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Women in the Inquisition: Spain and the New World. Edited by Mary E. Giles. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. xii + 402 pp. $49.00 cloth; $19.95 paper.
Although its obsessions with the culinary and vestimentary practices of women converted from Judaism or Islam sufficed to make them well represented among prisoners punished at its public autos-da-fe, Spain's Holy Office posed relatively minor problems for most Spanish women, and vice versa. Women were much less likely than men to make unorthodox remarks or to blaspheme in public. As for superstitious practices, an area where women were well represented across Europe, the Spanish Inquisition pursued them rather lethargically. Recent feminist scholarship, generally uninterested in food preparation or clothing fashions but obsessed with problems of female agency, has therefore chosen to privilege one significant sector of the numerous encounters between Spanish-speaking women and the Holy Office. "Women's bid for authority on the basis of visions and other extraordinary gifts," announces the editor of this collection, "proved to be the major point of contention with the Inquisition" (11). A majority of its fourteen essays examine women who claimed to have experienced divinely inspired visions, clearly a problematic situation for ecclesiastical authorities although hardly an everyday occurrence.
Although these articles (ten of them located in peninsular Spain...