The book examines, from the perspective of feminist disability theories, the concepts and role of women in selected Spanish discourses and literary texts from the late fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. It explores a wide range of Spanish medical, regulatory and moral discourses in order to show how these inherit, reproduce and propagate an amalgam of Western traditional concepts of the female embodiment. The book also examines concrete representations of deviant female characters, with a focus in the figure of the syphilitic prostitute and the physically decayed aged women, in a variety of l ... More

The book examines, from the perspective of feminist disability theories, the concepts and role of women in selected Spanish discourses and literary texts from the late fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. It explores a wide range of Spanish medical, regulatory and moral discourses in order to show how these inherit, reproduce and propagate an amalgam of Western traditional concepts of the female embodiment. The book also examines concrete representations of deviant female characters, with a focus in the figure of the syphilitic prostitute and the physically decayed aged women, in a variety of literary texts such Celestina, Lozana andaluza and selected works by Cervantes and Quevedo. The analysis of the personal testimony of Teresa de Avila, a nun suffering neurological disorders, complements the discussion of early modern women’s disability. By expanding the meanings of present materiality/social construction disability theories, the book concludes that femininity, bodily afflictions, and mental instability characterize the new literary heroes in paradoxical contrast with the Spanish apex of imperial power. The broken female bodies of pre-industrial Spanish literature reveal the cracks in the foundational principles of established masculine truths such as physical and moral integrity and religious and ethnic intolerance.