ABSTRACT
The possibility that women could be chosen as the guardians of their children and the amount of power female guardians possessed were both affected by the complicated legal culture of early modern Spain. In her work on women and law in the Netherlands, Martha C. Howell proposes that rather than being simply a mirror of society, or a way for the powerful to enforce their interests, “the law embodies a ‘social logic’ or ‘a social imaginary’ to which people aspire and which they eventually establish, often after a struggle, through private acts and social practices.”1 This is a particularly relevant description for Spain, where a series of formal, royal law codes struggled for survival with each other and with older, more local, customary laws on whose jurisdiction they infringed.
