Sanctified Subversives: Nuns in Early Modern English and Spanish Literature
As chaste women devoted to God, nuns are viewed as the purest of the pure. Yet, as females who reject courtship, sex, marriage, child bearing, and materialism, they have been the anathema of how society has proscribed, expected, and regulated women: sex object, wife, mother, and capitalist consumer. They are perceived as otherworldly beings, yet revered for their salt-of-the-earth demeanor. This book illustrates how both English and Spanish Renaissance-era authors latched onto the figure of the nun as a way to evaluate the social construction of womanhood. This analysis of the nun’s role in the popular imagination via literature explores how writers on both sides of the Catholic-Protestant divide employed the role of the nun to showcase the powerful potential these women possessed in acting out as sanctified subversives.
The texts under consideration include William Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure, María de Zayas’s The Disenchantments of Love, Aphra Behn’s The History of the Nun, Catalina de Erauso’s The Lieutenant Nun, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s autobiographical and literary works. No other book addresses these issues through a concentrated study of these authors and their literary works, much less by offering an in-depth discussion of the literature and culture of seventeenth-century England, Spain, and Mexico.
Dr Horacio Sierra is an Assistant Professor of English at Bowie State University. He earned his BS in Communication from the University of Miami and his PhD in English from the University of Florida. His teaching and research interests include Renaissance literature and culture, Shakespeare, religious discourse, gender, sexuality, popular culture, journalism, new media, and Hispanic literature and culture. He has published articles and reviews in Comparative Drama, The Sixteenth-Century Journal, MESTER, The Journal of Florida Literature, and CEA-MAG, among others. His edited collection, New Readings of the Merchant of Venice, was published in 2013.
"This book affords a special contribution to scholarship by presenting the convent as both a literal and a figurative space of central, potent significance in the early modern imagination, rather than the marginal and negligible role reassigned to it in modernity."
Amanda Powell University of Oregon Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 12:2 (2018)
“In this beautifully written book, spanning literary and dramatic criticism, history, church doctrine and religious controversy, Horacio Sierra examines how authors such as William Shakespeare, Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, and María de Zayas—among others—explore the nun’s cloistered life as “the perfect conduit through which authors can query and challenge society’s assessment of womanhood.” His fresh look at Shakespeare’s Isabella in Measure for Measure will prove exciting for actors and their audiences alike. The implications of this book for our current issues of female identity and the status (and treatment) of women are enormous.”
Sidney Homan
Professor of English
University of Florida
“Horacio Sierra’s study of nuns in British and Spanish early modern texts illuminates the complexities of conventual life for nuns and analyzes the portrayals of nuns as “sacred subversives” in Protestant and Catholic literary texts. Using archival materials of writers such as Maria de Zayas and well-known texts such as Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, Sierra interrogates the intersectionality of religion, class, place, and gender that informs our conception of nuns. Sierra reminds readers that convent life was not a simple feminist enclave, but remained under the control of the patriarchal church in a “double bind of freedom and surveillance.” He analyzes the duality of the nun in popular imagination as the pure woman and the free woman who rejects heteronormativity and reproduction. The combination of Spanish and British renderings of Catholic and Protestant nuns demonstrates the multiplicities that scholars often overlook. This study is an innovative comparative examination across religions, languages and locations that scholars and students alike will find revelatory.”
Catherine E. Hoyser
Professor of English and Director of Women’s Studies
University of Saint Joseph
"Sierra's Sanctified Subversives: Nuns in Early Modern English and Spanish Literature is an extraordinarily useful and erudite work that scholars will consult for years to come."
W. Reginald Rampone Jr., South Carolina State University Sixteenth Century Journal
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