ABSTRACT

The family in early modern Spain was the smallest element of social control exerted by the patriarchal establishment. Notions of the family stemmed from the Church fathers and from post-Tridentine doctrine, their strictures found in the works of such moralists as Juan Luis Vives, Luis de Leon, and Juan de Zabaleta. The traditional ending to the comedia in seventeenth-century Spain would see all problems and entanglements resolved through a satisfactory marriage, with lovers, honor, justice, and class all satisfied. Nieves Romero-Diaz has noted contemporary criticism of the system in Maria de Zayas's critique of the commodification of women in La burlada Aminta, where Aminta becomes the focus of conquest for her wealth and nobility. One of Ramirez de Guzman's more surprising poems concerns a pregnancy, a subject invisible in poetry of this period: "On the pregnancy of a lady". It is exceptional for its rare theme and more so for the physiological details of pregnancy and its informality.