Her Father's Daughter: Gender, Power, and Religion in the Early Spanish Kingdoms by Lucy K. Pick

Abstract

Reviewed by: Her Father's Daughter: Gender, Power, and Religion in the Early Spanish Kingdoms by Lucy K. Pick Miriam Shadis Her Father's Daughter: Gender, Power, and Religion in the Early Spanish Kingdoms. By Lucy K. Pick. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. 2017. Pp. xvi, 274. $65.00. ISBN 978-1-5017-1432.0.) With the publication of Her Father's Daughter, scholars of history and of religion can no longer ignore the crucial role of royal women in shaping the political worlds of the Middle Ages. In her study of the formation of the Christian realms of northern Iberia, Lucy Pick joins a growing group of scholars rethinking the notion that any medieval woman with power—and particularly political authority—was "exceptional." Pick has mastered a significant historiography pertaining to medieval gender, monarchy, and religion, and a chastening array of feminist and cultural theory to reinterpret the roles of some inarguably powerful women. Religious roles were their sources of power as women participated in political systems and kinship networks. In 1071, Urraca Fernández, the oldest child of Fernando I and Sancha of León re-founded the see of Túy, which had suffered Viking depredations. Why and how did Urraca, a consecrated virgin, have the power and authority to accomplish this? Urraca's action, recorded in an extraordinary charter, serves as a touchstone in Pick's study about the gendered features of political and religious power and authority in tenth and eleventh-century Iberia. Four lengthy chapters, as well as an introduction and epilogue make a strong case. Pick begins by examining matrilineal inheritance and the inheritance principles of Visigothic law. Royal daughters were reserved for the help and status they could supply their male relatives. These consecrated virgins were neither nuns nor abbesses: neither cloistered nor poor, they moved freely and effectively in the political world, controlling numerous monastic communities. Women's appearances in tenth- and eleventh-century charters prove their significant networks. Pick walks the reader through the structure and meaning of these remarkable charters: the protocols, the invocations, the probable singing and performance of these texts—and the networks revealed by the confirmants and witnesses, providing a veritable clinic in how to read a charter. A brilliant reading of Urraca Fernández's 1071 charter restoring the see of Túy demonstrates its extremely special relationship to liturgy, to performance, and to Christian texts such as Paul Albar's carmina. The charter expressed Urraca's power within her family and within Galicia, where she controlled significant property. Urraca and [End Page 142] her sister Elvira exercised their spiritual power as women, collaborated with their brother, Alfonso VI of León-Castilla, and built the networks which they carefully displayed and exploited, and they were not alone. Elite women such as Elvira Ramírez, Abbess Guntroda Gutiérrez, and Countess Muniadomna prefigure the activity of Urraca and Elvira, even a century and a half earlier (p. 123), as they competed over the relics of the virgin martyr Pelayo and the introduction of and control of his cult in northwestern Iberia. Finally, "Gift-giving and memory" were "always allied to power" (p. 19). Pick's fluent engagement with material culture is couched in a sophisticated analysis of scholarship on the medieval gift and counter-gift. Royal daughters were "at the nexus of memory, gift, and death" (p. 175), as a kind of gift themselves, but also charged with giving, preserving memory, and caring for the dead. In possibly the most enjoyable section of the book, Pick carefully reads a variety of artifacts, from the bronze candelabra of Abbess Mathilda of Essen to the reliquary of Saints Adrian and Natalia, now at the Art Institute of Chicago, which Pick persuasively identifies as Urraca's gift to Eslonza (pp. 186–188.) The theme of virginity is pursued as an analytical tool—these reliquary boxes and other containers physically represented donors' virginity. Similar claims are developed throughout the book: from Ambrose, to Leander, to Urraca's charter, to the foundation of San Martiño de Pazó, the aula regis puderis, the "royal hall of chastity" repeatedly frames and articulates the connection between virginity, gender, and royalty (pp...