CHAPTER ONE

GENDER STEREOTYPES AND SEXUAL TRANSGRESSIONS IN EARLY MODERN SPAIN AND PORTUGAL

In common with the rest of early modern Europe, Spanish and Portuguese societies embraced clearly defined and demarcated gender identities by reproducing and embracing misogynistic stereotypes of male and female behaviour and appearance. Biblical and Aristotelian notions of women/ female bodies as imperfect versions of men/male bodies were widely accepted, even within medical circles. The noted Spanish physician Juan Huarte de San Juan (c.1529–1592), for example, argued in his widely-read Examen de ingenios para las ciencias (1575) that the essential physical characteristics of female bodies – a cold and moist temperature – enabled them to conceive and made them apt to bear children but also sty- mied their intellectual development and thus rendered them inferior to men.1 Overtly misogynistic attitudes can easily be found in the considerable literature relating to the proper education or conduct of women, most notably in works such as The Education of a Christian Woman, published in 1523 by humanist scholar Juan Luis Vives (1493–1540) and the very pop- ular The Perfect Wife by Fray Luis de León (1527–1591), published in 1583 and republished in no less than eight subsequent editions between 1583 and 1621. Women were normally represented as possessing weaker bodies and characters than men. Fray Luis de León, in particular, used his work to promote a rigid definition of the roles of men and women in society: God did not endow women either with the capacity necessary for important business dealings, or with the vigour indispensable for war and agriculture. Let them take the measure of what they truly are, and be content with the lot which has befallen them, occupy themselves with the housekeeping, and be active about their houses, since that is what they were meant to do. (…) As men were meant to mix in public, so women were made for retirement;

1 M. Bolufer, “Medicine and the Querelle des Femmes in early Modern Spain”, Health and Medicine in Habsburg Spain: Agents, Practices, Representations, ed. T. Huguet-Termes, J. Arrizabalaga and H.J. Cook (London, 2009), 86–106. 18 chapter one

and as it pertains to men to go out, and to engage in discussions, so it behoves women to seek seclusion, and to withdraw from observation.2 In spite of such widespread gender stereotypes, or perhaps because of them, many individuals did find themselves transgressing gender roles. In the eyes of society, such individuals were negatively referred to as “effeminate men” (hombres afeminados in Spanish / homens afeminados in Portuguese) and “masculine women” (mujeres varoniles / mulheres varoniles). Whilst chroniclers in early modern Spain praised the “manly” spirit and virtues of Queen Isabel of Castile (1474–1504), such effusive admiration was not extended to other “manly” women and was in fact solely intended to highly praise her political and spiritual accomplish- ments despite her “womanly body”.3 Insofar as the church authorities in early modern Spain and Portugal were concerned, the physical appearance of genitals and the capacity of male or female genitalia to properly perform the reproductive function that was assigned to them played a crucial part in the definition of gender identity. Working with the records of ecclesiastical courts (episcopal rather than inquisitorial), Edward Behrend-Martínez has convincingly demonstrated how, at least in legal proceedings, “the body, like place and condition, arbitrarily determined who one was and how one was treated”. Thus a man was defined by his ability to sustain an erection, penetrate a woman with his penis and ejaculate semen. In 1587 Pope Sixtus V, respond- ing to a letter from the Papal nuncio in Spain soliciting advice on the sub- ject, expressly prohibited the marriage of eunuchs by issuing the papal brief Cum Frequenter. Marital litigation in the episcopal court of the dio- ceses of Calahorra and La Calzada-Logroño in northern Spain during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries reveals that men who did not pos- sess testicles – either due to a birth defect or as a consequence of surgery (for the removal of hernias) – were denied the right to marry: the conse- cration of manhood and male gender identity. Similarly, the same litiga- tion from northern Spain demonstrates that the husbands of “impotent women” – women who could not be penetrated vaginally or who were infertile – could appeal to Canon Law to annul their marriages.4 Such an

2 Fr. Luis de León, The Perfect Wife, (Denton Texas, 1943), 73–4. This translation is based on the earlier one by E. Wallace (Chicago, 1903). For Juan Luis Vives see The Education of a Christian Woman: a Sixteenth-century Manual, ed. and tr. Charles Fantazzi (Chicago, 2000). 3 D.A. Boruchoff, “Historiography with license: Isabel, the Catholic Monarch and the Kingdom of God”, Isabel La Católica, Queen of Castile (New York, 2003), 225–294. 4 For an analysis of Cum Frequenter, see A. McGrath, A Controversy Concerning Male Impotence (Rome, 1988); Edward Behrend-Martínez, “Manhood and the neutered body in