Women Building the Colonial Archive: Legal Authority, Female Knowledge and Affective Mobility in the Sixteenth-Century Iberian Atlantic World

From Firenze University Press Journal: Journal of Early Modern Studies (JEMS)

Juan Manuel Ramírez Velázquez, Colgate University

In the early modern period, women in the Spanish Empire lived in a volatile, ever-changing world. While they have been tradi-tionally positioned as caretakers of private spaces, specifically the home and the convent, the examination of archival sources that include non-elite women (peasants, workers, and poor) establishes women’s mobility in the public sphere. These sources — including letters, legal testimonies, wills, and other judicial documents — have revealed that women, and especially non-elite women, occupied different roles in the early modern period and were not always by men’s side.2 They became active and adaptable agents of a nascent early modern society embedded in economic exchanges and the search for better futures, aligning with the broader narratives of the Spanish Empire’s expansion and its relentless pursuit of labor, land, and gold. As such, women of the time took part in economic transactions and sought out opportunities for better futures. They migrated, moved, and created knowledge. Importantly, they documented their experiences and movements, thereby producing and sharing what I call a female discourse of mobility. The study of women’s social and economic mobility historically has yielded demographic data that illustrate their migration patterns, revealing their significant presence on the earliest voyages to the Americas, including those with Columbus.3 Women traveled in smaller numbers than men, yet social historians have argued that they fulfilled important duties, especially the preservation of Catholic family traditions and values as exemplars of virtue (Lavrin 2008, 324). Bearing this historical context in mind, the purpose of this article is to analyze women’s archival narratives through the lens of mobility as a reconceptualized complex theoretical and literary construct. This approach sheds light on the complex interconnected lives of women whose experiences of and with movement have ample implications for the construction of the early modern Spanish Empire and colonial Latin American society. The narratives of non-elite women that I examine in this article provide a distinctive view of their struggles and dislocations. These stories contribute to the perpetuation of collective memories during a transitional period from medieval unity to an early modern expansionist state. In this sense, the reconfiguration of gender norms along with the insertion of women in the worlds of letters4 and other male-dominated spaces are intrinsically connected to the roots of what José Antonio Maravall defines as the Baroque. Women’s depictions of the expanding world reflect the Baroque’s clash of traditional and modernizing tendencies; these tensions arose as social mobility, geographical displacement, and transatlantic economies presented extraordinary challenges to ‘maintain[ing] medieval lifestyles’ within Spanish society(ies) (1981, 175). While the Baroque is often associated with the seventeenth century, the expansion of the legal system since the late fifteenth century indicates an earlier onset of this cultural shift, as evidenced by the increasing significance of textual production in daily life.5The primary objective of this article is to investigate the experiences of common Spanish or criolla women within the world of letters and imperial knowledge, focusing specifically on how they represented their own mobility and that of others. Here, ‘mobility’ refers not just to physical movement but also to social and cultural shifts, serving as a lens to understand the female subjectivities in early modern Spain. This perspective, influenced by Adey’s concept of mobility as an ‘animating theoretical category’ (2017, 36), illuminates how these women’s journeys across the Atlantic and their lives in a transatlantic world shaped their experiences and narratives. Central to this use of mobility is the role of customs and collective memory, which, as Andy Wood suggests, are not merely implicit knowledge but actively discussed and integral to people’s understanding of their identity and place in society (2013, 94). These customs, deeply rooted in the Catholic empire, became a means for women to navigate, challenge, and sometimes subvert the dominant patriarchal system. The narratives of mobility, therefore, do more than recount physical movements; they reveal how women engaged with and influenced the social and legal structures of their time. By examining these narratives, we gain insight into how women used their experiences and the language of custom to legitimize what Wood defines as ‘popular claims’ within the legal system (12). This approach helps us understand the role of women in the socio-cultural transformations that marked the shift from medieval to early modern society, highlighting their contributions to the evolving colonial infrastructure and gender dynamics.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/jems-2279-7149-15266

Read Full Text: https://oajournals.fupress.net/index.php/bsfm-jems/article/view/15266