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Women and the Republic of Letters in the Luso-Hispanic World, 1447- 1700

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Women and the Republic of Letters in the Luso-Hispanic World, 1447- 1700 Villegas de la Torre, Esther Maria (2012) Women and the republic of letters in the Luso-Hispanic world, 1447- 1700. PhD thesis, University of Nottingham. 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For more information, please contact [email protected] WOMEN AND THE REPUBLIC OF LETTERS IN THE LUSO-HISPANIC WORLD, 1447–1700 Esther María Villegas de la Torre Thesis submitted to the University of Nottingham for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 2011 Abstract Questions of gender, feminism, and écriture feminine in individual cases continue to be given priority in studies of women’s writing in Baroque Spain, to the exclusion of study of the wealth of original sources that show women participating freely and equally in all aspects of the Republic of Letters, as contemporaries called the literary profession. My doctoral thesis seeks to correct this imbalance by charting the rise and consolidation of the status and image of women as authors in and around the period now recognized as having seen the beginnings of the literary profession, 1600-1650. I take as my field the república literaria in the Spanish Atlantic empire in the period 1450–1700, with parallels from England, France and Italy. Using Genette’s studies of the paratext (2001) and Darnton’s theory of the “communication circuit” (2006), and building on the work of cultural historians (Bouza 1992, 1997, 2001; Bourdieu 1993; Chartier 1994; Cayuela 1996 & 2005), I examine the role of women as authors and readers, chiefly through an analysis of the discourse of their paratexts in a representative corpus of texts patronized, written, or published by women in Catalan, Portuguese, and Spanish. The key criterion of selection has been the projection of a female voice in public texts, whether via a sobriquet, a real name, grammatical gender, or a pseudonym. However, where appropriate, it has been extended to include also literary correspondence, book inventories, and texts, which despite being published anonymously, have been shown to be by women. The study is divided into two parts wherein extant sources have been selected and arranged chronologically and by theme, rather than by author. Part I, comprising Chapters 1 and 2, examines the rise and expansion of women’s symbolic capital in the 2 public literary sphere. Part II, comprising Chapters 3 and 4, shows that, by the seventeenth century, women’s literary practices had achieved commercial, professional and didactic renown on both sides of the Atlantic. Chapter 1 shows the rhetorical significance embedded in women’s first metadiscourses, whether in identifiable or anonymous authorship, dating back to the fifteenth century. Chapter 2 illustrates women’s rising literary authority by reviewing their public endeavours and literary self-consciouness in the sixteenth century. Chapter 3 shows the rise of discourses of fame and professionalization in single publications by identifiable female authors, a shift most noticeable in commercial traditions in print (ephemera, the novela and the theatre). Chapter 4 challenges the fallacy that women chose anonymity or hid behind a patron (or publisher) because of their sexual difference. It thus assesses whether the question of women’s literary successes ultimately depended on a negation of their female sex —through publishing anonymously, under a pseudonym, or in the name of a publisher— or was, rather, influenced by their authorial intent, social and religious status. In sum, the thesis shows that women’s sexual difference did not prevent them from gaining a successful and recognized place within the rising Republic of Letters, but was on the contrary turned to their advantage as a promotional point. Women were as important as men as agents in the emergence of the modern concept of the author as independent artist. 3 Acknowledgements Financial support for this project came from the Departments of Hispanic Studies at the Universities of Manchester and Nottingham in the form of PhD studentships; the Cañada Blanch Centre for Advanced Hispanic Studies provided funds for my fieldwork in libraries in Spain and Portugal. My warmest and heartfelt gratitude goes to my supervisor Professor Jeremy Lawrance for his unconditional guidance and support, especially with the Latin, without which this project could have not been completed. I also would like to thank Dr Esther Gómez Sierra and Professor Adrian Armstrong, supervisor and member of my research panel respectively, for their support and useful input during the two years I spent at the University of Manchester. Finally, my greatest debt of gratitude, for their unfaltering support and faith in me, goes to my beloved family and friends, especially my husband Steven, and our son Leo, who gave me the strength to complete this project. This thesis is dedicated to both of them. 4 List of Contents Abstract ............................... 2 Acknowledgements ............................... 4 Declaration and Copyright Statement ............................... 6 Abbreviations and Conventions ............................... 7 Introduction ............................... 8 Part I – Establishing Traditions Chapter 1: Female Authorial Voices ............................... 46 1.1. A Positive Foreign Referent ............................... 48 1.2. Teaching Outside the Church ............................... 56 1.3. Translators and Illustrators ............................... 70 1.4. Mass Consumption and Print ............................... 75 Chapter 2: Wider Voices, Wider Roles ............................... 83 2.1. First Secular Voices ............................... 86 2.2. Patrons and Publishers ............................... 92 2.3. Prose Fiction Writers ............................... 103 2.4. Humanist Circles ............................... 117 2.5. Authoritative and Commercial Status ............................... 127 Part II – Consolidating Success Chapter 3: Fame, Print, and Professionalization ............................... 167 3.1. Publishing as Casadas and Doctas ............................... 170 3.2. Professional Attitudes ............................... 192 3.3. Seville-Madrid-Mexico-Zaragoza Networks ............................... 217 3.4. Commercial Traditions by the late 1600s ............................... 236 Chapter 4: Authorial Intent, Reticence, and Renown ............................... 251 4.1. Authorship and Publication, 1637-1672 ............................... 254 4.2. Authorship and Publication, 1672-1700 ............................... 290 Conclusion ............................... 327 Bibliography ............................... 333 5 Declaration No portion of the work referred to in this thesis has been submitted in support of an application for another degree or qualification of this or any other university or other institute of learning. An earlier version of sections 3.2 and 3.3 is published as ‘Transatlantic Interactions: Seventeenth-Century Women Authors and Literary Self-Consciousness’, in Identity, Nation, and Discourse: Latin American Women Writers and Artists, ed. by Claire Taylor (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), pp. 104-21. Copyright Statement i) Copyright in text of this thesis rests with the Author. Copies (by any process) either in full, or of extracts, may be made only in accordance with instructions given by the Author and lodged in the University Library of Nottingham. Details may be obtained from the Librarian. This page must form part of any such copies made. Further copies (by any process) of copies made in accordance with such instructions may not be made without the permission (in writing) of the Author. ii) The ownership of any intellectual property rights which may be described in this thesis is vested in The University of Nottingham, subject to any prior agreement to the contrary, and may not be made available for use by third parties without the written permission of the University, which will prescribe the terms and conditions of any such agreement. iii) Further information on the conditions under which disclosures and exploitation may take place is available from the Head of School of Modern
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