Saintly models: Isabel la Católica and the commissioning of a flos sanctorum

Abstract

One of the Castilian collections of saints’ lives, or santorales, derived in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries from Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda aurea was commissioned c. 1488 by Queen Isabel I of Castile. The process out of which Esc MS h‐II‐18 was born and its particularities, which often render it distinct from the other extant santorales, impel us to question the extent to which Isabel may have had input into the structural unity of the santoral, remodelling it according to her own designs. This study suggests that Esc MS h‐II‐18 mirrors the ideological imperatives that marked its patron’s rule and that the representation of female saints in the collection is closely bound up with the gender ideology of which Isabel was at once agent and subject – fashioning herself and being depicted by those around her as an exemplary figure who would satisfy the needs of Spain, a model for women in contemporary society but, like the female saints in the hagiographic work, a safe exception, set apart from the general rule for others of her sex.