Women's Webs of Dialogic Poetry in Early Modern Spain

Abstract

Since the publication of anthologies such as Julian Olivares’s and Elizabeth S. Boyce’s Tras el espejo la musa escribe (1993) and Teresa Soufas’s Women’s Acts (1997), women who wrote within the lyrical tradition of Spain’s Golden Age have claimed their long-overdue place in both classrooms and literary canons. While it is no secret that male writers dominated the early modern secular literary scene, a definitive body of critical evidence now attests to the presence of many women who left their cultural mark and are only now being rediscovered.2 Nowhere is this revaluation more convincingly argued than in Lisa Vollendorf’s The Lives of Women: A New History of Inquisitional Spain. By dismantling the longstanding assumption that women had only two limiting, passive “career” options as they entered adulthood— convent or conjugality—Vollendorf demonstrates that women found ways to intellectually and socially advance even within those two realms. In many cases, this entailed a writing vocation or minimally, a basic desire to write. These writings now demonstrate that these “alternate” livelihoods were tangential to the notion of women’s education and women as bearers and disseminators of knowledge as teachers, tutors, or advisers (Vollendorf 190). The possibility that women transmitted an awareness of womanhood through their writing would have been one way for them to engage in meaningful dialogues with their readers.