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Embroidering with Saintly Threads: María de Zayas Challenges Cervantes and the Church

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Patricia E. Grieve
Patricia E. Grieve*
Affiliation:
Columbia University
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Extract

When The Spanish Novella-Writer, María de Zayas y Sotomayor, challenged seventeenth-century male authorities, her challenge embraced both sacred and profane canons. Zayas invests her novellas with the formal properties of hagiography while subverting the ideology of that Church-sanctioned genre. At the same time, Zayas shows herself to be a subtle reader and interpreter of one of Spain's greatest writers, Cervantes, by challenging his attitude to and treatment of women.

Type
Studies
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 44 , Issue 1 , Spring 1991 , pp. 86 - 106
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1991

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Footnotes

A preliminary version of this paper was presented at the Ninth Annual Medieval- Renaissance Conference at Barnard College, "Images of Sainthood in the Middle Ages," 14 November 1987. I am grateful to the organizer of the conference, Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, for helpful comments on an earlier draft of the article. I would like to thank Columbia University for the following: a leave for the year 1988-89, during which time I finished this article; the Council for Research in the Humanities, which provided me with a summer stipend; and the Philip and Ruth Hettleman Award for Junior Faculty. Finally, I thank the students of my graduate course at Brown University in 1985, where I first postulated my ideas on Zayas' appropriation of hagiography as a means to subvert patriarchal discourse.

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