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ARTICLETITLE: 'Taming Don Juan': Limiting Masculine Sexuality in Counter-Reformation Spain
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Gender & History ISSN 0953-5233
Edward Behrend-Martinez, "Taming Don Juan': Limiting Masculine Sexuality in Counter-Reformation Spain'
Gender & History, Vol.24 No.2 August 2012, pp. 333-352.

'TamingDon Juan': LimitingMasculine

Sexualityin Counter-ReformationSpain
Edward Behrend-Mart{ nez

In the city of Cuenca in 1608 a young woman named Juana de Medina complained
to a church court that her husband, Juan de Baldivar, was 'an immature man who
lives a rowdy life' .1 Juana wanted Juan to settle down and conform to the image of a
respectable, hard-working, peaceful and monogamous husband. By the beginning of
the seventeenth century Spanish institutions were ready to help her. Marital separations
due to wife-battery, adultery, gambling and drinking were part of a broader regulatory
trend that aimed to reform problematic aspects of masculine behaviour. 2 Most illu-
minating - and surprising to people accustomed to the Don Juan literary cliche - is
that Spanish institutions laboured to control male sexual behaviour. They campaigned
against fornication, sodomy, bestiality, seduction, brothels and cohabitation. In doing
so, they targeted men whether young, married or clergy. Juana, for instance, filed her
protest 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 others
in which family members, neighbours and lawyers sought to curb the wilder aspects
of 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 misbehaving
clerics and husbands. 4 Social historians have studied Spanish men who sowed social
disorder in terms of crime, honour, state centralisation and even student life, but rarely
have they understood Spanish men through the lenses of gender construction and
sexuality. 5 Many historians of other parts of early modern Europe have identified
unruly male subcultures: Guido Ruggiero describes a subversive male sexuality in Re-
naissance Venice, Michael Rocke focuses on the extended adolescence of men in early
modern Florence and Merry Wiesner-Hanks studies the raucous journeymen of early
modern 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 which
such men, embodying what Wiesner-Hanks termed an 'anti-patriarchal', subversive
form of masculine sexuality, were the target of social disciplining efforts during the
reign of Philip II (1556-1598) and after. 7 These campaigns against uncontrolled male
sexuality were the opposite of the cultural anxieties Spaniards may have had about
male effeminacy. Recent studies have pointed out that as the Spanish Empire grew
and then began to flounder, Spaniards expressed concerns that men were becoming
© 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
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 it
sprang 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 battle
over male sexual behaviour signified a contest between two different kinds of Spanish
manhood.
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 Ruth
Mazo Karras describes as 'aristocratic masculinity' with its focus on violence and
sexual virility. During Philip H's era of reform, centralisation and regulation, several
institutions renewed efforts to bring masculine behaviour in line with the precepts
of Christian humanism. 9 After all, Spain's institutions required a disciplined corps
of bureaucrats living according to a tamer ideal of manhood. Its colonial churches
and missions needed men dedicated to conquering native souls through patience and
persuasion, and specifically not through the conquistadors' methods that used sex and
violence. The biggest critic of men's sexual misbehaviour in late sixteenth-century
Spain was the Counter-Reformation Church. Its institutional resources grew during
the sixteenth century, bolstered by Tridentine reform, larger and more efficient bu-
reaucracies and better training and education. The Church used this new power to
reform clergy and laymen alike. 10 The Inquisition's prosecution of illicit sexuality was
concerned with sex crimes primarily committed by men: bigamy, fornication, solici-
tation of confessants, sodomy, bestiality and adultery. 11 The vast majority of people
accused of these sex crimes were men. 12 Even efforts that targeted women, like closing
brothels, were done in part to reform male sexual behaviour. This effort coincided
with the rise of the new Society of Jesus; the Jesuits emphasised, after all, soldier-like
discipline, chastity and educated spirituality. Humanist educated lawyers, judges, in-
quisitors, clerks and clerics continued a slow and - at least until the mid-seventeenth
century - successful assault on the power and values of the landed nobility, commoners
and even conquistadors.
The concern over men's sexual misbehaviour appears in many kinds of charges
and many places. This article explores court cases from three different jurisdictions:
church courts, royal courts and Inquisition tribunals. From these cases there are three
different kinds of charges I examine: secular and church court cases for amance-
bamiento (public, sexual affairs that may or may not have been adulterous), Inquisition
trials against men defending fornication with single women and prostitutes and church
court marital separation trials. The cases originated from various Spanish cities, from
Ciudad Rodrigo on the Portuguese border to Cuenca in the high plateau southeast of
Madrid, to Galicia in the far northeast. Troublesome men, it seems, were a problem
everywhere. For bishop's court cases, I rely mainly on the Diocese of Cuenca in New
Castile and Calahorra and La Calzada in northern Spain. The secular cases came from
several different corners of Spain's kingdoms. I also include a couple of examples
found in the Royal Archive of the Kingdom of Galicia. And, finally, the Inquisition
cases examined here came from the Cuencan tribunal as well.
Reforming efforts targeted two types of men. First, there were the raucous boys
and young men Cervantes derided as 'the most mischievous generation on earth' . 13 In
fact, complaints about 'wild boys' seem to be ever-present. Of course, these boys, like

© 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

 Limiting Masculine Sexuality in Counter-Reformation Spain 335

the young college drop-out Hernan Cortes (1485-1547), grew up. When they did, they
became the second type of man subject to reform during this period: men, usually above
thirty, who were fully part of institutions like the Church and marriage. Yet these men
refused to adhere to the values of chastity, monogamy and self-discipline traditionally
promoted by Christianity and further championed by the Counter Reformation.
As an introduction to this older, yet recalcitrant, man, we meet Juan de Villesca
from the small town of Peraleja in the bishopric of Cuenca. 14 He was a farmer who
lived with his mother, wife and five or six children, all under the same roof. The facts
of Juan's life were recorded only because Juan unapologetically proclaimed his right to
have sex with prostitutes. This drew the attention of the Inquisition. Juan's views flew
in the face of the dogma of an invigorated Counter Reformation that praised Christian
male chastity. It is important to recognise that the women of Juan's household and
family first denounced him. It shows that women were not necessarily tolerant of
male sexual libertinism, even though most men were. Juan's pig-headed opinions
about having sex with single women and prostitutes then led to his arrest by the local
Inquisition. Officers of the Holy Office tried Juan in 1571. They were likely emboldened
by the Council of Trent's decrees which had been published only a couple of years
earlier. 15
Juan's cousin, Ysabel Martinez, was a beata (a laywoman attached to a religious
order). She apparently took offence at Juan unashamedly voicing his view that it was
not 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, neighbour
Elvira Sanchez, was more tolerant. She told the tribunal 'in [my] opinion in this town
he [Juan] is known as a good man except that he is very stubborn and often swears
at the Lord' . 16 He was also known to drink heavily. After listening to Juan argue that
prostitution could not be a sin since the King allowed it, Ysabel told him 'you're
drunk', to which Juan replied sarcastically 'and you're a saint' .17
So in Juan de Villesca we have an example of unreformed manhood, flaunting
the masculine sexual liberty common at the time: he was a stubborn, hard-drinking,
opinionated and probably over-worked farmer, determined to ruffle the feathers of
the more pious people of his community by asserting that men did not go to hell for
having sex with prostitutes. This case also contains an example of people who wanted
to reform such male sexual behaviour: religious individuals like the beata Ysabel
Martinez as well as the local priest. I do not argue that the Church had not recognised
this kind of sexual misbehaviour centuries before; indeed, such a discourse between
pious clerics and women against recalcitrant men had gone on for generations. 18 What
makes the end of the sixteenth century different from half a century earlier is that these
pious people were now being supported by the money, personnel and muscle of the
Inquisition.
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- from
journeyman to master, from dependent son to married citizen, from mozo (single young
man) to vecino (citizen) - these were still the same men going from one type of manly
performance to another. Obviously the masculine behaviour learned in a person's teens
and twenties often continued, as in Juan de Villesca's case, long after marriage or the
taking of holy orders and formal entrance into 'patriarchal masculinity'. Married men

© 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

336 Gender & History

and clergymen were not supposed to visit prostitutes; ideally prostitutes were to serve
single men. 19 But, of course, some married men and clerics did go to brothels. After
all, 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-old
student for debauchery was part of the same effort as a church court fining the adultery
of the thirty-five-year-old husband. Both of these petty criminals behaved sexually in
ways that disturbed social order, and both of them learned such behaviour in their
youth. 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 described
by Marfa de Zayas. In her Disenchantments of Love (1647), ten fictional stories
depicting oversexed and/or physically abusive men, Zayas focused on all the ills
caused 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 her
Disenchantments of Love was as much a criticism of undisciplined men. She levelled
her criticisms against single and married men alike. In fact, the main point of all her
stories was that men do most of the evil in personal relationships, contradicting a long
tradition - biblical, Roman and classical - of European misogyny that blamed women
for social disorder, pain, sin and violence. Zayas turned this misogynistic tradition on
its head, demonstrating how male lust, violence, deceit and passion lead to sin, disorder
and the dishonour and ruin of women.
In Zayas's disenchantments all men create problems: lustful young men beguile,
deflower and abandon nai"vewomen; jealous husbands abuse wives and other husbands
kill their wives in the name of honour; and lustful, adulterous husbands ruin friendships
and abandon good women. For Zayas, sexually driven men - not women - create social
disorder: 'Men should keep this in mind when they seduce young maidens, for they
are responsible for teaching them evil ways' .22 In these tales men are lustful seducers
who want sex, not love. They, therefore, should not be trusted. Her solution - Zayas's
work is a call for the reform of both genders - is that women should forgo marriage
until men can be disciplined and reformed. Of course, several Spanish institutions had
already worked to reform men along the lines that Zayas indicates; let us now turn to
several of these efforts.

Ending fornication and brothels

More than any other area of Europe, at least by reputation, early modern Spain had
institutions designed to enforce social order and cultural conformity. The Spanish
Inquisition is the most infamous example, but Spain's numerous court systems and
authorities also worked to achieve social order. Reforming lay sexuality was part of
several campaigns after the Council of Trent. The kind of masculine sexual behaviour
the Counter-Reformation Church and state desired occurred within matrimony. Holy
orders supposedly guaranteed the celibacy of clerical men and Spanish society had long
expected similar sexual continence, in the form of chastity, from women. Men's sex
lives, 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 these
men - who were oversexed from the contemporary clerical point-of-view - needed
© 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
 Limiting Masculine Sexuality in Counter-Reformation Spain 337

to be controlled. Clergymen needed to be educated and disciplined; husbands needed

to behave more like the caring St Joseph to the Virgin Mary rather than the violent
Santiago, the Moorslayer. 24 And the Church needed to curb the sinful activity of
raucous youths. The success of these Christian efforts is not easy to measure, of
course. Measuring men's violent crimes, for instance, has proved problematic. Violent
crime declined over the long seventeenth century, but the cause is not clear. It could
be due to the demographic dip of the seventeenth century, to young men being better
integrated into society (what Thomas Mantec6n, invoking Norbert Elias, claims was a
'civilizing process') or to more effective policing. Sex crimes are even more difficult
to measure than violent crimes. Sources are abundant, but the frequency of any one
charge often had more to do with new definitions of what constituted a sex crime, as
well as particular campaigns of enforcement, than the actual number of sex crimes
committed. 25
Authorities did not arrest women for sex crimes nearly as often as men because
authorities did not focus on women as the main sexual threat to social order. Stuart
Schwartz has recently suggested that the reason the Inquisition targeted men, and not
women, for sex crimes was because women were seen as 'inferior, irresponsible, or as
minors'. 26 This common assumption is not, however, supported by court documenta-
tion. First, the Inquisition and other courts prosecuted women for many kinds of crimes
such as Judaising, witchcraft and having dubious religious visions, as well as voicing
sexual propositions, etc. If the tribunals treated women as culpable actors in these types
of crimes, why not in sex crimes? Second, courts widely accepted female testimony
as valid throughout Spain. Why would authorities regularly find women trustworthy
enough to solicit their testimonies, but not rational enough to hold them responsible
for their own crimes? Finally, a growing body of evidence has shown that the northern
European customs and traditions that denied women legal agency are not applicable to
Spain. In the Hispanic world, in many courts and contexts, women were able to litigate
and be legal actors in their own right. 27
Closing brothels became a primary target of the reformation of masculine sexual
behaviour, especially after the Council of Trent. The royal decree that closed Spain's
brothels in 1623, for instance, did so in response to arguments that were meant to
reform men sexually. The decree was not mainly interested in keeping prostitutes from
burning in hell. 28 The long-standing Catholic argument in favour of prostitution was
that 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 the
metaphor of the latrine, arguing that brothels kept a city clean in the same way that a
sewer did, allowing filth to flow away from the rest of society. 29 This argument was
familiar even to ordinary Spaniards: take, for example, the Inquisition's case against
Juan Perez, the mayor of the town of Villora in 1571, for saying that simple fornication
was 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 so
that having them would avoid a thousand other sins'. 30 However, the post-Tridentine
anti-prostitution position ultimately prevailed. Its proponents argued that sexual sin
could not be eradicated by hypocritically promoting fornication, even if authorities
limited sex to well-monitored brothels. Advocates of ending legal prostitution further
argued that brothels taught adolescent men sexual expectations and appetites that did
© 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
338 Gender & History

not end when they married. Brothels hardly promoted the chastity of married men
either - or clerics for that matter. In his study of family life in Granada, James Casey
has shown that the end of prostitution in Spain was a Counter-Reformation attempt
to strengthen marriage, a point reinforced by Eukene Lacarra Lanz's description of
brothels in sixteenth-century Valencia, which banned entrance to married men and
clerics. 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 bishop
Juan de Ribera arrested several clergymen for public sexual affairs. 32 For Cuenca, Sara
Nalle 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 to
the effort to close brothels. Courts began arresting and prosecuting male adulterers and
fornicators at the end of the sixteenth century. Prior to this the Church and royal insti-
tutions mainly ignored male adultery along with barraganfa (clerical concubinage). 34
During the second half of the sixteenth century, however, many different jurisdictions
began to arrest, try and punish men having sex outside of marriage. Bishop's courts
started to fine adulterous husbands and philandering clergymen. The Inquisition began
to round up free-thinking libertines who declared that a single man and woman having
sex was not a mortal sin. 35 As with the closing of brothels, secular powers aided the
Church. Royal and municipal policing authorities, for instance, routinely threw young
fornicators in jail for short periods, often fining them as well. Authorities used what
was something of a catch-all charge, amancebamiento, to pursue illicit male sexuality.
Though its meaning changed according to its context, amancebamiento was any
type of fornication that insulted the public sexual moral economy. It was sex that
caused scandal and public sexual disorder. Amancebamiento could be an adulterous or
incestuous affair a clerical sexual affair or just simple fornication. In some areas it often
involved an unmarried cohabitating couple. 36 The eighteenth-century Diccionario de
Autoridades simply described it as 'illicit dealing and conversation between a man and
a woman', and it was first deemed a crime in Spain in 1387. 37 In the cases discussed
below, 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 amancebamiento
implied unchecked sexual behaviour and was a source of gossip. In fact, in some cases
discussed below, no sexual behaviour necessarily occurred. Rather, the very fact that
two 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 publication
of the Council of Trent's decrees in Spain after 1566. There was a sharp jump in the
number of trials for amancebamiento in the 1580s in both the diocesan and secular
courts. 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 all
inevitably rounded up or fined men for similar sexual behaviour. The church court
targeted irregular long-term relationships that caused gossip and scandal in towns
throughout the bishopric. Municipal courts arrested young men and young couples
caught intimately (juntandose, literally, 'getting together'). And the Inquisition targeted
men who said that such behaviour was not a mortal sin. The bishop's court relied on a
long, tedious trial process, with witnesses and hefty fines, while the local royal court
© 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
 Limiting Masculine Sexuality in Counter-Reformation Spain 339

merely tossed the accused in jail on the night of discovery and released him or her
the next day with a warning and perhaps a small fine. The Inquisition arrested and
humiliated male libertine thinkers. Those accused by the bishop's court were fully
adults, mainly men; many were either married, widowers or clergymen. This was true
of the Inquisition as well. The secular court, conversely, dealt with adolescents or
young adults. Cuenca experienced a sexual clean-up on all fronts. The bishop's court
heard twenty-two cases of amancebamiento between 1590 and 1600, more than half
of them in one year, from the autumn of 1591 to autumn of 1592. At the same time
that 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 the
Inquisition prosecuted ninety-seven cases for sexual propositions.
The twenty-two cases for amancebamiento that the bishop's court prosecuted in
the 1590s were the fruit of the work of Cuenca's visitadores generates (inspectors
general). In the autumn and winter of 1591-1592 the inspectors general for the dio-
cese, Leandro Rodrfguez and Francisco Gonzalez, travelled to the many small towns
of the diocese, uncovering illicit, long-term relationships as they went. They solicited
denunciations in the parishes that they travelled to, and may have even issued a printed
edict publicising their campaign. 38 In each instance, their notaries recorded, invari-
ably, four brief and often identical witness testimonies that attested to a public illicit
relationship and the scandal that it caused. The officials then sent these documents to
Cuenca where the court's prosecuting attorney composed formal accusations against
the criminals. They then demanded that the defendants travel to Cuenca and make a
confession. Most of the accused would make the journey and confess. On that same
day, the court's judge would give his verdict against the accused, warn him to stay
away from the woman in question and fine him. Fines ranged from one hundred to four
thousand maraved[s (Spain's money of account) and seemed to have varied according
to the wealth of the accused and the degree of his guilt. Three- fourths of the fine went
to the Bull of the Cruzada (revenues used to fund the fight against Muslims) and the
rest paid the officials and trial costs. 39
All these cases prosecuted men for having long-term affairs with either a married
woman or a widow. One of the most interesting characteristics of these cases was
their 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 the
woman 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 woman
whose name could, indeed, be recorded. 40 The usual length of these cases was roughly
fourteen to twenty folios, and the cases lasted a little more than two months, depending
on mail and travel times. Attempts by male defendants to rebut the charges were either
unusual or minimal. Once in Cuenca, the cases were perfunctory: the court often made
charges, took confessions and gave verdicts in a day.
The court focused primarily on male, not female, sexual misbehaviour. By going
after the philandering men in these cases, the bishop's court avoided publicising the
names of the usually married women involved. The focus on men as the main culprits
was especially apparent in cases involving widows, like the relationship between a
young man, twenty-six-year-old Francisco Dfaz, and widow Isabel Cuenca. Francisco
© 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
340 Gender & History

was single, but the couple was apparently too closely related to carry on an intimate
relationship legitimately or marry. Yet, for at least two years they lived, ate and slept
together in Isabel's house. Ifliving together was not bad enough, witnesses complained
that they were often seen talking with one another in public as well. The bishop's court
fined Francisco 1,000 maraved[s and told him not to be seen with Isabel in hidden or
suspicious places again. 41
Neighbours sometimes expressed concern that a propertied widow was wasting
her estate on a male friend. In the town of Villanueva de Guadalmajud, in 1592,
witnesses were upset that shoemaker Hernando Nufiez was doing more than fixing
widow Marfa Peynada's shoes. 42 According to testimony, Hernando took her on trips
to far-away places like Valencia and the city of Cuenca. Witnesses alleged that the
shoemaker was conning her out of her estate, which Marfa supposedly agreed to sell
to him. In the end, Hernando and Marfa were only fined one hundred maravedfs each
and 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 defined
by patriarchal control over a wife. The court held the male lovers accountable in such
cases and left the punishment of wives to their husbands. A wife's sexuality fell within
the jurisdiction of her husband to control and discipline. A man who defiled the institu-
tion of matrimony through an affair with a married woman delegitirnised her husband's
authority, 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 caused
discord, sin and possible violence.
Church courts provided an institution for communities to enforce their own notions
about what was sexually inappropriate behaviour. To prosecute amancebamiento cases
the bishop depended on neighbours denouncing neighbours. Only in this way could
philandering men come to the attention of the ecclesiastical inspectors who travelled
throughout the diocese. Some communities and witnesses gladly participated in these
campaigns against sex crimes, using the church court to regulate the sexual standards
of 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 of
sexual honour, reputation and propriety. 43 Cuenca's diocesan inspectors served much
the same purpose at the end of the sixteenth century, at least regarding amancebamiento.
Many townspeople already knew what kind of sexual behaviour caused scandal and
disorder: unchecked male sexuality. By providing this communal outlet, the bishop's
court made money and increased the power of the Church in the diocese. Not only
did fines pay church officials, and in part, make diocesan visitations profitable, but
since these adulterous men had to contribute to the cruzada - a special crusade tax
that ultimately went to the Spanish king - the entire campaign against male sexual
misbehaviour supported the Spanish monarchy.
While the church court in Cuenca patrolled rural towns throughout the diocese for
illicit 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 in
the streets and despoiling young single women. Eight of nine cases that we have from
the 1590s in Cuenca were against adolescent men and women. The cases were not the
© 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
 Limiting Masculine Sexuality in Counter-Reformation Spain 341

product of denunciation; rather a bailiff usually arrested these young men or couples
when he discovered them involved in sexual misbehaviour. The circumstances of the
sex crimes described by the bailiff were always detailed and unique. For instance, on
15 September 1591, one of Cuenca's bailiffs hauled into jail Luis Miderroda, Rodrigo
Garcia de Reinossa, Afianasea Martinez and Juana Ruiz. 44 The charge was simply
that these two couples were caught carousing together. After a night in jail, they
were released and warned in the future not to 'juntarse'. In another case, the bailiff
checked on the residence of a young single woman and found her in bed with a single
young man. He apprehended the couple, threw them in jail overnight and the next day
ordered them not to do it again. 45 This last case, as well as several others, shows that
single women were especially watched by the bailiffs, bringing to mind the scrutiny
of brothels in Seville described by Mary Elizabeth Perry. 46 But such scrutiny could be
used to catch and shame men who frequented single women and prostitutes as much
as 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 Marfa de Gris. 47 Marfa
lived estranged from her husband with her brother Francisco and her mother. Witnesses
alleged that her brother regularly escorted Marfa into the house of one Julio Catano. In
exchange for these suspicious visits, Julio gave the brother and sister gifts of money
and clothes. Here again, in the court's approach to this case of prostitution, the woman
was only secondarily at fault. Her brother was deemed the primary culprit, in this case
misusing someone else's sexuality rather than his own.
Secular cases show that the regulation of male sexuality was attempted at many
institutional levels. Unlike the ecclesiastical court cases against male sex-criminals,
the urban cases against young men usually involved local police. The role of the
community is less clear; irritated neighbours may or may not have initiated them,
denouncing local adolescents. The bailiffs did not treat these couples as long-standing
relationships. Rather, authorities always caught the young fornicators together - in
a 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 to
ten pieces of paper. If there were fines, they were modest. This fact illustrates the
mundane 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 and
the Inquisition had more officials, more money and even better paper, than the local
court. 48
The Inquisition prosecuted fornication as well, though it prosecuted the idea rather
than the act. We should not let this sleight of hand distract us from the result of such
prosecutions: fornication and the belief that it was acceptable to fornicate clearly went
hand-in-hand. There was some variety in the sexual libertinism that men espoused. In
at least five separate cases the Inquisition of Cuenca arrested men for saying, perhaps
as 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 was
sleeping with another man. 50 Most defendants caught saying that fornication was not
a sin were defending their actual sexual habits to their families and neighbours. Anton
Moronjal, for instance, was a Frenchman who had sex with a Cuencan barmaid, whom
local witnesses described as the most attractive woman in town. 51 Anton made the
mistake of bragging about his conquest to a nineteen-year-old Spanish youth, who
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342 Gender & History

immediately turned him in to the Inquisition. The inquisitors arrested Anton with the
charge 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, during
the Cuencan Inquisition's main campaign against heretical sexual opinions from 1568
to 1582, of the sixty-seven people charged, fifty-two had a known status: there were
two prostitutes, four married women, twenty-nine married men, three clergymen and
eighteen single men. 52 Most of the accused described themselves as farmers. How-
ever, the accused represented many trades, such as wool-carders and woodsmen, and
included two Frenchmen, a Sardinian, an Indian slave from Malibar and a soldier. The
youngest defendant was twenty and the oldest was sixty-eight; the average and median
age 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 sex
with a dishonest woman was not a sin, he told the Inquisition what it wanted to hear: 'I
never [carnally] knew any woman other than my own, ... I never treated [had relations
with] with another woman nor wanted to do so'. 54 Whether or not Juan actually lived
up to such a chaste marriage, both he and the inquisitors who arrested him idealised
male marital monogamy and chastity. In this case the Holy Office gave Juan a simple
warning 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 cases
throughout the early modern period, often in campaigns that produced a flurry of trials
in a few years. In the northern Spanish diocese of Calahorra and La Calzada, for
instance, there was a brief campaign against amancebamiento in 1641, when a dozen
cases appeared in the bishop's court against several men for relationships with married
and single women. Such cases appeared more regularly in the diocese between 1680
and 1715. 55 For the Diocese of Pamplona, amancebamiento cases peaked at more than
sixty cases in the decade between 1621 and 1630 and then fell off sharply to fewer
than ten in the decade after 1641. 56
These anti-fornication campaigns took place in secular jurisdictions as well. In
the small Galician town of Parderrubias in 1748, for instance, there was the interesting
case of don Diego Francisco Suarez who prosecuted a case of amancebamiento against
a local girl Antonia Pereira, who Antonia had an illicit sexual affair with a local cleric
resulting in an unwanted pregnancy. 57 Unable to prosecute a man of the Church, don
Diego charged Pereira and her entire family for allowing the sexual affair. In some
cases prosecutors seem to have indicted entire towns, as happened in Ciudad Rodrigo
in 1630. Secular authorities there used the charge of amancebamiento as a dragnet
to prosecute dozens of people in the town with sexual impropriety. In this one large
case, the royal justices prosecuted at least thirty-seven people involved in eighteen
different intimate relationships. Authorities prosecuted married laymen and women,
widows, single people and clerics, sometimes singly, and in other instances as couples
or families. 58
Wives could themselves prosecute their husbands' sexual misbehaviour by suing
for an ecclesiastical separation. Though cruelty was almost always cited as a primary
cause for a separation from bed and board, women and their lawyers often included a
husband'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 lawyers
frequently presented to the court the fact that a husband was not sleeping in the
same bed as his wife. Maids testified, as proof of marital discord, that a couple was
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 Limiting Masculine Sexuality in Counter-Reformation Spain 343

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 Marfa Gonzalez Bobadilla, complained that he no longer slept with her
and had not for over a year. In addition, she charged that her husband was despoiling
her dowry and large estate, spending much of it buying dresses and presents for his
lover, Marfa de Fe. He paid the rest of his wife's money to lawyers to defend himself
in criminal suits for having public affairs. One of her maids bluntly stated that she
had 'heard it said ... [that] he only had married [Ana Marfa Gonzalez] because she
had an estate' .60 Adultery charges against husbands were key arguments in the many
hundreds 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 campaigns
against sodomy were not necessarily about the eradication of effeminacy or simply the
notorious 'sin against nature'. Rather, campaigns against sodomy fit into the Counter-
Reformation's attempt to curb all forms of illicit male sexuality. Christian Berco argues
that the male-male sex described in Aragonese inquisition trials may have actually
served as a sexual education for young men who would then go on to lead heterosexual
lives as adults. 62 The lines between male-male sodomy and heterosexual fornication
were further blurred by some brothels in which anal sex with women was the preferred
and/or advertised form of sexual activity. 63 The vast majority of sodomites brought
before the Inquisition of Aragon were, again, young boys or men; usually they were
single.
In the Inquisition sodomy cases, authorities did not try to eliminate male ef-
feminacy, but sexual predators. Traditionally Mediterranean societies had considered
sodomy 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 were
foreigners - Italians, Frenchmen, North Africans - who threatened to sodomise lo-
cal native sons. As with other forms of illicit sexuality - like deflowering unmarried
daughters - sodomy threatened the patriarchal structure of society and harmed the
reputations of Spanish families.
Like sodomy, bestiality was a common sexual accusation, overwhelmingly against
men and was part of efforts to control male sexual misbehaviour. Bestiality was clearly
neither a rare nor insignificant charge: the 315 cases in Zaragoza from 1560 to 1700
against men for having sex with animals nearly equalled those in the city against
sodomites. Such men were typically rural labourers working with sheep, cattle and
mules. 64 As in the case of sodomy, the numbers of prosecutions for bestiality rose
dramatically at the end of the sixteenth century and peaked early in the seventeenth
century. 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 men
were executed for bestiality. 65
Yet another sex crime perpetrated exclusively by men was estupro (seduction and
defloration). Because seduction most often involved an elite or wealthy man taking
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344 Gender & History

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

A crisis of masculinity?
The real 'crisis of masculinity' in early modern Spain was how to rein in, control
and channel the violence and sexuality of legions of men throughout the empire who
were bent on emulating, not Christ, but Cortes, Pizarro and Juan of Austria (Philip
H'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 loss
or diminution. But, as the evidence above shows, there were aspects of masculine
misbehaviour other than effeminacy, which equally concerned authorities in the early
modern period. There was tension between the masculine ideal and the way men actu-
ally behaved, and this caused cultural anxiety, social repercussions and perhaps even
internalised individual anxiety. 67 Several scholars of early modern Spanish masculinity
have described such tension as part of a seventeenth-century 'crisis of masculinity', a
cultural 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 particular
preoccupation, they argue, explains early modern Spanish campaigns against sodomy,
or against - especially French - vanity and affectation. 69 The campaign focused on
behaviours that seemed womanly at the time and which therefore jeopardised Spanish
hegemony. Such crises of gendered behaviour, however, have been described for many
times and places, as Karras and others point out, ever since a change in masculinity
in the early modern period was first described by R. W. Connell in the 1980s. 70 It
might be better to describe crisis, instead, as a constant cultural tension that reveals its
symptoms in various ways over time.
Judging from hundreds of trials against men for sexual misbehaviour, there was
clearly a problem with men's gendered behaviour during the early modern period;
many men defined themselves and their manhood in ways that challenged patriarchal
power, the authorities in Church and state. These men performed masculinity through
sexual rebelliousness rather than through the household, control over kinswomen, sta-
tus and/or profession. Such men were either malcontents within the institutions of
Church or marriage, or they were young, single men, economically and politically
disenfranchised. Indeed, several historians have argued that in northern Europe the
Protestant Reformation ushered in a reform of masculine behaviour by promoting the
authority and order of the H ausvater 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

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 Limiting Masculine Sexuality in Counter-Reformation Spain 345

self-control. How else can we understand the public humiliation, for instance, of one
Francisco de la Plas;a, a twenty-six-year-old married farmer, who in 1571 was forced
by the Inquisition to abjure before his parish in a sacramental gown admitting that it
was a sin for a man to go to the local brothel? The Inquisition here and in hundreds of
other cases shamed men and exposed their libertine sexual attitudes in a bid to reform
Catholic masculine behaviour. 72
Some men were likely to have contested such scenes of shaming, pitting one view
of masculine sexuality against another, in a similar manner to how private duelling
became 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 against
such a 'civilising' of masculinity, in what Norbert Elias described as the development
of a cultural antithesis. 74 More recently, masculinity theorists have used the term
'hegemonic masculinity' to describe a dominant, normative masculinity that vies for
power with other, subordinate masculine models. 75 After all, indiscriminate violence,
sex, drinking and gambling were not part of the masculinity defined in the humanist
and Christian rhetoric of dispassionate reason, self-discipline and self-denial. 76 Neither
were such unruly men honourable from the patriarchal perspective, in the eyes of
powerful 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-life
adherents of this ideal of manhood clearly undermined the patriarchal hierarchy of
Spanish society. Not only did they challenge male authorities like preachers, alder-
men and governors; their unfettered sexuality that eschewed marriage and targeted
daughters and married women jeopardised fragile systems of inheritance. 78 Its most
familiar 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 were
not 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 sex
and violence we can assume that they envied, if not emulated, the adventurous life
of the knights of old. 79 They had strayed from the path followed by young men in
early modern Germany to patriarchal manhood described by Heider Wunder: 'Moral
strength in particular presented the greatest challenge to boys who, in order to become
men, had first to learn to keep themselves in check. The demands that were placed
upon boys as members of the "stronger sex" so that they might become men have
rarely been considered'. 80 Many young men looked to a different masculine ideal
than that promoted by confession manuals, municipal officials or even the demands of
honour.
Spanish men who embraced the normative definition of patriarchal masculinity
advocated by the Church and state - work, marriage, household - could actually be
regarded as having, to a degree, emasculated themselves. Many Spanish men promoted
themselves as 'true' men by their sexual promiscuity and by rejecting patriarchal
masculinity. To explain why many people thought fornication was not a sin, Stuart

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346 Gender & History

Schwartz found several men telling inquisitors that men who refused to have sex
with women were 'faggots'. 81 This view that promiscuity increased one's manliness
undoubtedly perturbed inquisitors. Similarly, Allyson Poska has shown that people
in 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 was
a given. Galicians might regard men who remained at home as timorous because
such men passively accepted the poverty of their native Galicia. This mirrors the
journeymen'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 minded
men who flouted the attempts to reform masculine behaviour that I have outlined
above. 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 caped
Lothario/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 like
Don 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 witness
testimony; the details of one wife's affair with the young troublemaker are extremely
colourful. Angela Pasqual was allegedly in love with the criminal Bandoma, a bandit
wanted by the law. Bandoma was the author of many daring amorous stunts. Pasqual's
husband, for instance, claimed that he had burst into his wife's room on one occasion
and 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 her
affair with the stealthy Bandoma. Fifteen-year-old Jazinto Carrillo said that he once
spotted Bandoma in the street at night hiding a woman under his cape, who he thought
looked 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 a
man ... and touching the hair and head of the man [I] discovered that it was Manuel
Lopez Bandoma'. Startled at the presence of a man in her bed, Marin feigned sleep
and made certain to stay on her side of the bed. 84 A neighbour, Josepha Ivafies, told a
more graphic and erotic story:

[Josepha] said that during Easter the day of the Resurrection she was standing in the gateway to
her house ... Angela Pasqual came home and sat on the porch steps and she told [Josepha] that
Manuel Lopez Bandoma was going to milk her breasts because they were full because she had
recently given birth, [Angela] also told her to close the gate to the street of that entrance, she closed
it and remained on the porch. And this being after twelve noon she was there until evening, and [the
witness] 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 from
her breasts ... 85

Bandoma's actions illustrate the type of social disorder a philandering single

man could cause in tightly-knit communities. According to the argument of Gregorio
Royo's lawyer, the husband was a victim of an armed bandit he could not fight and
a notoriously unfaithful wife he could not control. Royo suffered the humiliation and

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 Limiting Masculine Sexuality in Counter-Reformation Spain 347

dishonour of his wife's reputation; he was forced to support her and, indirectly, her
lover. In a sense, Royo was as much to blame for causing social disorder because he was
not 'man' enough to confront Bandoma. Though the couple lived separately, Pasqual
still 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 Ofiate, not only attempted to prove the facts of Pasqual's affair,
he also argued that Royo suffered continuous insults because of his dishonourable
predicament. The court notary testified that the husband had to endure ridicule in
the town as a cuckold. He described one man who 'when Gregorio was passing by
the street [the man] put his hand on his head in the manner of two horns', the cuckold
gesture. 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 sexual
behaviour. 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 freedoms
that persisted for centuries. But that should not lead anyone to assume that authorities
fully tolerated male sexual license. As in Bandoma's case, there were clearly limits
to what men could get away with, and those limits were constantly being culturally
negotiated, through custom, naturally, but then more formally through rules, regula-
tions and laws promulgated by the Church, town and King. During the latter half of
the sixteenth century, the Counter Reformation and reign of Philip II, the stated limits
to male sexuality became more clearly defined than they had ever been before. In the
early modern period there was a shift, then, in Spain's 'hegemonic masculinity' - that
is, in the attributes of male behaviour espoused by the people who dominated society
and culture. This was a trend away from praise for a masculinity based on military
skills and polygynous male sexuality to one that, at least among the elite members of
the Church and government, placed higher value on stoicism and self-discipline. I am
not suggesting that the 'Don Juans' of Spain disappeared. Rather, such men clung to
masculine ideals increasingly at variance with those in power.
In the early sixteenth century the image of Spanish monarchical authority was
a virile young Habsburg, Charles V, who once challenged the king of France to a
personal duel as a way to resolve European political differences. Half a century later
the Spanish Empire had grown enormously in size, complexity and wealth. Charles's
son, Philip II, wielded power with ink and a quill, seated behind a desk often late into
the night. We imagine him, as in the famous portrait by Sofonisba Anguissola, holding
a rosary in his hand. If power - in this case patriarchal power - was defined at court
and served, as Norbert Elias suggests, as a model for the rest of society, then there
clearly was a redefinition of what a powerful man was during the sixteenth century in
Spain.

Notes
I would like to thank Renato Barahona, Merry Wiesner-Hanks, Sara Nalle, the anonymous reviewers and editors
of 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 for
comments and advice in the revision of this article.

1. 'es un hombre moc;o que vive ynquietamente', Archivo Diocesano de Cuenca, Curia Episcopal (hereafter
abbreviated as ADCCE), Legajo 811/1519, Diborcio, Juana de Medina vs. Juan de Baldivar, f. 9 recto.

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348 Gender & History

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 divide
the couple and their household. See Joanne M. Ferraro, 'The Power to Decide: Battered Wives in Early
Modem Venice', Renaissance Quarterly 48 (1995), pp. 492-512; Edward Behrend-Martinez, 'An Early
Modem Spanish "Divorce Court" and the Rhetoric of Matrimony', in Anne J. Cruz (ed.), Disciplines on the
Line: Feminist Research on Spanish, Latin American, and US Latina Women (Newark: Juan de la Cuesta
Press, 2003), pp. 145-66.
4. Some recent studies, however, have investigated Spanish masculinity using early modem literary sources,
plays and sermons. See Sidney Donnell, Feminizing the Enemy: Imperial Spain, Transvestite Drama, and
the 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 Gender
Discourses in the Seventeenth Century', The Sixteenth Century Journal 32 (2001), pp. 637--67. Grace
Coolidge has recently analysed the flexibility of masculine performance and sexuality among Spanish
noblemen in 'Contested Masculinity: Noblemen and Their Mistresses in Early Modem Spain', in Mathew
P. 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. Mantec6n, 'The Patterns of Violence in
Early Modern Spain', The Journal of the Historical Society 7 (2007), pp. 229-64. Historians of other parts
of early modern Europe have identified unruly male subcultures. See Guido Ruggiero, The Boundaries of
Eros: 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 l (1989), pp. 125-37; Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture
in Renaissance Florence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
6. For recent work on male sexuality in early modem England see especially Elizabeth Foyster, Masculinity
in Early Modern England (New York: Longman, 1999) and Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in
Early 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 Modem 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's
Work' and Shepard, Meanings of Manhood. Authorities targeted the types of people they thought spread
sin 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. Vicente
and 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 Modem Seville: the Pol-
itics of Prostitution', Feminist Studies 4 (1978), pp. 195-214; E. William Monter, Frontiers of Heresy: the
Spanish 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 Early
Modern 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 Reform
in Valencia, 1568-1614 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). Another example of attempts
at centralisation was Philip's massive geographical survey sent out to the cities and towns of his realm, the
Relaciones topograficas, Alfredo Alvar Ezquerra, _MarfaElena Garcia Guerra, and Maria de los Angeles
Vicioso Rodriguez, Relaciones topograficas de Felipe 11,Madrid, 4 vols (Madrid: Comunidad de Madrid
Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientfficas, 1993).
10. For the impact of the Council of Trent on the Spanish Church, see Sara Nalle's detailed study of the effect
of Tridentine reforms on the bishopric of Cuenca, Sara Tilghman Nalle, God in La Mancha: Religious
Reform and the People of Cuenca, 1500-1650 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). Also

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 Limiting Masculine Sexuality in Counter-Reformation Spain 349

see Henry Kamen, The Phoenix and the Flame: Catalonia and the Counter Reformation (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1993).
11. Perhaps because of the abundance of work in women's history, scholars looking into sexual disciplining in
early modem 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 University
Press, 2008), pp. 106-30, here p. 114.
14. Archivo Diocesano de Cuenca, Inquisici6n (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, 'yen esta opinion de hombre de bien lo tienen en este pueblo salvo ques
es mui porfiado y jura muchas vezes al sefior'.
17. ADC, Inq. Legajo 251/3397, f. 12.
18. See, for instance, earlier efforts to crack down on fornication in M. C. Garcia Herrero, 'Prostituci6n 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 of
Medieval History 28 (2002), pp. 349--60. Diocesan legislation and constitutions had identified fornication
as a problem long before the Council of Trent. See, for instance, Sara Nalle's observations in Nalle, God in
La Mancha, p. 25. Scott Taylor also points out the flood of confessional literature that espoused Christian
sexual 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 Early
Modern 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. Marfa de Zayas y Sotomayor, The Disenchantments of Love, tr. Harriet Boyer (repr. 1647; Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1997).
21. See, for instance Joan Cammarata, Women in the Discourse of Early Modern Spain (Gainesville: University
Press 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 in
Marfa 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 in
Early Modern Spain', Journal of the History of Sexuality 17 (2008), pp. 351-76, here p. 26. Sodomy and
bestiality 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 Villasefior-
Black, 'Love and Marriage in the Spanish Empire', pp. 637--67.
25. Mantec6n, '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-
Martfnez, Unfitfor 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 in
the 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: Oxford
University 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.

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350 Gender & History

34. Lacarra Lanz, 'Changing Boundaries of Licit and Illicit Unions', pp. 161-5; Stephen Haliczer, 'Sexuality
and Repression in Counter-Reformation Spain', in Alain Saint-Saens (ed.), Sex and Love in Golden Age
Spain (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 argument
about the permissive attitude regarding early modem sexuality, see Rafael Carrasco's 'Lazarillo on a Street
Comer: What the Picaresque Novel Did Not Say about Fallen Boys', in Saint-Saens (ed.), Sex and Love in
Golden 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 described
in Antonio Gil Ambrona, Historia de la violencia contra las mujeres: misogin[a y conflicto matrimo-
nial en Espana (Madrid: Catedra, 2008), p. 205. In the northern kingdom of Navarra most cases of
amancebamiento were cohabitating couples who had not married before the Church. See Maria del Juncal
Campo Guinea, Comportamientos matrimoniales en Navarra: (siglos XVI-XVII) (Pamplona: Gobiemo de
Navarra, 1998). See also Pablo Perez Garcia, 'La criminalizaci6n de la sexualidad en la Espana Mod-
erna', in Jose Ignacio Fortea Perez, Juan Eloy Gelabert Gonzalez and Tomas A. Mantec6n (eds), Furor
et rabies: violencia, conflicto y marginaci6n en la edad moderna (Santander: Universidad de Cantabria,
2002), pp. 355-402; C. de la Llave, 'A una mesa y una cama: barraganfa y amancebamiento a fines
de la Edad Media', in Marfa Isabel Calero Secall (ed.), Saber y vivir: mujer, antigiiedad y medievo
(Malaga: Univeridad de Malaga, 1996), pp. 127-55; Poska, Women and Authority in Early Modern Spain,
pp. 71-86.
37. 'trato y comunicaci6n ilicfta de hombre con muger', 'Amancebamiento' in the Real Academia Espanola,
Diccionario de la lengua castellana compuesto par la Real Academia Espanola. A-B (Madrid: Joachin
Ibarra. 1770). It was first made a crime at the Cortes de Briviesca in 1387. Marfa 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 the
diocese of Calahorra and La Calzada in 1641, Archivo Diocesano y Catedralicio de Calahorra (hereafter
abbreviated ADCC), Legajo 197/2.
39. On the Bull of the Cruzada and its relationship to the Church and Crown see Sean T. Perrone, Charles
V 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 Hist6rico 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
Modem 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-Martinez, "'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 of
Illinois, 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 Hist6rico 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 Marfa Garcia de Yla, 20 August 1707.

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 Limiting Masculine Sexuality in Counter-Reformation Spain 351

60. 'le oyo dezir ... solo se hauia cassado con la susso dha porq. ttenia hacienda', ADCC, Legajo 27/80/13,
testimony of Maria la Puerta, 12 November 1694.
61. 'cometio adulterio y aestado y persistido en el mal estado desde entonzes amanzebado y sin hazer vida con
mi 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 others
have 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's
studies' 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 to
Men,p. 8.
68. See, for instance, Donnell, Feminizing the Enemy; Rebecca Haidt, 'Reading the Body: Petimetres, Phys-
iognomies and Gendered Otherness', in Rebecca Haidt, Embodying Enlightenment: Knowing the Body
in 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 in
Seville against sodomites and men wearing long hair and wigs in Mary Elizabeth Perry, Crime and Society
in 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 male
acculturation as an urban problem in four diverse societies: Brazil, the Caribbean, the United States and
sub-Saharan Africa.
78. Grace Coolidge thoroughly discusses how, among the nobility, illegitimate children could threaten, but in
some circumstances bolster a family's legacy and reputation: 'While multiple mistresses and illegitimate
children could publicly affirm a nobleman's virility and even provide back-up heirs who could sustain
the 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 an
overt heterosexuality, Christian Berco has recently explored how aggressive sexual relationships could have
been 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 one
were 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 Ulinka
Rublack (ed.), Gender in Early Modern German History (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2002), pp. 21-48, here p. 23.

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352 Gender & History

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 mofio 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 le
sacasse la leche por q tenia mui cargados los pechos q hazia poco hauia parido, y tambien la dijo q zerrasse
la puerta de la calle de dha Portillo y la zerro y se quedo dentro del portal, y siendo esto como despues del
mediodia se estubo alli hasta a nochezido, y saue q entonzes estaua dho Bandoma dentro de dha cassa y q
hauia entrado p' el corral de ella, y que quando salio la Pasquala dixo a la tgo la hauia sacado Bandoma
mui poca leche de los pechos ... ', ADCC, Legajo 20/145/16, f. 16.
86. 'lo q este hauia ejecutado en ocasion q pasaba dho Gregorio p' la calle de poner la mano a modo de dos
puntas en la caueza ... ', ADCC, Legajo 20/145/16, f. 38.

© 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.