ABSTRACT
A stroll through a medieval or early modern convent would overwhelm the modern observer with the palpable traces of the presence of secular individuals. Convents, for their part, depended heavily on the beneficence of temporal society for their survival and saw their own place in the city's social landscape enhanced by the recognition of their patrons. A study of the convents founded in Valladolid from the Middle Ages until the mid-seventeenth century reveals steady support for female monasticism. Patrons and convents were thus bound together in close community. In addition to founding convents, patrons employed other means to satisfy their intertwined goals of underscoring the efficacy of female monasticism and furthering social self-definition. They were aided in this by the arrangement of convent space. By the early modern era a comfortable symbiosis had developed between convents and their patrons whereby the two were bound together through the mechanisms of endowments, gift-giving, and the presence of female relatives.
