The King Is Dead

On July 8, 1454, just two weeks before his passing, Juan II dictated his last will and testament in Valladolid.⁸ Arévalo, along with Soria and the towns of Madrigal and Tordesillas, was confirmed as belonging to Juan II’s wife in order to provide for her support, while Cuéllar went to his daughter, Isabel, and the Maestrazgo de Santiago to his son, Alfonso.⁹ Reflecting his trust in his wife, the king made her responsible for the upbringing of their children, to be aided by the Dominican friar and bishop Lope de Barrientos and the Hieronymite chaplain Gonzalo de Illescas. For all matters relating to the upbringing of Alfonso she was also to consult with Juan de Padilla, the Prefect of Castile (Adelantado Mayor), while her household was placed under the supervision of the bishop of Lugo.¹⁰ In Juan II’s own words,

I command that the said queen, My wife, be the guardian and administrator of the said princes Lord Alfonso and Lady Isabel, My children and theirs, and of their goods, until the said Prince is fourteen years old, and the said Princess, twelve years old, and that she rule and administer them with the agreement and advice of the said Bishops of Cuenca and Prior fray Gonzalo, My confessors, and My Council. And I want and command that the said Princes, My children, be raised in that place and places ordered by the Queen, My very dear and beloved wife.¹¹

Juan II specified that the queen could stay with her children “if she remains in my kingdoms, and maintains her chastity, and not under any other conditions.”¹² That is to say, she could not return to her native Portugal, and remarriage was not an option. Such restrictions were typical of men’s wills of the time and meant that women who remarried did so at the price of losing their children. Only a generation earlier, Juan II’s mother, Catalina of Lancaster, had also been asked by her husband to remain a chaste widow as a precondition to becoming co-regent of Castile until her son’s coming of age. As a widow, Isabel had sufficient resources to support herself and her children, but while she enjoyed a certain prestige as queen dowager, she had no specific role at the royal court, given that she was not the mother of the new king. And so, with little reason to remain at court, she withdrew.

Medieval and early modern moralists, whether secular or religious, typically divided a woman’s life into three stages: virginity, marriage, and widowhood. Which is to say, a woman’s life was determined by her relationship with men and was grounded in her familial and reproductive roles. Generally, scholars have credited medieval widows with considerable agency. Widows were free of direct masculine supervision, although in many cases, they had to endure pressure from other male family members; they could, however, control their deceased husband’s estate and serve as guardian for their children. Theologians, such as Eiximenis, even wrote that men “endeavor to tyrannize women,” reflecting a clear link between marriage and subjugation. Eiximenis did not recommend remarriage for widows.¹³

In general, theologians insisted that the death of a husband should be seen as an opportunity for the widow to return to a life of chastity, and to regain a sort of virginal status. This recommendation survived the transition from the Middle Ages to the early modern period, not only in new editions of Eiximenis’s works, but also through those of the Valencian humanist Joan Lluís Vives (1493–1540), who was familiar with the writings of the Catalan Franciscan. In his The Instruction of a Christian Woman (De institutione feminae christianae; 1523), Vives also discouraged widows from remarriage, and praised widowhood as a virtuous state in which one could focus on serving God. These ideas certainly remained current in the sixteenth century. Hence, the Jesuit Gaspar Astete (1537–1601) also advised widows not to remarry, although he was more flexible with young women, who, he suggested, should wait at least a year before taking a new husband.¹⁴ Likewise, texts like The Perfect Wife (La perfecta casada; 1583) by the Augustinian scholar Fray Luís de León (1527–91), and the bishop (later, saint) Francisco Salas’s (1567–1622) Introduction to the Devout Life (Introducción a la vida devota; 1608), take the same position. The musings of male moralists aside, widows needed to carefully safeguard their reputation. Because they were free from direct male supervision, widows were seen as potentially promiscuous and a danger to public morals, and were vulnerable to potentially disastrous gossip.¹⁵

There were also laws regulating widowhood. Alfonso X’s Fourth Partida (law 3, title 12) cites Saint Paul’s view as expressed in Corinthians 7:39 that a wife is only tied to her husband while married, but nevertheless stipulates that a widow must remain chaste and unmarried for at least a year or lose her wedding goods (arras) and everything that was left to her in her husband’s will. Enrique III suspended this law in 1400 in response to the Black Death and the consequent demographic crisis of the late fourteenth century, thereby bringing the laws of Castile in line with canon law and the fueros of Aragon on this issue.¹⁶ Laws in Catalonia and Valencia, however, resembled the Partidas, and required widows to go through “the year of tears” (l’any de plor) before remarrying. That said, the law is one thing and custom another; thus, even in those kingdoms that eliminated the statutory year of mourning, the expectation remained that a widow should grieve for at least six months, and it should be clear before remarriage that she was not carrying a posthumous child. In addition, a widow who opted to remarry would forfeit her arras and lose any claim to her previous husband’s inheritance (which would pass per stirpes to their common children), although she could recover her dowry.¹⁷ Men of means, and kings in particular, often tried to limit their widow’s autonomy (or protect their interests) by appointing members of the nobility, the Church, or the royal family as wards in common, who shared the responsibility of caring for the surviving children.

In sum, Isabel of Portugal’s case exemplifies the limitations and possibilities that a queen consort faced when her husband died, particularly when she was not the mother of the heir. In such cases, dowagers needed to advocate for their otherwise vulnerable children—who constituted a latent political threat to the new king –but they themselves were seen as dispensable and could be disposed of by the new ruler at little cost. Thus, when Juan II died, Isabel was a twenty-five-year-old dowager with no role to play at court, and she, her mother, and her children moved to her castle in Arévalo (in the province of Ávila, in Castile), her preferred residence for the remaining forty-two years of her life.

Infirm and Vulnerable

Both Isabel and her illness appear in contemporary chronicles, but only obliquely. For example, although Hernando del Pulgar mentions Isabel on several occasions, it is usually to use her as a device for praising her daughter (and his patroness), the Catholic Queen. Isabel I is presented as a deeply attentive daughter who stayed close to and protected her ailing mother: “the Queen, her mother, who had been ill since the time of the lord-king, Juan, her husband died.”¹⁸ On another occasion he is more explicit regarding the elder Isabel’s condition: “The king, lord Juan, having died, the queen, lady Isabel, his wife, felt such great pain at the death of her husband, that she fell into a sickness so grave and long that she was never able to recover.”¹⁹

In The History of the Catholic Kings, Lord Fernando and Lady Isabel (Historia de los Reyes Católicos Don Fernando y Doña Isabel), the chaplain and chronicler Andrés Bernáldez (d. 1513) referred to Isabel as follows: “the Queen, our lady, whose father died when she was a girl, and for all intents and purposes the mother, too, which for children is no small misfortune.”²⁰ For his part, Lorenzo Galíndez de Carvajal (d. 1568) says that Isabel of Portugal “was hurt (estaba doliente) by the death of her husband, the lord-king, Juan.”²¹ The humanist Lucio Marineo Siculo (d. 1533) noted that Juan’s passing caused Isabel “great emotion and tears, and exhausting herself in this excessive crying, she fell into a most serious illness, as much of her body as of her mind, which left her unwell.”²² A contemporary romance noticiero, or “news-bearing ballad,” called “I Am the Dowager Queen” (“Yo me soy la reina viuda”), and identified by Francisco Asenjo Barbieri and Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo as referring to Isabel of Portugal, also describes the queen’s health. In the ballad, the dowager appears in transition from a life of joys to one of sorrow:

As noted, the way we express grief and react to loss is culturally conditioned and can take a multiplicity of forms that are further influenced by other factors, such as gender construction and social status. Sorrow is intertwined with materiality and performativity, and it is highly ritualized. This excerpt seems to indicate that Isabel’s sadness was well known at court and beyond, to the point that it made its way into popular verse. Isabel, it seems, was proceeding through her own stages of grief, but not necessarily arriving at the stage of acceptance. Of course, in any case, acceptance of reality does not mean that one has necessarily stopped suffering. In Isabel’s era, diagnosis of her condition would indicate that her humors were out of balance and that she was suffering from melancholy. Even accounting for contemporary misogynous stereotypes regarding women’s supposed propensity for emotional excess, it is clear that her contemporaries considered her grief disproportionate. Nevertheless, while writing during the reign of her daughter, Isabel I, chroniclers had to tread this subject carefully—Isabel of Portugal had to be presented in some way as a model for her daughter, and her image could not be tarnished in a way that would discredit or undermine the royal family.

On the other hand, the chronicle of Galíndez de Carvajal (d. ca. 1528) recounts in detail an episode that is only briefly mentioned by others, but is very relevant to Isabel’s state of mind as a widow. Immediately after Juan II died, the queen sought refuge in Arévalo. Two months later, Enrique and his men came to visit her. The king wanted Isabel’s help in arranging his second marriage to Juana of Portugal, the sister of Afonso V—who was Isabel’s cousin. In other words, although she had no role at the Castilian court, her status and family connections remained important. Enrique stayed in Arévalo until January 1455—a visit of four months. One of the men who accompanied him was Pedro Girón Acuña Pacheco (1423–66), Master of the Order of Calatrava (1445–66), Juan Pacheco’s brother and the nephew of Alfonso Carrillo Acuña, Archbishop of Toledo. At that point—and until Beltrán de la Cueva replaced him in 1461– Juan Pacheco was Enrique’s favorite and most trusted friend and adviser. In their youth, Pacheco and Girón had been recruited by Álvaro de Luna to serve the infante Enrique, but eventually pursued their own ambitions, forsaking their early protector.²⁴

Galíndez de Carvajal explains that while in Arévalo, Pedro Girón behaved in an inappropriate manner toward the grief-stricken queen, who was—illness notwithstanding—a very beautiful twenty-six-year-old woman:²⁵

There he began to act dishonorably with the Queen, and since she regretted this and felt much abused, and was truly good, and was in the grips of pain and sadness due to the passing of her husband, the king, she became very withdrawn, and from that point forward she withdrew even more, such that she would not talk to either the king, the master, or any other person, except for a few of her own people whom she trusted.²⁶

The episode also appears in the Spanish Deeds (Gesta hispaniensia), or Decades (Décadas), by the humanist historian Alfonso Fernández de Palencia (ca. 1492):

Meanwhile, the master of Calatrava, D. Pedro Girón, instigated by the King, and with the greatest impudence, because modesty was banished from that court, made an attempt against the honor of the widowed queen who, after her husband’s death, was locked up in a dark room and condemned to voluntary silence, lived dominated by such sorrow that already was degenerating into a kind of madness. The King favored as much as he could the iniquitous purpose; but he did not go beyond the courage of those who conceived her, and the chastity and virtue of that lady remained free of any suspicion.²⁷

Palencia revisited this story, saying that Girón’s intentions were to marry the dowager queen, something the chronicler considered outrageous, given that a nobleman like Girón should never have dreamt of marrying a dowager of Castile who was so far above him in station.

Indeed, it was very rare for a medieval dowager queen with children to consider remarriage—although, as we will see in the remaining chapters, this became common generations later, as the experiences of Isabel of Portugal’s granddaughters and great-granddaughters demonstrate. The chilling passages in Galíndez de Carvajal and Palencia seem to imply that Girón sexually assaulted the queen, who was secluded and overcome by grief to the point that Palencia qualified her condition as “madness” (locura). If true, Girón’s abuse would certainly have aggravated her condition.

Today, such an “attempt against a woman’s honor” would be qualified as sexual assault, and the aftereffects would likely be diagnosed as rape trauma syndrome (RTS), which is associated with “feelings of shame, guilt, anxiety or depression,” and as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).²⁸ Nowadays, PTSD is diagnosed if symptoms of intense psychological distress persist for more than a month after the traumatic event. In any case, recovery does not imply that the survivor forgets the experience or that symptoms will never recur. As Kaitlin Chivers-Wilson notes, when PTSD occurs as a consequence of sexual assault there is “mental defeat and confusion, negative appraisal of emotions and symptoms, avoidance and perceived negative responses from others.”²⁹ Again, obviously, this is not how Palencia could describe the queen, given that none of these terms were used in the Middle Ages, and, as Wendy Turner observes, we cannot “diagnose medieval health complaints using terminology of today.”³⁰ What Palencia says is that the queen “felt very bad” (se sintió muy mal), abandoned the world (mundo exterior), and locked herself up alone. She was, in Palencia’s words, “in a dark room, condemned to voluntary silence, weighed down by such suffering, and descending into a type of madness.”³¹

This disturbing episode can be analyzed on different levels. On the one hand, it shows that Isabel of Portugal’s situation as a dowager was so unstable that she was at risk of being sexually assaulted in her own house in the company of her mother, her children, and her entourage. It seems plausible that Enrique IV was willing to entertain an inequitable marriage between one of his closest noblemen and his stepmother—or even worse, he may have even been somehow complicit in the attack in an attempt to breach her chastity, and therefore compromise her status as dowager and deprive her of custody of her children. As the documentation bears out, in late medieval Castile accusations of sexual misconduct against women, particularly adultery, could have lethal consequences. Even the “Laws of Toro,” promulgated in 1505 under the reign of Juana I, did not forbid a husband from killing an adulterous wife or her lover, but merely noted that were the killing committed in absence of a sentence from the royal court, he would not be entitled to either his wife’s dowry or her property.³²

Enrique IV had his own problems. On May 11, 1453, he had his marriage to Blanca, the queen of Navarre, annulled, claiming in the certificate of annulment that after thirteen years their relationship had never been consummated, and that Blanca was still “an uncorrupted virgin.”³³ The king’s impotence was blamed on witchcraft. On December 20, 1453, while at Arévalo with his dowager stepmother, the once-again-eligible Enrique finalized his plans to marry Afonso V’s sister, the Portuguese infanta Joana.³⁴ The marriage took place on May 21, 1455, in Córdoba; but after the wedding the king eschewed the ceremonial “public coitus” that had been customary among his newly married predecessors. The fact that he did not allow witnesses into the bedchamber to observe the physical consummation of his marriage left him open to further whisperings of sexual incapacity, and cast suspicions on the legitimacy of the daughter, Juana, whom his new wife bore him seven years later. The vengeful ex-favorite Juan Pacheco would turn this gossip into political capital when he claimed that the new favorite, Beltrán de la Cueva, was the princess’s true father.³⁵ These rumors, which would cost Juana “la Beltraneja” (1462–1530) her birthright and propel Isabel the Catholic to the throne, were undoubtedly magnified by the comportment of Enrique’s queen. Banished from court, Juana of Portugal was placed in the household of Archbishop Juan Rodríguez de Fonseca, only to begin an adulterous affair with the prelate’s nephew, which led to the birth of two illegitimate sons, Andrés and Pedro.

Enrique’s reputation was sealed. In 1494 the German traveler Hieronymous Münzer, who diarized his journey through the Iberian Peninsula, including his audience with the Catholic Kings, reported Enrique’s impotence and sterility, together with the unsuccessful measures taken by his doctors to overcome it, and the role Juana of Portugal’s reputation had played in undermining her daughter’s claim to the throne. Münzer concurs that the king’s impotence with Blanca was caused by witchcraft, but notes that with Juana the problem was that the king “had a member small and weak in the root, but large on the end with the result it could not stand up.” He continued:

His physicians constructed a golden tube which the queen introduced into her womb to see if she could receive his semen by this means, a thing which proved impossible. They masturbated him, and sperm came out, but it was watery and sterile. Taking this into account, the nobles of the realm began to support his sister Isabel, in case she should survive her brother. The queen gave birth to lady Juana, but the nobles did not recognize her as the daughter of the king, because of the suspicions of adultery they had of the queen.³⁶

As a consequence of the doubts about Princess Juana’s parentage, Enrique’s half-siblings, Alfonso and Isabel, who were living in Arévalo under the tutelage of their mother and grandmother, were seen by many as the future heirs of Castile, and therefore constituted a direct threat to the king and his authority. Provoking the dowager into losing her independence and reputation by accusing her of breaching her chastity, or remarrying her to one of his trusted men, would have been an effective strategy for depriving Alfonso and Isabel of their protector. A marriage to Pedro Girón would have separated the dowager queen from her children and increased Enrique’s ability to control his half-siblings, and therefore his succession.

In fact, Enrique IV would deploy this strategy again years later, when he tried to marry the same Pedro Girón to the young infanta Isabel and the future queen of Castile, to ensure that she remained well guarded and to guarantee her loyalty and that of her younger brother, Alfonso.³⁷ Both siblings had been fighting against Enrique in support of Alfonso’s succession, when the monarch replaced Pacheco with Beltrán de la Cueva as his favorite.³⁸ This plan, however, came to nothing. Girón died in 1466 on his way to his wedding with Isabel, prompting many to say that he had been poisoned. Isabel, for her part, would secretly marry Fernando of Aragon in 1469 against the wishes of her stepbrother and his allies.

Given all of this, even though it is all but beyond doubt that Isabel of Portugal did indeed suffer some sort of psychological indisposition at the time—whether melancholy or what we would now call “complicated grief”—it is possible, as Cristina Segura Graíño has proposed, that the dowager and her entourage may have deliberately exaggerated her “poor health” as a way of protecting her from any proposal of marriage that would deprive her of her children.³⁹ Or it may be that as a consequence of the Girón affair, Enrique witnessed firsthand that his stepmother was truly indisposed, and as a result reconsidered his options altogether. At least that is what came to pass. After this attempt, Isabel of Portugal was never again pressured to remarry.

After Enrique IV’s marriage to Juana of Portugal, a long seven years passed until the birth of their daughter, Juana, in 1462. The suspicion of illegitimacy notwithstanding, Princess Juana would eventually battle Isabel the Catholic for the throne of Castile. No doubt anticipating such an event, Enrique had forced his half-siblings, Isabel and Alfonso, to leave their mother and move to his court just before the birth of his own child. As we shall see in chapter 8, this move foreshadows the fate Isabel de Portugal’s granddaughter, Juana I of Castile, would suffer many years later, in 1525. During Juana’s confinement, her daughter and companion, Catalina of Austria, was taken away from her on orders of her son, Carlos V, who married the latter to João III of Portugal (1521–57).

Parting from her children must have been difficult for Isabel of Portugal, as the closeness of their relationship is well attested. The most poignant of these testimonials is probably the 1469 marriage agreement between Fernando and Isabel. In that document, the future Catholic Queen strives to ensure that her betrothed will treat her mother with the respect and honor she deserves. Fernando, it reads, should show “all the respect and veneration and affectionate honor [due to her] as mother and lady, the illustrious and excellent lady, Queen Isabel, mother of the lady-princess.”⁴⁰ In addition, the document specified that Fernando would fight for the return of the towns and income that Enrique IV had taken away from his mother-in-law when he was trying to drain Princess Isabel’s resources as they fought for succession to the throne. This was necessary because in 1469 Enrique officially granted the town of Arévalo to Álvaro de Estúñiga, Count of Plasencia, who had already taken possession of the place a year earlier.⁴¹ In the official document, dated September 28, 1469, in which he dispossessed his stepmother, Enrique justified his actions by saying that Isabel of Portugal’s “sickness and disposition” left her incapable of supporting him in war and in peace as her vassalage required.⁴² Nevertheless, he kept his manners, referring to Isabel of Portugal “my dear and most beloved, my Lady and mother.”⁴³ An indignant and obviously upset princess Isabel wrote Enrique a long letter in response on October 12, 1469, in which she specifically complained about his actions against her mother, which she noted would aggravate the dowager’s pain and isolation. “Depriving any part of all [Arévalo] from the Lady Queen,” she maintained, was

in detriment of justice, and in oppression of her widowhood, and in augmentation of her pain and solitude, and in contempt of the bones and name of the most enlightened Lord King Don Juan, father of your Highness and mine.⁴⁴

But Enrique’s deprivation of Isabel of Portugal’s estates was not unjustified. As Diana Pelaz Flores notes, during Isabel and Fernando’s war against Enrique, Isabel of Portugal drafted a document in which she qualified her daughter and son-in-law as “princes” or “rulers” of Castile (Príncipes de Castilla), thus giving legitimacy to their cause.⁴⁵ In any case, the dowager did not recover the town until years later, when in 1480 Isabel I forced the Count of Plasencia to return Arévalo, in exchange for the lordship of Benquerencia, Magacela, and Castilnovo, the County of Bañares, and the Duchy of Plasencia.⁴⁶ This was of no small importance, given that, as Francisco de Paula Cañas Gálvez has noted, the dowager was actively involved in the administration of her lands, which included Soria, Arévalo, and Madrigal de las Altas Torres, and in promoting her own officials and servants.⁴⁷ Although she preferred Arévalo for her retirement, Isabel is also documented as residing at other locations, most frequently at nearby Madrigal, where she moved after Arévalo had been taken from her.⁴⁸

The death of her mother, Isabel de Barcelos, in 1465, left the dowager even more alone. The chronicler Palencia lamented her mother’s death, noting that the elder Isabel had been a great help in the context of “the increasing madness of her daughter caused by the death of her spouse [Enrique],” while Galíndez de Carvajal said that with Barcelos’s passing, Isabel of Portugal lost a valuable supporter. Isabel de Barcelos “was great help and provided consolation for the Dowager Queen, her daughter.”⁴⁹

As for her children, the dowager kept in contact once they had escaped Enrique’s control. For example, Isabel appeared in the company of her son during his short tenure as “monarch” after the “Farce (farsa) of Ávila,” when, on June 5, 1465, a group of noblemen symbolically deposed Enrique IV and acclaimed Alfonso King of Castile. Later, Isabel is recorded as being with her daughter and her family when they came to visit her. Isabel and Fernando are documented as staying at Arévalo on several occasions, either together or independently.⁵⁰ These visits were significant enough to be recorded even in later texts, including chronicles and didactic works aimed at augmenting Isabel the Catholic’s reputation as just and virtuous for future generations of readers on the basis of her affection for and dedication to her mother. For instance, the anonymous Franciscan writer who expanded Eiximenis’s Book of Women, mentions the mother and daughter, noting how

the household of the Lady-Queen [the dowager Isabel of Portugal] was well-stocked and served; the Catholic Kings, Don Hernando and Doña Ysabel, went there on many occasions, with the prince Don Juan and with the princesses, their daughters, to see the Lady-Queen. And this I was told by those who saw it with their own eyes: that when she was there at Arévalo visiting her mother, she herself personally served her mother at table. Let children take note of this.⁵¹

Late in life Isabel undoubtedly suffered from the typical maladies of aging. She died on July 14, 1496, aged sixty-seven—a venerable age for a woman in this era. By contrast, her daughter, Isabel, would not live beyond fifty-three, and her son, Alfonso, died prematurely at age fifteen. The humanist chronicler and diplomat Pietro Martire d’Anghiera (Pedro Mártir de Anglería; 1457–1526) noted that she died “consumed and exhausted by old age,” while the writer Melchor de Santa Cruz de Dueñas (d. 1585) reflected on how beloved she was and that “although she died very old, she was well mourned.”⁵² As was customary in testaments, Isabel specifically stated that her body was sick, but not her mind, and that her senses remained as when God had made her: “being as I am sick in body, but in judgment and natural faculties just as God wanted to give me.”⁵³ This was an important declaration, given her reputation for mental instability. On her death, she was laid to rest provisionally until she could be transferred to a monumental star-shaped sepulcher, and laid next to her husband, and close to her son, in the charterhouse of Miraflores a few miles east of Burgos (fig. 2).⁵⁴

The Making of a Myth: The Afterlife of Isabel of Portugal

Death may mark the end of one’s worldly life, but it is the beginning of an afterlife—one in which salvation or damnation may or may not come at the hands of an eternal God, but will inevitably come as the living establish the legacy and cement the memory and reputation of the deceased. Death, then, is the moment in which it becomes impossible to control our own narrative. As it happens, Isabel of Portugal had a remarkably robust afterlife, particularly during the short reign but long life of her granddaughter, Juana I, queen of Castile, as well as in the centuries that followed, as her image and reputation were distorted to fit the popular and pious narrative in which she had been placed. Isabel, in her illness, was considered not only a precedent for Juana the Mad’s psychological afflictions, but also an emotional type, consumed first by jealousy, then by grief, in relation to her royal husband. Whereas devotion and fidelity in wives were seen as virtuous, jealousy was not. As a mid-fifteenth-century marriage manual stated, jealous wives “are always sad and overly restrained, … they make their husbands suffer and make them aggressive, … they cannot keep or manage their estates as they should.”⁵⁵

Other than the melancholy that followed the birth of her children and her assault, and the intense grief she experienced after the death of Juan II, contemporary chronicles do not give any further hints about Isabel of Portugal’s mental instability. However, one incident in which the queen was allegedly involved became the focus of hagiographies, histories, and even theatrical productions, and sealed her reputation as a woman consumed by jealousy to the point of excess. The episode in question revolved around the queen’s lady-in-waiting, Beatriz da Silva, who left the court to found the Conceptionist Order of Our Lady and was eventually canonized 500 years later. In what became the established narrative, Isabel’s pathological feminine jealously was presented as the impetus for Beatriz’s journey to sanctity.

Hagiography was a very popular genre in the late Middle Ages and early modern period, and the blending of miracles with history made saints’ lives both supernatural and credible.⁵⁶ In this case, Beatriz, the future saint, was one of the Portuguese ladies who accompanied Isabel to Castile when she married Juan II. A woman of noble but not royal pedigree, she was the daughter of Rui Gomes da Silva, the governor (alcaide) of Campo Maior, and his wife, Isabel de Menezes, who held the title Countess of Portalegre and was the illegitimate daughter of Pedro de Menezes, a prominent soldier whose titles included Count of Viana. In the 1440s Beatriz’s youngest brother, João Mendes da Silva (1420–82), abandoned the worldly life to take up the habit of a Franciscan. Known as Amadeus da Silva or “do Portugal,” he eventually moved to Italy, where he served as confessor to Sixtus IV (1471–84) and worked to reform his order, eventually spawning a subgroup of the Observant Franciscans. Amadeus da Silva was famous for his piety, and miracles were attributed to him after his death.⁵⁷

Beatriz found her own calling at some point between 1451 and early 1453, around the time that João was becoming a Franciscan tertiary. By this point she had been in the Castilian court for several years, a time when Álvaro de Luna still held sway and when Juan and Isabel were apparently trying to conceive (Isabel was born in 1451 and Alfonso in 1453). It seems that Beatriz, then in her midtwenties and a few years older than the queen, cut a beautiful and graceful figure; and as the story goes, Isabel became increasingly unnerved by the attention Juan was paying her lady. Things came to a head when, during the court’s sojourn in Tordesillas, the queen in her jealousy ordered Beatriz to be locked up in a trunk, where she remained trapped for three days. In fact, the trunk where Beatriz was reputedly held can still be seen today, conserved in the cloister of the Conceptionist convent in Toledo. According to tradition, the Virgin Mary appeared to the young noblewoman during her confinement, offering her consolation, while keeping her alive and mapping out a spiritual path for her to follow.

After Beatriz was finally set free (it is not clear how or by whom), this incident convinced her to abandon the royal court for the Dominican convent of Santo Domingo el Real in Toledo, where she would devote her life to contemplation. Noblewoman that she was, she did not take this step alone, but was apparently accompanied by at least one of her servants, María de Saavedra.⁵⁸ Although she did not take the vows of a nun, Beatriz would remain in the Dominican convent for thirty-seven years. Stung by her experiences at court, it was said that from that moment on Beatriz veiled her face in order to prevent her beauty from sparking further conflicts. Her sixteenth-century vitae emphasize that after she took up with the Dominican sisters, Isabel the Catholic was the only person who ever saw her face unveiled.⁵⁹

Eventually, in 1484 she left the convent of Santo Domingo to establish her own monastic community in the royal palace of Galiana, next to the church of Santa Fe in Toledo—properties that were ceded to her by Isabel the Catholic for that purpose. Five years later Innocent VIII (1484–92) placed them under the Cistercian rule and the ground was laid for the Order of the Immaculate Conception of Our Lady. The nuns’ white habit and blue mantle were said to be the same costume in which the Virgin appeared to the imprisoned Beatriz. The transition from the Dominican convent to the new order was carried out with the support of Isabel I. In other words, Isabel the insane mother had locked up Beatriz, while Isabel the well-balanced daughter became her patroness.

The first source at our disposal that recounts the “miracle of the trunk” was written in 1517, a time when Isabel of Portugal’s granddaughter, Juana I of Castile, was sequestered in Tordesillas and her son, Carlos V (r. 1516–56), had just taken the throne as king of Aragon and Castile (he would become emperor three years later). This text, The History of the Conception (Historia de la Concepción; ca. 1517), is known also as The Quiñones Account (Relación Quiñones) after its attribution to the friar Francisco de Quiñones (1480–1540) by its modern editor, Ignacio Omaechevarría. Quiñones, who became the patron and protector of the order, likely wrote or commissioned this short history that centers on the life of Beatriz da Silva.⁶⁰ He was also behind the recognition of its first rule, approved in 1511 by Julius II (1503–13), its constitutions, written in 1513–14, and the establishment of several convents.

Francisco was no run-of-the-mill friar. Having served for a time as page to Cardinal Cisneros, he embarked on a stellar clerical career, being appointed Provincial Vicar of Castile (1512), Minister General of the Observant Franciscans (1523–27), Cardinal of the Holy Cross in Jerusalem (1527), and Bishop of Coria (1530–33).⁶¹ A kinsman of Carlos V and a confidant of popes, he mediated between the papacy and the emperor after the sack of Rome in 1527. The Quiñones family, which held the title Counts of Luna, was a major peninsular lineage that had been influential in the court of Juan II and of Isabel the Catholic. Francisco’s patronage of the Conceptionists was no accident: both his mother, Juana Enríquez, and his sister, Leonor, were prominent in Isabel I’s court and were close to Beatriz. In fact, it was Juana who funded the Conceptionist convent in León in 1516, with the aid of Leonor, and installed another daughter, Francisca, as abbess. This convent, once established, was richly endowed by the family, and became at once the religious base of the Quiñones Counts of Luna, and a vehicle for their expansion through the establishment of daughter houses across León.

If Quiñones did not write the Account, it must have been another Observant Franciscan close to the order, and therefore undoubtedly under the close supervision of Francisco and his sisters. It is not surprising that this work is not signed; its purpose was to initiate the hagiographic tradition surrounding Beatriz shortly after her death. Attaching the author’s name was unnecessary; those who needed to know who he was at the time knew. The aim was to establish the sanctity of Beatriz for posterity, and in this case, identifying the author and grounding the account in the context of the time might have undermined its timeless and objective appearance. Whoever the author may have been, the creation of the legend of Beatriz and “mad” queen Isabel was born of a strategy of the politics of lineage as much as a religious impulse. And it worked. In the years that followed, this Account was repeatedly copied, edited, and embellished, with the goal of supporting the canonization of Beatriz, and the promotion of her order through the establishment of the Immaculate Conception of Mary as doctrine—a controversy that became central to clerical and political discourse in early modern Spain.

The next major iteration of the tale was published in 1526 by an anonymous Franciscan who embellished the material in the Account to produce The History of the Life of the Venerable Mother Lady Beatriz da Silva, Founder of the Order of the Immaculate Conception (Historia de la vida de la venerable madre doña Beatriz de Silva, fundadora del orden de la Purísima Concepción, which is extant in a manuscript copy of 1660.⁶² In his 1969 edition, Enrique Gutiérrez attributed this vita to Francisco Garnica, a Franciscan friar, but this is conjecture.⁶³ Together, the Account and The History of the Life established the contours of a narrative that would be associated with Beatriz and repeated whenever she was mentioned, whether in histories of the city of Toledo, chronicles of Spain, or historical accounts of the Franciscan Order in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and beyond.

All of these accounts present Beatriz as a woman of striking beauty who attracted much attention among the men at court, Juan II included.⁶⁴ The earliest version of the confinement of Beatriz in the trunk can be found in the second chapter of the Account, and was repeated almost verbatim in The History of the Life:

[Beatriz’s] beauty and grace were so great that the queen, her lady, became jealous of her, and for that reason had her locked up in a trunk, which was in the town of Tordesillas, where she was kept for three days, without giving her anything to eat or drink. And after those three days, when they took her out, despite having been locked away in such deprivation, she emerged fresh and strong, as if nothing bad had happened. During the time she was locked up she didn’t know if it was due to ill intention or whether she had simply been forgotten, or whether Our Lord, desiring to demonstrate to this His servant what she ought to do as a service to His Mother, just as she did later.⁶⁵

While Beatriz was locked in the trunk the Virgin Mary appeared before her to offer consolation:

According to the marvelous vision which she was shown while in the trunk, being enclosed therein, she saw the unblemished Virgin, consoling and fortifying her with much strength, dressed in a habit of white and blue, which the nuns of Her Immaculate Conception now wear. By reason of which, together with another similar appearance which Our Lady made on another occasion, [Beatriz] established this habit (for her nuns), just like the one she had seen.⁶⁶

The two texts next recount how, after escaping her confinement and fleeing the court for the convent of Santo Domingo el Real, Beatriz encountered two men who addressed her in her native Portuguese. Startled, the young noblewoman assumed that they were courtiers who had been sent by the queen to kill her, but, in fact, they were none other than Saint Francis of Assisi, the founder of the Franciscans, and the early Portuguese friar Saint Anton of Padua, who had come miraculously to console Beatriz and assure her of the bright future in store for herself and her order.⁶⁷

Both accounts note the crucial support received from Isabel the Catholic, who “showed great interest in this lady, not so much out of their kinship, but for her piety.”⁶⁸ Isabel I certainly helped Beatriz to obtain the bull “Inter universa” from Innocent VIII, which on April 30, 1489, authorized the establishment of a monastery that would focus on Mary’s conception in liturgy and prayers. The house was to be under the rule of the Cistercians.⁶⁹ In addition, Isabel and Fernando commissioned the celebration in perpetuity of the Feast of Conception (December 8, and a national holiday in Spain today) in the church in Toledo to honor their memory and that of their descendants, while the queen went on to found chapels in the Virgin’s honor in Guadalupe, Toledo, and Seville.⁷⁰

Beatriz’s first nunnery was populated by eleven young ladies, including her niece, Felipa Silva de Meneses.⁷¹ She lived in that house for the remaining years of her life, embodying the same modesty and spirituality she had while with the Dominicans, never unveiling her face. In fact, Beatriz died without seeing her monastery finished, not to mention the order that she would later be credited as having founded. Curiously, for all her piety, Beatriz did not profess as a nun until the very end, when she was dying. This reflects, perhaps, the great agency she exercised– an aspect of her life her male-authored biographies do not emphasize. She had not only escaped the pressures and intrigues of court and of an arranged marriage to live as a religious, but she did so on her own terms—joining the Dominicans without formally submitting to their authority, and finally establishing her own house according to her own needs and desires. Even the deliberate veiling of her face should be seen as an act of self-determination in defiance of the beauty that had tyrannized her youth and brought her so much grief at court, and of those who would judge her by it.

Beatriz actively lobbied both Isabel the Catholic (the daughter of her supposed nemesis) and the pope to help institutionalize her approach to Marian piety, despite the fact she was a laywoman with no particular claims to religious authority and no debt or obligation to the Church. In view of all of this, both the Account and The History of the Life needed to justify the fact that Beatriz did not become a nun until the end, so they claimed that the Virgin Mary intervened again at the final hour, announcing to Beatriz her imminent death (just ten days away) and ordering her to take holy vows—in Mary’s words: “Daughter, ten days from today you must come with Me, as it is no longer Our wish that you enjoy on Earth that which you desire.”⁷²

By the time of her death in 1491 or 1492, Beatriz’s uncorrupted body presented the obvious signs of sanctity, and therefore was regarded as a precious relic that needed to be safeguarded and that could raise the prestige of the house that held it.⁷³ Two years after her death, on August 19, 1494, Pope Alexander VI’s (1492–1503) bull “Providence from On High” (“Ex supernae providential”) allowed the nuns of her convent to abandon the Cistercian rule to follow that of the Poor Clares, while making the house of the Conception of Toledo (Santa Fe) the head of the order and allowing for the foundation of daughter monasteries.⁷⁴ Graña Cid has noted that these narratives were trying to push Beatriz into Franciscanism, even though, at the time she professed as a nun, her convent was Cistercian. In fact, it is not even clear that she wanted to start a new order, rather than merely establish her own monastery.⁷⁵

As they came to Franciscan ideals, the Conceptionists focused increasingly on Mary’s purity and the notion that her own miraculous conception was unstained by original sin. It was not until September 17, 1511, when, thanks to Fernando the Catholic’s intervention, Julius II established the Conceptionist rule with his bull “Toward a Prosperous State” (“Ad statum prosperum”).⁷⁶ From that point, the order grew with extraordinary vigor. By 1526 it counted forty-six foundations, with fifty-eight more (including twenty in Latin America) having been established in 1605, and a further fifty-two by the end of seventeenth century.⁷⁷

On the Stage of History

Thanks to their focus on the sanctity of the Virgin Mary, the Conceptionists were particularly popular in seventeenth-century Spain, and it was in this context that the process of Beatriz da Silva’s beatification got underway in Toledo from May 10 to July 14, 1636.⁷⁸ The manuscript preserved at the convent in Toledo containing the 1660 recension of The History of the Life of 1526 includes an insert in which a miracle (a prerequisite for beatification) performed by Beatriz is recorded. The event was reported by Alonso de Chinchilla y Limana of Toledo, who claimed that he was “completely out of [his] mind” until a lady named Martina advised him to pledge himself to “Saint” Beatriz da Silva. As soon as he received a pilgrim badge (estampa) in her image, he was cured.⁷⁹

It was a few years earlier that the Mercedarian playwright Tirso de Molina (Gabriel Tellez; 1579–1648) moved to Toledo and became interested in the figure of Beatriz in his quest to promote the Immaculate Conception of Mary.⁸⁰ In the eponymous play of 1618 (or, perhaps, ca. 1635), The Miracle of Jealousy and the Excellent Portuguese Lady, Lady Beatriz de Silva (El Milagro por los celos y excelente portuguesa, Doña Beatriz de Silva), he presented a dramatized version of the legend, embellishing Juan II’s love for Beatriz and emphasizing Isabel of Portugal’s jealousy and despair as the motive for locking up Beatriz in a closet (rather than a trunk).⁸¹ Tirso had committed to a sequel focusing on Beatriz’s monastic life, but either he did not write it or it is lost. Tirso’s play, which follows the narrative of the Account, makes it clear that Isabel could brook no rivals to the king’s attention, whether these were friends and advisers, like Álvaro de Luna, or potential lovers, like Beatriz da Silva. When the Virgin appeared to the imprisoned Beatriz, she asked her to leave the queen’s service to serve her instead:

And, as in the Account, on her way to Toledo, Beatriz encounters two Franciscans, one of whom—Anton of Padua—shows her the path to follow.

On the other hand, only a few years earlier, Lope de Vega (1562–1635) had recounted the story of Beatriz’s confinement in his play The Miracle of Jealousy and the Excellent Portuguese Lady, also titled The Miracle of Jealousy and Don Álvaro de Luna, but downplayed the religious aspects of her life.⁸³ In Lope’s play, Juan II falls in love with Beatriz, thus provoking the queen’s envy. The “miracle of jealousy” occurs when the Virgin Mary comes to the rescue, prompting the king and queen to repent of their actions and inspiring them to support Beatriz in founding the first Conceptionist monastery in Toledo. This is the only miraculous intervention, and no other saints appear.

What playwrights like Lope de Vega and Tirso de Molina were aiming to do was to popularize the notion of the Immaculate Conception. This belief had been taking root in pious devotion, but was still questioned by some members of the Church, particularly by the Dominicans— which is somewhat ironic, given that Beatriz spent some twenty years living in one of the order’s convents. These plays should be seen as part of a larger movement that included an iconographic program and intended to establish the veracity of the miracle of Beatriz and the trunk and, therefore, the Virgin’s unblemished nature. The Immaculate Conception was the subject of much debate during the Middle Ages and beyond. It had first been championed by the Trastámaras, and subsequently by the Habsburg dynasty, particularly by Felipe III (1598–1621), Felipe IV (1621–65), and Carlos II (1661–1700), to the point that the cult of the Virgin became a symbol of the Spanish monarchy.⁸⁴ In this light, Isabel of Portugal and Isabel the Catholic can be considered trailblazers on a path that would be followed by the future rulers of Spain, even though the Immaculate Conception would not be established as Church dogma until 1854.

As art historians including Felipe Pereda, Victor Stoichita, and Suzanne Stratton-Pruitt have remarked, the courtly and popular enthusiasm for the Immaculate Conception gave rise to a particular iconography and type of painting that is directly associated with Spain, and is reflected also in efforts to bring about the canonization of Beatriz in the seventeenth century (figs. 3 and 4).⁸⁵

Traditionally, the Immaculate revival is traced back to Seville, when on September 8, 1613, Francisco de Molina, a Dominican prior from the Regina Angelorum convent, preached against this belief. He was soon rebutted by Álvaro Pizaño de Palacios, a doctor and canon at the cathedral of Córdoba, marking the beginning of a “Marian War” in which the Dominicans found themselves confronted by Franciscans, Carmelites, Mercedarians, and Jesuits, not to mention the general populace.⁸⁶ As a consequence of the controversy, a myriad of texts were also produced to advocate for the Immaculate Conception. Of the treatises produced at Seville in 1616 alone, three were dedicated to important personalities at the royal court.⁸⁷ But the papacy remained only lukewarm to the idea; on August 21, 1617, Pope Paul V declared himself “in favor” of this tenet, although qualified it as a matter that should not be further discussed.⁸⁸

Postscript, Post Mortem

Beyond the vitae of Beatriz, there is no evidence in contemporary documents or chronicles either of an obsession on the part of Juan II, or of Isabel locking her unfortunate lady-in-waiting in the trunk. As seen in the previous chapter, the king’s well-known and widely reported infatuation with his wife—and previously with his closest and oldest confidant, Álvaro de Luna, whom he sent nevertheless to the executioner’s block—renders this unlikely. This is corroborated tacitly by the earliest account of Beatriz’s life, which was written in 1512, five years prior to the Account—some twenty years after her death, and only sixteen after that of Isabel of Portugal. This first vita was signed by Sor Juana de San Miguel, who served as abbess of the Conceptionist convent in Toledo from 1522 to 1526.⁸⁹ Sor Juana may or may not have been the author of the text—she would have been a mere nun at the time—but her imprimatur as abbess signals her approval of it. This narrative, known as the “Testimony of Juana of San Miguel,” recounts Beatriz’s time as the queen’s lady-in-waiting and remarks on her great beauty. It notes how her hand was sought by high-ranking noblemen, but that she refused them all, finally veiling herself and taking refuge among the Dominican nuns:

Because of her great beauty and lineage, [Beatriz] was sought after by many counts and dukes in marriage, and in the midst of the world’s struggles she agreed to offer her virginity and chastity to her Spouse Jesus Christ.⁹⁰

What it does not mention is the alleged incident with the king, the queen, the trunk, and the Virgin Mary. There is no jealousy and no miraculous intervention. In contrast to the Account and later iterations of Beatriz’s life, it is not the Virgin’s command that prompts Beatriz to abandon the court for a life of devout compensation, but rather, it is her own choice. Beatriz is not the passive character of her hagiography but a woman with agency. The only mention of Isabel is in the context of her move from Portugal to Castile, at which point Beatriz was already in the queen’s entourage. Isabel the Catholic, so prominent in the Account and in The History of the Life, does not appear at all. It was Beatriz who chose her destiny, without the influence of any queen, whether earthly or heavenly.

However, Sor Juana’s untitled history does not seem to have circulated. It apparently existed in a single manuscript copy that was interred post mortem in the same urn as Beatriz’s earthly remains, and it was not discovered until that casket was opened on February 10, 1618.⁹¹ The original document is lost, but it has been preserved in two copies: a shorter version published by Fray Herrera in 1647, and a more detailed redaction dating from 1660 that was probably recopied by a nun who added some embellishments.⁹² In each of these versions, both of which transcribe Sor Juana’s seal of approval, Beatriz’s only miracles occurred after her death. When the veil was removed from her lifeless face at her burial, she began to radiate light, and a star appeared stigmata-like on her forehead. In other words, Sor Juana, the only recorded witness who actually knew Beatriz, presented a narrative that was more plausible and realistic than those written in the sixteenth century by the two friars who were responsible for developing the miraculous telling in which the Virgin Mary, Saint Francis, and Saint Anton of Padua intervened to guide the future saint and determine her agenda. As Caroline Walker Bynum observed, “Women’s vitae … were even more stereotypical than male vitae. In part this is because women’s lives were in fact less diverse and because women often learned patterns of piety from one another… . Thus women’s vitae and their daily lives often borrowed patterns from each other.”⁹³

Paradoxically, and even though the Account and The History of the Life were written after Sor Juana’s account, they reflect a hagiographic model that was on the decline. By the late sixteenth century, the rationalists of the Society of Jesus were working to purge hagiographies of their most unlikely and incredible elements. This can be seen in works like The Flower of the Saints (Flos sanctorum), the first part of which was published in 1599 by the Jesuit Pedro Ribadeneira (1527–1611), a companion and biographer of Ignatius de Loyola (1491–1556). In the following century, the Jesuit Bollandists (Société des Bollandistes) published their sixty-eight-volume The Deeds of the Saints (Acta sanctorum), beginning in 1643, which set out, Sic-et-non-like, to purge the inconsistencies and unreliable elements from saintly biographies. The Society took its name from the French Jesuit Jean Bolland (1596–1665), who edited the first two installments of The Deeds; but Ribadeneira had already laid out this approach a half century earlier in the prologue of The Flower of the Saints, which he addressed “to the benign Christian reader”:

There are many obscure and confused things in the histories of the saints that need to be disentangled and clarified; many dubious things, that ought to be verified; some contradictory things, that ought to be resolved if possible; other things, on the one hand, that are apocryphal, and on the other, that are so accepted and established in popular opinion that they cannot be verified without considerable prejudice as regards the truth, or dispensed with without giving great offence to the common and vulgar folk.⁹⁴

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Conceptionist Order grew in Spain and its American colonies, and with this the figure of Beatriz da Silva, its illustrious founder, was further integrated into the imaginary of the time. A process was undertaken to canonize her in 1636, but this was interrupted and only resumed in 1921. Eventually, Beatriz was beatified on July 28, 1926, under Pius XI (1922–39)—the delay of nearly four centuries due, perhaps, to the controversial nature of the Immaculate Conception, which was not recognized as dogma until 1854, with the bull “Ineffable God” (“Ineffabilis Deus”) promulgated by Pius IX (1846–78). Canonization only came on October 3, 1976, under Pope Paul VI (1963–78).⁹⁵

Over the course of the centuries, a series of chronicles and plays progressively embellished Beatriz’s story. Juan II, Isabel of Portugal, and Isabel the Catholic were woven into the narrative with the goal of enlarging the saint’s reputation, and therefore her order. As late as 2001, when reporting the visit of the papal nuncio, Monteiro de Castro, to the Conceptionist convent in Toledo to celebrate Beatriz’s anniversary, the conservative Spanish daily ABC repeated the now-established story of the saint’s miraculous escape from the jealous queen thanks to the intervention of the Virgin Mary.⁹⁶ In 2013 a scholarly volume on Beatriz da Silva and her order repeated the same story without showing any evidence. In one of the essays, José Félix Duque takes the episode as evidence of Isabel of Portugal’s “serious psychic disorder.” He considers Juan II’s “interest” in the very beautiful and extremely young Beatriz as “customary for the times”—an episode that he dates to 1451, when according to him Beatriz would have been only thirteen or fourteen years old.⁹⁷

Evidently, the Account and The History of the Life not only wove the miraculous elements of Beatriz’s vita out of whole cloth, but established them as canonical elements of her hagiography and thereby secured her reputation and sanctity. Both were produced in the context of Fernando of Aragon’s regency of Castile after the death of Isabel the Catholic (1507–16), and of the reform movement of Cardenal Cisneros, during his tenure as president of the Regency Council (1516–17), which ended with the arrival of Carlos V in the peninsula. This was, of course, the period in which Juana I, the reina propietaria and rightful heir of Castile, was incarcerated in Tordesillas as a consequence of what was judged to be mental incapacity. As we will see in the final chapters of this book, Juana was also portrayed as extremely jealous. The Franciscan authors of the Account and The History of the Life follow an established hagiographic model, seeking to present the ideals of feminine sanctity and piety as either taking orders, founding a monastery or a new religious order, or donating generously to the Church. More controversial attributes, such as the gift of prophecy, visions, levitations, and bouts of ecstasy, were not only seen as unnecessary to include, but risky. Such potentially miraculous or diabolical occurrences had to be treated carefully, subject as they were to investigation by the Inquisition and to suspicions of heterodoxy or heresy. As Ángela Muñoz Fernández has pointed out, even though one sees an abundance of eccentric “holy women” during the reign of the Catholic Kings, these women were closely regulated in order to ensure their obedience to the Church.⁹⁸

Other Holy Women

Beatriz da Silva was by no means the only holy woman with connections to the court who influenced the reform of the Castilian Church undertaken by Isabel I’s confessor, Cisneros.⁹⁹ The cardinal contributed to the diffusion of female spirituality and offered models of devotion for women through the translation and dissemination of the lives of other holy women, like Juana de Orvieto, Margarita de Castello, and Catherine of Siena.¹⁰⁰ Another example was Teresa Enríquez (1450–1529), known as “The Madwoman of the Host” (La Loca del Sacramento), a nickname given to her by Pope Julius II (1503–13). A member of the entourage of Isabel I, Teresa had ties to Fernando’s maternal family, while her husband, Guiterre de Cárdenas (d. 1503), was a commander of the Order of Santiago and chief accountant (contador mayor) of the Catholic Monarchs. Teresa also happened to be a cousin of Francisco Quiñones, the man behind the myth of Beatriz and the trunk, and was, like Beatriz, famous for her great beauty. Following Guiterre’s death, the widowed Teresa dedicated her fortune to helping the poor and to the foundation of a Conceptionist monastery, as well as to the construction of a collegiate church and two hospitals, which cared for both the poor and the wounded soldiers of Isabel the Catholic’s war against Granada, all in the town of Torrijos, just north of Toledo.¹⁰¹ Her generosity brought her great acclaim, and she was known also for supporting the education of young noble ladies so that they might marry well. Teresa’s particular passion was the Holy Sacrament; hence, she established the Brotherhood of the Most Holy Sacrament of Torrijos, the first such confraternity in Castile—one that survives to this day. Such pious but profligate generosity provoked the alarm of her son and heir, Diego de Cárdenas, who watched in dismay as his devout mother burned through his patrimony. Her devotion to the Conceptionists was such, for example, that she donated 10,000 maravedís for the printing of 500 breviaries of the Holy Conception.¹⁰²

Teresa, like Beatriz da Silva, did not profess as a nun, but preferred to remain independent, committed as she was to pious works. Like the saint who inspired her, she too was portrayed in sixteenth-century hagiographic accounts as a moral exemplar for women, particularly widows. For example, in both The Chariot of Ladies (1542) and in Moya’s Selected Histories of Holy and Illustrious Women (Varia historia de sanctas e illustres mugeres; 1583) she seems to be acting without agency, divinely inspired to dedicate her fortune to pious endeavors. However, these accounts differ from other near-contemporary chronicles that are not so sympathetic, and that represent Teresa as a wastrel, whose spendthrift ways and immoderate behavior were putting the patrimony of her son and his lineage in danger.¹⁰³

When Teresa died in 1529 at the age of nearly eighty, she was interred next to her husband in the Franciscan church of Torrijos, after which her body was eventually moved to the collegiate church of the Most Holy Sacrament, which she had founded. She may have lived a life of excessive piety, but this was presented in positive terms by the Church, despite the fact that she was widely referred to as “mad” and “simple.” When her tomb was opened on January 7, 1699, the friar who oversaw it claimed her body was uncorrupted—a sure sign of sainthood.¹⁰⁴ In 1808, during the Napoleonic Wars, her body was transferred to the Conceptionist monastery of Torrijos that she founded, and in 1979, only three years after Beatriz was canonized, the process of beatification of Teresa began.¹⁰⁵

There were also contemporary holy women who came from the lowest social strata and did not have court connections. María de Santo Domingo (ca. 1485–1524), known as the “Beata de Piedrahita,” and Juana de la Cruz (1481–1534), known as “Santa Juana,” were both illiterate peasants. María, a Dominican tertiary who lived in the convent of Ávila, was prone to fits of ecstasy in which she described herself as “Christ’s bride.” She duly impressed both Fernando the Catholic and Cisneros when she visited the court at Burgos in 1507; nevertheless, her life and teachings were investigated in the course of four separate trials that took place between 1508 and 1510.¹⁰⁶ Unlike Beatriz da Silva and Teresa Enríquez, María’s dramatic fist of rapture, which included a stigmatic wound in her side, and involved visions and prophecy, were seen as oversexualized and “lascivious.” Consequently, her revelations were branded as “fakes” (fingidas) by her detractors. Alfonso de Fonseca, the Bishop of Osma (1493–1505), one of the clergymen appointed to her tribunal, went so far as to dismiss her as “mad” (loca).¹⁰⁷

In the end, María was acquitted by the Church, which lauded her exemplary life and recognized her spiritual gifts as genuine—drawing a parallel to her famous fellow Dominican ascetic Catherine of Siena (1347–80). Around this time, Fadrique Álvarez de Toledo, the Duke of Alba and Count of Piedrahita (1488–1531)—himself a descendant of the Quiñones—endowed a convent in María’s hometown and installed her as abbess. María is credited with two works, The Book of Prayer (El libro de la oración; 1518), which was dictated to the Dominicans Antonio de la Peña and Diego Victoria, and a book of revelations. She founded the convent of Santa Cruz de la Magdalena in Aldeanueva (Ávila) in 1512—the same year that Sor Juana signed the first testimony of Beatriz da Silva’s vita.¹⁰⁸

Juana de la Cruz was born Juana Vázquez y Gutiérrez to a peasant family in the hinterlands of Toledo. She began to have ecstatic visions as a young girl, and soon professed as a Franciscan tertiary. Known for her great beauty, she was betrothed at age sixteen by her family to a knight, but she fled, disguising herself as a man, until her father relented and allowed her to take the vows of Carmelite in 1497. Her ecstasies continued, and like María de Santo Domingo, she began to characterize herself as the “bride of Christ,” experiencing visions that were highly erotic. Meanwhile, under the epithet “God’s Trumpet” (and later, “God’s Guitar”), she became greatly admired for her preaching, gaining a large popular following and the support of grandees, including the emperor Carlos V himself, Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba (“The Great Captain”), and Cisneros, as well as attracting the patronage of Pope Julius II (1503–13). Consequently, she was made abbess of the Carmelite convent of Santa María de la Cuba de la Sagra. After enduring resistance from the secular clergy, who were scandalized and threatened by the prestige she had accrued as a woman, she was briefly deposed, but was eventually rehabilitated and reinstated.¹⁰⁹ One of her fellow nuns, María Evangelista, compiled a vita, and at the request of Cisneros set down seventy-two of Juana’s sermons in a collection known as The Exhortation (El conhorte) beginning in 1509.¹¹⁰ Her death in 1534 did not diminish her popularity, and although she is known widely as “Saint Juana,” in fact the various efforts to beatify her, beginning in 1619, have yet to bear fruit.

The noblewomen Beatriz and Teresa, and the peasants María and Juana, can be seen as the “mothers”—as Ronald Surtz would put it—of the most celebrated and influential religious reformer and writer of all, the Carmelite mystic (Saint) Teresa de Ávila (1515–82), well known for the visions that Julia Kristeva referred to as “incarnated fantasies.”¹¹¹ Teresa’s experience illustrates how the tensions generated by the intense pietism of the late Middle Ages and early modern period, on the one hand, and the marginalization of women in both society and the Church, on the other, encouraged women to turn to seclusion and mysticism as devotional outlets. Women could not become priests or theologians, nor could they preach publicly (hence the clerical backlash “Saint Juana” faced). Nor could they escape their sexuality or gender. In response, they fled the male gaze, whether by veiling their faces or retreating into convents, and expressed their piety in the form of an unmediated and ecstatic connection with the divine that was difficult for masculine Church authorities to dispute. This was not the rational piety of male theologians, but an “irrational” piety, which was therefore more “feminine.” As such, it allowed women to exercise religious protagonism on their own terms and gave them a sort of legitimate authority, although those who pushed it too far were in danger of being qualified as “mad,” heretical, or diabolical, and as such, punished.¹¹² But as long as they walked the fine line between devotion and madness, such women were able to preserve their own agency and influence the course of Church history in dramatic and unexpected ways.

In conclusion, Beatriz and Isabel—as much as Álvaro de Luna and Isabel of Portugal—resemble one another. Each set out to establish her own autonomy—Isabel of Portugal as a queen, which implied the physical undoing of Álvaro, and Beatriz as a devout, which accidently provoked the historiographical undoing of Isabel. As Carl Jung put it, “Madness is a matter of scale,” a culturally constructed concept that changes meaning in every society and in each era. In a way, sanity and insanity are no less performative than gender—both involve a repetition of acts construed as “appropriate” or “inappropriate” symptoms. Isabel of Portugal’s case highlights some of the possibilities and limitations that dowager queens faced in the Middle Ages, particularly when they were not the mother of the heir. Beatriz’s experience shows us that some friars were uncomfortable with a narrative that portrayed women as independent and active (as opposed to reactive) thinkers. For women, the independence that came with widowhood was conditioned on maintaining chastity and avoiding remarriage, and, Isabel’s case shows, involved toeing a fine line. Even though the queen suffered from a melancholic postpartum episode, was grief-stricken after her husband’s death, and was then sexually assaulted by Girón, it is plausible that her poor health was exaggerated by herself and her entourage as a strategy to prevent her from being further abused and manipulated by Enrique IV and his courtiers. Likewise, when Beatriz left the court, she evaded marriage and dedicated her life to contemplation, but did not profess as a nun until the end of her life, thus avoiding conflict with and control by the masculine ecclesiastical hierarchy. In order to escape the royal court, both Isabel and Beatriz had to live in seclusion, but they did so on their own terms.

However, while each of them took control over their own lives, they could not control their own historical memory—the narratives constructed around them after they died tended to reduce their agency, making each of them, in their own way, subservient. Isabel of Portugal’s story casts an interesting light on the childhood and early experiences of her daughter, Isabel I the Catholic, who spent the first ten years of her life raised by two determined and independent Portuguese ladies, her mother and grandmother.¹¹³ Isabel of Portugal’s experiences would certainly resonate strongly in the following century when the courts of Castile and Portugal grappled with the grief of Isabel the Catholic’s two widowed daughters—Isabel and Juana—and with the grief of Isabel I herself, who lost three of her heirs in rapid succession, as we will see in the chapters to come.

1. For an assessment of postpartum mental distress from the twelfth to the sixteenth century, see Cohen-Hanegbi, “Postpartum Mental Distress,” 113–15. For a current definition of postpartum depression, see Mayo Clinic, “Postpartum depression.”

2. Gislon Dopfel and Foscati, “Introduction,” xv.

3. “She began to have great pain (graves dolencias) after giving birth, leading suspicion to fall on Don Álvaro, who could not have looked on the pure love of the king towards his wife with kind eyes, nor doubt that that birth had contributed to its increase.” Palencia, Crónica de Enrique IV, I:77.

4. Palencia, Crónica de Enrique IV, I:77–78.

5. Palencia, Crónica de Enrique IV, I:140.

6. Morales Castro, “Isabel de Barcelos,” 83; Sousa, História genealógica da casa real portuguesa, II:93.

7. Palencia, Crónica de Enrique IV, I:9. The power of the privanza, the role Pacheco had as Enrique’s favorite, was lost on no one. Carrillo de Huete remarked in his chronicle that Enrique was prepared to do whatever his favorite, Pacheco, asked of him. Carrillo de Huete, Crónica del Halconero, chap. 283: 356.

8.Memorias de Don Enrique IV, II:111–25, doc. XLVI (Valladolid, July 8, 1454).

9. Palencia, Crónica de Enrique IV, I:140–41.

10. Palencia, Crónica de Enrique IV, I:141; Cañas Gálvez, “Las casas de Isabel y Juana,” 29–30. The prefect was a magistrate and executor of the king’s orders.

11. From Juan’s will, in Memorias de Don Enrique IV, II:118, doc. 46 (Valladolid, July 8, 1454).

12.Memorias de Don Enrique IV, II:118, doc. 46; Azcona, Isabel la Católica, 18.

13. Eiximenis, LD, II:146; Viera and Piqué, La dona; Silleras-Fernandez, Chariots of Ladies, 94.

14. BNE: R/11207: Padre Gaspar Astete, Tratado del gobierno de la familia y del estado de viudas y doncellas (Burgos: Juan Baptista Varesio, 1603).

15. Silleras-Fernandez, “Between Expectation and Desire,” 353–70.

16. Birrel-Salcedo, “El cónyuge supérstite,” 16–17; García-Herrero, “Viudedad foral,” 431–50.

17. Birrel-Salcedo, “El cónyuge supérstite,” 26–27.

18. Pulgar, Crónica RC, I, 180.

19. Pulgar, Crónica RC, I, 4.

20. Bernáldez, Memoria, 37.

21. Galíndez de Carvajal, Crónica de Enrique IV, 76.

22. Marineo Siculo, Vida y hechos, 23.

23. The ballad has only been preserved in the Cancionero musical de palacio, ed. Romeu Figueras, La música en la corte, IV–2, 302; Marías Martínez, “Las muertes entorno a los Reyes Católicos,” 400–401.

24. Barrientos, Refundición de la Crónica del Halconero, 196; Marino, Don Juan Pacheco, 26.

25. Salvador also discusses this incident in Isabel la Católica, 97.

26. Galíndez de Carvajal, Crónica de Enrique IV, 78.

27. Palencia, Crónica de Enrique IV, I:151.

28. Chivers-Wilson, “Sexual Assault and PTSD.”

29. Chivers-Wilson, “Sexual Assault and PTSD,” section on “Psychology of PTSD.”

30. Turner, “Medieval English Understanding,” 99.

31. Palencia, Crónica de Enrique IV, I:151; Liss, Isabel, 17. The darkened room that Isabel took refuge in evokes the later image of a madwoman secluded in an attic, which became a trope in female-authored Victorian literature. See, for example, Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic.

32.Texto y concordancia de las Leyes de Toro, law 82; Val Valdivieso, “La acusación de adulterio,” 162. In Aragon, since 1349, the fueros considered only female adultery, and while widows were expected to pursue an honest life, widowers could take a concubine. García Herrero, “La marital corrección,” 45; Silleras-Fernandez, “Between Expectation and Desire,” 353–70. For a broader European context, see also Karras, Sexuality in Medieval Europe, 118–32.

33. Palencia, Crónica de Enrique IV, I:151. Luis de Acuña, administrator of the bishopric of Segovia, annulled Enrique IV’s marriage to Blanca of Navarre on May 11, 1453. The document used the term “divorce,” and the reason given was failure to consummate. See Memorias de Don Enrique IV, II:61–66, doc. 35 (Alcazuren, May 11, 1353), citation, 63. See also Suárez, Enrique IV, 121–30.

34.Memorias de Don Enrique IV, II:103, doc. 45 (Medina del Campo, December 20, 1353), 63.

35.Memorias de don Enrique IV, 141.

36. Münzer, Itinerarium hispanicum, 125.

37. Val Valdivieso, Isabel la Católica, Princesa, 124–25.

38. Marino, Don Juan Pacheco, chap. 2.

39. Segura Graíño, “Influencias de Isabel de Portugal,” 328–29. Pelaz Flores characterizes Isabel of Portugal as either depressed or feeble-minded (estado depresivo o de debilidad mental). Pelaz Flores, “El poder de la reina, 1740.

40. Balaguer, Los Reyes Católicos, 187.

41. Cañas Gálvez, “¿El osaso de una reina?,” 19–20; Lora Serrano, “El ducado de Arévalo,” 369–72.

42. Ávila Seona, “El proceso de señorialización,” 117, 120.

43. Ávila Seona, “El proceso de señorialización,” 120–23.

44. Enríquez del Castillo, Crónica del Rey Enrique IV, chap. 136, 256; Balaguer, Los Reyes Católicos, 205.

45. Pelaz Flores, “Hacedoras de reyes,” 36n57.

46. Ávila Seona, “El proceso de señorialización,” 118.

47. Cañas Gálvez, “¿El ocaso de una reina?,” 17–22.

48. See her itinerary in Pelaz Flores, Poder y representación, 311–14.

49. Palencia, Gesta Hispaniensia, II:348; Galíndez de Carvajal, Crónica de Enrique IV, 255.

50. The monarchs visited Arévalo in 1480, 1482, 1486, 1487, 1488, 1489, 1492, 1494, and 1495. Rumeu de Armas, Itinerario, 415.

51.CD, 1, 415–16.

52. Anglería, Epistolario, 1:b.9, doc. 172 (December 10, 1496), 325; Cabrera Sánchez, “La muerte de los miembros de la realeza,” 124.

53.Memorias de don Enrique IV, 714. This is a typical formula in testaments. See Martínez Gil, “Las confidencias de los testamentos,” 515.

54. Pereda, “El cuerpo muerto del rey Juan II,” 56. The remains of Isabel of Portugal are no longer in her tomb, apparently having been stolen by Napoleonic troops that robbed and vandalized the charterhouse in the course of Spain’s war of independence (1808–14). Caro Dobón, Suárez, and Edén, “Los enterramientos reales,” 25 and 34.

55. Francomano, Castigos y doctrinas, 289.

56. Gómez Moreno underlines the strong connection between hagiography and literature in Claves hagiográficas, 17–49.

57. Fray Amadeus established a convent in Milan in 1460, founded the Franciscan branch of the “Amadeistas” (as his followers were known), and wrote the Apocalipsis Nova. Omaechevarría, Orígenes, 6.

58. Meseguer, “María de Saavedra, sirvienta,” 349–53.

59.History of the Conception (or Relación Quiñones) and History and Life (or Refundición of 1526), ed. Omaechevarría, Orígenes, 62–63.

60. Beatriz’s vita (or History of the Conception) is preserved in ff. 10–23 of the old register of the monastery of the Conception of Toledo. Omaechevarría, Orígenes, 49; Omaechevarría, Las monjas concepcionistas, 61–75.

61. Omaechevarría, Orígenes, 49–50; Meseguer, “Programa de gobierno del Padre Francisco de Quiñones,” 5–51.

62. This text was edited by Gutiérrez, Historia de la vida (apéndice IV), 217–44. The original manuscript is preserved at the convent of the Conception in Toledo. Omaechevarría has also studied and edited this text, which he referred to as The Refoundation of 1526 (Refundición de 1526).

63. Gutiérrez, “La Orden de las Concepcionistas,” 382. The History of the Life was used as a source for a later version, written ca. 1550 and known as “Manuscript Torrijos” (from the monastery of Torrijos). Lost during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), it presents a few additions that probably date from the last quarter of the seventeenth century. Omaechevarría, Orígenes, 54–56.

64. For instance, Pedro Alcocer includes Beatriz in his History of Toledo (1554), where he states that the queen ordered a trunk to be made for the future saint because so many men were pursuing her affections. For his part, Marcos de Lisboa, in his chronicle of the Franciscans (1570), wrongly states that Isabel was the daughter of Duarte of Portugal, but like Alcocer he does not specifically state that Isabel was jealous, just that she thought that Beatriz’s attractiveness was encouraging undue masculine attention. The same story is repeated by Esteban de Garibay y Zamalloa in the twentieth book of his 1570 history of Spain, Los libros del compendio historial de las chrónicas y universal historia de todos los reinos de España. See Omaechevarría, Orígenes, 187, 189, 193, and 197.

65. Omaechevarría, Orígenes, 60.

66. Omaechevarría, Orígenes, 60. The Refundicion account is very similar; cf. Refundición, ed. Omaechevarría, Orígenes, 60.

67. Omaechevarría, Orígenes, 61–63.

68. Omaechevarría, Orígenes, 64; Graña Cid, Beatriz de Silva, 69.

69. Omaechevarría, Orígenes, 22. The bull is edited by Omaechevarría, Orígenes, 94–100.

70. Jiménez Sánchez, “Beatriz de Silva,” 695–96.

71. Graña Cid, Beatriz de Silva, 22; Omaechevarría, Orígenes, 8.

72. Omaechevarría, Orígenes, 69–70.

73. Omaechevarría, Orígenes, 70; Graña Cid, Beatriz de Silva, 71.

74. Omaechevarría, Orígenes, 92.

75. Graña Cid, Beatriz de Silva, 15, 21.

76. Omaechevarría, Orígenes, 11, 49; Gutiérrez, “La Orden Concepcionista.”

77. Sarabia Viejo and Huerta Ourcel, “Establecimiento y expansión,” 1:463–74; Paniagua Pérez, “Los monasterios concepcionistas,” 1:563–64; Omaechevarría, Orígenes, 12.

78. The nuns of Santo Domingo el Real kept Beatriz’s remains until 1618, when they were transferred to a new tomb in the convent of Santa Fe in Toledo. Meseguer Fernández, “Santa Beatriz de Silva,” 105.

79. Rodríguez Valencia, Isabel la Cátolica en la opinión, 3:219; Gutiérrez, “La Orden de las Concepcionistas,” 382.

80. Florit Duran, “Ad devotionem excitandam,” 446; Vázquez Fernández, Doña Beatriz de Silva de Tirso de Molina, 2:205–22.

81. He incorrectly believed that Isabel was the daughter of Duarte of Portugal. The queen tells Beatriz: “Here you are, locked up, where without air or sustenance you will die, since no other end will calm my passion.” Tirso de Molina, Doña Beatriz de Silva, 54.

82. Tirso de Molina, Doña Beatriz de Silva, verses 2179–81, 65. See Tudela’s notes to Tirso de Molina, Obras completas, 838–41.

83. Nancy Mayberry attributes this play to Blas Fernández de Mesa instead. See her edition of Fernández de Mesa, La fundadora de la Santa Concepción.

84. Vranich, “Carta de un ciudadano,” 242; Pereda, “Vox Populi,” 287; Mínguez and Rodríguez Moya, “Prólogo: Un planeta católico,” 11; Twomey, The Serpent and the Rose, 1–9; Hernández, Immaculate Conceptions, 31–40.

85. Pereda, “Vox Populi,” 287; Stratton-Pruitt, The Immaculate Conception; Stoichita, Visionary Experience, 103.

86. Domínguez Burdalo and Sánchez Jiménez, “El dogma de la Inmaculada,” 7; Pereda, “Vox Populi” 290; Vranich, “Carta de un ciudadano,” 241–74.

87. Guzmán’s 1616 Song for the Immaculate and Unblemished Conception of the Virgin Mary (Canción a la Inmaculada y Limpia Concepción de la Virgen María) was dedicated to Juana de Sandoval, Duchess of Medina Sidonia and daughter of the Duke of Lerma, King Felipe III’s favorite. BNE: VE/58/77(2); Guzmán, Canción a la Inmaculada, 6. Fray Antonio Jiménez dedicated his Sermon to Francisca Fajardo, the wife of Fernando Carrillo, President of the Council of Hacienda. The Mercedarian friar Hernando Muñoz, who defines Mary as “the unblemished Mother of the Lamb,” dedicated his work to Juan de Salazar, secretary of the powerful Francisco, Duke of Uceda (Juana de Sandoval’s brother, and another favorite of Felipe III). Muñoz, Sermón, f. 99v.

88. Domínguez Burdalo and Sánchez Jiménez, “El dogma de la Inmaculada,” 10.

89. Quintanilla saw the lost original, of which only copies have been preserved, and stated that the person who wrote the text had different handwriting from the person who signed it. Omaechevarría, Orígenes, 43–45.

90.Testimonio de Juana de San Miguel (1647 copy); Omaechevarría, Orígenes, 47.

91. Omaechevarría, Orígenes, 42–43.

92. Omaechevarría sees Sor Catalina de San Antonio as a possible candidate. Omaechevarría, Orígenes, 45.

93. Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, 83–84.

94. Ribadeneira, Flos sanctorum, “Prologue to the Reader”; Albisson, “El flos sanctorum castellano,” 60.

95. Forty-two witnesses declared in the beatification process, thirty-six nuns (twenty from the Conception Convent of Toledo), three knights, and three ladies. Meseguer, “Santa Beatriz de Silva,” 105; Graña Cid, Beatriz de Silva, 60.

96. Hernández, “Las Concepcionistas Franciscanas.”

97. Duque, “Santa Beatriz da Silva,” 45.

98. Muñoz Fernández, Beatas y santas neocastellanas; Morrás, “Introduction,” 16–17.

99. García Oro and Pérez López, “La reforma religiosa durante la gobernación del Cardenal Cisneros,” 50–59; García Oro, El Cardenal Cisneros.

100. Martín Abad, La imprenta en Alcalá de Henares, 63; Weber, Teresa of Ávila, 22–23.

101. Teresa was the daughter of Alonso II Enríquez de Quiñones.

102. Castro y Castro, Teresa Enríquez, 425, 14–16; Graña Cid, “Religión y política,” 147; Graña Cid, “El mecenazgo franciscano”; Bayle, La Loca del Sacramento, 40; Silleras-Fernandez, “Mystical Traditions,” 223–29.

103. See, for example, Castro y Castro, Teresa Enríquez, 427; Fernández, Teresa Enríquez, 78; Bayle, La Loca del Sacramento, 102–3.

104. Fernández, Teresa Enríquez, 78.

105. Silleras-Fernandez, “Mystical Traditions,” 227.

106. Beltrán de Heredia, Historia de la reforma, 78–142; Bilinkoff, “Charisma and Controversy,” 57; Hergiz, “Genuine and Fraudulent,” 151; Muñoz Fernández, “María de Santo Domingo,” 111–30; Sanmartín Bastida, La representación de las místicas, 318–48; Fernández de Córdova, “El ‘otro príncipe,’” 50.

107. Bilinkoff, “Charisma and Controversy,” 59.

108. Sanmartín Bastida and Luengo Balbás, Las revelaciones.

109. Zugasti, “Santidad bajo sospecha,” 2; Surtz, Writing Women, 104–26.

110. Surtz, The Guitar of God, 6; and El libro del Conorte.

111. Surtz, Writing Women; Kristeva, “The Passion According to Saint Teresa,” 202.

112. Other women were less fortunate, like Lucrecia de León, a young Castilian woman who was put on trial by the Inquisition in 1590–95 because of dreams that were considered blasphemous, heretical, and detrimental to the reputation of Felipe II. For the case, see Kagan, Lucrecia’s Dreams, 9–13.

113. Bernáldez, Historia de los RC, 40; Azcona, Isabel la Católica, 53; Val Valdivieso, Isabel la Católica, Princesa, 53.