The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 27.372  Friday, 11 November 2016

 

From:        Horacio Sierra <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>

Date:         November 8, 2016 at 12:03:58 PM EST

Subject:    Book Announcement: Sanctified Subversives: Nuns in Early Modern English and Spanish Literature

 

Hello, Colleagues!

 

I am happy to announce the publication of my book, Sanctified Subversives: Nuns in Early Modern English and Spanish Literature. The book has a chapter that focuses on the role of Isabella in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, so it may be of interest to many of you.

 

I hope you will ask your college librarian to order a copy of the book. He/she can get a discount for libraries by ordering directly through This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Here is the publisher's page on the book: http://www.cambridgescholars.com/sanctified-subversives

 

Book Description:

As chaste women devoted to God, nuns are viewed as the purest of the pure. Yet, as females who reject courtship, sex, marriage, child bearing, and materialism, they have been the anathema of how society has proscribed, expected, and regulated women: sex object, wife, mother, and capitalist consumer. They are perceived as otherworldly beings, yet revered for their salt-of-the-earth demeanor. This book illustrates how both English and Spanish Renaissance-era authors latched onto the figure of the nun as a way to evaluate the social construction of womanhood. This analysis of the nun’s role in the popular imagination via literature explores how writers on both sides of the Catholic-Protestant divide employed the role of the nun to showcase the powerful potential these women possessed in acting out as sanctified subversives.

 

The texts under consideration include William Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure, María de Zayas’s The Disenchantments of Love, Aphra Behn’s The History of the Nun, Catalina de Erauso’s The Lieutenant Nun, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s autobiographical and literary works. No other book addresses these issues through a concentrated study of these authors and their literary works, much less by offering an in-depth discussion of the literature and culture of seventeenth-century England, Spain, and Mexico.

 

Measure for Measure Chapter Summary:

The central figure of William Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure is Isabella, a would-be nun of the Order of Saint Clare who must delay her novitiate when her brother has been sentenced to death. His crime? Premarital sex with his girlfriend. Who better than the innocent Isabella to save his life? This is the thinking when she is summoned to plea on his behalf to Angelo, a stand-in for the Duke of Vienna. Shakespeare ingeniously transforms his source material, George Whetstone’s 1578 Promos and Cassandra, by having Isabella, who despite not yet being a professed nun is viewed by the audience as an austere nun, serve as the catalyst for a discussion of sexual ethics and the dichotomy between justice and mercy. Angelo demands that Isabella sleep with him in order to spare her brother’s life. Shakespeare cleverly renovates Whetstone’s Cassandra into the ultimate avatar for female purity – a nun. Isabella’s insistent denials only further excite Angelo. 

 

As the complexities of the drama’s rising action unfold, readers are given the opportunity to consider how the Catholic Church’s religious vocations for women challenged early modern Protestant ideals of womanhood. For a Jacobean audience still anxious about King James I’s commitment to a Protestant England, Isabella’s presence helps this “problem play” question conventional ideas about the supposed freedoms followers of Protestantism enjoyed and the alleged oppression Catholics suffered.

 

By studying dynamics between the sexes and gendered power structures in early modern England, this chapter examines how ideas about nuns invite the play’s characters and audience to consider Isabella’s dialogue and actions as representative of the queer female agency that Catholicism, ironically, affords Isabella as she challenges conventional notions about female identity and patriarchal prerogative. Isabella’s decision to reject traditional family structures and expectations that she become a wife and a mother positions her as someone who challenges heteronormativity. Isabella’s desire to take a vow of chastity marks her as asexual. She denies her sexual reproductive abilities, and she distances herself from women who follow a path of reproductive futurity. Doing so renders her as non-heterosexual or asexual; if we see acts constituting identities, however anachronistic some critics may deem such labeling, Isabella thus fits within Judith Halberstam’s inclusive reclamation of “queer” as a term befitting those who reject mainstream culture through sexual practices, or, in this instance, lack thereof.

 

Book Review:

“Horacio Sierra’s study of nuns in British and Spanish early modern texts illuminates the complexities of conventional life for nuns and analyzes the portrayals of nuns as “sacred subversives” in Protestant and Catholic literary texts. Using archival materials of writers such as Maria de Zayas and well-known texts such as Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, Sierra interrogates the intersectionality of religion, class, place, and gender that informs our conception of nuns. He analyzes the duality of the nun in popular imagination as the pure woman and the free woman who rejects heteronormativity and reproduction. This study is an innovative comparative examination across religions, languages and locations that scholars and students alike will find revelatory.” -Catherine E. Hoyser, Professor of English and Director of Women’s Studies, University of Saint Joseph

 

Horacio Sierra

Assistant Professor of English

Bowie State University

Horacio Sierra Bowie State University Profile

 

 

 

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