. Hortensio Sobrado Correa, ‘Movimientos migratorios en la Galicia oriental: el interior Lucense, 1700–1899’, in Eiras Roel and Rey Castelao (eds.), Migraciones internas y medium-distance, 535. 59 Ibid. 537. 60 Rey Castelao, ‘Movimientos migratorios’, 93. 61 Margarita Sanz Gonza ´lez, ‘Fases iniciales del fenomeno migratorio: Un ejemplo en la Galicia sudoccidental a comienzos del siglo XVIII’, in Eiras Roel and Rey Castelao (eds.), Migraciones internas y medium-distance, 521. 62 Rey Castelao, ‘Movimientos migratorios’, 87. 63 Eiras Roel, La poblacio ´n de Galicia, 94.

AT L

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A

I NT

C

OC

EAN

37

~

Mondenedo

ASTURIAS

~

A Coruna Betanzos

Lugo

Santiago de Compostela

more than 1.30

LEON

1.11 to 1.29 1.00 to 1.10

Ourense

less than 1.00 no data Tuy Data Source: Antonio Eiras Roel, La Poblacion de Galicia 1700–1860 (Santiago de Compostela: Fundacion Caixagalicia, 1996) 123–140.

P O RT U G A L

Map 2. Ratio of Women to Men (ages 16–40) by Municipality, 1787

numbers that the ratio of women to men in communities along the north coast rose from 1.08 to 1.31 at the end of the century.64 These parishes often had 30 per cent more women than men. In addition, it is important to note that much of Galicia’s shortterm migration went undocumented. Galicia has more than 1,300 kilometres of coastline that supported untold numbers of ﬁshermen and their families. Through the beginning of the seventeenth century, Malpica de Bergantinos (Corun˜a) was a signiﬁcant whaling centre and other men ﬁshed for sardines off the coast.65 While it did not have as dramatic effect on Galicia’s overland migration, the ﬁshing industry left many villages drained of men during most of the day and often for days at a time. What were some of the broader social and demographic implications of male migration for Galician women? First and most importantly, the dearth of men led to large numbers of female-headed households. Saavedra, Economı´a, polı´tica, y sociedad, 118. For an overview of the ﬁshing industry in the region, see Carmen Ferna´ndez Casanova, coordinadora, Historia da pesca en Galicia, Biblioteca de Divulgacio´n serie Galicia, no. 24 (Santiago de Compostela: Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, 1998). 64 65

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While research has demonstrated that female-headed households were commonplace in the rapidly growing cities of early modern Europe, there is little evidence of a similar phenomenon in rural Europe. European cities experienced high numbers of female-headed households because young women migrated there to work as domestics or in other urban industries.66 However, the same forces were not at work in rural Galicia. As we will see in Chapter 2, although a few Galegas migrated to larger cities in search of employment in domestic service, the large number of female-headed households in Galicia resulted not from the movement of women, but from the absence of men. In the mid-eighteenth century, approximately one in ﬁve households in Galicia were headed by women.67 The eastern mountains of Lugo had the fewest number of female-headed households,68 as families most often favoured eldest sons with additional portions of inheritance that encouraged them to remain at home.69 However, scattered across the rest of the region were parishes in which one-third or more of the households were headed by women. At the extreme were hamlets like Fiestras, where women headed 44.4 per cent of the households by 1597.70 In Chandoiro, in eastern Ourense, during the eighteenth century, 33 per cent of households were headed by women,71 and along the Atlantic coast, in places like Salcidos, nearly 38 per cent of households were headed by women.72 In the tiny villages and parishes in which a majority of Galegos lived, the inﬂuence of these households must have been signiﬁcant. In western Galicia, only 7 per cent of rural parishes had more than 200 families, and in central and eastern Galicia only 3 per cent of Galegos lived in hamlets larger than 100 families.73 For instance, in 1584 in the coto de Balboa in Mondon˜edo, 11 of the 38 households were headed by women (8 widows, 2 women who had been abandoned 66 For an overview of the role of single women in early modern Europe, see Judith M. Bennett and Amy M. Froide, ‘A Singular Past’, in Singlewomen in the European Past, 1250–1800, ed. Judith M. Bennett and Amy M. Froide (Philadelphia: University of 67 Dubert Garcı ´a, Historia de la familia, 61. Pennsylvania Press, 1999). 68 Saavedra, La vida cotidiana, 163. 69 Pegerto Saavedra, ‘Casa y comunidad en la Galicia interior’, in Parentesco, Familia y Matrimonio en la Historia de Galicia, ed. Jose´ Bermejo (Santiago de Compostela: 70 Saavedra, La vida cotidiana, 163. To´rculo, 1988), 103–4. 71 Saavedra, ‘Casa y comunidad’, 104. 72 Rey Castelao, ‘Movimientos migratorios’, 114. 73 Dubert Garcı ´a, Historia de la familia, 124.

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39

by their husbands, and one permanently celibate woman).74 Based on demographics alone, one might imagine that these women played a signiﬁcant role in the everyday life of their community. These female-headed households tended to be much smaller than those headed by men. Female households had on average only 2.5 persons per household, compared with an average family size of between 3.3 and 4.5 for families headed by men.75 That female-headed households would be smaller should not surprise us. Many of these households were headed by unmarried women who lived alone or with one illegitimate child. Many others were headed by widows who were past their childbearing years. Of course, those households headed by women with absent husbands had their size (and female fertility) constrained by frequent, if not permanent, male absence. The abandoned wives with whom I began this chapter knew from personal experience the impact of male migration. All of them lived in places in which women far outnumbered men. Ana lived in a parish in the area of Porrin˜o in the far south-east of Galicia. Although many parishes in her area suffered severe shortages of men, the situation for women of marriageable age was less serious, but still not good. There were 85 men for every 100 women.76 Ine´s’s parish of San Mamed de Rivadulla, not far from Santiago de Compostela, experienced even more intense male migration. There were 80 men of marriageable age for every 100 women.77 Finally, in Entrimo, the western corner of the province of Ourense on the border with Portugal, the case of Dominga, who lived without her husband for more than 20 years, was certainly not exceptional. Unlike many other areas of Ourense, male migration from that part of Galicia was quite strong. In the 16–40-year-old age group, there were only 77 men for every 100 women and widows outnumbered widowers by more than two to one.78 Although migration may have been more important in some communities than others and some men were gone for only short periods of time while others left for a lifetime, one fact becomes abundantly clear: during the early modern 74 Saavedra, Economı ´a, polı´tica y sociedad, 125. It is difﬁcult to know how these ﬁgures compare to other areas of Spain as the research is patchy, but in early modern Cuenca, 21% of households were headed by women, David S. Reher, Perspectives on the Family in Spain Past and Present (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 199. 75 Rey Castelao, ‘Movimientos migratorios’, 114. 76 Eiras Roel, La poblacio 77 Ibid. 127. 78 Ibid. 519. ´n de Galicia, 526.

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Women without Men

period, with each passing year, migration left more and more women in Galicia without men. As their husbands, brothers, and sons set off for distant places, these women adeptly managed without them. With courage, determination, and the sweat of their brows, tens of thousands of women maintained and expanded family estates, harvested crops, cared for homes and livestock, and married off children. Despite their relative poverty, peasant women controlled sufﬁcient resources to wield authority over friends and family members and used those resources as leverage in interpersonal relationships. In much of Galicia, women held the purse strings and made key decisions about friends and family, and their prerogative to do so was acknowledged by all the parties involved. Their use of property to assert authority over others presents a complex view of peasant women as economic and social actors in their families and their communities. Moreover, cultural norms and traditions socialized women into their critical roles as heads of households. As a result, early modern Galicia was not merely a land without men, as the elderly man described it to an anthropologist; Galicia was a land of women.

2 Single Women and Property She finds herself a person of age and not wanting to marry . . . Testament of Marı´a de Carbia (1709)

As the men of Galicia departed for faraway places, their departures swelled the numbers of unmarried women. However, if singleness was common, not all women experienced it in the same way. Struck by illness at age of 25, Marı´a de Carbia plainly declared to a notary that she did not want to marry and set about to ensure that her sister would inherit all of her property. In sharp contrast, Antonia de Silva from the same parish of Santa Eulalia Vedra lamented her lot in life. When arranging her affairs, she described herself as ‘so single, without children or hope of having them’.1 No doubt, other single women patiently bided their time, hoping that good men would come along to marry sooner than later. Whether single by choice or by chance, single women were a prominent feature of Galician society. Had these women lived in France or England, they might have been forced by need or drawn by possibilities to move to urban areas in search of economic opportunity and husbands. However, the majority of single Galegas remained in the countryside.2 There was no pressure for them to leave; their economic security was right before their eyes. A combination of Castilian law and Galician inheritance custom provided them with the resources to live on their own for a lifetime or until their lovers returned, working the land and making decisions without the supervision of any man. 1

AHUS, protocolo 5615, fo. 63 (1746). For a discussion of urban immigration for domestic service, see for instance Cissie Fairchilds, Domestic Enemies: Servants and Their Masters in Old Regime France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984). 2

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For most Galegas, singleness was a temporary, albeit extended, state. By the time most Galegas married, they were already more than 25 years old.3 In some parishes, women waited as much as a decade longer. If the average age of ﬁrst marriage for women in Riotorto (Mondon˜edo) was 30.2, then many women waited until they were in their mid-thirties before being blessed at the altar.4 Thus, large numbers of women remained single for more than half of their lives. In addition to these life-cycle single women, approximately 14 per cent of Galician women never married, a ﬁgure that was somewhat higher than the early modern Spanish average of around 10 per cent.5 However, interregional differences in migration and inheritance patterns meant that some areas had large numbers of single women. For instance, in the parish of Samos (Lugo), nearly 40 per cent of women remained single for all their lives.6 Although few other parishes had as many single women as central Lugo, the rest of the region was dotted with villages in which approximately one-ﬁfth of the female population never married.7 Of course, the fact that so many men left the region meant that it was difﬁcult for women of marriageable age to ﬁnd spouses. Yet the imbalance in the sex ratio alone does not account for the large numbers of single women in early modern Galicia.8 The high rates of parish endogamy suggest that early modern Galegas continued to rely almost exclusively on their own parish for marriage partners despite its dearth of marriageable men, a demographic norm that ensured that all women would not marry.9 In a few parishes, the rates of female celibacy (the 3 Antonio Eiras Roel, ‘Mecanismos autoreguladores, evolucio ´ n demogra´ﬁca y diversiﬁcacio´n intrarregional: El ejemplo de la poblacio´n de Galicia a ﬁnales del siglo XVIII’, Boletı´n de la Asociacio´n de Demografı´a Histo´rica, 8/2 (1990), 71. 4 Eiras Roel, La poblacio ´n de Galicia, 197. 5 Ibid. 202. Galicia’s rates of permanent female celibacy fell in the mid range when compared with the marriage rates of women in other European countries, which varied from fewer than 2% of Irish women who remained permanently single to more than 31% of Genevan women. See Bennett and Froide (eds.), Singlewomen, 336–9. 6 During the eighteenth century, female celibacy rates in Lugo were 218 per 1000 and in Ourense 165 per 1000: Pegerto Saavedra, ‘Casa y comunidad en la Galicia interior’, 108. See also Dubert Garcı´a, Historia de la familia, 61–2. 7 Eiras Roel, La poblacio ´n de Galicia, 202–3. See also Appendix 1, tables 29–41. 8 Stanley Brandes warned nearly thirty years ago against explaining nuptiality solely using demographic or socioeconomic data, in ‘La Solterı´a, or Why People Remain Single in Rural Spain’, Journal of Anthropological Research, 32/3 (Fall 1976), 206. 9 In one study, more than two-thirds of married couples came from the same parish: see Camilo Ferna´ndez Cortizo, ‘La Tierra de Montes en el siglo XVIII: Espacios

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43

proportion of the female population who never married) remained high despite the fact that marriageable men outnumbered their female peers in the local population.10 Thus, some Galegas either chose to remain single or were compelled to do so by forces other than migration. Indeed, studies of female singleness have shown that a certain percentage of women in Western Europe chose not to marry even when appropriate spouses were available.11 It is difﬁcult if not impossible to ascertain the reasons behind any particular woman’s singleness; however, it is clear that the critical factor in Galician women’s ability to remain unmarried for extended periods, or even permanently, was their acquisition and control of important economic resources. Castilian inheritance law was remarkably egalitarian in this respect. The major medieval law code, the Siete Partidas (thirteenth century) reafﬁrmed property rights afforded to women during the Visigothic period.12 The Leyes de Toro (1505), a collection of matrimoniales y reproduccio´n social’, Paper delivered at the VII Congreso de la Asociacio´n de Demografı´a Histo´rica (Abril 2004), available at http://www.ugr.es/ adeh/comunicaciones/Fernandez_Cortizo_C.pdf , 3. 10 Compare the relatively even male/female ratios with the rates of female celibacy in Cerdido in Betanzos, Asma and Caurel in Lugo, and Manzaneda and Queija in Ourense. Eiras Roel, La poblacio´n de Galicia, Appendix I, tables 57–63. 11 For a discussion of the issue of choice and singleness, see Bennett and Froide (eds.), Singlewomen, 22. 12 Early modern Spanish inheritance law was based on three main legal codes: the Fuero Juzgo, the Siete Partidas of Alfonso X, and the Leyes de Toro of 1505. The earliest, the Fuero Juzgo or Visigothic Code, was the legal code promulgated by the Visigothic king Recesvinto in the mid-seventh century. This code, which united the Spanish kingdom under a single rule of law, is a combination of Roman and Germanic law. The text contains twelve books, explicating laws and procedures for everything from adultery to the rights of Jews living under Christian rule. The Siete Partidas were compiled as a part of Ferdinand III (1217–52) and Alfonso X’s (1252–84) attempts to re-establish a single, uniform law code for Castile. More than merely a code of law, the Partidas were a comprehensive explication of the principles of Roman law that gradually superseded the Visigothic code. Adoption of the Partidas was slow, as it met with stiff opposition from jurisdictions that had traditionally been granted a high degree of autonomy from royal justice. It took nearly a century to conclude an agreement that allowed the Partidas to take effect in royal courts and royally granted charters, fueros, to remain in force in local and municipal courts. Richard L. Kagan, Lawsuits and Litigants in Castile, 1500–1700 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 22–31. For other discussions of Castilian law, see Joseph F. O’Callaghan, A History of Medieval Spain (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), 64–5; Eugene H. Korth, SJ and Della M. Flusche, ‘Dowry and Inheritance in Colonial Spanish America: Peninsular Law and Chilean Practice’, Americas, 43/4 (1987), 398; and Teo´ﬁlo F. Ruiz, From Heaven to Earth: The Reordering of Castilian Society, 1150–1350 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 60–6.

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eighty-three laws that dealt extensively with issues of property and inheritance law, reasserted those rights during the early modern period. For most Spaniards, one concept dominated the transfer of property from one generation to another: partible inheritance, in which, at least in theory, all legitimate children, both male and female, inherited equal portions of the family estate, known as legı´timas. The emphasis on partibility is evident in notarial records as Galician parents regularly invoked the vocabulary of equality in the formulation of their testaments, even though equal partition was the law. For instance, in 1671, Marı´a Dura, the widow of Pedro Rey, designated her three children, Juan, Catalina, and Dominga, as her heirs. She explicitly required that they divide her estate into equal parts.13 Similarly, Marı´a Ferna´ndez, the widow of Francisco Seoane from the village of San Juan Barbadanes (Lugo), mandated that all of her ﬁve children from two marriages receive equal portions.14 The desire for equal partition among heirs was not unique to women. Some male testators also reiterated the importance of equality. Bartolome´ Alvarez, the husband of Francesca Lo´pez, demanded that his estate be divided equally ‘with the blessing of God’ among his wife, three sons, and one daughter.15 Galician testators gave the idea of equality more than lip service. The emphasis on partibility was so strong that many Galicians included clauses that required heirs to bring back the goods that they had received prior to the testator’s death for repartition among all the heirs. Those possessions may have been loaned or even given to one of the heirs, but in actuality still pertained to the family estate. For instance, in 1694 Costanza Rigueyra demanded that her children bring the family’s goods together before proceeding with the execution of the testament.16 Of course, in Galicia families could not always achieve exact partibility with so many male heirs permanently absent. In those situations, daughters often received larger portions than they might otherwise have expected. When Marı´a Rodrı´guez Batalla, a widow, prepared her last will and testament in 1646, she made her three children, two daughters and a son, the equal heirs of her estate. However, she had to take into account that her son, Jacinto Lo´pez, had been absent from Galicia for more than 13 14 15 16

AHUS, protocolo 734, fo. 12 (1671). AHPO, caja protocolos 3669, n.f. (1662). AHPO, caja protocolos 3732, fo. 48 (1650). AHPO, caja protocolos 3773, fo. 91 (1694).

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sixteen years. She mandated that if he did not return, her two daughters were to divide his portion among themselves.17 Parents often took extra measures to ensure that young or disabled daughters received their fair shares of the estate and often gave older siblings the responsibility of managing the inheritances of younger children.18 When Sebastia´n de Mira, a peasant farmer, divided his estate, he had the difﬁcult task of providing for eight children and his wife, all of whom he made his universal heirs. He left his son, Francisco, an extra portion on the condition that he care for his unmarried sisters.19 Amaro Gonza´lez went even further to protect his youngest daughter. He noted in his will that, among his seven children from two marriages, his daughter Juliana remained unmarried. He insisted that, as she was of marriageable age, his other children should not divide his estate until after she was married.20 Siblings also bore responsibility for the portions due to mentally and physically disabled children. The widow Ana Pe´rez de San Paio noted in her will that among the children that survived her was a daughter, Jacinta, ‘whom Our Lord was served to give little understanding and capacity’. She charged her son, Pedro, with the responsibility of caring for Jacinta and gave him power over Jacinta’s legı´tima.21 Overall, between 75 and 85 per cent of testators in Galicia opted for an equal division when disbursing their worldly goods.22 Archivo Histo´rico Protocolos Corun˜a (AHPC), protocolo 742, fo. 65 (1646). AHPO, caja protocolos 3317, fo. 10 (1673). 19 AHPO, caja protocolos 3125, fo. 25 (1689). 20 AHPO, caja protocolos 3732, fo. 24 (1649). 21 Ana may have been wealthier than the average Galician. In addition to calling her daughter ‘don˜a’, she referred to both her deceased husband and her son by the title ‘Don’, AHPO, caja protocolos 3125, fo. 17 (1689). It is difﬁcult to judge the relationship between wealth and title. For a discussion of the use of the titles don and don˜a, see Mark A. Burkholder, ‘Honor and Honors in Colonial Spanish America’, in Johnson and Lipsett-Rivera (eds.), The Faces of Honor, 26. 22 This ﬁgure is based on Dubert Garcı ´a’s estimates of the percentages of testaments in Santiago de Compostela and the surrounding rural areas that opted instead for a preferred heir, Historia de la familia, 185. The degree to which true partibility was expected or achieved varied from one part of the region to another. According to anthropologists, in the recent past, partible inheritance has been most scrupulously maintained in the province of Ourense through a curious system known as a congra. Marisa Rey-Henningsen has characterized a congra as a system in which ‘young people marry but continue to live separately with their respective families . . . In this system there is no discrimination between sons and daughters: both sexes can inherit and the inheritance is shared equally among all the siblings.’ Rey-Henningsen, The World of the Ploughwoman, 102. For additional discussions of a congra, see C. Liso´n-Tolosana, 17 18

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Single Women and Property

Of course, the disbursement of real estate and moveable goods would have affected how beneﬁciaries experienced partibility. In declaring their desire for equality, testators did not delineate how parity would be achieved. The details of property division may have been hashed out prior to the testator’s death through family negotiation or the decision may have been left to heirs to work out among themselves. However, as we will see below, I found no evidence, for instance, that sons received land while daughters received moveable goods.23 In anthropological interviews, Galician peasants have conﬁrmed the cultural importance of gender equality implicit in partible inheritance, regularly reasserting the importance of being fair to all the children, regardless of their sex.24 In fact, modern Galician folklore abounds with tales in which the parent, generally the mother, comes back to haunt the child who failed to divide the inheritance equally. For example, a common story tells of a mother who had both a son and a daughter: When the son married, he brought his new wife into the home, where she quarrelled continually with her sister-in-law. Eventually, the daughter left. Later, the mother died without a will. With his sister away, the son claimed all of the property as his own. Three days after her funeral, the son attempted to plough the fields, but the oxen refused to budge. Just then, a white light appeared and he heard the voice of his mother telling him, ‘My son, I find no peace anywhere and have to keep wandering through the world until you give back to my daughter that which was hers!’ Unwilling to comply with the ghost’s request, the son tried to get back to his ploughing; however, the oxen still would not move. Frustrated with his inability to plough and feeling guilty that his mother was suffering, the son finally brought his sister back into their home and provided her with her portion of the family estate. The story ends happily with the mother achieving eternal peace and the daughter dutifully ploughing the fields with the oxen.25 Perﬁles simbolico-morales de la cultura gallega (Madrid: Akal Bolsillo, 1981), 67–9 and his Antropologı´a cultural, ch. 10. 23 In northern Portugal, Joa ˜o de Pina-Cabral found that women tend to receive land since men tend to migrate. Joa˜o de Pina-Cabral, ‘Female Power and the Inequality of Wealth and Motherhood in Northwestern Portugal’, in Women and Property—Women as Property, ed. Rene´e Hirschon (London: Croom Helm, 1984), 83. 24 See Liso ´ n-Tolosana, Antropologı´a cultural, 305 ff. 25 Marisa Rey-Henningsen, Tales of the Ploughwoman (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1996), 62–3.

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A more harrowing tale describes the tragic results of a child’s unwillingness to comply with the desire for partible inheritance expressed by a parent: A woman kept her daughter in the house and sent her sons to migrate. Later, the mother died without a will and the daughter made herself the sole heir to the house. One night, the daughter heard knocking outside the bedroom. The knocks got closer until the terrified daughter saw the ghost of her mother. The ghost said, ‘Oh, my daughter, for heaven’s sake, please go find my sons for me, because look how I have to suffer for the wrong I did them!’ However, the daughter did not fulfil her mother’s request, and the knocking and the ghost returned the next night. The daughter remained obstinate. On the third night, the mother’s ghost returned. She gave three loud knocks on the headboard of the bed. The daughter’s husband awoke to find the mother’s ghost grabbing the daughter by the hair, saying, ‘Well, if I have to go to Hell, then I’m going to take you with me!’ The ghost took her daughter’s soul away and left her dead body in the bed next to her husband.26

While it is unlikely that anyone died because they failed to comply with a parent’s wishes, the story clearly admonishes those who value individual gain over partibility. Although collected three centuries later, this tragic tale would have resonated with some unfortunate early modern heirs. In her 1677 testament, Ysavel Me´ndez bemoaned the fact that although she had inherited some goods at the death of her parents, her siblings had not given them to her and had already spent her inheritance.27 Although many siblings may have carefully managed the ﬁnances of younger brothers and sisters, some combination of greed and need left others without their rightful portions when they reached adulthood. Of course, partible inheritance may have had negative implications for daughters from poor peasant families. For those whose land only provided marginal subsistence, the continual division of plots may have left them increasingly impoverished. Moreover, it may have diminished daughters’ marriage prospects, leaving them unable to compete in an already tight marriage market.28 However, most Galegas must have been economically empowered and protected by the knowledge that they would inherit equally with 26 28

27 AHPC, protocolo 1721, fo. 491 (1677). Ibid. 63–4. Saavedra, La vida cotidiana, 215.

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their brothers. Regardless of their economic status, their ability to inherit presumably gave them more freedom to choose among potential suitors than women had in other inheritance regimes (an issue I will return to in Chapter 7). For instance, having their own property must have allowed many women to remain single rather than accept the ﬁrst suitor that came along. Most importantly, if a single woman like Marı´a de Carbia never found a desirable mate or just decided not to marry, her legı´tima provided her with the basis for economic independence. As central as equality was to both Castilian and Galician inheritance, many women could expect to inherit an even larger portion of the family estate. Beginning with the 1505 Leyes de Toro, Spanish elites could circumvent partible inheritance through the creation of mayorazgos (entailed estates), but the ability to create such an estate was limited to the aristocracy and required royal permission. However, there was a mechanism for the rest of the population to favour one heir over the others: the creation of a mejora (millora in Galego). The formula for its creation was clear, if not exactly simple. According to Castilian law, when a person died four-ﬁfths of the estate had to remain within the direct line and all legitimate heirs (typically children) had to share equally in those four-ﬁfths (their legı´tima). The remaining one-ﬁfth (quinto) of the estate was designated for funeral expenses, pious works, and free bequests. Once the funeral was paid for and the charity distributed, the testator could give the rest of that one-ﬁfth to whoever he or she chose. In addition, testators could also set aside one-third (tercio) of the estate as an additional bequest (mejora del tercio) for a favoured heir. Consequently, a testator could bequeath to a single heir the entirety of the tercio as well as the quinto, known as a mejora del tercio y quinto. For those testators who chose the option of a mejora, the partible portion of the estate was determined by subtracting the third and the ﬁfth. The remaining estate was then equally divided among all heirs who were due legı´timas, including the beneﬁciary of the mejora.29 More a rural than an urban phenomenon, mejoras had important implications for Galician peasant women and their families.30 True 29 This paragraph summarizes the very clear explanation of inheritance practices formulated by Korth and Flusche, ‘Dowry and Inheritance’, 398. 30 Hilario Rodrı ´guez Ferreiro found that in Morrazo, mejora del tercio y quinto were used by about one-quarter of the testators: ‘Estructura y comportamiento de la familia rural Gallega: Los campesinos del Morrazo en el siglo XVIII’, in La documentacio´n

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partible inheritance would have made long-term economic viability in Galicia nearly impossible, as family plots would become progressively smaller through the generations, a process that might threaten a family’s survival. Mejoras were a legally sanctioned mechanism that helped decelerate the pace of estate dissolution. Local traditions varied considerably when it came to choosing the recipient of a mejora, but in many areas parents regularly preferred single daughters as the mejorados(as). Along much of the Atlantic and Cantabrian coasts, daughters received the extra portions the majority of the time. For instance, in the coastal area of Morrazo near Pontevedra on the Atlantic coast, the historian Hilario Rodrı´guez Ferreiro found that during the eighteenth century 84 per cent of mejoras went to women and 88 per cent of these went to daughters.31 The choice of daughters as mejoradas in coastal areas has continued up to the recent past. In 1971, Liso´n-Tolosana studied 182 households in the northern part of the province of A Corun˜a and found that 77.2 per cent of those families favoured daughters with mejoras.32 There were good reasons to provide daughters with the bulk of the estate. First and foremost, these coastal areas experienced some of the highest rates of male migration. Thus, sons were potentially unavailable as heirs. In addition, as mentioned earlier, the absence of men led to large numbers of single women. On the peninsula of Morrazo, where parents overwhelmingly preferred daughters, women of marriageable age far outnumbered men. For instance, in Cangas (Santiago de Compostela), there were 1.42 women for every man and more than 20 per cent of women remained permanently single.33 Moreover, the dangers associated with the ﬁshing industry in many areas may have inﬂuenced family inheritance strategies. Daughters were reliable heirs in a society where men set sail in the morning but did not always return. Of course, it is impossible to establish cause and effect. Did parents provide extra portions to notarial y la historia: Actas del II coloquio de metodologı´a histo´rica aplicada, vol. 1 (Santiago de Compostela: Universidad de Santiago, 1982), 444. Similarly, Isidro Dubert Garcı´a found that a mejora was included in 25.9% of the testaments from the rural area around the city of Santiago, but only in 16% of urban testaments. Dubert Garcı´a, Historia de la familia, 185. 31 Rodrı ´guez Ferreiro, ‘Estructura y comportamiento’, 446. For a discussion of the same phenomenon in northern Portugal see Pina-Cabral, ‘Female Power and the 32 Liso ´ n-Tolosana, Antropologı´a cultural, 243. Inequality of Wealth’, 82. 33 See Eiras Roel, La poblacio ´n de Galicia, 627.

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daughters because they did not marry or did women not marry because their parents made such a decision economically feasible? We cannot know for certain. Whatever the case, many women in coastal areas inherited substantially more than their siblings, both male and female. As one moved inland, the preference for daughters as mejoradas decreased. In the rural areas surrounding the city of Santiago de Compostela, sons received the majority of mejoras (67 per cent), but still nearly 30 per cent went to daughters.34 In the interior province of Lugo, parents tended to prefer eldest sons over all other heirs.35 However, anthropological research indicates that when it came to choosing the mejorado, Lucense (from Lugo) parents privileged an heir’s competence over his or her gender or place in the birth order. Even in the most patrilineal areas of Galicia, parents never felt obligated to choose an unreliable male over a responsible female heir.36 With sons absent and sons-in-law hard to come by, Galician parents used the mejora to bequeath the family houses and surrounding lands to single daughters as a means of maintaining the property intact and the lineage in situ. For example, Francisco Domı´nguez was the father of ﬁve daughters and two sons, but both his sons were absent, probably having migrated permanently. After ensuring that his surviving wife would be well provided for, he bequeathed the house in which the family lived and the property that he owned around the house to his unmarried daughters, Marta and Catalina, on the condition that they share the property with their sister Ana Marı´a, who may have still been a minor.37 Upon his death, the property was theirs to share or to divide as they pleased. If one of the sisters were to marry, she might bring her husband into the family home. If her husband’s income was substantial enough, she might sell her share to her unmarried sister, who would remain in the house. In either case, the home was passed through the female line and their inheritance allowed these unmarried sisters some degree of economic self-sufﬁciency. The receipt of an extra portion of the inheritance nearly always involved a quid pro quo exchange of a service, either labour or general 34 Dubert Garcı ´a, Historia de la familia, 431. The remaining mejoras were left jointly 35 Saavedra, ‘Casa y comunidad’, 112. to a son and a daughter. 36 For an extensive discussion of inheritance in Lugo see Rainer Lutz Bauer, ‘Family and Property in a Spanish Galician Community’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 37 AHPO, caja protocolos 3317, fo. 10 (1673). 1983), esp. 70 ff.

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care and sustenance.38 Usually, the recipient was required to live in the home, although in most cases he or she would not become the head of the household until the death of both parents. In many families in both Galicia and northern Portugal, a parent designated a daughter, often the youngest, to stay home, care for her ageing parents, never marry or marry very late in life, and inherit the bulk of the family estate.39 These ‘daughters of the heart’ (hijas de corazo´n) or ‘la de casa’ were compensated for their hard work through the bequest of a mejora, often in the form of the family house.40 In Morrazo, half of the mejoras went to youngest daughters.41 The 1645 mejora provided by the widow Marı´a Boucoa to her daughter, Juana Patino, is typical. In return for having served her mother and helped her in her work, Juana would receive an extra portion that included the house and the surrounding lands upon her mother’s death.42 In other cases, the actual content of the mejora was left unstated; it was merely noted that it was an additional tercio y quinto of the estate. Costanza Rodrı´guez de San Thome´ signed a document that provided a mejora de tercio y quinto for her daughter, Magdalena Rodrı´guez, in 1690. Magdalena seems to have earned her extra share through years of hard work for her mother. In the document, Costanza explicitly connected the gift with Magdalena’s fulﬁlment of her obligations, stating that she provided the mejora ‘For all the work that Magdalena has done for me . . . for having sustained me until now and assisted me in my illnesses, old age, and work, since I have found myself so old and sick that I cannot work.’43 Magdalena had remained single and stayed at home to care for her ageing mother. At her mother’s death, she would be rewarded for her patience, kindness, and hard work. 38 While most mejoras were included in testaments, some mejoras were created in separate legal documents. The rural use of the mejora increased when they were documents independent of testaments. According to Dubert Garcı´a, testators used escritura de mejora twice as often in the countryside (11%) as in the city (5%). Dubert Garcı´a, Historia de la familia, 37. A mejora dictated in a separate document, well before the testator’s death, made the conditions of the additional bequest clear to all the parties involved. 39 For the life-story of Galician woman who undertook just such a relationship, see Hans and Judith-Marı´a Buechler, Carmen: The Autobiography of a Spanish Galician Woman (Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman Publishing Co., 1981). 40 Rodrı ´guez Ferreiro, ‘Estructura y comportamiento’, 444. For the term ‘la de casa’, see Buechler and Buechler, Carmen, 181. 41 Rodrı ´guez Ferreiro, ‘Estructura y comportamiento’, 446. 42 AHUS, protocolo 1357, fo. 30 (1645). 43 AHPO, caja protocolos 3342, fo. 16 (1690).

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For women like Magdalena, her additional inheritance came at a price. These contractual relationships between parents and children were subject to the full spectrum of positive and negative family dynamics. The favoured child may have had to win parental favour in competition with other sisters or siblings, jeopardizing otherwise pleasant and important relationships.44 Indeed, in 1709, family conﬂict forced Alonso de Bascoas, a peasant farmer, to withdraw the extra oneﬁfth portion that he had designated for his son Lorenzo. Lorenzo’s four siblings, including his unmarried sister Marı´a, had contested the mejora. According to the agreement reached among the family members, the gift had caused ‘quarrels and bickering, disputes and contention’ among the siblings, and only when the equality of the siblings had been reafﬁrmed could there be ‘peace and tranquillity’ in the family.45 In other cases, the mejorada had no choice; by virtue of her position as the youngest, she was designated at birth to remain single, care for her parents, and inherit the estate. This position could be frustrating for young women who wanted to marry or take another path in life. The mejora was a powerful tool during the testator’s lifetime because heirs lived under the constant threat of revocation. Hilario Rodrı´guez Ferreiro believes that it was ‘a dissuasive weapon’ used only to maintain control over children who might otherwise go against the provider’s wishes.46 Thus, in order to protect her inheritance, the chosen daughter had to focus all of her energies on her parents and maintain positive relations with them, a situation that anthropological research has shown could be exasperating and even oppressive in certain circumstances.47 Certainly, mothers used mejoras to cement strong relationships with their daughters. However, some anthropologists have over-romanticized this mother-daughter relationship as natural and a source of strength among Galician women.48 Heidi Kelley has demonstrated that although many mothers and daughters no doubt cared deeply for one another, and the absence of men in the household enhanced many mother–daughter 44 See Heidi Kelley, ‘ ‘‘If I Really Were a Witch’’: Narratives of Female Power in a Coastal Galician Community’, Anthropologica, 41/2 (1999), 137, and Rey-Henningsen, 45 AHUS, protocolo 3229, fo. 39 (1709). The World of the Ploughwoman, 92–4. 46 Rodrı ´guez Ferreiro, ‘Estructura y comportamiento’, 444. 47 For a contemporary discussion of the difﬁculties faced by a woman in this situation, see the story of Aurora in Buechler and Buechler, Carmen, 88–9 and 181. 48 See John Davis, Land and Family in Pisticci (London: Athlone Press, 1973), 22, and Gilmore, ‘Men and Women’, 960.

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relationships, not surprisingly, not all of these relationships were so harmonious. Mothers often made extra demands on chosen daughters both in terms of agricultural labour and household work. The mother– daughter relationship was (and is) inherently hierarchical. According to Kelley, ‘The good daughter is she who acquiesces to her mother’s demands.’49 Moreover, mother–daughter relationships presumably changed over time. Sometimes, the physical proximity and economic and emotional interdependence was indeed a source of strength for women, while at other times it was the source of irritation and conﬂict. Finally, the demand for elder care that was explicit in most mejoras makes them quite similar to employment contracts, and in many households favoured daughters became substitutes for domestic servants.50 I will return to the issue of elder care both later in this chapter and again in Chapter 5; however, at this point, from the perspective of the young female beneﬁciary of the mejora, some families did not clearly distinguish between the two roles. For instance, a widow like Costanza Rigueyra did not need additional servants. She had her daughter Olaya, whom she referred to as her ‘obedient daughter’, who had served her over the years. In her 1694 will, Costanza actually says that her daughter ‘served as her servant’. In return for her years of service, Olaya received the house, all of the furniture, and some land in addition to her legally determined inheritance.51 The same was probably true of Domingo Feyoo, whose daughter ‘had assisted him since her childhood’. For that reason and ‘other obligations that he owed her’, he bequeathed her two chestnut trees and their harvests.52 While these were certainly relationships based on affection and family obligation, they were also the products of contractual agreements between parents and children, not unlike contracts between servants and their employers. The expectations were detailed in notarized documents. In return for care and labour, the daughter received either a signiﬁcant addition to her legally predetermined inheritance or a mejora. Should she fail to fulﬁl her obligation, the daughter would receive only that inheritance guaranteed by law. 49 Heidi Kelley, ‘Competition vs. Cooperation: Female Self-Image in a Coastal Galician Community’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Washington, 1988), 455–6. 50 Hilario Rodrı ´guez Ferreiro calls mejorados/as ‘servants with certain prerogatives’ in ‘Estructura y comportamiento’, 449. 51 AHPO, caja protocolos 3773, fo. 91 (1694). 52 AHPO, caja protocolos 3773, fo. 127 (1693).

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The withdrawal of a mejora could be emotionally and ﬁnancially painful. Jacome Falcon, the father of six daughters and two sons, noted in his 1692 testament that he had provided an extra portion in mejora to his daughter Ysavel in another document. In that instrument, he bequeathed her a house and two pieces of land on the condition that she work for him and help sustain him, as he had cancer. However, in his testament, he claimed that this was no longer his will and he annulled the mejora, stating that he did not want to defraud his wife of what was rightfully hers.53 We do not know whether Ysavel fulﬁlled her father’s expectations of care, but even if she did, his change of heart brought this special father–daughter deal to an unfortunate end. Ysavel would have had to rethink her future. She may have delayed marriage, relying on the promise of the mejora, and she had certainly planned to live in the house and work the lands that her father had promised her. With the withdrawal of the mejora, all that changed. Yet, as precarious as the promise of a mejora may have seemed, the recipients of mejoras beneﬁted from some legal protections. The Leyes de Toro stipulated that the tercio y quinto could not be taken from dowries or donations propter nupcias (gifts conferred on sons for the purposes of contracting a marriage), nor from any other gifts provided to the heirs. Moreover, the actual content of the mejora was unalterable postmortem; the executors of the estate could not replace the mejora with an equivalent value in cash. Overall, as fraught with legal constraints and economic promise as they were, mejoras were critical mechanisms for the transmission of property to single women. Based upon the receipt of those properties, unmarried daughters became central to the maintenance and care of their families, perpetuating traditions of matrilocal residence and female-headed households in the region. Daughters who remained at home and never married became central to many Galician families, a tradition that has continued into the late twentieth century.54 Women often express a preference for daughters over sons. As recently as the 1970s, pregnant women in the region employed a wide range of folk 53

AHPO, caja protocolos 3125, fo. 162 (1692). In the recent past, mothers even bought plots of land adjacent to the family home in order to induce daughters to live close to them even if they chose livelihoods outside of agriculture. Buechler and Buechler, Carmen, 185. 54

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beliefs in the hope that they too would bear daughters who would care for them in their old age.55 Through both partible inheritance and the use of mejoras, a considerable amount of property in Galicia passed from woman to woman. The legı´timas and mejoras that formed that basis of single women’s property generally came from other women, usually, but not always, their mothers. Although in many families no son remained to inherit as the result of death or permanent migration, female testators tended to favour single daughters even when their sons were still alive.56 Marı´a Bidal left a mejora to her daughter Marı´a Gonc¸a´lez, despite the fact that she had four surviving sons from two marriages.57 In 1677, Marina Pe´rez, a widow and mother of both a son and a daughter, augmented her unmarried daughter Marta’s legı´tima by giving her half of the family house and half of the garden plot next to the house.58 Jacinta Ferna´ndez’s mother, Gracia, left her anything remaining in the house in addition to her partible portion, favouring her over her already established brothers.59 Other single women were the beneﬁciaries of close relationships with aunts and grandmothers. In 1684, Margarita Me´ndez Fermosa provided her unmarried niece and caretaker, Margarita Fermosa de Avellano, with a donacio´n entre vivos (literally, a gift between the living) that included the house which they had shared, on the condition that the younger Margarita have twelve masses said for her.60 Petronilla Rodrı´guez de Aguiar received a mejora from her grandmother, whose name she bore, of one-third of all the grandmother’s belongings, with the charge of having three perpetual masses said on her behalf. If Petronilla decided to marry, she would also inherit one-half of her 55 Rey-Henningsen, The World of the Ploughwoman, 131–2. Carmen, in her autobiography, expressed just such a desire for a daughter: ‘I was hoping for a daughter because daughters are the only ones who help at home.’ Buechler and Buechler, Carmen, 205. 56 According to Jack Goody, approximately 20% of all families would have daughters and no sons. ‘Inheritance, Property and Women: Some Comparative Considerations’, in Family and Inheritance: Rural Society in Western Europe 1200–1800 ed. Jack Goody, Joan Thirsk, and E. P. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 10. That both fathers and mothers might favour unmarried daughters was also true of seventeenth-century Brazil: see Muriel Nazzari, The Disappearance of the Dowry: Women, Families, and Social Change in Sa˜o Paulo, Brazil, (1600–1900) (Stanford: Stanford 57 AHUS, protocolo 1671, fo. 42 (1681). University Press, 1991), 22. 58 AHPO, caja protocolos 3550, fo. 3 (1677). 59 AHUS, protocolo 1728/1256, fo. 29 (1629). 60 AHPC, protocolo 2259, fo. 20 (1684).

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grandmother’s house.61 Marı´a Sotelo reaped the beneﬁts of her grandmother’s beneﬁcence when she bequeathed her the entire house in which she lived and the rents from a vineyard.62 As life for rural women was too unpredictable to make unconditional gifts common, Galician women used their property to ensure their own care and provide for the women upon whom they depended: single female relatives.63 The inheritance of family homes, lands, and livestock provided single women with the essential components of a subsistence living. Eventually most of these women put their accumulated wealth to work as dowries, but they were under little obvious social or economic pressure to do so. If tax lists are any indication, single women, with or without children, were not necessarily the poorest members of the community.64 Instead, they headed their own households, cultivated their own lands, and lived independently of men for most, if not all, of their adult lives. The majority of single women remained in the countryside to live, as their mothers had, off the small, leased plots that made up most Galician farms. Young women must have been raised to manage their own estates, no matter how meagre. In order to do so, they acquired the same knowledge of soil, weather, and yields that male farmers needed to produce a living. Indeed, contemporary studies of female farmers in Galicia have noted, ‘despite the idea that some farm tasks are exclusively male, women on the Galician coast undertake all kinds of work’ and that when the woman is the head of the farm, ‘her farm labour exceeds her domestic work’.65 There are few indications of any well-deﬁned gender division of labour in rural Galicia.66 In fact, Heidi Kelley found a strong connection among Galicians between female agricultural work and household reputation. A woman who kept her ﬁelds productive was AHPC, protocolo 2346, fo. 80 (1699). AHPO, caja protocolos 3669, n.f. (1660). 63 This is also true in northern Portugal: see Caroline B. Brettell, ‘Kinship and Contract: Property Transmission and Family Relations in Northwestern Portugal’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 33 (1991), 456. 64 Saavedra, A facenda real, 44–5. 65 M. Dolores Garcı ´a Ramon, Monserrat Vilarino, Mireia Baylina, and Gemma Canoves, ‘Farm Women, Gender Relations, and Household Strategies on the Coast of Galicia’, Geoforum, 24/1 (1993), 12–13. 66 The same was true of Tuscan smallholders in the late Middle Ages: see Rebecca Jean Emigh, ‘The Gender Division of Labour: The Case of Tuscan Smallholders’, Continuity and Change, 15/1 (2000), 117–37. 61 62

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rewarded by being described as ‘moita muller’ (very much a woman) and ‘como unha muller debe ser’ (what a woman should be).67 In addition to hard work, Galegas understood the intricacies of land transfers, leases, sub-leases, land sales, and purchases. The ﬁelds, groves, ponds, creeks, and small plots that they had inherited from relatives were only the beginnings of individual estates. Like men, women augmented their holdings by participating in the real estate market even though land transactions in Galicia could be quite complex. Many land transactions did not involve the sale of property over which the seller had direct ownership, but rather the purchase of a long-term lease or the rights to the usufruct from a property. Many transactions included both a sale price and some indication of the rents on the land due to a third party. Although scholars have not undertaken a statistical analysis of the role of gender in rural land transactions, most urban transactions occurred between men and presumably this was also the case in rural Galicia.68 However, peasant women actively participated in the local real estate market, as single adult women had full legal rights to buy and sell land and enter into shortand long-term leases and sub-leases on their own behalf. For instance, in 1743, Ana Costal, a single woman from San Miguel de Sarandon (Santiago), purchased a house for which she had to pay both a price to the seller, Pedro Martixo, and also rents to the true owner of the place.69 Joseph Terzado and his wife sold Andrea Boullon, a single woman, a piece of land alongside a plot that she already owned for 21 ducados de vello´n. According to the terms of the sale, each year she had to pay the owner of the land rents of one quartillo of wheat.70 Other purchases were simpler. When Marı´a Antonia Mesia augmented her holdings with the purchase of some lands from Lorenzo de Espino, she mentioned no further obligations.71 67 Kelley, ‘Unwed Mothers’, 571–2. Similarly, Sharon Roseman found that women who are not seen working hard in both their homes and their ﬁelds face severe criticism from neighbours. ‘ ‘‘Strong Women’’ and ‘‘Pretty Girls’’: Self-Provisioning, Gender, and Class Identity in Rural Galicia (Spain)’, American Anthropologist, 104/1 (2002), 27. 68 Serrana Rial Garcı ´a found that women generated approximately 18% of the land purchase transactions in her study of Santiago de Compostela. Las mujeres en la economı´a urbana del antiguo re´gimen: Santiago durante el siglo XVIII (A Corun˜a: Edicios do Castro, 69 AHUS, protocolo 3963, fo. 102 (1743). 1995), 149. 70 AHUS, protocolo 5616, fo. 19 (1747). 71 AHUS, protocolo 3781, fo. 5 (1718).

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Single women who had not yet reached the legal age of 25 needed their fathers’ permission to be involved in contracts, including land transactions, but that requirement did not keep them out of the real estate market. In 1709, young Andressa de Costa bought a piece of land from a soldier named Juan with the permission of her father. We can only speculate on why Andressa would have come to be interested in purchasing land in her own name while her father was still alive. She may have been the recipient of a mejora from an aunt or other relative that provided her with an independent living. Juan’s prolonged absences may have left precious land uncultivated, and Andressa’s father may have realized some advantage in purchasing the unused real estate for his unwed daughter.72 Or Juan may have been a relative—intrafamilial land transfers were one mechanism for families to consolidate land holdings that had been divided by partible inheritance. In 1726 Francisca de Prado, an adult single woman from the city of Santiago de Compostela, sold a piece of land to her niece, Feliciana de Prado from the parish of San Fiz de Sales, for seven ducados.73 Although we do not know the circumstances of this sale, Francisca may have inherited the land from Feliciana’s mother or father and selling it to her niece allowed Feliciana to augment her holdings and reunite adjacent family properties. Since partible inheritance meant that multiple heirs often owned separate pieces of land that formerly had been held by a single owner, many single women were involved in land transactions with their siblings. Marı´a Picon, unmarried and older than the legally required 25 years of age, joined with her younger brother, Domingo, who was somewhere between 18 and 25 years old, to sell a plot of land for 100 reales de vello´n to Lucia Va´squez de Leyes, a widow from their parish of San Lorenzo de Granja.74 Marı´a da Silba and her sister Ysavel not only sold an enclosed piece of land to Bartolome´ Conde, but the documents indicate that they had jointly litigated their ownership of the property before a local judge.75 In addition, although some single women may not have had the means to make substantial purchases of land, unmarried siblings who invested together took advantage of multiple incomes. The pooling of ﬁnances allowed three single sisters, Josepha, 72 73 74 75

AHUS, AHUS, AHUS, AHUS,

protocolo protocolo protocolo protocolo

3228, 4273, 5615, 3779,

fo. 32 (1709). fo. 105 (1726). fo. 23 (1746). fo. 25 (1715).

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Marı´a, and Eusebia Terzado, to enter as equal partners with their widowed sister Ana into the purchase of a plot of land from another widow, Marı´a de Ponte, in 1743.76 While most unmarried Galegas remained peasants whose lives revolved around sowing, harvesting, buying, and selling land, a reasonably well-documented minority left home at a young age to enter domestic service. Not surprisingly, as the region was generally rural and poor, domestic service was not as critical a factor in early modern Galician society as it was in other parts of Europe. By the mideighteenth century, less than 3.5 per cent of the Galician population was classiﬁed as servants and only 10.7 per cent of Galician households had servants living with them.77 In comparison, two to three times that number of French and English households had servants.78 In and around urban areas, servants were more common. In a 1587 census of the parish of Souto de Vigo (Santiago de Compostela), 18 of the parish’s 64 households had live-in servants.79 However, unlike Castile (but more like the rest of Europe), servants in rural or lower-class households were nearly always women.80 In the interior city of Ourense, female servants outnumbered male servants 3.5 to 1.81 Scholars disagree about the situation under which these female servants worked. According to Isidro Dubert, a Galician historian who has researched household servants as a part of a larger demographic study of the region, early modern Galicia was marked by the absence of ‘life-cycle’ servants, those who worked only temporarily until marriage. Dubert asserts that Galician servants tended to be assimilated into the family and remain there for most of their lives.82 However, another regional historian, Pegerto Saavedra, provides some evidence of servants fulﬁlling contracts 76 AHUS, protocolo 3964, n.f. (1743). Monica Chojnacka has found similar instances of siblings sharing economic interests in Working Women of Early Modern Venice (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 34–5. 77 Dubert Garcı ´a, Historia de la familia, 75–6. 78 David S. Reher, ‘Family Ties in Western Europe: Persistent Contrasts’, Population and Development Review, 24/2 ( June 1998), 205–6 and Tables 1 and 2. 79 Vassberg, The Village and the Outside World, 87. 80 For Castile, see ibid. 89–90. In Table 1 (p. 90) Vassberg found that male servants outnumbered female servants in two Galician parishes. This stands in stark contradiction to larger studies of domestic service in the region. On the rest of Europe see Ratna Saptari, ‘Review Essay: Rethinking Domestic Service’, International Review of Social 81 Saavedra, La vida cotidiana, 246. History, 44 (1999), 79. 82 Dubert Garcı ´a, Historia de la familia, 73.

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and then moving on, bringing them more into line with the life-cycle servants that scholars have documented in the rest of Europe.83 Although my archival research leaves this debate unresolved, I have found meaningful differences in the situations in which single women worked as domestic servants in Galicia. As mentioned above, many families relied on the labour of daughters who served their parents in contractual relationships based on mejoras. Almost as common were single women who went into service in the homes of other family members, usually as young girls. And ﬁnally, some Galegas left home to work for non-relatives. Although we know little about the day-to-day activities of these women, their relationships with their employers generated documentation that gives us insight into some aspects of servant women’s lives. When they could afford to do so, married couples, widowers, and women without daughters to care for them took in unmarried female family members to serve them in exchange for room and board. The practice of families taking in younger relatives such as granddaughters and nieces was common during the early modern period both in France and in other parts of Spain where oral histories reveal that the practice continued through the 1960s.84 These young girls both worked in the home and were raised by their employers. Even the Castilian word for servant, criado(a), means ‘he or she who is raised’. Sometimes these girls were as young as 8 or 9. Catalina de Biduido brought her niece, Antonia, into her home at a young age to help her in the house. In 1683, Catalina drew up a donacio´n entre vivos to her niece, in which she gave her all of her possessions and all the rights thereof, but she insisted that Antonia continue to care for her until she died and have a mass said for her after her death.85 Many women expressed fondness for their servant-relatives, but love and affection did not stop them from keeping Saavedra, La vida cotidiana, 247–8. For France, see Fairchilds, Domestic Enemies, 8. For Madrid, Carmen Sarasu´a, Criados, nodrizas, y amos: El servicio dome´stico en la formacio´n del mercado del trabajo madrilen˜o, 1758–1868 (Madrid: Siglo veintiuno de Espan˜a editores, 1994), 4 n. 5. For the practice in Spain see David S. Reher, Perspectives on the Family in Spain Past and Present (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 93–4. Monica Chojnacka suggests that in early modern Venice ofﬁcials at the Casa dei Catecumeni were concerned that couples were adopting children for cheap labour. Adoption contracts included assurances that this was not the case. Working Women, 132. For a discussion of child servants in Venice, see Dennis Romano, Household and Statecraft: Domestic Service in Renaissance Venice, 1400– 1600 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 152–5. 85 AHUS, protocolo 1673, n.f. (1683). 83 84

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accounts just as they would have for non-family members. When in 1677 Marı´a de Sas made her last will and testament, she noted that she had taken in her granddaughter, Juliana, as a child. Her will carefully detailed the goods that she had contributed to Juliana’s upbringing over the years in compensation for her service. They included some wheat, a ram, some earrings worth 17 reales, a pig worth 16 reales, 7 good ewes, clothing, and shoes. According to Marı´a, these were all the things that were ‘necessary during the years that I raised her . . . all of which I gave in satisfaction for the service that she did’.86 Her room, board, and other expenses were, in fact, Juliana’s inheritance; she received nothing more, as from her grandmother’s perspective, their obligations to each other had already been satisﬁed. In her will from 1693, Benita Garcı´a de Paz y Castro, the wife of a wealthy Santiago bureaucrat, bequeathed to her husband’s niece, Antonia, whom they had raised since the age of 2 and who was serving in their household, 50 ducados and some linens. In addition to requiring that Antonia continue to care for her uncle (Benita’s husband), Benita declared that Antonia was not to ask him for anything more in terms of either salary or aid.87 It is unclear whether most of these servant-relatives remained in their employers’ households until the employer died or whether some or all left their service when they reached adulthood. Whatever the case, these girls beneﬁted, at least temporarily, from the economic success of relatives, even if that prosperity was only a minor improvement over their own parents’ economic situation. When single Galegas left home to seek jobs elsewhere, they did so in small numbers and did not travel far. A recent study of internal migration in Galicia found that in a 1708 census, women made up only 4 per cent of those counted absent from their families.88 Moreover, unlike their male counterparts, during the early modern period few Galician women ventured to cities like Madrid and Seville.89 Those women who did may have been following in the footsteps or on the AHPC, protocolo 1721, fo. 61 (1677). AHPC, protocolo 2340, fo. 3 (1693). 88 Rey Castelao, ‘Movimientos migratorios’, 87. 89 As an example of later statistics, while Basque women far outnumbered Basque men as immigrants to Madrid during the nineteenth century (75% to 25%), the numbers are nearly the opposite from Galicia (68% men to 31.8% women), except for the port city of A Corun˜a from which nearly as many women as men migrated (42.5%). Sarasu´a, Criados, nodrizas, y amos, 33–4. 86 87

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advice of brothers or fathers who had already been enticed by the opportunities of the capital and the economic expansion of Seville and Ca´diz during the early modern period. More commonly, they stayed closer to home working with their families. In 1675, Juan Lopez was accused ‘of having induced Ysabel and Zicilia his daughters to go . . . to harvest in the kingdom of Castile’.90 As was typical in the rest of Europe, most of the women who migrated from the countryside, usually in search of domestic work, went to the next largest urban area. In the case of Galicia, the cities of A Corun˜a, Tuy, and Santiago de Compostela attracted young women, many of whom came from surrounding rural areas.91 At the beginning of the eighteenth century, 67.8 per cent of domestics in Santiago were women, a number that had increased to 71.5 per cent by the 1750s.92 Judging from the available documentation, nearly all these young women were single. Although early modern data are less clear, nineteenthcentury censuses indicate that more than 95 per cent of female domestics in Santiago were unmarried.93 Santiago de Compostela would have provided the most and bestpaying jobs in domestic service. As a cathedral and university town, it also offered the most cosmopolitan atmosphere for a young girl seeking more than just a living. There were also opportunities for excitement in port towns like Ferrol and Baiona, where shiploads of sailors and soldiers disembarked on a regular basis and merchants sold a broader array of goods than any girl could ﬁnd in her home parish. Towns, hospitals, and taverns along the pilgrimage routes fed and sheltered travellers from across Europe. However, most Galegas engaged as domestics found less excitement awaiting them. As mentioned in Chapter 1, most of Galicia’s towns were really quite small and very provincial. The growing numbers of single women moving to the cities and living on their own regularly alarmed municipal ofﬁcials. As early as 1589, the ordinances of the tiny coastal village of Noya ordered Saavedra, Economı´a, polı´tica y sociedad, 116. Rial Garcı´a, Las mujeres en la economı´a urbana, 111. More than 95% of the female migrants to Santiago were from Galicia and the majority of those were from within a 40–50 km radius of the city. Enrique Martı´nez Rodrı´guez, Marı´a Concepcio´n Burgo Lo´pez, and Domingo L. Gonza´lez Lopo, ‘Inmigracio´n urbana en la Galicia del antiguo re´gimen: Santiago, Tuy y Ferrol a ﬁnales del siglo XVIII’, in Eiras Roel and Rey Castelao (eds.), Migraciones internas y medium-distance, 488 and 491. 92 Rial Garcı 93 Ibid. 113. ´a, Las mujeres en la economı´a urbana, 108. 90 91

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vagabonds and free women to ﬁnd employers to serve or leave town within three days under penalty of 100 lashes.94 In 1722, the bishop of Tuy wrote to priests in his parish railing against single women who ‘separate themselves from their homes and the company of their parents and uncles’. Because of the ‘grave offences, sins, and scandals’ precipitated by these single women, the bishop demanded that the priests force them to return home to their families.95 In 1776, the Audiencia of Galicia issued legislation demanding ‘in the interest of public health’ that local ofﬁcials require single women living apart from their families to return to their families within eight days.96 While the regulation does not detail exactly how single women endangered public health, the spread of sexually transmitted disease or at least concerns about unsupervised female sexuality may have been the unspoken impetus behind this governmental intervention. Four years later, the bishop of Mondon˜edo was more explicit. He purchased a former textile mill to house ‘the excessive number of women, single girls totally independent of parents, guardians, or employers . . . who live by themselves in a house or bodego, prostituting themselves in this way . . . trampling the most natural and holy laws . . . causing notorious scandal by their incontinence’.97 Single women came to the cities because the wealthy clergy and aristocrats, as well as some prosperous artisans, could afford to hire nonfamily members to work in their homes. Noble families averaged nearly four servants per household while artisan families tended to have only one domestic, if any.98 As with servant-relatives, female servants appear regularly in the testaments of their employers as the recipients of a variety of small bequests. In her 1631 will, Don˜a Ana Arindes de Figueroa, the widow of a man who was a lawyer for the Inquisition in Santiago, mentioned having a female servant named Dominga.99 Don˜a Madagnela de Mendoza, a woman from Leo´n living in Santiago, bequeathed to her maid, Marı´a, 50 ducados for her dowry and a dress of good cloth in 1657.100 As one might expect, the richer the woman, the more servants of different types she had. Don˜a Ine´s Eugenia de Noriega, 94 ‘Ordenanzas de la Villa de Noya de 1589’, Cuadernos de Estudios Gallegos, 16 95 Cited in Saavedra, La vida cotidiana, 254. (1961), 247. 96 Pablo Pe ´rez Costanti, Notas viejas Galicianas (Vigo: Xunta de Galicia, 1993), 167. 97 Saavedra, La vida cotidiana, 255. 98 Rial Garcı ´a, Las mujeres en la economı´a urbana, 109. 99 AHUS, protocolo 1191, fo. 66 (1631). 100 AHUS, protocolo 1389, fo. 29 (1657).

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the wife of a prominent lawyer for both the city and the archbishopric of Santiago, mentioned three female servants in her will in 1693: Beatriz Nun˜ez, her private maid, Marı´a Crespa, her laundry woman, and Marı´a Touzeda, her servant.101 Such division of labour was possible only in the ﬁnest homes. In most households, a single female servant did everything necessary to help the woman of the house. She tended the hearth, fetched the water, cooked, washed, mended, and cared for the children. Bitoria Lo´pez Feyxeyro, whose husband may have been a soldier, had no children to help her and may also have been caring for her elderly mother. A servant girl must have lessened her burden considerably. In thanks, she left her maid, Dominga de Armenton, some linens in her 1646 will.102 In terms of the employer/employee obligations, the differences between female servants who were family members and those who were not are difﬁcult to unravel from the extant documentation. At the time, people expected servants to be treated like family, regardless of whether they were blood relatives or not. In fact, Spanish Castilian law decreed that masters were responsible for their servants’ activities, just as a father would be for his children.103 As many of those put out for domestic service were quite young, the tender age of these domestics no doubt accentuated the ﬁctional parent–child relationship, and the Church encouraged such relationships.104 When an episcopal visitor to the parish of San Martı´n Beariz found that parishioners were neither attending mass nor learning the catechism, he admonished them to either change their ways or face monetary penalties in which ‘the father pays for his son and the master pays for his servant’.105 When Alonso de Villarin died in 1661, he had masses said for the soul of his female servant in two different churches and left some ﬁne cloth to the man who had served him.106 Sometimes servants even bequeathed gifts to their masters.107 101

AHUS, protocolo 2118, n.f. (1693). AHUS, protocolo 742, fo. 44 (1646). Mistresses often fulﬁlled salary debts and gave personal gifts to female servants: see Giovanna Benadusi, ‘Investing in the Riches of the Poor: Servant Women and their Last Wills’, American Historical Review, 109/3 ( June 2004), 816. 103 Elizabeth Kuznesof, ‘A History of Domestic Service in Spanish America, 1492– 1980’, in Muchachas No More: Household Workers in Latin America and the Caribbean, ed. Elsa M. Chaney and Mary Garcia Castro (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 104 Bauer, ‘Family and Property’, 89. 1989), 21. 105 Libro de Visitas, San Martı ´n Beariz, AHDO, 14.3.5, fo. 10 (1571). 106 AHPO, caja protocolos 3029, n.f. (1661). 107 Bauer, ‘Family and Property’, 91. 102

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The degree to which employers and female domestics formed affective ties varied considerably according to the social and economic situation as well as the personalities of those involved. Some masters expressed fondness for their female servants. For instance, Francisca de Losada worked twelve years as a servant. When she married Francisco Fildalgo, a shoemaker, in 1683, her employer dowered her out of the ‘love and affection that I have for her’, but he also noted that the dowry complied with his obligation to her and in satisfaction for her salary.108 In contrast, the recent autobiography of Carmen, a Galega whose parents sent her to work as a domestic when she was only a child, reveals how she suffered bitterly while working for a family who denied her food. One imagines that her experience may have been more typical than that of Francisca. When economically unstable Galician families took in even poorer children as herders, farm hands, or household helpers, the extra mouths to feed often outstripped the family’s ability to compensate them for their work. Much of a domestic servant’s compensation came in room, board, and clothing.109 In 1564, Marı´a Ferna´ndez went to work for Juan de Montanal and his wife for four years at a salary of four ducados per year.110 However, regular payments seem to have been infrequent and many testators mentioned salaries owed to servants.111 Marı´a Rodrı´guez, the widow of a sailor, died owing her female servant’s salary,112 as did Marı´a Gutierrez Duen˜a, a notary’s widow.113 Neither the legal system nor gender differences nor class distinctions between servant and employer intimidated some uncompensated servants. When employers failed to comply with the terms of a contract, female servants did not hesitate to use the legal system to secure the debts owed on their salaries. In 1624, when Marina Pe´res ended her position as servant to Alonso Lo´pez de Monteagudo, a cleric, he was delinquent in paying her salary, which included shoes, clothing, and cash. She and her father sought the intervention of authorities and eventually he paid.114 Pelonia Reyna 108 AHPO, caja protocolos 3487, fo. 30 (1683). Benadusi rightly urges historians to be suspicious of these gifts, in ‘Investing in the Riches of the Poor’, 823. 109 AHUS, protocolo 1666, fo. 32 (1624). 110 Costanti, Notas viejas Galicianas, 266. 111 Rial Garcı ´a, Las mujeres en la economı´a urbana, 116. 112 AHPC, protocolo 738, fo. 69 (1642). 113 AHPC, protocolo 740, fo. 23 (1644). 114 AHUS, protocolo 1666, fo. 32 (1624).

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spent a considerable amount of energy in pursuit of the salary that Antonia Dos Santos and Juan Abad owed her for a decade of service. Pelonia must have come to work for them as a child or young teenager, as she claimed to be older than 18 but less than 25 years old at the time of the lawsuit. Juan Abad had died and Pelonia had gone to the local justice to pursue her claim against his widow. In front of a notary, the widow Antonia claimed that she could not fulﬁl Pelonia’s contract, which included clothing and cash, but instead offered three small pieces of land that were ‘worth more than the said salaries’. The substitution clearly was meant to end the animosity that had arisen between the women as Antonia expressed her fondness and affection towards Pelonia and acknowledged the good service that she had done.115 Pelonia accepted the offer. Single women who worked in the homes of non-relatives are especially interesting in the context of Galician culture. Because of male migration, many families relied on single women to remain at home, and even very recent anthropological research has shown that Galegos place a high value on female self-provisioning through agricultural labour.116 The single women who became servants may have been daughters of the very poor whose families could not otherwise provide for them, they may have hoped to supplement their legı´tima with income from life-cycle service, or they may have been orphans. The historian Serrana Rial Garcı´a asserts that domestic service may have been an ‘escape valve’ that helped to alleviate the intense sexual disequilibrium evident in many parishes.117 As many who have studied female domestics have noted, when women leave their families the push out of the home is generally more important than the pull of a new life.118 Especially in Galicia, under ordinary circumstances there would have been little motivation to leave one’s parish. Most adult women who did not want to live with their families could establish their own households without having to enter domestic service since they would 115 AHUS, protocolo 3229, fo. 40 (1709). For more on servants taking their mistresses to court, see Gayle Brunelle, ‘Contractual Kin: Servants and their Mistresses in Sixteenth-Century Nantes’, Journal of Early Modern History, 2/4 (1998), 374–94. 116 See Roseman, ‘Pretty Girls’, 26. 117 Rial Garcı ´a, Las mujeres en la economı´a urbana, 111. 118 Maryanne Kowaleski, ‘The Demographic Perspective’, in Bennett and Froide (eds.), Singlewomen, 57.

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inherit at least on equal terms with their brothers. Living under the constant supervision of strangers, their independence was at least as constrained as that of their peers who remained at home. Beyond the young women who left home for domestic service, few unmarried peasant women relied solely on a trade for their livelihoods.119 Women like Teresa Gonza´lez, who was listed on a 1594 tax assessment as a cloth worker, were rare,120 although by the late eighteenth century, more women participated in the short-lived expansion of the linen industry.121 Life could not have been easy for early modern female entrepreneurs. These women often only appear in the documentation when their business dealings went awry. We learn that in 1708, Dominga Barcala, a tavern-keeper who fell into considerable debt, had her belongings embargoed, and eventually had to turn over everything she owned to Juan Antonio de Ponte in order to repay her debt.122 It is unclear why so few Galegas undertook trades. As mentioned above, it may have been more socially acceptable for a single woman to farm, or local guild structures (which remain unstudied) may have made it difﬁcult for women to enter many trades. Among the occupations available to early modern women, single Galegas showed very little interest in the religious life. The few convents in early modern Galicia were exclusively for the female members of Galicia’s elite. In 1591, there were only 473 nuns in all of Galicia.123 According to the 1787 census, Galicia was home to only 25 convents with only 624 professed nuns and novices, a number that fell by 10 per cent over the next decade. At the same time, the region hosted 273 male monastic houses.124 The largest female order was that of the Poor Clares with 263 professed nuns and six novices. In 1591 there were no female monastic houses in A Corun˜a and Betanzos, and 119

120 Saavedra, A facenda real, 45. Saavedra, ‘Casa y comunidad’, 104. On the linen industry, see Xan Carmona Badı´a, ‘L’industria rurale domestica in Galizia (secoli XVIII e XIX)’, Quaderni Storici, 52 (1983), 11–24, and Pegerto Saavedra, Das casas de morada o´ monte comunal (Santiago de Compostela: Xunta de Galicia, 1996), 122 AHUS, protocolo 2453, fo. 66 (1708). ch. 6. 123 F. Ruı ´z Martı´n, ‘Demografı´a eclesia´stica hasta el siglo XIX’, in Diccionario de historia eclesia´stica de Espan˜a, vol. 2 (Madrid: CSIC, 1972), 690. 124 Censo Espan ˜ ol executado de o´rden del Rey comunicada por el excelentı´simo sen˜or Conde de Floridablanca primer secretario de estado y del despacho en el an˜o de 1787 (Madrid: En la Imprenta Real, 1787). 121

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in 1787 the entire province of Mondon˜edo was home to fewer than 100 female religious.125 Most of the region’s convents were tiny and housed a few female members of the highest levels of the aristocracy. For instance, the Franciscan convent of the Conception in Viveiro, founded by order of the testament of Don˜a Marı´a de las Alas Pumarin˜o in 1601, was an exclusive establishment for six members of her family and a few chosen others.126 Although high, convent dowries were less than what it would cost to appropriately marry off the daughter of one of Galicia’s elite families. However, they were often more than ten times the typical dowry of a peasant girl.127 There are only rare examples of Galician foundations setting aside places for charity cases. The same was not true of the male orders. The Benedictine monastery in Lourenza´ (Mondon˜edo) accepted men from a variety of economic backgrounds.128 Female monasticism was never particularly prominent in Galicia. Although male monastics played critical roles in the re-establishment of Christianity in the region during the recolonization of the Middle Ages, few female religious ventured there.129 According to Cristina Cuadra Garcı´a, even at the height of female monasticism between the eighth and eleventh centuries, only 9.2 per cent of monasteries in Galicia were exclusively female houses. None of the many double houses survived the Middle Ages.130 Moreover, by the early modern period, there is little evidence of an aspiring hidalguı´a who hoped to imitate Castilian elites by either founding convents or placing daughters in existing institutions. While in the rest of Spain communities often revered nuns for their proximity to the divine and the prayers that they offered on behalf of those outside convent walls, even wealthy Galegos did not value that aspect of early modern spirituality enough to either support existing convents or establish new ones.131 126 Ibid. 535. Saavedra, Economı´a, polı´tica, y sociedad, 534. 128 Ibid. 540. Ibid. 536. 129 I have not found any works on the role of female religious in the recolonization of Galicia. For a discussion of the establishment of convents after the reconquest in Valencia, see Robert I. Burns, SJ, The Crusader Kingdom of Valencia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), 226 ff. 130 Cristina Cuadra Garcı ´a, ‘Religious Women in the Monasteries of Castile-Leo´n (VIth–XIth Centuries)’, in Women at Work in Spain from the Middle Ages to Early Modern Times, ed. Marilyn Stone and Carmen Benito-Vessels (New York: Peter Lang, 1998), 57. 131 Elizabeth A. Lehfeldt, ‘Discipline, Vocation, and Patronage: Spanish Religious Women in a Tridentine Microclimate’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 30/4 (Winter 1999), 125 127

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The weakness of female monasticism in Galicia contrasts with other regions of Spain. Castile’s urban areas were home to large numbers of female religious. Madrid, Co´rdoba, and Valladolid had at least one nun for every two hundred people compared with Galicia where there was one nun for every 1,200 inhabitants.132 The city of Seville had more convents in 1620 than existed in all of Galicia during the early modern period.133 Moreover, it is curious that despite the deepening imbalance in the sex-ratio, the region experienced no signiﬁcant growth in the monastic population over the early modern period. Between the sixteenth and the mid-eighteenth century, the population of Galicia more than doubled and the rate of male migration steadily increased. Yet, unlike other parts of Europe, where families used convents to house unmarriageable daughters, Galegas rarely took the veil. Thus, the closest that most Galegas got to a convent was as servants. Ten servants served the twelve nuns in the convent of Valdeﬂores in Viveiro.134 Other single women regularly interacted with nuns when they paid rents and tithes as lessees of convent lands. Clearly, single women were not viewed as a burden to families: rather they were highly desired as caretakers of families and familial property. Galician single women’s access to property became crucial in times of crisis. One of the negative consequences of lifelong singleness was the lack of a caretaker in case of illness or injury. As a result, unmarried women without children often used their property to ensure that they would be cared for if they could no longer manage on their own. In order to do so, they had donaciones entre vivos drawn up in order to provide compensation for services rendered by siblings and other relatives. Approximately 10 per cent of the donaciones made in the rural area outside of Santiago de Compostela between 1675 and 1790 were by single women.135 In 1692, Marı´a da Cargo made just such a gift. 1023. For an overview of female monasticism in early modern Spain, see Allyson M. Poska and Elizabeth A. Lehfeldt, ‘Redeﬁning Expectations: Women and the Church in Early Modern Spain’, in Women and Religion in Old and New Worlds, ed. Susan E. Dinan and Debra Meyers (New York: Routledge, 2001), 27–33. 132 Ruı ´z Martı´n, ‘Demograf ´ıa eclesia´stica’, 722. 133 Perry, Gender and Disorder, 76. 134 Saavedra, Economı ´a, polı´tica, y sociedad, 535. 135 Dubert Garcı ´a, Historia de la familia, 432. Rial Garcı´a has found that in the city of Santiago most of these donations were in order to assure care or continued care by another female relative, often a niece. Rial Garcı´a, Las mujeres en la economı´a urbana, 58.

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Marı´a had been sick for an extended period during which her widowed sister, Francisca, had cared for her. Marı´a decided to compensate Francisca for her care before her death. Her donacio´n entre vivos gave her sister all her belongings.136 The donacio´n does not indicate the quantity or value of the goods that passed from Marı´a to Francisca, but on some level that does not matter. There is no doubt that Marı´a’s gift positively affected Francisca’s economic status by mitigating the cost of caring for Marı´a if nothing else. Just as importantly, the donacio´n was an important acknowledgement of love and gratitude between sisters. Lucia da Silba used much of the same language in her donacio´n to thank her brother Alberte who had cared for her during her illnesses. She expressed ‘much love and affection’ for ‘the many and good services’ and ‘good works’ that he had done for her.137 Marı´a de Carbia, whom I mentioned earlier as being unwilling to marry, was living with her sister Bibiana. Bibiana had been caring for her during her illness even though their father was still alive. After having asked permission from their father (the legal heir to her estate, as a living ascendant), Marı´a gave everything to her sister in a donacio´n, reserving only the usufruct of her estate for the remainder of her life.138 There is a sense of both regret and resignation in the language used by many of these women to describe their situation as they handed over all their hard-earned goods to someone else. Although not all single women had remained so by choice, it must have been difﬁcult for others to give up the independence that they had worked so hard to maintain. Antonia de Silva sadly acknowledged that reality, ‘ﬁnding herself so single, without children or hope of having them’. As she came to the end of her life, she moved in with her brother.139 With so many men absent and so many women living independently, single women often had to reach beyond the immediate family for support. In 1747, Marı´a de Souto found that she could no longer work or cultivate her property as she had for many decades. (She was more For more on sibling inheritance, see Caroline B. Brettell, ‘Fratelli, sorelle e successioni nel Portogallo nord-occidentale (XIX–XX secolo)’, Quaderni Storici, 87/3 (Dicembre 1994), 701–22. 136 AHPC, protocolo 1736, fo. 56 (1692). 137 AHUS, protocolo 3230, fo. 56 (1710). 138 AHUS, protocolo 3229, fo. 54 (1709). 139 AHUS, protocolo 5615, fo. 63 (1746).

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than 60 years old at the time.) Prior to falling ill, she had engaged her nephew, Andres Crespo, to live with her, care for her, and work her lands. Again, reserving only the usufruct from her property for herself, Marı´a gave Andres everything she owned in a donacio´n.140 Initially, Dominga Carnota, a lifelong single woman, found aid and companionship in her widowed sister Juana. However, by 1726, Dominga was more than 40 years old and neither she nor Juana had children to care for them. Beset by illness, they could no longer care for themselves, so they provided a distant female relative, Andrea Nun˜ez, and her husband with a donation of all their property on the condition that the couple care for them for the rest of their lives.141 In addition to providing for themselves, we see single women employing the property that they had accumulated as a means to acknowledge relationships and to assert their authority over friends and family. Castilian law was quite egalitarian when it came to the postmortem distribution of property. All women over the age of 12 could make a will, except those who were deaf, mute, or mentally disabled.142 Unlike their counterparts in Italy and other parts of Europe, once they reached legal adulthood, Spanish women still living under the authority of their fathers could make wills as if they were independent of their authority.143 Although often in possession of only small estates at their deaths, single women had considerable ﬂexibility in the disposition of their belongings. Like all Spaniards, up to one-ﬁfth of the estate could be allocated for funeral expenses, pious gifts, and free bequests. The rest was divided among legally designated heirs. Any children, then the surviving parents, were the primary heirs for single women. Single women without children or surviving parents could bequeath their possessions to the loved ones of their choice. One of many lifelong single women, Roﬁna do Horxal, was by her own account free and more than 54 years old, but she was also old, tired, and impeded by attacks of illness when she made her testament in 1666. She stated that she had 140

AHUS, protocolo 5616, fo. 13 (1747). AHUS, protocolo 4273, fo. 12 (1726). 142 Juan de la Ripia, Pra ´ ctica de testamentos y modos de subceder (Cuenca: Antonio Nun˜ez Enriquez, 1674), 25. 143 Leyes de Toro (Madrid: Ministerio de Educacio ´ n y Ciencia, Direccio´n General del Patrimonio Artı´stico y Cultural, 1977), 50. 141

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neither legitimate nor natural children and, as a result, named her brother and her niece her heirs.144 Brothers were the frequent recipients of unmarried women’s property.145 Madalena Rodrı´guez made her brother the heir to her estate,146 as did Francesca Gonza´lez in 1680.147 In 1681, Juana Bauttis chose her brother-in-law as her universal heir.148 Single women could use their wealth for a variety of purposes, both social and economic. Marı´a Alvarez, the daughter of Diego Alvarez and Marı´a da Serra, must have been relatively young when she prepared her testament in 1631. Although we do not know her age, her identiﬁcation as the daughter of deceased parents rather than as a single woman may be an indication of her youth. Whatever the case, Marı´a, probably through the inheritance of her parents’ property, had a substantial estate to distribute. She gave signiﬁcant amounts of cash to her aunt Jero´nima, remembered her good friendship with a woman named Benita by giving her a petticoat, a jacket, and some money, and gave some clothing to a friend named Mariana. She also bequeathed dowries to her nieces, Marı´a and Beatriz, along with an extra piece of land for Marı´a. Marı´a Alvarez also had enough income to take goods in pawn from others. At the making of her testament, Marı´a had one of Justa Rodrı´guez’s skirts and a sheet of Antonia de Soto’s, both of which had been pawned.149 Single Galegas seem to conﬁrm what the historian Martha Howell found in late medieval Douai: women treated property less as economic capital than as cultural or social capital.150 Freed of legal restrictions in their choice of heirs, they provided inheritances to people they cared for, using their wealth to reinforce interpersonal bonds even after death. AHUS, protocolo 734, fo. 100 (1672). In the city of Santiago, siblings were the heirs to single women’s estates 43% of the time. Rial Garcı´a, Las mujeres en la economı´a urbana, 54. 146 AHPO, caja protocolos 3732, fo. 3 (1650). 147 AHPO, caja protocolos 3125, fo. 12 (1680). 148 AHUS, protocolo 1671, n.f. (1681). 149 AHUS, protocolo 1748/1256, fo. 5 (1631). 150 Martha C. Howell, The Marriage Exchange: Property, Social Place, and Gender in the Cities of the Low Countries, 1300–1550 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 153, and Sandra Cavallo, ‘What did Women Transmit? Ownership and Control of Household Goods and Personal Effects in Early Modern Italy’, in Gender and Material Culture in Historical Perspective, ed. Moira Donald and Linda Hurcombe (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000), esp. 41–4. For more on women and testamentary bequests, see Benadusi, ‘Investing in the Riches of the Poor’, 814 ff. 144 145

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Single women’s access to property beneﬁted their souls as well as their bodies. Post-mortem masses were a critical feature of early modern religiosity, affording beneﬁts both in heaven and on earth. People believed that masses eased the soul’s journey to the next world and lessened the soul’s stay in Purgatory. Just as importantly, annual masses helped preserve the memory of the deceased among the living.151 Although most early modern Spaniards arranged for masses to be said on their behalf, bequests for funerary masses would have been particularly important for a single woman who had outlived her parents and siblings and thus had no close relatives who would be responsible for her soul in the afterlife.152 When Ysavel da Forxa’s father died in 1666, he left his unmarried daughter some land, along with a cow and some sheep and goats. However, Ysavel did not immediately take over her inheritance. She had been working for her aunt and uncle for the past six years and had left her inheritance in the hands of her mother and siblings. Unfortunately, only three months later, Ysavel was on her deathbed and distributing her heretofore unused inheritance. In compensation for their care and the cost of her medications, she ﬁrst mandated that her aunt be paid anything owed to her. Once that debt was met, Ysavel asked that the rest of her property be sold and used for funeral masses. She made her soul her universal heir.153 At her death, a single woman named Yne´s from San Este´ban de Medin (Corun˜a) left her niece a two-year-old lamb and a plot of land. The rest of her goods went to another niece, Dominga, whom she charged with having a mass said for her soul annually.154 With large numbers of men absent, single women ﬁlled the parishes of early modern Galicia. Their lives challenge many long-held assumptions about single women in the past. Historians have often viewed single women as economically unviable and vulnerable. Yet, in most of Galicia, single women knew that they would acquire predetermined portions of their families’ moveable property and real estate according to both Castilian inheritance law and Galician inheritance 151 For a discussion of the role of post-mortem masses in early modern spirituality, see my Regulating the People, 147–51. 152 For an excellent discussion of the role of post-mortem masses in Spanish culture, see Sara T. Nalle, God in La Mancha: Religious Reform and the People of Cuenca, 1500– 1650 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 181–205. 153 AHPC, protocolo 1491, fo. 10 (1666). 154 AHUS, protocolo 727, fo. 65 (1666).

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practices. In a society with an abundance of single women, the mejora provided for a daughter who might want to marry after the death of her parents without damaging their income and lifestyle during their lifetimes. It also relieved any pressure to marry that she might feel in a highly restricted marriage market. Of course, most of these estates were quite small. However, Galician single women were probably no more or less poor than their married sisters whose husbands had permanently migrated (a topic I will return to in Chapter 4). It is also clear that Galician single women were astonishingly familiar with the social and legal norms of property transmission. They did not shy away nor were they discouraged from employing the Spanish system of notaries to draw up the full spectrum of legal documentation. Their resources may not have been great, yet they used their access to property to create independent households, ensure their own care as they aged, and nurture relationships with friends and relatives.155 Women hoped that they would have daughters who never married to whom they could bequeath their property and upon whom they could rely for care. In a world without men, single women were the core of Galician society. 155 Elite women in Venice used property in many of the same ways: see Stanley Chojnacki, ‘Introduction: Family and State, Women and Men’, in Women and Men in Renaissance Venice: Twelve Essays on Patrician Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 14.

3 Sex and the Single Woman It is better to be a concubine than badly married. Mejor amancebada que mal casada. An early modern Spanish saying

In 1677, Ana Garcı´a de Prada and Antonio Dovale broke up for the second time. The ﬁrst time around, Antonio had promised Ana that they would get married someday and, trusting that promise, Ana had agreed to a sexual relationship. Eventually, she bore Antonio a daughter, but not before their relationship began to sour. When he refused to marry her, Ana took him to court. Although Antonio denied that he had promised marriage, he agreed to pay Ana 30 ducados for her dowry and lost virginity and to provide child support for their daughter. But the story of the unhappy couple does not end there. The couple reunited and, according to Ana, Antonio again promised to marry her. They moved in together, Ana became pregnant, and she bore a son named Salvador. When Antonio refused to fulﬁl his promise of marriage, she sought ﬁnancial support for their second child. According to their agreement, she freed Antonio to marry whomever he pleased as long as he paid 21 ducados for the care of the child. How was this possible? According to the works of many early modern Spanish writers, a woman who lost her virginity irreparably dishonoured herself and her family. She would be ostracized from the community and forced into seclusion and permanent celibacy. However, rather than being shamed, Ana, who had borne two illegitimate children and cohabitated with a man at least once, used the legal system to press for her rights. The couple had never formalized their relationship with public marriage vows or even a marriage contract. Nevertheless, Ana emerged from the relationship with custody of her children and child support

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from her former lover, an outcome that an unhappily married woman could not possibly hope for under either canon or Castilian law.1 What was more, Ana was free to marry. After a ﬂagrant violation of sexual norms, Ana was legally and ﬁnancially situated to go on with her life. For Ana and many other Galegas, the restrictive sexual norms of the Catholic Church had little in common with the world they knew. According to most Galegas, marriage was no more reliable than living together and a child born out of wedlock was every bit as good as a child conceived after a blessing by the parish priest. As long as she provided for herself economically and never crossed the ﬁne line into promiscuity, Ana found support for her single motherhood from Galician culture and, more surprisingly, from the Catholic Church and the Castilian legal system. Although she may have hoped to marry Antonio, Ana had not waited until a priest blessed her relationship to have sex with him. Instead, she had chosen amancebamiento, a consensual union or concubinage. Much like the contemporary situation known as ‘living together’ or ‘cohabiting’, the relationship between amancebados was a sexual relationship in which the couple resided together, either permanently or temporarily, and which may or may not have been a prelude to marriage. By the sixteenth century, amancebamiento was a crime that could be tried in either secular or ecclesiastical courts.2 Moreover, amancebamiento had spiritual consequences, as the Catholic Church clearly forbade sexual intercourse outside of marriage. Indeed, one of the major reforms of the Council of Trent was to clearly deﬁne marriage so as to prevent relationships like that of Ana and Antonio from passing as legal marriages.3 Yet local authorities demonstrated little interest in pursuing cases of amancebamiento. In 1585, Inquisitors in Santiago de Compostela complained that: the reason that little rigour is used with the fornicators is that we understand through experience . . . that the natives of these kingdoms, where among the 1 Although under certain conditions, ecclesiastical courts might grant a married woman a permanent separation, such decisions were rare. 2 Dyer, ‘Heresy and Dishonor’. According to Dyer, the ﬁrst secular cases appear around 1580. 3 For more on Tridentine marriage, see my Regulating the People, ch. 5, and Beatrice Gottlieb, ‘The Meaning of Clandestine Marriage’, in Family and Sexuality in French History, ed. Robert Wheaton and Tamara K. Haraven (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1980).

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farmers and peasants there is a great lack of doctrine, say many foolish things out of ignorance and without knowing what they say. Without any heretical intent, [they say] that for a single man and a single woman to have carnal access is not a sin . . . and commonly, the justices of this kingdom tolerate such things and do not punish them as they should, although they might be amancebados . . . 4

Despite the potential legal and spiritual consequences, consensual unions were quite common in early modern Galicia. These relationships were public and Galegas were remarkably candid about their nonmarital involvements. They not only described their amancebamientos to secular and ecclesiastical justices in order to exact payment from their former lovers, but when asked, they vividly articulated why they would rather live together than marry. Galegas even willingly revealed their views on cohabitation and marriage to judges of the most famous (or infamous) institution in early modern Spain—the Spanish Inquisition. For historians of other parts of Europe, the Spanish Inquisition has become known as the powerful, monolithic enforcer of orthodoxy and represser of individuality in the early modern period. Although that may accurately describe some of the tribunals at some points in their histories, the reality was more complex. Studies of the Spanish Inquisition have shown that its effectiveness as an institution varied considerably from tribunal to tribunal and from one Inquisitor to the next. Each Inquisitor had his own particular interests and the priorities of each tribunal changed over their 350-year history.5 Initially, the region fell under the jurisdiction of the tribunal of the Inquisition in Valladolid and Castilian Inquisitors showed little interest in the beliefs and practices of the people far away in cold and rainy Galicia. By the second half of the sixteenth century, Inquisition 4

Contreras, El Santo Oﬁcio, 628–9. For a broad history of the Inquisition, see Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision. There are a number of excellent studies of the different tribunals, among them William E. Monter, Frontiers of Heresy: The Spanish Inquisition from the Basque Lands to Sicily (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), Ricardo Garcı´a Ca´rcel, Herejı´a y sociedad en el siglo XVI: La Inquisicio´n en Valencia, 1530–1609 (Barcelona: Penı´nsula, 1980), and Jean-Pierre Dedieu, L’Administration de la foi: L’Inquisition de Tole`de, XVIe–XVIIIe sie`cles (Madrid: Casa de Vela´zquez, 1989). For an excellent example of the priorities of one Inquisitor, see Sara T. Nalle, Mad for God: Bartolome´ Sa´nchez, the Secret Messiah of Cardenete (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001). 5

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ofﬁcials began to express some anxiety that illiterate Galegos might be particularly susceptible to the unorthodox ideas brought by Lutherans and other heretics to the docks of Galicia’s Atlantic ports. After ﬁnancial, jurisdictional, and organizational difﬁculties thwarted two initial attempts to establish a tribunal in Santiago de Compostela, the Inquisition was ﬁnally installed in 1574.6 Yet all the energy that Church ofﬁcials invested in creating a Galician Inquisition came to naught, as the tribunal was one of the least active on the peninsula between 1575 and 1700. During those 140 years, it only took action against 2,203 people, less than 5 per cent of the total number of cases prosecuted by the Spanish Inquisition. Other tribunals prosecuted more than twice that number during the same period.7 There were two critical obstacles to Inquisitorial activity in the region. First, Inquisitors made few visitations into the countryside to seek denunciations of heretics. The mountainous, treacherous Galician topography prevented all but the most determined Inquisitors from reaching the rural parishes. Second, the Inquisition inspired little fear among Galicia’s Old Christian (those without Jewish or Muslim blood) populace. An Inquisition trial began with a denunciation of sinful activity either by oneself or by others. According to Henry Kamen, in areas where ‘internal discord was low and public solidarity high, fear of the Inquisition was virtually absent . . . In a real sense, the Inquisition was set in motion by ordinary people. And where they refused to cooperate, the tribunal was impotent and incapable of inspiring fear.’8 If Inquisition activity in Galicia was weak, it was because Galegos refused to denounce themselves or others to Inquisitors. As far as single Galegas were concerned, the greatest chance of coming into contact with the Inquisition was between 1580 and 1620 when the Inquisition became less interested in the activities of converted Jews and Muslims and more concerned with the beliefs and behaviours of Old Christians.9 During this period, the Church and the Spanish populace often found themselves at odds over sex. Theologians insisted that intercourse was for procreation only and that it should only take 6

For a discussion of this process, see Contreras, El Santo Oﬁcio, ch. 1. 8 Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition, 178–9. Ibid. 458 and 460. See Jean-Pierre Dedieu, ‘Los cuatro tiempos de la Inquisicio´n’, in Inquisicio´n espan˜ola: Poder polı´tico y control social, ed. Bartolome´ Benassar et al. (Barcelona: Crı´tica, 1984), 15–39. 7 9

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place under the auspices of a clerically sanctioned marriage. The Inquisition asserted that saying that simple fornication (sex between an unmarried man and an unmarried woman) was not a sin was an expression of heresy against the sacrament of marriage.10 Thus, although Galegos rarely faced punishment for participating in extramarital sexual activity or being amancebados, they could face charges of heresy for voicing their approval of such relationships. Although the Inquisition tribunal in Santiago de Compostela was not particularly active in this regard, it heard 174 cases (131 men and 43 women) of simple fornication during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Many of the relaciones are quite brief, yet the explanations of why these Galician peasant women made the heretical statements provide considerable insight into Galegos’ negative feelings about marriage and their support for amancebamiento. Often the relaciones set the context of the heretical statement by explaining that certain people were ‘talking about the things of men and women’. One woman recounted sitting with others in the plaza at Tuy, talking about a young unmarried man whose girlfriend had recently given birth to their child.11 A young servant girl remembered being in the house one night chatting with other servants from the household.12 According to witnesses, yet another conversation about men and women ‘lasted two or three nights’.13 In these casual chats, both married women and single women voiced their preferences for amancebamiento over marriage. A number of married women made statements to Inquisitors in which they indicated that they were involved in ‘bad marriages’ and consequently preferred consensual unions. In a conversation about ‘those in bad marriages’, Francesca de Castro said what was clearly on the minds of many young women. It was ‘better to be a concubine than badly married’—mejor amancebada que mal casada—a phrase that was common in the early modern Hispanic world.14 10 Most of those who faced prosecution for engaging in extramarital sex came before ecclesiastical courts. I have been unable to locate such records for the early modern period 11 AHN, Sec. Inq., legajo 2042, no. 31, fo. 4 (1593). in Galicia. 12 AHN, Sec. Inq., legajo 2042, no. 19, fo. 5 (1587). 13 AHN, Sec. Inq., legajo 2042, no. 19, fo. 6 (1587). 14 AHN, Sec. Inq., legajo 2042, no. 39, fo. 17 (1602). There is ample evidence that this phrase was common throughout Spain and Spanish America: see Stuart B. Schwartz, ‘Pecar en las colonias: Mentalidades populares, Inquisicio´n y actitudes hacia la fornicacio´n

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Being ‘badly married’ no doubt had many meanings to early modern women. For instance, the wife of Ygnacio Francisco probably believed that she was in this situation. When an Episcopal Visitor came to her parish for his periodic investigation, he found that Ygnacio had left his wife and was amancebado with a woman named Margarida. The Visitor ordered Ygnacio to end his extramarital relationship and return to his wife. We do not know whether Ygnacio did as the Visitor required, but his marital inﬁdelity and abandonment probably met his wife’s deﬁnition of mal casada.15 Marı´a de Fiscal was denounced to the Inquisition in 1593 for bursting out in tears and saying that she would rather be amancebada than unhappily married because if she were a concubine she would only be committing a sin from time to time (I assume that she meant during the sex act itself ). Besides, according to her, as it was, life with her husband was ‘doing no service to the Lord’.16 Although the Church emphasized that marriage was made in heaven and a means to salvation, many women were or knew victims of bad marriages and understood the pain that marriage could bring. Ana Ferna´ndez, a servant girl, conceded that simple fornication was a sin, but after seeing a neighbour repeatedly hit his wife she admitted to saying that it was better to be the concubine of a man who treated you well than to live unhappily married because at least people prayed for those in mortal sin.17 Marı´a Rodrı´guez knew from her own experience that being a concubine would have been better than her own lot in life. Her husband had left her more than twenty-six years before to go to the Indies and had never returned. She tearfully recounted her lonely life, saying that at least amancebados could stop sinning whenever they wanted to in contrast to her life of perpetual unhappiness.18 For these unhappy women, their assertions about the beneﬁts of concubinage were more than theoretical. Even young women showed little hesitation about speaking their minds about sex and marriage. In 1613, Marı´a Afonso, a 19-year-old tailor’s wife, appeared before the Inquisition in Santiago. She had told her neighbours that she had been simple en Espan˜a, Portugal y las colonias americanas’, Cuadernos de Historia Moderna, 18 (1997), 51–67. 15 Libro de Visitas, Santa Eulalia Bouses, AHDO, 27.2.5, n.f. (1580). 16 AHN, Sec. Inq., legajo 2042, no. 30, fo. 4 (1593). 17 AHN, Sec. Inq., legajo 2042, no. 31, fo. 5 (1591). 18 AHN, Sec. Inq., legajo 2042, no. 39, fo. 11 (1602).

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amancebada for a year and a half during which she was in the service of God. Now she was married and it was clear to her that her marriage was in the service of the devil.19 In 1636, 60-year-old Catalina Lo´pez, the mother of three daughters, told Inquisitors that it was better to live honestly as someone’s concubine than to be an adulterous wife, a statement she made in an attempt to defend the reputation of her daughter who was at the time in an illicit relationship with an unmarried man.20 Some women who confessed that they knew that simple fornication was a sin did not believe that it was a very serious sin. Alberta Rodrı´guez, a servant girl in Santiago, reformulated the concept of mortal and venial sins by creating a whole new category, saying that simple fornication was only a half sin.21 Similarly, Margarida Alonso, a 46-year-old widow, and her friends were discussing a young man and his girlfriend who had borne him a child. Margarida said that their relationship ‘was not such a big sin’.22 It made no sense to these women that such a regular part of life could be illegal or endanger their souls. Although these women described a moral system unfettered by Catholic doctrine on sex and marriage, Inquisitors were generally unwilling to inﬂict harsh punishments on them. There were numerous reasons behind their hesitation. First, an extraordinary number of the Inquisitors (28 out of 50) on the Galician tribunal were either from Galicia or were closely tied to the region.23 Thus, they were familiar with the local culture. In the missive quoted earlier, Galician Inquisitors acknowledged the poor quality of religious education in the region. They were also probably familiar with the plethora of single mothers, sisters, and aunts that populated the region. Moreover, by far the majority of those accused of simple fornication were men who not only regularly afﬁrmed that sex between single people was not a sin, but also tended to make even more outrageous statements about peasant sexuality. For instance, in 1581 Domingos da Pena, a farmer, was brought before the Inquisition, accused of having said that when he was single he had had sex with seven women in one day and four women on another day. When one of his listeners tried to tell him that he would go to hell if he failed to confess his sexual sins, he replied that there was no problem 19 20 21 23

AHN, Sec. Inq., legajo 2042, no. 54, fo. 1 (1613). AHN, Sec. Inq., legajo 2042, no. 76, fos. 13–14 (1636). AHN, Sec. Inq., legajo 2042, no. 31, fo. 4v (1593). Contreras, El Santo Oﬁcio, 187–90.

22

Ibid.

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since the women were not relatives of each other and they were single. Unimpressed with his logic, the Inquisitors punished Domingos with a ﬁne, 100 lashes, and exile for three years.24 Amaro Pe´rez was accused of saying that sleeping with two sisters was the same as eating two apples.25 Alonso Golin, a farmer and tavern-keeper, used the same peasant metaphor, saying that he had had sex with a mother and her three daughters and that this was no more of a sin than eating four apples off a branch that he had been hit with.26 No doubt, for Inquisitors listening to the bragging of these randy peasant men, the misunderstandings of a few illiterate women seemed trivial in comparison. The brevity of Inquisition relaciones does not permit me to analyse the way that peasant women may have crafted their responses in the ways that Natalie Zemon Davis and others have discovered.27 However, the originality and detail in each of the relaciones indicates that Inquisition ofﬁcials did not aggressively coerce the responses.28 Moreover, although these women willingly presented an alternative vision of relationships that bore little resemblance to the strict morality of the Catholic Church, they faced only minimal consequences for their forthrightness. Of the ﬁfteen women of whose cases I know the outcome, the records show that only nine received any punishment. One woman, the earliest of the defendants (from before the tribunal was established in Galicia), received 100 lashes. Eight others were sentenced to temporary exile from their parishes or home towns. The exiles varied from one to four years and the convicted heretic was prohibited from coming within two leagues (approximately 10 km) of the place during that period. Of the exiles, four of those cases noted that the woman was AHN, Sec. Inq., legajo 2042, no. 8, fo. 9v (1581). AHN, Sec. Inq., legajo 2042, no. 8 fo. 17 (1581). 26 AHN, Sec. Inq., legajo 2042, no. 18 fo. 6v (1587). 27 Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), and Gowing, Domestic Dangers, 54–8. 28 This is not to say that the situation was not frightening. Many of the accused were poor and illiterate and would have spent some time in the Inquisition jail, where more people died awaiting trial than ever faced execution. Although women were the minority of those brought before the Inquisition, for that reason alone it must have been a much more frightening experience. The Inquisition, from its judges and jailers to its executioners, was an entirely male institution, and its structures were all premissed on notions of law and order created by men, for men. In addition, for women more than men, shame and humiliation were coupled with the taint of heresy when convicted heretics were stripped to the waist and whipped while being paraded through town. 24 25

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simple or ‘rustic’ and thus no harsher penalty was imposed.29 The remaining six cases were suspended for lack of evidence. Although exile was the most frequent punishment, it is difﬁcult to know its effect on these peasant women. If indeed these punishments were enforced, the women could ﬁnd themselves in dire circumstances, displaced from their homes and separated from their families. However, the enforcement of the Inquisition’s sentence relied on the co-operation of the parish priest, especially in rural areas and, as we will see, the parish priest was not always in a position to impose harsh strictures on his ﬂock. An interesting aspect of Galician women’s negative views on marriage was that sex with a priest was seen as a step up from a bad marriage. Clearly, the notion of a celibate priesthood had not yet permeated the mentality of these early modern parishioners. As the historian Stephen Halizcer has shown, during the early modern period a number of women found great comfort in the arms of the most educated and most ﬁnancially secure men in the community. This was certainly the case in Galicia. Like many others, Elena Vicente, who came before the Inquisition in 1590, believed that it was better to have your daughters be the concubines of clerics than to be married to ruinous men.30 In 1581, Catalina Martı´nez said that she knew many honourable women who had been the concubines of clerics and that it was better to be a ‘friend of a cleric’ than unhappily married.31 Many anthropologists of northern Spain and Portugal report that as recently as the mid-1980s parishioners saw the parish priest as ‘just like any other man’.32 One Cantabrian woman told the anthropologist Ruth Behar, ‘If they have balls, if they haven’t been castrated, then they can’t be very different from other men.’33 When it came to choosing partners, single Galician women did not differentiate between men of the cloth and their lay counterparts. 29 It is possible that peasant women may have crafted their responses to Inquisitors to make themselves seem more ignorant or ‘rustic’ than they actually were in the hopes of obtaining some leniency. 30 AHN, Sec. Inq., legajo 2042, no. 25, fo. 7 (1590). 31 AHN, Sec. Inq., legajo 2042, no. 8, fo. 11 (1581). 32 Caroline B. Brettell, ‘The Priest and his People: The Contractual Basis for Religious Practice in Rural Portugal’, in Religious Orthodoxy and Popular Faith in European Society, ed. Ellen Badone (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 64. 33 Ruth Behar, ‘The Struggle for the Church: Popular Anticlericalism and Religiosity in Post-Franco Spain’, ibid. 91.

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Just as these women articulated the beneﬁts of clerical romances, the Catholic Reformation Church increased pressure on clerics to abandon their concubines. Although at both the conciliar and the synodal level the Catholic Church had propagated legislation against clerical concubinage since the thirteenth century,34 early modern synods worked to remove women from the homes of clerics.35 Thus, although the Church ostensibly aimed the legislation against clerical concubinage at the behaviour of men, women and children would have suffered most of the consequences, including emotional and ﬁnancial hardship. Ourense’s 1622 diocesan synod not only required clerics to end their relationships with their concubines within six days, but it prohibited clergy from keeping their young children in their homes because of the constant crying. According to the synod, the presence of these children negatively affected the relationship between clerics and laymen.36 In addition, it forbade clerics from having the children accompany them and from permitting the children to aid them with the administration of divine ofﬁces.37 Fortunately for most of the women and children involved, the harsh decrees of the diocesan synods seem to have gone largely unheeded in Galicia.38 Despite the threats of ﬁnes, loss of beneﬁce, and even 34 Ricardo Co ´ rdoba de la Llave, ‘Relaciones extraconyugales en la Castilla Bajomedieval’, Anuario de Estudios Medievales, 17 (1986), 605. In Galicia, synodal decree forbade clerical concubinage as early as 1289. Synod of Rodrigo Gonza´lez de Leo´n (1289), Diocese of Santiago de Compostela, reprinted in Antonio Garcı´a y Garcı´a, Synodicon Hispanum, vol. 1, Galicia (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1981), 272. In the diocese of Mondon˜edo, a 1496 synod dealt only with the problem of clerical concubinage, ending such relationships by requiring that priests ‘separate themselves from their maids’ within nine days under the threat of excommunication. Synod of Alfonso Sua´rez de la Fuente de Salze (1496), Diocese of Mondon˜edo, reprinted ibid. 40. 35 Synod of Pedro Pacheco (1534), Diocese of Mondon ˜ edo, reprinted in Synodicon Hispanum, 55, and Synod of Manrique de Lara (1543–4), Diocese of Ourense, reprinted ibid. 213. Theologians at the Council of Trent asserted that clerical concubinage was the ‘supreme disgrace to the clerical order’. The twenty-ﬁfth session, The Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, trans. Revd H. J. Schroeder, OP (Rockford, Ill.: Tan Books, 1978), 246. See also Constituciones Sinodales del Obispado de Orense compiladas hechas y publicadas por su Sen˜orı´a Illustrissima Don Pedro Ruiz de Valdivieso . . . (Orense: D. Juan Marı´a de Pazos, 1843), 157. 36 Constituciones Sinodales del Obispado de Orense, 157. 37 Ibid. 104. 38 It is probable that enforcement of the edicts was sporadic at best. According to Stephen Haliczer, even when prosecuted by diocesan courts, most clerics received modest ﬁnes and returned home to their families. Sexuality in the Confessional: A Sacrament Profaned (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 45.

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excommunication, the relationships between single women and parish priests persisted throughout the seventeenth century. For instance, Licenciado Saravia, the priest of Santa Eulalia Bouses (Ourense), baptized his own child, Marcos, in 1614.39 The mother of this child, Marta, was married to another man soon after Marcos was conceived, but there is no indication that the priest denied paternity as, despite his mother’s shotgun marriage to another man, Marcos carried his biological father’s surname. Moreover, both mother and son remained active members of the parish, serving occasionally as godparents. In the long run, Licenciado Saravia’s habits rubbed off on his son, as many years later he conceived a child out of wedlock as well. Marriage contracts provide considerably more evidence that single women continued to be involved with clerics throughout the seventeenth century, although these women’s names are lost to posterity. In 1631, Bartolome´ de Villija, the parish priest of San Andres de Penosin˜os (Ourense), arranged for the marriage of his illegitimate son, Francisco.40 In another example, the parish priest of San Martı´n Nogueyra (Ourense), Licenciado Don Juan Pe´rez San Paio, arranged for the marriage of his illegitimate daughters Benita Go´mez and Mari Ba´squez to the sons of Pedro Rodrı´guez.41 Nearly twenty years later, in 1696, he signed a similar contract for his illegitimate son, Don Benito Pe´rez Blanco.42 It is interesting to note that while ecclesiastical legislation took an increasingly negative view of clerical relationships, implying that they were only about sex and not love, some priests none the less felt a serious sense of responsibility for their lovers and offspring. In a Catalan case cited by Henry Kamen, the priest openly expressed his feelings of concern for his partner. When an Episcopal Visitor to the parish confronted the rector about his concubine, the rector replied ‘that in conscience he could not do anything about it because he had lived with her for so long that to leave her now would destroy her’.43 Other priests must have experienced similarly strong feelings about abandoning the women they loved. 39

Libro de Bautisados, Santa Eulalia Bouses, AHDO, 27.2.1 (24 April 1614). AHPO, caja protocolos 3328, fo. 243 (1631). 41 AHPO, caja protocolos 3550, fo. 107 (1674). 42 AHPO, caja protocolos 3319, fo. 20 (1696). 43 Henry Kamen, The Phoenix and the Flame: Catalonia and the Counter-Reformation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 326. 40

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Thus, amancebamiento, with either an unmarried man or a priest, offered some important beneﬁts for Galician women. First, they could engage in extra-legal relationships with men without permanently subjecting themselves to the constraints of marriage. As amancebos, a woman and her chosen partner could live under the same roof, engage in sexual activity, and have meaningful emotional ties. When the man left, that relationship could be terminated without any penalty other than the heartbreak that might accompany the break-up. These relationships were not secret, and no shame accompanied them despite the condemnation of both the civil and ecclesiastical establishment. In the public consciousness, these relationships even had a certain legitimacy since the couple could, of course, marry at any time (except in the case of clerical concubines). In fact, 18-year-old Marina de Cedeyra, a servant girl, seemed to think that the evolution from amancebamiento to marriage was the normal process. She was denounced to the Inquisition in 1587 for saying what she believed to be the truth—that sex between single people was not a sin because they could marry afterwards.44 Although religiously problematic, her statement was an accurate description of the relationship between premarital sex and marriage in Galician society. According to the historian Isidro Dubert Garcı´a, approximately 10 per cent of Galician brides came to the altar pregnant.45 Many of these pregnancies no doubt resulted from couples engaging in premarital sex as a guarantor of the marriage contract; however, many others were probably the result of couples moving from amancebamiento to clerically sponsored marriage when a new priest came to the village or an Episcopal Visitor pressured some couples to ﬁnally take the sacrament. Second, although we know little about marriage choice in peasant families, scholars have always assumed that early modern people privileged economics over affection when choosing partners. Even recent anthropological work reveals that peasants often viewed access to property as a critical concern of prospective marriage partners.46 However, the decision to become amancebados had no obvious economic beneﬁt other than the pooling of available resources. In fact, single women’s ability to inherit made them less economically 44

AHN, Sec. Inq., legajo 2042, no. 19, fo. 5 (1587). Isidro Dubert, ‘Los comportamientos sexuales premaritales en la sociedad gallega’, Studia Histo´rica Historia Moderna, 9 (1991), 128. 46 Gala Gonza ´lez, ‘Day Workers, Main Heirs’, 149–50. 45

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dependent on men other than their fathers. We tend to forget that, for many women, ‘active sexuality promised greater and, especially, more immediate rewards than custodianship of virginity’, as the historian Elizabeth Cohen has pointed out.47 Lust and love more than land and money prompted couples to move in together. Certainly some men made marriage promises purely for the purposes of seduction and sexual intercourse took place only once; however, amancebamiento was not a one-night stand, but a relationship. One would have to be very cynical about the relationship between love and lust to deny that many of the promises of marriage were the product of intense physical and emotional connections between people, even if those connections did not last long or end in marriage. Finally, through amancebamiento all women could engage in sexual relationships and produce the children that were critical to the maintenance of the family line in a region where women’s marital prospects were limited by male migration. Amancebamiento became an effective alternative to marriage because, according to the available evidence, Galician families did not attach any stigma to illegitimate birth, particularly if the couple might eventually marry.48 Parish books reveal the extent to which non-marital sex was common in the region. Illegitimacy rates in early modern Galicia were generally at least double, and often triple, the European average, and such high numbers of children born out of wedlock appear in nearly all parts of the region. During the last half of the eighteenth century in Lugo, illegitimacy rates ranged between 4.84 per cent and 8.54 per cent.49 In Ulla, near the Atlantic coast, during the ﬁrst half of the seventeenth century, illegitimacy rates stood at 7.13 per cent, and even as they fell during the second half of the 47 The same was true in early modern Rome: see Elizabeth S. Cohen, ‘No Longer Virgins: Self-Presentation by Young Women in Late Renaissance Rome’, in Reﬁguring Woman: Perspectives on Gender and the Italian Renaissance, ed. Marilyn Migiel and Juliana Schiesari (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 176. 48 According to Pina-Cabral, in northern Portugal, ‘Unmarried mothers, whose sexuality has not been redeemed by marriage, are not feared or ostracized because of their ‘‘illegitimate motherhood’’, rather they are despised and considered somewhat impure’ (‘Female Power and the Inequality of Wealth’, 87). Based on the available source materials, I ﬁnd no evidence to indicate that unmarried mothers in Galicia were despised. 49 The average illegitimacy rate in Europe was approximately 2% before 1750. By the end of the eighteenth century, it had grown to around 5%. Cissie Fairchilds, ‘Female Sexual Attitudes and the Rise of Illegitimacy: A Case Study’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 8/4 (Spring 1978), 627. For Galicia, see Saavedra, ‘Casa y comunidad’, 124.

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century, they remained far above the European average of 2–4 per cent.50 Jose´ Manuel Pe´rez Garcı´a found that on the peninsula of Salne´s, the numbers of illegitimate births ﬂuctuated widely, but they were over 9 per cent for the ﬁrst half of the seventeenth century and rose again at the end of the eighteenth century.51 Moreover, these ﬁgures may substantially underestimate illegitimacy in the region, as record keeping was often erratic and many illegitimate children were registered in parish books as expo´sitos, abandoned children.52 As male migration intensiﬁed, both illegitimacy rates and the numbers of abandoned children soared.53 During the late nineteenth century, one-quarter of the births in some communities were illegitimate.54 Galician women easily entered these relationships and bore illegitimate children because they knew that not only were they unlikely to be punished for their acts, but their choices would be supported by both the Castilian legal system and Galician culture. Most importantly, when non-marital relationships came to an end, single women in Spain had signiﬁcant legal rights, which they enthusiastically pursued. If the woman entered into a sexual relationship with a man based on a promise of marriage and he then reneged on that promise, the woman could pursue litigation against him in either the civil or ecclesiastical court. An adult single woman over 25 could initiate legal complaints on her own, while a young woman who was under 25 years old had to rely on her father or some other adult male to engage the justice system on her behalf.55 She might demand that the magistrate enforce the marriage promise, or she might insist on ﬁnancial compensation for her lost virginity and her dowry. If a child had been produced, she could request child support. Women rarely chose the ﬁrst option. When a betrothal did not work out, most Galegas were content to leave with ﬁnancially advantageous settlements. 50 Ofelia Rey Castelao, Aproximacio ´n a la historia rural de la comarca de la Ulla (siglos XVII–XVIII) (SantiagodeCompostela: UniversidaddeSantiago deCompostela,1981),42. 51 Jose ´ Manuel Pe´rez Garcı´a, Un modelo de sociedad rural de Antiguo Re´gimen en la Galicia costera: la Penı´nsula del Salne´s (Santiago de Compostela: Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, 1979), table 4-9. 52 For an extended discussion of early modern parish record keeping, see my Regulating the People, 91–2. 53 For statistics on the rise of abandoned children in Mondon ˜ edo, see Saavedra, 54 Kelley, ‘Unwed Mothers’, 566. Economı´a, polı´tica y sociedad, 132. 55 For more on women and early modern legal systems, see Gowing, Domestic Dangers, ch. 2, and Stretton, Women Waging Law.

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These settlements, recorded in notarial records in documents known as cartas de apartamiento, terminated pending litigation or legal claims on a person. Couples might also agree to end litigation in a document called a concordia. Unmarried couples frequently used apartamientos to end the legal relationship between them created by a promise of marriage.56 In large part, the legal connection created by a promise of marriage was the product of the Catholic Reformation’s clariﬁcation of the process of receiving the sacrament of marriage. Prior to the Council of Trent, a couple could make a promise of marriage in the present tense, ‘I marry you.’ That promise, as long as it was consensual, no impediment to the marriage existed, and was followed by sexual intercourse, legitimated a marriage. Couples made the promise, had sex, moved in together, and were married in the eyes of the community and the Church. However, Tametsi, the Council’s elaboration of the marriage process, required that couples begin the process of marrying with a promise of marriage in the future tense, ‘I will marry you.’ The marriage only became valid after the promise was announced by a parish priest on three consecutive Sundays, a promise of marriage in the present tense was made in the presence of a priest, and the priest conferred the nuptial blessing. In an attempt to prevent men from using a promise of marriage in the future to seduce women, the Church continued to insist that the promise in the present tense was legally and spiritually binding even if it did not constitute a legal marriage. As we will see, this caveat did not stop unscrupulous men from using a marriage promise to entice women to have sex with them; however, it did create a window during which a couple were legally bound to one another but not married.57 Sexually active single women could litigate against their former lovers for seduction by promise of marriage when their relationships ended before they made it to the altar.58 56 For more on apartamientos, see my ‘When Love Goes Wrong: Getting out of Marriage in Seventeenth-Century Spain’, Journal of Social History, 29/4 ( June 1996), 871–82. 57 For a discussion of the illicit sexual relationships between French peasants, see Fairchilds, ‘Female Sexual Attitudes’. 58 For a discussion of litigation of broken marriage promises in Mexico, see Patricia Seed, ‘Marriage Promises and the Value of a Woman’s Testimony in Colonial Mexico’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 13/2 (1988), 253–76. For a discussion of English cases, see Gowing, Domestic Dangers, 177–9.

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The scenarios presented in apartamientos share much in common. Most of the couples had agreed to have sexual relations and/or cohabit on the basis of a promise to marry sometime in the future; however, as time passed feelings changed and at least one partner decided to end the relationship. The couple required a legal termination of their promise in order to allow the former lovers to marry someone else. Without legal documentation, if one partner contracted marriage with another person, he or she could be charged with bigamy. Even in cases where there was no mention of cohabitation or reproduction, couples were required to formally terminate their betrothals. October 8, 1691 was a busy day for Juan Alvarez from the parish of Santiago de Cerreda (Ourense). He ﬁrst obtained an apartamiento from Marı´a Blanca. According to that document, the couple had agreed to marry twelve years earlier, but, for unnamed reasons, they never did. In the document, Marı´a and Juan freed each other of their obligations to each other and agreed that they were free to marry the partners of their choice. That same day, Juan entered into a marriage contract with a woman named Margarita.59 In other cases, things just did not work out as planned. Pedro Rodrı´guez had asked Marina Gonzalez to marry him. But when they approached her father for his blessing, he refused. Marina, not wanting to disobey her father, decided to call off their engagement and Pedro agreed in their apartamiento.60 In many of these documents, women made it clear that their lovers either had to marry them or pay up. Antonio de Castrelo had used ‘many marriage promises’ to persuade Polonia Rodrı´guez to have sex with him. She had agreed, they had had sex, and the child that their intercourse had produced lived with Antonio. However, their relationship had reached a crossroads. On the grounds that he had taken her virginity based on a promise of marriage, Polonia intended to use the ‘full rigour of justice’ to compel Antonio either to marry her or to pay an unspeciﬁed amount to be decided by two men of the parish.61 In certain circumstances, scorned women gained some temporary control over the course of their ex-lovers’ lives by ﬁling lawsuits. Once a man made that marriage promise, he could not marry someone else 59 60 61

AHPO, caja protocolos 3494, fos. 34, 84 (1691). AHPO, caja protocolos 2434, fo. 21 (1674). AHPO, caja protocolos 3375, n.f. (1659).

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unless his former lover legally agreed to end their relationship. When Martı´n Merino proposed to Marina Miguez, Catalina Jolin ﬁrmly reminded Martı´n of his obligations to her by putting an impediment on his new marriage based on his previous proposal to her. However, she no longer wanted to marry him and their subsequent apartamiento allowed Martı´n to marry Marina or whoever he wished.62 In addition to delaying his plans, a woman could force an ex-lover to compensate her for their relationship before allowing him to marry someone else. Ana Garcı´a de Prada, the single woman with whom I began the chapter, used her legal standing to exert some power over Antonio. When she and Antonio broke up the ﬁrst time, she forced him to agree to pay 30 ducados within two years and take responsibility for raising their child before she would grant him permission to marry his new lover (although he never did).63 Women could ask the courts to force their former lovers to pay for the loss of their virginity, even when the men denied having made a promise of marriage. In 1697, Josepha Go´mez ﬁled charges against her lover Andres Pe´rez. Before an ecclesiastical court, she charged that Andres had made her pregnant and promised to marry her. Andres denied that he had ever promised marriage. They eventually reached an agreement in which Andres paid 660 reales for having deﬂowered Josepha, for the care of the child, and for the costs of the lawsuit.64 Similarly, in 1695, Lucia Sa´nchez took her former lover, Francisco Go´mez, before the local justice. She claimed that he had taken her virginity and that as a result of their sexual encounters she had borne his child. Although Francisco denied the charges, the justice ordered him to pay her 36 ducados de vello´n in two instalments and to pay child support.65 In 1679, before a local justice, Pascua Vasquez and her father charged that Santiago Go´mez had promised to marry her. Pascua and Santiago had engaged in sexual intercourse and Pascua had given birth to a baby girl. Santiago rejected her claim that he had promised her marriage but conceded that ‘even if it were true, he was not obligated to marry her, but only to dower her as a result of the sexual intercourse’.66 62 63 64 65 66

AHPO, caja protocolos 3440, fo. 50 (1628). AHPO, caja protocolos 3317, fo. 34 (1672). AHPO, caja protocolos 3495, fo. 66 (1697). AHPO, caja protocolos 3319, fo. 50 (1695). AHPO, caja protocolos 3318, n.f. (1679).

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Men like Santiago knew that the price of having taken a woman’s virginity and/or having broken a marriage promise was around 30 ducados plus court costs. In some cases, marriage never seems to have been in the cards, yet that fact did not deter the women from ﬁling suit. After Marı´a Lorenc¸a became pregnant by Domingo de Burtelo, they did not want to marry and could not because of an unnamed impediment. However, Marı´a’s father was not about to let the young man off the hook so easily. In return for ending the legal action against him, Domingo and his father agreed to pay 30 ducados plus two ferrados of wheat, one canedo of good white wine, six quartillas of butter, and a pair of hens when Marı´a gave birth.67 In other cases, women were merely fools for unscrupulous men. Even though Madalena Rodrı´guez was a mature woman (more than 30 years of age), she was deceived at least three times. According to the agreement that ended their litigation, Eugenio de Soto had made her pregnant three times, each time promising to marry her. Eugenio then denied both having had sex with Madalena and having asked her to marry him; however, he agreed to pay her 25 ducados in order to end the lawsuit and to pay for the care of a child named Cristina, whom Madalena had unceremoniously left on his doorstep.68 Eugenio was not the only man to break hearts. Grabiel Correa was either a cad or the local scapegoat. In 1617, Catalina Vasquez charged that he had made her pregnant. He denied paternity and she eventually took back her accusation.69 However, this was not his last appearance before the courts. In 1631, Dominga Rodrı´guez charged that Grabiel had had sex with her. He denied it and she eventually admitted that her charge had been ‘malicious’. He agreed to pay her 8 ducados and some cloth as alms ‘because she was poor’ without admitting any guilt.70 Even women who had relationships with clerics could use the legal system to gain redress. Marı´a Antonia Go´mez, who was older than 18 and younger than 25, had sexual intercourse and ‘communication’ with Bachiller Don Ygnacio Gonza´lez de Condame, a cleric. When she became pregnant, she brought charges against the cleric that landed him 67 68 69 70

AHUS, protocolo 1672, n.f. (1682). AHPO, caja protocolos 3495, fo. 19 (1697). AHPO, caja protocolos 3594, fo. 4 (1617). AHPO, caja protocolos 3595, n.f. (1631).

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temporarily in jail. Eventually, his liaison cost him 100 ducados de vello´n and an agreement to care for and raise the child.71 Similarly, Marı´a Pascual charged the priest of Santa Marı´a de Sobrado (Ourense) with having deﬂowered her. He asserted his innocence and claimed that he did not even know Marı´a, but agreed to pay her 50 ducados for her dowry to end the litigation.72 Not all of these suits were successful. The apartamientos sometimes indicate that family members or other interested parties encouraged or even pressured the women to withdraw their complaints. Marı´a Feijoo dropped her allegations against Domingo de Rojas, a merchant from Ourense, after ‘some honorable people’ had intervened.73 Domingas Rodrı´guez also gave up her suit on the advice of some ‘persons of conscience’.74 One woman even asserted that she had been pressured to engage in the litigation. Ine´s Crespa noted in her apartamiento ending a legal complaint against Blas Bartolome´ that she had initiated proceedings against Blas because ‘some people had induced her’ and that she was an honest and honourable young woman who had not had sex with him.75 It is impossible to know what was behind these changes of heart. Some of the charges may have been frivolous, while some families may have been embarrassed by the ongoing proceedings or the gossip prompted by the litigation. The costs involved in prolonged court cases probably also played a role in the women’s decisions. Although a promise of marriage formed the basis of the suits, marriage was never the outcome of these cases. Of course, couples who settled their disagreements by agreeing to marry would not need an apartamiento. Couples who were at an impasse were unlikely to be forced to marry by judges, either secular and ecclesiastical. Although a judge could emphasize a man’s obligation to make good his word, he could not compel a man to marry against his will, as the Catholic Church placed a high priority on mutual consent in marriage.76 Moreover, there is no language in any of these apartamientos shaming AHUS, protocolo 2338, fo. 11 (1691). AHPO, caja protocolos 3324, fo. 17 (1616). 73 AHPO, caja protocolos 3582, fo. 33 (1672). 74 AHPO, caja protocolos 3317, fo. 31 (1675). 75 AHPO, caja protocolos 3566, fo. 16 (1618). 76 On the role of the Church in maintaining the importance of individual will in marriage, see Patricia Seed, To Love, Honor, and Obey in Colonial Mexico: Conﬂicts over Marriage Choice, 1574–1821 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), esp. ch. 2. 71 72

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the women for their non-marital sexual activity.77 Quite the contrary— the legal systems granted women some ﬁnancial security that then allowed them to begin new relationships either inside or outside of marriage. The ability of single women to engage in sexual activity without punishment did not limit their access to legal recourse when they were the victims of rape. If Inquisition testimonies are any indication, some Galician men not only believed that having sex with a single woman was not a sin, but they also acted on that belief without some women’s consent. After one of his servants accused him of taking her virginity, 60-year-old Pedro Gaybor was accused of saying that it was not a sin to deﬂower virgins and that it was no more of a sin for a man to sleep with two sisters than it was a sin for a man to eat an apple.78 One might also assume that when Melchior de Rosario said that if one was on a road and met a woman, and if she wanted to and he wanted to, it would not be a sin to sleep with her, he was not speaking hypothetically.79 As a consequence of these sexual attitudes, servant girls, who both lacked familial and communal protection and lived in close proximity to unrelated men, were often victimized by unscrupulous employers. Serrana Rial Garcı´a cites the example of Clara da Fonte, who had been the servant of a farmer in Santiago and had been made pregnant by him. She brought her case before local ofﬁcials and forced him to pay both for the birth and 440 reales towards her dowry.80 Other women were the victims of random attacks. In 1696, Marı´a de Serra, a single woman from Soto de Penedo (Ourense), appeared before a local justice to tell her tale of sexual violence. She testiﬁed that she was single, more than 25 years old, that her parents were both deceased, and that she was a weaver who had always lived honestly and chastely. One night during the previous April, she was on the road returning from the city of Ourense. In a vacant area, she had met a man whom she did not know, and he had beaten and raped her. As a result of the attack, she had become pregnant and was appearing before the local ofﬁcials to declare

77 Moreover, unlike English women in slander cases, Galegas rarely spoke of their own shame. See Gowing, Domestic Dangers, 121. 78 AHN, Sec. Inq., legajo 2042, no. 10, fo. 8v (1583). 79 AHN, Sec. Inq., legajo 2042, no. 8, fo. 16v (1581). 80 Cited in Rial Garcı ´a, Las mujeres en la economı´a urbana, 119.

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her pregnancy and its origins in order to avert any scandal and to protect her good name.81 Even rape cases could be resolved for a price that did not necessarily involve marriage. In 1684, Amaro de Gayoso charged Antonio de Passarin with raping his daughter Lucia. She was pregnant and ready to give birth. When Antonio refused to marry her, her dutiful father had Antonio imprisoned. They say that prison changes a man, and it certainly had its effect on Antonio. In jail, Antonio not only confessed to the rape, but he and Lucia became engaged. However, because the two were too closely related, they could not marry. In the apartamiento, Antonio’s parents agreed to pay Amaro 12 ducados, care for the soon-tobe-born child, and pay all the outstanding legal costs.82 Authorities only intervened when the relationship precipitated some public scandal, and those occasions were few and far between.83 Pregnancy was the surest sign of promiscuous or scandalous behaviour, and unmarried pregnant women were supposed to inform local judicial authorities of their status by ﬁling a document called an esponta´nea. Once the pregnancy became public, the local ofﬁcial would then be in a position to investigate a case of rape or to punish the offending parties for their transgression of public morality. However, one examination of esponta´neas from the province of Lugo found that the justices were content to admonish pregnant women to live from that point on without causing more scandal, rather than to ﬁne them, force them to marry, or exile them from the community. The only woman to receive a harsh sentence was making her third appearance as an unwed mother; she was exiled from the town of Navia de Suarna for forty days.84 More commonly, the couple dutifully came forward but received no penalty. For instance, on 26 February 1694, Juan de Outromuro and Marı´a Gonza´les ﬁled an esponta´nea before the local justice in the coto of Sobrado in the province of Ourense. Both came forward to state that they were of legal age, more than 25 years old, that they had engaged in sexual relations, and that Marı´a was approximately ﬁve months pregnant. They asked for leniency, assuring the justice that this was the ﬁrst 81

AHPO, caja protocolos 3773, fo. 64 (1696). AHPO, caja protocolos 3318, fo. 5 (1684). Abigail Dyer views these interventions as increasing during the early modern period as a result of a redeﬁnition of amancebamiento as a violation of public honour. ‘Heresy 84 Saavedra, ‘Casa y comunidad’, 125. and Dishonor’, 145–52. 82 83

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time that Marı´a had been pregnant. Besides, there had been no scandal and they had come forward on their own. Juan and Marı´a also assured the judge that they would cease having sexual relations. Two days later, the judge, Antonio de Seara, began a brief investigation of the case, asking some other citizens of the same village to conﬁrm the story presented by Juan and Marı´a. His most serious concern was that this was indeed Marı´a’s ﬁrst pregnancy. On 16 March, the judge issued his ruling on the matter, declaring that Juan and Marı´a were to live ‘chastely and honestly’ and that they were not to have any contact that might provoke suspicion or scandal. He ﬁned them each 200 maravedis in court costs.85 Similarly, the apartamiento between Pedro de Monteagudo and Marı´a de Avertesga, a single woman, indicated that a local justice had charged them with having had sex outside of marriage. The evidence of their interaction was clear, as Marı´a was pregnant. They both confessed to having had sex. In addition, Marı´a declared that she had previously given birth to a child by another man, thereby nullifying any claim that Pedro had taken her virginity. Once they had confessed to their immoral behaviour, the judge dropped the charges, and Marı´a and Pedro split the costs of the midwife and the care of the child.86 Neither the justice nor either party saw marriage as part of the resolution. Certainly, women experienced no penalty for having engaged in sexual relations nor was there any sign of social stigma, just the legal resolution of ﬁnancial responsibility for the child. Even the Catholic Church was trapped between its distaste for single women’s sexual behaviour and its need to deal with the consequences. Indeed, if single motherhood in any way marginalized women in their communities, at the birth of the child clerically administered ritual quickly reintegrated them both spiritually and socially. The ritual of choosing godparents, compadrazgo, created and/or reinforced spiritual and social networks for single mothers and their children. The Council of Trent, in the face of strong criticism by some Protestants, had strongly reafﬁrmed the importance of baptism and clariﬁed the relationships involving godparentage.87 For the good of their souls, all children, regardless of the circumstances of their conception, were supposed to be baptized to initiate them into the Christian community, 85 86 87

AHPO, caja protocolos 3773, fos. 14–15 (1694). AHPO, caja protocolos 3125, fo. 62 (1690). Twenty-fourth session, The Decrees of the Council of Trent.

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and one or two people other than the parents were to ensure that the child received proper spiritual guidance. At the baptismal font, the godparents swore to teach the child Christian doctrine. This ‘holy guardianship’ created a spiritual tie between the child and the godparents that was as strong as any blood relation and carried the same marital and sexual prohibitions. On a more practical level, compadrazgo implied co-parentage as well as spiritual guidance. Godparentage created support networks through which mothers ensured that their children would be provided for in a crisis. Should anything happen to the parents, the community expected the godparents, especially the godmother, the comadre, to help raise the orphaned child. It is difﬁcult to ascertain exactly how single women chose godmothers for their children, as the relationship between mother and godparents was not usually indicated in parish registers. However, baptismal records reveal that, at least from time to time, new mothers chose single female friends for this ritual sponsorship. For example, in the parish of Santa Eulalia Bouses (Ourense) in 1625, Ana Alvarez chose Gero´nima Pe´rez to be the godmother of her illegitimate daughter Lucia. Six years later, Gero´nima bore her own illegitimate daughter.88 Similarly, Costanza Sotelo chose Ana Sa´nchez as the comadre of her illegitimate daughter in 1666. Five years later, Ana became a single mother herself.89 We can interpret the relationships between these single mother comadres and their illegitimate children in a number of ways. Perhaps it was merely a coincidence that these women were close friends and both became single mothers. Perhaps single women with a propensity to engage in non-marital sex were, from the outset, more likely to have been friends. Whatever the case, it is interesting to see young single women forming relationships that had deep spiritual and practical implications. Other than these interesting cases, in my examination of the seventeenth-century baptismal records of two parishes (Santa Eulalia Bouses and Santiago de las Caldas, both in Ourense) I was unable to discern any particular pattern for single women’s choice of godmothers or godfathers for their children. The fact that single mothers seem to have been able to choose from a wide array of women to act as 88 89

Libro de Bautisados, Santa Eulalia Bouses, AHDO, 27.2.1. Libro de Bautisados, Santiago de las Caldas, AHDO, 30.8.1.

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godmothers indicates that neither they nor their illegitimate children were spiritually or socially marginalized. While godparentage ensured the spiritual care of their children, single mothers could be conﬁdent that Castilian law protected their economic interests. Castilian law granted their illegitimate children extensive legal rights including inheritance, which reduced the possibility that those children would fall into absolute poverty and be a burden to the community. Moreover, illegitimate status was not as rigid as scholars once believed.90 Castilian law recognized four categories of illegitimacy and most illegitimate children in Galicia were hijos naturales, natural children.91 According to the Siete Partidas, hijos naturales were the product of a sexual encounter in which at the time of conception the parents were able to marry (neither parent was married nor was there any legal impediment to their marriage), but, for whatever reason, they had not done so.92 For these children, the subsequent marriage of the parents erased their illegitimate status.93 If, however, their parents never married or married others, these children still possessed higher legal status than children born from adulterous or incestuous relationships or after one parent had taken holy orders. Children of these latter two categories were the bastards of Spanish society. Not surprisingly, as clearly as the laws deﬁned these children, it is not evident that Galegos distinguished between them either socially or in terms of inheritance. Overall, illegitimate children seem to have been well integrated into Galician communities. Parents dutifully provided them with dowries, spouses, and testamentary bequests. In 1645, Domingo de Pacio provided a dowry for his natural daughter, Marı´a. Not only was his gift of a dowry a clear indication that he viewed Marı´a as he would any other child, but he wanted her to live in his house after her marriage and expected the same reciprocal relationship as if she were his legitimate daughter. Moreover, her status does not seem to have affected her marriage prospects in the least. Her groom, Bartolome´ Ferna´ndez, 90 Wealthy parents could petition to change the status of an illegitimate child through a document known as a ce´dula de gracias al sacar. An individual could even petition on his or her own behalf. For a detailed examination of the gracias al sacar legitimations, see Ann Twinam, Public Lives, Private Secrets: Gender, Honor, Sexuality, and Illegitimacy in Colonial Spanish America (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). 91 Ibid. 128. 92 The critical legal tracts on illegitimacy are Partida 4, Title XV, Laws I–IX. 93 Twinam, Public Lives, Private Secrets, 128.

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agreed to provide the traditional arras, one-tenth of his goods, out of respect for his new bride.94 Similarly, Bastian Doutero found a groom for his natural daughter, Ysabel.95 Although, judging from her name, Don˜a Ysabel de Noguerydo Figueroa Villar de Francos may have been the hija natural of a local noble, it was her single mother, Dominga Riquerya, who arranged her marriage to Don Josephe de Entrepenas. Dominga also noted in her will that at the time of her daughter’s marriage, she had given the couple everything for which they had asked. In addition, she provided an inheritance for Don˜a Ysabel.96 Indeed, the notarial records include numerous marriage contracts for natural children. If these children faced discrimination in the local marriage market, I have not discovered any indications of it in the historical record. Illegitimate children faced some obstacles in terms of their ability to inherit. A man without legitimate heirs could leave his natural children the entire estate, portions of it, or nothing at all. Bastards had no particular rights to their father’s inheritance. If either the father or the mother had a legitimate heir, the natural child had the right to only oneﬁfth of the estate.97 Nevertheless, parents regularly provided for illegitimate children in their testaments. Marı´a Rodrı´guez de Parga, the wife of a soldier, had no surviving legitimate children when she prepared her testament in 1642. She made her natural daughter Marı´a, to whom she gave birth ‘before being married to my husband’, her universal heir.98 In other cases, the presence of legitimate offspring could alter the size of the inheritances of illegitimate children, as may have been the case with Ysavel Rodrı´guez. Her mother, Antonia Alvarez, acknowledged her gratitude towards her natural daughter Ysavel in her 1683 testament and bequeathed her 20 ducados ‘for her good and loyal services’. Her only legitimate heir, her son, Juan Gonza´lez, was absent from the kingdom of Galicia. If he returned to Galicia alive, he was designated as her universal heir; however, if he did not return or was not still alive, a local cleric (not Ysavel) inherited the rest of her estate.99 At ﬁrst glance, this seems terribly unfair, yet it is not clear that Antonia did not provide for Ysavel in addition to the 20 ducados. For instance, Antonia 94 95 96 98 99

AHPO, caja protocolos 3548, fo. 5 (1645). AHPO, caja protocolos 3441, fo. 13 (1634). AHUS, protocolo 2959/1734, fo. 133 (1684). AHPC, protocolo 738, fo. 92 (1642). AHPO, caja protocolos 3487, fo. 35 (1683).

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Leyes de Toro, 50.

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noted that Ysavel was already married, and she may have taken her legı´tima in the form of a dowry or Antonia might have provided for her through other legal mechanisms like a donacio´n entre vivos. Mothers like Antonia had many legal options to ensure that their illegitimate children were well provided for. Galician culture normalized single parenthood, as is evident from one Galician folktale, which had its roots or a parallel in medieval French folklore: Jesus Christ had a mother and not a father; Saint Anne had a father and not a mother. How was that? Well, Saint Anne was the daughter of a gardener, who, when he had her, already was a saint. That gardener had a garden and in the garden he had an apple tree. One day in the garden, he picked one of the apples and ate it. He cleaned the blade that he had used to cut the apple by wiping it on his arm. After a little while, he noticed that the muscle over which he had passed the blade had formed a small tumour. At first, he tried to see if he could make it smaller with his fingers, but instead of getting smaller, it only grew more. He had that tumour for nine months, after which it disappeared. The gardener then saw a precious little girl in the garden, and drew near her, but the little girl ran away. Every time the gardener ran towards her, she would run from him. The more he ran, the faster she would run. That night the saintly gardener heard a voice in his dreams that told him, ‘When you see the girl do not run since you frighten her. Call to her saying ‘‘My daughter, come here’’ and she will come because she is your daughter and you will have her as your daughter and raise her.’ He did so, and that was Saint Anne. Having grown up, Saint Anne married and lived very happily with her husband. However, the years passed and it was getting to be the time for the couple to separate because it was the law that if a couple were together many years without producing a child, they must separate. However, Saint Anne and her husband did not want to separate. Therefore, they decided to flee that country and go to another where they did not have a similar law, and they took off. On the road, the archangel Saint Gabriel appeared to them and told them not to go on, that they should return home, that they would not have to separate, and that Saint Anne would soon give birth to a girl. And that’s what happened and that little girl was the Virgin Mary. When the Virgin was young, her parents, for fear of heretics, put her in a solitary country house in the kingdom of Litaria, in the province of Bevora. The house was very humble so that the heretics would not suspect that such a great woman would be there. It was there that the archangel Gabriel came to her and

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said, ‘God save you, Mary. You are full of grace. You will have a son and you will call him Jesus. She responded: ‘How can that be if I have not had a man . . . ? And Saint Gabriel added: ‘Don’t be afraid, Mary, the Divine Word will be made man and will live among us.’100

For early modern Galegos, much in this tale would have struck a chord. The story is remarkable in that it begins by acknowledging the two generations of single parenthood. The numerous children of single mothers might have liked to know that, in addition to other neighbour children in the same situation, both Saint Anne and Jesus had only one parent. The tale also rejects any early modern emphasis on marriage, neither condemning nor condoning it. Although Anne marries and remains married despite her infertility, unlike other late medieval and early modern descriptions of the Holy Family, the Virgin does not marry.101 There is no mention of Joseph or any sense of impropriety surrounding her impending single motherhood. Finally, by not ever naming Anne’s husband Joachim, Jesus is portrayed as the product of matrilineal descent.102 In her analysis of such representations of Anne, the Virgin, and Jesus, Pamela Sheingorn has argued that sacred fathers ‘come into their own in the late Middle Ages’, largely replacing this maternal line.103 Although that may have been true in some parts 100 Vicente Risco, ‘Etnograf ´ ıa: cultura espiritual’, in Historia de Galiza, ed. Ramo´n Otero Pedrayo, vol. 1 (Buenos Aires: Editorial No´s, 1962), 348, and Francisco Caudet Yarza, Leyendas de Galicia y Asturias (M. E. Editores, 1995), 75–7. For a discussion of the French version of this tale, see Francesca Sautman, ‘Saint Anne in Folk Tradition: Late Medieval France’, in Interpreting Cultural Symbols: Saint Anne in Late Medieval Society, ed. Kathleen Ashley and Pamela Sheingorn (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1990), 70–2. 101 On legends of the marriage of Joseph to the Virgin, see Christiane KlapischZuber, ‘Zacharias, or the Ousted Father: Nuptial Rites in Tuscany between Giotto and the Council of Trent’, in Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 197 ff. For more on Spanish depictions of the Holy Family, see Charlene Villasen˜or Black, ‘Love and Marriage in the Spanish Empire: Depictions of Holy Matrimony and Gender Discourses in the Seventeenth Century’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 32/3 (Fall 2001), 637–68. For a discussion of the legends of St Anne in northern Europe, see Ton Brandenbarg, ‘St. Anne and her Family: The Veneration of St. Anne in Connection with Concepts of Marriage and the Family in the Early-Modern Period’, in Saints and She-Devils: Images of Women in the 15th and 16th centuries, ed. Le`ne Dresen-Coende`rs (London: Rubicon Press, 1987), 101–28. 102 Kathleen Ashley and Pamela Sheingorn, ‘Introduction’, in Interpreting Cultural Symbols: Saint Anne in Late Medieval Society, ed. Kathleen Ashley and Pamela Sheingorn (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1990), 17 and Pamela Sheingorn, ‘Appropriating 103 Ibid. 184. the Holy Kinship: Gender and Family History’, ibid.

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of Europe, sixteenth-century Galician sculptors perpetuated this matrilineal iconography in altarpieces and sculptures portraying Anne, Mary, and Jesus.104 Indeed, the persistence of this folktale and such imagery may be a reﬂection of the general absence of Galician men and the realities of women’s lives in the early modern period. Aside from the fact that local culture accepted single mothers and their children and legal norms and religious rituals protected them, there were at least three good economic reasons for women to bear children out of wedlock. First, as single women often inherited at least some of the family property, children would have been an important source of labour. Second, as single women aged, they could rely on their children to care for them. Finally, an illegitimate child could inherit the family property that a single woman had conscientiously cultivated for most of her life. As a result, Galegas viewed children as critical to a single woman’s economic independence. In an interview with the anthropologist Susana de la Gala Gonza´lez, a Galega named Marı´a tied her lack of independence to the death of her illegitimate daughter. According to Marı´a, had her illegitimate daughter lived, she would have become an independent farmer. However, the child’s early death left her without anyone to help her with her agricultural chores. The lack of a child and conﬂict with her brother, the main heir, forced Marı´a into domestic service.105 Moreover, there is no indication that, during the early modern period, illegitimate children hindered a woman’s ability to marry any more than the general demographic situation did. Marı´a Rodrı´guez de Parga, the soldier’s wife mentioned earlier, had a natural daughter before marrying,106 as did Antonia Alvarez.107 Thus, children allowed single mothers to provide for themselves without jeopardizing future relationships.108 Some women regularly engaged in non-marital sex and bore many illegitimate children. For instance, in the parish of Santa Eulalia Barroso, Marı´a Belosa and Apolonia Darrana both bore at least ﬁve 104 See, for instance, two early modern images of Anne, the Virgin, and Jesus that were prominently displayed in the 1991 exhibition Galicia no Tempo. See Galicia no Tempo (Santiago de Compostela: Xunta de Galicia, 1990), 251, 253. 105 Gala Gonza ´lez, ‘Day Workers and Main Heirs’, 150. 106 AHPC, protocolo 738, fo. 92 (1642). 107 AHPO, caja protocolos 3487, fo. 35 (1683). 108 The same was true in early modern Rome: see Cohen, ‘No Longer Virgins’, 174.

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illegitimate children.109 However, single women’s fertility patterns indicate that, with these few exceptions, illegitimate children were not usually the result of promiscuous sex. Most single women only bore one illegitimate child.110 By controlling their fertility after bearing their ﬁrst child (presumably through abstinence), a single woman’s child could be the emotional and labour support that she needed without being an economic burden. Indeed, in the recent past some families have voiced the beneﬁts of single motherhood for family dynamics and inheritance strategies. Anthropologists found that, far from excluding a woman from inheritance, ‘a husbandless daughter may appear a particularly apt heir, for there will be no outside interest (that is no husband) deﬂecting her attention from her parents and her natal household’.111 By not bringing a husband into the mix, she would bring no conﬂict into the house and would not challenge her mother’s authority. (I discuss this type of conﬂict more extensively in Chapter 4.) Although Carmelo Liso´nTolosana suggests that unmarried daughters were more problematic in that they were not actively reproducing the female line,112 he does not take into account the high illegitimacy rates of the region or the evidence that illegitimate children could be an invaluable source of additional labour, especially for single female heads of household.113 Moreover, anthropological interviews reveal that Galegos did not view single mothers negatively. Carmen, a Galega whose life-story has been compiled by Hans and Judith-Marı´a Buechler, says that when she was a teenager around the middle of the twentieth century she told her parents that she was pregnant. Far from admonishing her, her mother defended her, saying, ‘The same could have happened to the most 109 As a single mother Marı ´a Belosa had Pedro (baptized 23 March 1634), Francisco (23 February 1635), Francisco (23 April 1639), Francisco (4 January 1641), and Marı´a (18 April 1643). The fact that Marı´a named three of her children Francisco indicates that high infant mortality took a toll on her family. Apolonia Darrana had Antonio (baptized 24 January 1637), Bartolome´ (15 February 1638), Jhoan (3 November 1643), Catalina (25 May 1648), and Andre´s (26 June 1650). Libro de Bautisados, Santa Eulalia Barroso, AHDO 3.5.1. 110 See, for instance, Pe ´rez Garcı´a, Un modelo de sociedad rural de Antiguo Re´gimen en la Galicia costera’, 112, and Dubert, ‘Los comportamientos sexuales premaritales’, 132. 111 Brettell, cited in Kelley, ‘Unwed Mothers’, 575. 112 Liso ´ n-Tolosana, Antropologı´a cultural, 267. 113 Dubert, ‘Los comportamientos sexuales premaritales’, 130, and Buechler and Buechler, Carmen, 77–8.

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steadfast woman in the world. When people are in love, these things just happen.’114 Some Galegos even associated single mothers with relative wealth.115 When Heidi Kelley asked her informants about a Galician woman, Prudencia, who at the turn of the century had given birth to four children by four different men, her respondents told her that, ‘These single mothers . . . were rich women who could do what they wanted. They did not need husbands.’116 Those same villagers in the coastal town of Ezaro valued women’s economic independence more than any sense of strict sexual morality. According to Kelley, the association of reputation with economic success was ‘reﬂected in the nostalgia with which young married women in Ezaro today sometimes looked back on the time when there were many unwed mothers in the village, and in their opinion that many of these unwed mothers must have consciously chosen not to marry’.117 Peasant women often idealized the unwed mother as an independent woman. According to Kelley, unwed mothers represent for many Galegas ‘cherished ideals of female independence and individual initiative’. According to one of her female interviewees, these women ‘valued liberty [libertad ] over marriage’.118 Although neither the Church nor any other institution successfully imposed its morality on Galegos, Galicia was not without a moral code. Within their own communities, Galician peasant women and men determined the boundaries of condoned sexual activity, which were far from rigid. Much like Laura Gowing argues in her discussion of early modern England, ‘the rules, principles, and beliefs that women and men spoke of and appealed to suggest a range of moral structures and a degree of ﬂexibility’.119 To the modern researcher, the line between sexually active, economically responsible single women and promiscuous women seems blurred. Despite high illegitimacy rates, in my earlier study of episcopal visitations to parishes in Ourense, I found only one case in which the bishop’s representatives admonished local single women for their inappropriate behaviour. In 1571, a Visitor to the parish of Santa Marı´a Amarante found that Margarita, the daughter of 114 Dubert, ‘Los comportamientos sexuales premaritales’, 130, and Buechler and Buechler, Carmen, 56. 115 However, particularly in patrilineal areas of Galicia, the connection between poverty and illegitimacy may be stronger: Bauer, ‘Family and Property’, 150. 116 Kelley, ‘Unwed Mothers’, 570. 117 Ibid. 571. 118 Kelley, ‘Competition vs. Cooperation’, 451. 119 Gowing, Domestic Dangers, 10.

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Vicente Asiana, Cathalina, the daughter of Olinda de Dacon, and four others were ‘bad examples’. He ordered the women to ‘live honestly and chastely’ and their parents to punish them ‘so that they might live properly’.120 Although the Visitor did not describe their offence, I presume that he was referring to some type of sexual misconduct. Other Visitors criticized women living outside their native parishes. An Episcopal Visitor to the parish of Barrantes on the Atlantic coast in 1652 warned that there were two promiscuous women in the parish. Probably prostitutes, these women evaded prosecution by moving from one jurisdiction to another.121 In Santa Marı´a Salamonde (Ourense), a Visitor ordered Violante Delictanc¸o, who was not from Salamonde, to stop the scandal that she caused in the parish. He ordered her to leave within thirteen days. In addition, as noted in Chapter 3, a variety of local and regional authorities issued mandates against single women who had moved to towns and cities in large numbers. These admonishments seem to have had little effect, if for no other reason than that they came from men from outside the community with few effective means of enforcement. Considering the extent of non-marital sex in Galicia, it is possible that single women who engaged in sexual activity outside of the supervision of family and community caused more anxiety on that account than women who engaged in sexual activity within prescribed local norms. In at least one case, Portuguese women who migrated to parishes on the Galician side of the border found themselves in trouble. In Santa Eulalia Bouses in 1610, the Episcopal Visitor took it upon himself to rid the parish of such women. According the parish record of the visitation, the Visitor found that this place is on the frontier with Portugal and that often women, both married and unmarried, desiring to live in the said place, succeed in coming from the Kingdom of Portugal. For the most part, they come excommunicated by their prelates and their lives and customs are bad examples. They cause damage to the homes of the inhabitants of this place in the groves, vineyards, meadows, turnip fields, and other places. In order to remedy this, the said Visitor orders the said parishioners . . . do not give shelter nor rent nor sell to any such persons.122 120 121 122

Libro de Visitas, Santa Marı´a Amarante, AHDO, 24.1.13, fo. 17r (23 July 1571). Saavedra, La vida cotidiana, 56. Libro de Visitas, Santa Eulalia Bouses, AHDO, 27.2.5, fo. 95 (1610).

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These Portuguese women’s crimes seem to have been both bad ‘lives and customs’, terms that generally refer to promiscuity, as well as pilfering from local ﬁelds and groves. Whether the Visitor’s assessment of these women’s past was correct or not, they clearly transgressed some moral boundary. Yet determining where Galegos drew that line is difﬁcult for the historian. In each of these cases, an outsider and a cleric exercised his authority to enforce a moral code not produced by the community itself. It seems impossible to know the degree to which the Visitors worked on the community’s behalf or whether community members condoned the Visitors’ actions. On the one hand, the Visitors’ actions were presumably prompted by complaints expressed during the visitation. Certainly, women from outside the parish were vulnerable to community condemnation, as they had no familial ties to the parish and disrupted an already difﬁcult marriage market. On the other hand, if the community considered female outsiders ‘loose’, it was certainly a case of the pot calling the kettle black. Although the parish of Santa Eulalia Bouses was small, only about sixty families, in 1605 three of the twelve children were born to unmarried mothers. In 1615, two of the twelve newborns and in 1617 two of the eleven children were illegitimate. At least one child was born to a single mother or left abandoned in the parish every year between 1610 and 1620.123 Thus, other factors, largely invisible in archival documentation, must have inﬂuenced community assessments of individual women’s sexuality. In addition to the privilege given to economic independence mentioned above, interpersonal relations, family status, and the community’s perception of the relationship that produced the child must have made the difference between being perceived as promiscuous or as a woman who merely valued her liberty. But what about honour and the power of the Catholic Church? Galician women’s propensity to engage in non-marital relationships and bear illegitimate children strongly challenges the two major frameworks for understanding early modern Spanish sexuality: the Mediterranean honour code and the Catholic Reformation. According to anthropologists’ formulation of the honour code, in Mediterranean societies women derived their honour from the preservation of their chastity and male honour was dependent on their ability 123

Libro de Bautisados, Santa Eulalia Bouses, AHDO, 27.2.1.

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to maintain the chastity of the women in their care.124 The loss of a woman’s sexual purity under any circumstances tainted not only her own honour, but also the honour of her entire family. Certainly, honour was an important topic of discussion in early modern Spain. Playwrights, theologians, and secular authorities all concerned themselves with honour and its role as a social arbiter. Indeed, early modern Spaniards articulated concerns about honour as the basis of extensive litigation and even violence.125 However, for early modern Galegos, honour was not a rigid social and sexual code. Recent research has forced scholars to contextualize closely the multivalent meanings and uses of honour in Spanish society. Indeed, a person’s honour was constituted not by broad social norms, but by a combination of one’s own articulation of one’s behaviour and one’s interactions with the community.126 Galegos used honour in different situations for different purposes.127 With few exceptions, the language of honour is remarkably absent from the descriptions of women’s situations in apartamientos. When peasant women employed the language of honour, they used the term honra as a synonym for virginity or as a descriptor of their virginity in ways that are not easy to translate. For instance, Ine´s da Cornada wanted her ex-lover to pay for her ‘honra virginidad’.128 The use of honra in this way was not merely peasant talk—one of the three deﬁnitions of honra in the 1734 Diccionario de la lengua castellana equates it with a woman’s virginity.129 More in line with scholarly notions of sexual honour, women also used honra to refer to reputation. Francesca Pereyra had sued Gregorio Alvarez for the ‘satisfaction of her honour and known virginity’, as well as for the care of their child.130 In her apartamiento, Ine´s Crespa Pitt-Rivers, The Fate of Shechem, 23 ff. See Dyer, ‘Heresy and Dishonor’, Renato Barahona, Sex Crimes, Honour, and the Law in Early Modern Spain: Vizcaya, 1500–1750 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), and Scott Taylor, ‘Honor and Violence in Castile, 1600–1650’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Virginia, 2001). 126 Twinam, Public Lives, Private Secrets, 33. The notion of the ﬂexibility of honour is also an important theme throughout the essays in Johnson and Lipsett-Rivera (eds.), The Faces of Honor. See in particular Johnson and Lipsett-Rivera’s ‘Introduction’, 15, and much of Ann Twinam’s essay in the same volume, ‘The Negotiation of Honor’. 127 That even prostitutes used the notion of honour for their own purposes has been clearly described by Elizabeth S. Cohen, ‘Honor and Gender in the Streets of Early Modern Rome’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 22/4 (Spring 1992), 597–625. 128 AHPO, caja protocolos 3548, fo. 60 (1645). 129 On-line at www.rae.es. 130 AHPO, caja protocolos 3551, fo. 52 (1680). 124 125

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explained that her pending litigation against Blas Bartolome´ was the result of him having ‘asked for her honour and virginity’.131 She then asserted that she was an honest and honourable woman. Finally, women could use honra as a term that had particular meaning in a judicial setting.132 By conceptualizing their failed relationships as seductions by promise of marriage and as a consequent loss of honour, jilted women subverted any attempt by either the community or the legal system to judge them negatively for their sexual interactions. Moreover, the renegotiating of their relationship problems into issues of honour gave them legal recourse which was otherwise unavailable to them. As Elizabeth Cohen has so neatly put it, by referring to honour and accusing their lovers of seduction, peasant women portrayed themselves as ‘virtuous in intent, if no longer intact of body’.133 This tactic was familiar to peasant women and their families across Spain. Both Abigail Dyer’s work on Castile and Renato Barahona’s research on Vizcaya indicates that women and their families conﬁgured their descriptions of sexual interactions along certain formulas that they knew to be particularly effective.134 Yet the fact that women did not automatically resort to the language of honour indicates that they too understood that it had multiple meanings that they might employ or not as the case warranted. Indeed, the judicial system did not necessary privilege honour over all other factors. In 1623, Francisco de Quiroga y Taboada’s natural daughter and a priest, both of whom lived in his home in A Corun˜a, were lovers.135 Francisco, angered to discover that his daughter was engaging in illicit sex under his own roof, ﬁrst shot the priest outside the house and then entered the home and shot Francisca. In this rare but dramatic instance of an honour killing, it is interesting that Francisco viewed his illegitimate daughter as subject to very rigid standards of sexual purity, although she was the product of his own illicit union, and that he declared that he had murdered them ‘for the honour and good name of his house’. AHPO, caja protocolos 3566, fo. 16 (1618). For a recent discussion of peasant women’s ability to manipulate language, see Benadusi, ‘Investing the Riches of the Poor’, 805–26. 133 The same was true in early modern Rome: see Cohen, ‘No Longer Virgins’, 189. 134 Dyer, ‘Heresy and Dishonor’, 112–13 and Barahona, Sex Crimes, Honour, and the Law. See also Cohen, ‘Honor and Gender in Rome’, 601, for the way that early modern Romans used notions of honour to renegotiate ‘the nature of the squabble’. 135 Abigail Dyer narrates this story in her ‘Heresy and Dishonor’, 133–6. 131 132

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According to Castilian law, Francisco de Quiroga y Taboada would have been justiﬁed in killing his daughter and her lover had he caught them in the act. However, witnesses testiﬁed that Marı´a Francisca was already visibly pregnant at the time of her murder, so the affair had been going on for some time. Rather than kill them in ﬂagrante delicto, Francisco killed them in different rooms. His defence relied on the language of honour to excuse his actions, but he did not convince the judges. They found him guilty of murder and banished him from the kingdom of Galicia. No matter how acute, Francisco’s loss of honour did not justify murder. We should not be surprised that illiterate single peasant women would be able to use the language of honour effectively to press their legal claims. Research in other parts of Europe has indicated that peasants were remarkably savvy about judicial processes.136 Early modern Spaniards were very litigious, and peasant women engaged in other types of legal interactions over everything from land disputes to malicious woundings.137 The system provided legal assistance and notaries, so illiteracy and poverty were not obstacles to successful legal action. Thus, honour was contextual and negotiable.138 A single woman might have sex and feel no loss of honour. Depending on the circumstances, when that relationship ended, she may or may not have believed that she had lost her honour. For those women who felt dishonoured, that loss could be temporary. A man could ‘take’ a woman’s honour and it could later be restored either through litigation and ﬁnancial compensation or on the basis of good hard work. The other major regulator of female sexuality, the Catholic Reformation Church, was no more effective in restricting Galician women’s sexual interactions. As I have argued elsewhere, the Catholic 136 See Tommaso Astarita, Village Justice: Community, Family, and Popular Culture in Early Modern Italy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), and Caroline Castiglione, ‘Adversarial Literacy: How Peasant Politics Inﬂuenced Noble Governing of the Roman Countryside during the Early Modern Period’, American Historical Review, 109/3 ( June 2004), 783–804. 137 In Rome, even prostitutes used the courts to defend themselves: see Cohen, ‘Honor and Gender’. 138 For an excellent discussion of how English women negotiated issues of honour, see Anna Clark, ‘Whores and Gossips: Sexual Reputation in London, 1770–1825’, in Current Issues in Women’s History, ed. Arina Angerman et al. (London: Routledge, 1989), 231–48.

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Reformation was largely ineffective in Galicia. From an institutional perspective, the upper levels of the Church hierarchy paid little attention to Galicia, where the beneﬁces were less remunerative than in Castile. In addition, the slow establishment of seminaries in the region left Galician clergy illiterate and poorly trained well into the seventeenth century.139 One Episcopal Visitor after another chastised parish priests for failing to give sermons or teach the catechism. It may have been just as well. Someone denounced the priest of Puebla de Valdeorras (Ourense) to the Inquisition for telling his parishioners that ‘simple fornication was not a sin, because a single woman who willingly offers herself and is not offended has not sinned . . . and besides it says in Genesis: go forth and multiply and ﬁll the earth’.140 Francisco Mendez, the priest of Santa Marı´a de Villnueva (Ourense), was accused of saying that it was better to be a concubine than badly married.141 Not surprisingly, these men were as inﬂuenced by local culture as their parishioners.142 Many people denounced to the Inquisition defended their heretical statements by stating that they did not know that what they had said was blasphemous. Attempts to better regulate religious activity, such as inspections by Episcopal Visitors and the Inquisition, happened irregularly. As a result, Galegos’ ideas about non-marital sex were more inﬂuenced by love, passion, demography, and economic concerns than by the expectations of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. The Church was not only unable to inculcate Galegos with a stricter morality, but conﬂicting institutional and legal priorities gave peasants the opportunity to successfully assert their own priorities before judicial elites.143 As we have seen, both ecclesiastical and secular courts had the authority to prosecute women for engaging in non-marital sex; however, those laws were rarely enforced. Instead, Galegas used those same judicial systems to pursue ﬁnancial protection for themselves and their illegitimate children. Paradoxically, both secular and ecclesiastical law served to enforce this alternative set of sexual norms.144 139 Baudilio Barreiro Mallo ´ n, ‘El Clero de la diocesis de Santiago: estructura y comportamientos (siglos XVI–XIX)’, Compostellanum, 33 (1988), 469–507. 140 Contreras, El Santo Oﬁcio, 631. 141 AHN Sec. Inq., legajo 2042, no. 8, fo. 18 (1581). 142 See my Regulating the People, ch. 2. 143 Abigail Dyer has indicated that ‘there was no consensus within the Church or within early modern Spain as to which sexual acts and beliefs should be criminalized’ 144 Ibid. 25. (‘Heresy and Dishonor’, 3).

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Thus, Castilian law, the Catholic Church, and Galician culture created an atmosphere in which single women had considerable sexual independence. Galician single women were not constrained by notions of honour and shame or isolated by rigid social codes. Many single women engaged in non-marital relationships, bore children by those men, and when those relationships ﬁzzled, they moved on. If they were dissatisﬁed with the way the relationships ended, they took their former lovers to court in order to get back in monetary compensation what they had spent in emotional capital. When their unorthodox lifestyles got them into trouble, they brazenly explained to Inquisitors why concubinage was better than marriage. Far from suffering social stigma, their friends and families provided them with support. Relatives rewarded their hard work with money, their children found spouses, and their mothers defended them to the authorities. Single women in Galicia had rights, knew their rights, and pursued their own way in the world with the support of their families, friends, and even the Church and the State.

4 ‘A married man is a woman’: Gender Tensions in Galician Marriages For all the talk about single women in Galicia, most Galegas eventually married. Margarida da Gando found herself two husbands. In 1623, at only 20 years old, she married Juan Martı´nez. Their marital bliss would be short-lived. Soon after, Juan left for Castile in search of work and she heard nothing from him for ﬁve or six years. Then, much to her surprise, Margarida got word that he was living outside of Madrid. Approximately ﬁve more years had gone by when Margarida heard from other men that Juan had died. However, when she went to the ecclesiastical judge in Ourense to get permission to remarry, her informants contradicted their stories. Exasperated, she went with a friend to Madrid to ﬁnd out the truth. After returning with proof of Juan’s demise, Margarida, then 36 years old, married Pedro de Deca.1 Although someone denounced her to the Inquisition as a bigamist, she was in possession of the necessary documentation and was absolved of any crime. Unlike her cohabiting friends, Margarida may have seen a different side of marriage. Although many women espoused the beneﬁts of being single, others knew that, in Galicia, marriage did not necessarily imply submission to a man. Both women and women’s historians have long considered the home as ‘women’s space’, but in Galicia home, a casa, was more than that: it was the focal point of female authority. Galicia’s mature brides found comfort and support in post-marital residence patterns that allowed them to remain in their natal homes and made their husbands outsiders. As married women, they took advantage of 1

AHN Sec. Inq., legajo 2042, no. 79, fos. 1–4v (1639).

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ﬂexible property rights that required their consent to transactions made with their marital goods and allowed them to augment estates when their husbands were away. When they died, women were able to ensure that the estates that they had so diligently accumulated and tended would be passed to the next generation. Married life could be highly desirable under the right circumstances.

PREP ARING FOR MARRIAGE The ﬁrst step in getting married was ﬁnding an appropriate spouse. Of course, with a dearth of men, not all women could marry economically or socially desirable men and, like their cohabiting peers, many women must have been guided by love or lust. Whether based on love or ﬁnances, both parties had to agree to the marriage unconditionally. The Catholic Church privileged affection over economic or political priorities and willingly intervened to stop coerced marriages.2 Indeed, the Council of Trent vigorously defended the importance of free will in marriage choice.3 Nevertheless, for economic or other reasons, some parents compelled their children to marry. We know that forced marriages occurred from time to time, as men and women charged with bigamy regularly described marriages contracted without their consent.4 For instance, in 1579, Mencia de Rocha from Vigo told Inquisitors that, at the age of 7 or 8, her father and stepmother had married her off to her stepmother’s son. He left soon after the marriage and she never saw him again. Mencia had steadfastly maintained that she had never wanted to marry that man. She married a second time without having resolved the legal issues surrounding her ﬁrst marriage. Mencia was eventually absolved of the charge of bigamy, as Inquisitors decided that she was far too young to have consented to the marriage.5 Juana Pe´rez told a similar story of being coerced to marry at a young age by her 2 For a more complete discussion of the Church and coerced marriages, see Seed, To 3 Twenty-fourth session of the Council of Trent. Love, Honor, and Obey. 4 For some medieval examples of abducted wives, see Heath Dillard, Daughters of the Reconquest: Women in Castilian Town Society, 1100–1300 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 135 ff. For similar stories from the Basque country, see Barahona, Sex Crimes, Honour, and the Law, 73 ff. 5 AHN, Sec. Inq., legajo 2042, no. 5, fo. 1 (1579).

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parents and was similarly absolved.6 According to the summary of the bigamy trial of Caterina de Villaloa, an 18-year-old peasant girl, her ﬁrst marriage was forced upon her at the age of 14. She was living with her parents when a man abducted her. Eventually they arrived at the house of an unfamiliar cleric in the bishopric of Lugo. He married the couple and they consummated the marriage. After a few days, she left her abductor and returned to her parents’ house. In accordance with episcopal procedures, Caterina went to the Bishop’s provisor, had the marriage annulled, and received a licence to marry again. She produced the licence before the Inquisition and was also absolved.7 The Inquisition did not believe all the claims of forced marriages. During his bigamy trial, Juan Rodrı´guez told Inquisitors that twentyﬁve years before he had been forced to marry his ﬁrst wife after her brothers had found him alone with her. Unconvinced, the tribunal handed down the harshest sentence, which included a public whipping and ﬁve years in the royal galleys.8 A cad could not rely on a claim of force to excuse his roguish behavior. As intense as the competition for men must have been, most Galegas on the verge of marriage were not virginal teenagers. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the mean average age at ﬁrst marriage in Galicia had risen to 25.6 for men and 25.7 for women.9 The age at which women ﬁrst married varied considerably. In my analysis of bigamy trials, I found that many of those women married around the age of 20,10 but many other women must have waited until they were over 30. No doubt, some women married young in order to commit to a permanent relationship before their potential spouses migrated. Indeed, women married younger in coastal areas of high male migration. The majority of older brides came from the Galician interior.11 Some young women’s families may have pressured them, either subtly or not so subtly, to make economically or socially advantageous matches. Endogamy rates varied considerably from parish to parish, AHN, Sec. Inq., legajo 2042, no. 7, fo. 12 (1581). AHN, Sec. Inq., legajo 2042, no. 31, fo. 9 (1593). 8 AHN, Sec. Inq., legajo 2042, no. 19, fo. 3 (1587). 9 Eiras Roel, ‘Mechanismos autorreguladores’, 71. 10 Allyson M. Poska, ‘When Bigamy is the Charge: Gallegan Women and the Holy Ofﬁce’, in Women in the Inquisition: Spain and the New World, ed. Mary Giles (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 189–205. 11 Eiras Roel, La poblacio ´n de Galicia, 199. 6 7

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but we can speculate that partible inheritance must have encouraged cousins to marry in order to consolidate adjacent landholdings. One study of coastal Galicia found that during the eighteenth century, nearly 70 per cent of marriages were endogamous within the parish, and by the end of the century nearly 20 per cent of marriages were between cousins.12 In order to marry within certain degrees of consanguinity, a couple had to request a papal dispensation. In one parish in the diocese of Ourense between 1600 and 1633, nearly one out of every four couples required a dispensation to marry.13 Of course, the bureaucracy involved expenditures of time and money, as the couple had to petition episcopal ofﬁcials and pay for the dispensation to be acquired from Rome. The cost of negotiating that bureaucracy shows up occasionally in the documentation ending the betrothal. For instance, in 1684, Dominga Barcala had initially agreed to marry the widower Francisco de Hervon, but they found that they were too closely related to marry without a dispensation. According to their apartamiento, since they had not engaged in sexual relations and did not have the money to pay for a dispensation, they were terminating their marriage agreement. As a part of the apartamiento, Francisco had to pay Dominga 200 reales for the cost of investigating and determining their consanguinity.14 Given the cost involved, the number of intrafamilial marriages among peasant families is quite surprising. In fact, cousin marriages were so common across the peninsula that the Spanish monarchy became alarmed about the constant ﬂow of money into Rome.15 However, cost is relative. Santiago de Compostela’s 1648 diocesan synod mandated that a dispensation cost no more than 6 reales.16 12 For rates of endogamy, see Burgo Lo ´ pez, ‘Niveles sociales’, 183. Ferna´ndez Cortizo, ‘La Tierra de Montes en el siglo XVIII’, http://www.ugr.es/adeh/ comunicaciones/Fernandez_Cortizo_C.pdf, 1, 3. For more on parish endogamy, see Vassberg, The Village and the Outside World, 97–103. 13 Poska, Regulating the People, 114–15. 14 AHUS, protocolo 2408, fo. 24 (1684). 15 According to James Casey, roughly one in nine Spanish marriages required a dispensation in 1762. Early Modern Spain: A Social History (New York: Routledge, 1999), 203. 16 Isidro Dubert, ‘Estudio histo ´ rico del parentesco a traves de las dispensas de matrimonio y de los archivos parroquiales en la Galicia del antiguo re´gimen: Primera aproximacio´n’, in Parentesco, familia, y matrimonio en la historia de Galicia, ed. Jose´ Carlos Bermejo Barrera (Santiago de Compostela: To´rculo, 1988), 169.

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As we saw in the previous chapter, couples courted and became betrothed on the basis of a promise to marry guaranteed by sexual intercourse. Under the most favourable conditions, the couple then reported their decision to their parents, who then made the arrangements for the dowry, the wedding, and the post-marital residence. From that point, the couple lived together, often in the home of the bride’s parents. The wedding and exchange of property might take place within weeks or might be delayed for months or even years. In some cases, no wedding ever occurred but the couple continued to cohabit. This possibility must have concerned some families more than others, as some dowry contracts contain clauses that nulliﬁed them if the marriage did not take place within a speciﬁed period of time.17 Galegos married in this traditional fashion throughout the early modern period despite the fact that this sequence of events conﬂicted with the marriage process prescribed by the Catholic Reformation Church. According to the decrees of the Council of Trent, a couple was to promise marriage in the future (palabras de futuro), followed sometime later by a clerically sponsored marriage that included a promise to marry in the present (palabras de presente). The couple were not to live together until after banns had been posted and they had received the sacrament in the form of the nuptial blessing.18 Couples caught living together in violation of these decrees could face ﬁnes.19 Considering how many Galegos opted to cohabit on a promise of marriage rather than a formal marriage, the Church could have ﬁlled its coffers with ﬁnes had it seriously attempted to enforce its own rules on marriage. Even for relatively poor couples, marriage entailed an exchange of property. The woman’s contribution, the dowry, was a critical part of female inheritance and played a key role in determining the relationship between wife and husband.20 The Leyes de Toro left the decision about whether to advance a child a portion of her inheritance as a dowry up to the parent, but, beyond this, local custom rather than any legal norm seems to have guided the relationship between inheritance and dowry. 17 For example, AHPO, caja protocolos 3326, fo. 89 (1624) speciﬁes that the wedding must take place within one year. 18 Canons and Decrees, 183. For a discussion of the issue in the seventeenth century, see Valdivieso, Constituciones Sinodales, 246 and 301. 19 Libro de Visitas, Santa Eulalia Bouses, AHDO, 27.2.5, n.f. (1583). 20 Casey, Early Modern Spain, 200. In France, marriage also provided a means to circumvent partibility: see Hardwick, Practice of Patriarchy, 66 ff.

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On the Atlantic coast, Rodrı´guez Ferreiro found that daughters who did not receive mejoras received dowries instead from their parents.21 In some areas, a woman’s dowry substituted for her portion of the inheritance, and upon accepting the dowry she renounced any claims to the family estate. This practice seems to have been common in parts of the province of Lugo.22 However, in other areas the decision to provide a dowry in lieu of inheritance or in addition to it seems to have varied from family to family. Some Galician testaments indicate that the dowry and the daughter’s inheritance were one and the same. Jacome de Varreiro noted that, since he had already given his daughter a dowry, his three sons were to divide the estate among themselves.23 In contrast, Pedro Go´mez de Penalbos stated that he was giving his daughter, Ysavel, some property that he had promised as a part of her dowry to her now deceased husband over and above her legı´tima.24 When Marı´a Conde, a miller and the wife of Blas Gonza´lez, made her will in 1696, she delineated her daughter Lucia’s dowry. Lucia had received, among other things, an ass, a new blanket, some salt pork, and three hens; however, Marı´a also insisted that her goods be divided among all her children, Lucia included.25 The size of the dowry was determined by a combination of factors, including the size of the family estate, the number of children in the family, and the post-marital expectations of the newlyweds, an issue that will be discussed in depth later in this chapter. Poor harvests or the interruption of remittances from male relatives working outside of Galicia might decrease the size of the family estate and thus the portion available for a dowry. Some women received only money, but most brought an array of household necessities like bed linens and pillows to the marriage.26 More typically, the daughters of even struggling tenant farmers could expect at least a small piece of land and some livestock, in Rodrı´guez Ferreiro, ‘Estructura y comportamiento’, 448. Saavedra, ‘Casa y comunidad’, 113. 23 AHPC, protocolo 2340, fo. 129 (1693). 24 AHPO, caja protocolos 3317, fo. 3 (1675). 25 AHPO, caja protocolos 3487, fo. 48 (1696). 26 For some statistical work on the typical make-up of Galician dowries, see Rey Castelao, Aproximacio´n a la historia rural, 180–1, and Burgo Lo´pez, ‘Niveles sociales y relaciones matrimoniales’, 183. For a discussion of Castilian dowries, see MarieCatherine Barbazza, ‘Les Paysans et la dot: Un exemple de quelques practiques en Nouvelle Castille (1580–1610)’, Me´langes de la Casa de Vela´zquez, 25 (1989), 161–74. 21 22

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addition to essential household goods. For instance, when Mariana Salgado, the natural child of Antonio Salgado and his wife, decided to marry Pedro de Curras, her parents provided her with a substantial dowry, fully outﬁtting the couple. They gave her a part of a vineyard and some land, six sheep, a chest, one pregnant pig, six fanegas of grain, one set of bed linens, one hunk of bacon, and some lard.27 Similarly, when Ysavel do Souto married Gregorio de Neiro, a farmer, her parents set her up with all the necessities of a peasant farmer’s life. They gave her three dresses and a house full of linens as her trousseau. The contract speciﬁcally delineates the type of cloth and colour of each napkin and pillow. Pots, chests, and other household goods would furnish the newlyweds’ home. They also provided a piece of land from which could be harvested one fanega of grain, two oxen, eight sheep, some rye, wheat, and millet, and 5 ducados with which to buy a cart.28 Both the value and the content of the dowry set the stage for the bride’s authority in the family. Although it is difﬁcult to assess the exact value of most dowries, the woman’s contribution to the marriage was nearly always greater than the man’s, thus providing the woman and her family with considerable economic leverage over potential sons-in-law.29 At minimum, the dowry provided the essential components for establishing a household.30 In addition, the parcels of land and homes that many women inherited as a part of their dowries would have been adjacent to or enclosed within parental property, thus keeping daughters close to (if not actually in the home of ) their mothers and allowing fathers to keep a watchful eye on their sons-in-law. Historians have tended to view contracts in which both parents dowered a daughter as fundamentally the responsibility of the father. However, mothers often played an integral role in their formulation. A woman could dower a child without her husband’s approval or could refuse to allow her portion of the estate to be used for that purpose. If the dowry was made from either the couple’s bienes gananciales (marital property) or from any portion of the mother’s dotal (pertaining to her AHPO, caja protocolos 3029, no. 45, n.f. (1672). AHUS, protocolo 1711, fo. 2 (1670). 29 Muriel Nazzari has shown that this was also true in colonial Brazil: The Disappearance of the Dowry, 39. 30 For a nice discussion of varying dowry traditions, see Raffaela Sarti, Europe at Home: Family and Material Culture, 1500–1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 42–52. 27 28

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dowry) property, the wife/mother had to renounce her claim to that property before a notary as a part of the composition of the dowry contract. Although this may have been a merely formulaic action, it nevertheless made the mother central to the marriage process, as it required her to be present and participate in the creation of the dowry.31 Moreover, most children were not fortunate enough to have both parents alive at the time of their marriage. In my examination of approximately 300 marriage and dowry contracts in the province of Ourense, only about one-third of the brides had two living parents at the signing of the marriage contract.32 More than 28 per cent of brides had their marriages and/or dowries arranged solely by their widowed mothers. Many marriages were the result of negotiations between two widows. Marı´a de Cima de Villa and Marı´a Guerra arranged the marriage of their children, Benita and Fernando. Poor Fernando was clearly the odd man out. He was only a secondary participant in a marriage agreement in which women chose the groom, did the negotiating, and made the exchange of property. When both parents were dead, as was often the case in early modern Spain, brides-to-be could usually rely on other relatives to provide them with dowries. When Bernarda de Confurco prepared to marry her ﬁance´ Juan in 1646, her brother provided the dowry.33 Similarly, the parents of Ine´s Carreira must have died before she became engaged to Juan Vidal, a silk worker, as her widowed sister, Antonia, provided Ine´s with a very typical dowry. It contained the usual bed and table linens, chests, benches and other furniture, wooden tankards, candlesticks, and 100 ducados.34 Sometimes women either had no siblings living in the area or they were not in a ﬁnancial position to provide a dowry. This may have been the case with Marı´a do Mato. When it came time to marry, her aunt, the widow of a painter, provided her with a substantial 31 For the role of women in dowry creation in Renaissance Venice, see Chojnacki, Women and Men, 109–10, 178–9. 32 Thus, 65% of brides and grooms had lost at least one parent. This ﬁgure is slightly higher than David Vassberg has found for Castile. He estimates that nearly 40% of children in a selection of Castilian villages had lost at least one parent by the age of 19: ‘Orphans and Adoption in Early Modern Castilian Villages’, The History of the Family, 3/4 (1998), 441. Stanley Chojnacki has also addressed this issue of widows and dowries in Renaissance Venice in Women and Men, 80. 33 AHPO, caja protocolos 3597, n.f. (1646). 34 AHUS, protocolo 1388, fo. 1 (1652).

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dowry, which included a silver cup, bed linens, a mattress, pillows, two chests, ten napkins, ﬁve sets of table linens, furniture, clothing, rye, and 30 ducados.35 Thus, just as single women relied on bequests and gifts from older female relatives, an older generation of women facilitated the marriages of other women through the provision of dowries. The maturity of most Galician brides meant that they often could not or would not be completely reliant on the good will and ﬁnancial support of others. As noted in the previous chapter, Galegas sometimes worked to earn the money and goods necessary for marriage. Employers often mentioned both obligation and affection as motivations for dowering the brides. Madalena Ba´squez was the servant of the parish priest of Losada when she arranged to marry Pedro Preto in 1670. Although her parents were still alive and paid part of her dowry, the priest made a substantial contribution of his own.36 Marı´a Perez’s boss, a cleric, noted that he was dowering her out of the ‘kindness, affection, and goodwill, that [he] had for [Marı´a] as she had done many services deserving of remuneration’.37 Francisca de Puga’s master, a chaplain in the cathedral in Ourense, voiced very similar feelings towards her as he arranged her wedding.38 As Giovanna Benadusi has pointed out, these ‘gifts’ reﬂected the complex relationship between master or mistress and servant. On the one hand, this gift may have been the result of true feelings of affection that had developed between them. On the other hand, the provision of a dowry or other gift reinforced the social hierarchy that divided the employer from the servant and might have even been comprised of money that the master owed the servant as salary.39 Since many brides came to the altar as orphans, they often used a portion of their inheritance as their dowries, as was the case with Juana Martı´nez, whose parents were both dead. Relatively wealthy, prior to her engagement she had been living in a convent, but had not taken vows. When she was ready to marry Bartolome´ Va´squez, Juana carefully noted what she provided for herself as a dowry. This list included all the basics of starting a household: blankets, pillows, linens, a cruciﬁx, 35 36 37 38 39

AHUS, protocolo 1388, fo. 49 (1651). AHPO, caja protocolos 3317, n.f. (1670). AHPO, caja protocolos 3318, n.f. (1682). AHPO, caja protocolos 3582, fo. 60 (1674). Benadusi, ‘Investing the Riches’, 817, 823.

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a religious medallion, three chests, some cash, and some sugar. It is reasonable to assume that these goods had been kept in trust by the convent until she found an appropriate spouse, but, in the end, it was Juana who presented the goods as her own and gave them to Bartolome´ ‘for all time’.40 In the most densely populated areas of Galicia, where land was particularly scarce, some women did not receive dowries from their parents in the traditional form. Instead, they married as a part of an exchange of children known as marriage ‘a trueque’ (exchange). In these instances, families contracted marriage between two sets of children (i.e. two sons from one family marrying two daughters from another family or sons from each family marrying daughters from the other). After the wedding, one set of children resided in each parental home. Each family gained and lost a household member, and neither suffered any division of the familial estate among children residing outside of the family. Those children who left their parents’ home to go to live with their in-laws often renounced their legı´tima in exchange for a mejora provided by their in-laws.41 The preference for exchange marriages might be correlated with poor economic times, when families could ill afford any dispersion of family assets. However, they appear regularly in the provinces of A Corun˜a and Ourense during the last half of the seventeenth century. In some areas, as many as one-quarter of marriages were contracted ‘a trueque’.42 The degree to which marriages ‘a trueque’ affected a woman’s acquisition of property differed according to the inheritance norms of the area. Sometimes sons received dowries, sometimes daughters did. In other areas, sons generally received mejoras as a part of the marriage contract.43 These multiple dowry contracts could become quite complex. For example, Bartolome´ de la Iglesia found spouses for all three of his children in the Calba family. Luis de la Iglesia would marry Jacinta Calba, Ysavel de la Iglesia would marry Miguel Calba, and Andressa de la Iglesia would marry Francisco Calba. For their dowries, Bartolome´ gave Luis and Ysavel two-thirds of a place AHUS, protocolo 1357, fo. 159 (1648). Saavedra, La vida cotidiana, 215–16. 42 I have examined nearly 300 marriage and dowry contracts from the province of Ourense. For A Corun˜a, see Ofelia Rey Castelao, ‘Mecanismos reguladores de la nupcialidad en la Galicia Atlantica: El matrimonio a trueque’, in Obradoiro de Historia Moderna (Santiago de Compostela: Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, 1990), 250. 43 Ibid. 258–60 and table p. 268. 40 41

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called Ohousino. He would keep the other third for himself until his death, at which time his three children would divide it among themselves. He also gave his daughters three dresses each. Miguel Calba, probably the eldest sibling, provided some livestock (a pregnant cow and six sheep), linens, and some money to buy a cart, as well as some dresses for his sister Jacinta. He also agreed to teach his brother Francisco the skill of cloth making.44 For many Galician women, marriage was the critical moment in their acquisition of the assets that would be the basis of their familial authority. In addition to a dowry, most grooms brought the arras, a wedding gift, to the bride. According to the Leyes de Toro, a man could not give more than one-tenth of his possessions as the wedding gift;45 however, instead of a maximum, a one-tenth portion seems to have been customary. Many of the contracts connected the payment of the arras to the virginity of the bride. When Alonso do Bale agreed to marry Maria de Rioseco in 1617 in the diocese of Ourense, he stated in the contract that he was giving one-tenth of all this belongings in arras in respect for ‘the ﬂower and virginity of the aforementioned’.46 Bartolome´ de Quinta used similar language invoking ‘the ﬂower, virginity, and purity’ of his brideto-be Marı´a Blanca as the reason for his gift of arras.47 In fact, in Spanish America, the arras has been described as ‘a symbolic acknowledgement of the bride’s virginity’.48 Yet, in Galicia, few brides were virgins, and even widows received arras at the time of their second marriages. When Pedro Velo gave Dominga Suarez a promesa de arras, she was already a widowed mother of three. Her virginity was not at issue. In other cases, a groom with substantial means might use his arras to make a dowry unnecessary. When Dominga Douteiro, a young single woman, agreed to marry Domingo de Silva de Elinexo, a much older man, he gave her half of his house and lands (as long as she paid the rents on it) as his arras, and she provided nothing.49 According to Spanish law, both dotal property and the arras belonged to the woman’s separate estate throughout her lifetime. Her husband might use it, but not without her consent (a point to which I will return). 44 46 47 48 49

45 Leyes de Toro, 55. AHUS, protocolo 1675, n.f. (1687). AHPO, caja protocolos 3566, fo. 150 (1617). AHPO, caja protocolos 3566, n.f. (1618). Korth and Flusche, ‘Dowry and Inheritance’, 400. AHUS, protocolo 1388, fo. 9 (1651).

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In addition to providing a substantial portion of a woman’s personal property, many Galegos used marriage and dowry contracts as a mechanism to ensure the continued residence of married daughters in the family home. These contracts required that the newlywed couple reside with the bride’s parents, which was known in Galego as being ‘married in the house’, casada en casa.50 The preference for daughters to be ‘married in the house’ varied from one part of the region to another. Not surprisingly, residents of urban Santiago de Compostela preferred the matrilocal (living in the mother’s home) residence of sons, as their inheritance patterns more often imitated Castilian urban elites.51 In contrast, the preference for daughters to remain at home seems to have been closely linked with high rates of male migration. On the coast, three times more parents had married daughters living with them than married sons.52 While uxorilocal (living with the bride’s family) residence is not unique to Galicia,53 the expressed desire for a daughter to remain in and inherit the home sharply contrasts with other European peasant families, who favoured sons as necessary for the maintenance of the lineage and dismissed daughters as ﬁnancial burdens to be strategically forced on another family.54 On the contrary, based on interviews with Galegos, one scholar has suggested that as recently as 50 Liso ´ n-Tolosana, Antropologı´a cultural, 244 ff. For a discussion of the practice in northern Portugal, see Caroline B. Brettell, ‘Kinship and Contract: Property Transmission and Family Relations in Northwestern Portugal’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 33 (1991), 449–50. 51 Dubert Garcı ´a also found that well-to-do farmers in the area around Santiago de Compostela used mejora to encourage sons to live natalocally. In his sample, 90% of mejoras went to sons and two-thirds of those were ‘casados en casa’. Dubert Garcı´a, Historia de la familia, 195. 52 Rodrı ´guez Ferreiro, ‘Estructura y comportamiento’, 440. Compare his ﬁndings with those of Dubert Garcı´a, Historia de La familia, map on p. 57. 53 For an anthropological view of uxorilocality and matrivicinality in Andalusia, see Gilmore, ‘Men and Women in Southern Spain’, 959–60. It was also common in culturally related areas of Portugal: see Cole, Women of the Praia, 59, and in ﬁshing villages farther south. See Jan Brøgger, Nazare´: Women and Men in a Prebureaucratic Portuguese Fishing Village, Case Studies in Cultural Anthropology (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), 24. According to Raffaella Sarti, uxorilocal marriage was also common in Brittany, the Bas-Le´onnais, and Apulia (Europe at Home, 44–5). Through Portuguese migration, matrilocal residence of daughters spread to parts of colonial Brazil as well: see Nazzari, The Disappearance of the Dowry, 66. 54 For one example of a Mediterranean peasant culture that saw daughters as a liability, see Anthony Galt, ‘Marital Property in an Apulian Town during the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries’, in Kertzer and Sauer (eds.), The Family in Italy, 312.

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the 1960s it was considered shameful for the family when a mother had to ‘marry a son in the house’, either because no daughter had survived or lived in the region, or because she had had a falling out with the designated heir.55 No doubt, these dowry and marriage contracts represent only a fraction of the couples who moved in with the bride’s parents, as many Galegos may not have legally documented the relationship. For most families, a tacit, uncontested agreement between the generations assured that the family estate would pass through the female line by means of residence followed by inheritance. In other cases, maintenance of a daughter in the home was the only option, and legal documentation might be considered unnecessary, when the daughter was the only surviving child. However, early modern Spaniards were known for their litigiousness, and many preferred to rely on the legal system rather than a sense of familial responsibility to enforce agreements that would affect the family for generations. These contracts tend to be very straightforward, leaving no doubt about many Galegos’ desire for the continued residence of a married daughter on the basis of the fulﬁlment of reciprocal obligations. For their part, parents provided a home, usually some land, and the legally guaranteed inheritance for a married daughter. In return, the daughter and her husband would remain in the home and care for her parents in their old age.56 This was probably the case in 1649 when Pedro de Bales and Marı´a de Tanjil negotiated the marriage of their children, Catalina and Mateo. The contract was very simple. In return for the dowry, the newlyweds were to live with Marı´a. Although not expressly stated, the implication of this contract was that Catalina and her husband would then inherit the family estate upon Marı´a’s death. Similarly, in 1680, the widow Dominga Rodrı´guez negotiated a marriage between her daughter, Ruﬁna, and the orphan Juan Go´mez. The dowry contract acknowledged that Ruﬁna had ‘served [Dominga] and assisted her with all care and veneration’, but that, until that point, Dominga had not provided her with anything in return. In compensation, Dominga was willing and eager to provide a substantial dowry for the newlyweds, but only if the couple lived with her for the rest of their lives.57 While such Rey-Henningsen, The World of the Ploughwoman, 93. This sense of reciprocity was also true in Italian peasant marriage contracts: Galt, 57 AHPO, caja protocolos 3318, fo. 8 (1680). ‘Marital Property’, 314. 55 56

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an agreement was clearly in the best interest of the mother, it also had advantages for young women like Dominga. Daughters who agreed to remain at home and inherit the family estate may have improved their prospects in the highly restricted local marriage market. Moreover, in a region of tight resources, potential sons-in-law certainly beneﬁted from living with their wives’ families, as they were guaranteed a home and a basic livelihood, no matter how meagre, based on their wives’ inheritances. While many contracts left a daughter’s inheritance and succession as head of the household implicit, more often parents clearly delineated the terms under which the couple would live and exactly what they would inherit. Parents frequently set aside a portion of the inheritance in mejora for the couple in the marriage contract, in order to guarantee the continued residence of the daughter and the perpetuation of the matriline. For instance, when Madalegna Peres de Pressedo agreed to marry Domingo Rodrı´guez in 1690, the dowry from her parents included not only the typical array of household goods like clothing and linens, but also a mejora of one-half of the estate upon their death. However, Domingo and Madalegna had to live with her parents. This arrangement did not refer to two couples merely sharing a home while otherwise living independently. The contract demanded that the young couple had to provide food, clothing, and shoes for her parents, and pay all the rents on the property. In this case, as in others, a successful relationship between the two generations was not a foregone conclusion. If for some reason the newlyweds left or decided not to fulﬁl their obligations to her parents, they received only one-quarter of the estate.58 Through the inclusion of the mejora in the marriage contract, parents gained substantial leverage over their adult children. For instance, they made it clear that the head of household would not abdicate his or her status in favour of the younger generation. For their part, the newlyweds clearly understood their responsibilities towards her parents, making a successful multigenerational family more likely. These contracts and their clauses requiring a daughter to remain in the home frequently appear in contracts for matrimonios a trueque. Most often, these marriage contracts guaranteed that one couple would live with the bride’s family (often, but not always, the oldest or youngest 58

AHPC, protocolo 2265, fo. 27 (1690).

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daughter), while the other couple would live with the groom’s family. Such an arrangement satisﬁed both parties as it protected familial estates, allowed for all the children of larger families to marry, and provided for both sets of parents as they aged. For instance, the widower Juan Pe´rez had two daughters and the widow Marı´a Meyrina had two sons. When, in 1644, they successfully matched their four children, Juan insisted that his daughter Francesca and her husband Pedro live with him in her family’s home while his other daughter and her groom went to live with Marı´a.59 The division of the daughters was the best means to provide for both of their futures. Francesca would no doubt inherit and become the head of her deceased mother’s household upon the death of her father. The Meyrina family, who may not have had any surviving daughters, also stood to gain. Francesca’s sister or one of her sister’s daughters might very well come to head the Meyrina household, as long as the relationship between mother and daughterin-law ﬂourished. The mother who desired that a daughter be ‘married in the house’ was not always a blood mother. As widowers remarried and then died, a signiﬁcant number of second wives came to control their husband’s estates. Acknowledging the great love that she had for her deceased husband, Marı´a do Campo offered her stepdaughter, who had served her for some years, a dowry. Without children of her own, Marı´a demanded that, in return for the dowry, the newlyweds would live with her, help her in her home, and see to it that she was properly fed and clothed.60 Marriage contracts that demanded the bride’s residence created ﬁctive mother–daughter relationships when biology, celibacy, or death left women or couples childless or at least daughterless. In one case from 1664, although the bride’s mother was still alive, it was an aunt, Marı´a Dorrio, who provided the bulk of the dowry. Under the terms of the dowry contract, the bride, Marı´a Blanca, agreed that she and her new husband would live with Aunt Marı´a, work the estate, and love her aunt ‘like aunt and niece’ in order to earn the dowry.61 Although the contract does not say, it is probable that the mother of the bride still had a daughter at home to care for her, and that the aunt was both alone and childless. If that were indeed the case, this arrangement 59 60 61

AHPO, caja protocolos 3548, fo. 13 (1644). AHPO, caja protocolos 3318, fo. 8 (1688). AHPO, caja protocolos 3549, fo. 39 (1664).

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was equally beneﬁcial for all of the women involved. The contract saw to it that both the mother and the aunt were properly cared for, and that the daughter was able to marry and eventually establish a household of her own based on her inheritance from her aunt.62 The aunt and uncle of Ine´s de Villar also created a ﬁctive parent– child relationship when they dowered her in 1624. Ine´s and her prospective husband had to agree to live with them ‘without leaving them or dividing up the house’.63 In addition to providing care for the aunt and uncle, such an arrangement would have been particularly beneﬁcial for Ine´s. This ﬁctive kinship could be extended to women who had no relational ties to the family. From time to time, women who had raised servant girls in their homes used these contracts to encourage them to continue to live with them after marriage as if the girls were their own daughters. Marı´a Feijoa generously provided a dowry for Rosenda do Souto, who had ‘served and attended her since she [Rosenda] was a child’. However, Rosenda’s receipt of her dowry was contingent on her willingness to continue to live with Marı´a after the marriage had taken place.64 As recently as the 1960s, single Galician women entered into such relationships. Hans and Judith-Marı´a Buechler recount the story of Pura, who, during the ﬁrst half of the century, went to care for an elderly childless couple. In return for her care, they willed all of their land and possessions to her.65 Widowed fathers often insisted that their daughters remain in the family home, no doubt in order both to run the household and to ensure the succession through the female line. For instance, the death of Benito Cerreda’s wife, Ine´s, must have left him without women at home because the dowry contract that he formulated for his daughter, Polonia, ensured that she and her new husband would ﬁll that void.66 Similarly, 62 The strategy of adopting children in order to provide elder care in exchange for inheritance was not unique to Galegos. Anthony Galt found that Locorotondese peasants in Southern Italy made similar contracts. See Anthony H. Galt, Far from the Church Bells: Settlement and Society in an Apulian Town (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 176. 63 AHPO, caja protocolos 3326, fo. 39 (1624). For more on the sharing of homes, see Marı´a Angeles Rozados Ferna´ndez, ‘Marco material de la vida familiar en la Galicia de antiguo re´gimen’, in Parentesco, familia, y matrimonio en la historia de Galicia, ed. Jose´ Carlos Bermejo Barrera (Santiago de Compostela: To´rculo, 1988), 79–94. 64 AHPO, caja protocolos 3611, fo. 43 (1675). 65 Buechler and Buechler, Carmen, 91. 66 AHPO, caja protocolos 3494, fo. 13 (1687).

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Antonio Ferna´ndez demanded that his daughter Marı´a and her betrothed, Gregorio, live with him in his home.67 Perhaps these men preferred the security of having a married daughter in the house over the ﬁnancial or emotional complications of a second marriage as they aged. In a region where many sons migrated to faraway places and never returned, the assurance that one child and her heirs would remain behind to care for the family estate was a critical part of a family’s economic strategy. However, there were other beneﬁts as well.68 By keeping them in the house, mothers knew their daughters’ sexual partners, and thus the parentage of their grandchildren. The same could not be said of the children of non-resident sons whose peripatetic ways left daughters-in-law seemingly unsupervised. A nineteenth-century Galician refrain articulated the concern over paternity that only a daughter’s residence could ensure: Os fillos d’a min˜a filla Todos meus netin˜os son; Os fillos d’a min˜a nora Quezais si, ou quezais non.

The children of my daughter Are all my grandchildren; The children of my daughter-in-law Maybe so, maybe not.69

There were also emotional reasons for families to make such arrangements. The language of many of the contracts reveals that Galegos based their desire for the continued residence of married daughters on emotional as well as economic needs.70 According to the marriage contract between Isavel de Villar and Antonio Gonza´lez, Antonio and Isavel had to live with her parents, ‘together at one table and ﬁre without dividing anything’.71 ‘Dividing up the house’ was not unusual in peasant families. Without the ﬁnances or the physical space to construct separate ediﬁces, siblings or members of extended families designated certain sections of the family home for the particular use of each familial group. For reasons that remain unknown to us, Isavel’s parents found even that minimal degree of physical separation unacceptable. They demanded the emotional connection with their daughter that only sharing the same spaces could provide. In some Galician families, the sharing of 67 68 69 70 71

AHPO, caja protocolos 3550, fo. 65 (1675). Buechler and Buechler, Carmen, p. xv. Cited in Liso´n-Tolosana, Antropologı´a cultural, 256. Brettell, ‘Kinship and Contract’, 450. AHPO, caja protocolos 2424, fo. 40 (1686).

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home, goods, and labour implied emotional as well as economic interdependence. Since only one child in the family could be the favoured heir, parents would provide the other daughters with dowries that allowed them to set up independent households. However, newlyweds did not tend to move directly into their own homes. Many resided with their parents and married siblings on a temporary basis until they were ﬁnancially able to live on their own.72 The ability of these children to form new households depended on the combined resources of their families. Couples gained the most independence when parents provided them with independent households from the outset. For instance, when Marı´a Lorenza married Juan de Quintans, her father provided the household goods, while his parents gave him half of their land.73 Yet, even in these cases, the couple’s independence may have been limited. Typically, the land was adjacent to the provider’s home, and Juan’s father would have been an active and visible presence in their lives. Before the marriage could take place, their parish priest was supposed to examine the couple to ensure that they had the basic knowledge of doctrine necessary to participate in the sacrament. In Castile, scholars have employed Inquisition records to analyse the success of the Catholic Reformation Church in teaching doctrine to its parishioners. Sara Nalle found that both literate and illiterate women learned at least the basic prayers (the Credo, the Pater Noster, the Ave Marı´a).74 The evidence for women’s knowledge of doctrine in Galicia is sparse, as only summaries of the Inquisition trials remain extant. However, literacy rates among both women and men remained far below Castilian levels during the early modern period,75 and Episcopal Visitors regularly berated parish priests for failing to preach to, teach, or examine parishioners with any regularity throughout the seventeenth century.76 The results were evident to other authorities. In the course of their audiences, Inquisitors sometimes mentioned their perceptions of the mental capabilities and knowledge of the accused. They described Marı´a Ferna´ndez, who was 72

73 AHUS, protocolo 1389, fo. 79 (1658). Reher, Perspectives, 85. Nalle, God in La Mancha, 126–7, and ‘Literacy and Culture in Early Modern Castile’, Past and Present, 125 (November 1989), 65–96. 75 Gelabert Gonza ´lez, ‘Lectura y escritura’. 76 See Poska, Regulating the People, 60–1. 74

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accused of simple fornication, as ‘very rustic’.77 The 22-year-old Isabel de Seoane, accused of the same crime, was let off with only the lightest of punishments, as she was ‘a simple girl’,78 and Marina de Cedeyra was described as a ‘simple girl of little understanding’. She even referred to herself as ‘simple and ignorant’.79 Of course, these were not objective assessments of intellectual ability. These young women may have been hoping that the appearance of simplemindedness or ignorance might help soften their sentences. Or the Inquisitors’ perceptions may have been shaped by the linguistic and cultural differences between themselves and the accused. Whatever the case, authorities frequently assessed Galegas as lacking basic education.80 Finally, the priest announced the upcoming nuptials on three successive festival days before the wedding to ensure that no impediment to the marriage existed. With all the arrangements completed, the wedding itself was probably anticlimactic. By the time they reached the altar, most Galegas were already sexually active adult women with property and responsibilities of their own. Their premarital sexual activity is evident in parish records. As mentioned earlier, on the Atlantic coast between 5 and 10 per cent of Galician brides came to the altar pregnant. In the western interior, 8 to 12 per cent were already pregnant on their wedding day.81 In addition to these mothers/brides-to-be, many women came to the altar with children produced by those relationships or from previous relationships. In the damp cold of Galicia, family and friends came together in the countryside’s granite churches to witness the ceremony. As was true in many agricultural areas, most marriages took place in the late autumn and winter, after the harvest.82 Summer weddings were less frequent AHN, Sec. Inq., legajo 2042, no. 19, fo. 6 (1587). AHN, Sec. Inq., legajo 2042, no. 35, fo. 3 (1598). AHN, Sec. Inq., legajo 2042, no. 19, fo. 5 (1587). 80 Saavedra, La vida cotidiana, 369. 81 Dubert, ‘Los comportamientos sexuales premaritales’, 127–8. As Dubert points out (p. 125), these ﬁgures are considerably lower than rates of prenuptial conception in France during the same period. On the other hand, illegitimacy rates were much higher. Thus, pregnant women in Galicia did not feel as compelled to marry as did their French counterparts. 82 See my Regulating the People, 117; Baudilio Barreiro Mallo ´ n, La jurisdiccio´n de Xallas en el siglo XVIII: Poblacio´n, sociedad y economı´a (Santiago de Compostela: Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, 1973), 157; Rey Castelao, Aproximacio´n a la historia, 48. 77 78 79

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both because of local harvests and because large numbers of men had migrated to work on harvests elsewhere. There were three steps in the marriage process: the posting of the banns, the marriage ceremony, and the pronouncement of the nuptial blessing. If the mandates from episcopal visitations to parishes are any indication, as late as 1700 many couples failed to complete the sacrament with the administration of the nuptial blessing. Clerically sponsored marriage met numerous obstacles in rural areas like Galicia. Sometimes couples married during Advent or Lent, when the priest could not pronounce the nuptial blessing, and never returned to ﬁnish the ceremony. Other problems were more systemic. First and foremost, local marriage traditions were based on consent and guaranteed by sexual intercourse, and they did not require any priestly intervention and convincing parishioners to change age-old traditions required more than an episcopal decree. The failure to complete the sacramental ritual may also be evidence of Galician women’s ambivalence about marriage. Women may have thought that if they did not complete the sacrament, ecclesiastical authorities could not compel them to remain in the relationship if it did not work out.

M AR R I E D L I F E As we have seen, once they were married, many women remained in their family homes. However, some Galician families practised virilocal marriage, in which brides suffered the shock of moving into the homes of their mothers-in-law, an experience that has traumatized many brides in both European and non-European cultures.83 In virilocal families, young wives were often isolated and perceived as threats to the power of the mother-in-law and the loyalty of her husband to his family.84 These women were only integrated into the husband’s family through the birth of children, and even that was a slow, painful process of submission, assertion, and negotiation. In order to exercise any inﬂuence in the household, they had to create alliances with sisters-in-laws, 83 For instance, this may have been the case for many, if not all, elite brides in Renaissance Venice: see Stanley Chojnacki, ‘Measuring Adulthood: Adolescence and Gender’, in Women and Men, 189. 84 Bauer found this to be true in the patrilineal areas of Lugo: ‘Family and Property’, 105.

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neighbours, and other non-kin females.85 According to anthropologists, marriage was deﬁnitely not a happy occasion for these brides. In many areas of Galicia as recently as the 1960s, Galegas expressed an almost tragic view of marriage in a dramatic array of rituals that were more reminiscent of funerals than weddings. The mother and bride wept effusively, the bride balked at participating and sometimes even refused to speak during the ceremony, and some brides even wore black dresses.86 Common Galician verses give voice to the laments of a newly married man whose post-marital life is marred by his bride’s constant weeping. Casadin˜a de tres dı´as Non se cansa de chorar Pol-a vida de solteira Que non ha de recobrar Solteirin˜a, non te cases, Aproveita a boa vida; Qu’eu ben sei d’unha casada Que chora d’arrepentida.

Little bride of three days Doesn’t stop crying Because the life of a single woman She cannot recover. Little single woman, don’t you marry, Enjoy the good life; I well know a married woman That cries unrepentantly.87

Another Galician song says, Dime, Como Como E non

casadin˜a nova, que vai de casada? criada que sirve lle pagan soldada.

Tell me, new bride, How’s marriage going? Like a maid that serves And doesn’t get paid.88

85 The difﬁculties of virilocal residence seem to have transcended many cultural boundaries. For the effects on Chinese brides, see Margery Wolf, Women and the Family in Rural Taiwan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1972). For the similar experiences of Italian women, see Flaviana Zanolla, ‘Mothers-in-law, Daughters-in-law, and Sistersin-law at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century in P. of Friuli’, in Sex and Gender in Historical Perspective, ed. Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 177–99, and Galt, Far from the Church Bells, 178. For more on the effects of residence patterns and kinship groups on women’s authority, see Louise Lamphere, ‘Strategies, Cooperation, and Conﬂict Among Women in Domestic Groups’, in Rosaldo and Lamphere (eds.), Women, Culture, and Society, 97–112. 86 On black wedding dresses, Buechler and Buechler, Carmen, 26–7. During carnival, brides wore white to mock weddings as a part of the characteristic inversion. On the strange rituals surrounding Galician weddings, see Liso´n-Tolosana, Antropologı´a cul87 Ballesteros, Cancionero popular gallego, 1. 56–7. tural, 374–6. 88 Antonio Fraguas Fraguas, ‘Literatura popular en torno al casamiento, embarazo, y parto’, Revista de Dialectologia y tradiciones populares, 32 (1976), 187.

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Historical documentation concerning the status of daughters-in-law is sparse; however, in my archival work, I found one woman who speciﬁcally prohibited her daughter-in-law from inheriting any of her property. In 1695, Catalina Ferna´ndez from A Corun˜a noted in her testament that her only son, Pedro, had died very young, and that she and her husband Domingo had been caring for his daughter, who was now 9 or 10 years old. After Domingo’s death, the granddaughter would be the heir to her property, but should the granddaughter die without heirs, Catalina speciﬁed that it was her will that the child’s mother should not receive any portion of her goods.89 However, some women must have formed pleasant, if not affectionate relationships with their mothers-in-law. In her last will and testament, Marı´a Ferna´ndez made her daughter-in-law, the widow of her son Juan, one of her universal heirs.90 Married Galegas who remained in their family homes faced other joys and challenges. In some uxorilocal families, women enjoyed the protection and support of their kin.91 In addition to mothers and resident daughters (married or single), uxorilocal families often included sisters. In northern Portugal, it was common practice for the sister or sisters who were not chosen as primary heirs to marry and take up residence near the maternal home (matrivicinal residence).92 The degree to which sisters took up residence near one another during the early modern period is unclear from the extant documentation but the dominance of partible and even matrilineal inheritance combined with high rates of female singleness makes it quite probable that sisters would inherit properties adjacent to one another and to the parental household. Evidence from the recent past indicates that even daughters who were unlikely to inherit family homes tended to live nearby and that their parents purchased land in the vicinity in order to make that possible.93 The anthropologist John 89

AHPC, protocolo 2342, fo. 187 (1695). AHPC, protocolo 739, fo. 78 (1643). 91 Monica Chojnacka has recently emphasized the contact women maintained with their families in early modern Venice where most newly married couples headed their own households. ‘Women, Men, and Residential Patterns in Early Modern Venice’, Journal of Family History, 25/1 (January 2000), 6–25. Stanley Brandes found that when Castilian daughters marry, ‘their husbands in no sense displace the parents as objects of loyalty and affection’ (‘La Solterı´a’, 218). 92 Joa ˜o de Pina-Cabral, Sons of Adam, Daughters of Eve: The Peasant Worldview of the Alto Minho (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 72. 93 Buechler and Buechler, Carmen, 136, 185. 90

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Davis calls this woman-centred world a ‘permanent female infrastructure or matri-core’, which provides women with ‘access to allies and sources of information and gossip, and establishes a continual basis of kinship support’.94 This network of women would have been important, if not critical, to the survival of female-headed households after the migration of husbands, fathers, and brothers. Of course, uxorilocal families were not devoid of conﬂict. Sisters competed for parental emotional and ﬁnancial support.95 Mothers and daughters disagreed over issues including farming practices, childrearing, and cleanliness. Disputes ranged from the petty to the violent. In fact, anthropologists cite numerous examples of jealousy between the sister who ‘married in the house’ and other unmarried sisters still living there; however, history has a way of hiding all but the most serious family conﬂicts.96 While an uxorilocal household provided a community of support for the bride, the son-in-law came into the home as an outsider.97 From the moment that the newlyweds decided to move into the bride’s family home, the husband understood that he worked for and represented his wife’s family rather than his own.98 One anthropologist has even described northern Portuguese husbands as ‘broken in’ after about one year of marriage.99 In ﬁnancial terms, a husband gained only token control over his wife’s dowry as long as the couple lived under her parents’ roof.100 If conﬂict ensued, his wife would have to side with her mother in order to fulﬁl her obligation to care for her family.101 In fact, in a curious twist of gender expectations, a common Galician proverb 94 Studying residence patterns in southern Italy, Davis noted that some neighbourhoods became ‘a community of women’ and that community was their ‘chief source of power’. Davis, Land and Family in Pisticci, 71, 22. 95 Rey-Henningsen, World of the Ploughwoman, 94. 96 Liso ´ n-Tolosana, Antropologı´a cultural, 265–6. Carmen tells of her brother’s jealousy over her inheritance in Buechler and Buechler, Carmen, 203. Rodrı´guez Ferreiro also discusses the possibility of intrigue against the mejorada/o. He provides some evidence, in ‘Estructura y comportamiento’, 450. Although I have found no examples of sisters litigating against each other, many testators expressed concern about the possibility of post-mortem lawsuits. For example, Vitoria Lo´pez Feyxero pleads with her mother and brothers not to litigate her testament, AHPC, protocolo 742, fo. 44 (1646). 97 Gilmore, ‘Men and Women in Southern Spain’, 960. 98 Liso 99 Brøgger, Nazare ´ n-Tolosana, Antropologı´a cultural, 245. ´, 36. 100 Thomas Kuehn, Law, Family, and Women: Toward a Legal Anthropology of Renaissance Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 198. 101 Rodrı ´guez Ferreiro, ‘Estructura y comportamiento’, 449.

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explicitly delineates the son-in-law’s place in his wife’s family home: ‘A married man is a woman’ (home casado muller ´e).102 The gender inversion that uxorilocal families created was accentuated when the groom was from a poor family and brought little or nothing to the marriage and when the bride was older than the groom, as happened frequently—wives were commonly two or even three years older than their husbands. Indeed, according to Eiras Roel, in the province of Santiago de Compostela, and parts of the Atlantic and northern coasts, grooms who were older than their brides were the exception rather than the rule.103 Anthropologists have found that these men were not much more than servants at the disposal of their mothers-in-law.104 Moreover, if men who lived with their in-laws were subject to their authority, men who migrated and left their wives with her parents certainly had no status in the home of their in-laws. Evidence from both Galicia and other migrating cultures indicates that those men would never be consulted on family decisions, and their mothers-in-law were likely to have a greater say in raising the children than they would.105 The dominance of women in the household has led to the stereotype of the cuckolded Galician husband. In one commonly told folktale, the woman dominates both the men in her life: Once there was a married couple. The married man was a cuckold because he let the priest have his way with his wife. One day the man went to Mass and as he was leaving the priest called him a cuckold. The man was very surprised and told his wife that he would not go to Mass anymore because the priest had called him a cuckold. The wife responded that she would go to Mass the following Sunday and make the priest feel ashamed of himself. The following Sunday she said to the priest, ‘Reverend, why did you call my husband cuckold, seeing you are wearing a new shirt made with my flax and accepted the kiss I gave you, greased with my bacon; you lifter of my skirt, ruffler of my pubic hairs, who gave you leave to call my husband cuckold?’106

Female dominance also produced tense relations between sons and mothers-in-law that became a stock plot of Galician folklore. One Rey-Henningsen, The World of the Ploughwoman, 97. Eiras Roel, La poblacio´n de Galicia, 200–1. 104 Liso ´ n-Tolosana, Antropologı´a cultural, 248. 105 For an Irish study that may provide some insight into the role of husbands, see Abbey Hyde, ‘Matrilocality and Female Power: Single Mothers in Extended Households’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 22/6 (1999), 597–605. 106 Rey-Henningsen, Tales of the Ploughwoman, 107–8. 102 103

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Galician folktale, ‘The Mother-in-law, the Son-in-law, and the Tailor’, tells the story of a young man who married and moved into his motherin-law’s home. Each nightfall, he returned from working in the ﬁelds [her ﬁelds] to ﬁnd his wife and mother-in-law ﬁnishing their meal. The mother-in-law would rise from the table, quickly put the food away, and leave him only scraps of stale bread and rancid bacon. Finally, he engaged the help of his brother, a tailor, who taught the mother-in-law a lesson, by surreptitiously preventing her from eating day after day. Only once she had experienced hunger herself did the mother-in-law concede the need to feed her son-in-law.107 Despite the archetype of the cruel mother-in-law (which is not unique to Galicia), the documentation from the early modern period nearly always reveals a much more complex relationship, usually based on the mutual trust and dependence of a mother and her daughter’s husband. On their deathbeds, mothers-in-law generally looked favourably upon their sons-in-law. Such generosity is not surprising since in most cases they had been living together for an extended period before the mother-in-law’s death. When Marı´a Ferna´ndez, the wife of Jacome da Mata, a carpenter from Santiago, made her will in 1628, she left most of her goods and property to her husband. In addition, she speciﬁcally provided for her son-in-law, Alonso da Silva, who, while it is not clear whether they lived together, was a partner in some of the family’s holdings. Marı´a left him rents from a vineyard that she owned, and insisted that her husband and Alonso divide the livestock that the three of them owned in San Esteban de Trasmonte and San Juan dos Cabaleiros. She also named Alonso and her daughter as the executors of her will.108 With the testament of Ine´s de Bilcova, the widow of Alonso Bietez of Santa Marı´a de Biduido (Santiago), we see a mother-in-law fulﬁlling her promise to the daughter and son-in-law who had successfully fulﬁlled their contract to live with her and care for her. After dispersing what was legally due to her other children, Ine´s provided the half of the estate for her daughter Francisca and her son-in-law Juan, ‘for having fed and worked and assisted me in all my attacks and illnesses’. She also named Juan the executor of her will, thereby allowing him to fulﬁl his expected role as the public representative of her family.109 In some cases, 107 108 109

Rey-Henningsen, Tales of the Ploughwoman, 23–4. AHUS, protocolo 1530/1188, fo. 112 (1628). AHUS, protocolo 1674, fo. 21 (1684).

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a mother-in-law might even show preference for her son-in-law, through his connection to the favoured daughter, over her biological sons who might have emigrated or married into another woman’s home. In 1679, when Beatriz da Fonte bequeathed goods to the daughter and son-in-law with whom she shared a home, she also made him the executor of her testament, even though she had a son of her own.110 In fact, Galician mothers were not adverse to expressing fondness and gratitude towards their sons-in-law. The beneﬁts of bringing a son-in-law into her home came quickly to Marina de Sabucedo. In 1616, she had arranged the marriage of her daughter, Costanza, to a shoemaker, Antonio do Outromuro. Within one year, Costanza was dead and Marina was making her last will and testament. In that document, Marina graciously noted that Antonio had treated her daughter well before her death, and she generously bequeathed much of her property to him.111 Beyond earned affection, the frequency with which women named their sons-in-law to act as their executors conﬁrms what Liso´n-Tolosana found in his investigations of Galician families. It was the son-in-law’s responsibility to represent his wife’s family in public affairs, although even when a man acted on behalf of his wife’s family, the head of the household (often a woman) had to approve his decisions.112 The relationship between mothers and sons-in law could be particularly important in families in which the husband and sons had migrated, either permanently or temporarily. Although Vitoria do Mello was married, she noted that her husband was absent when she composed her 1670 testament. In the course of distributing her goods, Vitoria mentioned that she had been involved in a lawsuit against one of her sons, Jacinto, and that her son-in-law, Bernardo, had helped her litigate and had loaned her money for the lawsuit. She also named Bernardo co-executor of her testament along with another son.113 The documentary evidence probably overstates the positive relationships that mothers developed with their sons-in-law and local folklore probably exaggerates the tensions between them. There were 110 111 112 113

AHPC, protocolo 1723, fo. 1 (1679). AHPO, caja protocolos 3324, fo. 33 (1616). Liso´n-Tolosana, Antropologı´a cultural, 248. AHUS, protocolo 1711, fo. 83 (1670).

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certainly evil sons-in-law like Andres Varela, who, according to his old, blind father-in-law, had made him drunk and forced him to sign what he believed to be a part of the dowry contract for his daughter. Actually, the document made Andres the beneﬁciary of half of all the old man’s goods.114 From time to time, men litigated against their mothers-in-law for failure to complete the payment of the dowry or similar property disputes.115 One mother-in-law, Marı´a Maca, attempted to prevent such conﬂict by entering into an agreement with her son-in-law that once he married her daughter, Marı´a, they had no rights to particular properties. The document reads like a modern prenuptial agreement, forbidding the couple from asking her or her heirs for anything more than the dowry.116 For most other families, the reality was somewhere in between. As the providers of dowries, mothers played a critical role in choosing their daughters’ spouses. Thus, they would be more likely to dower a match with a man with whom they got along. Moreover, a mother had good reason to construct good relationships with her sonin-law since after her death he might play a critical role in the conservation of her grandchildren’s inheritance.117 Finally, those mothers who had conﬂictual relationships with sons-in-law would presumably opt for other heirs through the use of mejoras. We cannot know how early modern Galician men felt about living in these homes dominated by women. At times, the groom’s lack of status in the family must have conﬂicted with other social inﬂuences in his life such as the patriarchal and hierarchical culture espoused by the Castilian elite and/or his experiences as a migrant. Galician men from the recent past frequently expressed negative feelings about their lack of authority in the home. One informant told Liso´n-Tolosana, ‘When the motherin-law is alive, she has all the authority; she manages everything. She keeps the money.’118 Some Galegos even assert that domineering Galegas contributed to the high rates of male migration. One of Marisa Rey-Henningsen’s interviewees stated, ‘This is no life for a man; those who’ve been away know what it is to be a man.’ According to another, ‘Here, a man who wants to feel he is something has to go away and not 114 115 116 117 118

AHPC, protocolo 883, fo. 81 (1646). See, for instance, Dubert Garcı´a, Historia de la familia, 283. AHPO, caja protocolos 1674, fo. 59 (1684). Friedl, ‘The Position of Women: Appearance and Reality’, 107. Liso´n-Tolosana, Antropologı´a cultural, 246.

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come back. But if he does come back, he must have money in his pocket, or else he’s nothing.’119 The matrilocal residence of married daughters not only altered postmarital family dynamics, but also contributed to the frequent identiﬁcation of the lineage with the maternal line, even among peasants with only meagre holdings. According to the anthropologist Joa˜o de PinaCabral, in northern Portugal, ‘The members of these households receive the same nickname—often the personal name of the sisters’ mother— and cooperate closely in all matters.’120 Similarly, Sally Cole found that in Vila Cha˜ in northern Portugal, ‘there is a general tendency to identify property as belonging to the woman of the household, and not to the man. Sons and daughters say, for example, ‘‘the house is my mother’s’’ (A casa e´ da minha ma˜e). They will not say, ‘‘the house is my parents’ ’’.’ She goes on to point out that children referred to the house as belonging to the mother even in cases when the mother had not inherited the house from her parents.121 According to Heidi Kelley, in Galicia, even when the household is a ‘cooperative venture between husband and wife . . . the identity of the woman is never subsumed beneath that of her husband in community recognition of the household’. She goes on to give examples of households known by the mother’s name such as ‘a casa de Joseﬁna’ and others referred to by the name of the wife.122 Of course, the lifetime association of women with their natal families would have been accentuated by the tradition, common throughout most of southern Europe, of women keeping their families’ surnames even after marriage. Through traditions of matrilocal residence of daughters, Galician women perpetuated their own families and lineages, not those of their fathers and husbands.123 Once married, many women put the network of women around them to the test. The pressure to migrate meant that some men abandoned their brides very soon after the wedding, leaving Galicia populated with a signiﬁcant percentage of adult married women living without husbands, either in their own homes or in the homes of their mothers. These women are known as viuvas dos vivos—widows of the Rey-Henningsen, The World of the Ploughwoman, 96–7. 121 Cole, Women of the Praia, 58. Pina-Cabral, Sons of Adam, 72. 122 Kelley, ‘Competition vs. Cooperation’, 254. 123 For the contrasting case of Renaissance Florence, see Kuehn, Law, Family, and Women, 199. 119 120

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living. From the Atlantic coast, the proportion of married male migrants was very high; in 1708 married men represented 45.6 per cent of the migrants from the province of Santiago. In many coastal areas, those numbers did not fall below 40 per cent over the course of the eighteenth century.124 Not all these women were wives of migrants. Wives of sailors and ﬁshermen knew the dangers that awaited their husbands. According to one Galician folksong, A muller do marin˜ero Po´dese chamar viuda Que cando vai para o mar Vaise para a sepoltura

The wife of a sailor You can call widow Since when he goes to sea He goes to the grave.125

These viuvas dos vivos appear as both sad and independent ﬁgures, and one has to wonder whether the traditional black wedding dress bears a direct relationship to their impending ‘widowhood’.126 Abandoned wives enjoyed none of the beneﬁts of either marriage or singleness. They had no husband to care for them or provide them with companionship, nor could they keep the company of other men. Fortunately, the stories of these women have not been completely lost. They appear regularly in the testimonies of Galegos (both men and women) before the Inquisition, as viuvas dos vivos sometimes faced charges of bigamy after remarrying. As I mentioned earlier, many of these abandoned brides had been married at a relatively young age, often before the age of 20 (signiﬁcantly younger than the Galician population as a whole), and other studies indicate that more than 40 per cent of married female heads of household were less than 30 years old.127 Ana Rodrı´guez seems to have been typical; she was 30 years old at the time of her appearance before Inquisitors and she stated that her ﬁrst husband had been gone for twelve years, making her no more than 18 at the time of her ﬁrst marriage.128 Many ‘widows of the living’ 124

Rey Castelao, ‘Movimientos migratorios’, 115–16. Amancio Landı´n Carrasco, ‘Textos y documentos: Cantares Marineros Gallegos’, Cuadernos de Estudios Gallegos, 10/31 (1955), 285. 126 Widows of the living were probably more common during the early modern period than we have realized. In addition to migration, warfare also left many married women without husbands for extended periods. The story of Bertrande in Natalie Zemon Davis’s The Return of Martin Guerre comes to mind as a famous example of this liminal status (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983). 127 Dubert Garcı ´a, Historia de la familia, 64. 128 AHN, Sec. Inq., legajo 2042, no. 41, fo. 25 (1604). 125

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were left pregnant or with children to care for. Alvaro Lo´pez de Neyra e Miranda married his ﬁrst wife and had ﬁve children before he left to go and live in the diocese of Tuy. His decision to marry again many years later sent him to the galleys.129 Many of these couples had only been together for a few months before the men left. Ana Martı´nez, a 60-year-old farmer from San Pedro de Celas, testiﬁed that forty-two years before she had married Juan Pe´rez Cortas. She lived with him for only a matter of months before he left for Castile. Many years later, she incorrectly heard that he was dead, and eventually she remarried.130 Juan Pacheco, a soldier, lived with his ﬁrst wife, Catalina, for only two years before leaving for the wars in Italy and Flanders.131 Antonio Pita de Veiga, an embroiderer, had been married only a year and a half when he left his wife in Pontevedra to pursue work in Mondon˜edo. His decision to marry a second time led to his arrest by the Inquisition in 1670 and landed him in the king’s galleys.132 On average, Galician women accused of bigamy testiﬁed that their husbands had been gone for about ﬁfteen years. Many more never returned and were never heard from again. During the men’s absence, women worked the farm, raised the children, cared for the home, and looked after elderly parents. They were, for all intents and purposes, single mothers, bearing all the burdens of family life without help from men.133 Because of their awkward situations, viuvas dos vivos may have been more reliant on other family members than women whose husbands remained at home. The bonds between many pairs of sisters were probably strengthened by the absence of their husbands. When in 1643 it came time for Dominga Garcia to make her last will and testament, she opted to bequeath many of her personal goods to her sister. Dominga was married to Domingo de Santiago, a sailor, and her sister, Marı´a, was married to a soldier. Without the contributions and companionship of their husbands, they may have relied on each other for emotional and even economic support. The clothing that Dominga AHN, Sec. Inq., legajo 2042, no. 19, fo. 2 (1587). AHN, Sec. Inq., legajo 2042, no. 83, fos. 4–10 (1642). 131 AHN, Sec. Inq., legajo 2042, no. 35, fo. 1 (1598). 132 AHN, Sec. Inq., legajo 2042, no. 98, fo. 12 (1670). 133 For more on abandoned women see Poska, ‘When Bigamy is the Charge’, 189–205. Hans and Judith Buechler found that the situation for abandoned women was worse than that of unwed mothers: see Carmen, 80. 129 130

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passed to her sister may not have had much ﬁnancial value, but it was a meaningful reminder of their relationship. Dominga also reserved some pieces of cloth for her sister-in-law, indicating that she may have formed a close relationship with her as well.134 We are fortunate to have a unique description of the life of one of these young brides. Marı´a Antonia (1700–60), a peasant woman from O Penedo near Pontevedra, emerged from her humble origins to become a Carmelite holy woman and founder of the Carmelite convent in Santiago de Compostela. Famed for her saintliness, Marı´a Antonia composed an autobiography that described the evolution of her spiritual calling, and, more importantly for our purposes, her life as a peasant woman. At the age of 7, her mother had sent her to work and be raised in the home of an aunt. Within a couple of years, she returned to her widowed mother, who moved her children to Baiona, where they lived and worked in the home of a wealthy cleric. At the age of 22, she married a young man of few means and within a year she had given birth to their ﬁrst child, Sebastia´n. According to Marı´a Antonia, her husband Juan Antonio was determined to improve their quality of life by emigrating ﬁrst to Ca´diz and then to the Indies. Juan assured her that he would be gone only temporarily. Juan Antonio left a sickly Marı´a Antonia and his son alone with only a maid. Marı´a Antonia felt that she could not go to live with her mother, as the child would disturb her employer, nor could she live with her in-laws, with whom she did not get along. Juan Antonio’s absence was trying for her. Caring for a child, managing their affairs, and dealing with family proved to be a challenge for Marı´a Antonia, who was constantly beset by illness. However, she also had much time to contemplate and reassess her spiritual state and she expressed some ambivalence about Juan Antonio’s return two and a half years later. Marı´a Antonia became pregnant again, but before their daughter Leonor was born, Juan Antonio left again for Seville. Marı´a Antonia describes their parting: I cried a lot the second time that he left, and he didn’t cry less. It seemed that we were saying goodbye forever, yet with all our weeping and grief, he could neither stop himself from leaving nor could I stop him . . . when he left, I did not have the heart to see him leave the house, and the same was true of 134

AHPC, protocolo 739, fo. 141 (1643).

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him . . . and so he left with much pain in my heart, and I, crying, stayed in my house, with only the two children and the maid.135

The story of Marı´a Antonia’s marriage ended well. Juan Antonio returned from his second journey and the couple agreed to take monastic vows. However, her autobiography provides insight into the pain of separation and loneliness that Galician brides suffered as their husbands pursued other dreams far away from home. A number of factors may have made Galician marriages more co-operative than hierarchical. Couples tended to be close in age.136 Moreover, both partners usually entered the marriage as adults who had lived independently prior to the marriage. In addition, anthropological research suggests that in many parts of Europe, many peasant marriages were more egalitarian than we have previously believed.137 Susan Tax Freeman found in her study of a small village in Castile that ‘men and women share equally in the management of family and household affairs, and their formal statuses in this sphere are nearly equal, though the husband is the ofﬁcial administrator for the joint enterprise’.138 Not all scholars agree with this egalitarian vision of household work. Carmen Sarasu´a, working in Cantabria, and Lourdes Me´ndez, working in Lugo, both argue that peasant women gain little social or interpersonal authority from their work.139 However, it seems quite reasonable to suppose that the only way a peasant family living at subsistence level could sustain itself 135 Quoted in Una Mı ´stica Gallega en el siglo XVIII: La Venerable Madre Marı´a Antonia de Jesu´s fundadora del convento de Carmelitas de Compostela (A Corun˜a: Fundacio´n ‘Pedro Barrie´ de la Maza, Conde de Fenosa’, Serie Religiosa, 1991), 55. Her complete autobiography remains unpublished. The original and a copy are in the Discalced Carmelite convent in Santiago de Compostela. Madre Marı´a Antonia’s mystical text has been published as Ediﬁcio Espiritual (Barcelona: Juan Flors, 1961). 136 During the ﬁfteenth century, in the Florentine contado, the age difference between spouses was greater than six years. David Herlihy and Christiane KlapischZuber, Tuscans and their Families: A Study of the Florentine Catasto of 1427 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 211. 137 See Rogers, ‘Female Forms of Power’, and Gilmore, ‘Men and Women in Southern Spain’. For evidence of the traditional patriarchal peasant family, see Rogers, ‘Gender in Southern France’. 138 Susan Tax Freeman, Neighbors: The Social Contract in a Castilian Hamlet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 195. 139 Carmen Sarasu ´ a, ‘Understanding Intra-Family Inequalities: The Montes de Pas, Spain, 1700–1900’, The History of the Family: An International Quarterly, 3/2 (1998), 176, and Lourdes Me´ndez, ‘Cousas de mulleres’: Campesinas, poder y vida cotidiana (Lugo 1940–1980) (Barcelona: Anthropos, 1988).

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was through co-operative decision-making and complementary contributions to the household.140 The need for co-operation between husbands and wives in the day-to-day functioning of the farm was probably accentuated by the regularity of male migration. As precarious as existence might have been in rural Galicia, any attempt to strictly delineate between men’s and women’s work might threaten the family’s livelihood when the father or husband left for the season or the year. Early modern Galegas’ control over property also contributed to the formulation of ﬁnancial and emotional partnerships with their husbands.141 As we have already seen, women inherited property that remained theirs for life. Any gifts and inheritances given directly to a married woman was her property. However, control over marital property was complicated because, although legally both the dowry and the arras remained the property of the wife, their administration passed into the hands of her husband. In addition, the couple’s marital property, the bienes gananciales, was entrusted to the husband and the law permitted a husband to use it as he pleased as long as he did not dissipate the wealth.142 Some men clearly abused this responsibility. They illegally diminished their marital property, leaving their wives the burden of lawsuits and debts, despite legal injunctions against such activity. Although not a peasant woman, Don˜a Costanza Me´ndez de Borja from San Martı´n de Oleiros noted in 1692 that during her twenty-year marriage to Don Juan Varela, he had initiated many serious lawsuits. According to Don˜a Costanza, he had untaken these litigations without her intervention and none of them had originated as a result of her possessions or activities, yet he had squandered much of her property and had incurred considerable debts as a result.143 Fortunately, Spanish law sided with women like Don˜a Costanza. Although the misappropriated properties might never be returned, the law clearly protected women whose husbands committed crimes (even as serious as heresy) from 140 For an excellent example of the way that Spanish peasant women and their husbands co-ordinated their work lives in order to sustain the family economy, see Mercedes Borrero Ferna´ndez, ‘Peasant and Aristocratic Women: Their Role in the Rural Economy of Seville at the End of the Middle Ages’, in Women at Work in Spain from the Middle Ages to Early Modern Times ed. Marilyn Stone and Carmen Benito-Vessels (New York: Peter Lang, 1998), 14–15. 141 Monica Chojnacka also found this to be true in early modern Venice: Working 142 Siete Partidas, 4, Title XI, Laws VII and XVII. Women, 48. 143 AHUS, protocolo 2117, fo. 27 (1692).

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responsibility for their husbands’ debts.144 In addition, a wife could take her husband to court if he was dissipating her dowry and request that the court force him to surrender the dowry or entrust it to a third party.145 Spanish law also allowed for signiﬁcant ﬂexibility in the ways that couples managed their joint property. There can be no doubt that some women played little or no role in the management of their ﬁnancial affairs. If they did so subtly or behind the scenes, they are, by the nature of their activity, missing from the historical record. Yet, while a husband had the right to control all marital property, the law required him to obtain his wife’s consent before engaging in transactions with it, and this clause allowed and even encouraged women to participate actively in the management of their conjugal estates during their marriages.146 The testament of Marı´a Ferna´ndez provides an excellent example of the economic partnership that existed between many Galegas and their husbands, demonstrating how women invested their own monies in jointly administered property, both land and livestock.147 Her will describes the property that she owned and managed jointly with her husband Jacome da Mata, a carpenter. She mentions the beneﬁce of Santiago de Nomide that ‘we rent’, and that ‘both I and my husband, Jacome da Mata, bought and acquired the house in which we presently live’.148 She then stated exactly how her portions of the property were to be distributed. Nor was she unique in acting as partner in the family’s economic decisions. The widow Mariana Alvarez had purchased and resold land together with her husband—a transaction for which, she claimed in her will, she had never received proper compensation.149 Women’s ﬁnancial participation also worked to the couple’s beneﬁt. Marı´a da Tella, from the parish of San Cristo´bal de Armariz, noted in her testament that she had acquired signiﬁcant goods and proﬁts because of her investments with her husband. In her will, she insisted that his inheritance include all that was rightfully his as a result of their ﬁnancial successes.150 145 Korth and Flushe, ‘Dowry and Inheritance’, 401. Leyes de Toro, 57. For more on women co-operating with their husbands to manage their households, see Howell, The Marriage Exchange, 107. 147 For a discussion of elite Venetian women’s economic strength, see Chojnacki, 148 AHUS, protocolo 1530/1188, fo. 112 (1628). Women and Men, 128. 149 AHPO, caja protocolos 3669, n.f. (1662). 150 AHPO, caja protocolos 3317, fo. 5 (1672). 144 146

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Married women regularly participated in land transactions jointly with their husbands. The nature of Spanish marital property meant that there were few transactions that did not require the presence and permission of both husband and wife, no matter who actually initiated the transaction. For instance, in order for a husband or couple to employ (sell, lease, or mortgage) any portion of a woman’s dowry, arras, or inheritance, the wife had to consent publicly before the notary who documented the transaction. The use of the property acquired by the couple over the course of their marriage also required her consent. So, when Domingo Ferna´ndez and his wife Angela Cornado joined with Yne´s Martı´nes to sell some land to Pedro Rigueyra, Angela ‘in order to authorize the present [sale] asked license and expressed consent of her husband and he gave it to her and she accepted it’.151 Even when Dominga da Fonte, the wife of Diego Garcia, wanted to sell a piece of land that she had inherited and thus pertained to her own estate, she had to ask Diego for permision.152 Historians have tended to see wives as passive actors in these transactions and their consent as merely a formality.153 However, both the participants and the notaries seem to have taken the need for consent seriously. Women were not to be coerced by their husbands into transactions, and forced transactions could be nulliﬁed. For instance, in a case that was heard on appeal by the Royal Chancellery Court in Valladolid, the parties disputed the quality of a deceased couple’s relationship as the basis of one party’s attempt to negate a gift from the wife to another woman. According to the testimony taken in 1631, Marı´a Go´mez de Figueroa had provided a donacio´n entre vivos in 1613 of all her goods to Don˜a Teresa de Figueroa so that she might marry Antonio Go´mez de Caaman˜o. Juana Rodrı´guez de Caman˜o disputed the legality of the donacio´n, stating that Marı´a’s husband, Juan Prego, 151

AHUS, protocolo 2453, fo. 29 (1706). AHUS, protocolo 2407, fo. 32 (1683). For comparative purposes, see the examples of Venetian women and their property in Chojnacka, Working Women, 28–9. 153 In the Italian context, Tommaso Astarita used the requirement that married women receive their husbands’ consent to dispose of personal property as an indication of their inferiority in legal matters: Village Justice, 181. However, for an interesting discussion of married women and the law in Spanish America, see Kimberly Gauderman, Women’s Lives in Colonial Quito: Gender, Law, and Economy in Spanish America (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), ch. 2. Gauderman lays out a similar argument about women’s legal and property rights. 152

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had forced her to make the donation against her will. At the time of the lawsuit, both Marı´a and Juan were dead. Juana, whose husband testiﬁed on her behalf, gave as the primary reason to annul the transaction that Juan Prego had coerced Marı´a through both physical and verbal abuse, that the abuse was daily, and that local ofﬁcials had had to come to the house on a regular basis to calm things down. Of course, the recipient of the donacio´n and her husband told the court quite a different story. According to them, Marı´a authorized the donacio´n of her own ‘free and spontaneous will without being induced, persuaded, or terriﬁed’ into it. They stated that Juan was a tranquil man who always treated Marı´a with love and attention. Besides, they said, Juan was very sick and ordinarily remained in bed, and in order to get to the authorization of the donacio´n, he had to be carried in a chair. In the end, Juana and her husband lost their appeal and Don˜a Teresa was granted the donacio´n.154 Although the appellate court did not believe the charges of domestic abuse, what is important in this case is that the arguments of both parties hinged on the issue of Marı´a’s consent and the quality of her relationship with her husband. One important constraint on married women’s economic activity was that Castilian law generally forbade women from entering into contracts while they were married without the permission of their husbands.155 However, the law also took into account the numerous extenuating circumstances that might require a woman to make ﬁnancial decisions without the authority of her husband. For instance, husbands could empower their wives to act independently during an extended absence. Caetano de Gestido left a written authorization for his wife to sell their property if necessary, noting that his emigration would not have been possible without her assistance.156 The Leyes de Toro speciﬁcally mention a caveat that would have been critical to women in Galicia: if the husband was absent and either was not returning soon or was returning dangerously late, a judge could give a married woman permission to enter into contracts without his permission.157 In 1746, Ine´s de Souto, 154

ARCV, Signatura: Perez Alonso fenecidos 2350–1, legajo 461. Leyes de Toro, 55–6. 156 Cited in Rial Garcı ´a, ‘La actuacio´n de las mujeres de ausentes en el comericio de bienes raı´ces en el entorno de la tierra de Santaigo, 1700–1840’, in Eiras Roel and Rey Castelao (eds.), Migraciones internas y medium-distances, 513 n. 8. 157 Leyes de Toro, 56. 155

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the wife of Benito de Souto, went before local justices requesting such permission. Benito had been absent from Galicia, living in Andalusia for approximately four months, and Ine´s was requesting judicial permission to deal with a number of different legal matters, including the division of her in-laws’ estate. In response to her petition, the justice conducted a short investigation in which three witnesses testiﬁed that Benito was, indeed, in Andalusia and that he had not been heard from since he left. The judge then granted Ine´s’s request, giving her licence, either on her own or by way of a lawyer, to take whatever steps or enter into whatever contracts or legal instruments might be necessary.158 Despite her professed poverty, Josefa de Neyra came all the way from her home parish of Santiago Xustas in Lugo to the city of A Corun˜a to get permission from a local justice to appear in court and deal with the pending litigation on a variety of unnamed issues while her husband was absent. After a brief investigation, a judge likewise granted her request.159 Without such exceptions, one might imagine that economic activity would come to a virtual halt in the Galician parishes where men migrated in large numbers. Without the ability to engage in the legal and economic transactions necessary to manage family estates, the ‘widows of the living’ could easily fall into extreme misery during times of economic crisis. Instead, evidence indicates that these women regularly exercised their rights (granted either by their husbands or by a judge) to buy and sell property. Serrana Rial Garcı´a found in her analysis of eighteenth-century sales contracts from the rural area outside of Santiago de Compostela that women with absent husbands played an active role in the exchange of property. Generally, they sold property in order to pay off debts that had come due in their husbands’ absences and to supplement family income.160 Many of the women noted that they had had no word from their husbands for years and that they had received no remittances to help feed and clothe their families.161 While the ‘widows of the living’ who sold property required a judge’s intervention, there is little similar evidence of such interventions in transactions in which women were the purchasers.162 In 1746, Balthasara de Feal purchased two small pieces of land for 17 ducados from Pablo Pe´rez 158 159 160 162

AHUS, protocolo 5615, fo. 36 (1746). AHUS, protocolo 6714, fo. 15 (1776). Rial Garcı´a, ‘La actuacio´n de las mujeres de ausentes’, 501. Rial Garcı´a, Las mujeres en la economı´a urbana, 150.

161

Ibid. 503.

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and his wife while her husband was absent. Although Pablo’s wife, Ysidorra, provided her oral consent to the transaction before witnesses and the notary, there is no indication in the document that Balthasara provided any particular evidence of her husband’s consent to the deal.163 The absence of any indication of consent may be due to the nature of the documentation. The bound volumes of notarial documents are not so perfectly collated that we can be absolutely certain it was not misplaced. We might also attribute its absence to oversight by the notary. Whatever the case, the Spanish legal system was ﬂexible enough to allow Balthasara to buy the land she needed or wanted without the presence of her husband, and it probably differentiated unofﬁcially between a woman’s ability to augment the estate and her ability to alienate property that was not hers alone. According to local traditions, women make most household decisions because they are believed to be more ﬁscally responsible and better able to manage property than men.164 Galegas were central to the family’s economic decision-making,165 and a commonly told Galician folktale conﬁrms the cultural importance of that role: There was once a king who wished to marry, but before doing so he wanted to be sure that after marrying he would continue to be the one to decide things. The king asked his servant: ‘Who decides matters in a home when a man gets married?’ And his servant answered: ‘Your Majesty, in all the families I know, the woman is the one to decide.’ ‘That cannot be true,’ said the king. ‘If that is the case, I shall never marry.’ But his servant insisted: ‘Your Majesty, in my family, my wife decides everything, and I know of no home where the wife does not do so. At times, some women pretend to let their husbands decide, but when it comes to the point they always decide things themselves.’ ‘I cannot believe it,’ said the king. ‘If that is the case in your home you are not a real man the way God has decreed you should be. At all events, so as to convince you, we shall set forth in disguise, you and I, and take with us a herd of cows, and an equal number of horses, to give to people. We shall visit every house and ask which they prefer. Wherever they choose a horse it will be because the 163

AHUS, protocolo 5615, fo. 140 (1746). Rey-Henningsen, The World of the Ploughwoman, 99–102. For a similar discussion of northern Portugal, see Cole, Women of the Praia, 56–8. 165 Kelley, ‘Competition vs. Cooperation’, 322, and Buechler and Buechler, Carmen, p. xvi. 164

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husband decides things, and wherever they prefer a cow it will be because the wife does.’ The king and his servant travelled from house to house, offering the horses and cows. At each house, although the husband stated his preference for a horse, the wife always persuaded him that a cow would be more useful. After having called at nearly every house in the kingdom, finally they came to a house where the husband did all the talking and his wife listened without shushing him. And so, the king, pleased to see that there were still some husbands who decided things in their homes, told his servant to give him the best horse they had. Full of hope that henceforth they would have more luck, the king and his servant continued on their way. But, they had not proceeded very far when they heard hoofbeats and a man shouting: ‘Wait a moment, you there, please wait!’ They turned and saw the man they had just been talking to leading the horse by the reins. When he caught up with them he said, almost out of breath: ‘Pardon me, good sirs, pardon me. I should like to ask you from my wife if it would be possible to exchange this horse for a cow?’ And the king, disillusioned, said, ‘Give this man the fattest cow!’166

Galegos also tell stories about women’s ﬁnancial prowess. In a folktale from A Corun˜a, a poor family sat in an inn eating fried eggs, but at the end of the meal, they were unable to pay for their food. In the intervening years, the man worked in America and became quite wealthy. When he returned, the innkeeper gave a lawyer 1,000 pesos to collect the debt. When the lawyer found the man, he demanded the value of the eggs as if they had grown into chicks and multiplied many times, a million pesos for the long-ago eaten eggs. The man replied, ‘I’m not the one who looks after our money. My wife does, so I’ll see what she says.’ The wife gave her husband twelve pesos and told him to go and settle the debt. Even after the lawyer tried his pitch on her, she remained steadfast, eventually convincing the innkeeper to take back his 1,000 pesos and even give her back her twelve pesos. Satisﬁed with the ﬁnancial outcome brokered by the woman, everyone went home happy.167 In interviews, Galician peasant women reveal that they make the majority of household decisions, including when to sell the cows and when to harvest the grain.168 In a small study of women in coastal Galicia, more than 90 per cent of the women reported some level of participation in decisions relating to buying machinery for the farm 166

167 Ibid. 133–4. Rey-Henningsen, Tales of the Ploughwoman, 15–16. Liso´n-Tolosana, Antropologı´a cultural, 247. Friedl found similar participation by women in such matters in Greece: Friedl, ‘The Position of Women’, 106. 168

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and 8 per cent said that they alone made such decisions. More than 26 per cent of the women said that they alone made decisions concerning home improvements. In fact, social scientists working throughout Galicia and northern Portugal have noted with surprise the degree to which women control household ﬁnances. In that same study, 90 per cent of the women reported that they alone managed the family budget, and even during the 1960s, a surprising number of rural women had their own bank accounts.169 A popular expression just over the border in northern Portugal is ‘Na vida da casa quem manda ´e a mulher’ (In the business of the household, it is the woman who rules).170 In the nearby Minho region of northern Portugal, peasant men often refer to their wives as a patroa, the female boss, although women never refer to their husbands in the same way. The anthropologist Joa˜o Pina-Cabral notes that although there is often irony in the undertone, ‘there is also a deﬁnite acknowledgement that the power of the woman at home is great and indeed often greater than that of her husband’.171 Female authority in the home did not necessarily make for happy marriages although we certainly know much more about unhappy marriages than we do about those that worked out. For instance, it is clear that some women found marriage or married life disagreeable, and left the relationship despite ecclesiastical prohibitions on divorce. This may have been the case in 1669 when Feliciana Arias de Montenegro left her husband, Juan Nieto Blanco. An Episcopal Visitor to their parish of San Pedro Maus (Ourense) found the couple married but living apart. When Juan responded to the Visitor General’s demand for an appearance, but Feliciana did not, the Visitor ordered them to resume marital relations and blamed Feliciana for the discord.172 According to her husband, Domingos Ferna´ndez, Catalina Pe´rez had lived with him for two years and they had had one child. At that point, Catalina left him and went to Castile. Upon receiving news of her death in Valladolid, Domingos remarried. Unfortunately for him, Catalina was still alive, and Inquisitors sent him to the galleys.173 169 See Garcı ´a-Ramon et al., ‘Farm Women, Gender Relations, and Household Strategies’, 13. Marisa Rey-Henningsen also noted, although anecdotally, women’s control of bank accounts in The World of the Ploughwoman, 99. 170 Cole, Women of the Praia, 87. 171 Pina-Cabral, Sons of Adam, 87. 172 Libro de Visitas, San Pedro Maus, AHDO, 45.2.6, fo. 43 (1669). 173 AHN, Sec. Inq., legajo 2042, no. 41, fo. 26 (1604).

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When in 1594 Gregorio Carvallo, a farmer from Lugo, was denounced to the Inquisition for bigamy, he testiﬁed that his ﬁrst wife Marı´a Ramo´n had left him and the region after one year of marriage. When her father told him that she was dead, he remarried. Long after he had consummated his second marriage, his ﬁrst wife returned and asked him to take her back.174 Similarly, Vasco Xuarez, a farmer and carpenter from San Salvador de Van˜a (Santiago), testiﬁed to the Inquisition that many years before, he had married Maria de Corral, but that after six months she left and he never saw her again. His decision to remarry after twenty years without checking to see that she was dead led to his interaction with the Inquisition.175 The Episcopal Visitor to the parish of Santa Eulalia Bouses found that Madalena Pe´rez had left her husband, Diego Gallego, and was living apart from him. The Visitor ordered her to return home and to ‘eat and drink with her husband and make a good life with him, giving him food and everything necessary for a good married life’. Failure to comply would result in her excommunication.176 Some men accused their wives of causing their marital discontent. According to the testimony of Juan de Covaneyro, he was with his ﬁrst wife for eight or ten years when he had some troubles and had to go to Castile. When he returned, he found that she had committed adultery and he threw her out of the house. She returned and they were together for three more months, after which she left because he treated her badly. Later, Juan heard that she had died in a hospital in Santiago and seven or eight years later he remarried.177 On the rarest of occasions, marital conﬂict led to murder, as in the case of Ine´s de Portillo. In 1640, her husband, Captain Francisco de Medina, an infantry captain with the Royal Armada, stabbed her to death while she lay in bed next to him. Initially, Ine´s’s mother co-operated with the investigation into the murder, but then she changed her mind and decided to pardon him for the crime. In the apartamiento, Ine´s’s mother stated that Ine´s ‘deserved her death’ and that Francisco was a ‘principled and honourable person’.178 Although 174 175 176 177 178

ANH, Sec. Inq., legajo 2042, no. 32, fo. 3 (1594). AHN, Sec. Inq., legajo 2042, no. 44, fo. 4 (1608). Libro de Visitas, Santa Eulalia Bouses, AHDO, 27.2.5, fo. 34 (1584). AHN, Sec. Inq., legajo 2042, no. 16, fo. 3 (1586). AHPC, protocolo 736, fo. 31 (1640).

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Golden Age literature glamorized uxoricide and the Siete Partidas made it possible, the murder of an adulterous wife was rare and for most not a socially acceptable resolution to the problem. Even the Siete Partidas tried to discourage crimes of honour and passion, counselling the husband to warn the paramour of his suspicions in writing in the presence of other ‘reliable’ men. In that missive, the husband should prohibit any contact between the other man and his wife. The man should be warned three times. If the husband then catches the man in public with his wife, he should ﬁnd three witnesses to their prohibited behaviour and have the man arrested.179 A husband could only kill the offender if he caught the couple in ﬂagrante delicto. However, he should not kill his wife, but should let the judicial system pass judgment on her actions.180 We know far less about the day-to-day experiences of ordinary marriages in which men and women lived together without conﬂict and produced children. A woman in her role as mother appeared in documentation only at the baptism of her children, at their marriages, and when she made testamentary bequests to them. Thus, we have some demographic evidence of women’s fertility, but little else. However, even the picture of married women’s fertility is complicated.181 In general, early modern Galicia was characterized by relatively low fertility rates due to high rates of permanent celibacy, late age at marriage, and male migration. But, as we have already seen, not all reproduction took place during matrimony. To begin with, some married women (5–10 per cent) had already borne children outside of marriage. Another 5–12 per cent came to the altar pregnant, as did Margarida Guardia. When she married Domingos Padron in January of 1616, she was well into her pregnancy. Their child, Marı´a, was baptized less than two months later.182 Married women who did not ﬁt into either of these ﬁrst two categories tended to bear their ﬁrst child, on average, about ﬁfteen months after the wedding. Across the region, conceptions were Partida 7, Title XVII, Law XII. Partida 7, Title XVII, Law XIII. According to Abigail Dyer, many husbands were willing to reclassify their wives’ adulterous relationships as lesser crimes in order to circumvent or minimize the issue of their own honor. Dyer, ‘Heresy and Dishonor’, 139–42. 181 For the most extensive examination of Spanish demography, see Reher, Perspectives. For a broad overview of the history of mothering in Spain, see Marı´a Jose´ and Pedro Voltes, Madres y nin˜os en la historia de Espan˜a (Barcelona: Planeta, 1989). 182 Libro de Bautisados, Santa Eulalia Bouses, AHDO, 27.2.1. 179 180

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highest during May, June, and July and lowest during September and October.183 The interval between the ﬁrst and second child increased to 29 months, on average, and that between the next to the last and the last child to more than 37 months.184 Extended lactation, miscarriages, and male absences probably account for much of the gap between children. With such low fertility, by the middle of the eighteenth century the average number of children per married couple was just above two. Couples in the eastern part of the region tended to have slightly more children (2.48 per couple) than those on the Atlantic coast (2.16 per couple).185 These families were considerably smaller than their counterparts in New Castile, who averaged more than 3.8 children per couple during its period of lowest fertility between 1640 and 1750.186 We also know very little about mother–child relationships. Historians tend to be sceptical about expressions of sentiment in notarial documentation, believing that their formulaic nature obscured the feelings behind the words. However, it is not at all clear that those women who took the opportunity to express their love and affection for their children in their testaments felt constrained by notarial formulas. I would argue that since not all women asked the notary to include sentimental declarations, those statements take on even greater signiﬁcance. When Margarita de Caneda noted the ‘much love and affection that I have for Bartolome´ de Quian and Gregorio de Quian my legitimate sons’187 and Cristina Vasquez stated that she had ‘much love and affection for all of my children’,188 they were stepping outside of the legal formula to share particular feelings with those who survived them. Some women, like Catalina Pereira, singled out one child, her daughter Pascoa Borraja, for a special declaration of love.189 Although such pronouncements might 183 For Ourense, see Poska, Regulating the People, 121. For Salne ´s, see Pe´rez Garcı´a, Un modelo de sociedad, graﬁca 4.1. For Xallas, see Barreiro Mallo´n, La jurisdiccio´n de Xallas, 179–80. For Lugo, see Saavedra, Economı´a rural antigua, graﬁco I-7. This pattern is similar to that found in Arago´n: see Angels Torrents, ‘Actitudes pu´blicas, actitudes privadas, 1610–1935’, Boletı´n de la Asociacio´n de Demografı´a Histo´rica, 10/1 (1992), 16. 184 Pe ´rez Garcı´a, Un modelo de sociedad, 126–7. The average was nearly the same in the jurisdiction of Xallas: see Barreiro Mallo´n, La jurisdiccio´n de Xallas, 203–4. For a discussion of urban fertility, see Enrique Martı´nez Rodrı´guez, ‘La fecundidad urbana en la Galicia moderna: Santiago de Compostela durante el siglo XVIII’, in Obradoiro, 201–24. 185 Dubert Garcı ´a, Historia de la familia, table no. 1.16, 395–6. 186 Reher, Perspectives, 178. 187 AHUS, protocolo 1389, fo. 30 (1658). 188 AHUS, protocolo 732, fo. 12 (1669). 189 AHPO, caja protocolos 3125, fo. 56 (1690).

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be indicators of particularly strong attachments, the lack of such a declaration of sentiment does not necessarily imply that a mother did not love her children. There were a myriad of other mechanisms to express such sentiments, including bequests of valued goods.190 Certainly, we can speculate that in families divided by migration, the bond between a mother and her children would have been strengthened by the absence of the father. The reciprocity expected by Galician families must also have affected relationships. As we will see in the next chapter, just as mothers cared for their children, those children were expected to care for their ageing parents both in this life and into the next. Motherhood also provided the opportunity to strengthen the networks among women through the designation of godparents. Comadres or madrinas, godmothers, were an integral part of the community’s ritual and social life. Although the Catholic Church emphasized the spiritual relationship between godparents and children, my examination of godparentage patterns in the parishes of Santa Eulalia Bouses and Santiago de las Caldas (Ourense) reveals that married women used the sacramental ritual to strengthen relationships between women within their own childbearing cohort. In approximately half of the cases, women chose godmothers for their children who had either recently given birth to a child or would soon do so. Clearly, in small rural communities, the choice of godparents frequently sanctiﬁed an old relationship, for instance between childhood friends, rather than initiating a new one.191 In highly endogamous communities, the parents and godparents may have also been cousins or cousins by marriage. An ethnographer of the region, Vicente Risco, pointed out that, as recently as ﬁfty years ago, Galician couples strengthened existing ties by choosing people who had participated in their weddings as godparents for their ﬁrst children.192 That 190 For a more extensive discussion of the role of sentiment in historical analyses, see Hans Medick and David Sabean, ‘Interest and Emotion in Family and Kinship Studies: A Critique of Social History and Anthropology’, in Interest and Emotion: Essays on the Study of Family and Kinship, ed. Hans Medick and David W. Sabean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 9–27. 191 Michael Bennett, ‘Spiritual Kinship and the Baptismal Name in Traditional European Society’, in Principalities, Powers and Estates: Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Government and Society, ed. L. O. Frappell (Adelaide: Adelaide University Union Press, 1979), 3. 192 Risco, ‘Etnografı ´a’, 492. George M. Foster also mentions that marriage godparents often sponsored the ﬁrst child, in ‘Cofradı´a and Compadrazgo in Spain and Spanish America’, Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, 9/1 (Spring 1953), 4.

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women might seek out their peers as madrinas should not surprise us, as compadrazgo implied co-parentage as well as ritual sponsorship.193 As maternal mortality was the most frequent cause of death for early modern women, a godmother might be called upon to care on a temporary basis for her godchildren until the widower remarried, or, in even more severe situations, this care might become permanent should the children be orphaned. By opting for other new parents, new mothers and fathers assured themselves that in case of death or other dire circumstances their newborns would be cared for by a family able to fulﬁl the special needs of an infant or small child. These relationships between women complemented or even supplanted networks based on biological relations.194 Women also looked to inﬂuential women in these small communities to augment their vertical networks. Marı´a Ferna´ndez de Saravia, the mother of the parish priest of Santa Eulalia Bouses (Ourense), became a godmother at least fourteen times in three years between 1602 and 1605. After her death, Marı´a Pe´rez, the priest’s maid, seems to have taken over the role as the parish godmother. Convenience, as well as their proximity to the parish priest, may have played a role in these women’s popularity. Many children were baptized during childbirth and these women could accompany the priest to the birth at a moment’s notice. They may also have been the parish midwives. While childbirth provided women with additional support systems through both their children and their godmothers, not all married women had children. Approximately 8 to 10 per cent of couples were sterile,195 and a number of married women noted in their testaments that they had no children. Dominga Garcı´a, the wife of a sailor, noted that she had no children.196 Marin˜a Macias declared that she had no children or heirs.197 It is difﬁcult to know whether they meant that they had never had children or that they had no surviving children; however, disease, poor nutrition, male migration, and the fact that many women did not marry until they were well into their thirties conspired to leave many Galician women childless. Bennett, ‘Spiritual Kinship’, 3. John Bossy, ‘Blood and Baptism: Kinship, Community and Christianity in Western Europe from the Fourteenth to the Seventeenth Centuries’, in Sanctity and Secularity: The Church and the World, ed. Derek Baker (Oxford: Blackwell, 1973). 195 Saavedra, La vida cotidiana, 175. 196 AHPC, protocolo 739, fo. 141 (1643). 197 AHPO, caja protocolos 3773, fo. 2 (1693). 193 194

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As wives and mothers, Galegas took on the responsibility of caring for the men in their lives and the children that they bore. This was, no doubt, the central activity of most of their adulthood. As they came to the end of their lives, married women used the property that they had accumulated to repay the people to whom they were obligated, to care for the people for whom they felt responsible, and to reward the people whom they loved. Married women were free to disburse their property within the parameters described by Castilian law (see Chapter 2) and I found only one female testator who alluded to her husband’s inﬂuence on her testamentary bequests.198 Dominga de Esparis noted in her testament from 1684 that her second husband, Gabriel de Mun˜in, was present at the making of the will, and that ‘as necessary, I requested permission to make this testament, which he gave to me’.199 Although it was not legally required, that Dominga felt compelled to include this statement of his permission might be an indicator of his control over her and her property. Joint testaments worked differently. Although I examined few testaments made by couples, nearly all began with a clause in which the woman asked for permission to make the testament and the husband ofﬁcially granted that permission, such as in 1683 when Dominga da Bustelo and Juan de Luzi made a joint testament in front of the notary, Juan Sa´nchez de Traspen˜as.200 Married women had the freedom to allocate their dowries, any family inheritance that they had received, and one-half of the property from their marriages in any way they saw ﬁt in testamentary bequests. The testament of Marı´a Bidal provides one illustration of the property that remained in a married woman’s possession. In 1681, Marı´a, the wife of Domingo Gonca´lez from Santiago de Compostela, used her testament to distribute the extensive property that she had acquired over the course of two marriages. To her surviving husband, she left three pieces of cultivated land and an accompanying granary. She gave her daughter, Marı´a Gonca´lez, a mejora in compensation for caring for her during her illnesses. The extra portion alone included one-third of the groves, lands, waters, ﬁelds, etc. where she and her husband lived, as well as 198 199 200

Juan de la Ripia, Pra´ctica de testamentos, 25. AHUS, protocolo 1674, fo. 86 (1684). AHUS, protocolo 2407, fo. 20 (1683).

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a house called ‘Pallete’ that was on the grounds, two large chests, each of which held 30 ferrados of wheat, plus two brown cows, two sheep, one goat, some linens, and a copper ﬁreplace pot.201 The remainder of the estate (slightly less than half) was divided equally between all six of her children from both marriages, including the younger Marı´a. A seemingly unremarkable woman in terms of either wealth or status, Marı´a Bidal bequeathed a considerable estate at her death. As ordinary women could acquire such substantial resources, wills offer an excellent opportunity to understand their authority in the family, as they show women in the act of allocating those resources as a means to display their affections and assert their priorities. For instance, the testaments regularly bear witness to women bequeathing family homes to their surviving husbands. Men would not necessarily have been the primary heirs to their homes, as family homes were often identiﬁed as passing through the female line. Nor did a husband have any particular legal right to a family home that belonged to his wife. Before Marı´a Ferna´ndez died in 1628, she carefully distributed her property to ensure that her husband, the carpenter Jacome de Mata, would be well cared for. Marı´a and Jacome had bought their home together, and she mandated that Jacome receive her portion of the house, no doubt to ensure that he had a place to live for the rest of his life, as well as the usufruct of her part of the property in order to sustain him. She also provided him with some livestock and authorized him to collect a portion of the harvest on some land that they rented.202 Ana de Deza left her husband everything that they had acquired over the course of their marriage, including some land, a house, and all her personal goods.203 Ana Enrı´quez, the wife of Diego Rodrı´guez the younger, noted in her testament that it was her desire that Diego have possession of all of her dotal property and other capital up to the legally allowed one-third plus one-ﬁfth.204 On their deathbeds, many women took the opportunity not only to reward their husbands with bequests and even mejoras, but also to record the love and affection that had developed between them over the years. While affection does not necessarily indicate an egalitarian 201 202 203 204

AHUS, protocolo 1671, fo. 42 (1681). AHUS, protocolo 1188, fo. 112 (1628). AHPO, caja protocolos 3669, n.f. (1659). AHPO, caja protocolos 3317, fo. 54 (1675).

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relationship, many of these women described their husbands as companions who had shared their experiences. Marina Lo´pez left her husband half of all her possessions in gratitude for his love, affection, and companionship.205 Dominga Me´ndes and her husband had not only developed a strong loving bond, but she noted that he had worked with her and shared her suffering during her illnesses.206 This sense of companionship did not develop overnight. In 1658, full of sentiment, a healthy Costanza Forneyra made her last will and testament in which she expressed remarkable warmth towards her fourth husband, Antonio. She willed him an additional ﬁfth of all her belongings, plus some vineyards, chestnut trees, and other pieces of land, ‘[f ]or the love and affection and obligations that I have for him and for having been married to each other for more than twenty-two years during which he has esteemed me and treated me like an honourable man should with much kindness and goodwill’.207 Women with children must have felt torn between their desire to provide for their husbands and the needs of their children. Some women dealt with this dilemma by splitting their bequests. Marina Lo´pez left her husband, Andres de Castro, half of everything she had but she also made her daughter Marı´a her universal heir.208 Alberta Dias de Andrade was concerned that her young son would not outlive her husband, Domingo. As a consequence, she gave her son her half of the house and mandated that only if he died would Domingo inherit her part. She made them both her universal heirs.209 Dominga Pe´rez, whose husband was a soldier, had no children. However, her otherworldly concerns cut into her husband’s inheritance. She left him half of all her possessions, but named her soul as her universal heir. All of this may not have amounted to much. She stated in her will that she was desperately poor, pobre de solemnidad.210 Other women must have felt assured that their husbands could and would provide for themselves, and thus favoured their children over their husbands. Marı´a de Seoane, whose husband had migrated, left nothing to him. Instead, she made her two 205 206 207 208 209 210

AHUS, protocolo 733, fo. 6 (1669). AHPC, protocolo 2263, fo. 29 (1688). AHPO, caja protocolos 3669, fo. 134 (1658). AHUS, protocolo 733, fo. 6 (1669). AHPC, protocolo 2269, fo. 75 (1694). AHPC, protocolo 742, fo. 105 (1646).

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sons (one of whom had also migrated) her heirs.211 Similarly, Marı´a Rey, the wife of Juan Dono, made her six children her universal heirs, providing nothing for her husband.212 When women provided for their husbands, they often attempted to control their husbands’ ability to pass the inheritances to the next generation. With love and affection, Marı´a Boa bequeathed almost everything to her husband, Gregorio. The only things that she kept aside were the clothing that she gave to her niece, Catalina, and the part of her house in which her brother lived, which he was allowed to keep. However, she also mandated that after her husband’s death, all of her property would go to her niece.213 Marı´a was not the only married Galega to prefer to pass her property to another woman. Marı´a de Riveyra’s ﬁrst marriage had been to a mercer named Juan who had left her greatly in debt. They had had children, all of whom were dead; however, she had a surviving granddaughter, whom she had cared for since she had been orphaned. She also mentioned that at the time of her second marriage to Martı´n Viquiera, he had brought nothing to the marriage. As their home belonged to her, she bequeathed it to him, noting that he had spent ‘money, work, and care’ on it. She also left him some of the furnishings as a token of ‘the great love that he had for me during the years that we were married’. After he died, she mandated that the house go to their surviving granddaughter, thereby returning it to the female line.214 Much more so than men, women used their property to express feelings for and improve the lives of persons outside of their nuclear family.215 Galician women’s wills reveal considerable afﬁnity between siblings. With their own property, married sisters could help provide dowries for their unmarried siblings, as was the case when Madalena Alvarez married in 1663. Her married sisters, Isabel and Ba´rbara, helped to dower her.216 Brothers too were frequently the recipients of property.217 So, although Ysavel Alvarez made her husband the heir to nearly AHUS, protocolo 1389, fo. 65 (1658). AHUS, protocolo 734, fo. 42 (1671). 213 AHUS, protocolo 734, fo. 19 (1671). 214 AHPC, protocolo 2261, fo. 169 (1686). 215 For more on this, see Cavallo, ‘What did Women Transmit?’ 216 AHPO, caja protocolos 3549, fo. 55 (1663). 217 For another facet of the enduring relationship between married women and their brothers, see Chojnacki, Women and Men, 103–4. 211 212

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all of her goods, she left her brother, Domingo, a chestnut grove, a part of a vineyard, and two small pigs.218 Marı´a de Jesu´s left a considerable array of livestock and property to her husband, but made her brother the heir to nearly everything else.219 In addition to their own children, women involved in second or even third marriages formed attachments to their spouses’ children from previous marriages and provided them with meaningful, if small, bequests. Dominga Sa´nchez, the wife of Juan Rodrı´guez, a baker, made her sons from her ﬁrst marriage the heirs to most of her property, including the home in which she lived with her second husband. The fulﬁlment of this legal norm did not preclude any inheritance by stepchildren. Dominga also left a skirt to her second husband’s daughter from an earlier marriage.220 Similarly, Beatriz da Fonte made her daughters her heirs, but bequeathed a gift of some grain to the son of her ﬁrst husband.221 Although men rarely bequeathed goods to people outside of the immediate family, testaments reveal the degree to which Galegas put their property to use for extended family members.222 Clearly, the care of grandchildren, nieces, and nephews fell to the older women of the family. Marı´a Conde from Ourense took the opportunity in her 1696 testament to care for an orphaned grandchild. Her son Lorenzo had been married to a woman named Mariana (Marı´a confessed that she did not know her daughter-in-law’s surname, only that she lived on the Calle de Pelourin˜o). Within two months of the marriage, her son had died, leaving his wife a pregnant widow. Marı´a provided her daughterin-law with two chests, a vineyard, and some linens. She also provided for her niece who had been serving her, as well as her surviving two children and her current husband, Blas.223 In 1695, Catalina Ferna´ndez, whose husband was a skilled artisan in the city of A Corun˜a, spread her goods among a number of different female relatives. She made her granddaughter the heir to her property after the death of her husband. She bequeathed a shirt to one of her sisters and some blue ﬂannel 218 219 220 221 222 223

AHPO, caja protocolos 3317, fo. 18 (1670). AHUS, protocolo 1357, fo. 470 (1650). AHPC, protocolo 1510, fo. 52 (1666). AHPC, protocolo 1723, fo. 1 (1679). Howell, The Marriage Exchange, 161–2. AHPO, caja protocolos 3487, fo. 48 (1696).

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petticoats, an undershirt, and a shirt to another sister. She left her husband’s sister a dark green blanket, an undershirt, and a shirt.224 Catalina Pe´rez gave her niece, Alberta Pe´rez, a chest and some linens for her trousseau if she decided to marry.225 Marı´a Lorenc¸a de Alorei bequeathed a cow, a copper pot, and some linens to the nieces of her second husband and 50 ducados to her grandson Francisco.226 Marriage certainly imposed some constraints on some women’s activities, but Galicia’s demographic situation and cultural orientation signiﬁcantly altered the relationships that marriage created. Matrilocal residence of married daughters made sons-in-law into outsiders and reinforced the strength of the matriline. Although their husbands technically controlled the majority of women’s property during a marriage, married women regularly exercised their rights to dispose of their wealth. Their relationships with their husbands were often partnerships, in which women helped manage and augment family estates. Motherhood reinforced the centrality of women as they often raised children on their own or with the help of other mothers from within their own cohort. Finally, they used their wealth to aid their spouses both before and after their deaths. Friends and relatives, both near and more distant, beneﬁted from their care, generosity, and ﬁnancial acumen. 224 225 226

AHPC, protocolo 2342, fo. 187 (1695). AHUS, protocolo 1389, fo. 49 (1657). AHUS, protocolo 1357, fo. 209 (1646).

5 Widowhood How content was I the day I married; but now I am even more so, since I was left a widow. Galician proverb

Unlike wealthy Spanish women, most widowed Galegas could not withdraw from the world into the quiet life of the convent after the deaths of their husbands. Although the contemporary literature is ﬁlled with scenes of demure Spanish widows renouncing their homes and inheritances in favour of a life of piety and prayer, as I have already discussed, retirement to a convent was an expensive option generally unavailable to women from the lower classes. Moreover, this option probably did not appeal to most Galician women, who were accustomed to considerable economic and social independence. For many, the transition would not have been too traumatic, as both the extended period of singleness as a young woman and the responsibilities of married life left Galegas well prepared for their tenures as widows. Many women had already served as de facto heads of households during their husbands’ absences. Even those women whose husbands had remained at home understood and had experience with family ﬁnances, the management of the farm, and the legal system. They were accustomed to the rigours of rural life and in the habit of making important economic decisions. Before their husbands died, their hard work and ﬁnancial acumen had earned them the respect of their families and communities. Nevertheless, widowhood brought some new experiences and responsibilities. The few legal constraints that had bound a married woman and her property to her husband immediately disappeared upon his death. In addition to the grief that accompanied the death of their spouses, some women faced the decision of whether to remarry, the

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challenge of protecting the inheritances of minor children, and the need to provide for themselves as they aged. As we will see, Galician widows freely employed the property and status that they had accumulated over the years to care for themselves and to inﬂuence others in both this life and the next. Across Galicia, approximately 12 per cent of households were headed by widows,1 although, again, the rates varied considerably from parish to parish. In parts of the province of Lugo, in which families generally rewarded sons with mejoras, widows rarely succeeded their husbands as heads of households. In contrast, in the parish of O Bolo in the province of Ourense, widows headed nearly one-third of the households.2 The majority of widowed heads of households were not young; most were around the age of 50.3 Nor did these widows tend to live alone. Although the majority of women who lived alone were widows, the average 50-year-old widowed Galega ran a household that included three to four members.4 Like women in other parts of Europe, most Galician widows did not remarry, while most widowers did.5 Only 2–4 per cent of Galician marriages involved a widow, while nearly 20 per cent included a widower.6 In addition, those few widows who chose to remarry tended to wait much longer than men in the same circumstances. Between 1 Dubert Garcı ´a, Historia de la familia, 62. For statistics on sixteenth-century Castile, see David E. Vassberg, ‘The Status of Widows in Sixteenth-Century Rural Castile’, in Poor Women and Children in the European Past, ed. J. Henderson and Richard Wall (New York: Routledge, 1994), 183. For excellent discussions of some of the issues facing early modern widows, see Sandra Cavallo and Lyndan Warner (eds.), Widowhood in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (London: Longman, 1999). Heidi Wunder also has a good discussion of widowhood in He is the Sun, She is the Moon: Women in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 32–6. For England, see Lynn Botelho and Pat Thane (eds.), Women and Ageing in British Society since 1500 (London: Longman, 2001). For Italy, see Isabelle Chabot, ‘Widowhood and Poverty in Late Medieval Florence’, Continuity and Change, 3/2 (1988), 291–311. 2 Saavedra ‘Casa y communidad’, 103–4. 3 Dubert Garcı 4 Ibid. 85. ´a, Historia de la familia, 64. 5 For elite women in Venice, see Chojnacki, Women and Men, 98–9. For poor women in early modern England, see Margaret Pelling, ‘Who Needs to marry? Ageing and Inequality among Women and Men in Early Modern Norwich’, in Women and Ageing in British Society since 1500, ed. Lynn Botelho and Pat Thane (London: Longman, 2001), 31–42. 6 Rey Castelao, Aproximacio ´n de la historia rural, 45, and Barreiro Mallo´n, La jurisdiccio´n de Xallas, 170. This ﬁgure is much lower than the 25–35% that was the norm in Castile: see Saavedra, La vida cotidiana, 173.

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one-quarter and one-third of widows waited more than four years to remarry after the death of their spouses, while most men remarried much more quickly. In western Galicia, only one-quarter of widows remarried in less than a year, while 63.7 per cent of men remarried within a year and 86.2 per cent within two years. In fact, many men remarried within two or three months, presumably because their wives had died during childbirth or with young children and they needed someone to care for the children.7 Despite the regularity with which men remarried, widower remarriage was the object of considerable popular scorn. Contemporary Galician rhymes warn women who marry widowers that they are just one in a series of wives. In one verse, the widower says, ‘I married one time, now I’ll marry again, and I will marry a third time if I am widowed.’ In another version, the widower proclaims, ‘I married two times, now I am a widower, marry me, young woman, so that I do not have to suffer alone.’ Another common refrain admonishes women, ‘Don’t you marry a widower although he might have a lot of clothes, he will always go around saying this little woman replaced another.’8 Young widows must have had a difﬁcult time attracting single men, although there were, of course, exceptions. The widowed Costanza Ramos found a single man, Pedro de Rodicio, when she decided to remarry,9 and in 1684 Catalina de Surga, the widow of Antonio de Ramos and mother of his children, agreed to marry Antonio Rodrı´guez who was, as yet, single.10 Luysa de Casar, a widow with four children, found a second husband in the never-married Miguel Moyneiro. Despite these warnings, Galician widows had few options in a tight marriage market, so when they did remarry, they most often married older widowers.11 In 1655, Apelonia de Bran, a young widow, agreed to marry Alonso Pe´rez, a tailor, who described himself as an ‘old man’. Alonso was not only older but also very ﬁnancially stable. He gave her one-quarter of his house and part of a house that he leased as 7 Pe ´rez Garcı´a, Un modelo de sociedad rural, 118 (see also the table that accompanies this information, 4-16-B), and Barreiro Mallo´n, La jurisdiccio´n de Xallas, 171–2. 8 Fraguas Fraguas, ‘Literatura popular’, 191. 9 AHPO, caja protocolos 3551, fo. 127 (1680). 10 AHPO, caja protocolos 2424, fo. 59 (1684). 11 Pe ´rez Garcı´a, Un modelo de sociedad rural, 117, and Barreiro Mallo´n, La jurisdiccio´n de Xallas, 170. In contrast, in Xallas, 70% of second marriages were between a widower and a single woman: Barreiro Mallo´n, La jurisdiccio´n de Xallas 171.

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a dowry. He also contributed household linens, furniture, and a copper ﬁreplace pot.12 Petronilla Ferna´ndez, the widow of Miguel Ferna´ndez, married Alonso Grande in 1618. In this case, although the bride was described as much younger than the groom, both were mature adults. Their marriage contract noted that Alonso was quite old and that Petronilla was a young woman, despite the fact that she had ‘a large quantity’ of children, some of whom were more than 25 years old.13 Some women remarried more than once. Marina Rodrı´guez had already been twice widowed and had remarried when she made her testament in 1695.14 Gregoria de Sossa noted in her will that she had no surviving children from any of her three marriages.15 Like their never-married counterparts, widows found that initiating a new relationship was fraught with difﬁculties. Grieving and lonely widows may have been more vulnerable to seduction. This may have been the case with Eulalia Ferna´ndez, a widow, who had an unsuccessful relationship with Benito Domı´nguez, a single man. During their relationship, they had engaged in sexual relations and she had become pregnant. After bearing a son named Alexandro, the couple broke up. Her poverty and status as a pregnant widow did not deter her from taking legal action against Benito. Eulalia got a local justice to force Benito to pay 25 reales, a fanega of grain and a fanega of dried chestnuts, and 9 ducados in compensation for their failed relationship.16 When it came to the decision to remarry, the ‘widows of the living’, whom I discussed in the previous chapter, were an interesting subset of Galician widows. A few of these widows believed or decided, for whatever reason, that their emigrant husbands were dead and that they would remarry.17 As mentioned earlier, a ‘widow of the living’ often lived for a decade or more without knowing even the whereabouts of her husband. During this period, her status was tenuous. At any moment, her husband might return or she might receive the news of his death. Despite or because of their precarious situation, either very few ‘widows of the living’ decided to remarry, or else their communities AHUS, protocolo 1388, fo. 20 (1655). AHPO, caja protocolos 3325, fo. 24 (1618). 14 AHPO, caja protocolos 3342, fo. 64 (1695). 15 AHPC, protocolo 2342, fo. 48 (1695). 16 AHPO, caja protocolos 3612, fo. 64 (1685). 17 Such a defence was also common in Castilian bigamy cases: see Dyer, ‘Heresy and Dishonor’, 186. 12 13

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were generally supportive of their decisions, as they were rarely denounced to the Inquisition as bigamists. However, the few summaries of female bigamy trials provide some insight into the process that viuvas dos vivos underwent in order to remarry. Some women were like Ysabel, the wife of Jerome Lo´pez. She seems to have just decided at some point that her husband was dead and remarried without taking any action to conﬁrm whether he was alive or dead.18 Yne´s Delgaldo’s husband had been gone for more than fourteen years when she decided to remarry. She tried to justify her second marriage by saying that she married ‘conditionally’. She made a deal with her second husband that if her ﬁrst husband was not dead, then their marriage was not valid. Unfortunately, her ﬁrst husband was still alive and ‘conditional marriage’ was not possible within Catholic doctrine. She received a harsh punishment for her unique interpretation of the sacrament of marriage.19 Sometimes family members encouraged widows to remarry, presumably either for love and companionship or out of economic necessity. In 1604, Catalina Golpa testiﬁed that she married her ﬁrst husband, Gregorio Va´squez, and two months later he left. He had been gone for twelve years when Catalina’s mother and sister told her to remarry, assuring her that he was dead. Unfortunately, someone produced a letter saying that he was alive and living in Torrejo´n in the power of a Morisco. She was also convicted of bigamy.20 Unlike Ysabel, Yne´s, and Catalina, Inquisition records generally indicate that most Galegas were familiar with the legal processes necessary to legally certify their husbands’ deaths and gain permission to remarry. No doubt, such knowledge was the result of generations of experience with migrating men. In order to obtain the necessary licence, wives had to provide some evidence of their husbands’ deaths to the Bishop’s Provisor. When in 1587 Margarida Feyxoa, a peasant woman, was charged with bigamy, she told Inquisitors that her husband had been absent for more than thirteen years. The only sign that he was alive was a letter that he had sent to his father from Oran in North Africa. The problem was that neither Margarida nor his father believed that the letter was legitimate since her husband did not know how to write. Unable to verify his whereabouts, Margarida had not taken any 18 19 20

AHN, Sec. Inq., legajo 2042, no. 39, fo. 18 (1602). AHN, Sec. Inq., legajo 2042, no. 12, fo. 1 (1585). AHN, Sec. Inq., legajo 2042, no. 41, fo. 26 (1604).

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chances; before remarrying, she had obtained the necessary licence from the Bishop’s Provisor.21 Similarly, Dominga Gonca´lez testiﬁed that her ﬁrst husband had been gone for twenty years when she heard that he had died in a hospital in Seville. Following the legal norms, she then went to the local justice to get a dispensation to remarry.22 Of all the widows of the living who were charged with bigamy, Margarida da Gando, whom I mentioned in the previous chapter, went to the greatest ends to ensure that her ﬁrst husband was no longer alive. According to her 1639 testimony, Margarida had married Juan Martı´nez sixteen years before. He later left for Castile. She heard nothing from him for twelve years, then she learned from some merchants from Castile that he was dead and buried in the church at San Adria´n de Ballecas. Margarida then went to the Provisor in Ourense to get a licence to remarry. When they could not conﬁrm the merchants’ story, she took other steps to clarify her marital status. In the end, Margarida went with a man named Blas Go´mez to Madrid to investigate personally. She obtained a licence to remarry and then married Pedro de Deca. Inquisitors absolved her of the charges.23 In other cases, such diligent investigation still left the woman’s marital status unclear. Ana Martı´nez, a 60-year-old peasant woman, testiﬁed that she had married Juan Pe´rez Cortas fortytwo years before. She had lived with him from June to February when he left to go to Castile. Twenty-eight years later, a man named Juan Martı´nez de Paredes came from Castile. He said that her husband was dead. Since she found herself ‘abandoned’, and wished to remarry, she accepted an offer of marriage from Bastian Douteyro. After their wedding, the couple heard that Juan was still alive. Bastian told her that, ‘although it might cost a lot, they would have to know if he was alive or dead’. So, Bastian and Ana sent a man from Porrin˜o to the hospital of Amor de Dios in Seville, where he was assured that Juan Pe´rez Cortas was dead and got two scribes to attest to that fact. Witnesses provided conﬂicting testimony, and it seemed that the document had been falsiﬁed. Her case was suspended, but not without a severe admonishment by the Inquisitors for not being certain of Juan’s death before remarrying.24 21 22 23 24

AHN, Sec. Inq., legajo 2042, no. 18, fo. 4 (1587). AHN, Sec. Inq., legajo 2042, no. 72, fo. 1 (1633). AHN, Sec. Inq., legajo 2042, no. 79, fo. 1 (1639). AHN, Sec. Inq., legajo 2042, no. 83, fo. 4 (1642).

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Some women were so intent on remarrying that they provided false information in order to take another husband. Many may have been naively deceived by false rumours, but others made conscientious attempts to change their marital status from ‘widow of the living’ to widow. In 1591, Marina de Castro told Inquisitors that some time ago her husband had abandoned her. Eventually, she received notice that he was dead and she remarried. When her ﬁrst husband returned, quite alive, she became a bigamist. The Inquisitors believed that she had been unwittingly deceived by false information and mandated that she not cohabit with either husband until her case could be decided by local justices.25 Inquisitors were less certain about the story told by Marı´a Go´mez, alias Maripaz. According to the convoluted testimony from both Marı´a and her mother, Marı´a had married Juan de Rubians when she was only 17 or 18 years old. They were married, but the nuptial blessing had never been pronounced because they were too poor to live together and they had not consummated their relationship. Four months later, Juan, a soldier, left and was not heard from for many years. Marı´a then married Marcus Go´mez, who had falsiﬁed documents stating that Marı´a’s ﬁrst husband was dead. Marcus proved to be unwilling to take responsibility for his actions, as he ﬂed when he heard that Juan was returning. Inquisitors decided that Marı´a was not entirely culpable in the creation of the false notice of Juan’s death, that she was ‘a rustic woman’, and that her crime merited only light punishment.26 Maybe these women were lonely, maybe they were in love, or maybe they found themselves in severe economic straits. Whatever the case, they took assertive actions to end their ‘widowhood’ and begin married life anew. These women were exceptions to the rule. Most widows were like Juana de Avila y Figueroa, who noted in her testament that her husband had been dead for more than thirty years and that she had never remarried.27 Beyond the dearth of eligible males, age must have been a formidable factor in Galician widows’ decisions not to remarry. Remarkably, nearly half of all Galician marriages lasted at least twentyﬁve years.28 If one considers the late average age at ﬁrst marriage for Galician women, 25.7 years,29 then about half of widows reached that 25 26 27 29

AHN, Sec. Inq., legajo 2042, no. 26, fo. 13 (1591?). AHN, Sec. Inq., legajo 2042, no. 41, fo. 12 (1604). 28 Saavedra, La vida cotidiana, 173. AHPC, protocolo 2343, fo. 1 (1696). Eiras Roel, ‘Mechanismos autoreguladores’, 71.

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status after the age of 50. As they were unable to bear more children and, as we will see, ﬁnancially stable, remarriage must have held few advantages. Moreover, a widow who remarried faced the possibility of losing the guardianship of her children, an issue I will discuss later in this chapter.30 Even Galician proverbs such as this one extol the beneﬁts and happiness that comes with widowhood: How content was I the day I married; but now I am even more so, since I was left a widow.31

As the heads of households, widowhood changed Galegas’ status outside as well as inside the home. As yet, we have only scattered indications of a widow’s public rights and responsibilities as a head of the household in Galicia. On the one hand, both the parish and local administrative councils, consejos, were controlled by men. Women did not serve as members of these councils, and I found no evidence that they ever served as churchwardens, mayordomos, of the parish. On the other hand, most Galegos lived under seigniorial jurisdiction and/or dispersed settlements whose integration into civil jurisdictions was often weak, and women, particularly widows, may have had a greater say in the informal governance and politics of the community than the documentary record indicates.32 Although no one has studied widows’ rights in Galicia, in some Castilian jurisdictions, women were allowed to express their opinions in town meetings, but they were not allowed to vote, except through a male proxy.33 Castilian widows had free access to village commons and could often enjoy rights bestowed on their husbands as part of their citizenship.34 Generally, widows acted as heads of households without the complete rights of vecinos, and in some cases widow became a civic category of its own. Some jurisdictions excluded widows from census counts that listed the numbers of vecinos, while others, like San Esteban de Cos and Santa Marı´a de Sarandones, listed widows in addition to the number of citizens, noting that they had ‘twelve citizens and two widows’ and ‘forty married citizens and two widows’.35 Siete Partidas, Partida 6, Title XVI, Law V. Fraguas Fraguas, ‘Literatura popular’, 192. 32 Riegelhaupt, ‘Saloio Women’, 122–5. 33 Helen Nader, Liberty in Absolutist Spain: The Sale of Habsburg Towns, 1516–1700 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 33. 34 Susan Tax Freeman also found this to be true in her anthropological study of a 35 Gonza ´lez Mun˜oz, Galicia en 1570, 173. Castilian village: Neighbors, 195. 30 31

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If widowhood meant additional civic responsibilities for Galician women, early modern ofﬁcials assumed that it brought poverty to the community, and their tax status reﬂected that belief. Generally, widows paid seigniorial dues if they lived under the jurisdiction of a noble, and if they lived under royal jurisdiction, they paid royal taxes, although most ofﬁcials counted widows as only one-half in the assessment.36 For other taxes, the inclusion of widows in the distribution of the charges varied from jurisdiction to jurisdiction and from tax to tax.37 For instance, the 1594 assessment of the alcabala in San Martin˜o de Ribeira lists Sancha Ferna´ndez, a widow with children, paying 4 reales, more than many of her neighbors.38 In other jurisdictions, local ofﬁcials just assumed that widows were poor and completely exempted them from their share of assessment.39 Although this may have aided many widows ﬁnancially, it also probably served to limit their participation in community decision-making, as taxpaying was a primary requisite of civic participation. Although many early modern people assumed that widowhood and poverty went hand in hand, the actual economic status of most Galician widows is difﬁcult to assess, primarily because the deﬁnition of poverty in early modern Spain varied according to the circumstances.40 According to the historian David Vassberg, a poor person was generally understood in Spanish society as someone who ‘could not live from rents or accumulated savings, and had to resort to personal labour or some other means of subsistence’.41 The majority of Galician peasants, not just widows, would have met this deﬁnition of poverty, as few tenant farmers could afford to live off their meagre investments. Those ofﬁcials involved in the formulation of the Catastro de Ensenada used a much stricter deﬁnition, characterizing the poor as those who owned no real estate or had no stable work.42 The only people that early moden 36 Nader, Liberty in Absolutist Spain, 32. This was true of the 1591 tax census in 37 Ibid. 33. Galicia: Saavedra, A facenda real, 25. 38 Ibid. 42. 39 Ibid. 31. 40 For more on the relationship between poverty, old age, and widowhood, see Robert Ju¨tte, Poverty and Deviance in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), and Claire S. Schen, ‘Strategies of Poor Aged Women and Widows in Sixteenth-Century London’, in Women and Ageing in British Society since 1500, ed. Lynn Botelho and Pat Thane (London: Longman, 2001), 13–30. 41 Vassberg, ‘The Status of Widows’, 185. 42 Baudilio Barreiro Mallo ´ n and Ofelia Rey Castelao, Pobres, peregrinos y enfermos: la red asistencial gallega en el Antiguo Re´gimen (Vigo: Nigra Arte, 1998), 11–13.

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Spaniards agreed were poor were the most serious cases, those classiﬁed as pobre de solemnidad, forced to live off alms. In addition to the complexities involved in deﬁning poverty, there were political and religious aspects. As previously mentioned, politically, poverty could mean an exemption from some taxes and could affect a citizen’s municipal rights. Moreover, the poor were an integral part of religious festivals, as participants sought relief from Purgatory through almsgiving and funerary rites—poor people often accompanied caskets to the cemetery and ate at the wake.43 Individuals may have wanted to be designated as poor for some purposes and not for others. Finally, poverty is relative in any society, and Galicia was a region ﬁlled with poor farmers, both male and female. In that context, many of the selfdesignated poor widows were indeed poor, but not destitute. Whatever the deﬁnition, the numbers of poor women, particularly widows, living in rural areas are difﬁcult to estimate.44 With the majority of the rural population living at or just slightly above subsistence, poverty was not an absolute descriptor of their economic circumstances, yet any epidemiological, economic, or agricultural crisis could easily push them into that category. In urban areas, analyses of the Catastro de Ensenada indicate that large numbers of single women, particularly older women, were classiﬁed as poor. In Santiago de Compostela, nearly 25 per cent of households headed by women were ‘poor’ in 1752 and three out of every four poor households were headed by women, mostly widows.45 Of course, urban areas like Santiago de Compostela and A Corun˜a not only attracted large numbers of rural poor, but they were also home to the charitable institutions that cared for them. The scarce evidence that we have from the countryside indicates that the majority of the poor were indeed widowed women. In the coastal village of Padro´n, 85.5 per cent of the poor households were headed by women, slightly more than half of whom were widows.46 In the rural parish of See my Regulating the People, 139–40 and 152–3. Pegerto Saavedra provides an excellent example of the relative nature of rural poverty, especially how deﬁnitions of ‘poor’ varied among residents of mountain villages and those in valleys, in Economı´a, polı´tica y sociedad, 596–7. 45 Rial Garcı ´a, Las mujeres en la economı´a urbana, 32–3. In general, it seems clear that rural jurisdictions seriously underestimated the numbers of poor in the Catastro de Ensenada. For instance, according to its ﬁgures, only around 1% of Galegos were ‘poor’ and the province of Tuy had only three poor widows: Barreiro Mallo´n and Rey Castelao, 46 Ibid. 14. Pobres, peregrinos y enfermos, 11–13 and 17–18. 43 44

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San Martı´n Beariz (Ourense), between 1650 and 1700, the parish death records designated twice as many women as poor as men.47 Some women suffered a decline in economic status after the deaths of their husbands. The case of the widow Dominga de Castro illustrates a situation that may have been familiar to many widows. In 1692, Dominga described how her uncle had given her, as a part of her dowry, a piece of land and its usufruct under the condition that it not be sold. Having suffered the deaths of two children, her late husband, a peasant farmer, had convinced her to give the land in a donacio´n to her nephew Domingo. Domingo agreed to work the land on their behalf during their old age. However, the deal had not worked out for reasons that are unclear, and, at the making of her testament, Dominga was living in self-described poverty and misery with a cousin in A Corun˜a. She sought to have the donacio´n annulled, presumably in order to have the means necessary for the execution of her testament, which included having masses said for her soul.48 It is important to note that despite her poverty and widowhood, Dominga did not shy away from using the judicial system to regain what she believed to be rightfully hers. Ysabel de Barreyro found herself in similar straits after her husband died. She and her husband made and sold liquor while he was alive. When he died intestate, she was left owing 768 reales on his debts and with responsibility for their two young children, whom she described as ‘poor’.49 The widow Marina Pe´rez may not have described herself as poor, but when she made her testament, she was heavily in debt. She noted that her son Agustı´n was in Castile working as a ropemaker and that the money he made was to be used to pay off the many debts that she owed the convent of San Esteban Ribas de Sil.50 According to Castilian law, only their marital property could be used to repay her husband’s debts, not her dowry or any other property that she had acquired. Although widows may have been poorer than the general population, the documentary evidence is skewed towards women who had some property. In fact, some peasant widows acquired signiﬁcant property. Under normal circumstances, at the deaths of their husbands, women regained their exclusive control over their property, which by that point 47 48 49 50

Libro de Bautisados y Difuntos, San Martı´n Beariz, AHDO, 14.3.1. AHPC, protocolo 2339, fo. 1 (1692). AHPC, protocolo 742, fo. 69 (1646). AHPO, caja protocolos 3550, fo. 3 (1677).

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could be substantial. A widowed woman had the right to half of a couple’s community property (bienes gananciales), the dowry, the arras, and any additional inheritance or gifts from family members that she had acquired before or during the marriage.51 She might also control the inheritances of her minor children until they reached legal age.52 In addition, deceased husbands frequently provided their wives with additional portions of the estate.53 Juan Cutrin, a peasant, expressed his love and affection for his wife, Marı´a Bixoy, by bequeathing their house to her.54 Pedro Go´mez de Penalbos left his wife a one-ﬁfth portion of a house and some land.55 Francisco Domı´nguez wanted to be sure that his wife, Antonia Sampil, was well provided for. He reserved the usufruct of their lands for her for the rest of her life and asked that his daughter, Ana Marı´a Dominguez, bring back those goods that she had taken when she got married.56 Having accumulated some property, widows had free reign to administer their holdings as they wished, and the notarial records indicate that they were active participants in the local real estate market. Land transactions are not easily divisible into rural and urban categories since many urban dwellers owned or leased land in the countryside, but a study of such transactions from the notarial records in Santiago de Compostela shows the dominance of widows among women in the real estate market: 72 per cent of female buyers and sellers were widows.57 Their purchases were both large and small. Lucia Va´squez de Leyes bought an ‘old garden’ for the price of 100 reales de vello´n.58 Venita Carvalla, a widow from San Cristo´bal de Reis, traded some land she owned to Alberte Douteiro for three-quarters of a ferrado of seeded land.59 Yne´s Martı´nez sold Francisco de Remesar two pieces of land.60 Ysavel Pe´rez was an active participant in the real estate market, buying one piece of land and selling another at the same time.61 51 52 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61

Korth and Flushe, ‘Dowry and Inheritance’, 399. 53 Leyes de Toro, 51. Vassberg, ‘The Status of Widows’, 182. AHUS, protocolo 1671, n.f. (1681). AHPO, caja protocolo 3317, fo. 3 (1675). AHPO, caja protocolo 3317, fo. 10 (1673). Rial Garcı´a, Las mujeres en la economı´a urbana, 149. AHUS, protocolo 5615, fo. 23 (1746). AHUS, protocolo 2408, fo. 102 (1684). AHUS, protocolo 3963, fo. 128 (1743). AHUS, protocolo 3963, fos. 137–8 (1743).

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Real estate transactions also provide evidence of the business relationships that formed among women. In the parish of Santa Eulalia Vedra just outside of Santiago de Compostela, the widow Marta de la Iglesia bought a plot of land from Marı´a Lo´pez.62 In another transaction, two women joined together to sell the plot to Santiago Ribeira. In a sale that involved only women, Ana Terzado, widow, and her three single sisters, Josepha, Marı´a, and Eusebia, bought a piece of property from Marı´a de Ponte, also a widow.63 Widowed sisters also owned property together and put it on the market when necessary, as when Teresa and Dominga Carvalla joined with Teresa’s son to sell some land to two men who may have been their brothers-in-law.64 As most Galegos leased rather than purchased their land, we also ﬁnd widows negotiating and renegotiating rents. In 1699, Dominga Toja, a widow, joined with Yne´s Coveillas to renew the lease agreement that they had with the uncle of Don Josseph Antonio de Cajamonde y Mendoza. Dominga and Yne´s agreed to keep paying rents that included two and a half ferrados of wheat and some laying hens in the months of August or September.65 Marı´a Posse, the widow of Roque Blanco, rented one-eighth of a plot in a place called Gomarı´z.66 Although my examination of rural notarial records did not uncover any instances of women acting as the lessors of property, Serrana Rial Garcı´a found that in the city of Santiago de Compostela some women did rent property, but they tended to be women of means, Don˜as, and were much less common than female lessees.67 Considering the evidence that married women frequently owned rental property with their husbands, we can assume that some of them must have also rented out ﬁelds, groves, houses, and other property after their husbands’ deaths. The ability to make contracts led many widows into contact with the legal system when disputes arose over their transactions.68 Widows who 62

AHUS, protocolo 2453, fo. 87 (1708). AHUS, protocolo 3964, n.f. (1743). 64 AHUS, protocolo 1666, fo. 62 (1624). 65 AHUS, Corcubio ´ n, protocolo 821, fo. 36 (1699). Poultry and grain were the traditional form of payment of seigniorial dues: see Nader, Liberty in Absolutist Spain, 32. 66 AHUS, Corcubio ´ n, protocolo 821, fo. 69. 67 Rial Garcı ´a, Las mujeres en la economı´a urbana, 155–6. 68 For a discussion of medieval women and litigation, see Teo ´ ﬁlo Ruiz, ‘Women, Work and Daily Life in Late Medieval Castile’, in Stone and Benito-Vessels (eds.), Women at Work in Spain, 114–16. Richard Kagan found surprisingly large numbers of widowed litigants in his study of the Royal Chancellery in Valladolid: Kagan, Lawsuits 63

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wanted to litigate could do so on their own or give the power to litigate to a man, either a lawyer or a male relative, through the creation of a document known as a poder. A person could create a poder for general use, as was the case with the poder drawn up by the widowed sisters Marı´a de Linares and Catalina de Linares. They gave a general power of attorney to their son and nephew respectively, Sebastia´n de Matto.69 More often, widows drew up a poder to deal with a speciﬁc incident that required legal representation and resolution. Widows pursued all types of legal issues before Spanish courts, both on their own and through other representatives. Before his death, Dominga da Torre and her husband sold some land to Amaro da Torre. Nine years later, in 1743, Dominga, now a widow, pursued a legal claim against Amaro, which was resolved with an apartamiento.70 Marina Alvarez, the widow of Antonio de Souto, claimed that her husband had been persuaded to make a single man named Pedro de la Yglesia his heir. Marina believed that upon Antonio’s death, Pedro and his father had not fulﬁlled their obligation to pay for his funeral and had deceived her into selling some wine against her will without giving her the proﬁts. She urged her heirs to litigate against Pedro to recover the money owed to her.71 If they believed that they had not received justice from local judges, widows, like other Galegos, felt free to pursue judicial appeals. The Castilian legal system made entering an appeal fairly easy. A litigant only had to make it clear that she or he believed that the previous magistrate had ignored or denied the inherent justice of her case. Spaniards eagerly employed the numerous tribunals and lengthy procedures not only to obtain successful outcomes, but also to postpone the successes of their opponents.72 Certainly, a widow who had either wealth or social status could more easily turn her attentions to lawsuits and lawyers. As a result, most of the cases that reached Spain’s highest court of appeal, the Royal Chancellery in Valladolid, involved women of substantial means. The attempts of and Litigants, 104, 106. Widows also ﬁgured prominently in litigation in Venice: see Chojnacka, Working Women, 42–3. 69 AHUS, protocolo 3782, fo. 12 (1719). 70 AHUS, protocolo 3963, fo. 155 (1743). 71 AHPO, caja protocolos 3669, n.f. (1662). 72 Kagan, Lawsuits and Litigants, 48.

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a hidalgo’s widow from the north coast of Galicia to litigate a complicated inheritance lawsuit offer some insight into the troubles faced by widows and their ability to use the legal system. Dona˜ Aldonza de Sierra Osorio was the widow of Juan Martı´nez de Villar and the mother of his children. According to her testimony, she had been an honest widow and hija de algo (a member of the lower nobility). Then the parents of Don Pedro de Navia Osorio had approached her about marrying their son, Pedro, who was a student at the university in Salamanca. She accepted Don Pedro’s proposal of marriage in front of two clergymen and other witnesses. However, there were obstacles to the marriage: ﬁrst, the couple were too closely related—they were ﬁrst cousins and needed a dispensation. Second, Don Pedro wanted to ﬁnish his studies and obtain a government position either in Spain or the Americas before the wedding took place. During the interim, Don Pedro remained in Salamanca and the couple corresponded regularly. He wrote her lengthy letters that addressed her as ‘my angel’ and expressed his love for her. All of his letters described his aggressive pursuit of employment. One letter in particular noted his failure to be appointed to a position in Lima, ‘the city of silver’, and the money that he had invested in the process. His letters also constantly asked Don˜a Aldonza to send more money and he regularly sent a valet to her to collect the sums. A dutiful ﬁance´e, she complied with all of his requests, sending money on a regular basis and allowing Don Pedro and his brother to come and go at her house as they pleased. She was also persuaded by Don Pedro and his parents to give him ten thousand ducados to help sustain him at court and in Salamanca. After complying with many of his ﬁnancial requests, Don˜a Aldonza found out that Don Pedro had deceived her and had become engaged to a woman in Seville. Betrayed and hurt, Don˜a Aldonza ﬁled a lawsuit charging that Don Pedro had broken his marriage promise and demanding restitution of her ten thousand ducados. Soon after, Don Pedro died suddenly, and Don˜a Aldonza became engaged in a lawsuit asserting her right to his legı´tima and mejora, which his brother had inherited. The brother, Juan Alonso de Navia, a local justice, responded that he was not responsible for repaying the money that Don˜a Aldonza spent on Don Pedro. He asserted that there was no way that Don Pedro had asked her to marry him, since they were ﬁrst cousins, a relationship which ‘his Holiness will not dipense except for illustrious and titled

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persons’. He also claimed not to have inherited anything from his brother because Pedro had overspent his assets and the mejora came with the condition that he pay off his debts. Since at the time of his death he had not settled his debts, their mother, Don˜a Mencia de Valdes, had to sell his possessions to pay off the large debts. In the end, at the highest level of the Castilian court system, the justices found that Don˜a Aldonza had proved her case and charged Juan Alonso to pay her the ten thousand ducados. The sentence included payments of the debts that she incurred on his behalf.73 Despite the fact that the participants in this case were all from a higher social stratum than most Galegos, it still offers us some important evidence about Spanish widows. We see a widow in charge of her own ﬁnances, although in this case Don˜a Aldonza proved to be overly generous to an unreliable man. Moreover, we ﬁnd Don˜a Aldonza using the judicial system to regain her squandered monies. If she was embarrassed by her actions, the legal record provides little evidence of reticence or shame. Although most widows did not pursue justice with such enthusiasm, widows of less lofty station also did not hesitate to use the legal system to resolve interpersonal conﬂicts. According to a concordia from 1672, Catalina Baltar and her husband, Domingo de Herosa, had provided a dowry for the marriage of Alberte de Herosa and Antonia Besteira. (The document does not indicate that Alberte was their son; he may have been a nephew or stepson.) It included half of everything that they owned in a place called Baltar. Then Domingo died, after which Alberte and his wife went to local ofﬁcials in Santiago and asked to have the estate divided according to the dowry contract. However, the widowed Catalina opposed the execution of the contract. According to her, the document had a clause that said that Alberte and Antonia ‘had to be very humble to the said Domingo de Herosa and Catalina de Baltar’, which the couple had not fulﬁlled to her satisfaction. Since Catalina had determined that Alberte and Antonia had not demonstrated the requisite humility, the contract was no longer valid. After much legal wrangling, the widow ﬁnally reached an agreement with Alberte and Antonia. They would get their rightful dowry and she and Juan Rebolo (who was also living on the property) reserved the other half of the property as their own.74 73 74

ARCV, Signatura: Pe´rez Alonso, fenecidos 1813–02. AHUS, protocolo 1738, fo. 9 (1672).

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While this seems like an equitable resolution to a property conﬂict, a turn of the page in the notarial records reveals that their conﬂict had been much more than a war of words over some land. In an apartamiento that followed, we ﬁnd out that Alberte had ﬁled criminal charges against Catalina de Baltar and Marı´a de Souto, the wife of Juan Rebolo, for having hit him and grasped him by the throat, among other things. The widow Catalina and Marı´a had ﬁled counter-charges, saying that Alberte and his wife had similarly mistreated them. As a result of those accusations, Antonia Besteira had ended up in jail. With the signing of the apartamiento, all parties agreed to drop all charges and Antonia would be released from jail;75 so much for the stereotype of the timid, reclusive widow. Few lawsuits involved such physical drama. More often, widows interacted with the legal system as guardians of their minor children.76 The Siete Partidas presented an efﬁcient system for ensuring the care of orphaned children. There were two types of guardians: a tutor was responsible for the care of the children and their possessions until they reached adolescence (at the age of 14 for boys and 12 for girls), and a curador was the trustee of the children’s property from adolesence until they reached the legal age of 25.77 Generally, one person ﬁlled both roles. Although a father was automatically the guardian of his children upon the death of their mother, at a father’s death anyone else, including the mother, had to petition to be legally appointed as the guardian of the children. Guardians could be appointed in three ways. A father could appoint the guardian for his children in his testament, and frequently men designated their wives as such.78 If the father died suddenly or without appointing a guardian, the guardianship fell automatically to the next male kin. Should the child have no close relatives, the court was to choose a ‘good faithful man’ as the guardian.79 These court-appointed administrators had the responsibility for keeping an inventory of the minor’s possessions, representing the minor in legal actions, and ensuring that the child was properly fed and cared for. AHUS, protocolo 1738, fo. 18 (1672). Partida 6, Title XVI, Law I. For more on guardianship see Grace E. Coolidge, ‘Families in Crisis: Women, Guardianshp, and the Nobility in Early Modern Spain’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana University, 2001), and Antonio Merchan Alvarez, La tutela de los menores en Castilla hasta ﬁnes del siglo XV (Seville: Publicaciones Universidad de 77 Vassberg, ‘Orphans and Adoption’, 451. Sevilla, 1976). 78 Coolidge, ‘Families in Crisis’, 45. 79 Partida 6, Title XVI, Law II. 75 76

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At the end of the guardianship, he or she had to provide a public accounting of the expenses incurred on the child’s behalf.80 Barring any previous testamentary action, after her husband’s death the widowed mother petitioned the court to appoint a guardian for her children, who, according to the Siete Partidas, had to be over 25 years of age, of good morals, not a spendthrift, and ‘a man and not a woman’. Mothers or grandmothers were the exception to this clause; however, in order to be appointed as the guardian, the widow had to promise not to remarry. According to the Siete Partidas, ‘The reason why we forbid her to marry while she has charge of said children is because, on account of the great affection which she may bear to the new husband whom she has taken, she will not properly care for the persons of her children or will do something which will result in their serious injury.’81 If a mother/guardian remarried, she forfeited her guardianship to the nearest relative. At the time of her remarriage, an accounting was made, and if anything was owed to the children, both she and her new husband were held liable for the debt.82 A recent study of guardianship among the Castilian nobility reveals that despite these misogynistic concerns, the mother was designated as the guardian of their children unless she had conﬂict with her husband’s family or her children were illegitimate.83 When a widowed mother sought the guardianship of her children, it was a three-stage process. First, she had notaries record her petition for guardianship. Then a local justice investigated her situation as described in the petition, and ﬁnally he appointed a guardian based on that investigation. This is how Josepha da Devesa became the guardian of her children. When her husband, Domingo Tejo, died in 1708, he left his widow with four minor children: Alexandro, Marı´a, Antonio, and Bartolome´. Josepha asked to be declared their legal guardian. The process went as follows. Based on the petition, the judge undertook an auto, an investigation into her situation. Ordinarily, these investigations were relatively brief. The judge generally asked the petitioner’s neighbours to conﬁrm the information provided to the court. The judge wanted assurances that the spouse was indeed deceased and that the 80 This summarizes the discussion of tutores, in the recent English edition of Las Siete Partidas, vol. 5, translated by Samuel Parsons Scott and edited by Robert I. Burns, SJ (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), p. xv. 81 Partida 6, Title XVI, Law IV. 82 Partida 6, Title XVI, Law V. 83 Coolidge, ‘Families in Crisis’, 53.

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mother could fulﬁl the responsibilities required of a tutor and curador. Once the judge was satisﬁed as to the facts of the case, he approved her petition.84 Once again, women seemed to be familiar with the legal requirements and the process involved. When Alonso de Vasquez died, he left his wife, Antonia Abad, with two daugters, Rosa who was only seven months old, and Marı´a who was 3. Before entering her petition, Antonia took all the necessary steps to have their inheritance inventoried and declared that she was ready to accept their guardianship.85 As should be clear, guardianship required more than love, and its responsibilities could be especially challenging for illiterate peasant women. However, potential problems did not dissuade mothers from undertaking the responsibility. After Ysavel do Paco was named the tutor of her daughter Andresa de Afonsin, she promised to be a good tutor ‘of the person and goods of the said Andresa de Afonsin her daughter, caring for her person and goods, feeding her, clothing and shoeing her, teaching her and educating her’. Although she could not sign her name, presumably with someone’s aid, Ysavel agreed to keep a book in which she would keep track of the expenses incurred in her child’s care and provide a full accounting when Andresa reached legal age. Ysavel’s father, Antonio do Paco, served as her guarantor.86 Despite their good intentions, things did not always go well for these women. In 1623, Lucia Lo´pez appeared before a local justice to work out the problems with the debts that had encumbered the inheritance and guardianship of her young children in the ﬁve or six years since her husband’s death.87 Beset by grief and/or poverty, some women preferred to have other relatives named as the guardians of their children. Antonia Lo´pez had only been married to Benito de Alvela for three years when he died. They had one child named Marı´a, who was eleven months old at the time. Antonia found herself in bad economic circumstances because of Benito’s debts and funeral-related expenses. She suggested her father, her brother, or one of her deceased husband’s two brothers as potential guardians. The judge investigated her petition and named her father as the child’s guardian.88 The death of Cathalina de Caricoba’s husband 84 85 86 87 88

AHUS, protocolo 2453, fo. 50 (1708). AHUS, protocolo 4274, fo. 160 (1726). AHUS, protocolo 2453, fo. 34 (1708). AHUS, protocolo 1665, fo. 66 (1623). AHUS, protocolo 4273, fo. 48 (1726).

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left her with more responsibilities than she could handle. Her husband had been the guardian of some orphan children, and two months after his death Cathalina petitioned the judge to ﬁnd a new guardian for those children. According to her petition, she had just been widowed and was ready to give birth, and, besides, she was not related to the children. The task of ﬁnding another guardian proved to be difﬁcult. Upon investigation, the older peasant man that Cathalina had suggested was found to be too ill to accept the responsibility. The judge then had to take action to ﬁnd another person to accept the charge.89 It is important to note that widows who chose not to be designated as the guardians of their children neither abdicated their responsibility for their children nor renounced custody. All that the choice of a man as guardian implied was that a widow could not or did not want to undertake the ﬁnancial oversight of her children’s inheritance that the law required. As widowed guardians of minor children were responsible for the maintenance of their inheritance, they often bought and sold land on behalf of their children. In 1743, Marı´a de Moreyras, the widow of Pablo de Villar, bought a piece of land from Juan Alvarez, on behalf of her children, using what she described as ‘their money’.90 More commonly, we see widows with children selling land, presumably to pay off debts incurred as a part of their guardianship. Marı´a Ponbo was twice widowed and guardian of the two adolescent children from her ﬁrst marriage, Juan Andres and Marı´a Antonia. On their behalf, she sold a piece of land to Alberto Rey.91 Marı´a da Ribeyra sold some land to Francisco de Lerdeyra on behalf of the children that she had with her deceased husband.92 Marı´a Laran˜a sold some land to Alberte Laran˜o, possibly her brother, for 9 ducados de vello´n. The sale notes that as the guardian of her two children, Alberte and Dominga, she was obligated to make the sale.93 There is little doubt that most widows in Galicia were well prepared for the responsibilities that came with the guardianship of their children. In particular, if their husbands had migrated, either temporarily or 89 90 91 92 93

AHUS, protocolo 3780, fo. 36 (1716). AHUS, protocolo 3963, fo. 103 (1743). AHUS, protocolo 3964, n.f. (1743). AHUS, protocolo 2453, fo. 32 (1708). AHUS, protocolo 2406, fo. 103 (1682).

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permanently, the women had a full understanding of the family estates, knew how to manage them, and could step easily into their husbands’ shoes. As we have seen, even those women whose husbands remained at home probably had some experience with family ﬁnances and management of the household. Widowed mothers and grandmothers also took upon themselves the full responsibility for dowering and ﬁnding spouses for their offspring. We have already seen the acquisition of dowry by women as a critical aspect of the creation of female wealth, but the provision of dowries was also a manifestation of the authority of the older generation of women. In the tight marriage market of early modern Galicia, their bequests of dotal property could be the factor deciding which children would marry.94 In her 1679 testament, the wealthy widow Marı´a Ferna´ndez made it clear that prior to making her will she had spent lavishly on her children’s futures. In addition to trying to help her son Antonio get some education and work and giving a mejora to her son Domingo, she had provided dowries for her daughters Antonia and Marı´a. Antonia received two oxen, three cows, twenty-four sheep, some grain, and some household goods and linens. Marı´a received a variety of goods and some property. According to her testament, the elder Marı´a now had nothing other than the linens in which she slept.95 Similarly, Pedro Vasquez’s widowed mother helped arrange his marriage to Juana Varela Mosquera by providing a dowry for him that included a cow, some grain, one suckling pig and two smaller ones, six sheep, and and blanket.96 Petronilla Rodrı´guez de Aguiar attempted to ensure that her granddaughter Petronilla would be able to marry. She provided her with a mejora and one-half of her house once she married.97 Wealthier widows from urban areas like Santiago de Compostela were able to offer young women the option of entering the religious life, as Don˜a Ana Arindes de Figueroa did for her granddaughter, Angela.98 Whatever the case, women’s property, in the form of dowries and testamentary bequests, became a determining factor in 94 Dowry also played a critical role in the familial authority and economic power of elite women in Venice: see Chojnacki, Women and Men, esp. 110–11. 95 AHPC, protocolo 1723, fo. 18 (1679). 96 AHPO, caja protocolos 3029, n.f. (1675). 97 AHPC, protocolo 2346, fo. 80 (1699). 98 AHUS, protocolo 1191, fo. 66 (1631).

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shaping other women’s futures and identities, or at least allowing them to shape their own.99 As we have already seen, not only the provision of dowries, but also the responsibility for arranging children’s marriages frequently fell to widows. As mentioned in the previous chapter, two widows, Marı´a Cima de Villa and Marı´a Guerra, arranged for the marriage of their children, Benita and Fernando.100 Similarly, Ine´s Martinez and Catalina Mendoza settled the affairs for their children’s marriage.101 No man was necessary. They were legally and ﬁnancially able to negotiate the entire process successfully. When Isabel Va´squez and Susana Ferna´ndez, both widows, arranged the marriage of their children, Josepha and Gregorio, in 1687, they did so without the participation of a man. They were not the archetypal impoverished widows. The dowries that they provided their children included an extensive list of land, houses, and household goods.102 While Galician widows used their property to inﬂuence the futures of younger generations of women, they also used the property that they had acquired over their lifetimes to ensure that they would be properly cared for as they aged. Certainly, both men and women in Galicia worried about becoming too old or sick to work their lands, but across cultures women outlive men, and in Galicia, where single and/or independent women were demographically dominant, the effects of female longevity were even more pronounced. Typically, because of high infant mortality rates, a pre-modern person’s average life expectancy at birth was very low—only 36 to 40 years.103 In that respect, Spanish women were no different from their European counterparts. However, Galegos may have tended to live slightly longer than other Spaniards.104 Once a Galego/a made it to the age of 7 or 10, the chances of surviving to old age were actually quite good. Nearly one-third lived to be 60, and about 9 per cent of early modern Galegos lived to be 80 years old.105 Despite the physical toll of pregnancy and post-partum 99 Stanley Chojnacki has a wonderful discussion of the ability of elite women in Venice to shape the gender identities of other women: ‘The Most Serious Duty’, in 100 AHPO, caja protocolos 2424, fo. 57 (1686). Women and Men, 178–9. 101 AHPO, caja protocolos 3318, fo. 20 (1680). 102 AHPO, caja protocolos 3487, fo. 15 (1687). 103 Saavedra, La vida cotidiana, 241. David Reher estimates that premodern life expectancy was even lower, 25–30 years, in Perspectives, 100. 104 Saavedra, Economı ´a, polı´tica y sociedad, 120. 105 Saavedra, La vida cotidiana, 241.

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disease, this propensity to live longer probably affected women more than it did men.106 Galicia’s inheritance patterns, based on partible inheritance and the receipt of mejoras, allowed many Galician widows to continue to maintain their own households well past middle age. The Catastro de Ensenada indicates that, of those rural Galician households with female heads, 12 per cent were headed by women more than 60 years old.107 Some of these rural women lived alone even at very advanced ages, as women older than 70 years of age headed at least 3 per cent of households headed by single women. There must have been many women like Felipa Cardosa, a widow and mother of twelve children, who by her own account was more than 60 years old when she retired to the home of her son, Juan.108 Despite their vigour, as their health and income became more precarious, many women relied on the use of mejoras as leverage to provide themselves with some degree of emotional and ﬁnancial security. Elderly women used mejoras to mitigate the effects of ageing. It is important to remember that in Galicia it was not only widows who faced old age alone: many of the thousands of lifelong single women and women whose husbands had migrated could expect to spend the last years of their lives without companionship. Although they had been self-sufﬁcient for many years, ageing women beset by illness could easily fall into poverty and depression.109 Having lost their prized independence, they were suddenly forced to rely on children and other relatives for their sustenance. Widows spoke often in their testaments of their age and illnesses. Margarita Mendez Fermosa described herself as a widow beset by constant illness who found herself ‘very old and tired’,110 as did Marı´a Domı´nguez.111 Many, like Costanza Rodrı´guez de San Thome, could no longer work.112 There were probably many women like Ysavel Lo´pez, who noted in her will that, because of her widowhood and state of ill health, she had not been able to work her land. Instead, her son Alberto had been doing it at his own expense.113 106 For more on the proportion of widows in Spanish society see David Vassberg, 107 Dubert Garcı ´a, Historia de la familia, 385. ‘The Status of Widows’, 183–4. 108 AHUS, protocolo 1357, fo. 274 (1647). 109 Reher, Perspectives, 109. 110 AHPC, protocolo 2259, fo. 20 (1684). 111 AHPC, protocolo 1722, fo. 32 (1678). 112 AHPO, caja protocolos 3342, fo. 16 (1690). 113 AHPC, protocolo 1721, fo. 59 (1677).

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These widows used the cultural authority that accompanied their status as mothers and the economic resources that they had acquired over the years to negotiate support and care as they aged without abdicating their position as heads of the household. A widow frequently used a mejora to encourage or even force a daughter, either single or married, to remain at home to care for her. In fact, one of the most important uses of mejoras by women was for what might be termed retirement contracts.114 According to Isidro Dubert, 53.8 per cent of the non-testamentary mejoras that he examined explicitly required assistance in old age.115 As a part of these contracts, the mother gave up very little, if anything, while setting the terms of the newlywed couple’s lives. The widowed mother controlled where they lived, their contributions to the household, and their obligations to her and her family. During her lifetime, her needs were primary. When Marina Alvarez married off her daughter, Costanza, to Blas Alvarez in 1668 she required that they live with her and work her land.116 Like many other widows, when Lucia Gonza´lez arranged the marriage of her daughter to Bartolome´ da Quinta, she demanded that they dress and shoe her ‘according to her status’.117 Other mothers demanded that they be cared for ‘in the style to which I have become accustomed’. Dominga Carnera gave her married son a mejora on the condition that he and his wife live with her, sharing the fruits of their labours, as well as any taxes that they would incur.118 Marina Gonza´lez employed language that expressed her desire for companionship as well as care. The dowry contract that she used to provide for her last years required the newlyweds ‘to eat at the same table and live and die at home with the said Marina Gonza´lez’.119 114 For a more extensive discussion of the use of mejora as a retirement strategy, see my ‘Gender, Property, and Retirement Strategies in Early Modern Northwestern Spain’, Journal of Family History, 25/3 (July 2000), 313–25. For more on old-age contracts in other parts of Europe see Hanawalt, The Ties that Bound, 242, and Elaine Clark, ‘Some Aspects of Social Security in Medieval England’, Journal of Family History (Winter 1982), 307–20. Merry Wiesner also mentions retirement contracts in Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 76. For comparative work on familial care for the aged, see Monica Das Gupta, ‘Kinship Systems and Demographic Regimes’, in Anthropological Demography: Toward a New Synthesis, ed. David I. Kertzer and Tom Fricke (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 45 ff. 115 Dubert Garcı ´a, Historia de la familia, 196. 116 AHPO, caja protocolos 3549, fo. 41 (1668). 117 AHPO, caja protocolos 3566, n.f. (1618). 118 AHUS, protocolo 729, fo. 35 (1667). 119 AHPO, caja protocolos 2424, fo. 2 (1683).

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The widow’s ﬁnancial and emotional control meant that the younger couple had to tread carefully in their interactions with her because at any point she could decide to revoke the mejora in favour of another heir.120 In fact, Hilario Rodrı´guez Ferreiro has called the use of mejora in this way ‘a cruel game . . . that assures her [the mother] absolute power in the family and the blind obedience of the children’.121 Widowed testators regularly referred to such obedience in their wills. Margarita de Caneda left her sons, Bartolome´ and Gregorio de Quian, a mejora, ‘for having always assisted me and been very obedient’.122 Similarly, Marı´a da Bila, the widow of Amaro Vasquez, left her daughter Angela some household goods in addition to her legı´tima ‘for having always assisted and served me and been very obedient’.123 Along the same lines, disobedient children received only that which was due to them by law. Vitoria do Mello, whose husband Juan Rocico was absent at her death (she was a viuva do vivo), provided an extra portion of the inheritance for her daughter because ‘she had assisted me in my many illnesses with much love and care, something which her brothers had not done’.124 The cultural expectation that children, but particularly daughters, would be unquestioningly obedient to their mothers is vividly expressed in the following folktale. Saint Catherine died and went to Heaven, because throughout her life she had been very good and very saintly. On the other hand, her mother had been very bad all her life, never went to Mass and never complied with what God ordained. For this reason, in Heaven, the saint prayed to God that her mother would repent and come to Heaven with her, for Catherine loved her mother very dearly, which is only natural. But, her mother did not mend her ways. And one day she finally died, and because of all her sins she went to Hell. When Saint Catherine came to hear of this she was much saddened and hastened to the Virgin to ask her to pardon her mother; seeing that she had suffered so much on account of Christ on earth, she knew better than anyone what suffering meant. And the Virgin told her that this would be in order as 120 Liso ´ n-Tolosana, Antropologı´a cultural, 246–7. In a region where land equalled wealth, the threat of disinheritance was a powerful means of control: see Buechler and Buechler, Carmen, 97. For more on parents using mejoras as a means to ensure obedience see also Bauer, ‘Family and Property’, 77. 121 Rodrı ´guez Ferreiro, ‘Estructura y comportamiento’, 44. 122 AHUS, protocolo 1389, fo. 30 (1658). 123 AHPC, protocolo 1511, fo. 82 (1667). 124 AHUS, protocolo 1711, fo. 83 (1670).

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far as she was concerned but that she would have to speak to Our Lord first, to hear what He felt. And so she went to Our Lord, and He said that He would say the same as His mother, and that if she would pardon her, so would He. And so the saint, well satisfied, descended into Hell to look for her mother, and put out her hand for her to grasp so that she [could] pull her out. When the other souls saw that Saint Catherine’s mother’s soul was about to leave they all gathered round and wanted to escape with her. But the saint’s mother said: ‘Stand back! Stand back! If you want to go to Heaven you must have a daughter as saintly as mine.’ And the devils, when they saw that so many souls were clinging to the soul of the saint’s mother and were about to escape, seized hold of them and pulled them back inside, and as there were so many of them, forming such a weight, the saint was unable to pull her mother out—and had to let go. Well, after that she returned to Heaven to complain to God. But God said to her: ‘No, Catherine, there is nothing to be done. What devils seize they never relinquish. If you want to be with your mother you’ll have to go to Hell with her.’ And as Saint Catherine did not want to leave her mother all alone, she went to Hell to keep her company.125

This tale, which is common across Spain, not only promotes the expectation of an obedient daughter, but reiterates the theme of the authoritarian mother whose inﬂuence over her daughter lasted throughout this life and into the next.126 Widows without daughters sought out sisters, cousins, granddaughters, and single female neighbours as caregivers.127 Marı´a Rodrı´guez bequeathed some linens, a pair of cows, half of all her sheep, and some grain to her granddaughter, Margarita da Yglesia, for having served her and for the love that she felt for her.128 Marı´a Ferna´ndez, the widow of Bartolome´ Ferna´ndez de Placa, was living with a sailor’s wife, Dominga Garcı´a. She bequeathed her two old sheets and two everyday petticoats.129 Widows may also have informally adopted girls in order to ensure their care and the post-mortem inheritance of their property.130 In earlier discussions, we have seen the beneﬁts for single women who 125 126 127 128 129 130

Rey-Henningsen, Tales of the Ploughwoman, 39. Rey-Henningsen, The World of the Ploughwoman, 232. Rodrı´guez Ferreiro, ‘Estructura y comportamiento’, 445. AHPC, protocolo 1733, fo. 59 (1689). AHPC, protocolo 739, fo. 78 (1643). Vassberg, ‘Orphans and Adoption’, 445.

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agreed to be the caretakers of friends and relatives; however, widows also stood to gain from nurturing relationships with younger women. From time to time, sons were also the beneﬁciaries of mejoras in return for having cared for their ageing mothers. Although she greatly appreciated the loyalty and obedience of all her children, Cristina Va´squez provided a mejora for her eldest son Andre´s, who had lived with her and helped her with all her needs.131 Felipa Cardosa also provided a mejora to her son, Juan Rodrı´guez Lorencana, with whom she had lived for a number of years.132 Margarita de Caneda, a widow from Santa Baya de Vigo, provided a mejora for both her sons to be divided between them, noting, ‘I have much love and affection for Bartolome´ de Quian and Gregorio de Quian.’ She based their additional inheritance on the quality of their care for her, not their gender, as Margarita had both a daughter and a granddaughter to whom she left only their legı´timas.133 Widows’ wills also reveal the sincere love and gratitude that they felt towards those who had cared for them during their last days, months, or years. When Marı´a Bidal dictated her last will and testament in 1681, she noted the ‘great love and affection’ that she had for her daughter, Marı´a Gonza´lez, ‘for the good and loyal services that she has done for me, having aided me and succoured me in my illnesses’. In compensation, young Marı´a received a healthy mejora: one-third of the buildings, lands, groves, waters, etc., as well as some livestock and household goods.134 Similarly, Ine´s de Bilcova spent her last years in the company of her daughter, Francisca, and her son-in-law, Juan. In her testament, Ine´s acknowledged that they had diligently fulﬁlled their duty to feed her, work for her, and care for her during her illnesses. She repaid their thoughtfulness with a bequest of one-half of all her goods, dividing the other half among her ﬁve other children.135 When Catalina de San Pedro provided a vineyard in mejora for her daughter and son-in-law, she not only provided the couple with a valuable piece of property from which they could earn a living, but also gratefully recognized their contribution to her care and wellbeing. They had sustained her, cleaned for her ‘with great punctuality’, and taken care of 131 132 133 134 135

AHUS, protocolo 732, fo. 12 (1669). AHUS, protocolo 1357, fo. 274 (1647). AHUS, protocolo 1389, fo. 30 (1658). AHUS, protocolo 1671, fo. 42 (1681). AHUS, protocolo 1674, fo. 21 (1684).

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all her needs.136 Marı´a do Saboriz bequeathed a house and vineyard to her son, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter, who had cared for her and cultivated her lands for more than twelve years.137 Women who were not properly cared for could take legal action against those who mistreated them, as did Benita Carvalla, the widow of Antonio Carbon. She had three grown children, Domingos Carbon, Dominga Carbon, the wife of Cristo´bal de Veiro, and Alonso Carbon, who was recently deceased. Alonso had left his wife, Jacinta Riveira, with six minor children. Alonso, Jacinta, and their children had been living together with Benita, although it is not clear in whose home. Benita, who claimed to be very old, impeded, and tired, could no longer work her own land. Despite her inﬁrmities, the recently widowed Jacinta had thrown Benita out of the house and refused to feed her or otherwise provide for her sustanence. As a result, Benita formulated a poder that authorized her other son, Domingo, to represent her in legal action against Jacinta.138 Widows attempted to ensure that the emotional bonds created by these retirement contracts lasted beyond this life into the next by requiring care for their souls once they had passed away. In 1683, Catalina Biduido bequeathed all of her worldly goods to her caretaker and niece, Antonia. In return, she required that Antonia continue to care for her until her death and pay to have mass said for her after she died.139 Similarly, Margarita Me´ndez Fermosa gave her niece and caretaker the house that the two had shared, on the condition that the niece have twelve masses said for her after her death.140 Other women tried to inﬂuence the behaviour of their heirs after they had died. Marı´a Ferna´ndez asked that her children divide the estate amicably, without ﬁghting or putting impediments, because ‘it cost me much work to earn the little that I leave them’.141 The connection between these chosen heirs (both male and female) has continued in Galicia. One of Liso´nTolosana’s informants from Pontevedra told him that in his region they provided mejoras to daughters in order to ‘care and assist and make 136 137 138 139 140 141

AHPO, caja protocolos 3669, n.f. (1660). AHPO, caja protocolos 3669, n.f. (1660). AHUS, protocolo 2406, fo. 67 (1682). AHUS, protocolo 1673, n.f. (1683). AHPC, protocolo 2259, fo. 20 (1684). AHPC, protocolo 2344, fo. 17 (1697).

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a funeral for the parents’.142 Many of the Galegos that he interviewed expressed a strong belief in the responsibilities of the favoured children for the care of their parents at burial and in the afterlife. On their deathbeds, Galician women had more than their own material and spiritual needs on their minds. Like their married and single counterparts, they took the opportunity to provide for a wide range of friends and relations. Not surprisingly, grandchildren were the regular recipients of bequests. Catalina Go´mez, the widow of Juan Gonc¸a´lez do Vale, left her grandson, Pedro Gonc¸a´lez, a piece of vineyard and some chestnut trees out of love for him and ‘other just causes’.143 Marı´a Pereira, the widow of Domingos Cascon, left her grandson Martin˜o de Losada a mejora de tercio y quinto and two pigs.144 As we have seen, many granddaughters received mejoras in return for having cared for their grandmothers. Others received more personal gifts. Marı´a Rodrı´guez Batalla bequeathed two sheets, two sets of linens, two pillows, and some other household goods to her granddaughter, Filipa Lo´pez, for her trousseau.145 Other relations also beneﬁted from the generosity of widows. Marı´a da Monte received a chest and a sheet from her sister-in-law, Marı´a Rodrı´guez.146 Marta Sa´nchez, the widow of Juan Sa´nchez from Fontela, reached out to a number of different people in the course of making her testament. She gave her daughter and son-in-law her portion of her husband’s estate, some land, and some livestock. Her son had already been the recipient of a mejora from her late husband. She, in turn, provided a mejora for her granddaughters. She gave the wife of Bernabe´ de Santaya a calf and a chest and Dominga das Maroas two ferrados of wheat and a used bedsheet. Marta had always been generous. She noted that she had lent many people money, including 30 ducados that she and her husband lent to Miguel de Somorrostro to get him out of jail.147 Although historians have generally dismissed the signiﬁcance of these types of bequests, Monica Chojnacka has offered keen insight into the meaning of these gifts, as well as other transfers of property between women. 142 143 144 145 146 147

Liso´n-Tolosana, Antropologa cultural, 335. AHPO, caja protocolos 3550, fo. 3 (1676). AHPO, caja protocolos 3317, fo. 25 (1672). AHPC, protocolo 742, fo. 65 (1646). AHPC, protocolo 1733, fo. 59 (1689). AHPC, protocolo 1732, fo. 25 (1688).

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Goods such as wardrobe chests, beds, and aprons that were transferred from household to household, helped daughters, sisters, and neighbors create their own households . . . The possession and transmission of these objects endowed women with a localized power—a social power vis a vis those who might hope to inherit their belongings. The possessions owned and controlled by the humblest women were valuable items whose worth would endure after their owner died. This power could help other women form households and begin their adult lives.148

Chojnacka’s words take on added meaning when scholars examine bequests by people who had few material possessions. Used bedsheets, worn jackets, and small cash gifts may not seem substantial in monetary terms, but we cannot place a market value on the emotional meaning of these gifts nor on their ability to inﬂuence the lives of the recipients. As we examine the material bequests of Galician women, it is easy to forget that death was also an intensely religious moment. As the worries of this life faded into the past, widows revealed their concerns about their own souls and the souls of their loved ones. Madalena Rodrı´guez, a carpenter’s widow, left money for masses to be said for herself, as well as for the souls of her parents and her deceased husband.149 Marı´a Rodrı´guez, the widow of a sailor, left most of her possessions to her nephew Juan, but only on the condition that he have masses said for her soul and the soul of her deceased husband.150 A widow without heirs, Gregoria de Sossa named her own soul as her universal heir and charged her executors with ensuring that any monies that might result from pending litigation be used for masses for her soul.151 There is no doubt that after the deaths of their husbands, many widows fell into poverty and misery. However, the picture of widowed life is much more complicated than a steep decline into despair and eventual death. Many widows controlled considerable economic resources and used those resources to care for themselves and for their families. They used the legal system and participated in the real estate market, seemingly undeterred by their gender. Free of any legal or social constraints, Galician widows energetically exercised their authority as the heads of their families and their communities. 148 149 150 151

Chojnacka, Working Women, 49. AHPO, caja protocolos 3084, no. 366, fo. 6 (1660). AHPC, protocolo 738, fo. 69 (1642). AHPC, protocolo 2342, fo. 48 (1695).

6 Modelling Female Authority The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.

In Galicia, women’s authority and their consequent ability to negotiate their relationships with men were rooted in their relative access to economic resources, no matter how meagre. To the degree that any peasant people could, Galegas used these resources to maintain some control over their lives and destinies and to inﬂuence friends and family. Although women never excluded male family members from their circles of ﬁnancial and emotional care and concern, they dedicated considerable time, energy, and resources to creating ﬂourishing horizontal and vertical networks with other women. However, these networks were about more than just property and money. In addition to providing sisters, daughters, granddaughters, and nieces with the necessities of life, older women acted as models and transmitters of gender expectations. They socialized other women to function in a society that was home to fewer men with every passing decade. From generation to generation, mothers raised daughters to be the heads of households and the focus of family life.1 Daily, daughters witnessed their mothers making a wide array of agricultural and household decisions. By observing their mothers, aunts, and older sisters, they learned how to successfully manage small farms, sell ﬁsh, grow and spin linen, and harvest grapes. Young girls saw single mothers or other women living in households without men, caring for their children, providing for their families, and managing familial estates. In the recent past, anthropologists have found that families socialized their daughters 1 According to David Gilmore, ‘in dominating the domestic realm, women have de facto control of socialization and of cultural indoctrination; and, to invoke the adage, the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world, at least in peasant villages . . .’ (‘Domestic Power’, 954).

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to be industrious, thrifty, and skilful household managers. In northern Portugal in the mid-1980s, girls as young as 7 or 8 collected seaweed on the beach to sell and joined female relatives on ﬁsh-selling expeditions.2 There is nothing to indicate that these intergenerational activities are a modern phenomenon. Moreover, early modern girls learned more than just domestic and income-generating skills from older women. They knew that their mothers litigated in courts and bought and sold property. They may even have accompanied their mothers and sisters to notaries when they conducted those transactions. Because a daughter often remained in her family home, the transmission of gender expectations from mother to daughter, or from older woman to younger woman, did not end with marriage. Quite the contrary: Galician mothers spent their lifetimes bequeathing knowledge, conﬁdence, and decision-making skills to their daughters, nieces, and granddaughters.3 Peasant women socialized their children into the gender norms of the region through oral culture. Although we do not have records of their conversations per se, we know that peasants spent countless hours chatting, debating, and storytelling. They even told authorities, including Inquisitors, about those conversations. When peasants denounced one another to the Inquisition, they described talking in groups ‘of the things of men and women’, and arguing while walking to and from the ﬁelds. In fact, many Inquisitorial investigations relied on accounts of peasant conversations. At her trial, Leonor Varela described how she came upon Gregorio de Carballe and Amaro Lo´pez arguing about whether having sex with a single woman was a sin. She then proceeded to tell them that sex with a single woman was less of a sin than adulterous sex. According to the account, Leonor was adamant, restating her opinion seven or eight times.4 Domingo de Quintana, a farmer, was gossiping with six or seven friends in a vineyard about the son of another man and a pending lawsuit over an illegitimate child when he blurted out his heretical statement about single people having sex.5 Witnesses also recounted correcting the errors of others during those conversations. The witnesses at the Inquisition trial of Marı´a Ferna´ndez described a group of young men and 2 Cole, Women of the Praia, 80–1. Not surprisingly, anthropologists have found that thrift and hard work are admired in women around the Mediterranean. See also Galt, 3 Liso ´ n-Tolosana, Antropologı´a cultural, 255. Far from the Church Bells, 194. 4 AHN, Sec. Inq., legajo 2042, no. 38, fo. 15v (1601–2). 5 AHN, Sec. Inq., legajo 3861, no. 18, fo. 24 (1692).

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women talking about ‘married and single women’. When Marı´a and two of her companions stated that sex between single people was not a sin, another member of the group interrupted in order to correct them. The young women responded with laughs and jokes. According to witnesses, that conversation went on for the next two or three nights.6 Admittedly, as historians we are not eavesdropping on these conversations. Some of these witnesses may have reconstructed the problematic discussions so as not to accidentally denounce themselves before the Inquisition, thus we can never know if the conversations took place exactly as described. However, these archival snippets clearly reveal that, in addition to mindless chatter and gossip, peasants discussed and debated issues of sex and gender. In those conversations, older Galegos taught young women key components of regional gender expectations. Additionally, in preparing their daughters for their roles in Galician society, Galegas could draw upon an array of stories, both Christian and secular, whose female protagonists reﬂected and may even have shaped regional gender expectations.7 The relationship between cultural models and social realities is complex. On the one hand, certain female protagonists were popular precisely because their stories resonated with local people; on the other hand, those same stories no doubt informed gender expectations by providing cultural models whom listeners might emulate. Certainly, the behaviours that the Church, state, or even parents hoped to model and the lessons that young women received from these tales could be quite different.8 However, when considered in the context 6

AHN, Sec. Inq., legajo 2042, no. 19, fo. 6 (1587). For more on the transmission of gender norms through storytelling, see M. Jane Young and Kay Turner, ‘Challenging the Canon: Folklore Theory Reconsidered from Feminist Perspectives’, in Feminist Theory and the Study of Folklore, ed. Susan Tower Hollis et al. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 9–28; Karen E. Rowe, ‘Feminism and Folktales’, Women’s Studies, 6 (1979), 237–57; and Kay F. Stone, ‘The Misuses of Enchantment: The Controversies on the Signiﬁcance of Fairy Tales’, in Women’s Folklore, Women’s Culture, ed. Rosan A. Jordan and Susan J. Kalcik (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 125–45. For an important discussion of gender and Spanish folktales, see James M. Taggart, Enchanted Maidens: Gender Relations in Spanish Folktales of Courtship and Marriage (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). The two classic discussions of European folklore and history have also inﬂuenced this discussion: Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, 1984), and Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1978). 8 See, for instance, Isabelle Poutrin, ‘Souvenirs d’enfance: L’apprentissage de la saintete´ dans l’Espagne moderne’, Me´langes de la Casa de Vela´zquez, 23 (1987), 331–54. I want to thank Alison Weber for bringing this article to my attention. 7

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The cruceiro at Allariz (Ourense)

of the evidence for female authority presented in previous chapters, from the Virgin Mary to legendary queens, Galician culture consistently portrayed women as determined, deﬁant, and independent. Without a doubt, the dominant cultural ﬁgure in the region was the Virgin Mary. Although pilgrims came from hundreds of miles away to pray at the shrine to St James in Santiago de Compostela, Galegos focused their devotions on Mary. During the early modern period, more Galician parishes and parish churches were dedicated to her than any other devotion.9 In addition, Marian shrines and images of the Mother of God dotted the landscape, consecrating the land between the parishes that bore her name. She watched over crossroads, town plazas, and other important sites from the top of the large stone crosses unique to Galicia, known as cruceiros. On many cruceiros, the cruciﬁed Christ is represented on one side and the Virgin Mary, of equal size, is carved on the reverse. Sometimes, as in the seventeenth-century cruceiro at 9 I want to thank James D’Emilio for his generosity in sharing his work in progress on medieval Galician parishes. The majority of Galician parishes are of medieval origin. While some churches have been suppressed or rededicated over the centuries, D’Emilio notes that out of 100 parishes suppressed during the nineteenth century, only 10 were dedicated to the Virgin Mary.

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San Bieito de Cortegada (Ourense), the Virgin holds the baby Jesus on her lap, or the cruciﬁed Christ rests in her arms, as on the cruceiro at Allariz. What is striking about these images is the juxtaposition of Mary and Christ. While Christ is afﬁxed to the cross, she is independent of it. Moreover, a person walking towards the cross from the direction that the Virgin faces sees only her, framed by the edges of the cross. She is at the centre of one’s visual ﬁeld, a view that establishes her as the subject of devotion equal to that of her son on the other side of the cross.10 From an iconographic perspective, the equality of the two ﬁgures is indisputable and a visual reminder of her authority over the land and the people. Regional enthusiasm for the Virgin Mary increased during the late Middle Ages and early modern period in part due to the seemingly miraculous rediscovery of numerous Marian images in the Galician countryside. Beginning with the Muslim invasions of the eighth century, Galegos often hid images of her in caves and buried them in ﬁelds to prevent their desecration by the attackers. Although the Muslim incursion was short-lived, many of the statues were quickly forgotten, only to reappear over the next 900 years. These images and their shrines became the focus of intense devotion during the early modern period. For example, shepherds miraculously discovered the image of Our Lady of the Ermitas (an ermita is an outdoor shrine) in western Ourense. According to Juan de Villafan˜e’s eighteenth-century description of the shrine, ‘according to tradition . . . some devout persons, afraid of the power of the Moors . . . hid it [an image of the Virgin] in a very rugged site near the river that they call Vivei’.11 The shepherds were alerted to the presence of the image by their livestock, which became agitated each time they reached a certain spot in the ﬁeld.12 In the wake of the discovery, devotees erected a small chapel, and the veneration of the image 10 Cruceiros have only recently become the subject of scholarly interest. Most available works on cruceiros are merely collections of photos and basic data. Some cruceiros also have animal ﬁgures, serpents, or images of other saints, especially St James, on the main column. Some are plain crosses, grouped in Calvaries, three at a time. Similar sculptures exist in Brittany. 11 Juan de Villafan ˜ e, Compendio histo´rico en que se da noticia de las milagrosas, y devotas imagines de la Reyna de cielos y tierra, Marı´a Santissima, que se veneran en los ma´s celebres santuarios de Espan˜a (Madrid: Imprenta y Librerı´a de Manuel Ferna´ndez, 1740), 215. 12 Many Spanish images were discovered by animals. William A. Christian, Jr., Apparitions in Late Medieval and Renaissance Spain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 16–20.

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thrived among locals until 1624 when an Astorgan prelate fell ill during a pastoral visit. At the peak of his illness, the Virgin of the Ermitas appeared to him and he was completely cured. Word of the miraculous healing spread rapidly, and at the end of the seventeenth century a larger sanctuary and auxiliary buildings were constructed in order to care for throngs of faithful who came to the shrine seeking cures for dying children, gout, paralysis, and muteness.13 Similarly, Galegos sought out the image of Our Lady of Franqueira (Tuy) during spiritual and physical crises. According to the legend described by Villafan˜e, locals discovered the image on some high rocks. From the pedestal that held the statue gushed a fountain of cold, clear water that fertilized the nearby ﬁelds. Parishioners then built a chapel on those same rocks to house the miraculous image.14 According to Villafan˜e, the devotion to Our Lady of Franquiera was ‘most extraordinary’ in ‘that bishopric, that kingdom, and even outside of it’, and a steady stream of miracles fuelled veneration of her image during the early modern period. Among other miracles, Villafan˜e recounts a long tale of how, in 1609, the Virgin gave a child to a barren couple from a nearby parish. She also healed the sick, resurrected a dead gentleman in 1642 and a dead child in 1653, and exorcized a possessed woman in 1668. The Virgin also appeared to early modern parishioners in dreams, speaking to them and offering them consolation.15 Both the discovery of these images and the miracles that they worked were dramatic events in the lives of local parishioners. People regularly retold the tales as a part of the region’s history and religious culture.16 13 Dr Don Manuel Contreras, Historia del celebre santuario de Nuestra Sen ˜ ora de las Hermitas situado en las montan˜as que ban˜a el Rio Bibey en tierra del Bollo Reyno de Galicia y Obispado de Astorga (Salamanca: Oﬁcina de Francisco de Toxar, 1798). 14 The modern legend of the discovery of the image is quite different and it is unclear at what point it became popular. According to the ethnographer Vicente Risco and most of the literature associated with the shrine, during the Middle Ages an old shepherdess discovered the image of Our Lady of Franqueira. A light drew the woman into a nearby cave where the image sat. Two parishes claimed the cave as part of their jurisdiction and, as word spread about the discovery, locals could not agree which church would house the image. Parishioners decided to leave the decision up to the Virgin by putting the image in a cart drawn by two oxen. They covered the oxen’s eyes and set them free to go in whichever direction the Virgin desired. The oxen went toward the parish of Franqueira where the faithful dutifully built a small shrine to house her image. Risco ‘Etnograf ´ıa’, 390. Today, the faithful annually re-enact the Virgin’s decision by carrying her image through the 15 Villafan ˜ e, Compendio histo´rico, 230–40. parish in an ox-drawn cart. 16 Christian, Apparitions, 4.

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Of course, tales of both miraculous images and apparitions of the Virgin were standard across early modern Europe. However, their prevalence does not diminish their importance. As the anthropologist William A. Christian has pointed out, ‘What people hear the saints say, or the way they see the saints, reveals their deepest preoccupations.’17 The images and apparitions connected localities and parishioners directly to the Virgin and her power, protection, and authority. They also focused religious life around a female ﬁgure. Although, theologically, the Virgin acted only as an intercessor with Christ, in terms of most people’s practice and belief, she was a primary source of supernatural power. Galicians spent remarkable amounts of time, money, and energy on festivals, pilgrimages, ex-votos, and prayers dedicated to the Virgin because, to the early modern peasant, these ‘appearances’ of the Virgin were no different from actual visits from the Mother of God. Despite the admonitions of an Episcopal Visitor to the parish of Santa Marı´a Codosedo (Ourense) in 1656, parishioners continued to spend lavishly on their celebrations for the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin and even increased their spending in contravention of episcopal decree.18 Festivities dedicated to the Virgin merited such sacriﬁce and deﬁance because they helped maintain the connection between the Virgin and parishioners. As long as the parish held the image, had a festival, or retold the story of the apparition, the Virgin lived among them. Indeed, from an early modern peasant’s perspective, the Virgin intended to be found so that she might use her power on their behalf. There was no higher honour. In return for the devotion to the Virgin, parishioners expected aid in times of crisis. Distraught family members prayed that she would cure sick relatives or even bring dead relations back to life. Parishioners carried the images through the countryside asking her for an end to droughts and outbreaks of disease.19 After the crisis passed, satisﬁed believers held festivals that acknowledged the Virgin’s authority and urged her continued protection. Some scholars argue that the Virgin Mary’s perpetual virginity and her lack of original sin so differentiated her that ordinary women saw no 17

Ibid. Libro de Visitas, Santa Marı´a Codosedo, AHDO, 45.6.6, fo. 58 (1656). 19 For examples, see Christian, Local Religion, 46–7, and Poska, Regulating the People, 24–5. 18

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connection between themselves and the Mother of God.20 Thus, she was not an effective model for female behaviour. However, Galegas seem to have assumed that, despite her heavenly power, the Virgin Mary was, in other ways, quite like themselves. Peasants frequently denied the virginity of Mary, revealing the degree to which they humanized the mother of Christ. Many women, like young Marı´a de Granja, were denounced to the Inquisition for having denied Mary’s virginity. Marı´a said that she did not believe that Mary had given birth as a virgin because it was impossible to give birth without having had sex with a man.21 Nor did men necessarily put the Virgin Mary into a category unlike the women they knew. As Juan de Couto stood with his brother watching a re-enactment of the Passion, he also voiced his scepticism about the possibility of a virgin birth, telling his sibling that such a thing was just not possible.22 Other legends of the Virgin in Galicia underscore both Mary’s power and her connection to the region. In these tales, the source of Mary’s authority exceeded her role as mother of God; she was an independent woman who left her mark on both the landscape and the Galician mentality. Some of the most widespread legends of the Virgin’s visits to Galicia relate her visit to the initial evangelization of the region by St James. According to Christian lore, recounted in many medieval and early modern texts, including Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend (1260), when the disciples dispersed to preach the gospel around the world, St James came to Galicia to convert its pagan peoples. However, his efforts met with little success.23 Suddenly, on the coast near the town of Muxı´a, the distraught Apostle saw a mysterious boat approaching the shore. The vessel, made completely of stone including the sail and the rudder and driven or guided by angels, brought the Virgin Mary to shore. The Virgin encouraged James and, in some versions, she told him to return to Jerusalem, as his work in Galicia was complete. In others, the Virgin revived James’s evangelical fervour, providing the exhausted Apostle with the strength and faith to continue on his sacred mission. 20 Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York: Vintage Books, 1983). 21 AHN, Sec. Inq., legajo 2042, no. 11, fo. 4 (1584). 22 AHN, Sec. Inq., legajo 2042, no. 48, fo. 62v (1609). 23 Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, vol. 2, trans. William Granger Ryan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 3.

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The stone vessel, the Pedra de Abalar, and the sail, the Pedra dos Cadris, remained on the beach as a sign of the Virgin’s presence in the region. This story was widely known during the early modern period. Travelling through the region in the 1580s, Erich Lassota von Steblau described how in the village of Munxia (sic), ‘they venerate the so called Our Lady of the Boat with great devotion’. According to Lassota, ‘the Virgin, they say, came in a rock boat that is at the edge of the sea, with its sail, rudder, and mast all of rock’.24 The current sanctuary of Our Lady of the Boat dates from the seventeenth century and has long been the site of regular pilgrimages.25 Newer Marian devotions also tied the Virgin to the region. During the late eighteenth century, devotion to the Virgin Peregrina, the Pilgrim Virgin, became increasingly popular. Although veneration of this Virgin might have originated in France, brought to Galicia by French pilgrims, the idea of the Virgin as traveller also had roots in the thirteenth-century Galego-Portuguese ballads, Las Cantigas de Santa Marı´a.26 In particular, Cantiga 49 praises the Virgin for rescuing lost pilgrims and describes her appearance to frightened pilgrims who call upon her for aid. According to the Cantiga, ‘She led them through many strange lands as one who well knows the way.’27 Indeed, early modern artists regularly portrayed the Virgin as a seasoned traveller in their depictions of the Flight into Egypt and the Holy Family resting on the Flight into Egypt. Devotion to the Pilgrim Virgin achieved ofﬁcial recognition in Galicia when a brotherhood and sanctuary dedicated to her were established in 1778 in the city of Pontevedra.28 The spread of this 24 J. Garcı ´a Mercadal, Viajes de extranjeros por Espan˜a y Portugal desde los tiempos ma´s remotos hasta ﬁnes del siglo XVI, vol. 1 (Madrid: Aguilar, 1952), 1272–3. 25 For an older examination of the history Our Lady of the Boat, see F. Bouza-Brey, Etnografı´a y folklore de Galicia, vol. 1, ed. Jose´ Luis Bouza Alvarez (Vigo: Ediciones Xerais de Galicia, 1982), 203–18. That essay was originally published in 1942. 26 For the Cantigas in the original, see Afonso X, O Sa ´bio, Cantigas de Santa Marı´a, ed. Walter Mettman, 3 vols. (Coimbra: Universidad da Coimbra, 1959). For the Cantigas in English, Songs of Holy Mary of Alfonso X, the Wise: A Translation of the Cantigas of Santa Marı´a, trans. Kathleen Kulp-Hill (Tempe, Ariz.: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2000). For more on the historical context of the Cantigas, see Emperor of Culture: Alfonso X the Learned of Castile and His ThirteenthCentury Renaissance, ed. Robert I. Burns, SJ (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania 27 Cantiga 49, Kulp-Hill, Songs of Holy Mary, 65. Press, 1990). 28 For a discussion of the expansion of new Marian devotions in the region during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see Domingo L. Gonza´lez Lopo, ‘Onoma´stica y

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devotion may be connected to the appearance of a number of commonly told, but undated tales in which the Virgin travelled to Galicia. According to one early twentieth-century ethnographer, ‘everywhere [in Galicia] there are signs of the passage of the Virgin when she went around the world’.29 In Castro de Caldelas (Ourense), local legend describes the devil chasing the Virgin and the baby Jesus through the Galician countryside. Hoofprints mark the site where, on the back of a mule, the mother and child successfully jumped a river.30 In a fascinating twist on the New Testament story of the Holy Family’s search for hospitality in Bethlehem, the Virgin, travelling with the baby Jesus to Galicia, regularly found no room at the inn. A number of these legends exist for different sites around the region, but they all follow more or less the same narrative: When the Virgin travelled the world, she came to Galicia. Her travels with the baby Jesus on the back of a mule over Galicia’s rugged terrain left her exhausted. Thus, when she arrived at a town alongside a lake, she decided to rest for the night. Not knowing who she was, the citizens of the town, who were for the most part wealthy, one after another denied the weary mother and child a room for the night. The Virgin, angry and tired, retreated to the banks of the lake to ponder her lodging crisis. Then, infuriated by the townspeople’s lack of Christian hospitality, she ordered the lake to flood the town and kill all the inhabitants.

This was not the only time that the travelling Virgin destroyed an entire town in a pique of anger. In another version of the tale: Once there were some women baking at the communal oven when another woman arrived, begging for bread. As she travelled in disguise, they did not know that this beggar woman was actually the Virgin Mary. The women told the beggar to wait a bit and they could make her a little roll. However, the bread rose larger than they had expected and, wanting to save it for themselves, they decided not to give the strange woman any of it and the woman left. Passing across a mountain, the woman [the Virgin] met a young girl who was herding sheep with her little dog. The woman asked for a small piece of the girl’s bread. The girl offered her the whole thing, but the woman refused and told her to give her only a tiny piece. The girl then invited the stranger to her home in the village where they could both eat more. After she had eaten her devocio´n: La diffusion de nuevos cultos marianos en la Galicia meridional durante los siglos XVIII y XIX: El obispado de Tuy’, Obradoiro de historia moderna, 1 (1992), 165–83. 29 Risco, ‘Etnografı 30 Ibid., 337. ´a’, 335.

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long-sought-after piece of bread, the Virgin, frustrated by the selfishness of the rest of the townspeople, looked at the nearby lake and swore, ‘I submerge you from top to bottom, leaving only this girl and this little dog’, and the town was submerged forever.31

In a similar legend, the Holy Family stopped in the area around the city of Lugo. As they were poor, they begged for food, but no one in the city would provide for them. They ﬁnally arrived at the home of a poor family who offered them a place to sleep but no food. The Virgin told the woman of the house to make a pie from ashes, which she did and the pie miraculously became edible, providing food for the entire entourage. However, to punish the city for its lack of hospitality for the Virgin, God submerged the town.32 These legends reveal a very human Virgin Mary, beset by the frustrations of motherhood and travel. When she did not get her way, she exacted retribution.33 In addition to wreaking havoc on the population, the Virgin radically changed the landscape during her visits, not only by creating numerous lakes but also by altering rivers. According to another legend, during their journey across Galicia, the Virgin and Child decided to rest along the banks of the Min˜o River next to an outcropping of rock. The baby was very tired and wanted to fall asleep, but the river waters made so much noise that they kept him awake. Like so many mothers before and after her, the Virgin was willing to do whatever was necessary to get her baby down for his afternoon nap. Once again, she called upon the powerful forces that she had available to her, saying: Rio Min˜o go quietly don’t wake me or my baby. The noisy river soon grew calm, and ever since the Min˜o River has flowed gently and makes no noise.34 31 As with any folktales, numerous versions of these stories exist. These are my abbreviated translations of ‘La Ciudad Sumergida’, in Las leyendas tradicionales gallegas, ed. Leandro Carre´ Alvarellos, 2nd edn. (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe SA, 1978), 90–2 and ‘Lenda de San Martin˜o do Lago’, in Lendas galegas de tradicio´n oral, ed. X. M. Gonza´lez Reboredo (Vigo: Editorial Galaxia, 1993), 103–4. 32 ‘A Cidade asulagada de Boedo’, in Lendas galegas, 97–8. 33 For another perspective on this issue, see Michael P. Carroll, Madonnas that Maim: Popular Catholicism in Italy since the Fifteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins 34 Risco, ‘Etnograf ´ University Press, 1992). ıa’, 337.

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These tales convey multiple messages and richly describe regional gender expectations. Unlike the typical portrayals of the Flight from Egypt, in which Joseph is prominently featured, in the Galician tales the Virgin always travels alone or accompanied only by the baby Jesus—a sight that would have been quite common in a region populated by single women and widows. She overcomes challenges from the devil, the local inhabitants, and the landscape, ultimately dominating all three. She is an independent actor whose access to power does not explicitly rely on any man. Moreover, she is one of the earliest pilgrims to the region, sacralizing the territory and bringing it into the narrative of Christian history. The power of the Virgin is not unique to early modern Galicia, but her authority takes on new meaning in north-western Spain, where she was only one of many protagonists who provided models of female authority and action for young women. Throughout the early modern period, Galegos also venerated a number of virgin martyrs, most of whom they believed had suffered their martyrdoms on Galician soil centuries before. One of the most venerated martyrs in the region was St Eulalia. According to Prudentius’ ﬁfth-century hagiography, Eulalia, the strongwilled daughter of noble parents in the southern city of Me´rida, refused to offer the required sacriﬁce to the Roman gods. Her parents kept her hidden in the country, far from the watchful eye of the Roman authorities. However, hoping for martyrdom at only 12 years of age, Eulalia deﬁed her parents, escaped from her country safehouse, and presented herself before the Roman governor for punishment. Despite his anger at her impertinence, the governor tried to convince her of the beneﬁts of marriage, saying, ‘Think of the great joys you are cutting off, which the honourable state of marriage offers you.’ He then threatened her with instruments of torture. Eulalia refused to submit, and executioners ripped at her skin with iron hooks and touched the wounds with lit torches. She suffocated as her hair caught ﬁre, and, as she expired, a dove ﬂew out of her mouth.35 Veneration of the rebellious young woman, known in Galego as St Olalla or St Baia, dates back to the resettlement of the region after the 35 Prudentius, Loeb Classical Library, vol. 2, trans. H. J. Thomson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961), 143–57. Over time, her legend became conﬂated with that of another Spanish saint, St Eulalia of Barcelona.

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expulsion of the Muslims in the ninth century. She was an early patron of the Cathedral of Iria (now Padro´n) and many parishes in the northernmost parts of the region (which were resettled ﬁrst) are dedicated to her.36 Enthusiasm for the martyr continued during the early modern period when many of the churches to St Eulalia underwent additions or reconstruction, as did the parish church of St Eulalia at Villagarcı´a de Arousa (Santiago). Around 1600, the parish of Santa Eulalia Barroso purchased a new retable that included an image of St Eulalia alongside those of the Virgin and St John.37 Devotion to St Eulalia is also evident in the fact that during the ﬁrst half of the seventeenth century, parents in the diocese of Ourense regularly named their daughters after the martyr.38 Today, at least 141 parishes and parish churches are dedicated to Eulalia, probably fewer than existed prior to the nineteenth century.39 These dedications manifested and reinforced local religious devotion in a number of ways. Parishioners conducted a wide array of social and economic transactions in the parish church. When parishioners ratiﬁed contracts or other agreements in a parish church, the saint’s authority sealed and legitimized those activities. Moreover, the annual celebration of her feast day allowed for the retelling of the saint’s legend, thereby reiterating the relationship between the saint and the parish. Finally, each time parishioners attended services or other activities in the parish church, they encountered statues, altarpieces, wall-paintings, and other images that retold the legend of that saint. Eulalia’s martyrdom was typical of virgin martyr stories. She was young, chaste, and steadfast in her Christian faith. The legend contains some subversive messages such as a young girl’s deﬁance of both her parents’ authority and Roman authority, and some traditional messages such as her desired martyrdom and her submission to torture. Although there is no mention of sexuality in her hagiography, the Roman governor cannot convince her of the beneﬁts of marriage, a particularly meaningful message for Galician women whose opportunities for marriage were highly constrained. 36 37 38 39

James D’Emilio, personal communication. Libro de Visitas, Santa Eulalia Barroso, AHDO 3.5.12, fo. 25 (1599). Poska, Regulating the People, 87. James D’Emilio, personal communication.

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Galegos made other holy women into native daughters. Probably the most extensively venerated virgin martyr from Galicia was St Marina or Marin˜a. Marina’s hagiography is almost exactly that of St Margaret of Antioch (who was called Marina in some early texts), which was spread by the Golden Legend.40 However, early modern versions of the legend carefully transpose the details of her martyrdom on to the Galician landscape.41 According to the traditions recounted by Enrique Flo´rez in his eighteenth-century compendium of Spanish religion, Espan˜a Sagrada, Marin˜a was the daughter of a pagan, born in Antioquı´a de Limia (Ourense).42 Her father was the Roman governor of Limia. Her mother died in childbirth, and her father sent her to be raised by a Christian wetnurse in the town of Pin˜eira de Arcos. The pious woman then taught Marin˜a the fundamentals of her faith. Marin˜a was only 15 years old when, while tending sheep, the Roman prefect, Olibrio, witnessed her considerable beauty, fell in love with her, and demanded that she be brought to the city of Armea´. Olibrio had just begun to persecute local Christians. When she appeared with a small cross around her neck, he realized that she was a Christian. She refused his sexual advances and he imprisoned her. He had her whipped and tortured her with carder’s combs and iron hooks, but three days later she was brought before him and her wounds had miraculously healed. He then had her burnt with lit candles and submerged her in a basin of water. He even had her enclosed in an oven. She miraculously survived each of his tortures. Finally, Olibrio demanded her decapitation. As her head fell to the ground, it bounced three times, and each time that it touched the earth, a miraculous fountain surged from the point of 40 Enrique Flo ´ rez, in his eighteenth-century attempt to sort out the legend, also noticed the conﬂation with the legend of Margaret of Antioch, Espan˜a Sagrada: Theatro geographico-historico de la iglesia de Espan˜a. Origen, divisiones, y terminos de todas sus provincias. Antiguedad, traslaciones, y estado antiguo y presente de sus sillas, en todos los dominios de Espan˜a, y Portugal, vol. 17, Orense (Madrid: Oﬁcina de Pedro Marin, 1799), 217. Flo´rez did not edit all 51 volumes of Espan˜a Sagrada. Some of the later volumes were completed by Manuel Risco and others. 41 According to Karen Winstead, it was common for hagiographers to ‘create ‘‘new’’ virgin martyrs by reproducing existing legends, changing only the protagonist’s name’: Virgin Martyrs: Legends of Sainthood in Late Medieval England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 1. However, Dr Winstead indicated to me that it was quite unusual to see the location of the story so dramatically altered. I want to thank Dr Winstead for her help on this matter. 42 Flo ´ rez takes the reader through many versions of the legend: Espan˜a Sagrada, vol. 17, pp. 216–22.

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contact.43 Loyal Christians retrieved her body, buried it, and secretly worshipped her despite regular persecutions. The shrine at Aguas Santas (Ourense) includes the oven in which she was burned, the basin in which she was submerged, and a fountain that emerged where her severed head hit the ground.44 During the early modern period, the site of St Marin˜a’s martyrdom at Aguas Santas was the focus of great devotion. In 1550, Licenciado Bartolome´ Sagrario de Molina, a traveller to the region, noted that St Marin˜a was venerated by ‘all the people’. He also reported that her miracles were well known and that people made a ‘great’ pilgrimage to the site of her martyrdom. He goes on to describe her martyrdom, ‘two leagues from the city of Orense’, the ovens in which she was burned, and the miraculous fountains.45 In 1572, Ambrosio de Morales (1513–91), a humanist from Co´rdoba who spent extended periods in the region, collected information on Galicia’s religious sites for Philip II.46 Although sceptical of the conﬂicting traditions surrounding the virgin martyr, Morales reported that veneration of Marin˜a in the region was ancient.47 According to the visit of Jero´nimo del Hoyo to the diocese of Santiago de Compostela at the beginning of the seventeenth century, devotion to St Marin˜a had spread beyond Ourense. Ermitas dedicated to her in the tiny parish of San Miguel de Bronoa and in the city of Santiago attracted large numbers of devotees.48 Ofﬁcial reinvigoration of her cult in the region came during the tenure of the bishop of Ourense, Juan Mun˜oz de la Cueva. In 1727, he published a detailed description of her life and martyrdom.49 Later in the eighteenth century, Flo´rez noted that pilgrims ﬂocked to the site of her martyrdom and that Marin˜a was associated with miracles connected to women and children. 43 For a modern version of the story, see Risco, ‘Etnografı ´a’, 349. For a discussion of many of the older versions of the story, see Manuel Chamoso Lamas, ‘Santa Marina de Aguas Santas’, Cuadernos de Estudios Gallegos, 10 (1955), 41–88. 44 The connection between saints’ heads and water is quite common: see Francesca Sautman, ‘Saint Anne in Folk Tradition’, in Ashley and Sheingorn (eds.), Interpreting Cultural Symbols: Saint Anne in Late Medieval Society, 81–2. 45 Bartolome ´ Sagrario de Molina, Descripcio´n del Reyno de Galizia (Compostela: no publisher, 1947), fo. viii. 46 Ambrosio de Morales, Viaje a los Reinos de Leon y Galicia, y Principado de Asturias, 47 Ibid. 157. facsimile edn. (Oviedo: Biblioteca Popular Asturiana, 1977), 1. 48 Cardenal Jero ´ nimo del Hoyo, Memorias del Arzobispado de Santiago, ed. Angel Rodrı´guez Gonza´lez and Benito Varela Ja´come (Santiago de Compostela: Porto, 1950–9), 49 Chamoso Lamas, ‘Santa Marina de Aguas Santas’, 41. 139, 325.

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He recounts one miracle in which a nursing child’s mother died of consumption and no one would nurse the child. Finally, a 52-year-old woman named Marin˜a stepped in and, seeing the child in danger of dying, went to the site of Marin˜a’s martyrdom and asked for the saint’s help. Suddenly, the woman’s breasts ﬁlled with milk and the child, who had been sick with a fever, was suddenly healthy. She nursed him for three years and he grew healthy and robust. In Flo´rez’s estimation, St Marin˜a was ‘very illustrious’ in Galicia.50 Probably the most provocative legend of virgin martyrs from Galicia is that of the ‘Nine Sisters from One Birth’. The legend of these martyred sisters appears at least as early as 1561 in a text that Flo´rez provided in an appendix to volume 14 of Espan˜a Sagrada. Fray Prudencio de Sandoval reiterated a version of the legend in his Antigu¨edad de la Ciudad y Iglesia Cathedral de Tuy y obispos que se save aya avido en ella (1610) and it was included in the Acta Sanctorum (1727).51 According to legend, the Roman ruler of Galicia, Lucio Catelo (or Catelio Severo), and his wife Calcia lived in the city of Baiona. During his rule, Catelo, a pagan, persecuted Christians in his territories. One day, Calcia gave birth to nine daughters at once. As this was such an extraordinary occurrence, she feared that it would lead to suspicions of adultery. As Catelo was away and did not know of the birth, she had a maid take the baby girls to the river to drown them. However, the midwife had a change of heart midway down the road and decided to save the girls by leaving them with some Christian women in a nearby village. The girls were baptized and given the names Quiteria, Eumelia (or Euphemia), Liberata, Marin˜a (or Margarida), Genebra (or Genoveva), Germana, Basilissa (or Basilia), Marcia, and Vitoria. They were educated in the Christian faith and dedicated their virginity to Christ. As the girls grew to adulthood, Roman ofﬁcials pursued a bloody campaign against the Christians in the region. Eventually, enemies denounced the pious sisters and authorities arrested them and took 50 Florez, Espan ˜ a Sagrada, vol. 17, p. 221. At least 100 parishes as well as dozens of ermitas in Galicia bear her name, probably fewer than during the early modern period. James D’Emilio, personal communication. 51 Flo ´ rez, Espan˜a Sagrada, vol. 14, p. 394. Don Fray Prudencio de Sandoval, Antigu¨edad de la Ciudad y Iglesia Cathedral de Tuy y obispos que se save aya avido en ella (1610) Biblioteca de Historia Hispanica. Historias regionales y locales serie minor no. 1 (Barcelona: Ediciones El Albir, 1974), 36–43. Joanne Bapt. Sollerio, Joanne Pinio, Giulielmo Cupero, Petro Boschio, et al., Acta Sanctorum Julii ex Latinis & Graecis, aliarumque gentium monumentis . . . (Antwerp: Jacobum du Moulin, 1727), 55 ff.

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them to Catelo. He threatened them with torture but could not break their faith. Catelo was impressed by the girls’ fortitude, and also noticed a resemblance to his wife. Bringing his wife into the room, she immediately recognized the girls and both parents were overtaken with fondness for their lost children. It is at this point that versions of the legend diverge. In some, both father and mother pleaded with the girls to make the necessary sacriﬁces to the pagan gods, but they refused to compromise their faith. Infuriated, their father renewed his threats, giving his daughters the choice of either worshipping the pagan gods or facing death. Rather than anger their father, the daughters ﬂed, each down a different road. Catelo had them captured and eight of them were martyred at different sites. In some versions, the sole survivor, Liberata, retired to the wilderness, where she lived a life of prayer and penitence and survived by eating herbs and roots. Eventually, pagans discovered Liberata and, attracted by her beauty, attempted to rape her, but she fought off their advances. Roman authorities arrested her and ofﬁcials again attempted to force her to worship their idols. Despite being tortured, she steadfastly refused to abjure her faith and was cruciﬁed at the age of 20. In other versions, she was beheaded.52 In some accounts of the martyrdom of St Liberata that do not include the other sisters, after she dedicated herself to virginity, she miraculously grew a beard and moustache in order to dissuade any prospective suitors. As Flo´rez points out, her hagiography is often conﬂated with that of St Wilgefortis. Veneration of St Liberata was centred in the city of Baiona. Ecclesiastical authorities transferred her relics from the city of Sigu¨enza to Baiona in 1515 and a chapel was dedicated to her at the end of the seventeenth century.53 According to Flo´rez, her saint’s day had been venerated across Spain since 1682.54 Another sister, Euphemia, was unable to escape from her pursuers and suffered martyrdom at the hands of her father’s soldiers. As was the case with St Marin˜a, Galegos took a widely venerated martyr from the East and transformed her into a deﬁant Galega.55 52 Flo ´ rez discusses this legend in vol. 14 of Espan˜a Sagrada, pp. 127 ff. For a modern version of this legend, see Caudet Yarza, Leyendas de Galicia y Asturias, 13–15. 53 A beautiful seventeenth-century statue of Saint Liberata was recently displayed at the exhibition Galicia no tempo. See the exhibition catalogue, Galicia no tempo, 296. 54 Flo ´ rez, Espan˜a Sagrada, vol. 14, p. 139. 55 For one account of the martyrdom of St Euphemia, see Voragine, The Golden Legend, 181–3.

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As one of the Nine Sisters, Euphemia’s Galician origins were undisputed. However, local veneration increased with the discovery of her relics.56 In his sixteenth-century description of her body in the cathedral in Ourense, Ambrosio Morales recounted the miraculous circumstances of their discovery.57 According to the legend he retold, a shepherdess was watching over her ﬂock along the border between Galicia and Portugal when she spotted a hand with a gold ring on one ﬁnger, lodged between some stones. The girl took the ring off the ﬁnger and was immediately struck mute. She ran home to her father with the ring and, using signs, brought him back to the site of the hand. When the father returned the ring to the hand, the girl could speak again. The father then heard a voice saying, ‘Here is the body of Santa Euphemia; make sure that you take it and place it with honour in the temple of Santa Marin˜a’, and he did so. However, he did not take it to the main church dedicated to Marin˜a [I imagine he was referring to the one at Aguas Santas], but to a small ermita dedicated to Marin˜a located in San Salvador de Manin (Ourense).58 Later, ecclesiastical authorities transferred her body to the cathedral in Ourense and placed it in a chapel dedicated to her. At some point, authorities moved her remains to the seventeenth-century Jesuit church, which became the parish church of St Euphemia after the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1776. Many parishes are dedicated to her, and many churches, including Santa Eufemia del Milmanda (Ourense), have reliefs or altarpieces that portray her martyrdom. The association of St Euphemia with the region has not diminished. According to a modern version of the Galician legend, Euphemia threw herself from a cliff that is called today Penedo da Santa (Cliff of the Saint) in Gereˆs (today in Portugal, just over the border), and a rock opened up and swallowed her (to protect her), and from there ﬂowed a hot spring. Today, remains of a Roman site in the national park in Gereˆs are called the ruins of Calcedonia (the home of St Euphemia in Asia Minor), and a peak is referred to as the Alto de Santa Eufemia. Of course, I am not interested in the historicity of the legends of Galicia’s virgin martyrs. In fact, any attempt to unravel the legends is confounded by the fact that different versions associate different sisters 56 57 58

Molina, Descripcio´n del Reyno de Galicia, fo. vii. Morales, Viaje a los Reinos, 147–8. Flo´rez, Espan˜a Sagrada, vol. 17, pp. 223–4.

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with certain parts of the story. For instance, many replace Liberata with Quiteria, and some accounts make Santa Marin˜a of Aguas Santas one of the Nine Sisters.59 More importantly, both the legend of St Marin˜a and that of the Nine Sisters include the essential components of most early Christian martyr legends. Generally, the protagonist refuses to participate in pagan practices and/or relinquish her virginity, afﬁrms her Christian faith, and faces horrible tortures.60 However, those legends are made culturally speciﬁc by their location in Galicia and the identiﬁcation of the martyrs as Galegas. This appropriation of the legends by Galegos transforms them from universalized Christian exempla to mediums for the transmission of local knowledge and gender expectations.61 In an attempt to tease out the varieties of lessons conveyed by these legends, we can examine some of the component parts of each legend and the overall messages that they may have transmitted. First, in the legend of the Nine Sisters, the sisters’ names would have been critical to a listener’s reception of the tale. Names were more than personal identiﬁers: they provided insight into the person’s character, as early modern people believed that they were both reﬂective of and inﬂuential in the formation of the individual. Among the sisters, Liberata is the liberator, Basilia is a queen, Vitoria, the victor, and Marcia, the warrior or brave one. Each of the sisters’ names associates them with strength and independence. As is true in other virgin martyr tales, these stories celebrate behaviour that Christian society otherwise considered inappropriate in women.62 Although couched in the language of Christian piety, the legend of the Nine Sisters provides a vivid example of deﬁance of paternal authority. The daughters steadfastly refuse to accede to their father’s wish that they worship pagan gods. Although the Church asserted the ultimate necessity of their rebellion in the face of their father’s pagan beliefs, it did not normally condone such refusals to comply with the patriarch of the family. In most cases, the Fifth Commandment to honour one’s Chamoso Lamas, ‘Santa Marina de Aguas Santas’, 47–8. For a discussion of those components, see Winstead, Virgin Martyrs, 5–6. 61 As Kathleen Ashley and Pamela Sheingorn have pointed out, saints’ legends (in their case that of Saint Anne) have different meanings. ‘In different periods, different readings assume cultural dominance, and what is suppressed or muted at one time may be voiced in another’ (‘Introduction’, Interpreting Cultural Symbols, 5). 62 Winstead, Virgin Martyrs, 98. 59 60

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father and mother took precedence over spiritual callings. Although many famous saints deﬁed their parents in order to pursue the religious life, there are also numerous examples of female saints who married in order to obey their parents but later achieved sainthood.63 However, by refusing to submit to patriarchal commands, these daughters became protagonists in tales of deﬁance in which women subverted the traditional gender hierarchy and in which they made decisions independent of male intervention and/or in contravention of a man’s expressed wishes. In all versions of the legends, men are portrayed as opportunistic, self-centred, and ruthless.64 Olibrios is sadistic, as his desire to torture Marin˜a overcomes his lust for her. Catelo’s authoritarianism forces him to pursue and execute his long-lost daughters. Moreover, patriarchal authority took forms other than those of biological fathers. The fact that the opposing forces—paganism, violence, and Roman culture— are all represented by men further accentuated the gendered nature of the saints’ struggles. Thus, both legends promote women as the protectors and conservators of local culture. These women rebel against the religious and imperial pretensions of the Romans, and defy masculine domination more broadly. Such a reading of the tales reafﬁrms Karen Winstead’s suggestion that the story’s audience may have grasped the fact that even supposedly mild-mannered virgin martyrs ‘may be surreptitiously destabilizing the household and the state’.65 Moreover, if, as Winstead goes on to add, ‘the virgin martyr’s disruption of the gender hierarchy could stand for a spectrum of activities that threatened traditional relations of domination and subordination . . .’,66 then in Galicia, where women often successfully negotiated ‘traditional relations of domination and subordination’, these virgin martyrs did much to legitimize assertive and even subversive female behaviour. Compounding the emphasis on independent female action, in Galician virgin martyr tales, women do not rely on or even expect heavenly aid. Although both the Nine Sisters and St Marin˜a are fervent believers, they do not call upon God for help nor does he intervene on 63 Donald Weinstein and Rudolph Bell, Saints and Society: The Two Worlds of Western Christendom, 1000–1700 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 91. 64 This is also typical of these legends: Winstead, Virgin Martyrs, 6. 65 Ibid. 82. 66 Ibid. 110.

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their behalf. They are powerful individuals in their own right, not mere vehicles for the assertion of heavenly authority.67 From the Catholic Church’s perspective, the martyrs’ refusal to give up their souls to pagan worship went hand in hand with their refusal to give up their bodies to pagan men. In most of early modern Europe, such enthusiastic virgins would have committed themselves to the religious life. They foreswore sex with men in order to become brides of Christ. However, Galegas did not seek out the religious life despite the tight marriage market and general scepticism about the beneﬁts of marriage. Rather than promoting lifelong virginity, which, based on illegitimacy rates, we know was rare in the region, these legends may have supported the idea expressed by some women to the Inquisition that marriage led to submission to violent and/or overly authoritarian males.68 Calcia’s fear of her husband after she gives birth to the nine daughters is a dramatic case in point. In all versions of this legend, Calcia’s abandonment of the infants paved the way for their eventual martyrdom. Moreover, even when Calcia accepted the daughters as her own, she did not intervene to save them from their enraged father.69 It is difﬁcult to understand these profoundly negative visions of motherhood that so contrast with social expectations of maternal sacriﬁce. In fact, Flo´rez includes a sixteenth-century version of the martyrdom of St Liberata that ends with a tirade against Calcia and her failure to protect her daughters. Calcia’s complicity with patriarchal goals may have inadvertently functioned to reinforce the plot’s central emphasis on the beneﬁts of never marrying—a message that held particular meaning for large numbers of Galician women. Indeed, the Virgin, St Marin˜a, the Nine Sisters, and other virgin martyrs may have been popular because their stories so closely touched the experiences of early modern Galegas. Although we cannot know exactly how early modern women received these stories, we can 67 Winstead makes this case for Jacobus de Voragine’s portrayals in The Golden Legend, Virgin Martyrs, 66. 68 For some insight into early modern women’s ambivalence about marriage but not about non-marital sex and illegitimate children, one might also examine the many versions of the legend of St Irene of Portugal, whose hagiography featured a cruel confessor, a ‘false’ pregnancy, and an intrepid lover. Flo´rez, Espan˜a Sagrada, vol. 14, pp. 201–4. 69 This view stands in sharp contrast to the mothers analysed by Winstead, Virgin Martyrs, 6–7.

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speculate that listeners, both male and female, lay and clerical, took what they wanted from these narratives, emphasizing those aspects that reafﬁrmed their own experience and expectations. In her analysis of medieval English hagiographic texts, Karen Winstead points out that, ‘even as the hagiographer promotes certain readings, however, latent alternatives remain open to the reader’. In largely illiterate Galicia, no doubt many storytellers and listeners came to understand these texts in ways that clerical hagiographers would not have anticipated nor approved.70 Similarly, Isabelle Poutrin has argued that young girls’ readings of saints’ lives may have moved beyond the models of piety and devotion desired by their parents, instead focusing on a variety of ‘asocial’ behaviours.71 In Galicia, where the clergy remained poorly trained well into the eighteenth century and were frequently chastised by the episcopal hierarchy for failing to preach, Galegas had little guidance about doctrinally correct ways to understand these tales. Instead, they had to rely on their own knowledge and experience. For many Galegas, these stories must have reafﬁrmed independent action, provided models for confrontations with males in authority, and strengthened an already strong regional reluctance to marry. Finally, the complete transposition of both the virgin martyr legends and the stories of the Virgin Mary onto Galicia and Galician history must have made it easier for Galegas to apply the gender norms portrayed in these legends directly to their own lives. Winstead has suggested that, in the English case, ‘the concreteness of the Middle English legends makes readers less ready to look for the theological signiﬁcance of the saints’ struggles and more likely to read the legends as stories with lessons for the here and now’.72 The fact that these virgin martyrs were also Galegas must have made the potential for this reading even more likely. As powerful as these virgins were, not all of the legendary heroines of Galicia sacriﬁced themselves in Christian martyrdom. Although the Virgin Mary may have destroyed cities, at least one woman was credited with founding a Galician port town. According to Jero´nimo de Hoyo’s 1607 visit to the town, ‘They say that this town of Noya was founded by a granddaughter of Noah, I mean daughter of Noah, that they called 70 72

71 Poutrin, ‘Souvenirs d’enfance’. Ibid., 13 and 15. Winstead, Virgin Martyrs, 47.

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Noela and thus its foundation is very old.’73 Moreover, powerful women governed the kingdom from its earliest days. Reina (Queen) Lupa (or Loba or Luparia) was the pagan queen whose conversion led to the Christianization of the entire region. Although its origins are obscure, this legend, one of the most familiar in Galician culture, became commonplace in medieval texts across Europe, including the Codex Calixtinus (twelfth century) and the Golden Legend.74 There are, as one might imagine, many versions of the story of Reina Lupa. What follows is a summary of the version from the Golden Legend: After James was beheaded, his disciples took his body away and put it aboard a rudderless boat. With an angel of the Lord as their pilot, they set sail and made port in Galicia, Spain. They landed in the realm of Queen Lupa, whose name, which means she-wolf, fitted her well. The disciples took James’s body out of the ship and laid it on a great stone and the stone promptly softened, miraculously shaping itself into a sarcophagus for the body. The disciples presented themselves to Queen Lupa and described how they had come to be in Galicia and that they needed a place for James’s tomb. When the Queen heard their story, she sent them to a cruel king to ask his consent. That king arrested the disciples and imprisoned them. When the king was at dinner, an angel of the Lord opened the prison and let the disciples escape. The king sent out his soldiers to recapture the disciples, but as they crossed a bridge, the bridge broke and drowned all the soldiers. When the king received the news, he repented for himself and his people and sent for the disciples. The disciples returned and converted the city to Christianity. Queen Lupa took the news badly, and when the disciples returned to her, she told them to go up the mountain, take two of her oxen, yoke them to a cart, and bring the body and build a tomb for him. However, she knew that there were no oxen, but only wild bulls, and that even if the disciples could yoke them to the cart, they would run amok, breaking the cart, tossing the body, and killing the disciples. The unsuspecting disciples went up the mountain and were met by a fire-breathing dragon, but they made the sign of the cross and the dragon was destroyed. Then they made the sign of the cross at the wild bulls and the bulls were tamed. Then the disciples took the body of St James in the stone tomb and the bulls took it to the palace of Queen Lupa. She was astounded at their success, came to the true faith, and received baptism. She turned her palace into a church and ended her life in good works. 73

Hoyo, Memorias del arzobispado, 183–4. This tale appears in Voragine, The Golden Legend, vol. 2, pp. 5–6. It appears in its most complete form in Book III, chapter 1 of the Codex Calixtinus, also known as the ‘Pilgrims Guide’. 74

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Lupa was never the subject of local religious devotion per se, but her role in the evangelization of Galicia was well known enough to make the site of her encounter with the disciples, known as Pico Sacro or Monte Sacro, a centre of early modern tourist culture from at least the late Middle Ages. In 1550, Licenciado Molina mentioned a castle at the top of Monte Sacro that was uninhabitable due to constant thunder and lightning.75 A century earlier, the traveller Leon Rosmithal described presumably the same castle near Padro´n in which Reina Lupa supposedly imprisoned St James when he came to preach.76 Rosmithal goes on to tell his own version of the story. He describes Reina Lupa as ‘inhumane, principally with all Christians’ and ‘very cruel, as inﬁdels usually are’.77 Indeed, on one level, she is the stereotypical evil queen— cruel and treacherous. She lies to the disciples and her name, of course, means she-wolf, an animal renowned for its deceptive nature.78 Yet the mythical queen was also a powerful ruler who exerted her authority over the Christian missionaries until she was persuaded by their perseverance and strong faith. Although many of the versions of the legend criticize Lupa as wicked for hindering evangelization, they also praise her for her ultimate change of heart. Thus, the establishment of Christianity in the region is again tightly bound to the wisdom and authority of a woman. Other parts of the legend of St James reiterate her role in the conversion. Not only was her palace turned into a church, but, according to some modern versions of the legend, it was Reina Lupa who gave the disciples a ﬁeld in which to bury the Apostle, the site of the current cathedral and city of Santiago de Compostela.79 Galician women also led rebellions against authority. According to the commonly told tale, MariCastan˜a was the wife of a wealthy landowner in fourteenth-century Lugo. Angry about an increase in ecclesiastical taxes, in July of 1370, she joined a group of male hidalgos to complain to the bishop about the additional burden. When the bishop Molina, Descripcio´n del Reyno de Galicia, fo. xiii. 77 Ibid. 275–6. Leon Rosmithal in Viajes de extranjeros, vol. 1, p. 275. 78 Mar Llinares Garcı ´a has speculated that Lupa’s name may be related to wolves that inhabited nearby mountains or that the use of the Latin word tied Lupa to paganism and stories of the she-wolf who suckled Romulus and Remus, thus giving foundation to Rome just as Lupa founded Christian Galicia. ‘La Reina Lupa entre la leyenda literaria y la tradicio´n popular’, Cuadernos de Estudios Gallegos, 38/103 (1989), 303–6. 79 Walter Starkie, The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of Saint James (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1957), 17. 75 76

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and the cathedral canons appeared before the mutinous hidalgos to explain the increase, MariCastan˜a took rocks that she had hidden in her clothing and began to throw them at the clergymen. In the meˆle´e, MariCastan˜a and the others trapped one man and killed him. The conclusion of this violent incident appears in the eighteenthcentury Espan˜a Sagrada. According to the text, on 18 June 1386, a woman named Marı´a Castan˜a, the wife of Martin Cego, and two other men confessed to having caused considerable injury to the church of Lugo and to have killed Francisco Ferna´ndez, the bishop’s steward. The murderers provided compensation to the diocese by donating some of their lands to the cathedral. They also paid 1,000 maravedis and promised not to do any more damage.80 The story of MariCastan˜a was well known during the early modern period and the phrase ‘the times of MariCastan˜a’ quickly entered Castilian literature. I have been able to trace the phrase at least to the beginning of the sixteenth century, and it appears in seventeenthcentury works by Quevedo and Cervantes. ‘The times of MariCastan˜a’ referred to the long-ago past; however, it was also used to refer to times when the world was turned upside-down. In his El Casamiento Engan˜oso (1613), Cervantes refers to ‘the times of MariCastan˜a when squashes talked’,81 and Juan de Luna in his Dia´logos familiares en lengua espan˜ola (1619) says, ‘in the time of MariCastan˜a, the frogs wanted to have a king’.82 Thus, from an early modern Castilian perspective, a time when a woman led rebellions against the clergy was as distant and as unimaginable as when plants and animals acted like people. However, Galegas listening to this legend may have appropriated different messages based on their own experiences. For instance, from a Galician perspective MariCastan˜a’s knowledge of and concern about an increase in taxes would have seemed normal for a diligent landowner of either sex. As I noted in Chapter 4, wives often held property in 80 Marı ´a Castan˜a’s confession appears in Espan˜a Sagrada, vol. 41, pp. 126–7. The rock-throwing incident may be a conﬂation of an incident in 1344: see ibid. 115. For a modern version of the story, see Pedro de Frutos, Leyendas Gallegas: de Breoga´n al ﬁn del mundo (Madrid: Tres, catorce, diecisiete, 1981), 83–4. 81 Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, ‘El Casamiento Engan ˜ oso’, in Novelas Ejemplares, vol. 2 (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1933), 205. 82 Juan de Luna, Dia ´ logos familiars en lengua espan˜ola (Madrid: Imp. Go´mez Fuentenebro, 1874), 273. I found this example at the website of the Real Academia Espan˜ola www.rae.es.

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common with their husbands and/or maintained control over their own marital properties and a rise in ecclesiastical taxes would have directly affected MariCastan˜a. Galegas would not have ﬂinched at MariCastan˜a’s willingness to confront the bishop over the tax increase. As landowners and owners of foros and other leases, women had regular interactions with both seigniorial and ecclesiastical authorities over rents and taxes. When women went to renew expiring leases, they presumably took that opportunity to renegotiate rents. In addition, parish account books and visitation records often include long lists of peasants who owed ecclesiastical taxes. Indeed, MariCastan˜a’s murder of the bishop’s steward may have given voice to peasant women’s frustrations about the inﬂexibility of ecclesiastical rents. Finally, the fact that MariCastan˜a received only a ﬁne for the murder seems to indicate that women confronted ofﬁcials with some conﬁdence about the outcomes. If MariCastan˜a could murder a clergyman and only pay a ﬁne, then they could imagine how much more lenient the ofﬁcials would be for lesser offences such as not paying taxes. If Reina Lupa and MariCastan˜a provided Galegas with secular heroines who either held authority in their own right or successfully challenged authority, by the seventeenth century Galegas were able to look to their own recent history for a tale of female bravery that became legendary. The dramatic story of Marı´a Pita and the defence of A Corun˜a quickly captured the imagination of the people of the region. In April 1589, English vessels under the leadership of Sir Francis Drake and Sir John Norris appeared in the Galician harbor of A Corun˜a. Drake was searching for Spanish ships, munitions, and supplies as Philip II attempted to rebuild his Armada after the disaster of 1588.83 Philip must have anticipated Drake’s arrival, as the port was nearly empty. Nevertheless, Drake disembarked about 7,000 troops, who stormed and plundered the lower part of the town. The English killed approximately 500 Spaniards, mostly civilians, in the assault. The English even wandered seven or eight miles inland, met only by an unprepared force of 2,000 Spaniards whom they quickly routed. Norris and his soldiers then attempted to lay siege to the upper town. For nearly two weeks, the poorly armed inhabitants of the town battled 83 For a complete discussion of Drake’s adventure and invasion of Galicia, see John Cummins, Francis Drake (London: St Martins, 1997).

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against the well-trained English soldiers. After torching the lower town, Drake and Norris evacuated the city and sailed for Lisbon to continue their attacks on Spanish forces.84 Although the incident was one of many skirmishes between the English and the Spanish, from the Galician perspective their defence of A Corun˜a became a moment of intense regional pride, and women’s participation in that defence was central to the contemporary accounts. Four months after the siege, the Real Audiencia recorded accounts that testiﬁed to the extensive participation and the unquestioned bravery of the Galegas. Women and children brought wine, food, and water to the soldiers who were holed up in the city walls. As they provisioned the troops, the women did not shy away from battle. According to contemporary accounts, ‘the said women and children came near the most dangerous parts with great courage throwing rocks at the enemy’. Witnesses testiﬁed that ‘the said women were very important, many of them ﬁghting valiantly, inciting their husbands and the soldiers. And some of them were killed by the enemy . . . as was a female servant of Juan Jaspe and the wife of a shoemaker and others that the witness does not remember.’85 One woman, Marı´a Pita, emerged as the collective representation of the valiant women of A Corun˜a. Marı´a Pita was born Mayor Ferna´ndez de Ca´mara Pita, in or around A Corun˜a between 1562 and 1568. According to the decree issued by Philip II in 1596, Marı´a Pita fought exceptionally alongside her husband and a document from 1606 praises her, noting that ‘she did many services for His Majesty, who is in Heaven, when the English came to the city of La Corun˜a’. Because of her heroic defence of the city, the king authorized her to collect 5 escudos each month and gave her a licence to move 200 mules from Spain to Portugal, a privilege that was reiterated numerous times.86 84 There are many English accounts of the siege at A Corun ˜ a. For this summary, I employed R. B. Wernham, After the Armada: Elizabethan England and the Struggle for Western Europe, 1588–1595 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 109–113, and Cummins, Francis Drake. 85 The account of the Real Audiencia is cited in Jose ´ Ramo´n Barreiro Ferna´ndez, Historia de la ciudad de La Corun˜a (La Corun˜a: Editorial La Voz de Galicia, 1986), 269–70. Barreiro Ferna´ndez’s work is based largely on the nineteenth-century account by A. Martı´nez Salazar, El Cerco de La Corun˜a en 1589 y Mayor Fernandez Pita (apuntes y documentos) (La Corun˜a: Andre´s Martinez, 1889). 86 Barreiro Ferna ´ndez, Historia de la ciudad de La Corun˜a, 271. The decrees providing for her privileges are reprinted in Miguel Gonza´lez Garces, Marı´a Pita, sı´mbolo de

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Her fame spread quickly. Felipe de Ga´ndara y Ulloa in his Armas y Triunfos: hechos heroicos de los hijos de Galicia (1662) described the valour of ‘the Amazon of Galicia, Marı´a Pita, wife of an infantry lieutenant . . . [who] shot as if she were a brave young man . . . and was a critical part of detaining them’. According to Ga´ndara, the king gave Marı´a Pita the salary of a lieutenant and Philip III extended the privilege in perpetuity for her descendants.87 Her reputation endured, as in 1726 the Enlightenment thinker Fray Benito Jero´nimo Feijoo (1676–1764) in his ‘Defence of Women’ used Marı´a Pita as an example of a valiant woman of recent times, describing her as a ‘Galician heroine’.88 Thus, Galegas could look to their own recent past for an example of a courageous woman who stood up to foreign invasion and even succeeded where men had failed. She was then rewarded for her initiative and valour by not one king, but two. The story of Marı´a Pita becomes even more powerful when juxtaposed with the virgin martyr tales. Just as Galicia’s virgin martyrs challenged patriarchy, Roman rule, and paganism, a woman of their own time refused to capitulate to foreign and Protestant domination. Although the line between the past and present, legend and reality, often became quite blurred, the message was remarkably consistent. As we have seen, in Galician culture, female protagonists both acted as authority ﬁgures and assertively challenged authority. The women in these stories never hesitated to take independent action or govern on their own. This normalization of female authority had implications beyond the creation of cultural models. As Galegos perpetuated tales of libertad de la Corun˜a (A Corun˜a: Galicia Editorial, 1989), 153–5. Martı´nez Salazar’s work also includes numerous transcriptions of documents related to Marı´a Pita. For recent research on Marı´a Pita, see Marı´a del Carmen Saavedra Va´zquez, ‘Guerra, mujeres y movilidad social en la Espan˜a moderna: el ejemplo de Marı´a Pita’, in Entre No´s: Estudios de Arte, Xeograf ´ıa e Historia en homenaxe o´ professor Xose´ Manuel Pose Antelo, ed. Xesu´s Balboa Lo´pez and Herminia Pernas Oroza (Santiago de Compostela: Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, 2001), 339–57. Saavedra Va´zquez has also recently published a book on Marı´a Pita entitled Marı´a Pita, una aproximacio´n a su vida y a su tiempo (A Corun˜a: Via Lactea Editorial, 2003), but I was unable to obtain a copy of that work before this manuscript went to press. 87 Felipe de la Ga ´ndara y Ulloa, Armas y triunfos: hechos hero´icos de los hijos de Galicia (Madrid, 1662) (Santiago de Compostela: Bilio´ﬁlos Gallegos, 1970), 472. 88 Fray Benito Jero ´ nimo Feijoo, Teatro crı´tico universal discursos varios en todo ge´nero de materias, para desengan˜o de errores comunes, vol. 1, discurso 16, ‘Defensa de las mujeres’, on-line at http://www.fgbueno.es/edi/feijoo1.htm.

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powerful women, their views of female authority helped limit the spread of witchcraft accusations in the region. During the early modern period, Galicia was already famous as a land of witches. Outsiders regularly remarked on the prevalence of superstition and witchcraft there. In 1572, Inquisition ofﬁcials decried Galicia as lacking in ‘the religion that there is in Old Castile’, and described Galegos as ‘full of superstitions’, and with ‘little respect for Christianity’.89 The dramatist Tirso de Molina (1579–1648), who had spent time in Galicia, popularized the association of Galicia with witchcraft. Caldeira, a character in the play ‘Mari-Herna´ndez, La Gallega’ (1610), comments wryly that ‘Galicia produced witches as easily as turnips’.90 They were not wrong. Galegos, like their counterparts across Europe, believed that witchcraft existed and that certain people in their communities had the special ability to call upon supernatural sources of power. These practitioners were referred to by a wide array of different names, among them hechicera, bruxa, and meiga. Galegos believed that these people could invoke the full range of supernatural interventions, from astrology and divination to palm readings and traditional cures.91 Most were probably like Dominga Landeira, who, according to Inquisition documents, ‘gives remedies to different people for their illnesses and for livestock and sowing and . . . for that reason, many ordinary people from different places come to her house as if it were a pilgrimage’.92 Moreover, Galegos clearly associated women and witchcraft. Among those denounced to the Galician Inquisition for ‘superstition’, women outnumbered men by nearly two to one (92 to 48).93 Most were peasant women about whom the scribe recorded little information. Other women identiﬁed themselves as a butcher’s wife, a shoemaker’s wife, and a soldier’s wife. Liso´n-Tolosana identiﬁed fourteen as widows and four as single women.94 The occupations and marital statuses of the rest have been lost to history. Contreras, El Santo Oﬁcio, 461. Tirso de Molina, ‘Mari-Hernandez la Gallega’, in Obras drama´ticas completas de Tirso de Molina, vol. 2, ed. Blanca de los Rı´os (Madrid: Aguilar, 1946–58), 102. 91 Carmelo Liso ´ n-Tolosana, Brujerı´a, estructura social y simbolismo en Galicia 92 Quoted ibid. 44. (Madrid: Akal, 1987), 13. 93 Contreras, El Santo Oﬁcio, 686. 94 Liso ´ n-Tolosana, Brujerı´a, estructura social, 12. 89 90

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However, despite the association between Galegas and witchcraft, over the course of 150 years, fewer than 100 Galician women were ever accused of the crime. In an intriguing interplay between Spanish elites and local culture, Inquisitional norms and regional gender expectations combined to protect Galegas from the wrath of witchcraft accusations. Throughout the history of the Inquisition, witchcraft cases made up only a small percentage of the trials. Between 1540 and 1700, in the twenty-two tribunals of the Inquisition whose jurisdiction stretched from Lima to Madrid to Sicily, 3,532 people were denounced for superstition and witchcraft, comprising only 7.9 per cent of the total number of cases. Nearly 73 per cent of those cases came from the Aragonese, Italian, and American tribunals. During that same period, the Castilian Inquisitions tried fewer than 1,000 cases of witchcraft.95 Indeed, the Inquisition proved to be highly suspicious about the existence of witchcraft, and the prosecution of witchcraft in Galicia provides a vivid example of this scepticism.96 In his monumental study of the Inquisition, Henry Charles Lea reports one brief witch-craze in Galicia, which occurred prior to the establishment of an Inquisitional tribunal in Santiago de Compostela. According to Lea, in 1551 ‘many arrests had been made and trials were in progress by the magistrates’, but, when informed about the situation, the Suprema, the central council of the Inquisition in Madrid, recommended that the trials be temporarily suspended.97 Moreover, the establishment of a tribunal in Santiago de Compostela two decades later did not prompt a rise in witchcraft denunciations. Between 1574 and 1700, that tribunal dealt with only 140 cases of superstition and witchcraft—6.4 per cent of its prosecutions.98 Witchcraft trials were not even an annual event in Galicia. Indeed, over 126 years, there were witchcraft trials in only 46.99 95 Jaime Contreras and Gustav Henningsen, ‘Forty-four Thousand Cases of the Spanish Inquisition (1540–1700): Analysis of a Historical Data Bank’, in The Inquisition in Early Modern Europe: Studies on Sources and Methods, ed. Gustav Henningsen and John Tedeschi in association with Charles Amiel (Dekalb, Ill: Northern Illinois University Press, 1986), 114. 96 For a good discussion of Spanish views of witchcraft, see Lu Ann Homza, Religious Authority in the Spanish Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000),181 ff. 97 Henry Charles Lea, A History of the Inquisition in Spain, vol. 4 (New York: 98 Contreras, El Santo Oﬁcio, 685. Macmillan, 1906–7), 221. 99 Ibid. 512–13.

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The two most famous Galician trials clearly support historians’ characterization of the Inquisition as a very cautious institution when it came to witchcraft. In 1611, a secular judge began proceedings against Beatriz Ferna´ndez, a tailor’s widow and 60-year-old vagrant who begged around Corcubio´n (Corun˜a). He tortured her and she confessed to having 200 accomplices. But in a remarkable move, one of the women that Beatriz accused asked authorities for permission to ‘discharge her conscience’ before Inquisitors. When the Inquisition ofﬁcials arrived, Beatriz gave nearly the same confession, naming all 200 accomplices again as well as admitting to sex with the devil, participating in black masses, and killing children. Horriﬁed, the Inquisitors wrote to the Suprema asking for advice, noting that ‘the damage that the devil has caused in this kingdom is not small’. Authorities in Madrid reacted cautiously, counselling the Inquisitors to act prudently, which they did. In later correspondence with the Suprema, the Inquisitors showed the same restraint, pointing out that one of the main defendants, Marina Maestra, gave confusing testimony, sometimes saying that she was a witch and other times denying it. Noting that talk about witches was rampant in the kingdom, the Suprema suspended the cases.100 The same caution prevailed again in 1626 when secular authorities attempted to prosecute a number of women for witchcraft in Cangas (Santiago). They tortured Catalina de la Iglesia and Elvira Martı´nez until the two women described how, twenty years before, they had ‘gone on a boat guided by the devil in the shape of a goat and that the said Catalina married the devil when he was in the shape of a man’. The women followed with descriptions of sodomy, a witch’s mark, a witches’ sabbath, and ﬂying unguents.101 Once alerted to the confessions of Catalina de la Iglesia and Elvira Martı´nez, the Inquisition again intervened and the prosecutions ended.102 Indeed, no Galician witches were ever executed. In 20 per cent of the cases, the investigations were either suspended or the defendants were absolved. The rest, whose cases were deemed heretical but not serious, were either reprimanded (24.2 per cent) or forced to admit and renounce their heresy (53.5 per cent). After the defendants admitted their guilt, the Inquisitors penalized some with exile from their home parishes for two years and/or had them publicly whipped. In the end, all of the accused witches of Galicia went free.103 100

Ibid. 688–9.

101

Ibid. 690.

102

Ibid.

103

Ibid. 551.

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However, Inquisitional scepticism cannot alone account for the small numbers of witch trials. During the same period, similarly reluctant Inquisitors in other parts of the peninsula convicted more witches in less densely populated areas. Certainly, the general inactivity of the tribunal in rural Galicia made it less likely to encounter witchcraft accusations. Although Inquisitors were supposed to make regular visitations to the countryside, in reality, outside of the immediate environs of Santiago de Compostela and the city of Tuy, few Galegos even had the opportunity to denounce witches to the Inquisition. Inquisitors made only ﬁve brief visits to the diocese of Lugo and only three to the diocese of Mondon˜edo during the entire sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.104 Most importantly, as I mentioned earlier, the Inquisition process relied on an interchange between local accusers and Inquisition ofﬁcials, as Inquisitors did not pursue a potential heretic independent of an accusation. When an Inquisitor arrived for a visitation, he read the Edict of Faith, a document that delineated possible heresies and urged community members to denounce others or themselves. Many scholars, myself included, have argued that Spaniards generally distrusted the Inquisitional apparatus and were reluctant to take accusations to its ofﬁcials despite threats to their salvation. In fact, one Galician parish priest even told his parishioners to withhold information from visiting Inquisitors: ‘Let us be very careful tomorrow when the Inquisitor comes here. For the love of God, don’t go telling things about each other or meddle in things touching the Holy Ofﬁce.’105 In addition, the cultural acceptance of women’s authority in Galicia made witchcraft accusations even less likely. Galegos believed in the ability of some women to access supernatural power and relied on them for emotional aid, physical healing, and other forms of aid in times of crisis. As a result, just as Galegos worshipped the Virgin Mary while telling stories of her destructive potential, they tolerated the negative powers of witches in order to ensure that the positive potential of their abilities would be available when necessary. Regional ambivalence about women and witchcraft is clearly expressed in the reconﬁguration of the legend of St Comba, whose veneration in Galicia dates from the Middle Ages. Her cult was probably a combination of the cults of two virgin martyrs. The ﬁrst virgin, St Comba 104

Contreras, El Santo Oﬁcio, 478.

105

Ibid. 683.

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(or Columba), was a third-century French martyr from Sens. A Visigothic church dedicated to St Comba in Bande (near the Portuguese border) which dates from the seventh century may indicate the spread of devotion to her prior to the Muslim invasion. The second virgin was St Columba, a martyr from Co´rdoba. According to legend, she served as a nun at Tabanos until the Moorish persecution started in 852. She went to Co´rdoba, where she refused to deny her Christian faith and was beheaded in 853. Settlers probably brought this version of the cult to Galicia with the repopulation of the region after the expulsion of Muslims and it was quickly conﬂated with the legend of the French martyr. However, over time the image of St Comba as a virtuous virgin martyr underwent a remarkable turnabout in Galicia. According to a commonly told legend that dates from at least as early as the nineteenth century, before becoming a saint, Comba was a witch. One day, Comba the witch encountered Jesus along a Galician road and he asked her where she was going. She replied that she was going to ply her trade. Jesus responded, ‘Go ahead and be the witch, but you will not enter my kingdom.’ Surprisingly, Jesus did not reject her power as a witch, but instead acknowledged it. However, his denial of salvation convinced her to stop practising her craft.106 In some versions of the legend, Comba then went on to be martyred, and, as in the more traditional tales, refused the sexual advances of men and/or refused to deny her faith—thus the conﬂation with the virgin martyr of the same name. Across Galicia, St Comba is known as the patron saint of witches, a curious notion in and of itself. On the one hand, she acts as an intercessor on behalf of witches, while on the other hand, people go to her to defend themselves against witches.107 One informant told Marisa Rey-Henningsen, ‘there . . . you can see she was a great witch, and now she is the greatest of saints.’108 Even today, Galegos remain comfortable with both the positive and negative connotations of having witches in their midst.109 106 This legend dates at least from the late nineteenth century—it appears in Jesu ´s Rodrı´guez Lo´pez, Supersticiones de Galicia y Preocupaciones vulgares, whose ﬁrst edition appeared in 1895 (Buenos Aires: Editorial Nova, 1910, p. 45). 107 Risco, ‘Etnografı ´a’, 348. St Comba is not the only saint associated with witches— St Cyprian is also known as the patron saint of witches in the region. 108 Rey-Henningsen, The World of the Ploughwoman, 193. 109 Kelley, ‘Competition vs. Cooperation’, 303, and ‘The Myth of Matriarchy: Symbols of Womanhood in Galician Regional Identity’, Anthropological Quarterly, 67/2 (April 1994), 75.

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One of the most interesting aspects of this normalization of female power is that during the mid-nineteenth century, Galician intellectuals seized upon the image of the powerful woman to represent Galicia and galegu¨edad (Galicianness). As Heidi Kelley has pointed out, Galicia’s great writers of the period, including Emilia Pardo Baza´n and Rosalı´a de Castro, celebrated women as a means to express both the power of regional identity and Galician oppression. By focusing on the ‘matriarchal’ nature of Galician society, they described Galician women as simultaneously powerful and marginalized by Castilian institutions.110 Moreover, by promoting the idea of matriarchy, Galician writers asserted an autochthonous development for Galicia and promoted the Galego language and culture in the face of increasing Castilianization. Like more recent promotions of the region’s Celtic identity, matriarchy differentiated Galicia from the rest of Spain and reinforced notions of Castilian cultural and institutional dominance.111 However, I would argue that female authority in Galicia was not created as a part of some intellectuals’ search for a unique regional identity. To use a phrase coined by the anthropologist Peggy Sanday, it seems clear that even before the nineteenth century, Galicia had a strong ‘script for female power’. According to Sanday, there is a strong (but not absolute) connection between a culture’s sexual hierarchy and the sexual identity of the protagonists of that culture’s myths.112 As I have shown, this script was vibrantly expressed in Galician culture during the early modern period. The positive descriptions of female power in Galicia were not created in the nineteenth century, but rather they were reappropriated. Galician writers took the images that were deeply entrenched in Galician society and employed them for their own political purposes. Long before Pardo Baza´n and her cohort, Galegas could draw upon an array of powerful female protagonists with which to socialize their children into the gender norms of the region. Some of these cultural models originated in Christian tradition but were reframed to reﬂect 110

Ibid., 71. Ibid. 73. Kelley goes on to argue that urban Galegos and other Spaniards use the stereotype of ‘matriarchal’ Galicia to marginalize it. ‘In a cultural tradition that sanctiﬁes male authority, it makes sense that the ‘‘marginal’’ Galicians would also be the ones seen as dominated by their women’ (p. 72). 112 Sanday, Female Power and Male Dominance, ch. 1. 111

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local gender expectations. Others were tales of local women whose power was respected and whom Galegas were encouraged to emulate. Of course, independent virgins, tough queens, and powerful witches were not just ﬁctional archetypes; in Galicia, female authority was more than merely the stuff of legends.

7 Beyond Finisterre In 1746, Balthasara de Feal from the parish of San Miguel Sarandon (Corun˜a) purchased two small plots of land. Balthasara’s husband was away and she had no way of knowing when or even if he would return. She did not wait for his approval. She had children to care for, and an additional plot would help keep her family ﬁnancially aﬂoat even if he never arrived. Although we do not know the sexes of her children, their fates were almost predetermined. Any sons would have followed their father to Castile or headed to the Americas, lured by the promise of a regular income, while Balthasara remained in San Miguel, farming her land, raising her daughters and grandchildren, and making a good life for her family. When she died, her daughters would take up where Balthasara left off, farming that same plot of land.1 Balthasara’s life would have been very familiar to thousands of other rural Galegas whose husbands and sons migrated. But what about the millions of peasant women who lived beyond the mountains that divided Galicia from the rest of the peninsula? How different were Galegas from peasant women in other parts of Spain? Was this world of strong peasant women merely a historical accident or does it offer new insight into the lives of many other rural women across the peninsula? In order to better contextualize the Galician experience, I want to take some of the essential components of Galician women’s lives and situate them next to those of other Spanish peasant women. I have chosen three other culturally differentiated parts of the peninsula for this comparison: the Basque country, Catalonia, and Extremadura in south-western Castile. Other scholars have produced studies that allow me to compare many of what I consider the critical factors in Galician women’s experience. 1

AHUS, protocolo 5615, fo. 140 (1746).

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Let me say from the outset, this overview is far from exhaustive. I will not attempt an examination of the folklore in these other regions, as I am not familiar with the linguistic intricacies and local references that are critical to such an analysis. I have no doubt that further investigation will reveal other factors unique to each region that shaped and informed peasant women’s experience. However, I hope that, despite its limited scope, I can provide some additional context for understanding Galegas and early modern peasant women more broadly and that these preliminary comparisons will prompt the type of detailed study that the women who made up the majority of early modern Europeans so richly deserve. I want to begin with the aspects of life that Spanish peasant women shared. Women’s, but especially peasant women’s participation in daily life is often lost in the seemingly genderless archival descriptions of ‘all the people’, ‘all the inhabitants’, and ‘the entire town’. However, we can look beyond those generic descriptions to see women everywhere—in the ﬁelds, in village squares, in church. Such a gendered vision of peasant experience reveals a number of commonalities in peasant women’s lives, both on the Iberian peninsula and, I would argue, in Catholic Europe more broadly. To the best of our knowledge, across early modern Europe, the majority of domestic tasks fell to women. This aspect of life generally eludes archival investigation, as domestic work rarely produced the revenue that attracted bureaucratic intervention or the conﬂict that led to judicial proceedings. Nevertheless, the provisioning and preparation of food, the maintenance of household items and clothing, and the general care of the family’s physical and emotional needs were fundamental to individual and family success. Women’s expertise in food preparation brought responsibilities beyond basic nutrition. Women were also responsible for keeping Lenten abstinences and the maintenance of dietary vows made by family members and the parish. In addition, food prepared by women frequently accompanied a request for aid from a heavenly intercessor, maintaining the reciprocal relationship between humans and saints. As I have already discussed, women were integral to the success of the family economy beyond their domestic role. The co-operative and complementary nature of agricultural labour must have ranked among the most pervasive and formative of peasant women’s experiences. Of

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course, in each region and probably in each family, the speciﬁcs of that co-operation varied. Across a wide array of daily life activities, husbands and wives negotiated the division of labour according to age, physical strength, size of family, familial wealth, personal preferences and expertise, and type of agriculture. At harvest time, a frail woman with ﬁve small children presumably did different work, either quantitatively or qualitatively, from a strong, mature mother of teenagers. The degree to which their husbands engaged in domestic work also helped to deﬁne women’s agricultural labour. In a peasant economy, a rigid gendered division of labour was both impractical and even dangerous. Migration (temporary or permanent), warfare, illness, and death easily and quickly changed family dynamics, and family members of the other sex had to be ready and able to undertake a wider range of responsibilities at a moment’s notice. Although the status that a woman gained from that labour might vary within a family or a community, the importance of that labour is undeniable.2 In addition to their productive roles, the majority of peasant women became mothers at some point in their lives. While motherhood was certainly conditioned by local cultural norms, there were essential physical and emotional aspects of childbirth, infant mortality, and parenthood that transcended political and cultural boundaries. Pregnancy brought changes in women’s bodies, as well as excitement, fears, and hopes for the future. Raising children meant new challenges at every turn. In addition, malnutrition, and disease could strike at any moment. An unsupervised toddler could fall into a hearth, be trampled by a horse, or be mauled by a wild animal.3 Of course, motherhood was full of joyful moments as well as constant anxieties. Mothers were the primary transmitters of local culture, religious knowledge, and language to generations of children and grandchildren. The most fortunate of 2 Carmen Sarsu ´ a asserts that scholars employing this notion of the complementarity of work roles in the peasant household have overvalued women’s domestic authority (‘Understanding Intra-Family Inequalities’). She points out that Lourdes Me´ndez in her study of Lugo found no sense of ‘peasant woman’s power’; however, Me´ndez worked in Lugo, where families typically favoured eldest sons with mejoras. Thus, most women did not own land, a fact that no doubt altered their relationship to husbands and other landowners. 3 For a discussion of the dangers of childhood, see Barbara Hanawalt, The Ties that Bound, 157 ff. For a Galician girl who was mauled to death by wolves, see Poska, Regulating the People, 129.

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peasant women watched their children take their ﬁrst steps, speak their ﬁrst words, ﬁnd loving spouses, and bear children of their own. Parish life was punctuated by public celebrations, and women gained some status in the community through their participation in baptisms, local festivals, and holy day festivities. The visibility of women in parish life was no doubt accentuated by the fact that thousands of Spanish parishes had 50 or fewer households (fewer than 250 or so inhabitants). In these small communities, everyone knew everyone else and each member of the parish enacted certain roles in terms of both interpersonal and intercommunity relationships. One woman may have been locally renowned for her cooking, while another was the preferred godmother for local children. Both formally and informally, peasant women accomplished a wide array of socio-religious tasks. The plethora of religious feast days and devotions to local saints required extensive planning and food preparation. Even when men were the ofﬁcial organizers of local festivities, it is unlikely that women did not contribute their expertise. Once the festivities began, they ate, drank, danced, and sang with the rest of the community. Women also tended to sick and elderly neighbours. They provided charity to the poor, sometimes through parish confraternities, at other times purely through a personal sense of neighbourliness and Christian charity. Women also contributed to the fabric of the parish. They cleaned the church and sewed and mended altar cloths and clerical robes. Their possessions decorated altars and chapels, as even those of little means bequeathed candlesticks, cloth, or small amounts of cash to the parish church at their deaths. Women’s presence marked most religious activities. Women and men sat (or in many rural churches, stood) and prayed next to one another during mass. They walked shoulder to shoulder in processions through the village square or to sacred sites around the parish. Individually and in groups, women journeyed to local and regional pilgrimage sites in search of spiritual comfort, cures for illnesses, or resolutions of personal crises. At the end of life, women’s presence was keenly felt. When a community member died, women prepared the body. Then as now, female friends and neighbour women brought food and comfort to the family. At the funeral, women, wept, mourned, and walked behind the body on its way to the cemetery.

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Other experiences connected some women but not others. Although not all peasant women actually undertook the trip, many would have known other peasant women who left the parish to work at least temporarily as domestic servants. Some merely travelled to a relative’s home in another parish. Others made the long trek to the city. Some peasant women entered wage labour to make their own livings while others worked to supplement family incomes during difﬁcult times. Peasant women were also linked by the restrictions that society placed upon them. As I mentioned in Chapter 4, to the best of our knowledge peasant women across Spain were excluded from ofﬁcial political activity. We have no evidence of women’s formal participation in the functioning of small town councils and gatherings of vecinos, citizens. That is not to say that widows and other heads of households may not have been actively involved either on their own or through the proxy of male family members, but we cannot document that involvement. Moreover, it is not at all clear how important these local political institutions were to either the individual Spanish peasant or to the community at large. Finally, the emotional bonds that women cultivated with friends and kin shaped families and communities. They passed on love, generated conﬂict, and maintained grudges from generation to generation. Thus, peasant women across Spain shared a wide range of experiences. Yet their lives were conﬁgured by not only their own personalities and the personalities of those around them, but also by local cultures, inheritance patterns, demography, and economy. Employing the work of other scholars, I want to examine the lives of three peasant women who appear in their research and explore their experiences in relation to the Galegas who populate this book. BASQUE WOMEN (VASCAS) Much of the experience of Galegas that I have described in this book would have been familiar to Marı´a Pe´rez de Eraso, a peasant woman from the Basque province of Guipuzcoa. In his study of the effects of migration on a Basque valley, the historian Juan Javier Pescador tells the story of Marı´a’s struggle to deal with the consequences of her brother’s emigration to the Indies during the late sixteenth century and early

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seventeenth centuries.4 Like Galegos, Basques were proud of their culture. Marı´a and her family spoke the Basque language and saw themselves as culturally distinct from their Castilian neighbours. According to Basque tradition, they were more egalitarian than the other inhabitants of the Spanish kingdoms by virtue of the fact that the Castilian crown had recognized the noble status, hidalguı´a, of all inhabitants of Vizcaya and Guipuzcoa in 1526 and 1610 respectively. Like most of her neighbours, Marı´a’s family made a living from farming and raised some sheep and goats. Most Basques worked family farmsteads (called baserri in the Basque language), which tended to be larger than Galician farms and therefore better able to sustain a family. Women were responsible for agricultural work near the home while men generally worked on collective properties and in the region’s industries, including foundries and shipyards.5 Like Galegos, Basques put a high priority on female economic independence.6 Marı´a, who had been widowed after a short marriage, was one of a signiﬁcant number of unmarried women in the region. She lived with a daughter and a sister, Cathalina, who had never married and was the mother of two illegitimate children by different fathers.7 Cathalina was not alone in her singleness. More than 16 per cent of women in Guipuzcoa never married. Nor would these women have stood out as single mothers. Illegitimacy rates in the Basque country were even higher than in Galicia during the seventeenth century. In the Oiartzun Valley, approximately 15 per cent of children were born out of wedlock.8 In other parts of the Basque country, illegitimacy rates were even higher. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, in the village of Villafranca near Calahorra, nearly one-third of baptized children were illegitimate.9 No doubt, the fact that Basque women waited until they were, on average, more than 26 years old to marry contributed to the high numbers of illegitimate births. Basque women married later than Galegas and nearly three years later than the Spanish average.10 4 Juan Javier Pescador, The New World Inside a Basque Village: The Oiartzun Valley and its Atlantic Emigrants, 1550–1800 (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2003), 48 ff. 5 Ibid. 3. 6 Ibid. 67. 7 Ibid. 142, n. 5. 8 Ibid. 71. 9 Lola Valverde, ‘Illegitimacy and Abandonment of Children in the Basque Country, 1550–1800’, in Henderson and Wall (eds.), Poor Women and Children in the European Past (London: Routledge, 1994), 52. 10 Antonio Eiras Roel, ‘Aproximaciones a las migraciones internas en la Espan ˜ a de Carlos III a partir del censo de Floridablanca’, Studia Historica, 7 (1989), 619. Scholars

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Moreover, as in Galicia, clerical control was lax and couples continued longstanding traditions of premarital sex and cohabitation, and clerical concubinage remained quite common.11 Even as illegitimacy rates dropped during the eighteenth century, they remained at least twice the European average.12 Through the seventeenth century, illegitimate children enjoyed largely the same rights as legitimate children. They held local ofﬁces, received at least part of the family estate, and frequently inherited the entire baserri. Despite Castilian legal norms to the contrary, even the children of priests were considered hijos naturales, as was true of the seven children that the priest Juan Lo´pez Zuaznabar had by three women.13 As in Galicia, the substantial numbers of non-marital relationships led to litigation, both by women and on their behalf. Renato Barahona has recently shown that Basque women also willingly employed the justice system to seek compensation in cases of rape, injury to reputation, and unfulﬁlled marriage promises.14 Although women may have expressed their injury in terms of honour, nevertheless they unabashedly recounted their stories to judges and continued to engage in nonmarital sex. Without husbands, Marı´a and Cathalina raised their children on the family baserri, but they were not the primary heirs to the estate. Basque families tended to favour one heir, either male or female, without regard to birth order, who could best manage the estate. The designation of the primary heir involved both male and female members of the family, and in many parts of the Basque country parents chose daughters as often as sons as the primary heirs.15 However, in Marı´a’s case, her family chose her brother, Luis, as the primary heir and, as a result, Marı´a and Cathalina had to rely on Luis’s good will for their sustenance and upkeep. Unfortunately, Luis had little with which he might disagree on the relationship between late age of marriage and illegitimacy. While the correlation is not absolute, there is no evidence that women typically waited until marriage to engage in sexual relations. As a result, the later the average age at marriage, the higher the numbers of illegitimate children. 11 Valverde, ‘Illegitimacy and Abandonment’, 53–4. For some perspective on sexuality through the Inquisition, see Antonio Bombı´n Pe´rez, La Inquisicio´n en el Paı´s Vasco: El tribunal de Logron˜o (1570–1610) (Bilbao: Universidad del Pais Vasco, 1997). 12 Pescador, The New World, 69–73. 13 Ibid. 72. 14 Barahona, Sex Crimes, Honour, and the Law. 15 Pescador, The New World, pp. xxii and 44; Reher, Perspectives, 78 n. 54.

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demonstrate his beneﬁcence. The baserri that Luis inherited was seriously in debt and he decided that his temporary migration to the Indies might alleviate the family’s economic problems.16 Luis followed a growing number of his countrymen to the Americas. During the early modern period, rates of male migration from the Basque country were high. Basque involvement in iron and shipbuilding industries created links with the Indies from the beginning of the Spanish colonization and conquest and, by the late eighteenth century, Guipuzcoa and neighbouring Vizcaya had the most serious dearth of men on the peninsula: there were only 90 men for every 100 women and, among men of marriageable (16–40), there were only 86 men for every 100 women.17 Basque women emigrated much less frequently. Those Basque women who migrated went to urban centres both within the Basque country and in other parts of the peninsula in search of work as domestic servants. The migration of young women may have been prompted by inheritance patterns that did not provide for all children and male migration that made it difﬁcult for many women to ﬁnd spouses. Nevertheless, the large numbers of women remaining at home in charge of the baserri prompted one local authority to remark that ‘in 1640, of every four people from Vizcaya, three are women because of the many men who leave and do not return’.18 Upon Luis’s departure, Marı´a became the de facto head of the baserri. During his absence, she undertook all decision-making and responsibility for the farmstead, which included her sister’s children and may even have housed Luis’s abandoned wife. Indeed, Luis never returned to the Oiartzun Valley. Upon receiving news of his death in 1602, Marı´a began the complicated and frustrating process of attempting to obtain his legacy from the Indies. She recruited Basque merchants and other emigrants to help her manœuvre through the complexities of transatlantic communication and commerce. It took her nearly a decade before she and her nieces ﬁnally received her brother’s inheritance. However, her legal woes were far from over. The execution of the pious works 16

17 Eiras Roel, ‘Aproximaciones’, 617. Pescador, The New World, 48–9. Cited in V. Vazquez de Prada Vallejo and J. B. Amores Carrdano, ‘La emigracio´n de navarros y vascongados al nuevo mundo y su repercusion en las comunidades de origen’, in La emigracio´n espan˜ola a Ultramar, 1492–1914, ed. Antonio Eiras Roel and Agustı´n Guimera´ Ravina (Madrid: Tabapress, Grupo Tabacalera, 1991), 134. 18

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mandated by his testament would frustrate Marı´a for years.19 Ironically, despite Marı´a’s diligent work on behalf of the baserri, Luis named his second wife, with whom he lived in New Spain, as his primary heir.20 Nevertheless, ﬁrst in her unofﬁcial role as head of the baserri and then later as executor of her brother’s legacy, Marı´a functioned as the de facto head of the family.21 Other Basque traditions placed women in positions of authority. In many Basque parishes, a woman acted as the prime administrator, the serora. According to Juan Javier Pescador, ‘Women held a predominant role in the upkeep of the temple, guarding its jewels and ritual objects, and collecting certain alms. The female administrator, or serora, competed for this lifetime appointment before ayuntamiento [municipal] authorities. Once approved, she posted a deposit or dowry and then moved into quarters in the parish church.’22 The anthropologist Julio Caroja Baroja found descriptions of the position as early as the sixteenth century.23 In the Basque country, traditions of female economic and sexual independence, inheritance patterns that allowed women to be heads of households and manage family estates, and high rates of male migration gave women extensive authority at home. Indeed, Pescador also describes women’s ‘local primacy’ in the face of male migration.24 Yet, as was true in Galicia, women’s authority and centrality to the family was not absolute nor should we idealize the lives of women like Marı´a. Basque women had to constantly renegotiate their status within the family and in the community according to the decisions of male relatives. Moreover, as the anthropologist Teresa del Valle has pointed out, life on the baserri could be quite difﬁcult without the income typically provided by men’s wage labour.25 Nevertheless, Basque men’s ability to migrate to the Indies and retain the family farmstead depended on women’s ability to manage the estate. Although their authority was not always codiﬁed in law, Basque society expected Marı´a and other Basque women to be independent and authoritative in their work on behalf of both themselves and their families. 19

20 Ibid. 52. 21 Ibid. 51. Pescador, The New World, 50–1. Ibid., p. xx. 23 Julio Caroja Baroja, De la vida rural vasca ( Vera de Bidasoa) (San Sebastia ´n: 24 Pescador, The New World, 65. Editorial Txertoa, 1974), 275 n. 17. 25 Teresa del Valle et al., Mujer Vasca: Imagen y realidad (Barcelona: Anthropos, 1985), 56–7. 22

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CATALAN WOMEN Despite the many things that she had in common with her Basque and Galician sisters, the expectations of and authority granted to Vascas and Galegas would have surprised Marı´a Esteve Rosell (1640–1700). Marı´a was the wife of Antoni Rafecas, a well-to-do peasant from the small primarily agricultural town of Sant Pere de Riudevitlles (about 300 inhabitants) in Catalun˜a.26 In this village, the inhabitants spoke Catalan and passed down Catalan traditions from one generation to the next. Marı´a was around 25 years old when she became Antoni’s third wife. He was already twice a widower and 57 years old. Antoni had married for the ﬁrst time as a 19-year-old orphan, and his ﬁrst wife, Mo`nica Olivella, had been only 16, quite a bit younger than most Catalan brides.27 Most of her friends waited until they were closer to 24 before they married. Even so, the average Catalan woman married least two years earlier than Galician and Basque women.28 Catalan inheritance patterns encouraged women like Mo`nica to marry young. Catalonia traditionally followed Roman, not Castilian law, a practice that highly restricted women’s access to property. Unlike the partibility that marked Castilian law and practice, Catalan inheritance was impartible, and the main heir could acquire more than 80 per cent of the family estate.29 The remaining 20–25 per cent was divided among the rest of the heirs, and daughters usually received their inheritance in dowry.30 Although, as in the Basque case, the heir was supposed to be the best able to manage the estate, in practice he was nearly always the eldest son (the hereu). Only if no sons existed did the eldest daughter become the heir (the pubilla). Depending on the family, 26 Marı ´a appears in Angels Torrents, ‘Marriage Strategies in Catalonia from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century: A Case Study’, Continuity and Change, 13/3 27 Ibid. (1998), 481. 28 Eiras Roel, ‘Aproximaciones’, 619. 29 Reher, Perspectives, 55. 30 Llorenc ¸ Ferrer i Alo`s, ‘The Use of the Family: Property Devolution and Well-to-do Social Groups in Catalonia (Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries)’, The History of the Family: An International Quarterly, 3/2 (1998), 249. For a comparative discussion of Catalan inheritance, see Andre´s Barrera-Gonza´lez, ‘Domestic Succession, Property Transmission, and Family Systems in the Agrarian Societies of Contemporary Spain’, The History of the Family: An International Quarterly, 3/2 (1998) 221–46. For a very detailed look at Catalan inheritance, see Andre´s Barrera-Gonza´lez, Casa, herencia y familia en la Catalun˜a rural (Lo´gica de la razo´n dome´stica) (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1990).

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this scenario could be quite rare. Marı´a’s husband, Antoni, remarried twice in the hope of having a male heir despite the fact that he had two surviving daughters from his ﬁrst marriage. Indeed, his granddaughter, Marı´a Rafecas Tort de Patiet, was the family’s only female heiress for three centuries.31 Unlike her Galician peers who longed for daughters, Marı´a must have felt considerable pressure to bear a male heir. Catalan families considered the succession of a pubilla a family crisis and were preoccupied with the loss of the identity of the casa (the house and the lineage), as the children would take the name of the heiress’s husband’s family. According to Barrera Gonza´lez, with a female heir, ‘it is as if the house had come to an impasse, a period of interregnum’.32 Indeed, he goes on to say that a female heir turned Catalan relationships and basic expectations on their heads. From the Catalan perspective, a woman could not successfully pursue the interests of the casa.33 It was quite likely that Antoni’s casa would face this scenario. Marı´a’s marriage contract ensured that she would be the pubilla if no male heirs survived.34 Fortunately, Marı´a bore two sons, Joseph and Ramon.35 Although the parents remained in control of the family estate until they died, the chosen heir remained in the home, brought his (or her) spouse into the household, and supported the parents.36 Although unmarried siblings could remain in the family home with the parents, the heir, and his family, this was much less likely to happen than in Galicia or the Basque country.37 Since Catalan women were unlikely to inherit their own family estate or even enough to survive independently, it made sense for them to marry as soon as was feasible.38 Not surprisingly, 30 per cent fewer Catalan women remained single all of their lives than Vascas or Galegas.39 31

Torrents, ‘Marriage Strategies’, 483. 33 Ibid. 251. Barrera-Gonza´lez, Casa, herencia y familia, 247. 34 Torrents, ‘Marriage Strategies’, 480. 35 Ibid. 483. 36 Ibid. 476, and Reher, Perspectives, 54. 37 Torrents, ‘Marriage Strategies’, 476, and Eiras Roel, ‘Aproximaciones’, 617. 38 Torrents argues that women were the cornerstone of marriage strategies (‘Marriage Strategies’, 492), but I see early marriage more as a reproductive strategy. 39 Eiras Roel, ‘Aproximaciones’, 617. Some Catalan women remained single because of a dearth of men in some parts of the countryside, as a severe agrarian crisis in 1763–4 and the expansion of Barcelona’s textile industry prompted rapid migration to the city in the last half of the eighteenth century. Antonio Domı´nguez Ortı´z, Sociedad y estado en el siglo XVIII espan˜ol (Barcelona: Ariel, 1976), 255. Indeed, signiﬁcant numbers of rural 32

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So, unlike Galegas, Catalan women married younger and lived in their husbands’ family homes (virilocally) under the watchful eye of men. Without a doubt, as outsiders, Catalan brides were less likely to be in a position to negotiate their status in the household with fathers- and mothers-in-law. Marı´a Esteve escaped this difﬁcult scenario by marrying an orphan, as did her son’s wife, Marı´a Tort del Patiet. One might imagine that under these circumstances Catalan women had considerably less sexual independence than Vascas or Galegas. As they married more often and at younger ages, they spent less time outside of the supervision of men. Although I was unable to ﬁnd any studies of illegitimacy in early modern rural Catalonia, I would hypothesize that the rates were considerably lower than in either Galicia or the Basque country.40 Although Catalan women faced numerous restrictions on their lives, the Catholic Church was no more a directive presence in peasant women’s lives in Catalonia than it was in Galicia. Well into the seventeenth century, Catalan couples continued traditional marriage practices, including having the ceremony in places other than the parish church.41 Episcopal Visitors and Inquisitors appeared only irregularly in the Catalan countryside, preferring the urban lifestyles of Barcelona and other cities to uncomfortable travels over difﬁcult rural terrain.42 For women like Marı´a Esteve, migration was less of an issue than in Galicia or the Basque country. Although Catalans were important in the settlement of the Americas, male migration from the region did not reach the intensity of Galicia or Guipuzcoa until the nineteenth century. Even then, the increased absence of men did not lead to changes in property devolution or gender norms that favoured women. Although Catalan peasant women lived under a very different cultural regime than their Basque and Galician counterparts, they were not completely marginalized or subordinated. As noted earlier, peasant Catalan women migrated to the city to work in urban textile mills during the last half of the eighteenth century. Other women may have been unable to ﬁnd appropriate husbands because they lacked sufﬁcient dowries. 40 Catalan historians have not pursued this issue with the same vigour as other historians around the peninsula. I want to thank James Amelang for his help in this regard. For a discussion of sexual norms through the lens of the Inquisition, see Andre´ Ferna´ndez, Au Nom du sexe: Inquisition et repression sexuelle en Aragon 1560–1700 (Paris: 41 Kamen, The Phoenix and the Flame, 9, 281 ff. L’Harmattan, 2003). 42 Ibid. 265.

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women were central to both secular and religious festivities. No doubt, Marı´a gained considerable prestige from her marriage to a wealthy peasant and beneﬁted from the regular care and protection of male family members. In fact, Catalan families who successfully combined wage labour and agricultural production may have had better standards of living than many other peasants. However, Catalan women were much more constrained by their limited opportunities for independent living and their restricted access to property. ˜ AS EXTREMEN Although Galician women longed for children, legitimate or not, the stain of illegitimacy was much stronger in other parts of Spain. In 1720, Isabel Thexado, a single woman from Arroyo de Puerco, a village outside of Ca´ceres in Extremadura, was accused of attempting to abort the illegitimate child that she had conceived as a result of sexual relations with a cleric, Don Juan Molano. She had sought out four different medicines for this purpose at the instigation of her lover, who wanted to hide his indiscretion. Not surprisingly, the herbal abortifacients were ineffective and Isabel gave birth to a son.43 If Isabel had lived in Galicia or the Basque country, where illegitimate children and children of clerics were common, she and Don Juan might not have felt the need to resort to such desperate measures. However, the tiny villages in south-western Spain were very different in terms of non-marital sexual activity. During the eighteenth century, fewer than 2 per cent of births were illegitimate.44 No doubt a number of factors contributed to the low numbers of illegitimate births in Extremadura. A single woman like Isabel would have stood out in her village as Extremen˜as certainly had a strong advantage over their peers in other parts of the peninsula when it came to marriage. There were plenty of men around—104 men for every 100 women.45 Most Extremen˜as found appropriate spouses within their 43 Isabel appears in Mercedes Santillana Pe ´rez, La Vida: Nacimiento, matrimonio y muerte en el partido de Ca´ceres en el siglo XVIII (Ca´ceres: Institucio´n cultural ‘El Brocense’, 1992), 89. 44 Ibid. 88, and Isabel Teston Nu ´ n˜ez, Amor, sexo y matrimonio en Extremadura (Badajoz: Universitas Editorial, 1985), 228. 45 Eiras Roel, ‘Aproximaciones’, 617. On marriage patterns in the region, see Jose´ Pablo Blanco Carrasco and Mercedes Santillana Pe´rez, ‘Mercado matrimonial,

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communities.46 Moreover, with so many suitors, Extremaduran women married young. On average, they were only 21.8 years old, and only 7.4 per cent of Extremen˜as never married.47 Considering the high rates of marriage and the prevalence of early marriage, it comes as no surprise that illegitimacy rates in the region were quite low. However, as we have seen, demography alone does not account for very low rates of illegitimacy. The ability of the Catholic Church to inﬂuence sexual norms also seems to have been greater in Extremadura. As Extremen˜os followed proscriptions against marrying and engaging in intercourse during Advent and Lent better than their Galician counterparts,48 it seems likely that those same religious norms inﬂuenced the other decisions that they made concerning sexuality.49 That is not to say that amancebamiento and extramarital sexuality were unknown in Extremadura; however, sexually active women like Isabel were much less common and they clearly did not have the same degree of cultural acceptance as they did in Galicia and the Basque country. Here, too, early modern migration transformed peasant life. Along with Andalusia, Extremadura had the highest rates of emigration on the peninsula during the early modern period. Some of that migration was internal: large numbers of Extremen˜os migrated to Seville while others became migrant labourers in other parts of Castile.50 Many other Extremen˜os made the adventurous journey to the Americas. However, although initially this migration was almost exclusively male, by the end of the sixteenth century approximately one-quarter of all Extremen˜o emigrants were women.51 Their numbers increased in the opening migraciones y movilidad social en Extremadura, ss. XVI-XVIII’, paper presented at the VII Conference of the Asociacio´n de Demografı´a Histo´rica, Granada (1–3 April 2004), available at http://www.ugr.es/adeh/comunicaciones/Blanco_Carrasco_J_P.pdf. 46 Teston Nu ´ n˜ez, Amor, sexo y matrimonio, 108. 47 Eiras Roel, ‘Aproximaciones’, 619. 48 Teston Nu ´ n˜ez, Amor, sexo y matrimonio, 124, 138. 49 For a discussion of sexual crimes in Extremadura, see Marı ´a Angeles Herna´ndez Bermejo, La Familia Extremen˜a en los tiempos modernos (Badajoz: Diputacio´n Provincial de Badajoz, 1990), 295 ff., and Teston Nu´n˜ez, Amor, sexo y matrimonio, 168 ff. 50 Ida Altman, Emigrants and Society: Extremadura and Spanish America in the Sixteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 92, and Vassberg, The Village and the Outside World, 70–1. 51 Encarnacio ´ n Lemus, ‘Extremen˜os hacia America: La Emigracio´n en la edad moderna’, Historia general de la emigracio´n espan˜ola a Iberoame´rica, vol. 2 (Madrid: Historia 16, 1992), 270, and see also J. L. Pereira Iglesias and M. Rodrı´guez Cancho, ‘Emigracio´n extremen˜a a indias en el siglo XVI. (Cato´logos de pasajeros)’, in Eiras Roel and Guimera´ Ravina (eds.), La emigracio´n espan˜ola a Ultramar, 1492–1914, 265.

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decades of the seventeenth century. Between 1600 and 1637, 30 per cent of emigrants were women, and married women outnumbered single women nearly 3 to 1.52 After that ﬂurry of family migration, single women and married women left in nearly equal numbers.53 The majority of these female emigrants accompanied husbands, children, or other relatives.54 Isabel need not have feared for her economic security, at least no more so than anyone else. Rural Castile was known for its emphasis on partible inheritance. Indeed, that egalitarianism extended into residence patterns, as parents tried to ensure that each child had a home upon marriage, either subdividing the parental home or setting up temporary residences.55 Thus, neither Isabel’s rash act nor the high rates of migration were prompted by a lack of access to property. In addition to their legı´timas, Extremaduran women acquired property through other mechanisms. In her study of testaments, Santillana Pe´rez found that more than 70 per cent of mejoras del tercio y quinto went to women, frequently under circumstances similar to those I described for Galegas. In return for caring for ageing parents, they received the family homes.56 Moreover, many women received signiﬁcant pieces of land as a part of either testamentary bequests or dowries.57 Without further study, I can only speculate that other factors must have made it difﬁcult or undesirable for many Extremen˜as to remain at home managing the familial estate. For instance, some parts of the region were barren and impoverished, and in others it was difﬁcult to make more than a subsistence living. Ida Altman has suggested that ‘facing the likely prospect of poverty or ﬁnancial struggle at home, women would be willing to consider accompanying or joining their men overseas’.58 Moreover, women’s migration relied heavily on the decisions of men. According to Altman, 52 By the eighteenth century, female migration from the region had dropped dramatically so that more than 90% of migrants were men. Lemus, ‘Extremen˜os hacia 53 Ibid. 272–3. America’, 270. 54 Ida Altman, ‘Spanish Women and the Indies: Transatlantic Migration in the Early Modern Period’, in New Perspectives on Women and Migration in Colonial Latin America, PLAS Cuadernos No. 4, ed. M. Anore Horton (Princeton: Program in Latin American 55 Reher, Perspectives, 64. Studies, 2001), 30. 56 Santillana Pe ´rez, La Vida, 222–3. 57 Teston Nu ´ n˜ez, Amor, sexo y matrimonio, 91 ff. 58 Altman, ‘Spanish Women and the Indies’, 26.

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women generally only joined the movement in substantial numbers during a second phase, by which time earlier migrants, mostly male, had managed to establish some basis not only for earning their livelihood but for supporting families as well. At that point men would start to return or send for their spouses and families, and married couples with or without children would begin to relocate in some numbers.59

However, as she has pointed out in another work, we should not assume that women were passive partners in the decision to emigrate. The partnership expected in marriages no doubt inﬂuenced couples’ decisions about if, and when, and where to go.60 In Chapter 1, I suggested that some regional cultures placed a greater cultural value on migration than others. Altman has shown that Extremaduran migration ‘was in many senses a collective undertaking that hinged on the existence of networks of kinship and association and ongoing contacts that linked people in the Indies, Seville, and Extremadura’.61 Women were not immune to those forces, and indeed the pull on Extremaduran women seems to have been great despite the social and ﬁnancial beneﬁts of remaining at home. I must admit that, despite extensive reﬂection, my research has provided no insight into why this was true for Extremen˜as but not for Galegas and Basque women. I hope that this overview has provided a schema for understanding some of the similarities and differences in Spanish peasant women’s lives. On many levels, Balthasara the Galega, the Basque Marı´a, the Catalan Marı´a, and the Extremen˜a Isabel shared much in common. However, the differences in some basic components of their lives, including the sexual norms of their communities, their ability to inherit property, and the impact of migration, reveal the continued vitality of regional cultures long after the uniﬁcation of the Spanish kingdoms under one crown.

CONCLUSION In Galicia, women say, ‘the men count for nothing where we women are.’ Although this may not have been the experience of all early modern 59 61

60 Altman, Transatlantic Ties, 153. Ibid. 29. Altman, Emigrants and Society, 280.

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Galegas, without a doubt, it would have rung true to many. As their fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons spread across the Iberian peninsula and the Americas, Galician society came to rely on and revolve around women. Although one cannot generalize the personality of an entire region, it is clear that Galegos valued female authority and independence and the life stories of many Galegas demonstrate that they fulﬁlled their social roles with strength, savvy, and determination. Many women headed families for most if not all their adult lives. Many others proved their self-sufﬁciency at key points in the life cycle. When regional inheritance customs provided them with signiﬁcant access to familial property, women used it to live independently, support their families, reinforce social networks, and aid younger generations of women. Undeterred by their low social status, Galegas displayed remarkable knowledge and conﬁdence in their interactions with the institutions of both Church and State. Throughout their lives, these peasant women were active participants in their communities and central ﬁgures in their families. This authority was not usurped or appropriated, but acquired through hard work and granted by a society in need of their persistence, strength, and loyalty. However, female authority in Galicia existed within clear parameters. As women, they had no voice in politics, and, as peasants, they were conﬁned by Spain’s rigid social structure. Some villages and even families were more patriarchal than others. Religious piety pressured some women to remain virginal. Some Galegas dutifully moved in with their in-laws, and were excluded from all but the minimal inheritance. They lived their whole lives ﬁnancially and socially dependent on men. Nevertheless, women’s demographic dominance, access to property, and social and cultural support provided many Galician women with the ability to live independently and/or negotiate successfully with men. They exercised domestic power in innumerable ways and were dynamic actors in a society that was, in many respects, formulated around them and their needs. Galegas lived on the periphery of Spain, but they were not unique. Millions of peasants lived on the periphery of Europe and at the fringes of their emergent nation states. From Scandinavia to Russia to the Balkans, the critical sources of female authority in Galicia— demographic imbalance, female-oriented inheritance, egalitarian division of labour, post-marital residence patterns, and the centrality of parish

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socio-religious life—existed in different combinations and to differing extents. The complex interaction of these forces determined women’s lives in ways that we have barely begun to understand. This examination of the role of women in Galician society also encourages a reconsideration of gender norms in colonial Latin America. Until recently, scholars have assumed that honour and rigid gender expectations constrained colonial women as much or more so than their peninsular peers. However, Castilian law gave women in Spanish America the same legal rights as women on the peninsula, and the Catholic Church had as many or more problems enforcing stricter sexual norms in rural areas of the Americas as it had in Galicia. Moreover, as tens of thousands of Galegos and Basques came to the Americas, they brought with them local expectations about peasant women’s independence and authority. Such ideas would be critical in this new context. Colonial society was highly mobile, and millions of creole women worked and raised families in the shadows of absent men. They inherited property, managed estates, bore untold thousands of illegitimate children, and litigated at the drop of a hat. Such knowledge and skill was not intuitive. They could undertake these tasks because their peninsular grandmothers and mothers had taught them how. This study of Galician women also forces us to reassess our assumptions about peasant gender dynamics. Galician society afforded women authority and expected them to use it for a wide array of purposes, both personal and communal. Thus, powerful women, even witches, were not marginalized by local culture but integral to its functioning. Not surprisingly, people (both men and women) did not always like women who exercised authority, but they could not survive without them. The Galician example reveals the weaknesses of both the early modern Catholic Church and the early modern state when they confronted local culture. Although the Catholic Reformation Church worked to bring Spanish parishioners into conformity with Church doctrine, peasant behaviour continued to be inﬂuenced by a variety of other factors, including demography and local culture. Moreover, the Castilian legal system worked to support local gender norms in ways that medieval jurists could never have anticipated. Finally, this study demonstrates the need to consider seriously the role of class in European culture. European peasants were not incompletely

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developed aristocrats. They lived in different worlds, faced different challenges, and had different priorities. Although I do not want to romanticize peasant life, it is clear that peasant women could make choices that were difﬁcult, if not impossible, for elite women ever to make. Peasant women could be pious and celibate, irreverent and sexually active, or even pious and sexually active. Although their possibilities for social and economic mobility were strictly limited, in rural society, peasant women could take many different paths. Nearly two thousand years ago, the Greek geographer Strabo proclaimed that in the north of Spain, ‘it is the custom among [them] for the husbands to give dowries to their wives, for the daughters to be left as heirs, and the brothers to be married off by their sisters. The custom involves, in fact, a sort of woman-rule.’ Although he may have exaggerated the power of Galician women, his words held a grain of truth. Only now, as we look at peasant communities from the inside out, can we see the manifestations of female authority in Galicia. Of course, Galegas knew it all along.

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Index A Corun˜a: city of 28, 34, 49, 62, 67, 108, 121, 133, 148, 150, 161, 172, 218–19, 223, 228 province 24, 36, 37, 73 abortion 240 Advent 131, 241 age at marriage 42, 114, 140, 153 Basque 233 Catalan 237 Extremaduran 241 agriculture 24, 27, 36, 56–7, 67, 102, 193, 229–30, 233, 240 amancebamiento, see cohabitation Andalusia 22, 23, 34, 148, 241 Anne, Saint 100–2 Argentina, see Spanish America aristocracy 7, 25, 28, 48, 63, 68, 245–6 arras 99, 122, 144, 146, 174 art: Flight into Egypt 201 images of matrilineality in 102 image of Saint Liberata 209 see also cruceiros ayuntamiento 170, 232, 236 Baiona 62, 142, 208, 209 baserri 233–6 Basilia, Saint 208, 211 Basque Country 108, 228, 239 Basque women 61 n. 89, 232–6, 245 Benedictines 68 Betanzos 67 betrothals 88, 90, 115, 116 bigamy 33, 34–5, 90, 112–14, 140–1, 151–2, 166–9 blasphemy 110 see also simple fornication Ca´diz 30, 32, 34, 62, 142 Caldero´n de la Barca, Pedro 4 Cantabria 36–7, 49, 83, 143

Cantigas de Santa Marı´a 201 Carmelites 142 cartas de apartamiento 89–93, 95, 96, 107–8, 115, 152, 176, 179 Castile 25, 35, 59, 69, 108, 110, 129, 143 migration to 22, 23, 28, 31, 32, 36, 62, 112, 141, 151, 152, 168, 173, 228 see also Extremadura Castro, Rosalı´a de 226 Catalonia 85 Catalan women 237–40 Catastro de Ensenada 171, 172, 185 Catherine, Saint 187–8 Catholic Church 15, 18–19, 64, 76, 81, 82, 84–5, 93, 96, 104–6, 110–11, 113, 155, 211, 213, 231, 236, 239, 241, 245 see also Virgin Mary; virgin martyrs; and under individual saints Catholic Reformation 5, 18, 84, 89, 109–10, 116, 129, 245 Cervantes y Saavedra, Miguel de 217 chastity 2, 3, 5, 9, 106–7, 213 see also virgin martyrs child support 75–6, 90–3, 95, 107 childlessness 70–1, 126, 127, 156, 166, 173 children 1, 10, 21, 40, 41, 70, 128, 131, 135, 140–1, 153–5, 183, 184, 185–8, 189, 194, 207, 219, 230 child marriages 113–14 and inheritance 44–56, 71, 117, 159, 238 as servants 60–1, 64–6 of clergy 84–5, 234 of single mothers 39, 75–6, 81, 87–8, 90–3, 95, 96, 102, 103, 233 see also godparentage; guardianship; marriage contracts; stepchildren; illegitimacy

268

Index

clothing 63, 66, 72, 120, 122, 125, 141–2, 160, 229 Codex Calixtinus 215 cohabitation 76–7, 79–87, 90, 116, 169, 234, 241 Columba, Saint 225 Comba, Saint 224–5 consanguinity 115 convents 33, 67–9, 120, 143, 163, 173, 183 Co´rdoba 69, 207, 225 Council of Trent 76–7, 89, 96, 113, 116 cruceiros 196–7 Cueva, Juan Mun˜oz de la (bishop of Ourense) 207 daughters 1, 2, 12, 51–4, 76, 81, 83, 85, 95, 97–103, 105, 108, 117, 122–9, 133–4, 139, 159, 162, 183, 186, 187–8, 189, 190, 192, 193–5, 234, 237, 238 see also guardianship; marriage; marriage contracts; mother–daughter relationships daughters-in-law 126, 128, 133, 161, 190 debts 65, 67, 73, 144, 148, 150, 160, 173, 177–8, 180, 181, 182, 235 domestic abuse 147 domestic power 10–12, 244 domestic service/servants 38, 53, 59–67, 79–81, 86, 94, 102, 120, 127, 135, 219, 232, 235 donacio´n entre vivos 55, 60, 69–71, 100, 146–7, 173 dowry 11, 15, 56, 63, 65, 72, 75, 88, 93, 94, 98, 100, 116–29, 134, 138, 144–5, 146, 156, 160, 166, 173, 174, 178, 183–4, 186, 237, 242 Drake, Sir Francis 218–19 drama 2, 7–8, 221 Edict of Faith 224 egalitarian relationships 11, 13–14, 143–4, 158–9, 242 elder care 50, 53, 55, 124, 127, 141, 164, 173, 186–90, 242 endogamy 42, 115, 155 England 7, 41, 59, 104, 214–15 invasion of Galicia 218–19

ermitas 197–8, 207, 210 ethnohistory 14–15, 19–21 Eulalia, Saint 204–5 Euphemia, Saint 208–10 expo´sitos (abandoned children) 88 Extremadura 240–3 farming, see agriculture Feast of the Assumption 199 female celibacy: in the Basque Country 233 in Catalonia 238 in Extremadura 241 rates of 42–3, 153 female-headed households 38–9, 54, 193, 232 Ferrol 62 festivals 172, 199, 231 fishing industry 24, 37, 49, 193, 194 Flanders 141 Flo´rez, Enrique 206–9, 213, 217 folklore 46–7, 54–5, 100–2, 128, 132, 135, 136, 140, 149–50, 165, 170, 187–8, 195–227 folksongs 28, 31, 140 foros 25–6, 218 France 41, 59, 130 n. 81, 201 Franciscans 68 funerals 48, 132, 176, 190–1, 231 Galego (language) 18, 201 galegu¨edad 226 Gallaecians 1, 2 Ga´ndara y Ulloa, Felipe de 220 Genebra, Saint 208 Germana, Saint 208 godparentage 85, 96–8, 155–6, 231 Golden Legend, see Jacobus de Voragine Granada 23, 32 grandchildren 16, 55, 60–1, 128, 133, 138, 160, 161, 183, 188, 189, 190, 191 guardianship of minor children 164, 170, 179–83 Guipuzcoa, see Basque Country gynaecocracy 1 hagiography 204–6, 209, 213–14 harvests 26, 29, 117, 118, 130–1, 150, 158

Index as job for migrants 23, 31–2, 36, 62, 130–1 Holy Family 101, 201–3 honour 1–9, 75, 83, 106–9, 152–3, 234, 245 honour killings 4, 7, 108–9, 152–3, 157 Hoyo, Jero´nimo de 207, 214 humanism 6 illegitimacy 39, 75–6, 85, 87–8, 97–104, 106, 194, 213 Basque 233–4 Catalan 239 Extremaduran 240–1 illness 42, 51, 69, 71, 136, 142, 157, 159, 185, 187, 189, 198, 221, 230, 231 Indies, see Spanish America inheritance 43–55, 61, 63, 71–4, 99, 116–17, 118, 120, 123–7, 133, 138, 144–6, 157, 159, 160, 161, 174, 175, 177, 181, 182, 185, 188, 189, 192, 244 Basque 234–5 Catalan 237–8 Extremaduran 240–1 and migration 29, 38 partible 26, 43–56, 240–1 Inquisition 16–18, 33, 35, 76–82, 86, 112, 113–14, 129–30, 140–1, 151–2, 167–9, 194–5, 200, 213, 221–4, 239 see also under individual crimes Irmandin˜os: revolt of the 25 Italy 71, 141 jail 82 n. 28, 93, 95, 179, 191 James, Saint 196, 200, 215–16 Jesuits 210 Jesus 100–2, 197, 202, 225 Joachim 101 Joseph 101, 204 land 115, 117, 118, 124, 127, 129, 133, 157–8 access to 25, 28, 121 cultivation of 26–7, 56–7, 70, 184, 186, 190

269

ownership 11, 26, 27, 29, 47, 50, 53, 57, 58, 59, 73, 145, 191, 228 poverty of 24 purchases of by women 57–9, 146–9, 174–6, 182 tenure 8, 25 see also inheritance landlessness 28 Lassota von Steblau, Erich 201 latifundia 25 Latin America, see Spanish America law, canon 76 law, Castilian 16, 26, 41, 43–4, 48, 64, 71, 73, 76, 88, 98, 109, 111, 122, 144–5, 147, 157, 173, 237, 245 see also Siete Partidas; Leyes de Toro law, Roman 237 legı´timas 44–5, 48, 55, 66, 117, 121, 177, 187, 189, 242 Lent 131, 229, 241 Leo´n, Fray Luis de 3–4, 6–7 Leyes de Toro 43, 48, 54, 99 n. 97, 116, 122, 145, 147, 174 Liberata, Saint 208–9, 211, 213 linen industry/workers 67 Lisbon 32 literacy 15, 109, 129, 181 litigation 52, 58, 65–6, 88–93, 107–8, 137, 138, 144, 148, 176–9, 192, 234 love 60, 65, 70, 85–7, 104, 111, 113, 126, 147, 154–5, 157, 158, 159, 167, 169, 174, 177, 181, 189, 232 Lugo 31, 33, 36, 38, 42, 44, 50, 87, 95, 114, 117, 143, 148, 152, 164, 203, 216–18, 224, 230 n. 2 Luna, Juan de 217 Lupa, Queen (Reina) 215–16, 218 Luparia, see Lupa Madre Marı´a Antonia 142–3 Madrid 23, 30, 32–3, 61, 69, 112, 168, 222–3 Marcia, Saint 208, 211 Margaret of Antioch, Saint 206 MariCastan˜a 216–18 Marina, Saint 206–8, 210–13 marital fertility 153–4 marital property 118–19, 144–6, 156, 173

270

Index

marriage 4, 12, 112–62, 164, 166, 169, 177, 178, 183, 184, 204, 205, 213, 240–1 see also cohabitation; marriage contracts; marriage promises marriage contracts 16, 19, 119, 121, 124–7, 166, 184, 238 marriage promises 90–3, 116, 177, 234 masculinity 13, 30–1, 134–6, 138–9, 212 masses 55, 60, 64, 73, 173, 190–2 women’s attendance at 231 matriarchy 1–2, 21, 226 matricentricity 12 matrifocality 12 matrilineality 101, 133–4, 139, 160 matrilocal residence 54, 112, 123, 133–4, 139, 162 mayorazgo 48 Medina del Campo 31 mejora 48–55, 58, 60, 74, 117, 121, 123 n. 51, 125, 138, 157–8, 164, 177–8, 183, 185–7, 189, 191, 242 midwives 96, 156, 208 migration: female 36, 59–62, 241–3, 245 male 22–4, 27–40, 49–50, 55, 66, 69, 87–8, 114, 123, 128, 131, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139–43, 144, 147–9, 153, 155, 183, 233, 235, 239, 241–3, 244–5 minifundia 26 Min˜o river 203 miracles 198, 207, 208 Molina, Bartolome´ Sagrario de 207, 216 Molina, Tirso de 221 Mondon˜edo 25, 38, 42, 63, 224 Morales, Ambrosio de 207, 210 moriscos 23, 24, 167 mother–daughter relationship 44, 46–7, 51–3, 81, 99–100, 103–4, 126, 128, 133–4, 142, 154, 183, 186–8, 189, 193–5, 245 see also guardianship; elder care mothers-in-law 126, 128, 131, 134–8, 161 Muslims: conquest of 23 invasion of Galicia by 25, 197, 205, 225 Muxı´a 200–1

naming 205 Nine Sisters from One Birth 208–13 notaries 16, 109, 119, 146, 149, 154, 157, 174, 175, 179, 180 Noya 62, 214 nuns, see convents Oporto 32 orphans 66, 119, 120, 124, 156, 160, 161, 239 see also expo´sitos; guardianship Our Lady of Franqueira 198 Our Lady of the Boat 201 Our Lady of the Ermitas 197–8 Ourense (province and city) 28, 31, 35, 36, 38, 39, 84–5, 90, 92, 93, 94, 95, 97, 102, 104, 105, 106, 110, 112, 115, 119, 120, 121, 122, 151, 155, 156, 161, 164, 168, 173, 196, 197, 199, 202, 205, 207, 210 Pardo Baza´n, Emilia 226 paternal authority, defiance of 211–12 Peru, see Spanish America Philip II 207, 219 Philip III 220 Pilgrim Virgin 201–2 pilgrimage 199, 201, 207, 221, 231 Pita, Marı´a 218–20 poder 176, 190 Pontevedra 49, 141, 142, 190, 201 Poor Clares 67 population density 26 Portugal 11, 20, 23, 29, 32, 133, 134, 139, 151, 210 Portuguese women 105–6, 133, 194 poverty 24, 26–30, 40, 74, 92, 98, 109, 148, 159, 166, 171–3, 181, 185, 192, 242 pregnancy 94–6, 130, 140, 142, 153, 161, 166, 184, 230, 240 preference for daughters 54 priests 63, 110, 129, 130, 131, 234 concubines of 83–5, 92–3, 135, 214, 224, 240 as employers 65, 120 promiscuity 76, 104–6 Protestantism 78, 220

Index

271

pubilla 237–8 Purgatory 73, 172

stepchildren 126, 161 Strabo 1, 2

Quiteria, Saint 208, 211

Talavera de la Reina 31, 34 taxes and rents 25–6, 56, 122, 125, 126, 171, 172, 175, 186, 216–18 testaments and testamentary bequests 15, 44–6, 52, 54, 61, 64, 71–3, 99, 117, 133, 136–7, 141, 145, 154, 157–61, 166, 169, 173, 174, 180, 183, 185, 188, 189–92, 235–6, 242 see also inheritance Toledo 35 Tuy 39, 62, 79, 141, 198, 224

rape 94–5, 209, 234 remarriage 112, 126, 140–1, 151–2, 156, 164–70, 180, 238 remittances 117, 148 reputation 81, 104, 107, 234 Roman Galicia: myths of 206, 208–9, 211–13, 220 Rosmithal, Leon 216 Royal Chancellery Court (Valladolid) 146, 176–7 sailors: wives and widows of 65, 139, 141, 156, 188, 192 saints: devotion to 199, 229, 231 see also under individual saints Sandoval, Fray Prudencio de 208 Santiago de Compostela 28, 39, 50, 58–9, 62, 63, 69, 115, 123, 135, 136, 140, 142, 148, 152, 157, 172, 174, 175, 178, 183, 196, 205, 207, 216, 222–4 serora 236 servants, see domestic service Seville 22, 34, 62, 69, 142, 168, 177, 241, 243 sex ratio 22, 36–7, 39, 42, 49 in the Basque country 235 in Extremadura 240 siblings 45, 47, 52, 58–9, 70, 71, 73, 119, 122, 129, 133, 160–1, 175, 176, 238 Siete Partidas 43, 98, 144, 153, 179–80 silk industry/workers 119 simple fornication 79–82, 94, 110, 129–30, 194–5 sisters-in-law 131, 142, 191 soldiers 209, 215, 218–19 wives and widows of 65, 99, 102, 141, 159, 169, 221 sons-in-law 12, 118, 125, 134–9, 189–90, 191 Spanish America 5, 23, 30, 32, 33–4, 177, 235, 239, 241–3, 245

uxoricide 4, 7, 152–3 see also honour killings uxorilocal residence 123–7, 129, 131, 133, 134, 135 vecinos, see ayuntamiento Villafan˜e, Juan de 197–8 virgin martyrs 204–14, 220 Virgin Mary 100–2, 188, 196–204, 213–14, 224 virginity 75, 87–8, 91–2, 94, 96, 107–8, 122, 199–200, 204–9, 213, 244 virilocal residence 131–2, 239 see also daughters-in-law Vitoria, Saint 208, 211 Vives, Juan Luis 3–4, 6–7 Vizcaya, see Basque Country Voragine, Jacobus de 200, 215 wage labour: as incentive for migration 29, 59, 66 weddings 116, 120, 130–2 widows 38, 39, 59, 71, 81, 119, 122, 163–92, 221, 223, 232 widows of the living (viuvas dos vivos) 38–9, 139–41, 148, 166–9, 187 Wilgefortis, Saint 209 witches and witchcraft 9, 221–5 work: women’s 53, 56–7, 67, 229–30 men’s 27–8, 31–3 see also domestic service