| "[Linehan]
paints a vivid and compelling picture of a community whose members
found themselves caught up in larger conflicts of authority within
the Church and between Church and State. . . . A fine example of the
way in which study of the local and the particular opens out on to
the wider perspectives of Castilian history and the problems a Church
as a whole faced with the rise of the mendicant Orders."-Colin Thompson,
Times Literary Supplement
"Using exciting archival material about a moral scandal in a convent
of Dominican nuns in thirteenth-century Spain, Peter Linehan has
produced a fascinating study of problems in the turbulent world
of religion and the difficulties facing women trying to make their
way in a patriarchal society. What might have been a mere anecdote
turns out to be a first-rate in-depth study that sensationally exposes
the manners and philosophy of an entire community-as exemplified
by the ladies of Zamora."-Jacques Le Goff
"The Ladies of Zamora is a lovely book, solidly based
on first-hand investigations of documents in Spanish archives. Linehan's
prose is disciplined, graceful, and clear, and his scholarship is
absolutely first-class."-James A. Brundage, University of Kansas
The Ladies of Zamora tells the remarkable story of a scandal
that occured 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
Dueœas 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 The records of this inquiry, hitherto unpublished,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 Dueœas.
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. |
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