The Politics of Widowhood

Isabel of Portugal, the wife of Juan II, was an active queen during the lifetime of her husband, although she showed occasional symptoms of emotional or psychological distress, including profound sadness after giving birth. However, after his death in 1454 she withdrew from the court and took refuge in an isolated castle in the town of Arévalo. There she raised her daughter, the unlikely future queen Isabel I the Catholic, and her son, Alfonso, in the company of her mother, Isabel de Barcelos, who had come from Portugal to support her. The new king of Castile, her stepson, Enrique IV, was content to have his stepmother living away from the court; on one of the rare occasions he visited her, one of his men, Pedro Girón, the Master of the Order of Calatrava, sexually assaulted her, causing further trauma. Because there was no indication her daughter would grow up to rule Castile, Isabel of Portugal was out of the limelight; there is little documentation concerning her later life, and we do not know if she eventually overcame the melancholy that plagued her after Juan’s death. Although unforeseen at the time, the reclusion of Isabel of Portugal likely set a precedent or provided an inspiration for how royal women seen as troublesome might be neutralized. Her example would have been fresh in the minds of the Catholic Kings and their courtiers.

The influence of the Trastámara dynasty on Iberian culture ran deep, but the times were changing in ways they could not resist. Humanist discourse was reshaping the feminine ideal, but the status of women was also changing, affording them more autonomy and granting them greater liberties in the public sphere. Thus, for example, in his last will and testament, Juan II specified that his widow, Isabel of Portugal, would have to remain chaste and unmarried or lose access to her own children and cease to enjoy the prerogatives of a royal widow. In real terms, this meant renouncing not only any ability to remarry but also any prospect of sentimental or sexual companionship. This would no longer be possible only a few decades later—not because the status or standing of women had improved per se, but because royal women had come to be seen as political assets precisely because they could remarry. Royal women, whether single, widowed, legitimate or illegitimate, became even more crucial pieces in a complex game of alliances and rivalries that drove an unprecedented wave of territorial expansion. Regardless of how women were seen by society or presented in misogynistic discourse, their importance within the structure of the dynasty and their role in royal government only grew as Europe embarked on a trajectory that would lead eventually to absolutism and the principle of the divine right. Consequently, this period saw a proliferation of women inheriting positions of formal power and authority, and ruling as queens in their own right.

Isabel and Fernando married in 1469. He was already King of Sicily, and would inherit the Crown of Aragon in 1479, whereas she became Queen of Castile in 1475. Hence, through this union the Trastámaras achieved what had appeared impossible only a generation or two before: the dynastic union of the two most important Iberian crowns. But this was not the end of their ambitions. Even before the marriage of the Catholic Monarchs, both Trastámara branches had been marrying aggressively into the ruling dynasties of Navarre and Portugal, which had become united with them through multiple bonds of matrimony and kinship. Meanwhile, the Trastámara patrimony continued to expand: first with the conquest of Nasrid Granada in 1492, the laying of the foundations of their New World empire in that same year, and the annexation of Iberian Navarre in 1512. The Crown of Aragon (which also included Naples and other territories) and the Crown of Castile were themselves composite dynastic aggregates made up of formally independent kingdoms and principalities that just happened to be the patrimony of single rulers. At the institutional level they constituted composite monarchies, in which the constituent realms had their own institutions, laws, and even languages, but shared the same monarch.

The paradigm of composite monarchy was first proposed by H. P. Koenigsberger in the 1970s and was popularized in the Hispanic context by the British historian John Elliott, who deployed the term in reference to the Spanish Empire of the early modern era. However, it was no less applicable to the medieval Crown of Aragon.⁵ Elliott employed the terminology of the Castilian jurist and oidor (judge) of the Audiencia of Lima, Juan de Solórzano Pereira (1575–1655), who discerned two types of composite monarchies: the accessory and the aeque principaliter.⁶ In an “accessory composite monarchy” new territories conquered or acquired by the sovereign were united to the main kingdom and its legislative and institutional regime. On the other hand, in an aeque principaliter (equally important) composite monarchy, the structure is less centralized, and new territories are aggregated to the dynasty but remain independent, under their own laws, institutions, and customs.⁷ It is this second system of government that came to characterize the early modern Spanish Empire, as it had the Crown of Aragon before. More recently, to emphasize the decentralized nature of the multi-territorial Spanish and Portuguese early modern monarchies the concept of “polycentric monarchies” has been proposed.⁸

The massive amalgamation that became Carlos V’s empire derived from Juana’s marriage to Philippe of Burgundy. Carlos inherited the Crown of Castile and its overseas colonies and African enclaves from his mother, together with the Crown of Aragon and its Mediterranean territories (including Mallorca, Naples, Sicily, and Sardinia, among others), and the Habsburg lands (the Holy Roman Empire, Germany, northern Italy, and the Burgundian Netherlands), from his paternal grandfather. Two strategies were employed to maintain and rule over these many far-flung territories, and both required female collaboration.

The first was the institution of the lieutenant (or viceroy, or regent) and the other was an ambitious program of royal matrimony. As the famous Habsburg motto went, “Let others wage war: thou, happy Austria, marry” (Bella gerant alii, tu felix Austria nube). In fact, in order to cement their matrimonial politics, both the Habsburgs and the Trastámaras at times embarked on double marriages, where two siblings would simultaneously marry two siblings of another dynasty—a practice that in the short run guaranteed the dynastic union would not fail, but in the long run condemned their descendants to debilitating congenital afflictions on account of their intense inbreeding.

The challenge of ruling over widely dispersed territories had been an issue for the Crown of Aragon as early as the reign of Jaume I (1213–76), who ruled over Catalonia, Aragon, Roussillon, and Montpellier, and established the kingdoms of Mallorca (1231) and Valencia (1238) in territory he conquered that had been under Muslim rule. His solution was to create the office of the lieutenancy on June 15, 1274. The problem was that a royal presence was necessary to exert royal authority, but the king could be physically present in only one kingdom at a time. To remedy this, he empowered lieutenants to serve as alter egos—personal embodiments of royal power in his various realms. As subsequent Aragonese monarchs acquired territories in Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, Naples, and southern Italy, this practice became further entrenched.

Aragonese kings preferred to choose lieutenants from within their immediate family, and if there was no son and heir who was able to serve in that role, they would typically appoint a brother, an uncle, or wife to serve. By the mid-fifteenth century and during the Habsburg period, the pool of potential lieutenants needed to expand because there were so many territories that required the presence of the monarch, and individuals from outside the royal family either did not embody the same authority or could not be trusted, so royal daughters, aunts, and sisters—who were in less of a position to break out on their own—would serve in this role.⁹ Dynastic or familial proximity to the monarch was the most important element in choosing who would be appointed lieutenant, viceroy, or regent, and the queen or other close female relatives were good candidates.

The Catalan dynasty that ruled over the Crown of Aragon until 1412 and the Trastámaras, who succeeded them, regularly appointed queens as lieutenants. For example, Alfons the Magnanimous appointed his wife, María of Castile, and his brother, the future Joan II of Aragon, to this office. Fernando the Catholic and his mother had both served as lieutenants of Catalonia; and the reason Fernando was able to spend so much time in Castile during his marriage to Isabel was because he ruled Aragon through lieutenants.¹⁰ After Fernando’s death, his grandson, Carlos V, appointed his step-grandmother, the deceased king’s dowager, Germana de Foix, along with her second husband, Johann of Brandenburg-Ansbach (d. 1525), and her third, Duke Fadrique of Calabria (d. 1550), as viceroys of Valencia. The emperor’s wife, Isabel of Portugal, acted as regent of Spain on several occasions, and his aunt, Marguerite of Austria, held the regency in the Low Countries from 1507, to be replaced in 1531 by her niece, María of Hungary.¹¹

Active female involvement in government was not uncommon in the Iberian Peninsula. Indeed, both Isabel the Catholic and Juana I inherited the throne of Castile fully and in their own right. Prior to its annexation by Castile in 1512, Navarre had been ruled continuously by queens from 1425, except for a brief span of fourteen years, and Navarrese queens had married into both the Castilian and Aragonese branches of the Trastámara family, as well as into the native dynasty of Barcelona.¹² Carlos V’s son, Felipe II (1556–98), continued to employ women in his administration. His sisters, Juana (the Princess of Portugal) and María, and the latter’s husband, Maximilian, served as regent in Spain, while his half sister, Margaret of Parma, held the regency in the Low Countries, to be replaced eventually by the king’s daughter, Isabel Clara Eugenia, and her husband, Albert VII, Archduke of Austria.¹³ The so-called Lesser Austrias, Felipe III (1598–1621), Felipe IV (1621–65), and Carlos II (1665–1700), also employed royal women in the service of the dynasty. For instance, during Carlos’s minority his mother, Queen Marina, acted as his regent from 1665 to 1675.¹⁴

Paradoxically, the sixteenth century—the very time Juana I was locked away in the palace in Tordesillas, as her sister Catalina would be in England after 1531—was the century of female participation in government par excellence. All across Europe there were women ruling either in their own right (normally because a male heir had died) or as regents. Henry VIII of England, who married six times in an effort to secure a viable male heir, was succeeded by not one, but two of his daughters, Mary Tudor (1553–58) and Elizabeth I (1558–1603), while Mary Stuart (1560–67) came to the throne in Scotland.¹⁵ In France, the Salic law prevented women from inheriting, but there were several regents ruling on behalf of their husbands or sons: Louise de Savoie (1515 and 1525) for François I, Catherine de Medici (1560–63) for Charles IX, Marie de Medici (1610–14) for Louis XIII, and Anne of Austria (1643–51) for Louis XIV.¹⁶ This long list reflects not only the crucial role women played in politics, but the fact that medieval and early modern monarchies are best understood as family collectives, in which various members of the royal family (and when that was not possible, of the nobility) actively participated.

Other than appointing women as regents and viceroys the Habsburg dynasty used female relations to establish alliances and aggregate territory through inheritance. This was no innovation; it had been a feature of royal politics since the Middle Ages. Marriageable women constituted an important resource; thus, widows, particularly those of child-bearing age would often remarry, whereas unmarried or younger childless widows would be obliged to do so by their family. So, for the Catholic Monarchs, it was unthinkable that their daughter, Isabel of Aragon, would not remarry after the death of her husband, Afonso, in 1491. She needed to reestablish the marriage alliance her parents had brokered with Portugal (and incidentally to keep Juana “la Beltraneja” from making any claim to the throne). Moreover, Manuel I had insisted she was the wife he wanted; consequently, he was willing to pay whatever price she demanded, in this case, the expulsion of the “heretics” of Portugal. A distraught Isabel, who most likely had been reading consolatory texts and listening to the preachers’ advice while suffering from prolonged and complicated grief, saw the expulsion of the heretics from Portugal as a way of assuaging the vengeful God who had taken away her beloved first husband. To Manuel, it did not matter that she was meddling in the affairs of the kingdom or that she was not interested in marrying him. This was outweighed by the potential political benefit: the dynastic union of the two kingdoms of Portugal and Castile (and potentially Aragon) under his line. Had their son Miguel da Paz reached adulthood, this would likely have come to pass. As for Fernando the Catholic, his will did not impose a life of solitude on his young and childless widow, Germana de Foix. In 1519, three years after his death, Germana married Johann of Brandenburg-Ansbach, and a year after his passing in 1525 (this being the recommended waiting period for widows to remarry), she wed Fadrique, Duke of Calabria.

For his part, Henry VII of England had hoped to marry Juana I of Castile during her troubled widowhood. The rumors of her madness or melancholy did not bother him because he had met her personally, and she had much to offer. She was not only queen of Castile and heiress to Aragon in her own right, but had the proven ability to produce healthy children at a point when the English monarch had only one male child left, the future Henry VIII. However, in this case, her father, Fernando, judged it to be in his dynasty’s interest not to marry her off; so, whatever her own feelings on the matter, it was not going to happen. Previously, Henry VII had also unsuccessfully tried to negotiate marriage with the twice-widowed Marguerite of Austria, who was the dowager of the Catholic King’s heir, Prince Juan, and subsequently, of Philibert II of Savoy. When her happy marriage to Philibert ended after three years, Marguerite fell into the grips of intense sorrow and suicidal thoughts. She was not interested in remarrying, but if Marguerite was able to resist her father’s wishes for a union with Henry VII, it was only because her brother, Philippe the Handsome, unexpectedly died. At that point she was needed more in Flanders as regent of the Netherlands than as a bride for the king of England.

Another childless widow, Juana’s sister Catalina (or Catherine of Aragon), had been ordered to remain in England as a dowager for seven years after the death of her husband, Arthur, Prince of Wales, heir to the throne of England, until in 1519 she could marry her deceased husband’s brother, who had just come to the throne as Henry VIII. Catalina had served as the Castilian ambassador to England in the interim, and soon after her marriage to Henry would be appointed “Governor of the Realm and Captain General” of England while the king was away on campaign. In this way, she rebuilt the alliance with England by remarrying into the same family, just as her sister Isabel had done in Portugal, and as their younger sister, María, would do again after Isabel’s passing, when she married her former brother-in-law, Manuel I. Surprisingly, Catalina’s marriage to Henry lasted only from 1509 to 1531/3. He annulled it on the grounds that their marriage was incestuous, because she had been wedded to his brother. In reality, it was somewhat more complex. Henry wanted a male heir, which in his view Catalina had failed to produce, and he anticipated his new paramour, Anne Boleyn, would give him one.

Indeed, in Henry VIII we see the double standard of gender in high relief. Three of six wives went to the executioner’s block. By any objective standard, the English king was even more impetuous, jealous, erratic, and emotionally driven in his sentimental relations than Juana was said to have been with Philippe. He broke with the papacy and ruptured the Church in pursuit of Anne Boleyn, and when he succeeded in marrying her, condemned Catalina, the mother of his daughter, to a life of humiliating misery and imprisonment. In the face of this, Catalina remained intransigent, like her sister Juana, and refused to acknowledge her husband’s new marriage. Yet, Henry’s mental capacity was never put in doubt, despite the fact that he had three of his wives beheaded. There is no small irony in the fact that the daughter Catalina gave him and whom he rejected on the basis of her gender would succeed to the Tudor throne as Mary I (1553–58)—and marry her nephew Felipe II of Spain—while Anne Boleyn, like two of Henry’s other six wives, was executed once he had tired of her. Mary would be succeeded by Anne’s daughter, Elizabeth I “the Virgin Queen” (1558–1603), who famously refused to marry.

Talking about Marriage

These various marital alliances—most of which fell within the Church’s prohibited degrees of consanguinity and therefore required papal dispensation—coincided with a revitalization of marriage in humanist discourse. In the eyes of the humanists, women should be raised as obedient and not overly educated wives, whose primary calling was to produce children and avoid worldly engagement, even though (or perhaps, because) this was an era in which women were increasingly wielding monarchical power. This dissonance is reflected in Francesc Eiximenis’s late fourteenth-century Book of Women, written at a time when it was not unusual for queens of the Crown of Aragon, including his patroness, Queen Maria de Luna, to publicly exercise political power via the lieutenancy. But Eiximenis ignored this reality to focus on his idealization of womenkind. He saw women’s lives as transitioning through five stages: the girl, the young woman, the married woman, the widow, and the religious.¹⁷ For Eiximenis, all young women of the upper class needed to be educated to read and write, but from there they had one of two paths: marriage or the convent. These options were not arbitrary—for him, the most obviously virtuous choice was to remain a virgin and devote one’s life to God. In marriage Eiximenis advocated the principle of mutual consent, recognized the “marital debt” of sexual intimacy both spouses owed, and encouraged husbands to treat their wives tenderly, saying, “The wife is as a sister to her husband, and not a slave nor a servant.”¹⁸ Nevertheless, a wife’s obedience to her husband was expected; her world was the home, and the outside world was his prerogative. The friar conceived of widowhood as a stage in which women were granted an opportunity to return to a sort of virginal and spiritual state free of male supervision, and to get closer to God in preparation for death. Remarriage was not recommended, and it was only advisable for the weak who could not control their sexual desire.

The Castilian translation of Eiximenis appears in inventories of the libraries of Isabel I and her female descendants.¹⁹ Juana, for example, had a copy in Tordesillas and her daughter Catalina took it with her to Portugal.²⁰ Eiximenis was also esteemed by Isabel’s entourage. For instance, Hernando de Talavera, who served as Isabel I’s confessor and was the first archbishop of Granada, recommended Eiximenis’s works and sponsored their translation from Catalan to Spanish, and saw that they were set down in type.

Seen in this light, the resistance of the dowager princess Isabel to her parents, the Catholic Kings, does not seem irrational or capricious; by refusing to remarry, she was following the recommendations of Eiximenis and other authors of the tradition she had read as a youth. But Isabel and Fernando saw no issue in disregarding the very same religious discourse on women they had promoted, when that discourse conflicted with their political interests. By the same token, their daughter Juana’s modesty and her efforts to withdraw from court to focus on her spiritual life and the burial of her husband also resonated with the recommendations of contemporary Christian moralists. The problem was that Juana I was not just any woman; she was the ruling queen and had to govern Castile. For this reason, her political responsibilities should have trumped any religious or social expectations regarding female behavior during widowhood.

Eiximenis’s book was retranslated and adapted in 1542 by an anonymous Franciscan who undertook to modernize the content and dedicated the book to Catalina of Portugal (Juana’s beloved daughter). In fact, the Franciscan author claimed that he got the idea to undertake the translation because he had been in the company of Pope Adrian VI (the former regent of Castile) when he was offered a copy of The Book of Women, and the pope had praised the treatise to the point of recommending that “all Christian kings needed to have a copy of this book.”²¹ So the good Franciscan decided to adapt it, changing the title to The Chariot of Ladies (Carro de las donas).

This updated text included more recent examples of virtuous womanhood, including Isabel the Catholic and her daughters (including Isabel and Juana), together with other pious and devout Iberian ladies. He also excised Eiximenis’s lengthy section on nuns—his 1542 adaptation was intended for women who would become wives, mothers, and widows. Also included was a consolatory text intended to alleviate Catalina’s sorrow and concerns regarding the succession. At that point, and despite giving birth to nine offspring, only two of her children were alive. Here, he followed the consensus of the moralists of the previous century: Catalina was asked to accept God’s will without questioning and prepare for the inevitable. It bears noting that consolatory texts were generally written by male religious authors who tended to internalize the misogynism of the day. Not only did most never marry or have children; they lived celibate lives (at least in theory) and had relatively little contact with women. They were not writing based on experience and had little sympathy or empathy for their subjects, but were giving voice to abstract theological and social ideals. Far from being compassionate, many, as the private correspondence of Jorge da Costa, Cardinal Alpedrinha, and Fray Íñigo de Mendoza, shows, held the bereaved morally responsible for the death of their loved ones, on the grounds that they had excited the wrath and envy of God, whether as a result of excessive love or as a consequence of their own sins or those of their forebears.

By the time The Chariot of Ladies was produced, the notion that perpetual virginity or life in a monastery was morally superior to marriage had been challenged. Protestants went so far as to dissolve the monasteries, and in 1521 the reformer and ex-monk Martin Luther (1483–1546) married an ex-nun, Katharina von Bora, and the two became parents. Celibacy was not an ideal in Protestant circles. Marriage also gained approval among Catholic moralists. In his treatise In Praise of Marriage (Encomium matrimonii; 1519) Erasmus of Rotterdam complimented the institution and recognized the expression of sexuality within its bounds.²² Erasmus also defended marriage in his The Institution of Marriage (Christiani matrimonii institutio; 1526), a work he dedicated to Catalina of Aragon only a year before Henry VIII petitioned Pope Clement VII to annul their union, which he had earlier qualified as a “most sacred and fortunate marriage.”²³

Marriage is also featured in the most popular contemporary European book devoted to the instruction of women: The Education of a Christian Woman penned by a Valencian converso in exile, Joan Lluís Vives, in 1523. This text was also dedicated to Catalina of Aragon and was intended for her daughter, Mary (who later would reign as Mary I of England). Five years after its publication, Juan Justiniano translated the text into Spanish and dedicated it to the queen of Aragon, Germana de Foix (who, as the wife of Fernando the Catholic, had been Catalina’s stepmother).²⁴ Vives also composed On the Obligations of the Husband (De officio mariti; 1542), a treatise he dedicated to Juan de Borja, Duke of Gandia, but which did not circulate widely in Spain. His treatise on women, on the other hand, was a runaway success.²⁵

Vives’s work sits somewhere halfway between the spirit of Eiximenis’s original Book of Women (which he knew well because it was popular in his native Valencia), and the adaptation of 1542. Vives forcefully pushes for female instruction, which is something that was already established in European and Iberian courts, as reflected in the upbringing of the daughters of Fernando and Isabel, who all learned Latin and were well read.²⁶ For Vives the four stages of women’s lives were childhood, unmarried youth, marriage, and widowhood. While medieval didactic texts tended to emphasize chastity—a virtue supposedly applied to both men and women—Vives made it the sum of all feminine morality. “In a woman,” he writes, “chastity is the equivalent of all virtues.”²⁷ He was referring, of course, to abstinence before marriage, faithful conduct while wed, and a return to abstinence in widowhood. He certainly did not envision women taking a leading role in politics or government or in public life in general, and emphasized the husband’s obligation to exercise authority over his wife. Nor do wifely obligations end with the death of the spouse, for “there is no husband who does not wish his death to be mourned by his wife, and that he be missed.” Nevertheless, he recommends decorum and moderation; in his view it was no less a fault to mourn too much than to mourn too little. One should aspire to a golden mean of grief:

Let a widow mourn her dead husband with true affection, but not cry out or afflict herself by beating her hands together or with blows to her limbs or her body. In her grief, she should observe modesty and moderation and not make such show of her distress that others will see it. When the first shock of sorrow subsides, she should begin to take thought of consolation.²⁸

Indeed, the dowager Juana seemed to be acting in accord with this model up to the point that she disinterred her husband’s corpse and embarked on their postmortem journey to Granada.Juana, of course, was no mere woman, but a ruling queen, and different rules applied to her. In any event, as Freud learned following the death of his own daughter, it is far easier to write about a perfect and balanced state of bereavement in the abstract than to live it in real life.²⁹ Theory and practice rarely go hand in hand.

While in humanist discourse the lives of women were being reduced to that of educated and faithful wives who were to remain at home and whose agency was limited, the historical record contradicts this ideal. We see this tension in texts like Fray Luis de León’s (1527–91) The Perfect Wife (La perfecta casada), a work he dedicated to his niece, María Varela Osorio. Fray Luis was an Augustinian monk, a writer, and a professor at the University of Salamanca who for a time came under the scrutiny of the Inquisition but was ultimately rehabilitated. For Fray Luis, gender boundaries and social order were of paramount importance: women were to be obedient and stay at home while men were to be active in the outside world to support the family. He even built his case by using an example from another culture. “The Chinese,” he waxed, “disfigure the feet of their little girls at birth, so that when they are women, they will not be able to leave the house, and because in the home, such twisted [feet] are sufficient.”³⁰ For his part, Vives mentions sati, the ancient South Asian tradition that involved the self-immolation of a widow on her husband’s pyre—a sign of great wifely devotion that was expected of widows who were not pregnant or caring for small children.³¹ While neither Fray Luis nor Vives advises following these Chinese and South Asian customs, they embraced their symbolic nature, and appreciated them as confirmations that the patriarchal order held sway over even foreign, heathen cultures.

Altogether, the contemporary genre of female edification established women as the inhabitants of domestic space. These books were meant to prepare them for marriage, but for the most part to discourage remarriage—the latter recommendation being one that women of ruling families could not in truth obey. Nevertheless, these high-status women were held up as examples. For instance, the 1542 adaptation of The Chariot of Ladies included Isabel the Catholic and her daughters as moral examples for a new generation, despite the fact that they evinced an agency and influence that absolutely contradicted the ideals these works presented. Meanwhile, the Catholic Monarchs had become icons for Golden Age Spain and seemed to embody a simpler and more traditional past than the ambiguities and complexity of the Habsburg century. Fernando was held up as an epitome in Machiavelli’s The Prince, and Isabel was praised in Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, the work that codified the courtly culture of early modern Europe.³² Isabel the Catholic, together with her mother, Isabel of Portugal, Fernando, and their contemporary Beatriz da Silva appear as characters in works by some of the greatest playwrights of the age: Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, and Luis Vélez de Guevara.³³

For the most part Isabel the Catholic is not praised in early modern writing for being an effective and authoritative ruler, but rather for being a good Christian and a faithful daughter who tended to her widowed mother in Arévalo, a loving wife and mother to her husband and children, a patron and protector of the Franciscan Order, a founder of monasteries in a Granada newly conquered from Islam, and a scourge of the Jews. Her role in government and her acumen as queen are of no interest.

These texts deploy the same strategy we saw used in chapter 4 by Francisco de Quiñones and later playwrights, like Lope de Vega and Tirso de Molina. Their works deprive women of their conscious agency and public personas. In the end, these texts, which aspire to be proscriptive, are not even descriptive. Royal women in this period filled many roles; they were wives, mothers, and daughters, but they also engaged in diplomacy and forged political alliances, served as protectors of the Church, were active patronesses of culture, and played formal and informal roles in government. But the moralists happily overlooked whatever did not conform to the narrow role they imagined women were meant to fill in society. In fact, looking back across this book, it appears that those women who did indeed emulate the model proposed by the moralists—women like Isabel of Aragon and Juana I—were regarded as deviants, and punished either with a new marriage or with the accusation that they were neglecting their royal duties. In other words, they were caught in a moral and social double bind. Royal women were given the impossible task of squaring the circle of their conflicting moral and political obligations.

Unemotional Rulers Wanted

Of course, ruling kings and queens represented a miniscule proportion of the population, and together with their families enjoyed a position of extreme privilege. On the other hand, they were held up as mirrors and examples for their subjects and were expected to bear the pressures, responsibilities, and risks of rule with a certain sangfroid. Monarchs had to appear in control and keep their passions in check, but as seen in this study, the power of love, anger, jealousy, and grief was at times too great to repress. Grief was particularly problematic, as it could easily slip into debilitating melancholy, which in turn could be seen as madness.

In the sixth part of his Dialogues on Natural and Moral Philosophy (Diálogos de philosophia natural y moral; 1558) Pedro Mercado suggests that episodes (accidentes) of unfounded anxiety can spiral into suicidal tendencies.³⁴ In 1585 Andrés Velázquez published his Book on Melancholy (Libro de la melancholia; 1585), the first work on the subject written in a European vernacular. Therein he identified a subtype, “morbid melancholy,” as related to insanity. He referred to the two types of madness identified in the Greek medical tradition: melancholia and mania, the second of which is more intense and presents distinct symptoms. Interestingly, he presents both as medical conditions (as opposed to divine or demonic maladies) and such, believed they were curable. This was not the case for Juana, who once she had been confined could not be released.³⁵ Small comfort, perhaps, but at least she was in a palace and would have her physical needs attended to. In fact, her kingdoms were among the first in Christian Europe to develop institutional care for the mentally ill in hospitals created specifically for that goal, including foundations in Valencia (1409), Córdoba (1419), Zaragoza (1425), Seville (ca. 1436), Toledo (1483), Valladolid (1489), and Granada (1527).³⁶

As Barbara Rosenwein has noted, “No one is born knowing appropriate modes of expression, or whether to imagine emotions as internal or external, or whether to privilege or disregard emotion.”³⁷ Emotional performances are learned, and each culture and social environment has specific expectations in that regard. At times, rulers had to be coldly ruthless, and in the Iberian Peninsula, at least in the period studied in this book, only the merciless triumphed, while those who vacillated or indulged in introspection were pushed aside. Thus, Isabel the Catholic’s father, the perennially vacillating and domineered Juan II of Castile, was overshadowed by his favorite, Álvaro de Luna, and defied by his cousins, the Infantes de Aragón. In the imagination of the time, Juan was a weak king—a pleasure-seeker suspected of sexually submitting to Álvaro de Luna, and subsequently lustily falling into the thrall of his second wife, Isabel. Juan’s son and successor, Enrique IV, fared little better. He too was seen as a poor monarch: dismissed as impotent, to the point that the daughter he did produce was slandered as the adulterous offspring of the royal favorite, Beltrán de la Cueva. To his subjects, the king was a cuckold.

For this reason, the right of “La Beltraneja” to succeed was challenged by her aunt, Isabel the Catholic, who was all too ready to believe her to be illegitimate. After winning the civil war against Juana and her supporters, Isabel and Fernando disposed of the deposed heiress by confining her to a convent, unwittingly foreshadowing the fate of their own daughters, Juana and Catalina. As for Fernando, there was no rival to dispose of. His father, Joan II of Aragon, had done him that service, when instead of allowing the infante’s older half brother, Carlos de Viana, to inherit the throne of Navarre from his mother and serve as heir to the Catalano-Aragonese crown, he imprisoned him twice, which likely helped precipitate his early demise. This served as a precedent, perhaps, when Fernando would later consider the fate of his daughter Juana, and elected to deprive her of her birthright and put her away. Carlos V followed suit, further isolating his mother, and ensuring she would never be free. His son, Felipe II, grew up seeing his grandmother Juana at times, and even tended her toward her end. Accordingly, it was a natural step for him to put away his own unbalanced and rebellious son, Carlos.

As it was, ruler after ruler in the Trastámara-Habsburg line found they needed to dispose of a potentially troublesome family member. It is tempting to see this as the legacy of the dynasty’s original sin: when on March 23, 1369, Enrique Trastámara, the illegitimate son of Alfonso XI, murdered his half brother, Pedro the Cruel, the legitimate king of Castile, under a flag of truce, by personally plunging the dagger into his breast. Cain and Abel. From that point the Trastámara monarchs would stop at nothing to rule. As Martire d’Anghiera put it in a missive to Alfonso Carrillo, Bishop of Pamplona, in which he informed him of the passing of Prince Afonso of Portugal, “We will never run short of kings who wish to govern us.”³⁸ And for women, the standards were higher. Isabel the Catholic sensed this intuitively as a consequence of her upbringing and the experiences of her mother. Juana did not. Thus, her hesitations, her lack of commitment, and what was perceived as her preference for her husband over her kingdom came to be taken as signs of instability, and ultimately, insanity.

The women who are at the center of this book: Isabel of Portugal, Isabel the Catholic, Isabel of Aragon, and Juana I, along with Leonor of Viseu (together with her husband, João II), fell into the grip of intense sorrow, because prior to their grief that they had experienced intense love. Nevertheless, they were all members of an emotional community that embodied precise rules for behavior, and demanded restraint. Intense love was to be reserved for God alone, therefore abandoning oneself to excessive mourning represented an offense to God and a defiance of his will. Those who allowed themselves the luxury of excessive grief were violating the First Commandment: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” Similarly, in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus directed, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment,” to which he added: “And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”³⁹

Moreover, given that death is the fate of every mortal, people were expected to accept it as part of life. There was simply no justification for disproportionate and debilitating displays of grief. And those who were vulnerable or could not adhere to this ideal could turn to consolatory writings intended to interiorize, compartmentalize, and intellectualize mourning, so that it did not provoke personal, dynastic, or political crises. The danger was, as Gail Holst-Warhaft put it, that “because it arouses passion, grief can always be manipulated for political ends.”⁴⁰ Therefore, failing to perform grief correctly could have devasting consequences not only for the individual but for the kingdom. Of the two bereaved sisters, Isabel and Juana, the former found a way out by externalizing and channeling her anxieties and sense of culpability into a tangible, morally vindicating end: the expulsion of non-Christians and heretics from the Portuguese kingdom. She traded her own suffering for the suffering of others. Juana, who turned inward, only made herself suffer more. The era of “great confinement” arrived in Castile much earlier than Foucault anticipated, at least in royal circles and as it pertained to women.

But it was not only women who were caught up in such political-emotional situations. In 1597, one year before Felipe II died, the stoic king finally lost his composure. He was seventy years old and had lost four wives and at least six children when he received news of the passing of his beloved daughter, Catalina Micaela. Of all his offspring only Isabel Clara Eugenia and the future Felipe III remained alive. This broke the king’s spirit, and according to Fray Jerónimo de Sepúlveda “el Tuerto” (“the One-Eyed”) from the monastery of El Escorial, the monarch “felt it too intensely” (sintiólo demasiadamente). Sepúlveda continued that never “had he seen him complain … and now all he does is complain.”⁴¹ Even Felipe II—the epitome of sobriety and restraint—had reached his limit, and now every setback became an irritation. On September 13, 1598, he passed away. Nevertheless, while he lived, he held the line, rarely wavering in the face of repeated personal tragedies and emotional stresses. In this sense, he was a model for his age and the culmination of the transition from medieval to early modern modes of mourning. Ever more strict personal restraint would be offset by ever more pompous public ceremonial—such were the politics of emotion in the new Europe at the dawn of the modern age.

These approaches to grief and mourning had not yet been established in the time of Isabel the Catholic, or her mother and daughters. These women lived, loved, and grieved in an era that was transitioning from the emotional culture of the Middle Ages to new modes of feeling and expression. At this juncture, the emotional communities of the court were in flux, particularly for women, who as a gender were seen as prone to irrationality. Thus, episodes of intense emotion or behavior that did not align with the agendas that were imposed on them left these women vulnerable to accusations of madness. For royal women the emotional and the political were inextricably bound, and the distinction between private and public life was elusive at best. As a consequence, presenting them as “mad” in the context of situations of emotional duress could be deployed as a strategy for marginalizing them politically. In the court environment, emotion was always political, and there are few emotional states more intense or volatile than the passions associated with love, death, and grief.

1. For a comprehensive political reading of the couplets, see Montelón, “Las coplas de Manrique.”

2. Cascone, “Archaeologists Have Discovered”; Laqueur, The Work of the Dead, part 1.

3. Han, What Is Power? 30.

4. Han, What Is Power? 15.

5. Koenigsberger used the concept “composite state,” while Russell, when analyzing the British composite monarchy, preferred to use “multiple kingdoms.” Koenigsberger, “Monarchies and Parliaments,” 191–217; Koenigsberger, “Composite States,” 135–53. See also Russell, The Causes of the English Civil War, 27.

6. Elliott, “A Europe of Composite Monarchies,” 52–53; Elliott, “Catalunya dins d’una Europa,” 11–23.

7. Glöel, “Las monarquías compuestas,” 91–92; Solano Camón, “La institución virreinal,”149–62.

8. Cardim, Herzog, Ruiz-Ibáñez, and Sabatini, Polycentric Monarchies.

9. Lalinde, “Virreyes y lugartenientes,” 111; Cardim and Palos, El mundo de los virreyes, 16–19; Silleras-Fernandez, Power, Piety, and Patronage; Silleras-Fernandez, Chariots of Ladies, 162–68.

10. Buyreu, “Algunes puntualitzacions,” 321–38.

11. Eichberger, Women of Distinction; Iogh, Margaret of Austria; Tremayne, The First Governess; and Rethelyi, Mary of Hungary.

12. Woodacre, The Queens Regnant of Navarre, passim.

13. González Cuerva, Maria of Austria, 51–52; Steen, Margaret of Parma; Van Wyhe, Isabel Clara Eugenia.

14. Mitchell, Queen, Mother, and Stateswoman; Sánchez, The Empress, the Queen, and the Nun.

15. McLaren, “Queenship in Early Modern England.”

16. Crawford, Perilous Performance; Opfell, Queens, Empresses, Grand Duchesses; Matarasso, Queen’s Mate; Bertière, Les reines de France; Knecht, Catherine de Medici; Viennot, La France.

17. Viera, “The Structure and Division,” 159–64.

18. Eiximenis, LD, I:129.

19. Viera, “The Presence of Francesc Eiximenis,” 1–6.

20. Sánchez-Molero, “Portugal y Castilla,”166; and Regia Bibliotheca, 1:8–82. Carlos V authorized Catalina to take the books from her mother’s library with her to Portugal. Jordan, A rainha coleccionadora, 29.

21.CD, I, 134.

22. “I have no patience with those who say that sexual excitement is shameful and that venereal stimuli have their origin not in nature, but in sin. Nothing is so far from the truth.” Rummel, Erasmus on Women, 66. According to Bataillon, Erasmus was influential at the court of Carlos V and esteemed by writers like Alfonso de Valdés (1490–1532), but fell out of favor under Felipe II. Bataillon, Erasmo y España; Bataillon, Études sur le Portugal. That said, for Sánchez-Molero, Prince Felipe’s court in Valladolid (1541–48) became a new center of Erasmianism. Sánchez-Molero, Felipe II: La educación, 815. See also Checa, “Didactic Prose,” 284.

23. Rummel, Erasmus on Women, 79.

24. The text was translated also from Latin into English by Richard Hyrd (a friend of Thomas More), who dedicated it to Queen Catherine (Catalina).

25. The treatise on women was printed in 1529, 1535, 1539 (in two editions), 1545, 1555, and 1584. Vives’s De officio mariti was published in dual editions, along with his De institutione feminae christianae, in Paris (1542) and Milan (1561). Correia Fernandes, Espelhos, cartas e guias, 144–46 and n8; and San José Lera, “Introducción,” in La perfecta casada, 27n53.

26. Vives refers to and applauds the Catholic Monarchs’ daughters’ education (The Education of a Christian Woman, 61 and 69–70). Other important books on education were Erasmus’s On Education for Children (De pueris instituendis; ca. 1509) and On the Civility of Youthful Mores (De civilitate morum puerilium; 1530). Norbert Elias considered the latter a precursor of a “process of civility” that took root among both European elites and lesser classes. Elias, The Civilizing Process, 53–54; Chartier, “Distinction et divulgation,” 50–54.

27. Vives, The Education of a Christian Woman, 85.

28. Vives, The Education of a Christian Woman, 303.

29. For Freud on grief, see the introduction.

30. Fray Luis, La perfecta casada, 181–82 and n235. The Chinese custom was added to the 1586 edition, having been taken from Juan González de Mendoza’s History of the Most Notable Things, Rites, and Customs of the Great Kingdom of China (Historia de las cosas más notables, ritos y costumbres del gran Reyno de la China), published the same year.

31. Vives, The Education of a Christian Woman, 300.

32. Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, 203. Castiglione’s book was printed in 1528, but he started writing it twenty years earlier. It was translated into Spanish in 1534. See Monter, The Rise of Female Kings, chap. 3, “Difficult Beginnings: Heiresses with Crowned Husbands, 1300–1550,” 54–93.

33. See, for example, Lope de Vega’s “El mejor mozo de España” and “El niño inocente de la Guardia”; Tirso de Molina’s “Antona García,” “El amor médico,” and “Doña Beatriz de Silva”; and Vélez de Guevara’s “La luna de la sierra,” “La serrana de la Vera,” and “La corte del demonio.” See Caba, Isabel la Católica; Profeti, Los Reyes Católicos en el teatro, passim.

34. Carrera, “Madness and Melancholy,” 4.

35. Huguet-Termes and Arrizabalaga, “Hospital Care for the Insane,” 81.

36. Carrera, “Madness and Melancholy,” 6; Scull, “The Asylum,” 102.

37. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities, 15.

38. Anglería, Epistolario, 1:b.5, doc. 93 (March 18, 1492).

39. Matthew 22:35–40.

40. See Holst-Warhaft, The Cue for Passion, 5.

41. Varela, La muerte del rey, 33l; Jerónimo de Sepúlveda’s Historia de varios sucesos del reino de Felipe II is preserved in two volumes at the BNE: MSS 2576 and 2577.