Lanterna Rally

Author: Emily Sarah Colbert

Publisher:

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 9781267421159

I explore, in both fictional and historical works the complex construction and representation of the "Jew" as both Spanish and colonial other in the Iberian Diaspora. Following different converso female figures my dissertation travels between England, Spain, Italy, and ends across the Atlantic in New Spain. By moving converso Jews from the margin to the center and analyzing this subgroup through the narrower lens of female identity and practice, my dissertation demonstrates the need to re-think the boundaries of Iberia in the Early Modern world as well as female contribution to the preservation of Jewish rituals. I examine how a series of texts engage with the issues of religious and gender identity. Male authors use female protagonists to explore their relationships to a changing society and burgening modern world. They use the female body as a blank space to project and inscribe social ideals. At the same time, these women use their bodies and bodily practices to speak back and create identity. I explore in detail the material practices surrounding the body including clothing, food, and language. These practices reveal the center of female power and the importance of the home in the continuity of tradition and maintenance of Jewish ritual and converso identity. I show in Chapter 1 how Isabel from La Espanola Inglesa is a projection of feminine ideals, how in Chapter 2 La Celestina and La Lozana Andaluza in Chapter 3 use their body to speak back against ideals of female subservience, and Isabel de Carvajal in Chapter 4 uses her body to observe crypto-Jewish religious practices. As these figures all struggle with boundaries and liminal spaces, I show crypto-Jewish practice to be a hybrid combination of Jewish and Catholic traditions. As I analyze the female protagonists from La Espanola Inglesa, La Celestina, La Lozana Andaluza, and the Inquisition manuscripts of Isabel de Carvajal, an alternative discourse is created which challenges patriarchal and hegemonic centers of power. Located on different corners of the Sephardic Diaspora in the Early Modern period, these figures reveal different ways of belonging and aspects of identity that normally go unnoticed.