Women and Community in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia ed. by Michelle Armstrong-Partida, Alexandra Guerson and Dana Wessell Lightfoot

Abstract

Reviewed by: Women and Community in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia ed. by Michelle Armstrong-Partida, Alexandra Guerson and Dana Wessell Lightfoot Tatevik Gyulamiryan Armstrong-Partida, Michelle, Alexandra Guerson, and Dana Wessell Lightfoot, editors. Women and Community in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia. U of Nebraska P, 2020. Pp. 288. ISBN 978-1-49620-511-7. Women and Community in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia edited by Michelle Armstrong- Partida, Alexandra Guerson, and Dana Wessell Lightfoot is a compilation of twelve essays looking into the communities of early modern Iberia with a focus on women and their roles. The essays connect to each other through a common thread—women in their respective communities— while also presenting various social, cultural, and political contexts ranging from financial support systems to violence against women to minoritized women’s lives in early modern Iberia. The contributors have carried out notable archival research, and they relate their findings about early modern Iberian women in such an inviting, engrossing way that the reader cannot help but be transported into the era and context due to the vivid pictures of various communities painted by the contributors of the volume. Before presenting the contributors’ pieces, the editors of the collection write in their Introduction, Contextualizing Women, Agency, and Communities in Premodern Iberia, of how they see “similarities and differences across the medieval and early modern period of women influencing, navigating, and managing their roles within their communities, including testing the bonds and limitations of the community within which they operated” (1–2). The volume is consequently divided into three parts, and each part invites readers to explore a different aspect of female agency in the early modern Iberian reality. The first part, Community Networks and Economic Agency, begins with Sarah Ifft Decker’s essay “Credit and Connections: Jewish Women between Communities in Vic, 1250–1350.” The author follows the transactions of a woman named Reina to tell the story of Jewish women creditors who lent money to the people of and around Vic. Natalie Oeltjen researches the lives of several conversas and their families from Mallorca, tracing the fiscal and royal mandates that further complicated converso lives beginning in 1391. Her essay “Challenges Facing Mallorcan Conversas after 1391” is a very intriguing read regarding the systemic oppression that conversos and conversas withstood in all parts of Iberia. Grace Coolidge, in “Death and Gender in Late [End Page 297] Sixteenth-century Toledo,” analyzes the wills of a single woman, a married woman, and a widowed woman, showing how inheritance, rights to dowry, or financial control worked among women in sixteenth-century Toledo. Part 2, Challenging Communal Ties, is a compilation of essays that relate the experience of women who withstood physical violence at the hands of men in their community. The first essay in this section is “Women, Injurious Words, and Clerical Violence in Fourteenth-century Catalunya” by Michelle Armstrong-Partida. The author recounts various instances of clerical beating of women and how such beatings were viewed by women and men of the neighborhood, based on the court reports that Armstrong-Partida consulted. Following this essay is Mark Meyerson’s “Women, Violence, and Community in Late Medieval Valencia,” in which the author discusses the roles of women in violent incidents. What remains unclear to me is the author’s frame of argument—whether Meyerson contends that women incited violent contests of honor, or that women fell victim to violent acts at the hands of men who were following the social construct of “honor” of the time. Next, Alexandra Guerson and Dana Wessell Lightfoot’s “Mixed Marriages and Community Identity in Fifteenth-century Girona” invites the reader into the world of mixed marriages, opening with the 1420 order for men to abandon their spouses of Jewish heritage (132). This interesting essay precedes the concluding essay of this part, Stephanie M. Cavanaugh’s “In Defense of Community: Morisca Women in Sixteenth-century Valladolid,” in which the author illustrates how morisca women came together in “collective legal defense of their community, properties, and shared neighborhood in Valladolid” (152). Part 3, Institutional Relationships and Creating Communities, commences with Mireia Comas Via’s essay titled “Looking for a Way to Survive: Community and Institutional...