This volume brings together specialists from different areas of medieval literary study to focus on the role of habits of thought in shaping attitudes toward women during the Middle Ages.

The Catholic Church produced an enormous volume of written material designed to ensure the servility of nuns. Reading this body of proscriptive literature alongside nuns’ own writings, Kirk finds that practice often diverged from theory. She analyzes how seventeenth- and eighteenth-century nuns formed alliances and friendships in defiance of Church authorities’ efforts to contain and control them.

Nineteenth-century Spanish American writers reimagined gender roles, modernization, and national identity during Spanish America’s uneven transition toward modernity. This ambitious volume surveys an expansive and diverse range of countries across the nineteenth-century Spanish-colonized Americas, showing how both men and women used the discourses of modernity to envision the place of women at all levels of social and even political life in the modern, utopian nation.