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Loading... The Ladies of Zamoraby Peter Linehan
   None No current Talk conversations about this book.  siriaeve | Apr 16, 2023 |  no reviews | add a review
The Ladies of Zamora tells the remarkable story of a scandal that occurred in a Spanish convent during the thirteenth century. Peter Linehan, the foremost expert on medieval Spain, expertly sets forth the details of the affair and shows how the effects were felt not just in Spain but throughout Europe, even as far as the papal curia. Established in 1264 by two wealthy sisters, the convent of Las Dueñas soon became the focus of a bitter jurisdictional struggle between the bishop of Zamora and the local Dominican friars to whose order a faction of the sisters hoped to have their convent incorporated. In 1279, the bishop visited the convent and interrogated thirty of the sisters. The records of this inquiry, hitherto unpublished, provide the documentary basis for this book, and they reveal startling discrepancies between the stern precepts of their rule and the relaxed realities of life behind the convent grille. They speak of sisters in "love nests" with friars at the convent gate, giving their prioress the evil eye, and threatening their bishop with sticks. At one level, the book can be read as an entertaining story--a saga of copulation, cross-dressing, and general mayhem. But Linehan uses the story to bring into sharp focus a number of usually unrelated aspects of the age: tensions between the mendicant orders and the local ecclesiastical authorities, thirteenth-century religiosity (female religiosity in particular), and collusion in high places, both in Castile and in Rome. One of the friars involved in the scandal eventually became Master-General of the Dominican Order until he was dismissed by Pope Nicholas IV in 1291. Finally, in 1300 Boniface VIII enacted a series of measures designed to bring under stricter control "those damned friars" (as he called them) and convents such as that of Las Dueñas. The Ladies of Zamora provides novel insight into the century that began with Pope Innocent III's approval of the foundation of Saint Dominic's Order of Preachers and ended with a Dominican Order that had lost its innocence and fatally compromised the ideals that had already so profoundly affected Western society. We also see the social realities of a frontier society where the rule of law--canon law in particular--remained subject to the whim of willful men--not to mention women, of course. No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)271.97204624Religions History, geographic treatment, biography of Christianity Religious Congregations and Orders in Church history Orders of Women Other Roman sisterhoods Second of St DominicLC ClassificationRatingAverage: (0.5)
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Wikipedia in English
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Neither Peter Linehan's bibliography nor his understanding of the sisters of Zamora shows much engagement with the burgeoning body of work on women religious which was in existence by the late 90s when this work was published. I don't think he engages with a female historian's work except to snipe at it (feminist history, by the way, is "ideological colonisation, indeed, of the as yet uncharted past" which is "historiographical modishness [...] the ladies themselves being sacrificed to the pitiless imperatives of the dialectic") Yet while Linehan insists over and over that his is strictly a just-the-facts-ma'am account, he consistently treats his male and female subjects differently, and holds them to different evidential standards—hardly the model of impartial reason he clearly prides himself on being.
This is apparent throughout. While the cathedral canons of the city devote themselves to "extending and rationalising" their estates, the sisters' stewardship of their estates shows them to be caught up by "the spirit of limited-term investment rather than permanent commitment" to the religious life. Based on the evidence of an (abbreviated! scribally created! non-vernacular!) deposition transcript, Linehan concludes that the sisters were sex-crazed "harridans", "thin-lipped", "sullen", "a community of possibly vindictive women", and compares these grown women to immature female undergrads. (Wow, it must have been fun to be a woman and one of his students.)
The sisters of Zamora are, in Linehan's account, not truly agential or integrated parts of the political and religious lives of their city—but they sure are shrews! Hence, I presume, why he uses a misogynist quotation from Byron as a chapter epigraph, and an even worse one from Ovid (Casta est quam nemo rogavit) as a pithy, "haha ladies amirite?" summation of some kind of eternal truth about women.
Add in a soupçon of xenophobia (living in the south of Spain would offer northern European settlers only "endless olive oil and the prospect of stomach cramps in perpetuity"), disjointed organisation, and some truly tortured syntax, and this makes for a truly horrendous book. Avoid. (