Elizabeth A. Lehfeldt

Despite the title, Elizabeth Lehfeldt's Religious Women in Golden Age Spain largely focuses on women religious in one Spanish city, Valladolid, between the late Middle Ages and the mid-seventeenth century. Lehfeldt argues that pushes for reform and greater enclosure like those that came out of the Council of Trent can't be assumed to have been applied uniformly or without resistance, and that the histories of communities must be understood within their specific local contexts. The cloister wall could be permeable, both physically and intellectually, in ways that historians have not always fully appreciated. A solid work which helps to reinforce much recent scholarship on female religiosity in the medieval/early modern periods.… (mais)