‘Taming Don Juan’: Limiting Masculine Sexuality in Counter-Reformation Spain

Gender & History ISSN 0953-5233Edward Behrend-Martınez, “Taming Don Juan’: Limiting Masculine Sexuality in Counter-Reformation Spain’Gender & History, Vol.24 No.2 August 2012, pp. 333–352.

‘Taming Don Juan’: Limiting MasculineSexuality in Counter-Reformation Spain

Edward Behrend-Martınez

In the city of Cuenca in 1608 a young woman named Juana de Medina complainedto a church court that her husband, Juan de Baldivar, was ‘an immature man wholives a rowdy life’.1 Juana wanted Juan to settle down and conform to the image of arespectable, hard-working, peaceful and monogamous husband. By the beginning ofthe seventeenth century Spanish institutions were ready to help her. Marital separationsdue to wife-battery, adultery, gambling and drinking were part of a broader regulatorytrend that aimed to reform problematic aspects of masculine behaviour.2 Most illu-minating – and surprising to people accustomed to the Don Juan literary cliche – isthat Spanish institutions laboured to control male sexual behaviour. They campaignedagainst fornication, sodomy, bestiality, seduction, brothels and cohabitation. In doingso, they targeted men whether young, married or clergy. Juana, for instance, filed herprotest in a church court that attempted to bring peace to marriages troubled by do-mestic violence, gambling, drinking and philandering. Her case was like many othersin which family members, neighbours and lawyers sought to curb the wilder aspectsof the ways Spanish men typically performed manhood.3

Until recently historians have overlooked the many efforts of institutions to con-trol unruly masculine behaviour; that of young, single men as well as misbehavingclerics and husbands.4 Social historians have studied Spanish men who sowed socialdisorder in terms of crime, honour, state centralisation and even student life, but rarelyhave they understood Spanish men through the lenses of gender construction andsexuality.5 Many historians of other parts of early modern Europe have identifiedunruly male subcultures: Guido Ruggiero describes a subversive male sexuality in Re-naissance Venice, Michael Rocke focuses on the extended adolescence of men in earlymodern Florence and Merry Wiesner-Hanks studies the raucous journeymen of earlymodern Nuremberg who defined masculinity in terms of drinking and the single life,to point to several important contributions.6 This article explores the ways in whichsuch men, embodying what Wiesner-Hanks termed an ‘anti-patriarchal’, subversiveform of masculine sexuality, were the target of social disciplining efforts during thereign of Philip II (1556–1598) and after.7 These campaigns against uncontrolled malesexuality were the opposite of the cultural anxieties Spaniards may have had aboutmale effeminacy. Recent studies have pointed out that as the Spanish Empire grewand then began to flounder, Spaniards expressed concerns that men were becoming

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334 Gender & History

soft and womanly, leading to a ‘crisis of masculinity’.8 They argue that in this con-text Spaniards understood male lasciviousness as a symptom of effeminacy because itsprang from idleness and a lack of a sense of duty. The gender tension this article ex-plores, however, is not along a manly/womanly spectrum; rather it argues that the battleover male sexual behaviour signified a contest between two different kinds of Spanishmanhood.

In late sixteenth-century Spain there was a renewed emphasis on a Christian hu-manist ideal of male power and an increasingly negative attitude toward what RuthMazo Karras describes as ‘aristocratic masculinity’ with its focus on violence andsexual virility. During Philip II’s era of reform, centralisation and regulation, severalinstitutions renewed efforts to bring masculine behaviour in line with the preceptsof Christian humanism.9 After all, Spain’s institutions required a disciplined corpsof bureaucrats living according to a tamer ideal of manhood. Its colonial churchesand missions needed men dedicated to conquering native souls through patience andpersuasion, and specifically not through the conquistadors’ methods that used sex andviolence. The biggest critic of men’s sexual misbehaviour in late sixteenth-centurySpain was the Counter-Reformation Church. Its institutional resources grew duringthe sixteenth century, bolstered by Tridentine reform, larger and more efficient bu-reaucracies and better training and education. The Church used this new power toreform clergy and laymen alike.10 The Inquisition’s prosecution of illicit sexuality wasconcerned with sex crimes primarily committed by men: bigamy, fornication, solici-tation of confessants, sodomy, bestiality and adultery.11 The vast majority of peopleaccused of these sex crimes were men.12 Even efforts that targeted women, like closingbrothels, were done in part to reform male sexual behaviour. This effort coincidedwith the rise of the new Society of Jesus; the Jesuits emphasised, after all, soldier-likediscipline, chastity and educated spirituality. Humanist educated lawyers, judges, in-quisitors, clerks and clerics continued a slow and – at least until the mid-seventeenthcentury – successful assault on the power and values of the landed nobility, commonersand even conquistadors.

The concern over men’s sexual misbehaviour appears in many kinds of chargesand many places. This article explores court cases from three different jurisdictions:church courts, royal courts and Inquisition tribunals. From these cases there are threedifferent kinds of charges I examine: secular and church court cases for amance-bamiento (public, sexual affairs that may or may not have been adulterous), Inquisitiontrials against men defending fornication with single women and prostitutes and churchcourt marital separation trials. The cases originated from various Spanish cities, fromCiudad Rodrigo on the Portuguese border to Cuenca in the high plateau southeast ofMadrid, to Galicia in the far northeast. Troublesome men, it seems, were a problemeverywhere. For bishop’s court cases, I rely mainly on the Diocese of Cuenca in NewCastile and Calahorra and La Calzada in northern Spain. The secular cases came fromseveral different corners of Spain’s kingdoms. I also include a couple of examplesfound in the Royal Archive of the Kingdom of Galicia. And, finally, the Inquisitioncases examined here came from the Cuencan tribunal as well.

Reforming efforts targeted two types of men. First, there were the raucous boysand young men Cervantes derided as ‘the most mischievous generation on earth’.13 Infact, complaints about ‘wild boys’ seem to be ever-present. Of course, these boys, like

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Limiting Masculine Sexuality in Counter-Reformation Spain 335

the young college drop-out Hernan Cortes (1485–1547), grew up. When they did, theybecame the second type of man subject to reform during this period: men, usually abovethirty, who were fully part of institutions like the Church and marriage. Yet these menrefused to adhere to the values of chastity, monogamy and self-discipline traditionallypromoted by Christianity and further championed by the Counter Reformation.

As an introduction to this older, yet recalcitrant, man, we meet Juan de Villescafrom the small town of Peraleja in the bishopric of Cuenca.14 He was a farmer wholived with his mother, wife and five or six children, all under the same roof. The factsof Juan’s life were recorded only because Juan unapologetically proclaimed his right tohave sex with prostitutes. This drew the attention of the Inquisition. Juan’s views flewin the face of the dogma of an invigorated Counter Reformation that praised Christianmale chastity. It is important to recognise that the women of Juan’s household andfamily first denounced him. It shows that women were not necessarily tolerant ofmale sexual libertinism, even though most men were. Juan’s pig-headed opinionsabout having sex with single women and prostitutes then led to his arrest by the localInquisition. Officers of the Holy Office tried Juan in 1571. They were likely emboldenedby the Council of Trent’s decrees which had been published only a couple of yearsearlier.15

Juan’s cousin, Ysabel Martinez, was a beata (a laywoman attached to a religiousorder). She apparently took offence at Juan unashamedly voicing his view that it wasnot a mortal sin to have sex with a single woman, especially if one paid for the service.Ysabel was eager to testify against Juan to the Inquisition. Another woman, neighbourElvira Sanchez, was more tolerant. She told the tribunal ‘in [my] opinion in this townhe [Juan] is known as a good man except that he is very stubborn and often swearsat the Lord’.16 He was also known to drink heavily. After listening to Juan argue thatprostitution could not be a sin since the King allowed it, Ysabel told him ‘you’redrunk’, to which Juan replied sarcastically ‘and you’re a saint’.17

So in Juan de Villesca we have an example of unreformed manhood, flauntingthe masculine sexual liberty common at the time: he was a stubborn, hard-drinking,opinionated and probably over-worked farmer, determined to ruffle the feathers ofthe more pious people of his community by asserting that men did not go to hell forhaving sex with prostitutes. This case also contains an example of people who wantedto reform such male sexual behaviour: religious individuals like the beata YsabelMartinez as well as the local priest. I do not argue that the Church had not recognisedthis kind of sexual misbehaviour centuries before; indeed, such a discourse betweenpious clerics and women against recalcitrant men had gone on for generations.18 Whatmakes the end of the sixteenth century different from half a century earlier is that thesepious people were now being supported by the money, personnel and muscle of theInquisition.

This article treats the regulation of young single men and married men together.Even though early modern literature discussed the stages of male life separately – fromjourneyman to master, from dependent son to married citizen, from mozo (single youngman) to vecino (citizen) – these were still the same men going from one type of manlyperformance to another. Obviously the masculine behaviour learned in a person’s teensand twenties often continued, as in Juan de Villesca’s case, long after marriage or thetaking of holy orders and formal entrance into ‘patriarchal masculinity’. Married men



and clergymen were not supposed to visit prostitutes; ideally prostitutes were to servesingle men.19 But, of course, some married men and clerics did go to brothels. Afterall, the fictional archetype of masculine misbehaviour, Don Juan, was married (in fact,he was married many times over). So a town bailiff punishing the twenty-year-oldstudent for debauchery was part of the same effort as a church court fining the adulteryof the thirty-five-year-old husband. Both of these petty criminals behaved sexually inways that disturbed social order, and both of them learned such behaviour in theiryouth. Ultimately, these kinds of male sexual practices – fornication, seduction, etc. –disturbed social order no matter the marital status of the men involved.

The problems that male sexuality caused at the time were clearly describedby Marıa de Zayas. In her Disenchantments of Love (1647), ten fictional storiesdepicting oversexed and/or physically abusive men, Zayas focused on all the illscaused by specifically masculine sexuality.20 Zayas is often read today for her proto-feminist perspective, as an advocate for women in seventeenth-century Spain.21 But herDisenchantments of Love was as much a criticism of undisciplined men. She levelledher criticisms against single and married men alike. In fact, the main point of all herstories was that men do most of the evil in personal relationships, contradicting a longtradition – biblical, Roman and classical – of European misogyny that blamed womenfor social disorder, pain, sin and violence. Zayas turned this misogynistic tradition onits head, demonstrating how male lust, violence, deceit and passion lead to sin, disorderand the dishonour and ruin of women.

In Zayas’s disenchantments all men create problems: lustful young men beguile,deflower and abandon naıve women; jealous husbands abuse wives and other husbandskill their wives in the name of honour; and lustful, adulterous husbands ruin friendshipsand abandon good women. For Zayas, sexually driven men – not women – create socialdisorder: ‘Men should keep this in mind when they seduce young maidens, for theyare responsible for teaching them evil ways’.22 In these tales men are lustful seducerswho want sex, not love. They, therefore, should not be trusted. Her solution – Zayas’swork is a call for the reform of both genders – is that women should forgo marriageuntil men can be disciplined and reformed. Of course, several Spanish institutions hadalready worked to reform men along the lines that Zayas indicates; let us now turn toseveral of these efforts.

Ending fornication and brothels

More than any other area of Europe, at least by reputation, early modern Spain hadinstitutions designed to enforce social order and cultural conformity. The SpanishInquisition is the most infamous example, but Spain’s numerous court systems andauthorities also worked to achieve social order. Reforming lay sexuality was part ofseveral campaigns after the Council of Trent. The kind of masculine sexual behaviourthe Counter-Reformation Church and state desired occurred within matrimony. Holyorders supposedly guaranteed the celibacy of clerical men and Spanish society had longexpected similar sexual continence, in the form of chastity, from women. Men’s sexlives, on the other hand, had not received much scrutiny before the sixteenth century,even regarding sex crimes like sodomy or bestiality.23

If Catholic reform were ever to achieve the social order it desired, then thesemen – who were oversexed from the contemporary clerical point-of-view – needed



to be controlled. Clergymen needed to be educated and disciplined; husbands neededto behave more like the caring St Joseph to the Virgin Mary rather than the violentSantiago, the Moorslayer.24 And the Church needed to curb the sinful activity ofraucous youths. The success of these Christian efforts is not easy to measure, ofcourse. Measuring men’s violent crimes, for instance, has proved problematic. Violentcrime declined over the long seventeenth century, but the cause is not clear. It couldbe due to the demographic dip of the seventeenth century, to young men being betterintegrated into society (what Thomas Mantecon, invoking Norbert Elias, claims was a‘civilizing process’) or to more effective policing. Sex crimes are even more difficultto measure than violent crimes. Sources are abundant, but the frequency of any onecharge often had more to do with new definitions of what constituted a sex crime, aswell as particular campaigns of enforcement, than the actual number of sex crimescommitted.25

Authorities did not arrest women for sex crimes nearly as often as men becauseauthorities did not focus on women as the main sexual threat to social order. StuartSchwartz has recently suggested that the reason the Inquisition targeted men, and notwomen, for sex crimes was because women were seen as ‘inferior, irresponsible, or asminors’.26 This common assumption is not, however, supported by court documenta-tion. First, the Inquisition and other courts prosecuted women for many kinds of crimessuch as Judaising, witchcraft and having dubious religious visions, as well as voicingsexual propositions, etc. If the tribunals treated women as culpable actors in these typesof crimes, why not in sex crimes? Second, courts widely accepted female testimonyas valid throughout Spain. Why would authorities regularly find women trustworthyenough to solicit their testimonies, but not rational enough to hold them responsiblefor their own crimes? Finally, a growing body of evidence has shown that the northernEuropean customs and traditions that denied women legal agency are not applicable toSpain. In the Hispanic world, in many courts and contexts, women were able to litigateand be legal actors in their own right.27

Closing brothels became a primary target of the reformation of masculine sexualbehaviour, especially after the Council of Trent. The royal decree that closed Spain’sbrothels in 1623, for instance, did so in response to arguments that were meant toreform men sexually. The decree was not mainly interested in keeping prostitutes fromburning in hell.28 The long-standing Catholic argument in favour of prostitution wasthat it preserved honourable Christian women and families from the predation of sex-starved young men since it directed their lust into the brothels. In 1585, for instance,Francisco Farfan wrote extensively on the sin of simple fornication; he invoked themetaphor of the latrine, arguing that brothels kept a city clean in the same way that asewer did, allowing filth to flow away from the rest of society.29 This argument wasfamiliar even to ordinary Spaniards: take, for example, the Inquisition’s case againstJuan Perez, the mayor of the town of Villora in 1571, for saying that simple fornicationwas not a sin. He defended himself using the same argument as Farfan and St Augustine:‘he said that the King decided to put public women [i.e. prostitutes] in the public sothat having them would avoid a thousand other sins’.30 However, the post-Tridentineanti-prostitution position ultimately prevailed. Its proponents argued that sexual sincould not be eradicated by hypocritically promoting fornication, even if authoritieslimited sex to well-monitored brothels. Advocates of ending legal prostitution furtherargued that brothels taught adolescent men sexual expectations and appetites that did



not end when they married. Brothels hardly promoted the chastity of married meneither – or clerics for that matter. In his study of family life in Granada, James Caseyhas shown that the end of prostitution in Spain was a Counter-Reformation attemptto strengthen marriage, a point reinforced by Eukene Lacarra Lanz’s description ofbrothels in sixteenth-century Valencia, which banned entrance to married men andclerics.31

After 1570 there was a flurry of trials against fornication, as well as men proclaim-ing that it was not a mortal sin. In Valencia in 1571, for instance, the reforming bishopJuan de Ribera arrested several clergymen for public sexual affairs.32 For Cuenca, SaraNalle found that in 1573 the Inquisition ‘launched a major attack on contemporary stan-dards of sexual behaviour’.33 This crackdown was linked to Tridentine reform and tothe effort to close brothels. Courts began arresting and prosecuting male adulterers andfornicators at the end of the sixteenth century. Prior to this the Church and royal insti-tutions mainly ignored male adultery along with barraganıa (clerical concubinage).34

During the second half of the sixteenth century, however, many different jurisdictionsbegan to arrest, try and punish men having sex outside of marriage. Bishop’s courtsstarted to fine adulterous husbands and philandering clergymen. The Inquisition beganto round up free-thinking libertines who declared that a single man and woman havingsex was not a mortal sin.35 As with the closing of brothels, secular powers aided theChurch. Royal and municipal policing authorities, for instance, routinely threw youngfornicators in jail for short periods, often fining them as well. Authorities used whatwas something of a catch-all charge, amancebamiento, to pursue illicit male sexuality.

Though its meaning changed according to its context, amancebamiento was anytype of fornication that insulted the public sexual moral economy. It was sex thatcaused scandal and public sexual disorder. Amancebamiento could be an adulterous orincestuous affair a clerical sexual affair or just simple fornication. In some areas it ofteninvolved an unmarried cohabitating couple.36 The eighteenth-century Diccionario deAutoridades simply described it as ‘illicit dealing and conversation between a man anda woman’, and it was first deemed a crime in Spain in 1387.37 In the cases discussedbelow, it was primarily a long-term intimate relationship between a man and woman,such as a master and a servant, or a cleric and parishioner. A charge of amancebamientoimplied unchecked sexual behaviour and was a source of gossip. In fact, in some casesdiscussed below, no sexual behaviour necessarily occurred. Rather, the very fact thattwo people were meeting improperly, talking with one another in ‘suspicious’ places,caused scandal.

The prosecution of men for sex crimes in Cuenca coincided with the publicationof the Council of Trent’s decrees in Spain after 1566. There was a sharp jump in thenumber of trials for amancebamiento in the 1580s in both the diocesan and secularcourts. This happened together with a jump in Inquisition cases, in 1568 and after,against men for voicing the proposition that simple fornication was not a mortal sin.These three jurisdictions dealt with fornication in different ways, though they allinevitably rounded up or fined men for similar sexual behaviour. The church courttargeted irregular long-term relationships that caused gossip and scandal in townsthroughout the bishopric. Municipal courts arrested young men and young couplescaught intimately (juntandose, literally, ‘getting together’). And the Inquisition targetedmen who said that such behaviour was not a mortal sin. The bishop’s court relied on along, tedious trial process, with witnesses and hefty fines, while the local royal court



merely tossed the accused in jail on the night of discovery and released him or herthe next day with a warning and perhaps a small fine. The Inquisition arrested andhumiliated male libertine thinkers. Those accused by the bishop’s court were fullyadults, mainly men; many were either married, widowers or clergymen. This was trueof the Inquisition as well. The secular court, conversely, dealt with adolescents oryoung adults. Cuenca experienced a sexual clean-up on all fronts. The bishop’s courtheard twenty-two cases of amancebamiento between 1590 and 1600, more than halfof them in one year, from the autumn of 1591 to autumn of 1592. At the same timethat the church court was cracking down on philandering men throughout the diocese,Cuenca’s municipal court was doing the same in town. Between 1568 and 1610 theInquisition prosecuted ninety-seven cases for sexual propositions.

The twenty-two cases for amancebamiento that the bishop’s court prosecuted inthe 1590s were the fruit of the work of Cuenca’s visitadores generales (inspectorsgeneral). In the autumn and winter of 1591–1592 the inspectors general for the dio-cese, Leandro Rodrıguez and Francisco Gonzalez, travelled to the many small townsof the diocese, uncovering illicit, long-term relationships as they went. They soliciteddenunciations in the parishes that they travelled to, and may have even issued a printededict publicising their campaign.38 In each instance, their notaries recorded, invari-ably, four brief and often identical witness testimonies that attested to a public illicitrelationship and the scandal that it caused. The officials then sent these documents toCuenca where the court’s prosecuting attorney composed formal accusations againstthe criminals. They then demanded that the defendants travel to Cuenca and make aconfession. Most of the accused would make the journey and confess. On that sameday, the court’s judge would give his verdict against the accused, warn him to stayaway from the woman in question and fine him. Fines ranged from one hundred to fourthousand maravedıs (Spain’s money of account) and seemed to have varied accordingto the wealth of the accused and the degree of his guilt. Three-fourths of the fine wentto the Bull of the Cruzada (revenues used to fund the fight against Muslims) and therest paid the officials and trial costs.39

All these cases prosecuted men for having long-term affairs with either a marriedwoman or a widow. One of the most interesting characteristics of these cases wastheir speed and uniformity. Trials employed four witnesses to corroborate the crime –no more, no less. Rather than being lengthy, detailed gossip about sexual liaisons,testimonies were short, formulaic and copied down by rote. In one case, for instance,the notary, who was so accustomed to writing in trial after trial that the name of thewoman involved could not be mentioned so as to protect the holy state of matrimony,mistakenly wrote that phrase, and had to cross it out in a case against a single womanwhose name could, indeed, be recorded.40 The usual length of these cases was roughlyfourteen to twenty folios, and the cases lasted a little more than two months, dependingon mail and travel times. Attempts by male defendants to rebut the charges were eitherunusual or minimal. Once in Cuenca, the cases were perfunctory: the court often madecharges, took confessions and gave verdicts in a day.

The court focused primarily on male, not female, sexual misbehaviour. By goingafter the philandering men in these cases, the bishop’s court avoided publicising thenames of the usually married women involved. The focus on men as the main culpritswas especially apparent in cases involving widows, like the relationship between ayoung man, twenty-six-year-old Francisco Dıaz, and widow Isabel Cuenca. Francisco



was single, but the couple was apparently too closely related to carry on an intimaterelationship legitimately or marry. Yet, for at least two years they lived, ate and slepttogether in Isabel’s house. If living together was not bad enough, witnesses complainedthat they were often seen talking with one another in public as well. The bishop’s courtfined Francisco 1,000 maravedıs and told him not to be seen with Isabel in hidden orsuspicious places again.41

Neighbours sometimes expressed concern that a propertied widow was wastingher estate on a male friend. In the town of Villanueva de Guadalmajud, in 1592,witnesses were upset that shoemaker Hernando Nunez was doing more than fixingwidow Marıa Peynada’s shoes.42 According to testimony, Hernando took her on tripsto far-away places like Valencia and the city of Cuenca. Witnesses alleged that theshoemaker was conning her out of her estate, which Marıa supposedly agreed to sellto him. In the end, Hernando and Marıa were only fined one hundred maravedıs eachand told to stay away from one another.

All the other amancebamiento cases in the church court involved married women.Here, the victims were the cuckolded husbands, the patriarchs at the head of the mat-rimonial institution. Such sexual conquests subverted the patriarchal order of society.The definition of masculinity characterised by sexual virility undermined that definedby patriarchal control over a wife. The court held the male lovers accountable in suchcases and left the punishment of wives to their husbands. A wife’s sexuality fell withinthe jurisdiction of her husband to control and discipline. A man who defiled the institu-tion of matrimony through an affair with a married woman delegitimised her husband’sauthority, might call into question the legitimacy of his children’s inheritance and un-dermined the way the Spanish community ordered itself sexually. And the lover causeddiscord, sin and possible violence.

Church courts provided an institution for communities to enforce their own notionsabout what was sexually inappropriate behaviour. To prosecute amancebamiento casesthe bishop depended on neighbours denouncing neighbours. Only in this way couldphilandering men come to the attention of the ecclesiastical inspectors who travelledthroughout the diocese. Some communities and witnesses gladly participated in thesecampaigns against sex crimes, using the church court to regulate the sexual standardsof their own towns in much the same way that Laura Gowing has shown for England:English church courts provided places for women and men to litigate their notions ofsexual honour, reputation and propriety.43 Cuenca’s diocesan inspectors served muchthe same purpose at the end of the sixteenth century, at least regarding amancebamiento.Many townspeople already knew what kind of sexual behaviour caused scandal anddisorder: unchecked male sexuality. By providing this communal outlet, the bishop’scourt made money and increased the power of the Church in the diocese. Not onlydid fines pay church officials, and in part, make diocesan visitations profitable, butsince these adulterous men had to contribute to the cruzada – a special crusade taxthat ultimately went to the Spanish king – the entire campaign against male sexualmisbehaviour supported the Spanish monarchy.

While the church court in Cuenca patrolled rural towns throughout the diocese forillicit male sexuality, municipal officials in Cuenca patrolled the streets. Here, though,the focus was not on men wrecking marriages, but on young men causing scandal inthe streets and despoiling young single women. Eight of nine cases that we have fromthe 1590s in Cuenca were against adolescent men and women. The cases were not the



product of denunciation; rather a bailiff usually arrested these young men or coupleswhen he discovered them involved in sexual misbehaviour. The circumstances of thesex crimes described by the bailiff were always detailed and unique. For instance, on15 September 1591, one of Cuenca’s bailiffs hauled into jail Luis Miderroda, RodrigoGarcia de Reinossa, Afianasea Martinez and Juana Ruiz.44 The charge was simplythat these two couples were caught carousing together. After a night in jail, theywere released and warned in the future not to ‘juntarse’. In another case, the bailiffchecked on the residence of a young single woman and found her in bed with a singleyoung man. He apprehended the couple, threw them in jail overnight and the next dayordered them not to do it again.45 This last case, as well as several others, shows thatsingle women were especially watched by the bailiffs, bringing to mind the scrutinyof brothels in Seville described by Mary Elizabeth Perry.46 But such scrutiny could beused to catch and shame men who frequented single women and prostitutes as muchas it was a way simply to control female sexuality.

Some of the municipal cases against amancebamiento included charges of pros-titution or pimping, as was the case against Julio Catano and Marıa de Gris.47 Marıalived estranged from her husband with her brother Francisco and her mother. Witnessesalleged that her brother regularly escorted Marıa into the house of one Julio Catano. Inexchange for these suspicious visits, Julio gave the brother and sister gifts of moneyand clothes. Here again, in the court’s approach to this case of prostitution, the womanwas only secondarily at fault. Her brother was deemed the primary culprit, in this casemisusing someone else’s sexuality rather than his own.

Secular cases show that the regulation of male sexuality was attempted at manyinstitutional levels. Unlike the ecclesiastical court cases against male sex-criminals,the urban cases against young men usually involved local police. The role of thecommunity is less clear; irritated neighbours may or may not have initiated them,denouncing local adolescents. The bailiffs did not treat these couples as long-standingrelationships. Rather, authorities always caught the young fornicators together – ina house or in bed – and then tossed them in jail. The cases were usually short,lasting two or three days, and the court dealt with them quickly using only two toten pieces of paper. If there were fines, they were modest. This fact illustrates themundane nature of such ‘vice’ police work, involving the maintenance of public order,as well as the sparse legal resources of local courts. Both the bishop’s court andthe Inquisition had more officials, more money and even better paper, than the localcourt.48

The Inquisition prosecuted fornication as well, though it prosecuted the idea ratherthan the act. We should not let this sleight of hand distract us from the result of suchprosecutions: fornication and the belief that it was acceptable to fornicate clearly wenthand-in-hand. There was some variety in the sexual libertinism that men espoused. Inat least five separate cases the Inquisition of Cuenca arrested men for saying, perhapsas a popular joke or maxim, that ‘with necessity a son could do it with his mother’.49

In another case a man defended sleeping with only one woman, even though she wassleeping with another man.50 Most defendants caught saying that fornication was nota sin were defending their actual sexual habits to their families and neighbours. AntonMoronjal, for instance, was a Frenchman who had sex with a Cuencan barmaid, whomlocal witnesses described as the most attractive woman in town.51 Anton made themistake of bragging about his conquest to a nineteen-year-old Spanish youth, who



immediately turned him in to the Inquisition. The inquisitors arrested Anton with thecharge that he had said that having sex with the single woman was not a sin.

The Inquisition did not limit its attention to young, single men. In fact, duringthe Cuencan Inquisition’s main campaign against heretical sexual opinions from 1568to 1582, of the sixty-seven people charged, fifty-two had a known status: there weretwo prostitutes, four married women, twenty-nine married men, three clergymen andeighteen single men.52 Most of the accused described themselves as farmers. How-ever, the accused represented many trades, such as wool-carders and woodsmen, andincluded two Frenchmen, a Sardinian, an Indian slave from Malibar and a soldier. Theyoungest defendant was twenty and the oldest was sixty-eight; the average and medianage were both forty. These were men like sixty-three-year-old farmer Juan Merodio.53

After witnesses denounced Juan in 1576 for saying that, if the need arose, having sexwith a dishonest woman was not a sin, he told the Inquisition what it wanted to hear: ‘Inever [carnally] knew any woman other than my own, . . . I never treated [had relationswith] with another woman nor wanted to do so’.54 Whether or not Juan actually livedup to such a chaste marriage, both he and the inquisitors who arrested him idealisedmale marital monogamy and chastity. In this case the Holy Office gave Juan a simplewarning never again to say that having sex with a single woman was not a sin.

Authorities in other parts of Spain continued to prosecute amancebamiento casesthroughout the early modern period, often in campaigns that produced a flurry of trialsin a few years. In the northern Spanish diocese of Calahorra and La Calzada, forinstance, there was a brief campaign against amancebamiento in 1641, when a dozencases appeared in the bishop’s court against several men for relationships with marriedand single women. Such cases appeared more regularly in the diocese between 1680and 1715.55 For the Diocese of Pamplona, amancebamiento cases peaked at more thansixty cases in the decade between 1621 and 1630 and then fell off sharply to fewerthan ten in the decade after 1641.56

These anti-fornication campaigns took place in secular jurisdictions as well. Inthe small Galician town of Parderrubias in 1748, for instance, there was the interestingcase of don Diego Francisco Suarez who prosecuted a case of amancebamiento againsta local girl Antonia Pereira, who Antonia had an illicit sexual affair with a local clericresulting in an unwanted pregnancy.57 Unable to prosecute a man of the Church, donDiego charged Pereira and her entire family for allowing the sexual affair. In somecases prosecutors seem to have indicted entire towns, as happened in Ciudad Rodrigoin 1630. Secular authorities there used the charge of amancebamiento as a dragnetto prosecute dozens of people in the town with sexual impropriety. In this one largecase, the royal justices prosecuted at least thirty-seven people involved in eighteendifferent intimate relationships. Authorities prosecuted married laymen and women,widows, single people and clerics, sometimes singly, and in other instances as couplesor families.58

Wives could themselves prosecute their husbands’ sexual misbehaviour by suingfor an ecclesiastical separation. Though cruelty was almost always cited as a primarycause for a separation from bed and board, women and their lawyers often included ahusband’s adultery or sexual neglect as another reason that a separation was necessary.In the diocese of Calahorra and La Calzada, for instance, witnesses and lawyersfrequently presented to the court the fact that a husband was not sleeping in thesame bed as his wife. Maids testified, as proof of marital discord, that a couple was



not sleeping together. In 1707 Catalina de Villegas’s maid accused her husband of‘depriving [Catalina] entirely of the conjugal communication of bed and table’.59

Charges of adultery often accompanied such allegations. In 1694 Joseph de Eguizaval,for instance, lived openly with a single woman while he was separated from his wife.His wife, Ana Marıa Gonzalez Bobadilla, complained that he no longer slept with herand had not for over a year. In addition, she charged that her husband was despoilingher dowry and large estate, spending much of it buying dresses and presents for hislover, Marıa de Fe. He paid the rest of his wife’s money to lawyers to defend himselfin criminal suits for having public affairs. One of her maids bluntly stated that shehad ‘heard it said . . . [that] he only had married [Ana Marıa Gonzalez] because shehad an estate’.60 Adultery charges against husbands were key arguments in the manyhundreds of separation cases in Spain’s diocesan courts. In another separation case,this from Cuenca in 1614, Anna Dias complained that her husband Pasqual Harto had‘committed adultery and been in and persisted in the evil state, since then [he has been]amancebado [with the lover], without living with [me]’.61

Seen from the perspective of masculine reform, the sixteenth-century campaignsagainst sodomy were not necessarily about the eradication of effeminacy or simply thenotorious ‘sin against nature’. Rather, campaigns against sodomy fit into the Counter-Reformation’s attempt to curb all forms of illicit male sexuality. Christian Berco arguesthat the male-male sex described in Aragonese inquisition trials may have actuallyserved as a sexual education for young men who would then go on to lead heterosexuallives as adults.62 The lines between male-male sodomy and heterosexual fornicationwere further blurred by some brothels in which anal sex with women was the preferredand/or advertised form of sexual activity.63 The vast majority of sodomites broughtbefore the Inquisition of Aragon were, again, young boys or men; usually they weresingle.

In the Inquisition sodomy cases, authorities did not try to eliminate male ef-feminacy, but sexual predators. Traditionally Mediterranean societies had consideredsodomy to be an effeminising practice only for the passive partner. In Spain’s Mediter-ranean ports, those men most often and most harshly punished for sodomy wereforeigners – Italians, Frenchmen, North Africans – who threatened to sodomise lo-cal native sons. As with other forms of illicit sexuality – like deflowering unmarrieddaughters – sodomy threatened the patriarchal structure of society and harmed thereputations of Spanish families.

Like sodomy, bestiality was a common sexual accusation, overwhelmingly againstmen and was part of efforts to control male sexual misbehaviour. Bestiality was clearlyneither a rare nor insignificant charge: the 315 cases in Zaragoza from 1560 to 1700against men for having sex with animals nearly equalled those in the city againstsodomites. Such men were typically rural labourers working with sheep, cattle andmules.64 As in the case of sodomy, the numbers of prosecutions for bestiality rosedramatically at the end of the sixteenth century and peaked early in the seventeenthcentury. Measured by numbers and gravity of punishment the Inquisition meted out,the Holy Office treated bestiality just as seriously as sodomy. Many cases, after all,ended in execution. Between 1570–1624, in the kingdom of Aragon seventy-eight menwere executed for bestiality.65

Yet another sex crime perpetrated exclusively by men was estupro (seduction anddefloration). Because seduction most often involved an elite or wealthy man taking



advantage of a young woman of lower status, one might expect that the courts wouldhave protected the men involved leaving such crimes unpunished. After all, both classand gender should protect such men in a patriarchal society. And yet, here again, manysecular courts prosecuted men who took sexual advantage of young women whom themen then refused to marry.66 Such sexual misdeeds produced illegitimate offspring, ofcourse, creating social disorder and economic burdens on parishes and communities.Church courts had long had to deal with similar situations when they took up casesof unkept marital promises. In these cases, usually, a young woman complained that ayoung man had promised to marry her and then reneged on the promise. Often the twohad already had sex.

A crisis of masculinity?

The real ‘crisis of masculinity’ in early modern Spain was how to rein in, controland channel the violence and sexuality of legions of men throughout the empire whowere bent on emulating, not Christ, but Cortes, Pizarro and Juan of Austria (PhilipII’s militarily heroic and illegitimate half-brother). Nearly all studies that have inves-tigated early modern Spanish masculinity have been interested in anxiety over its lossor diminution. But, as the evidence above shows, there were aspects of masculinemisbehaviour other than effeminacy, which equally concerned authorities in the earlymodern period. There was tension between the masculine ideal and the way men actu-ally behaved, and this caused cultural anxiety, social repercussions and perhaps eveninternalised individual anxiety.67 Several scholars of early modern Spanish masculinityhave described such tension as part of a seventeenth-century ‘crisis of masculinity’, acultural insecurity about Spain’s imperial and national self-image that resulted in insti-tutional and social attempts to identify and eliminate male effeminacy.68 This particularpreoccupation, they argue, explains early modern Spanish campaigns against sodomy,or against – especially French – vanity and affectation.69 The campaign focused onbehaviours that seemed womanly at the time and which therefore jeopardised Spanishhegemony. Such crises of gendered behaviour, however, have been described for manytimes and places, as Karras and others point out, ever since a change in masculinityin the early modern period was first described by R. W. Connell in the 1980s.70 Itmight be better to describe crisis, instead, as a constant cultural tension that reveals itssymptoms in various ways over time.

Judging from hundreds of trials against men for sexual misbehaviour, there wasclearly a problem with men’s gendered behaviour during the early modern period;many men defined themselves and their manhood in ways that challenged patriarchalpower, the authorities in Church and state. These men performed masculinity throughsexual rebelliousness rather than through the household, control over kinswomen, sta-tus and/or profession. Such men were either malcontents within the institutions ofChurch or marriage, or they were young, single men, economically and politicallydisenfranchised. Indeed, several historians have argued that in northern Europe theProtestant Reformation ushered in a reform of masculine behaviour by promoting theauthority and order of the Hausvater and the continent pleasures of marital sexuality.71

The parallel reform in Spain worked to produce a chaste, respectable Catholic clergy,of course, but also an ideal of masculinity among laymen that embraced sexual



self-control. How else can we understand the public humiliation, for instance, of oneFrancisco de la Placa, a twenty-six-year-old married farmer, who in 1571 was forcedby the Inquisition to abjure before his parish in a sacramental gown admitting that itwas a sin for a man to go to the local brothel? The Inquisition here and in hundreds ofother cases shamed men and exposed their libertine sexual attitudes in a bid to reformCatholic masculine behaviour.72

Some men were likely to have contested such scenes of shaming, pitting one viewof masculine sexuality against another, in a similar manner to how private duellingbecame popular just as monarchies were attempting to stop such masculine violence.73

In many ways a subversive masculine sexuality could be described as a reaction againstsuch a ‘civilising’ of masculinity, in what Norbert Elias described as the developmentof a cultural antithesis.74 More recently, masculinity theorists have used the term‘hegemonic masculinity’ to describe a dominant, normative masculinity that vies forpower with other, subordinate masculine models.75 After all, indiscriminate violence,sex, drinking and gambling were not part of the masculinity defined in the humanistand Christian rhetoric of dispassionate reason, self-discipline and self-denial.76 Neitherwere such unruly men honourable from the patriarchal perspective, in the eyes ofpowerful male authorities like patrons, priests and councilmen.

Rather, this sexually promiscuous, hypermasculine ideal had few advocates in con-duct manuals, confessional booklets or legal codes of the sixteenth century. However,it was well represented in Golden Age literature, in Lazarillo de Tormes, Cervantes’s‘Rinconete and Cortadillo’ and especially Tirso de Molina’s El Burlador de Sevilla.77

Perhaps this was because Spaniards could recognise such men or because such charac-ters added the drama necessary to literature. The young, violent and oversexed real-lifeadherents of this ideal of manhood clearly undermined the patriarchal hierarchy ofSpanish society. Not only did they challenge male authorities like preachers, alder-men and governors; their unfettered sexuality that eschewed marriage and targeteddaughters and married women jeopardised fragile systems of inheritance.78 Its mostfamiliar protagonists were young men who had not fully joined typical Spanish insti-tutions: they were not in the Church, the army or a formal profession, and most werenot married. Unlike the young knights in the late Middle Ages described by Karras,these Spanish young men rarely had claims to the aristocracy, though by their sexand violence we can assume that they envied, if not emulated, the adventurous lifeof the knights of old.79 They had strayed from the path followed by young men inearly modern Germany to patriarchal manhood described by Heider Wunder: ‘Moralstrength in particular presented the greatest challenge to boys who, in order to becomemen, had first to learn to keep themselves in check. The demands that were placedupon boys as members of the “stronger sex” so that they might become men haverarely been considered’.80 Many young men looked to a different masculine idealthan that promoted by confession manuals, municipal officials or even the demands ofhonour.

Spanish men who embraced the normative definition of patriarchal masculinityadvocated by the Church and state – work, marriage, household – could actually beregarded as having, to a degree, emasculated themselves. Many Spanish men promotedthemselves as ‘true’ men by their sexual promiscuity and by rejecting patriarchalmasculinity. To explain why many people thought fornication was not a sin, Stuart



Schwartz found several men telling inquisitors that men who refused to have sexwith women were ‘faggots’.81 This view that promiscuity increased one’s manlinessundoubtedly perturbed inquisitors. Similarly, Allyson Poska has shown that peoplein Galicia regarded married men as not ‘true’ men.82 Rather, they became ‘men’,she argues, by emigrating. By leaving home, boldly venturing out into the world,one became a man by finding one’s fortune. Sexual promiscuity while away wasa given. Galicians might regard men who remained at home as timorous becausesuch men passively accepted the poverty of their native Galicia. This mirrors thejourneymen’s definitions of masculinity in Nuremberg described by Merry Wiesner-Hanks; matrimony and chastity emasculated men.83

During Spain’s ‘Golden Age’ there were countless cases of independently mindedmen who flouted the attempts to reform masculine behaviour that I have outlinedabove. They consistently embraced a more disruptive masculine sexuality. To con-clude we have one last example, the antihero of a divorce case in 1749, the capedLothario/criminal named Miguel Lopez, alias Bandoma. Were his story not a docu-mented case tried in a church court, we might take him for a fictional character likeDon Juan. The details of the case show all the romantic hallmarks of Bourbon Spain:a daring outlaw, a flowing black cape, a dagger and a secret and amorous rendezvous.Perhaps we see the influence of popular literature on court documents and witnesstestimony; the details of one wife’s affair with the young troublemaker are extremelycolourful. Angela Pasqual was allegedly in love with the criminal Bandoma, a banditwanted by the law. Bandoma was the author of many daring amorous stunts. Pasqual’shusband, for instance, claimed that he had burst into his wife’s room on one occasionand caught Bandoma hiding under the bed. Bandoma managed to grab the husband,held a knife to his throat and ordered him to leave Pasqual alone.

Witness testimonies vilified Pasqual with imaginative and lurid stories of heraffair with the stealthy Bandoma. Fifteen-year-old Jazinto Carrillo said that he oncespotted Bandoma in the street at night hiding a woman under his cape, who he thoughtlooked like Pasqual. Cosma Marin, a relative who had once shared a bed with Pasqual,claimed that in the pitch darkness of the night she discovered ‘that Angela was with aman . . . and touching the hair and head of the man [I] discovered that it was ManuelLopez Bandoma’. Startled at the presence of a man in her bed, Marin feigned sleepand made certain to stay on her side of the bed.84 A neighbour, Josepha Ivanes, told amore graphic and erotic story:

[Josepha] said that during Easter the day of the Resurrection she was standing in the gateway toher house . . . Angela Pasqual came home and sat on the porch steps and she told [Josepha] thatManuel Lopez Bandoma was going to milk her breasts because they were full because she hadrecently given birth, [Angela] also told her to close the gate to the street of that entrance, she closedit and remained on the porch. And this being after twelve noon she was there until evening, and [thewitness] knows that then Bandoma was inside the house and that he had entered by the barnyard,and that when he left la Pasquala said to the witness that Bandoma had drawn very little milk fromher breasts . . . 85

Bandoma’s actions illustrate the type of social disorder a philandering singleman could cause in tightly-knit communities. According to the argument of GregorioRoyo’s lawyer, the husband was a victim of an armed bandit he could not fight anda notoriously unfaithful wife he could not control. Royo suffered the humiliation and



dishonour of his wife’s reputation; he was forced to support her and, indirectly, herlover. In a sense, Royo was as much to blame for causing social disorder because he wasnot ‘man’ enough to confront Bandoma. Though the couple lived separately, Pasqualstill regularly went in and out of her husband’s house and properties. Shame, however,was the central argument that might award the husband a separation. Royo’s lawyer,Blas Antonio de Onate, not only attempted to prove the facts of Pasqual’s affair,he also argued that Royo suffered continuous insults because of his dishonourablepredicament. The court notary testified that the husband had to endure ridicule inthe town as a cuckold. He described one man who ‘when Gregorio was passing bythe street [the man] put his hand on his head in the manner of two horns’, the cuckoldgesture.86

When describing sexuality in the early modern period, and for Spain in particular,it is easy to rely on stereotypes and draw absolute conclusions regarding male sexualbehaviour. Clearly, there was a great onus placed on female sexual behaviour – seques-tration, the rhetoric of honour, etc. – and a double standard in terms of sexual freedomsthat persisted for centuries. But that should not lead anyone to assume that authoritiesfully tolerated male sexual license. As in Bandoma’s case, there were clearly limitsto what men could get away with, and those limits were constantly being culturallynegotiated, through custom, naturally, but then more formally through rules, regula-tions and laws promulgated by the Church, town and King. During the latter half ofthe sixteenth century, the Counter Reformation and reign of Philip II, the stated limitsto male sexuality became more clearly defined than they had ever been before. In theearly modern period there was a shift, then, in Spain’s ‘hegemonic masculinity’ – thatis, in the attributes of male behaviour espoused by the people who dominated societyand culture. This was a trend away from praise for a masculinity based on militaryskills and polygynous male sexuality to one that, at least among the elite members ofthe Church and government, placed higher value on stoicism and self-discipline. I amnot suggesting that the ‘Don Juans’ of Spain disappeared. Rather, such men clung tomasculine ideals increasingly at variance with those in power.

In the early sixteenth century the image of Spanish monarchical authority wasa virile young Habsburg, Charles V, who once challenged the king of France to apersonal duel as a way to resolve European political differences. Half a century laterthe Spanish Empire had grown enormously in size, complexity and wealth. Charles’sson, Philip II, wielded power with ink and a quill, seated behind a desk often late intothe night. We imagine him, as in the famous portrait by Sofonisba Anguissola, holdinga rosary in his hand. If power – in this case patriarchal power – was defined at courtand served, as Norbert Elias suggests, as a model for the rest of society, then thereclearly was a redefinition of what a powerful man was during the sixteenth century inSpain.

NotesI would like to thank Renato Barahona, Merry Wiesner-Hanks, Sara Nalle, the anonymous reviewers and editorsof Gender & History, the students in my Fall 2011 senior seminar course and colleagues Lucinda McCray,Michael Behrent, Ryan Jones and Jari Eloranta in the Appalachian State University History Department forcomments and advice in the revision of this article.

1. ‘es un hombre moco que vive ynquietamente’, Archivo Diocesano de Cuenca, Curia Episcopal (hereafterabbreviated as ADCCE), Legajo 811/1519, Diborcio, Juana de Medina vs. Juan de Baldivar, f. 9 recto.



2. Ruth Mazo Karras shows that institutions were attempting to ‘tame’ male violence already in the Mid-dle Ages. Ruth Mazo Karras, From Boys to Men: Formations of Masculinity in Late Medieval Europe(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003).

3. In marital separations, first courts tried to shame husbands, and then the ecclesiastical judge might dividethe couple and their household. See Joanne M. Ferraro, ‘The Power to Decide: Battered Wives in EarlyModern Venice’, Renaissance Quarterly 48 (1995), pp. 492–512; Edward Behrend-Martınez, ‘An EarlyModern Spanish “Divorce Court” and the Rhetoric of Matrimony’, in Anne J. Cruz (ed.), Disciplines on theLine: Feminist Research on Spanish, Latin American, and US Latina Women (Newark: Juan de la CuestaPress, 2003), pp. 145–66.

4. Some recent studies, however, have investigated Spanish masculinity using early modern literary sources,plays and sermons. See Sidney Donnell, Feminizing the Enemy: Imperial Spain, Transvestite Drama, andthe Crisis of Masculinity (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2003); Elizabeth Lehfeldt, ‘Ideal Men:Masculinity and Decline in Seventeenth-Century Spain’, Renaissance Quarterly 61 (2008), pp. 463–94; C.Villasenor-Black, ‘Love and Marriage in the Spanish Empire: Depictions of Holy Matrimony and GenderDiscourses in the Seventeenth Century’, The Sixteenth Century Journal 32 (2001), pp. 637–67. GraceCoolidge has recently analysed the flexibility of masculine performance and sexuality among Spanishnoblemen in ‘Contested Masculinity: Noblemen and Their Mistresses in Early Modern Spain’, in MathewP. Ramaniello and Charles Lipp (eds), Contested Spaces of Nobility in Early Modern Europe, (Farnham;Burlington: Ashgate, 2011) pp. 61–83.

5. For the violence caused by Spanish men see Scott K. Taylor, Honor and Violence in Golden Age Spain(New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2008); Tomas A. Mantecon, ‘The Patterns of Violence inEarly Modern Spain’, The Journal of the Historical Society 7 (2007), pp. 229–64. Historians of other partsof early modern Europe have identified unruly male subcultures. See Guido Ruggiero, The Boundaries ofEros: Sex Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985);Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, ‘Guilds, Male Bonding and Women’s Work in Early Modern Germany’, Gender& History 1 (1989), pp. 125–37; Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culturein Renaissance Florence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).

6. For recent work on male sexuality in early modern England see especially Elizabeth Foyster, Masculinityin Early Modern England (New York: Longman, 1999) and Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of Manhood inEarly Modern England (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

7. A notable exception is the treatment of masculinity in Allyson M. Poska, ‘A Married Man is a Woman:Negotiating Masculinity in Early Modern Northwestern Spain’, in Scott H. Hendrix and Susan C. Karant-Nunn (eds), Masculinity in the Reformation Era (Kirksville: Truman State University Press, 2008),pp. 3–20. On ‘anti-patriarchal’ masculinity see Wiesner-Hanks, ‘Guilds, Male Bonding and Women’sWork’ and Shepard, Meanings of Manhood. Authorities targeted the types of people they thought spreadsin and discord: conversos (Jewish converts to Christianity), gypsies, moriscos (Muslim converts to Chris-tianity), the spiritual mystics called alumbrados, single women, prostitutes, recalcitrant nuns and monks,witches, even medical quacks. See for instance, Mary Elizabeth Perry, ‘Patience and Pluck: Job’s Wife,Conflict and Resistance in Morisco Manuscripts Hidden in the Sixteenth Century’, in Marta V. Vicenteand Luis R. Corteguera (eds), Women, Texts and Authority in the Early Modern Spanish World (Aldershot:Ashgate Press, 2003), pp. 91–106; Mary Elizabeth Perry, ‘“Lost Women” in Early Modern Seville: the Pol-itics of Prostitution’, Feminist Studies 4 (1978), pp. 195–214; E. William Monter, Frontiers of Heresy: theSpanish Inquisition from the Basque Lands to Sicily (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press,1990); Richard Pym, The Gypsies of Early Modern Spain, 1425–1783 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,2007).

8. A ‘crisis of masculinity’ is a central theme in Donnell, Feminizing the Enemy. See also, for instance,Lehfeldt, ‘Ideal Men’, and Federico Garza Carvajal, Butterflies Will Burn: Prosecuting Sodomites in EarlyModern Spain and Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003).

9. Philip II drew up instructions on everything from medical practitioners to cartography to university curricula.See for example, Benjamin Ehlers, Between Christians and Moriscos: Juan de Ribera and Religious Reformin Valencia, 1568–1614 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). Another example of attemptsat centralisation was Philip’s massive geographical survey sent out to the cities and towns of his realm, theRelaciones topograficas, Alfredo Alvar Ezquerra, Marıa Elena Garcıa Guerra, and Marıa de los AngelesVicioso Rodrıguez, Relaciones topograficas de Felipe II, Madrid, 4 vols (Madrid: Comunidad de MadridConsejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientıficas, 1993).

10. For the impact of the Council of Trent on the Spanish Church, see Sara Nalle’s detailed study of the effectof Tridentine reforms on the bishopric of Cuenca, Sara Tilghman Nalle, God in La Mancha: ReligiousReform and the People of Cuenca, 1500–1650 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). Also



see Henry Kamen, The Phoenix and the Flame: Catalonia and the Counter Reformation (New Haven: YaleUniversity Press, 1993).

11. Perhaps because of the abundance of work in women’s history, scholars looking into sexual disciplining inearly modern Europe have most often focused on the regulation of women’s sexuality.

12. On solicitation, see Stephen Haliczer, Sexuality in the Confessional: a Sacrament Profaned (New York;Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).

13. Cervantes is here describing rowdy boys in Salamanca. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, ‘The Glass Gradu-ate’, in Cervantes Saavedra, Exemplary Stories, tr. Lesley Lipson (New York; Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 2008), pp. 106–30, here p. 114.

14. Archivo Diocesano de Cuenca, Inquisicion (hereafter abbreviated ADC, Inq.), Legajo 251/3397.15. Religious officials in Cuenca had already been debating the new Tridentine decrees in 1566: Nalle, God in

La Mancha, p. 40.16. ADC, Inq. Legajo 251/3397, f. 11, ‘y en esta opinion de hombre de bien lo tienen en este pueblo salvo ques

es mui porfiado y jura muchas vezes al senor’.17. ADC, Inq. Legajo 251/3397, f. 12.18. See, for instance, earlier efforts to crack down on fornication in M. C. Garcıa Herrero, ‘Prostitucion y

amancebamiento en Zaragoza a fines de la Edad Media’, En la Espana Medieval 12 (2005) pp. 305–22;M. A. Kelleher, ‘“Like Man and Wife”: Clerics’ Concubines in the Diocese of Barcelona’, Journal ofMedieval History 28 (2002), pp. 349–60. Diocesan legislation and constitutions had identified fornicationas a problem long before the Council of Trent. See, for instance, Sara Nalle’s observations in Nalle, God inLa Mancha, p. 25. Scott Taylor also points out the flood of confessional literature that espoused Christiansexual morality beginning in the sixteenth century. Taylor, Honor and Violence in Golden Age Spain,pp. 104–05. For a description of violent young men as a group, see Julius R. Ruff, Violence in EarlyModern Europe, 1500–1800 (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 125–6.

19. Eukene Lacarra Lanz, ‘Changing Boundaries of Licit and Illicit Unions: Concubinage and Prostitution’,in Eukene Lacarra Lanz (ed.), Marriage and Sexuality in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia (New York:Routledge, 2002), pp. 158–86, here p. 176.

20. Marıa de Zayas y Sotomayor, The Disenchantments of Love, tr. Harriet Boyer (repr. 1647; Albany: StateUniversity of New York Press, 1997).

21. See, for instance Joan Cammarata, Women in the Discourse of Early Modern Spain (Gainesville: UniversityPress of Florida, 2003); Eukene Lacarra Lanz, Marriage and Sexuality in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia(New York: Routledge, 2002); Lisa Vollendorf, ‘Reading the Body Imperiled: Violence Against Women inMarıa de Zayas’, Hispania 78 (1995), pp. 272–82.

22. Zayas y Sotomayor, The Disenchantments of Love, p. 133.23. The most recent and informed work on sodomy and gender in Spain is that of Cristian Berco. Cristian

Berco, Sexual Hierarchies, Public Status: Men, Sodomy, and Society in Spain’s Golden Age (Toronto:University of Toronto Press, 2007); Cristian Berco, ‘Producing Patriarchy: Male Sodomy and Gender inEarly Modern Spain’, Journal of the History of Sexuality 17 (2008), pp. 351–76, here p. 26. Sodomy andbestiality are also fully covered in the classic work Monter, Frontiers of Heresy.

24. For an example of the Church’s campaign to resuscitate the masculine image of St Joseph, see Villasenor-Black, ‘Love and Marriage in the Spanish Empire’, pp. 637–67.

25. Mantecon, ‘The Patterns of Violence in Early Modern Spain’.26. Stuart B. Schwartz, All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World

(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 33.27. The legal rights of women are central to the theses of several recent studies. See Edward J. Behrend-

Martınez, Unfit for Marriage: Impotent Spouses on Trial in the Basque Region of Spain, 1650–1750 (Reno:University of Nevada Press, 2007); Cynthia Ann Gonzales, ‘Taking It To Court: Litigating Women inthe City of Valencia, 1550–1600’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Arizona, 2008); Allyson M.Poska, Women and Authority in Early Modern Spain: the Peasants of Galicia (Oxford; New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 2005).

28. Enriqueta Zafra, Prostituidas por el texto: discurso prostibulario en la picaresca femenina (West Lafayette:Purdue University, 2009).

29. Perry, ‘“Lost Women” in Early Modern Seville’, p. 205.30. ADC, Inq. Legajo 251/3402, f. 14 verso.31. James Casey, Family and Community in Early Modern Spain: the Citizens of Granada, 1570–1739

(Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 132–4.32. Ehlers, Between Christians and Moriscos, p. 51.33. Nalle, God in La Mancha, p. 64.



34. Lacarra Lanz, ‘Changing Boundaries of Licit and Illicit Unions’, pp. 161–5; Stephen Haliczer, ‘Sexualityand Repression in Counter-Reformation Spain’, in Alain Saint-Saens (ed.), Sex and Love in Golden AgeSpain (New Orleans: University Press of the South, 1996), pp. 81–104.

35. Alain Saint-Saens, ‘“It Is Not a Sin!”: Making Love According to the Spaniards in Early Modern Spain’,in Saint-Saens (ed.), Sex and Love in Golden Age Spain, pp. 11–26, here p. 25. For a similar argumentabout the permissive attitude regarding early modern sexuality, see Rafael Carrasco’s ‘Lazarillo on a StreetCorner: What the Picaresque Novel Did Not Say about Fallen Boys’, in Saint-Saens (ed.), Sex and Love inGolden Age Spain, pp. 57–69 and, most recently, Schwartz, All Can Be Saved, pp. 26–33.

36. In many cases amancebamiento was a relationship of a female lover and a married man, as describedin Antonio Gil Ambrona, Historia de la violencia contra las mujeres: misoginıa y conflicto matrimo-nial en Espana (Madrid: Catedra, 2008), p. 205. In the northern kingdom of Navarra most cases ofamancebamiento were cohabitating couples who had not married before the Church. See Marıa del JuncalCampo Guinea, Comportamientos matrimoniales en Navarra: (siglos XVI-XVII) (Pamplona: Gobierno deNavarra, 1998). See also Pablo Perez Garcıa, ‘La criminalizacion de la sexualidad en la Espana Mod-erna’, in Jose Ignacio Fortea Perez, Juan Eloy Gelabert Gonzalez and Tomas A. Mantecon (eds), Furoret rabies: violencia, conflicto y marginacion en la edad moderna (Santander: Universidad de Cantabria,2002), pp. 355–402; C. de la Llave, ‘A una mesa y una cama: barraganıa y amancebamiento a finesde la Edad Media’, in Marıa Isabel Calero Secall (ed.), Saber y vivir: mujer, antiguedad y medievo(Malaga: Univeridad de Malaga, 1996), pp. 127–55; Poska, Women and Authority in Early Modern Spain,pp. 71–86.

37. ‘trato y comunicacion ilicıta de hombre con muger’, ‘Amancebamiento’ in the Real Academia Espanola,Diccionario de la lengua castellana compuesto por la Real Academia Espanola. A-B (Madrid: JoachınIbarra. 1770). It was first made a crime at the Cortes de Briviesca in 1387. Marıa Helena Sanchez Ortega,La mujer y la sexualidad en el antiguo regimen: la perspectiva inquisitorial (Madrid: Akal, 1992), p. 29.

38. No printed edicts were mentioned in these trials, but such edicts were used in a similar campaign from thediocese of Calahorra and La Calzada in 1641, Archivo Diocesano y Catedralicio de Calahorra (hereafterabbreviated ADCC), Legajo 197/2.

39. On the Bull of the Cruzada and its relationship to the Church and Crown see Sean T. Perrone, CharlesV and the Castilian Assembly of the Clergy: Negotiations for the Ecclesiastical Subsidy (Leiden; Boston:Brill, 2008).

40. ADCCE, Legajo 772/780, f. 6.41. ADCCE, Legajo 772/780, ff. 1–13.42. ADCCE 772/755.43. Laura Gowing, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words, and Sex in Early Modern London (New York; Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1996).44. Archivo Historico Provincial de Cuenca, (hereafter AHPC), Jud. 90–22.45. AHPC, Jud. 94–6.46. Mary Elizabeth Perry, ‘Deviant Insiders: Legalized Prostitutes and a Consciousness of Women in Early

Modern Seville’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 27 (1985), pp. 138–58.47. AHPC, Jud. 90–8.48. Not surprisingly, the penmanship and thoroughness of the cases of the well-funded Inquisition is noticeably

better than secular cases from the same place and time.49. The proposition that ‘it is not a sin for a man to have sex with his mother, if necessary’ is the charge

in the following cases, all from between 1568–1580: ADC, Inq. Legajos 243/3255, 255/3444, 276/3799,278/3837 and 283/3949. Sara Nalle discusses this proposition as well in Nalle, God in La Mancha, p. 68.

50. ADC, Inq. Legajo 245/3270.51. ADC, Inq. Legajo 255/3447.52. These statistics are from on my own research in the ADC, Inq.53. ADC, Inq. Legajo 270/3707-A.54. ADC, Inq. Legajo 270/3707-A.55. Edward J. Behrend-Martınez, ‘“She Wanted to Be Her Own Master”: Women’s Suits against Impotent

and Abusive Husbands in a Spanish Church Court 1650–1750’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University ofIllinois, Chicago, 2002), pp. 48–51.

56. Campo Guinea, Comportamientos matrimoniales en Navarra: (siglos XVI-XVII), pp. 63–4.57. Arquivo do Reino de Galicia, Legajo 5923, num. 57.58. Archivo Historico Nacional, Consejo de Castilla, Legajo 25522, exp. 11.59. ‘negandole enteramente la comunicazion conyugal de cama y mesa . . . ’ ADCC, Legajo 27/566/44, testi-

mony of Marıa Garcıa de Yla, 20 August 1707.



60. ‘le oyo dezir. .. solo se hauia cassado con la susso dha porq. ttenia hacienda’, ADCC, Legajo 27/80/13,testimony of Marıa la Puerta, 12 November 1694.

61. ‘cometio adulterio y aestado y persistido en el mal estado desde entonzes amanzebado y sin hazer vida conmi parte . . . ’, ADCCE, Legajo 837/1942, f. 2.

62. Berco, ‘Producing Patriarchy’, p. 26.63. Carrasco, ‘Lazarillo on a Street Corner’, p. 68.64. A. Fernandez, ‘The Repression of Sexual Behavior by the Aragonese Inquisition Between 1560 and 1700’,

Journal of the History of Sexuality 7 (1997), pp. 469–501, here p. 485.65. Fernandez, ‘The Repression of Sexual Behavior’, p. 495.66. Renato Barahona, Sex Crimes, Honour, and the Law in Early Modern Spain: Vizcaya, 1528–1735 (Toronto:

University of Toronto Press, 2003).67. Masculinity is, in part, socially engendered. For a clear discussion, based on recent genetic studies, that

argues that neither femininity or masculinity are fundamental to being human see Elisabeth Badinter, XY,On Masculine Identity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). As Ruth Mazo Karras and othershave shown, there were many ways to be ‘masculine’, even though one ideal might have been preferred.See Karras, From Boys to Men. For a recent overview of debates regarding masculinity in the field of ‘men’sstudies’ and the early modern period see R. W. Connell and J. W. Messerschmidt, ‘Hegemonic Masculinity:Rethinking the Concept’, Gender & Society 19 (2005), pp. 829–59, here p. 829; Hendrix and Karant-Nunn,Masculinity in the Reformation Era. Karras points out the ambiguity of masculine performance clearly:‘Not only do societies adopt particular models and ideals of manhood under particular historical conditions,but individual men may also adopt them in particular situations in everyday life’. Karras, From Boys toMen, p. 8.

68. See, for instance, Donnell, Feminizing the Enemy; Rebecca Haidt, ‘Reading the Body: Petimetres, Phys-iognomics and Gendered Otherness’, in Rebecca Haidt, Embodying Enlightenment: Knowing the Bodyin Eighteenth-Century Spanish Literature and Culture (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1998), pp. 107–48;Berco, ‘Producing Patriarchy’, p. 26; Federico Garza Carvajal, Butterflies Will Burn; Elizabeth Lehfeldt,‘Ideal Men’, p. 32.

69. On evidence of efforts to stop effeminacy, see also Mary Elizabeth Perry’s description of crackdowns inSeville against sodomites and men wearing long hair and wigs in Mary Elizabeth Perry, Crime and Societyin Early Modern Seville (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1980), pp. 142–3.

70. R. W. Connell, Masculinities (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009).71. Scott H. Hendrix, ‘Masculinity and Patriarchy in Reformation Germany’, in Hendrix and Karant-Nunn,

Masculinity in the Reformation Era, pp. 71–91.72. ADC, Inq., Legajo 253/3511.73. On anti-duelling opinions in Spain, see Taylor, Honor and Violence in Golden Age Spain, pp. 26–9.74. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: The Development of Manners, tr. Edmund Jephcott (New York:

Urizen Books, 1978), pp. 8–13.75. Connell and Messerschmidt, ‘Hegemonic Masculinity’, p. 829.76. For an explanation of academic and Christian masculinity see Karras’s discussion of student life in late-

medieval universities in Karras, From Boys to Men. For a discussion of such literature in Spain see Lehfeldt,‘Ideal Men’, pp. 476–85; Coolidge, ‘Contested Masculinity’, pp. 63–4.

77. For a recent cross-cultural, comparative study on young men see Gary Barker, Dying to be Men: Youth,Masculinity and Social Exclusion (London: Routledge, 2005). Barker identifies similar difficulties of maleacculturation as an urban problem in four diverse societies: Brazil, the Caribbean, the United States andsub-Saharan Africa.

78. Grace Coolidge thoroughly discusses how, among the nobility, illegitimate children could threaten, but insome circumstances bolster a family’s legacy and reputation: ‘While multiple mistresses and illegitimatechildren could publicly affirm a nobleman’s virility and even provide back-up heirs who could sustainthe family strategy, they could also threaten loss of control when it came to disposing of his property’.Coolidge, ‘Contested Masculinity,’ p. 69. Although the sexual behaviour I describe here was most often anovert heterosexuality, Christian Berco has recently explored how aggressive sexual relationships could havebeen learned in same-sex encounters, especially during adolescence. See Berco, ‘Producing Patriarchy’,p. 26.

79. Cervantes’s Don Quixote was famously addicted to romance literature and serves as an example, if onewere needed, of the popularity of knightly literature at this time.

80. Heide Wunder, ‘What Made a Man a Man? Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Findings’, in UlinkaRublack (ed.), Gender in Early Modern German History (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2002), pp. 21–48, here p. 23.



81. Schwartz, All Can Be Saved, p. 31.82. Poska, ‘A Married Man is a Woman’.83. Wiesner-Hanks, ‘Guilds, Male Bonding and Women’s Work’, pp. 125–37.84. ‘que dha Angela estaua con ombre . . . y tento el pelo y mono del tal ombre conociendo hera Manuel Lopez

Bandoma’, ADCC, Legajo 20/145/16, f. 9.85. ‘Dixo que por pasqua de resureccion estando la testigo en la puerta de su cassa . . . llego Angela Pasqual y

se entro en ella y se sento en la escalera del portal y la dijo q yba a que dho Manuel Lopez Bandoma lesacasse la leche por q tenia mui cargados los pechos q hazia poco hauia parido, y tambien la dijo q zerrassela puerta de la calle de dha Portillo y la zerro y se quedo dentro del portal, y siendo esto como despues delmediodia se estubo alli hasta a nochezido, y saue q entonzes estaua dho Bandoma dentro de dha cassa y qhauia entrado pr el corral de ella, y que quando salio la Pasquala dixo a la tgo la hauia sacado Bandomamui poca leche de los pechos . . . ’, ADCC, Legajo 20/145/16, f. 16.

86. ‘lo q este hauia ejecutado en ocasion q pasaba dho Gregorio pr la calle de poner la mano a modo de dospuntas en la caueza . . . ’, ADCC, Legajo 20/145/16, f. 38.


‘Taming Don Juan’: Limiting Masculine Sexuality in Counter-Reformation Spain

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