| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

Helen Nader, editor. Power and Gender in Renaissance Spain: Eight Women of the Mendoza Family, 1450–1650. (Hispanisms.) Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. 2004. Pp. x, 208. Cloth $44.95, paper $21.95.

"I have been one of the worst offenders. More than twenty years ago, I published a book on the Mendoza family as leaders in the development of the Renaissance in Spain [The Mendoza Family in the Spanish Renaissance, 1350–1550 (1979)]," but "assuming that all decisions were taken by men, I disregarded documents by or about women" (p. 18). With this disarming confession, Helen Nader introduces a well-orchestrated revisitation of her subject, the fruit of a collaborative program of research, dating back to the mid-1990s, examining the agency of the Mendoza women. If the Mendozas were not self-evidently the "most noble family" (p. 2) in Spain—the assertion is implicitly challenged by the contributor who suggests that this accolade belongs to the dukes of Medinaceli (p. 113)—they had certainly risen to wholly exceptional prominence through their loyalty to the Trastámara dynasty. While the relative lack of attention given to female members of the lineage is explained in part by the nature of the written record, as Ronald Surtz laments in a resourceful essay "In Search of Juana de Mendoza" (pp. 48–70), there is sometimes a veritable surfeit of material. (Stephanie Fink De Backer suggests that further scrutiny of the notarial archives in Toledo might shed more light on María Pacheco and her role in development of the comunero revolt; p. 79.) Medieval scholars of the Castilian nobility can only envy the availability of the autobiography, poems, and one hundred letters bequeathed by Luisa de Carvajal (subject of Anne Cruz's chapter, "Willing Desire," pp. 177–193). As Nader herself indicates, there is material enough to have allowed a thorough reconsideration of the researchers' initial premises as to the invulnerability of the patriarchal system and the absolute marginalization of women to (and within) the domestic sphere. All the Mendoza women, she affirms, received an excellent education; half engaged in political activity; two of the eight rejected both the altar and the veil to establish their own households. All, she claims, made decisions "with the support and encouragement of the men in their families and the entire society" (p. 19).

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