Perfect Wives, Other Women: Adultery and Inquisition in Early Modern SpainDuke University Press, 13. veebr 2001 - 328 pages In Perfect Wives, Other Women Georgina Dopico Black examines the role played by women’s bodies—specifically the bodies of wives—in Spain and Spanish America during the Inquisition. In her quest to show how both the body and soul of the married woman became the site of anxious inquiry, Dopico Black mines a variety of Golden Age texts for instances in which the era’s persistent preoccupation with racial, religious, and cultural otherness was reflected in the depiction of women. Subject to the scrutiny of a remarkable array of gazes—inquisitors, theologians, religious reformers, confessors, poets, playwrights, and, not least among them, husbands—the bodies of perfect and imperfect wives elicited diverse readings. Dopico Black reveals how imperialism, the Inquisition, inflation, and economic decline each contributed to a correspondence between the meanings of these human bodies and “other” bodies, such as those of the Jew, the Moor, the Lutheran, the degenerate, and whoever else departed from a recognized norm. The body of the wife, in other words, became associated with categories separate from anatomy, reflecting the particular hermeneutics employed during the Inquisition regarding the surveillance of otherness. Dopico Black’s compelling argument will engage students of Spanish and Spanish American history and literature, gender studies, women’s studies, social psychology and cultural studies. |
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Page 14
... conduct literature of the sort that flourished throughout sixteenth- century Europe either helped prompt or was itself prompted by this possibility hardly seems debatable . But it draws attention to the central paradox of prescriptive ...
... conduct literature of the sort that flourished throughout sixteenth- century Europe either helped prompt or was itself prompted by this possibility hardly seems debatable . But it draws attention to the central paradox of prescriptive ...
Page 17
... conduct manuals and adultery - honor plays written in the period is staggering ; even citing only the most canonical examples of each renders a sizable corpus . Among the better - known conduct manuals dedicated to wives , for instance ...
... conduct manuals and adultery - honor plays written in the period is staggering ; even citing only the most canonical examples of each renders a sizable corpus . Among the better - known conduct manuals dedicated to wives , for instance ...
Page 20
... conduct literature rests . This brings us to what is no doubt the most crucial question that emerges from reading the wifely conduct manuals beside the wife- murder plays to what is , in many respects , the most vexing question of all ...
... conduct literature rests . This brings us to what is no doubt the most crucial question that emerges from reading the wifely conduct manuals beside the wife- murder plays to what is , in many respects , the most vexing question of all ...
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accident adultery aligned analogy anxieties argue baroque bien blood buena Calderón casa Castaño Christ comedia conduct manuals containment converso cosmetic Counter Reformation Covarrubias cross-dressing Cruz cuerpo cultural dagger desire Dios discourses early modern Spain empeños Enrique esto eucharistic female body feminine Fray Luis Fray Luis's gender Gutierre Gutierre's hand hermeneutic Hispanic hombre honor dramas honor plays honra Howard Bloch husband illegibility Inquisition inquisitorial inscribes interpretation italics Juan legibility lengua Leonor limpieza de sangre literal Luis de León Madrid makeup male marital marriage married means médico Mencía's Mencía's body metaphor Mexico misogyny Morisco mujer nombres de Cristo palabras passage Pedro perfect wife perfecta casada perhaps problematic pues question ramera reading relation Renaissance rhetoric sacrament semiotic sense sexual sino somatic Sor Juana Inés sort Spanish specifically suggests Tesoro textual threat tion trans transgression Translation transubstantiation transvestism treatise University Press vida wife's body wives woman women words