Workshop 25

25.
The Built Environment and the Imaginary;
Women's Space in Early Modern Spain and Italy

Organizers:

Darcy Donahue, Spanish Literature, Miami University
Helen Hills, Art History, University of Manchester, UK
Eunice D. Howe, Art History, University of Southern California
Elizabeth A. Lehfeldt, History, Cleveland State University;
Mary Elizabeth Perry, History, Occidental College;

Description:
This theme of this workshop relates directly to the plenary topic, the Built Environment. The organizers will present examples from history, art and literature that reveal the range of spaces inhabited by Early Modern Women. Crossing the national boundaries of Spain and Italy, but also of race, age and social class, we will show that women maintained a dynamic association with their environment, as they created real and imaginary spaces, or devised alternative spaces that contested the terms of their confinement. We situate women within history, but explore a multiplicity of contexts and experiences with attention to structures and subjectivities. Our intention is to provoke a lively, constructive discussion on broad issues that underlie (or challenge) the case studies that are presented.

The interdisciplinary focus is a major thrust of this workshop. The six organizers come from three different fields within Early Modern Studies: history, art/architectural history and literature. All, however, challenge disciplinary boundaries in their own work, and acknowledge the value of cross-disciplinary approaches for feminist scholarship. Our workshop is also unusual in presenting an exchange of ideas on Italy and Spain—two countries that are normally, and regretably, considered in isolation, although they shared political, religious and cultural conditions. We seek to redress that imbalance by examining correspondences in woman’s relationship to sacred and secular space. We define the Early Modern period broadly--chronologically but also culturally—and consider material culture as well as artistic production.

Section I: In Spain, the spatial organization of religious communities is revealed in convent design, showing both the limitations and possibilities of physical enclosure. How and where were women confined, and to what purposes? What were their responses--creative, internalized, or disobedient? In the radically different case of the moriscas, it will be suggested that women accommodated changes imposed on their built environment and transformed their homes into what might be called "spaces of resistance."

Section II: The analysis of Early Modern Women in Italy considers the architecture and art of enclosed communities. The Council of Trent’s decree on clausura dictated the terms of communal living, and Post-Tridentine ecclesiastics, like Carlo Borromeo, formulated rules on art and architecture. How did design and figurative decoration relate to communal practices? We present two alternative spaces--a convent for upper-class religious in southern Italy, and a conservatory for dispossessed women in Rome—both of which retain important aspects of their interior design.

Section III: Center and Margins: Women and the Spatial Imaginary in Early Modern Spain--The spatial imaginary to which marginalized women are relegated in early modern Spanish literature and history encompasses the limits and violations of living areas, but also the shifting geographical spaces across which moriscos and gypsies were persecuted. Literary descriptions include Calderon's play, Amar despues de la muerte, which describes the dispersal of the moriscos across Spain. Similarly, gypsies are displaced by laws of expulsion to designated towns. Cervantes's exemplary novel La gitanilla depicts gypsy women as transgressors of the law as they negotiate relations between the dominant culture and their own.

Format
The session will be introduced by three speakers, each representing one of the Sections listed above, in five-minute presentations of their topics, reviewing the case studies and readings that will launch discussion. (In Sections I and III, introductions will take the form of a brief statements; in Section II, slides will be shown). Discussion will follow for a total of 20 minutes, after which come the final three case studies in the next 15 minutes, using the same combination of verbal and visual presentation. This will leave 40 minutes for a moderated discussion. After addressing specific issues related to the final three presentations, one organizer will initiate the concluding discussion with a set of questions that stress underlying themes or motifs related to women’s space.

Given the number of organizers for our session, we recognize the need to adhere strictly to the format and to coordinate our presentations in advance.

Preliminary List of Readings:
Section I:

Floor plan of Spanish 16th-century convent (1 page)
Roberta Gilchrist, Gender and Material Culture: The Archaeology of Religious Women, (Routledge, 1994). (1 page)
Illustration from El tratado de Ibn 'Abdun (ca 1100) on the ideal Muslim home (1 page)
Translations and excerpts from the following works (4-5 pages): Leyendas moriscas, transl. and edited by Guillén Robles (for story of Job's wife who makes a new home for him, and for story of Carcayona, who builds her own home and then agrees to go with her husband to build a home in a new city)
La perfecta casada, by fray Luis de León, which is an idealized statement about women's place in the home.
Constituciones del Arçobispado de Sevilla (1609) restricting the living space of Moriscos 1589 census of Moriscos, from Archivo General de Simancas Das Trachtenbuch des Christoph Weiditz, for an illustration of a Morisca working in her home Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, in which bell hooks explores spaces that become women's "space of resistance"
Tales of Nationalism, Catalonia, 1939-1979, in which anthropologist Hank Johnston explores the political significance of domestic and quotidian space

Section II:

5 slides of Convent of San Gregorio Armeno, Naples (one floor-plan and 4 interior views)
5 slides of the Conservatory at the Hospital of Santo Spirito (one floor-plan and 4 frescoes).

Section III:

Pascual Boronet y Barrachina, Los moros espanoles y su expulsion. Vol. II. Valencia: Francisco Vives, 1901. 317-320.
Angus Fraser, The gypsies. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. 130-137; 245-247.
Bernard Leblon, Les gitans d'espagne. Paris: PUF, 1985. 36-39.
Sancho de Moncada, Restauracion politica de espana [1619], "Expulsion de los gitanos", 1746. 128-134.
Maria Helena Sanchez Ortega, Los gitanos espanoles. el periodo borbonico. Madrid: Castellote, 1977. 107-113.

Additional Suggested Readings (on convent architecture and the Council of Trent):

Elizabeth Makowski, Canon Law and Cloistered Women; `Pericoloso’ and its Commentators, 1298-1545, Washington D.C., The Catholic University of America Press, 1997.
Evelyn Carole Voelker, Charles Borromeo's `Instructiones Fabricae et supellectilis Ecclesiasticae, 1577,’ A Translation with Commentary and Analysis, Phd. Dissertation, Syracuse University, 1977.