Francisco de Osuna's "Norte de los estados" in Modernized Spanish: A Practical Guide to Conjugal Life in Sixteenth-Century Europe ed. by Dana Bultman

Abstract

Reviewed by: Francisco de Osuna's "Norte de los estados" in Modernized Spanish: A Practical Guide to Conjugal Life in Sixteenth-Century Europe ed. by Dana Bultman Elizabeth Rhodes Francisco de Osuna's "Norte de los estados" in Modernized Spanish: A Practical Guide to Conjugal Life in Sixteenth-Century Europe. Edited by Dana Bultman. AMSTERDAM UP / ARC HUMANITIES P, 2019. 360 PP. FRANCISCO DE OSUNA (1492?–1540) was one of several Observant Franciscans who codified their practice of recogimiento, a method of intense self-discipline and affective prayer. He is most known as the author of Tercer abecedario espiritual (1527), the book that Teresa de Ávila identified as her spiritual primer. Dana Bultman here presents another of his prescriptive texts, Norte de los estados, a guide to mid-sixteenth-century Catholic morality for secular men as defined by the male Catholic establishment that Osuna represents. The text is in the form of a dialogue between the author and the character Villaseñor, who stands "en persona de todo mancebo Cristiano" (76). Composed in Spanish, the treatise was first published in 1531 and appeared only twice again, in 1541 and 1550. Bultman attributes the book's failure to endure to its author's endorsement of relatively liberal views about marital behavior, views censored in Spain in the late 1500s. The fact that the author expresses overt support of the Franciscan nun Magdalena de la Cruz (1487–1560) in his treatise was perhaps another reason why his book met with limited publishing success, since Magdalena, who claimed to have had revelations and the stigmata, was discredited in 1546. The map of Francisco de Osuna's travels with which the book opens provides evidence of his itinerant life, which traced a triangle whose far points are Santiago de Compostela, Tripoli, and Antwerp. Opening her sixty-one-page introduction, Bultman provides a synopsis of the author's life and influence, detailing his military career, his subsequent education, and his residence in the spiritual hotbed in Escalona (Toledo) from 1526–28, where illuminists mingled with other reform-minded types such as Juan de Valdés (1509–41). Bultman follows a helpful review of other scholarly readings of the text with a detailed summary of its contents, but readers should not use that summary as an excuse to skip the text itself. In her introduction, she notes that Francisco de Osuna relied on Church fathers for many of his ideas, often [End Page 151] glossing Augustine's On the Good of Marriage and On Holy Virginity. Bultman characterizes the treatise as a reformist Catholic response to Protestantism for its emphasis on the sacramental nature of marriage and points to the author's high regard for monastic virtues such as chastity. I am less convinced than she that "Osuna's model of marriage was well outside the views that were later to become dominant in the Catholic Church" (2). His defense of women's inheritance rights and their subject status in the context of certain activities, such as their control of the household, might be considered moderately liberal. However, since Luis de León's La perfecta casada of 1583 takes a similar position on those topics, it is not clear that Osuna's ideas about marriage were later repressed, and cautious readers might not affirm their liberal slant in the first place. Although he defines the house as the wife's domain, he also states that her husband has the right to beat her behind its closed doors. More convincing is Bultman's insistence on the importance of monastic morality that clergymen such as Francisco de Osuna attempted to impose on secular Catholics, noting not only the twelve-chapter rulebook for married couples in the text, chapters that mimic those of the Franciscan rule itself, but also the text's insistence on the analogy of the married state to other sacred relationships, such as that of Christ to the Church. A two-page list of chapters precedes the edited text, making it easy to identify the embedded nondialogic sections, which, being long, anagogical lectures, make for slow reading. Those include a sermon for weddings, a rulebook for the good marriage, a sermon against adultery, a sermon...