From Body to Community: Venereal Disease and Society in Baroque Spain 9781442620681

Table of contents :
Contents
Tables
Preface
Acknowledgments
From Body To Community
Introduction Beyond Mercury: Venereal Disease In Context
Chapter 1. Getting Sick: Signs, Sin, And Social Worth
Chapter 2 .Encounters Of The Third Kind: Medical Assumptions And Patients
Chapter 3.Melting Pot: The Hospital De Santiago’S Patients
Chapter 4.Safeguarding Reputation: Gender, Hospitalization, And Textiles
Chapter 5.Between Body And Soul: Treatment At The Hospital De Santiago
Chapter 6.Getting Hitched: Pox, Sexuality, And Marriage
Chapter 7.Making Ends Meet: Disease, Work, And Family
Chapter 8.Playing Nice With Others: Pox And Community
Conclusion Patients As People: Disease, Society, And Beyond
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

FROM BODY TO COMMUNITY: VENEREAL DISEASE AND SOCIETY IN BAROQUE SPAIN

This page intentionally left blank

CRISTIAN BERCO

From Body to Community Venereal Disease and Society in Baroque Spain

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press 2016 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-­1-­4426-­4962-­0 Printed on acid-­­free, 100% post-­­consumer recycled paper with vegetablebased inks. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Berco, Cristian, author From body to community : venereal disease and society in Baroque Spain/ Cristian Berco. (Toronto Iberic) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4426-4962-0 (bound) 1. Hospital de Santiago (Toledo, Spain) – History.  2. Sexually transmitted diseases – Spain – History – 17th century.  3. Sexually transmitted diseases – Patients – Spain – History – 17th century.  4. Sexually transmitted diseases – Treatment – Spain – History – 17th century.  5. Sexually transmitted diseases – Hospitals – Spain – History – 17th century.  6. Diseases – Social aspects – Spain – History – 17th century.  I. Title.  II. Series: Toronto Iberic. RC201.6.S63B47 2016   616.95'1094609032   C2015-906913-0 This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.

Funded by the Financé par le Government gouvernement du Canada of Canada

To my parents, Ana and Eduardo

This page intentionally left blank

Contents

List of Tables  ix Preface  xi Acknowledgments  xv Introduction – Beyond Mercury: Venereal Disease in Context   3 1 Getting Sick: Signs, Sin, and Social Worth  21 2 Encounters of the Third Kind: Medical Assumptions and Patients  38 3 Melting Pot: The Hospital de Santiago’s Patients  55 4 Safeguarding Reputation: Gender, Hospitalization, and Textiles  70 5 Between Body and Soul: Treatment at the Hospital de Santiago  88 6 Getting Hitched: Pox, Sexuality, and Marriage  105 7 Making Ends Meet: Disease, Work, and Family  123 8 Playing Nice with Others: Pox and Community  144 Conclusion – Patients as People: Disease, Society, and Beyond  166 Notes  171 Bibliography  229 Index  251

This page intentionally left blank

Tables

3.1 4.1 4.2 6.1 7.1

Hospital patients by residence and gender  58 Patients wearing ragged or valueless garments  72 Patients’ clothing by fabric  73 Hospital patients by marital status and residence  108 Profession of patients or immediate family members by socioeconomic sector  127

This page intentionally left blank

Preface

Consider an early modern venereal disease hospital. Such institutions would have dotted the European landscape after the sudden 1495 eruption of an illness that contemporaries would term the French Disease or the Great Pox, among other names. Virulent and chronic, this disease displayed symptoms of what today we would call syphilis, as well as gonorrhea. While scholars continue to debate the origins of the pox – American-­born or not – and how changing medical knowledge conceptualized this illness, when we focus on the patients who underwent treatment at these hospitals, specific images come to mind. Usually, we would expect to encounter in such places the poor, the downtrodden, the dregs of society who, unable to afford private care, offered their sores born of sin to public scorn and doubtful remedy. Patients would come and go, leaving little more in institutional records than names attached to the shame of venereal infection. But what about patients’ lives beyond the hospital? What of the time before infection – adventures enjoyed, dreams pondered, friends made? What of all that came after release from hospital, once mercury dried the venereal sores and patients were spit back out into the social maelstrom of the everyday, with jobs to find, marriages to secure, and families to appease? Histories of early modern disease have focused fruitfully on the hospital and its accompanying bureaucratic scaffolding to shed light on treatment, changing understandings of disease, the role of medicalization and discipline, and the reality of poverty. Yet patients were much more than merely diseased. They carried with them familial interactions, civic identities, relationships with networks, and careers. In short, they enjoyed rich and complex social lives, which this illness affected well beyond the mere few weeks they might have spent

xii Preface

in hospital. After all, the French disease was a chronic condition with long-­term consequences not only for the body but also for an individual’s place within society, financial wherewithal, and relationships to loved ones. These twin interconnected experiences of venereal disease and fragile social processes affected much of Europe. Indeed, many across the continent shared similar economic, social, and familial structures and pressures marked by pre-­industrial culture. Many also shared the scourge of the pox – public lives and private ailments, communal interaction and bodily afflictions. From Body to Community traces the steps of patients before, during, and after hospitalization to gain a textured understanding of what it meant to live with venereal disease in early modern Spain. Through a combination of medical, institutional, and notarial sources regarding patients treated at Spain’s Hospital de Santiago in the seventeenth century, this book speaks to the way early modern Europeans coped with the French disease as a social reality. Thanks to historian Stephanie Fink DeBacker, who alerted me to its existence, I first encountered the only surviving patient admissions book for Toledo’s Hospital de Santiago, a hospital dedicated to treating the pox, at the Archivo de la Diputación Provincial de Toledo. I was struck by the wealth of information therein. Covering the years 1654 to 1665, the admissions book provided information on roughly four thousand patients who had sought treatment at the hospital. Everything from their names, birthplaces, residences, parents, and marital status (including the identity of the patients’ partners), to a detailed inventory of the garments they wore upon entry, including fabrics, color, and condition, was duly listed by hospital notaries.1 While such identifying information was common for hospitals at the time – one need go no farther than Toledo’s San Juan Bautista hospital to view similar records – the sheer variety of occupations and apparent levels of wealth among patients, given the clothes they wore, provided an unexpected source of interest that impelled me to work on these patients further. Indeed, through the stream of entries noted impersonally in clerical handwriting, one could start to glimpse the individuality and the myriad stories that patients carried with them as they sought succour for venereal illness. Priests and university students, farmers and artisans, day labourers and merchants, poor single women and well-­heeled wives all seemed to have found their way to the Hospital de Santiago. While one entry might confirm the worst Dickensian

Preface xiii

expectations of the poverty we have come to assume of hospital patients (the notary describing garments in tatters), the next one might provide a vision of a Toledano of means, all expensive ruffles and luxurious silks. As I transcribed these patient entries, starting to gain glimpses into lives that promised so much more than chronic venereal infection, I started to wonder about their families, their economic situations, their communities – in short, the types of experiences these patients encountered outside the hospital walls, both before and after infection. As such, I undertook the task of trying to trace hospital patients in other types of records, namely notarial ones housed in Toledo’s Archivo Provincial. More a hunch than a certain analytical strategy, I imagined that, given some of the middling-­to-­well-­off patients who attended the hospital, at least some of them would have found their way to commissioning notarial contracts. Much to my grateful surprise, it turned out that patients from all walks of life seemed to have left traces in various notarial documents. Considering early modern Spain’s highly legalistic and notarialized culture, in which even the rental of a basement hovel required a contract, scores of patients and their families left behind glimpses into their daily lives through a variety of wills, work agreements, dowries, rentals, powers of attorney, and so forth.2 Ultimately, living successfully with venereal disease required both individual perseverance and broader networks of familial and communal support. Given the difficulties pox patients encountered as symptoms progressed and the bodily signs of illness became evident, maintaining reputation, finding work, and creating successful families required skill in navigating the complex cultural and social shoals that dotted early modern life.

This page intentionally left blank

Acknowledgments

I am deeply grateful to all the people who, over many years of research, extended a helping hand to me and made this book possible. To the archivists and librarians at the Archivo de la Diputación Provincial de Toledo, the Archivo Histórico Provincial de Toledo, the Archivo Histórico Nacional, the Archivo de la Chancillería de Valladolid, and the Biblioteca Nacional, my most sincere appreciation for the welcome they afforded me and the knowledge they so willingly shared. I am also greatly indebted to many colleagues. First, I would like to sincerely thank Stephanie Fink DeBacker. Not only did she selflessly point me to the source – the Hospital de Santiago’s book of patients – that would become the genesis for this research, as well as contribute her invaluable insights and unrelenting work ethic to collaborative projects we have embarked on, but I have had the privilege of calling her my friend for many years. I am also deeply indebted to Nicholas Terpstra, who supervised me as a postdoctoral student when I was starting this work and who, over the years, has provided sage advice and insightful comments on my research. To Tom Cohen, who most graciously commented on an early version of chapter 4, my sincere thanks. I am also very grateful to John Henderson who so courteously agreed to read a paper on the subject that I was unable to present due to illness at the 2009 INHH conference in Barcelona. Furthermore, none of this work would have been possible without the following scholars who freely shared their expertise with me at various venues: Konrad Eisenbichler, Kevin Siena, Amanda Wunder, Kenneth Borris, George S. Rousseau, Libby Cohen, Jane Stevens Crawshaw, and Donna J. Guy, as well as my colleagues at Bishop’s University’s History Department and the Crossing Borders Research Cluster. Finally, I would like to express

xvi  Acknowledgments

my deepest and enduring gratitude to Helen Nader, my mentor and dissertation director at the University of Arizona, who taught me how to approach the past with an open heart and a clear mind. Beyond the academic milieu, I have been extremely fortunate to enjoy the unstinting love and generous support of family and loved ones in Canada, Spain, and Argentina, including Ana Lorda de Berco and Eduardo Berco, Nathan A. Clarke, Mauricio Berco and Stephelynn DeLucca, Laura Dos Santos, Raquel Dulevich, Michael Delarmee, Cristian Martínez and María Fernanda Lorda and, of course, Mia Berco and Lucas Berco. To all of you and the other friends and family too numerous to name individually, thank you for all the joy you have so selflessly shared with me. This research would have been impossible without it. The generosity of various granting agencies was essential for the conduct of this work. This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and was also undertaken, in part, thanks to funding from the Canada Research Chairs Program. Bishop’s University Senate Research Committee grants also supported this research and its publication. Of course, this book would not have been possible without the help of the fantastic editorial team at the University of Toronto Press, especially Suzanne Rancourt, whose support, thoughtfulness, and grace during the acquisitions process were invaluable; Barb Porter, who lovingly shepherded the manuscript through the editorial and production process; and the anonymous readers who so generously contributed their time and thoughtful comments. Finally, I would like to thank the journals in which some of this research first appeared for allowing me to use it in this book. An earlier version of chapter 4 was published in the Journal of Social History 44, no. 3 (Spring 2011): 785–810. Likewise, a previous version of chapter 6 appeared in the Journal of Early Modern History 15, no. 3 (2011): 223–53. Note on Transcriptions: All transcriptions from published primary sources – whether original or modern editions – remain true to the originals, including the inclusion of archaic spelling, punctuation, and accentuation that differs from modern Spanish standards and may even replicate errors from early modern editions. In the case of previously unpublished archival sources, I have kept the original spelling but added tildes when the Spanish letter “ñ” applies, as well as accented the appropriate vowels according to modern grammatical rules, for ease of reading.

FROM BODY TO COMMUNITY

This page intentionally left blank

Introduction

Beyond Mercury: Venereal Disease in Context

The Great Pox, the French Disease, the Neapolitan Sickness, the Spanish Illness, the Bubas. By such varied names, reflecting the suspicion of extraneous pollution, did Europeans come to know a terrifying new illness that struck the continent with a vengeance in the 1490s and thereafter settled in as a common, if harsh, disease. Indeed, spreading outward from the Italian peninsula, where contemporaries first reported its appearance at the French army’s siege of Naples in 1495, the disease soon spread across Europe, leaving no stone unturned and no community unharmed. The rapid spread of this illness across the European continent and its initial morbidity, combined with available practices and medical theories, meant the so-­called pox was a moving target. While nineteenth-­ century physicians would eventually reconceptualize the French disease of yore into modern components such as syphilis and gonorrhea, this early modern illness that took Europe by surprise was constantly changing as concept, not only over time but depending on local context. As Claudia Stein has cogently argued in her work on Augsburg, Germany, “the identity of the pox was not only flexible and temporary … but was also locally defined.”1 Indeed, the sudden eruption of this virulent disease caused not only consternation but spirited scientific debate among Renaissance physicians as they tried to incorporate observable data into prevailing Galenic models of medicine. Arrizabalaga, Henderson, and French’s seminal The Great Pox explored the changing understandings of this illness from a variety of perspectives – medical, religious, institutional – to paint a dynamic picture of how Europeans reacted to its appearance in their midst. Likewise, much scholarship has also been devoted to specific questions that particularly needled Renaissance scientists and doctors.2

4  From Body to Community

Ann G. Carmichael and Anna Foa have focused on the crucial question of whether the disease was new or already known to the ancients, an issue related to a possible American origin for the disease that remains a current discussion among scientists.3 Likewise, Darin Hayton has tackled the belief in planetary movements as one of the prime causes of the pox, part of the common astronomical understanding of disease during the Renaissance.4 Even the popularly held early modern theory that the spread of the pox was due to cannibalism has received much welcome attention from William Eamon.5 In short, the Great Pox struck at the heart of long-­held Galenic assumptions about disease and contagion that led physicians to reassess and reconsider its tenets. Although physicians seemed at first unable to treat the horrifying symptoms of this disease that, as it progressed, left sufferers disfigured, with lost nose cartilage, broken bones, baldness, and festering pustules and horrifying sores covering their bodies, by the early sixteenth century surgeons were employing various substances such as mercury, guaiac, and sarsaparilla to dry patients’ skin lesions. But the road to stable forms of treatment was complicated and shaped by the aforementioned theoretical debates. In fact, most of the theoretical discussions of the day were conducted in the context of continued practice with suffering and dying patients. Jon Arrizabalaga has deftly analysed the early debates and contributions made to both the theory of illness and the practice of healing the pox by a variety of physicians, especially Spaniards Gaspar Torrella and Pere Pintor, both of whom worked in Rome at the time.6 Likewise, Claudia Stein has focused on the complex interaction between physicians’ and patients’ interpretations of the diseased body and its relation to the pox in Augsburg’s hospitals.7 As the disease spread and reached what contemporaries described as epidemic proportions, broad public health measures were taken to deal with the matter, including both greater medical control over public brothels and the establishment of specific hospitals, or sometimes wards, dedicated to treating this scourge.8 The role of the hospital in everything from treatment to moral reform has been explored by, among others, Kevin Siena, Robert Jütte, and María Luz López Terrada.9 That patients at such hospitals at times suffered from the burden of moral suspicion is not surprising given the assumptions tied to the pox. Not only was the illness often considered to be of foreign origin, both conceptually and in local practice, as seen in studies by Roze Hentschell and Mary Hewlett for England and Italy respectively, but various cultural markers were often attached to the disease.10 We need go no further

Introduction: Beyond Mercury  5

than poverty, the presumed culpability of loose women as contagious, or the libertine attitudes attributed to young men to encounter a maze of ingrained cultural assumptions that shaped responses to the pox. From Kevin Siena’s work on London and the poor to Laura J. McGough’s exploration of Venetian responses and Winfried Schleiner’s assessment of gendered attitudes to the pox, the disease emerges as challenging not just to health but also to social structures and relationships.11 In short, the wealth of scholarship on the early modern pox has allowed us to understand more completely not only its medical dimensions, but also the institutional, social, and cultural regimes attached to the illness. In effect, the historiography on the pox has been heavily indebted to a much broader turn to the “social question” in the history of medicine. From the 1970s onward, in an energizing, eclectic fashion, the field grew exponentially and incorporated insights, theories, and methodologies from, among other areas, the history of gender, the body, and culture.12 Long-­gone are the days when historians of medicine focused solely on the development of medical theory and practice. Today we have greater knowledge of the evolution of the medical profession itself, including its hierarchies and its often uneasy coexistence with unregulated healers.13 We also have a much better understanding of the manner in which the state has historically responded to disease,14 of the way in which disease itself has been constructed, and of how these discursive practices have changed over time.15 In the emerging subfield of patient-­centred history, Roy Porter’s seminal scholarship has led to a variety of fascinating works on patients’ resistance to institutional methods of control, their conceptions and understanding of disease – often heavily reliant on alternative healing practices – and even their complex views on the body.16 But as much as we now have a greater understanding of the way disease has been conceptualized, how patients experienced it, and the treatments they received, there is scant information on the wider social world of hospital patients, regarding both the pox and other chronic diseases. Beyond the assumption that it was mostly the downtrodden, or at least different types of poor people, who sought treatment in public hospitals, we know little of their lives before and after hospitalization.17 How did the pox – replete with all the aforementioned cultural frames – shape individuals’ social spaces? How did early modern Europeans afflicted with this illness deal with work, marriage, family, and community in reputation-­focused societies? These people were not just patients who were treated for a few weeks in a local hospital; these

6  From Body to Community

men and women, wealthy and poor, clerics and laypersons – in short, a cross-­section of early modern society – had to re-­enter complicated social worlds after hospitalization and lead everyday lives while managing illness. After all, the issue of how the pox was experienced went well beyond its treatment for, as a chronic illness, its ravages spoke to the challenges of everyday life. As such, this social history of venereal disease draws from the lives, successes and failures of the roughly four thousand patients who, between 1654 and 1665, were treated at the Hospital de Santiago, the sole pox health care institution for the Spanish city of Toledo and its rural hinterland.18 Smack in the centre of the Iberian Peninsula, lording over the Tagus river basin and straddling important royal roads connecting northern urban centers such as Valladolid, Segovia, and the eventual court in Madrid with the south and the fertile plains of Andalucía, Toledo was a meeting point for travellers, merchants and officials on bureaucratic business.19 Not only did Toledo have an august history as ancient Visigoth capital, but it was also the seat of the Spanish primate and most important archbishopric in the peninsula, and was home to crucial industries, mainly silk and steel. Until eclipsed by Madrid and Seville, it was the most populated city in Iberia, reaching between 60,000 and 80,000 inhabitants by the late sixteenth century. Though it would suffer through a period of decline in the seventeenth century, due to both a generalized demographic crisis and an economic recession occasioned by the flight of local investment to the court in Madrid, which had been established in 1561, Toledo still held the capacity to inspire awe throughout this period.20 The neuralgic centre of Toledo would have appeared very much the same way to travellers of yore as it does to us today. Enveloped on three sides by the meandering Tagus River, a cramped medieval citadel stood atop a hill surrounded by walls with various access points. From the east, the Alcántara Bridge crossed the Tagus and allowed entrance to the city proper. Gleaming under the Castilian sun, the Alcázar – Toledo’s fortress, restored in the 1540s – would have dominated the view of the city as one prepared to cross the bridge. Close to it, and also visible as it perched on the city walls, stood the Hospital de Santiago itself; once an institution that treated knights from the Order of Santiago, it had been turned into a pox hospital by 1500. If one approached from the north and the royal road coming from Madrid, the New Gate of Bisagra, constructed in the mid sixteenth-­century , replaced the old Moorish one and greeted travellers with an imposing triumphal arch.21

Introduction: Beyond Mercury  7

Both gates – alongside other lesser ones – served less the function of protection than that of a funnel through which goods, and thus taxes, had to pass, particularly since the population had by the 1500s overgrown the ancient citadel and spilled over into the surrounding areas.22 Some of these outlying neighbourhoods were less than genteel: Antequerela, for instance, just outside the New Gate of Bisagra, was known for its ruffians and prostitutes, especially once the city council placed the new municipal brothel there in 1577.23 Regardless, traffic through these gates was generally busy, even in times of economic recession such as the seventeenth century, as the city still attracted a variety of goods: wine from Yegros, mutton from Mora, charcoal from the Montes de Toledo, and bread from nearby villages like Mocejón for notable episcopal and monastic institutions. Once one crossed into the city proper, a short walk uphill led to Toledo’s main square, Zocodover, not only a stage for various public processions, festivals and more somber occasions, like inquisitorial autos de fe, but also a veritable hive of activity on normal days. From gentlemen discussing their affairs to maimed vagrants begging for alms, from children from the nearby poor neighbourhood of Cobachuelas employing their quick fingers and wily ways to survive to silk-­clad ladies purposefully making their way across the square with servants in tow, Zocodover reflected a chaos of characters, sights, and sounds. In the corner of the square, a sad sight: the clavicote, a cage in which the bodies of the drowned or the impoverished dead were displayed so that good Christians would take pity on them and toss some money to cover the costs of their burial. Just as is the case today, the streets leading out of Zocodover hummed with the bustle of trade. One could find anything there, from quality Toledo steel to fine regional wines, from the purest silk garments to expensive spices.24 These few blocks of busy mercantile activity eventually ended in the political epicenter of the city, where its three dominant powers faced each other: the city hall, the cathedral, and the archiepiscopal palace. Alongside such powerful institutions, and dotting the rest of the urban landscape, stood a rich variety of monasteries, churches, confraternities, and, yes, hospitals that provided Toledanos with immeasurable pride in their city. That Toledo would come to house one of the largest health care centers for the pox, the Hospital de Santiago, was owed to a quick policy response. Indeed, just as many other European jurisdictions managed to react rapidly to the scourge of the pox, so did those in the Iberian

8  From Body to Community

Peninsula. The Spanish kingdoms, though ruled jointly by Isabel and Ferdinand when the outbreak of pox hit Europe, actually reflected a plurality of royal jurisdictions – namely Castile and Aragon – as well as a long tradition of municipal self-­rule. Nevertheless, no matter what the jurisdictional mosaic, institutional actors quickly moved to respond to the epidemic. In Seville, although conflicting reports exist, it would seem that the Hospital of San Salvador was treating the poxed by 1497. Some, like physician Díaz de la Isla, claimed it was Ferdinand and Isabel who, while staying in Seville during the outbreak of the illness, ordered members of the Protomedicato – the royal institution in charge of medical licensing in Castile – to find a remedy and house patients at this hospital.25 Modern scholars, however, have pointed to the minutes of Seville’s municipal council in 1497, which noted the quickly spreading threat of the illness and thus determined to seek a solution. Because two established hospitals in the city refused to treat these patients (as it was against their regulations), the municipal council opted to house the poxed in the old hospital of San Salvador, which was mostly used for housing the needy and was under municipal patronage.26 By 1591, the Hospital del Espíritu Santo, under archiepiscopal patronage, would also do so in Seville.27 Another prominent treatment centre in the peninsula, Valencia’s pox ward in its General Hospital, owed its existence specifically to the municipal council that amalgamated various institutions into one hospital in 1512.28 At other times it would be religious orders that would cooperate with private interests related to the monarchy to provide health care for the poxed. For instance, Madrid’s pox Hospital de Nuestra Señora del Amor de Dios was founded in 1552 by Antón Martín, first follower of St John of God, founder of the Brothers Hospitallers. The land on which the institution was built, however, was gifted by Hernando de Somontes, accountant to the king.29 In Toledo, the role of the Catholic Monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabel, in addressing the health problem was pronounced. Indeed, in 1500 they used their newly acquired royal control over the military order of Santiago to transform the order’s health care jewel in Toledo, the Hospital de Santiago, into an institution dedicated to treating the pox.30 While the military order of Santiago, alongside those of Alcántara and Calatrava, had been instrumental in a medieval crusading context, the conquest of Granada in 1492 had rendered its original purpose somewhat superfluous. When the last non-­royal master of the order died

Introduction: Beyond Mercury  9

in 1494, king Ferdinand himself took the title through an apostolic bull and, together with Isabel, dove into a serious program of reform. Alongside new disciplinary measures for the order’s clerics and a clarification of the role of its secular members, the Crown pursued broader reform of the many hospitals the order controlled. From medieval hospitals that had focused on limited care for wounded knights and on providing some shelter to the poor and to pilgrims, the order’s hospitals, such as those in Santiago (Galicia), Ávila, and Toledo, were reorganized to provide more specialized medical care, in a trend similar to broader European ones.31 For Toledo’s Hospital de Santiago this meant major infrastructure expansions and a shift to treating exclusively those afflicted with the French disease. Although the hospital had been treating those suffering from the French disease exclusively since 1500, the sole patient admissions book from this hospital to survive – a rare artifact – covers these fateful years of the mid-­seventeenth century when Toledo, and much of Spain itself, was mired in a demographic and economic depression. Drawing on this patient book and the hundreds of documents on everything from rental agreements and sales of goods to dowry contracts and wills that patients have left in Toledo’s notarial archive, this book reconstructs the way these individuals experienced venereal disease, from the travails of infection and treatment to the drama of their lives after they left the hospital. Together with medical treatises, literary texts, and more extensive hospital sources from the late sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries detailing everything from medical assumptions surrounding disease to hospital regulations and accounts, this examination of patient experiences seeks to immerse the reader in the complexities of lives marked by venereal infection in this era. To understand the benefits of methodologically marrying hospital patient records with notarial sources, consider two patients, separated by residence and economic circumstance, yet sharing the common experience of venereal disease. In the impersonal hand of the hospital notary, they left us the following information. Hospital de Santiago, April 28, 1655. Spring Treatment Session, ­patient number 101. Name: Joan Amador, single, citizen of Toledo. Parents: Martín Amador and Catalina de Talavera. Garments: Poor-­quality leather jerkin, white wool stockings, sandals. Jacket, doublet and pants “are not worth anything.”32 Hospital de Santiago, September 16, 1659. Fall Treatment Session, patient number 21. Name: Pascual Martín, widower, citizen of Toledo,

10  From Body to Community

resident of Albalá de Tajo. Parents: Andrés Martín and Petronila Gutiérrez, citizens of Camarena. Garments: green woolen cape and long coat, damask doublet with silver tassels, worn velvet sleeves, cotton jerkin with sleeves, lead-­coloured woolen breeches, brown silk stockings, linen socks, collar, lined hat, and gloves.33 Though both originally from Toledo, Joan and Pascual probably did not know each other. Both, however, underwent the same harrowing treatment. Unending salivation, rotting gums, unbearable sweating, and joint pain would have accompanied a treatment that lasted approximately two weeks. As is clear from the notes of the hospital scrivener who admitted them, however, their social circumstances could not have been more different: while many of Joan’s garments were so tattered and poor the notary refused even to list them, as they were worthless, Pascual could boast of gentlemanly attire, including silks and silver passementerie. Pascual returned to the hospital by the spring of 1662.34 He still remained the gentleman he had originally appeared, the years of chronic venereal disease not having made a dent in his position – at least outwardly. Indeed, he again wore coveted textiles, including a damask doublet embroidered with gold accessories. When Joan returned for treatment in the fall of 1658, he still could not compete with the much wealthier Pascual, but he does actually seem to have improved his circumstances. Instead of the many garments so tattered the notary had refused to describe them on Joan’s earlier visit to the hospital, Joan boasted respectable, if somewhat worn, attire: sandals, cap, and brown woolen doublet and pants. He had even upgraded his stockings to trama, a low-­ end silk – not high-­quality, but better nonetheless than the woolen ones he had previously worn.35 Beyond the impersonal entries into the hospital’s admissions book and their incipient indication of socioeconomic status, however, evidence of the disease suffered by these two men and how they coped with diagnosis, its progressive side-­effects, the bodily signs that could ruin reputation, and their interaction with friends, family, and community seems lost to the ravages of time. Of course, records regarding a few weeks’ stay at a hospital can only reveal so much about a chronic venereal illness that over the course of years would progress to affect bone structure, cartilage, and even cognition – its physical and social aftereffects lingering over time. The hospital records – namely the admissions book so solicitously kept by the notary – provide us with snapshots of these men’s lives,

Introduction: Beyond Mercury  11

of points in time at which, as they came to the hospital to seek care for their ailments, we get a glimpse of how they presented themselves to the world, and thereby an inkling of their socioeconomic fortunes. Combined with other hospital sources, such as letters, contracts, reviews by the authorities, and regulations, these snapshots give us a good sense of the travails that treatment for the pox entailed, including both the physical and spiritual care provided.36 But, as with any discreet evidence, much is left to be desired, and questions arise that cannot be answered by hospital records alone. Why did someone like Pascual, so well-­groomed, require treatment in a venereal disease hospital apparently devoted to the poor? How could he afford to dress so luxuriously? Had the chronic illness not impeded his socioeconomic fortunes? In the case of Joan, we wonder about a life marked by poverty and disease. How did he face these twin misfortunes? More importantly, how was he able to change his circumstances, from pauper on the margin of destitution to someone able to afford at least respectable garments? Were these the product of charity or a shift in his fortunes? These questions point to the limitations of the hospital records historians most often use to study chronic illnesses like the French disease. While they certainly allow us to explore treatment, medicalization, and the effects of changing scientific and moral discourses, they give us only a sense of patients as defined by the disease that afflicted them. A veil of silence extends, under these circumstances, to the lives of patients spent in broader families and communities, to work and culture, to marriage and sexuality – in short, to all the vagaries that enrich experiences beyond the mere spectre of disease and that inform our understanding of how patients lived with illness. Uncovering such a silence requires one to forage beyond the hospital walls and seek patients’ records, such as notarial contracts, that illuminate other areas of their lives. When one does so, both Joan’s and Pascual’s stories, for instance, gain texture and richness. No longer are they mere “poxed,” but rather individuals living with a disease in the midst of wider challenges and successes, relationships and enmities. In short, we gain a greater dimension in terms of the social history of illness as we explore familial and socioeconomic circumstances. In the case of Pascual, it appears his sartorial wealth had been well-­ earned through shrewd business dealings. In 1660, just one year after his initial treatment at the Hospital de Santiago, Pascual encountered an opportunity too good to pass up. Two of his neighbours in Albalá de Tajo had finally come to the end of their rental agreements with

12  From Body to Community

Toledo’s cathedral chapter for 200 hectares of prime arable land. When they did not renew it, Pascual swooped in and struck his own deal with Toledo’s clerics to rent the land and harvest grain for the next six years. Importantly, he did not go into this contract blind. Indeed, his partner and guarantor was a friend from Toledo proper, baker Juan Jiménez. Such an arrangement was more than smart – the partners could now control the process of bread production from start to finish, with all the value added and a relatively captive market in the myriad clerical institutions in Toledo, with which they were already familiar.37 Two issues that round out Pascual’s bout with the French disease emerge from this contract. First, his wealth seems the by-­product of a large-­scale farming business. His was not the fate of the landless paupers and laborers who flocked to a city like Toledo and the Hospital de Santiago. On the contrary, as a Toledano himself who had moved into a rural area to make his fortune, Pascual had done well. He could afford to enter into a large contract with the cathedral that would enrich himself and his partner. This was not something he undertook on his own, as 200 hectares of arable land required laborers to tend them. Pascual was more businessman than farmer, a fact reflected by his ability to sign the contract, literacy often being correlated with higher socioeconomic circumstances.38 Furthermore, that Pascual was able, one year after his initial bout with the pox, to negotiate this contract suggests that visible symptoms, such as the loss of nose cartilage, had probably not affected him yet. Otherwise, as we will see, finding partners or continuing to operate in the close-­knit and reputation-­dependent economy of early modern Toledo would have been much harder.39 Finally, because the pox was a chronic disease with symptoms that receded and reappeared over time, Pascual’s willingness to undertake a six-­year contract with the cathedral chapter suggests that even the internal consequences of the disease, such as lethargy and consistent pain, had perhaps not manifested themselves fully. The French disease may have been a death sentence in the long term, but patients like Pascual often managed to continue leading productive lives, immersed in broader communal webs. Even after his return to the hospital in 1661, Pascual appears to have continued in the contract, for no revocations or changes to it were made at this time or thereafter. In the case of Joan Amador, the pauper who went from indescribable rags to reasonable sartorial respectability, the notarial records likewise offer a detailed understanding of his change in fortunes. Indeed, by 1657, two years after Joan’s initial bout with venereal disease, he seems to have finally lucked out in the midst of a harsh urban economy that

Introduction: Beyond Mercury  13

usually had little compassion for the poor, let alone the diseased. Cleric Tomás Martínez, who would himself come down with the pox by 1659, apparently had befriended Joan and thereby acted as his guarantor and go-­between with a local Cistercian convent that contracted Joan to produce tiles for them.40 As he had always lived in Toledo’s tilers’ neighbourhood, Joan probably already had experience in this trade as a laborer. But now, thanks to a helping hand, he could start work on his own, earn a decent living, and even get married to Mari Gómez.41 In Joan’s case, although the French disease was obviously progressing unimpeded, he was able to rely on a network of support. The connection between Joan and his clerical benefactor is murky. Was the priest already poxed when he helped Joan with a loan in 1657, thus forging a common bond? Certainly, the ways in which sufferers managed their myriad symptoms and played around the edges of healthy respectability – hiding or transforming the visible signs of illness – were usually understood, at least by writers, as well-­worn signs to the cognoscenti, a shorthand for illness over which the ill could commiserate and through which they could understand each other.42 Perhaps their common plight had cemented a bond, a not-­uncommon occurrence, as we will see, between patients. Or perhaps they enjoyed a sexual relationship, a supposition that would square well with the priest’s willingness to put so much on the line for a pauper like Joan and also the former’s eventual venereal infection. Regardless of the nature of their relationship, Joan and cleric Tomás Martínez point to some of the ways in which a poxed patient could rise from the depths of disease and poverty. Not only does the notarial contract Joan signed paint a fuller picture of how a poor and unemployed sufferer of a chronic illness was able to make ends meet by relying on broader networks of support, but it also suggests, as does Pascual’s fate, that life did not simply end after a French disease diagnosis. Patients, despite their difficulties, still had lives to lead, families to support, sweethearts to marry, and communities in which to be involved. Although difficulties became more acute as symptoms worsened, as we will see, these were lives defined by much more than illness – by family and community, by contacts and friends. Indeed, while others may have gabbed and gossiped, rhetorically building a box – the poxed as category – for those who crossed the hospital’s threshold, every patient was immersed in complex relationships and social identities. Every patient was someone’s sibling, child, or friend, the social world beyond the mere fact of disease still shaping their everyday lives.

14  From Body to Community

Tracking patients through records beyond the hospital does present methodological challenges. Very common names such as María or Juan Sánchez were difficult to match definitively without additional information. Nevertheless, the detail included in both the hospital entries and the notarial contracts often allowed for successful strategies. For instance, patients who were married could be found in notarial sources, as both the hospital and contracts tended to list both partners. Likewise, patients who were visitors to Toledo, if identified in both hospital and notarial documentation by their places of residence and their occupations, were hard to miss, especially if they had conducted business right around the time of infection. Unmarried patients, especially if still young or if conducting business with the help of family, were also easy to match as parents were listed in both types of sources. In short, although not every patient left traces beyond the hospital’s walls, in the case of many, enough hits in notarial documentation allowed for a picture of lives marked by more than just disease – by family, work, marriage, and community – to emerge. Also difficult was tracking how families with many pox sufferers managed the disease and communal expectations. Although the French disease was easily passed to marriage partners and children as well, due to congenital infection, it is unclear whether a high incidence of disease within specific families tended to foster greater poverty and loss of reputation. Nevertheless, even in just a little over a decade we find examples of families with high rates of venereal infection. Two of Joan Amador's siblings, Martín and Francisca, were also hospitalized in 1655 and 1659 respectively.43 Likewise, the Galician sisters Dominga and María de Arcay, daughters of Pedro de Arcay and Dominga de Cerba, were both admitted to the hospital, the first in 1659 and the latter in 1660.44 Unfortunately, however, the chronological limitation of the admissions book renders any representative sample impossible and does not allow us to track the incidence of disease across generations. In the same vein, the unavailability of judicial records for the city of Toledo proper (outside of criminal trials for villages that fell under Toledo’s jurisdiction) means we cannot obtain broader testimony about patients, whether as witnesses or defendants, that could add yet another layer to the patients’ experience. The only such records available for the city of Toledo, those of the Inquisition, were examined but did not yield the names of any patients. That these limitations exist for Toledo does not detract from the profitability of such an inquiry in other jurisdictions.

Introduction: Beyond Mercury  15

For instance, cities like Madrid and London have very well-­preserved secular court criminal records, especially for the eighteenth century.45 Despite the problems inherent in following patients beyond the hospital walls, notarial sources – which are widely available – are specifically useful in this regard. Indeed, notarial records can help to illuminate areas of patients’ lives that are particularly relevant to the daily management of chronic disease, including the pox. Notarial sources include not only contracts, such as sales or rental agreements, but all sorts of official documentation that give snapshots of individuals’ lives and social interactions. Indeed, we can find information on specific milestones (reaching adulthood, marriage, death), relationships central to community (guarantors, witnesses, creditors), changing circumstances (jobs, homes, citizenship), and even culture (descriptions of bodily and facial features, almsgiving, familial interactions). In short, the variety and richness of notarial documentation can help to build a more complete picture of hospital patients beyond the immediacy of treatment and specific medical issues. We can thus enter the broader world of patients and more effectively examine how disease interacted with cultural and social contexts. This methodology builds on and complements recent scholarship on the experience of disease. Consider, for instance, Barbara Duden’s acclaimed The Woman Beneath the Skin, Michael Stolberg’s Experiencing Illness and the Sick Body in Early Modern Europe, and Michael Ray Solomon’s Fictions of Well Being: Sickly Readers and Vernacular Medical Writing in Late Medieval and Early Modern Spain, among others.46 These works have greatly improved our understanding of how early modern Europeans lived with illness and its bodily symptoms and how such experiences intersected in complex ways with changing medical knowledge. Indeed, such somatic experiences are central to From Body to Community. Likewise, this research also draws on current approaches to the experience of chronic disease in different contexts, such as Julie Livingstone’s research on Botswana, or Arthur Kleinman’s work on the medical anthropology of suffering, to combine the bodily and socio-­ familial experiences of illness specifically.47 As we know, chronic illnesses, by their very nature, affect individuals well beyond symptomatology and treatment. Just as it does today, living with a chronic illness in the early modern era included familial and social dimensions, encounters between the somatic and the sociocultural. Since such points of contact were not discrete but continuous,

16  From Body to Community

examining patients’ lives beyond the hospital can help to illuminate further the lived meaning of chronic illness. Ultimately, following patients like Pascual and Joan beyond the hospital suggests that we cannot effectively divorce the analysis of the role of the French disease in early modern Europe from the broader social experiences of sufferers. They were not only treated for the illness, but also lived in wider cultural and socioeconomic contexts, and thus were defined by much more than disease as sons and parents, workers and owners; in short, as members of vibrant communities that did not fade into the background as they entered the hospital. The way patients lived with venereal disease, including both its physical manifestations and economic and social implications, is at the heart of this study. All patients suffering from the pox would have faced certain cultural expectations surrounding venereal disease. Indeed, becoming ill with the French disease, treating it, and dealing with its long-­term effects went far beyond illness as physical repercussion. This illness’s effects on the body carried messages about sin and reputation, social worth and community. Chapter 1, “Getting Sick: Signs, Sin, and Social Worth,” thus considers the cultural frameworks, concepts, and assumptions surrounding venereal infection from the point of view of a potential patient. Based on detailed readings of prescriptive and literary texts, this chapter breaks down these social understandings. What were the social tropes framing pox sufferers? How could someone tell when he or she had contracted the French disease? What were the signs people were told to expect? Disease, its tropes, and it signs were as much cultural processes as physical ones. Delving into these mental frameworks and their intersections with physical realities is central to this chapter. When thinking of culture and pox, however, another aspect to consider is medical science and its understandings of this illness. While an analysis of medical texts and scientific views on the French disease may profitably focus on the intellectual trends informing and shifting alongside this epidemic, the medical literature of the day also contained a variety of assumptions that greatly affected patients, thus shaping a certain medical culture around the pox. Chapter 2, “Encounters of the Third Kind: Medical Assumptions and Patients,” specifically focuses on medical science and its relationship to patients. In effect, through an analysis of medical texts on the French disease, the assumptions about this illness are read in terms of how patients would have been affected. To what extent was the pox considered a treatable disease? If patients came down with symptoms again after treatment, who was to blame?

Introduction: Beyond Mercury  17

What were patients’ responsibilities in maintaining the appearance of health? How did assumptions about the contagiousness and transmission of the pox shape patients’ everyday lives? Ultimately, medical understandings of the disease reverberated well beyond the hospital and into patients’ daily undertakings and relationships. Beyond these common contexts, at the heart of the shared patient experience stood the Hospital de Santiago, the largest and foremost institution devoted to treating the French disease for Toledo and its surrounding rural regions. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 bring us into the institution at the core of this health care mission and into its complex relationship with the patient population it served. Because of its regional importance, the Hospital de Santiago stood at the crossroads of a broad swathe of people in dire need of treatment. As such, its clientele emerges as varied and socioeconomically complex. Chapter 3, “Melting Pot: The Hospital de Santiago’s Patients,” analyses the social and geographical makeup of the hospital’s clientele. Culling data on patient provenance, employment, and marital status from both hospital and notarial sources, this chapter provides a snapshot of those who sought care at the Hospital de Santiago. By putting together both aggregate data and specific exempla drawn from individual patients’ lives, this chapter examines the variety of patients who sought hospital care, and thereby places the traditional interpretations of patient poverty in a broader context. One of the main findings of this chapter suggests that, despite literary tropes that conceptualized the pox as an urban disease, it greatly affected rural areas as well. From the point of view of any individual, the process of encountering a venereal infection and actually receiving treatment, of going from everyday citizen to poxed patient, required an initial highly public step: standing before the gates of the Hospital de Santiago as it opened its doors for seasonal treatment. Unlike hospitals that might have been tucked into the folds of the forgotten countryside, the Hospital de Santiago was an urban institution in the heart of a bustling metropolis. In fact, it stood but a few feet away from Toledo’s main square of Zocodover. As such, seeking treatment often meant publicizing one’s own illness. Chapter 4, “Safeguarding Reputation: Gender, Hospitalization, and Textiles,” examines from a gendered perspective the basic procedures involved in seeking out treatment, evaluating competing possibilities and, eventually, entering the Hospital de Santiago. Not only will this chapter consider the social and institutional expectations placed on patients as they sought health care for venereal

18  From Body to Community

infection, but it will also analyse the wider implications of seeking care, including what patients chose to wear as they entered the hospital. While information about admission to the Hospital de Santiago and the makeup of its patient population yields new interpretations of the role of the hospital in early modern society, the centrality of treatment as a common experience all poxed patients shared cannot be understated. They may have sought health care while still clinging to the varied identities that informed their everyday lives, but as soon as they crossed the hospital’s threshold they finally became “patients” ready to suffer the travails of treatment and ministrations to their souls, no matter their provenance. Chapter 5, “Between Body and Soul: Treatment at the Hospital de Santiago,” provides a close reading of the procedures patients underwent in an attempt to unscramble their experiences. What were the differences in available medications? How did physicians and surgeons treat various symptoms? Were the experiences of male and female patients comparable? How did the hospital address both physical and spiritual care? Drawing evidence from hospital regulations, medical texts, and even the writings of venereal disease sufferers, this analysis will provide a detailed and in-­depth rundown of treatment and its effects. As much as a stay at Toledo’s Hospital de Santiago left indelible marks on patients, everyday concerns and obligations still awaited them once they left the hospital’s walls. Venereal disease patients, like any other people, had to earn a living and interact with families, negotiate libidinal impulses and potential marriages, and manage reputation and social spaces within local communities. In short, life did not end either at diagnosis or after treatment for the pox: all the pressures, opportunities and vagaries of daily existence in an early modern society remained, with the added pitfalls of dealing with a chronic illness. By following patients treated at the Hospital de Santiago through notarial records, including sales contracts, rental agreements, wills, dowry negotiations, loans, and employment contracts, chapters 6, 7, and 8 provide a textured understanding of the ways patients lived with venereal disease in the midst of broader communities. One of the surprising findings in the notarial sources regards the ability of single patients to find marriage partners. Chapter 6, “Getting Hitched: Venereal Disease, Sexuality, and Marriage,” probes the sexual lives and marriage prospects of patients. Indeed, the sexuality of the poxed constituted a hotly debated topic among medical practitioners and cultural commentators. Although the pox was understood mostly as a venereal disease, the daily realities of life before effective

Introduction: Beyond Mercury  19

prophylactic protection together with the necessities of marital sexuality for a majority of patients meant that sex would have been a regular preoccupation. How did medical doctors and patients approach sexuality, especially considering its ties to the French disease? What were the gendered differences, if any, in these attitudes? How were patients expected to behave sexually after treatment? Were there any efforts in place to promote the prevention of disease transmission? How did single patients approach the possibility of marriage? These questions underscore the chasm between our modern assumptions and reactions to venereal disease and those of early modern people. That marriage was so crucial even to those afflicted with the pox reflected the financial hardships and strains inherent in early modern economies. Work constituted perhaps the most challenging aspect of patients’ success and adaptation to living with illness, given the tribulations of continuing to work in the long term and the disease’s debilitating effects. Throughout this difficult process, it was often family that came to the rescue, though not without conditions. Accordingly, chapter 7, “Making Ends Meet: Disease, Work, and Family,” steers the analysis toward the world of everyday labour and familial sustenance. Considering that social safety nets, especially for the disabled and chronically ill, were sparse at this time, this chapter examines how patients participated in the labour market after their exit from the hospital. Was chronic pox an impediment to obtaining work? Did the signs of infection – all too visible in many faces – affect someone’s chances of obtaining a job? What were patients’ strategies for seeking work and finding sustenance? What was the role of familial support in such a process? How did venereal infection affect familial relationships? Through a close analysis of the notarial contracts patients left behind, this chapter explores the wider world of work and family in specific relation to venereal disease. Finally, as much as work, marriage, and family were immediate concerns for poxed patients upon exiting the Hospital de Santiago, they also had to negotiate their space within wider communities. In an early modern context of face-­to-­face interaction and an emphasis on reputation, how patients re-­entered their communities and managed expectations as well as pressures could be crucial to their long-­term adaptability. Chapter 8, “Playing Nice with Others: Pox and Community,” expands analysis outward from individual patients and their experiences to encompass the communities in which they lived. Today we know that communal practices, rituals, and identities were a crucial element in

20  From Body to Community

early modern people’s lives. A king might never be seen by his subjects, but the politics and social relationships embedded in community were experienced every day. How did venereal infection affect patients’ standing in their communities? What was the community’s response to venereal disease? As we move from individual patients and their experiences of disease in outward circles to encompass much wider socioeconomic and cultural forces and structures, including community overall, the reality of disease and the ambiguity of the border between ill and healthy gain increasing significance. After considering the patients’ lives in sociocultural contexts, their hospital experience, and their reinsertion into the world of work, family, and community, the conclusion, “Patients as People: Disease, Society, and Beyond,” brings together these disparate yet interconnected aspects that defined living with a chronic venereal disease. Ultimately, physical ministrations and cultural expectations, familial support and financial success, communal involvement and successful management of symptoms all contributed to the ability of patients suffering from the French disease to lead productive, if difficult, lives. Illness and its experience went well beyond the physical to encompass the broader social and cultural contexts that patients carried with them as they moved in and out of hospital. As such, this chapter explores the opportunities available to historians of disease as they broaden scholarship on pox sufferers to examine them in more extensive socioeconomic and cultural contexts. The aim of this book to contextualize fully the experience of living with the pox involves following patients beyond the hospital through contracts, wills, and inventories left in notarial archives to yield information that details their lives further. Expanding our search for patient information beyond treatment and early modern medicine’s institutional structures can greatly illuminate how individuals lived with disease, the way they forged economic relationships, the influence of kinship and familial responsibilities in their lives, and their standing within complex and hierarchical communities. In short, we can add different perspectives – economic, familial, communal – to the lived experience of chronic disease.

Chapter 1

Getting Sick: Signs, Sin, and Social Worth

Luis de Valera had it pretty good by 1655. Having recently turned twenty-­five and thus having reached the age of legal majority, he could finally move out of his parents’ home. He had been working for a while as a servant in Toledo’s cathedral. It might not have been the most glamorous work, but it was a job that gave him a secure income and plenty of friends, none greater than fellow servant Alonso Benito. Both youngsters were around the same age, and by the end of August had decided to rent a home together. They must have looked rather young for their age, as the notary who drew up the contract felt it necessary to include a clause stipulating that they had, indeed, reached the age of majority and were not subject to their parents. At 24 ducats per year, the home must have been spacious, smack in the centre of town, and perfect for two young men striking out on their own.1 Perhaps the freedom Luis had obtained clouded his moral judgment. He certainly must have made bad sexual choices as, by the spring of 1656, he found himself saddled with venereal sores and seeking treatment at the Hospital de Santiago.2 Gaiety and innocence had been irrevocably lost. But one wonders what Luis had thought, in those months of unadulterated liberty, of the French disease. Did he, like many youths, consider himself invincible? Did he worry about the possibilities of infection after sexual escapades with ladies of the night? What signs, if any, would he have expected to notice? How would he have viewed the social implications of his disease? Though far removed from the assumptions of modern medicine, physicians had long been aware of the initial symptoms affecting the poxed. Surgeons especially, under whose purview the pox fell, had specifically been given to successful empirical observation and study.

22  From Body to Community

Most early modern manuals on the pox would list symptoms and assess the progression of this illness – in various stages – in a way that resembles our contemporary understanding of syphilis. We thus find a listing of the typical assortment of genital ulcers and scabs, inflammation of glands and tumour-­like buboes, and the appearance of pimple-­ like protrusions in hands, feet, and face as signs of venereal corruption.3 But when we consider what everyday people unconcerned with medical minutiae until the French disease became a bodily reality would have expected to encounter, we enter a broader culture. People’s expectations and the way they imagined the French disease depended on how the poxed were portrayed in public discourse. Just as we today are influenced and constrained by, and dependent on, wider images informing our understanding of everything from dieting to dying, so did early modern people have certain frames informing their opinions on the illness. Courtiers, Nobles, and Prostitutes Certainly, many writers noted the unerring reach of the pox across class and gender lines. Such observations were likely correct, for, although earlier histories often argued the disease mostly affected the upper classes, recent evidence points to the quasi-­epidemic nature of the illness, even if data on the incidence of disease is impossible to mine given the limitations of the sources.4 Physicians and commentators, including moralists, thus referred to venereal disease as a scourge that knew no distinctions of status. Ruy Díaz de la Isla, one of the preeminent Spanish physicians who wrote on the French disease in the first half of the sixteenth century, argued that “it has been so harmful that I have not heard of one village in all of Europe where ten out of one hundred people have not died of this disease and ailment. And it has come to my notice that kings and dukes and great lords have died of this illness; and a third of the population has been infected with this ailment.”5 Likewise, Cristóbal Mosquera de Figueroa, in his work titled Paradoxa en loor de las bubas reflected on the spread of the French disease: “[T]he pox has become familiar and domestic ... Furthermore, we should consider it so generous that it is not content to enter the bodies of gossiping cleaning women and pitcher maids but also striking and coiffed ladies.”6 While Mosquera de Figueroa expressed disapprobation of the epidemic extent of the French disease through cutting satire, others noted the limitless reach of this illness in more measured tones. Toledo’s own Sebastián de Horozco, in reference to the grouping of the

Getting Sick  23

poxed in a metaphorical confraternity, matter-­of-­factly observed in his celebrated poem “La Cofradía del Grillimón”: People from all estates are admitted to this brotherhood young men, friars, married people kings, lords, prelates of any status. And it is so extended that almost nobody escapes entrance is allowed but to exit not even a papal bull suffices.7

In short, the French Disease struck everywhere, from palatial homes to insalubrious basement apartments, from the halls of powerful clerics to the sunbaked fields of farm laborers. Men, women, and children of all estates could come to know and suffer this terrible affliction. Nevertheless, some people were considered more culpable than others. For young men like Luis de Valera, the tropes that would have most affected them were those on the libertine urbane courtier, the so-­called galán – that smooth-­talking, heart-­stealing, coiffed Don Juan – whose unbounded sexuality resulted in the spread of infection. Indeed, the galán as character received ample ink and attention among the literati, picaresque authors, and concerned clergymen. One need go no farther than Cervantes’s Don Quijote and the character of Don Fernando, a nobleman who seduces the young Dorotea, falsely promises her marriage and delights in her sexual favours, only to leave her later without a husband, her maidenhood, or her reputation.8 Of course, not everybody was a galán, but such a model of unfettered male sexual conquest was aspirational, especially for young men like Luis living in a major Iberian city. After all, despite its demographic decline, Toledo was not a backwater unconcerned with the fashionable trends emanating from courtly life in Madrid. On the contrary: not only did Toledo itself boast an important number of municipal leaders over several generations related to noble households, including such luminaries as the Marquises of Maqueda and the Dukes of Lerma, but its citizens were particularly known for their gallantry.9 Sebastián de Horozco’s poetry rightly reflects an urbane preoccupation with dress and public image, not only among women but also among Toledo’s

24  From Body to Community

men. For instance, satirizing Toledo’s rivalry with a smaller town, Horozco has a man from Llerena refer to a Toledano as “very polished and courtly.”10 And as much as he criticized some Toledano men for wearing fine silks in the midst of winter, Horozco also railed against a neighbour who did not keep up with fashion and went out in public wearing an old-­style smock.11 Dress, fashion, and public image – factors essential to courtly demeanor – mattered in Toledo, both because of its importance and gilded history and because the luxury silk industry counted the city as one of its most important Iberian centers.12 As well as wearing courtly fashions, Toledo’s young men also participated in a model of sexuality that was particularly epitomized by the figure of the galán. Indeed, while the galán as character was fodder for exaggerated condemnation and crude caricatures, it did reflect wider social realities across the peninsula and across class lines. Consider the sheer number of trials, for instance, wronged women brought against suitors who had promised marriage purely as a ploy to obtain sexual gratification, as discussed in Renato Barahona’s Sex Crimes, Honour and the Law in Early Modern Spain.13 Likewise, think of the hundreds of cases inquisitors brought mostly against men for believing fornication – that is, having sex outside of marriage – was not a sin.14 For Toledo itself, the fact that the French disease appears predominantly as a young, single man’s illness speaks volumes. Indeed, single men constitute a whopping 48 per cent of all patients at the Hospital de Santiago. Although these youths were increasingly facing ambiguous messages concerning sexuality, as we will examine in detail in chapter 6, suffice it to say that long-­standing cultural patterns of sexual behaviour gave young men substantial opportunities to exercise their libidos. Thus, while brothels had been banned nationally in 1623 and some historians have detected new forms of masculinity emerging in the seventeenth century that emphasized male self-­control and chastity, early modern Hispanic culture was suffused with assumptions about male sexual freedom.15 Once again, Horozco proves a useful guide. In a poem typical of the ribald picaresque well-­known in Spain and titled “Question and Answer by the Author, Although not for Ladies,” Horozco explores an unfettered, if crude, male sexuality expected of Toledo’s galanes. Asked, “if the galán when he thrusts / finds the lady / and luckily sticks it in / all the way up to here / which of them has it inside?,” Horozco responds “if the lady wants to be skewered / and comes looking for it / only she is responsible / for having it inside her clamp / while the galán is just present.”16 Altogether, the daily reality of

Getting Sick  25

male sexual pursuits rendered the galán – an imaginary figure particularly tied to the codes and culture of courtiers – a reflection of broader male attitudes toward engaging in sexual activity.17 But on the question of male sexuality and the pox, the salient feature remains the tension between condemnation and celebration of male sexual conquest. Both these aspects were often discussed in relation to venereal disease, thereby revealing not only the anxieties surrounding the illness but also the seedy underbelly of urban sexual life, the pursuit of pleasure, and even the understanding of the pox as a badge of honour, a marker of a man’s prowess with women. That the French disease was common among courtiers was a well-­ known stereotype in much of Europe. So prevalent was the view of the pox as a courtier’s disease that, in 1544, the Spanish physician Luis de Lobera published his best-­selling Libro de las quatro enfermedades cortesanas (Book on the Four Courtiers’ Diseases), among which he included the pox. Though Lobera starts his section on the French disease with the customary reference to sin, the tone throughout this practical text is very matter-­of-­fact, including details on diagnosis, treatment, and an assortment of recipes.18 He casually speaks of the many lords he has treated successfully, a perfect advertisement for the audience that would purchase his book.19 Indeed, this treatise was such a hit that Cervantes had it in his library.20 That the mix of refined courtiers and loose women with whom the seedy underworld of Spanish urban life teemed was at least somewhat reflective of everyday sexual culture needs no further confirmation than the short life of a Baroque literary star, Pantaleón de Ribera, celebrated for his wit and poetry but condemned to an early death at twenty-­nine due to complications from the pox. In the fascinating article “De burlas y enfermedades barrocas,” Jesús Ponce Cárdenas paints a vivid picture of the pursuit of pleasure and the attitudes surrounding venereal infection among court literati and noblemen. Granted, the always-­incisive Francisco de Quevedo would blast in mordant poetry the excesses of this generation. Others, like Lope de Vega himself and Pedro Méndez de Loyola, specifically mocked the late Pantaleón with sarcastic references to his dissipated life.21 But in a series of autobiographical poems, Pantaleón highlights both the gaiety of libidinal pursuits among the men of the court and the travails he suffered as a result of venereal infection. Pantaleón’s poems provide a window into two intertwined aspects of the French disease: the cultural assessment of venereal infection and its bodily

26  From Body to Community

repercussions. On the understanding of the pox as a disease tied to sexual morality and sin, Pantaleón captures the ambivalence surrounding it, the push and pull between the licentious courtly life and the condemnation of sin that could ensue. According to Ponce Cárdenas, Pantaleón’s often heavily edited Nadie sin amor alienta includes saucy references to a group of noblemen, as well-­known as Pantaleón himself for their amorous victories. When speaking of the nights of sexual pleasure typical of courtiers, he unmistakably refers to the noblemen who partook in these earthly delights: Don Hernando de Guzmán, who is praised “for all conquering and stalking”; “the Count of Fistinface”, with whom “girls or actresses neither in limbo nor on stage have their honour safe”; Don Enrique de Toledo y Alagón, “who by slaps picks up” and with such odd courtship goes around “tormenting beauties”; The Duke of Lerma and his brother, hit up without pity by whores; Don Rodrigo de Tapia, Don Antonio de Aguiar and the Lord Governor of Oran, “who is wooed by a centenarian mistress of mature and wrinkled beauty.”22

Pantaleón’s description of the sexual peccadillos of court men leaves no stone unturned, including an amusing detailing of high noblemen’s amorous techniques, names, warts, and all. That a curtain of decorum would eventually be drawn over this poem when it was finally published, lest it dishonour the august lineages it mentions, speaks more to the prudishness of the nineteenth century than anything else. When Pantaleón wrote this satirical poem, the finger pointing at various court characters, including the very powerful, was meant to amuse. On the other hand, despite the liberality of court life and the sophistication of amorous pursuits, Pantaleón alludes to punishment for sin when detailing his own venereal infection in a poem dedicated to the Duke of Lerma, who had sent a page to inquire about Pantaleón’s health upon becoming infected. One of the stanzas reads: I was honourable but now I am disgraced because in the sarsaparilla I wallow and with each swallow I burst.23

Mired in the typical course of treatment for the pox (hence the reference to drinking sarsaparilla), Pantaleón alludes to his fall from grace.24

Getting Sick  27

Just as once he had a patent of nobility, now, suffering from the pox, it is the metaphor of the sambenito, the garment worn by condemned inquisitorial penitents, that defines him. From the honour of high station to the shame of condemnation, Pantaleón sees himself as a fallen man. That Pantaleón could go from honour to shame in such a short stretch might seem merely the product of reflection upon infection, the dawn of a Christian sensibility upon the terrible bodily realization of sexual sin. But Pantaleón’s carefree pursuit of love and his preoccupation with sin when at death’s door were but two sides of the same coin within the broader discourse on venereal infection. Consider that references to the shame of the pox were so critical and so mordant precisely because many suspected that Spaniards in general were anything but shamed by venereal infection. Certainly Pantaleón’s so-­called literary friends, as seen above, struck blows at his memory by recalling his sins. Likewise, in the widely read satirical work La pícara Justina, the female protagonist argues the poxed like her have no shame because they speak of their illness and that of others to anyone who will hear it.25 Of course, the unspoken message to the Baroque reader laughing at Justina’s bravado is that she should feel shame, that the poxed ought to be consumed by their perversity and the punishment they have received for their sins. As Toledo’s own archbishop Carranza fulminated in 1558, “Matters have taken on such a state that now a man does not lose authority or honour for having this leprosy of bubas [pox], rather it is a court fad to have them.”26 Hyperbole might well suit a cleric intent on reversing the sexual ills of his day, but, just as we saw with Pantaleón, others had a less-­critical assessment of venereal infection. So widespread were court sexual peccadillos that authors did not hesitate to critique this culture of manly bravado, amorous conquest, and the French disease that often came with it, merely another in a long list of notches in a courtier’s belt. Consider the high-­minded dialogue Academias del Jardín from 1630 which gives a fictional account full of classical references of the dinner and erudite discussion of four courtly lords after watching Juan Pérez de Montalván’s play No hay vida como la honra. Speaking of the virtue of discretion, the sharpest of the four, Jacinto, criticizes the focus on male bravado, so inimical to true substance, found among courtiers; it is considered desirable “[t]o go dressed in quality woolens, carry perfumed gloves, brag about being rebellious, have a poor memory, and suffer in health from any ailment, and if from the pox, even better.”27 Jacinto thus mocks the warped behaviours of so many courtly denizens. Here, the pox emerges as a

28  From Body to Community

badge of honour, a tribute to the sexual prowess and the in-­your-­face masculine bravado of courtiers living not for a higher purpose – least of all an intellectual one – but only for the pleasures and transitory adulations of the here and now. To critics, such male sexual bravado could only end in well-­deserved punishment. In an anonymous poem comparing the love a galán suffers for his lady to the gout that has attacked him, respite from illness is short-­lived – although treated for the gout, the galán is by the end of the poem stricken with venereal disease, a recompense for his amorous pursuits: Thus love, by prize gifts the French Disease and the dandy cannot stay on his feet without his walking stick.28

Unable to walk properly due to the venereal affliction of his bones, the galán must amble along with a bordón, a decorated walking stick. Such are the travails of love’s pursuit. Just as the French disease among male courtiers emerged as an ambiguous cultural sign, so did venereal disease among the wider population at court, and particularly the nobility. Indeed, the pox was often broadly imagined as a disease particularly affecting the nobility and specifically reflective of their more liberal, and indolent, attitudes toward sexual shame. The best evidence for this carefree attitude comes from an unlikely witness, Madame d’Aulnoy, a French countess who sought refuge at the Spanish court between 1679 and 1681. Though criticized for her penchant to mix historical narrative with romanticized accounts, Aulnoy’s 1696 published memoirs of her Spanish voyage were an instant success. Not only were they widely entertaining but Aulnoy’s easy style in detailing extensively the customs, lives, and attitudes of the Spanish nobles and the colourful masses that made up Charles II’s Madrid provides a rare contemporaneous account of life in late seventeenth-­century Spain. Though she enjoyed her stay immensely, the Countess could not resist blasting Spanish customs as too provincial for her tastes, especially when they included kneeling every time the protagonist in a play at the royal theatre erupted in fervid prayer. Yet despite her whining about Spanish attachment to all sorts of religious excess, including masses for the dead and interminable periods of mourning for noble widows, she could not really make sense of

Getting Sick  29

Spanish attitudes to the pox. Indeed, her Parisian sensibilities received a shock at the easy manner in which even ladies at court referred to the illness: “People speak easily of such a cruel illness in the king’s chambers and the halls of the most noble and prim ladies, as if speaking about headaches or fevers, and all patiently bear these sorrows without being embarrassed for a single moment.”29 Granted, Aulnoy’s tales of her voyages in Spain probably contain as much fiction and spin – the better to meet her audience’s expectations – as impartial reporting. But her assessment of liberal attitudes toward venereal infection at court does not appear far-­fetched. Consider Jerónimo de Barrionuevo’s mid-­seventeenth-­century letters to the Dean of Zaragoza’s cathedral informing him of goings-­on, both curious and serious, at court. Often noting illness and death among the noble houses, he had this to say about one of the most powerful couples in Spain, the Duke of the Infantado, Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar Gómez de Sandoval y Mendoza and his wife María de Silva y Guzmán: “[They] are also very ill, with constant fever that spikes, and both are so full of bubas (pox) they cannot remain standing ... They say they want to amputate one of the Duchess’s legs, and the Duke suffers from bloody discharges.”30 Indeed, the Duke would die within the month from his illness. Note, however, the direct reporting devoid of the Christian moralizing or sarcastic tones so common in literary descriptions of the French disease. Then again, much of this laissez-­faire attitude among the cynical members of court only served as fodder for those who criticized the licentiousness of Spain’s nobles. As part of a tradition of biting satire of the excesses of court, Lucas Hidalgo, in his Diálogos de apacible entretenimiento, bitterly commented on the ladies and gentlemen who so easily acquired the French disease: “And so you will be warned that, when tipping your hat to the gentleman or the lady in public, half of that homage is done to them and the other half to the pox they carry.”31 As much as all-­too-­worldly nobles could basically laugh off a bout with the French disease, attitudes hardened as the gaze of moralizing discourse moved farther away from the gilded lives of the nobility. For instance, the powerful mix of venereal disease and gendered expectations meant, most often than not, that everyday women suffered the brunt of moralistic treatises blasting them for their excesses. Although the question of gendered attitudes toward the pox will be fully explored in chapter 4, consider merely the example of Quevedo, one of the most celebrated poets of the Spanish Golden Age. Following convention that from the earliest times of the epidemic had blamed prostitutes as the

30  From Body to Community

fount of illness, his best-­known poems on the pox – Tomando estaba sudores and Marica la chupona – highlight the just bodily punishment a woman of the night receives for her sins. Afflicted with the pox, the disease eats away at her body, disfiguring her once-­beautiful face and essentially marking her as an Other to be avoided.32 The construction of female poxed, especially prostitutes, as the source of danger and infection was both well-­known and reflected broader processes of marginalization. From Miguel de Cervantes’s hapless protagonist in El casamiento engañoso, Lieutenant Campuzano, who finds himself infected with the French disease after being swindled by a beautiful prostitute, to the satirical voice of La pícara Justina and her description of a poxed underworld; from the most famous poxed character of La Lozana andaluza and her adventures in Rome to the poetry of Toledo’s Sebastián de Horozco, the French disease emerges in literature for diverse audiences and on diverse themes as a sexually transmitted disease born of bad women.33 Consider, however, the connection many of these literary characters had to the other well-­worn stereotype of danger in the Spanish psyche: crypto-­Jews. Indeed, Lozana’s adventures in Rome revolve around a community of conversos afflicted with both apostasy and the pox. Likewise, López de Úbeda’s Justina may suffer the taint of Jewish blood.34 Even Quevedo, in the aforementioned poem, juxtaposes allusions to Marica’s French disease and her disfigurement with circumcision, the bodily sign marking crypto-­Jews.35 Both the poxed and the crypto-­Jew were dangerous precisely because of the moral disease they carried – an illness that disfigured but could still be hidden from public view.36 Here was the risk both groups presented: their outwardly normative bodies hid corruption of the worst sort. In cultural production, the French disease emerged as shorthand for the various ills affecting Spanish society and symbolizing its decline: licentiousness, corruption, and sin – all spread incessantly, much to the chagrin of the innocent, by shadowy groups that pretended to form part of reputable society but were anything but. The poxed as a defined type, a harbinger of pollution – both bodily and moral – reflected the dangers ascribed to various outsiders, such as Jews, purportedly seeking to strike at the heart of the Spanish nation. Such attempts to bind the poxed to specific social types were all too common across Europe. In Venice, much of the focus rested on beautiful women and libidinous men; in England, both foreigners and the poor received disproportionate attention; in Lucca, Italy, specific contexts targeted foreign sodomites as culprits for transmission.37 In short,

Getting Sick  31

while often tied to local developments, the stretch of this venereal epidemic across Europe led to strong undercurrents that sought to define, categorize, and separate the afflicted from upstanding members of the community. But discourse was one thing; the reality of everyday infection was another. Ultimately that constituted the essential problem facing a nation that conceptualized disease as sin and the Other as dangerous. Nobles and their excesses could be blamed, prostitutes could be corralled, even crypto-­Jews could be attached to the metaphor of pox as pollution to the national body. But none of these discourses could hide the reality of a Christian society containing ordinary men, women, and children – from the artisan to the laborer, from the maid to the wealthy patroness, from the cleric to the layman – who were contracting the French disease, displaying shameful, if equivocal, signs, and seeking treatment. How to account for this, if it was not an easily classifiable outsider but a family member, a friend, or a lover who brought such misfortune? In this sense, the French disease appears like a fault line running through the expectations of a Christian society faced with the everyday reality of libidinous activities. These contradictions were not new for Europeans, and Spaniards had always demonstrated a willingness to skirt sexual prescriptions and engage in what moralists and clerics would have considered unforgivable sins – premarital sex, adultery, sodomy and the like.38 The pox only made the debates and the tension between the practice of sexuality and its Christian ideal more evident – a visible sign for some of how low society had fallen, and for others, a badge of gallant liberation. The Poxed Body The cultural ambiguity surrounding the nature of venereal infection and its social repercussions was also reflected in expectations surrounding the bodily signs of disease. For Spaniards of the day, the French disease meant, above all, baldness. Indeed, pelón and pelona, the male and female nouns for bald in Baroque Spanish, were regularly used at the time as monikers for the pox.39 Thus, López de Úbeda’s La pícara Justina starts with a rhetorical bang as the female protagonist proudly embraces her pox: “I admit I am pelona, two hundred dozen times.”40 Sebastián de Horozco himself teases a diseased pelón in a poem, hoping to pin a public admission of pox on him.41 Eugenio de Salazar’s playful Letters warns the reader of the example of a dandy who, given to pursuing too

32  From Body to Community

many ladies, finds himself nursing the pox, after losing even eyebrow hair and eyelashes.42 Because it was such a public, identifiable symptom, a smooth head equaled the French disease, no matter whether any other common symptoms such as pustules were visible or not. In the same vein, consider Cervantes’s aforementioned novella El casamiento engañoso.43 In this short tale, the author of Don Quixote explores a common theme in Baroque Spanish literature: the swindling woman who misrepresents herself, toys with her male victim, and, on top of it all, gives him the pox. The one aspect I want to highlight here is Cervantes’s conception of the symptoms signalling infection. The protagonist, hapless Lieutenant Campuzano, unwisely falls for a beautiful and apparently wealth woman, Estefanía de Cayzedo, who only intends on marrying him to purloin whatever meager possessions he owns. Not only does Campuzano end in the metaphorical gutter, utterly poor and heartbroken, but, to make matters worse, he acquires the pox from his wife, like a parting gift. Indeed, soon after Campuzano leaves Estefanía, I changed my lodgings and my hair within a few days; because my eyebrows and lashes began to fall, and little by little my hair left me, so that I was bald before my time, with an illness called alopecia, or hair loss by a clearer name. I truly found myself pelón, for I had no beard to comb or money to spend. The sickness thus advances in time with my need ... and when the treatment season opened at the Hospital of the Resurrection, I was admitted and have taken forty sweats.44

Campuzano therefore finds himself in Valladolid’s venereal disease hospital, undergoing mercury treatment to salivate and sweat away the excess humours that ail him. Note, however, the first symptoms he encounters so soon after infection by Estefanía: hair loss – eyebrows and eyelashes initially, and then his head of hair, leaving him pelón or bald and probably closer to our fevered ideas of alien visitors than Cervantes could have predicted. Unlike our own tendency to associate iconic symptoms of venereal epidemics with impending death, early modern culture provided a shorthand for the pox – baldness – that functioned more broadly. Part of the reason for this was that the medical establishment considered the French disease utterly treatable, as we will see in chapter 2. While many died, their deaths were viewed more as a consequence of unregimented lives than as a failure of medical and surgical treatments. It was like

Getting Sick  33

blaming rape victims for their assault or the poor for their hunger, or, in this case, the sick for the progression of their illness. In the end, baldness as a cultural shorthand for the pox served primarily to mark the ill as different from the rest of the population. Just as societies have time and again either created specific markings or played up certain bodily characteristics to mark outsiders (think Jews, gypsies, slaves, etc.), so did Spanish culture use baldness as a representation of venereal disease symptoms among the ill. It was like stamping the poxed with a best-­before date for everybody to see. Such easy correlation, to the point of citing baldness as an initial symptom of the French disease, constituted a convenient construction, a characterization meant to make the sin undergirding the disease public knowledge, and thereby serve as a cautionary tale. The literary fable of the poxed waking up in horror to hairlessness immediately upon infection merely reflected the ready association between such an obvious symptom and public knowledge of the disease. The loss of hair, sudden and terrible, signalled not only the onslaught of venereal illness but the public transformation of individuals into pox sufferers, of ladies and gentlemen into walking admonitions against the ravages of lust. Whether things like hair loss were truly reflective of the course of infection or not, the social reality of the French disease, and the concomitant cultural judgments, only emerged after symptoms were visible far beyond the genital area. The real and imagined poxed thus functioned almost as early modern public service announcements. Body Techniques and Ambiguity The desire to classify and mark the ill as dangerous and the will to separate them from the herd ultimately created a tension between the wider cultural frameworks that provided ready-­made visual shorthand for illness and the entirely reasonable attempts by the sick themselves to obfuscate their condition. The appearance of symptoms that publicly transitioned individuals from healthy to ill, from upstanding citizens to lascivious culprits in need of self-­control, engendered fear and shame because they were so ingrained in cultural consciousness. It is not surprising, then, to find among patients tools that allowed them to mask, hide, and obscure such markers. After all, who wants to advertise a disease born of lust? Indeed, those suffering from the pox often went to great lengths to keep their disease private, to maintain a public façade of normalcy and

34  From Body to Community

health. For instance, the first and most obvious fashion accessory that allowed French disease patients some leeway in shaping their public image was the head covering. By the time of the Spanish Baroque, that era when proper public image and the accompanying trappings reigned supreme, nobody who was anybody went about in public with an uncovered head. Men invariably wore hats. In fact, these were so widespread that even among patients at the Hospital de Santiago, 49 per cent of males were admitted wearing a hat – some luxurious and new, signalling status, and others old, tattered, and more deserving of the dustbin than anything else.45 Hats were common as a fashion accessory, both among the lower classes and the wealthy, especially since they played such an important role in the representation of status and hierarchy.46 That they helped cover the incipient baldness of the poxed-­in-­ progress was a not-­unimportant bonus. As Toledo’s foremost satirical poet exclaimed against a poxed individual, “because you go about very wrapped up with woolens and caps ... you should not pretend otherwise having such an old illness.”47 In another poem, and again displaying his mordant criticism, Horozco made fun of this person for wearing not only two types of caps but a hat on top of that, and urged him to “not complain if the closed up humour does not escape.”48 Women, too, hardly ever went about with their heads uncovered. The wealthy and wannabes wore long silk cloaks, while the rest accessorized with either shorter cloaks or the ubiquitous toca, a head cover common in married women throughout the peninsula.49 Soon thereafter the ever-­helpful world of fashion provided yet another accessory that most pox sufferers would have welcomed: the wig. This is not to say that the sheer extent of the French disease across Europe, affecting everyone from the poor and downtrodden to the influential and noble, suddenly sparked a taste for ornamental and elaborate headpieces (made of hair plucked from anything from animals to willing humans) by itself. The trend for wigs, propagated at Louis XIII’s court in the seventeenth century, could have had as much a connection to new and increasingly complex ways of displaying social hierarchies, changing understandings of the self, and new ways of mediating the interaction between consumption and status.50 Regardless of how wigs came to be so adored by court glitterati and ambitious urban up-­and-­ comers, however, by the eighteenth century one would have been hard-­ pressed to find a head without one in western Europe, especially within fashionable circles. Anyone who presumed to any status, from the dry highlands of Spain to Moscow’s winter court, wore them.51 We can

Getting Sick  35

only imagine the relief this fashion occasioned in pox sufferers afflicted by baldness – consider the example of a patient in eighteenth-century London lifting his wig to show his doctor the otherwise-­secret ravages of the French disease.52 Another way of quite literally constructing a public face to obfuscate the realities of private infection was the use of makeup. Though makeup was certainly used in the Middle Ages, by the early modern era, Spanish commentators – mostly male – had reached paroxysms of condemnation against the wily women who adorned themselves in this fashion, thereby both inviting sin and deceiving their intended audi­ences.53 One of the fathers of Spanish philology, Sebastián de Covarrubias, defined makeup in his masterful dictionary as “the adornment added to something to make it look good, and specifically that which women put on their faces, hands, and breasts to [make them] appear white and blush even if they are black and faded, thus denying nature and, wanting the impossible, they try to change skin.”54 He laboriously continues with this harsh condemnation for another page, and he was not alone. Perhaps he was influenced by his father, Toledo’s aforementioned Sebastián de Horozco, who dedicated one of his poems to an impoverished woman who spent all her meager resources on makeup: it must be very expensive maintaining the front because we clearly see that for treating the face your tail is showing.55

Even luminaries such as Quevedo, Cervantes, and Lope de Vega, among others, got into the business of blasting women’s attempts to conform themselves to the public image in vogue at the time.56 Aside from the Hispanic literary and clerical tradition against the use of makeup, what fascinates in terms of the poxed is that the technologies of adorning the body could serve to hide illness not only by covering it, but also by obfuscating the difference between ornament and attempts to hide disease. Certainly, the more straightforward approach was quite basic: assuming a public image that hid venereal illness. Consider, for instance, the apocryphal version of the celebrated Baroque tale of Guzmán de Alfarache. Referring to the men who chased these women so preoccupied with exterior adornments, Guzmán laments that “their assets are lost in gifts, rings, luxuries, hollands, perfumes and the like.

36  From Body to Community

And even if the servants suffer it, the wife cries it, the children fast it, so that those women eat and enjoy, they regret nothing. Everything is spent, everything consumed, including everybody’s life and health, ending with pox, pains, sarsaparilla, and holy wood [guaiac].”57 Pursuing the beauty of such fake, made-­up women only led, at least in Guzmán’s assessment, to a sentence of pox. The problem was that one just could not tell who was ill and who was healthy. This was partly because the very methods women used to beautify their faces blurred the boundary between venereal disease and adornment. For instance, one of the main feminine preoccupations moralists lambasted was the tweaking and shaping of increasingly delicate eyebrows. That one of the most memorable literary examples of a brow-­waxing expert is none other than the poxed protagonist of La Lozana Andaluza underscores the ambiguous border between beauty and illness. In an utterly comical skit, we find Lozana demonstrating various cosmetic techniques to the Roman prostitutes who visit her home, including the careful art of waxing eyebrows. “By my life, you seem to have been plucked (pellejadas) by a hand other than Lozana’s. Now let me show you what I can do, since you pay someone else to pluck you badly (mal pelar),” exclaims Lozana excitedly.58 Note, however the use of the verb pelar, which also referred to the loss of hair the poxed suffered, and its derivatives – pellejadas – in speaking of the beautifying process. Effectively, the problem the visiting prostitutes had was that their previous beauticians had done such a poor job that few if any hairs had been left in their eyebrows: “Look at this eyebrow; there are no hairs left. And who wasted money on an eyebrow like this? By the king’s life, whoever did this deserved a slash on the face so that next time she pays attention to what she does.”59 Producing beauty – and thereby health – thus required a fine hand that would wax only to the point of meeting the canon of delicate femininity without falling into the trap of poxed hairlessness.60 Why were such apparently contradictory standards – female beauty and venereal sign – so utterly close, so dependent on the steady hand of those who could navigate them? Was this a mere coincidence? Regarding the latter question, I would wager probably not. If we continue to examine female beauty techniques, we see that Spanish women prized above all else a pale complexion. The origins of such obsession could have been many, including the necessity of cultural differentiation from all the dark outsiders who threatened Hispanic superiority, whether the indigenous subjects of imperial adventures, displaced Moriscos, or an increasing numbers of black slaves.61 Regardless, when we examine

Getting Sick  37

the widespread literature known as female manuals – books containing recipes on everything from a mouth-­watering stew and luscious desserts to home remedies for ailments and, yes, makeup and creams – we find beauty techniques that, if anything, resembled those used to treat the French disease. In effect, most of the applications for women’s faces used solimán, a paste made partly from mercury, the main ingredient used to treat venereal sores.62 Apparently, the mercury rendered the skin whiter, thus allowing women to parade their manufactured beauty in the busy streets. But paleness or whiteness, as a recognized side effect of mercury, was also associated with venereal infection.63 Again, the boundary between beauty and treatment for illness seems hard to distinguish; if we were magically transported to a gathering of such pale faces, we might wonder which was the cause – the pox or the beauty product. In the end, it could very well be the inability to tell these apart that made this fashion of paleness so very successful. Let the ubiquitous murmuring hags gossip to their hearts’ content; how could they truly pin the pox on such a visage? The blurring of the Baroque border between canons of beauty and signs of the French disease should not, however, be taken as a universal response to the scourge of venereal disease. One may argue that obfuscation particularly suited a society so focused on image that the difference between reality and fakery occupied a prominent cultural space. Indeed, commentaries of the time increasingly complained of the impossibility of determining truth from appearance, of the deception the worthless worked on the honourable, of the utterly confusing hall of mirrors social relations had become. The age of scepticism, while affecting much of Western Europe, seemed particularly enervating to an increasingly insecure Spanish society caught in a whirlwind of economic downturns, lost influence, and shattered dreams.

Chapter 2

Encounters of the Third Kind: Medical Assumptions and Patients

On 16 October 1656, Catalina García, a married woman from Toledo, had just left the Hospital de Santiago after almost one month of harrowing treatment for the pox.1 We can only imagine how interminable it must have felt. Sure, she received good, solid meals every day in the women’s ward, but she also had to undergo regular bleeding, purging, and, worst of all, the application of a mercury-­based ointment to different parts of her body. The resulting sweating and salivating, sweating and salivating in a never-­ending cycle that included bad breath, sharp pain in the gums, and, sometimes, loss of teeth, was universally feared by patients.2 Catalina had now undergone this ordeal, and having recuperated after a short convalescence, found herself outside the hospital gates. That she was thankful for her health, for her life, for the end of the torment of treatment is evident from one of the first matters she undertook.3 Doña Clara de Ontiveros, a local widow, had owed considerable sums to Catalina. Over time she had paid off most of her debt, but still owed 324 reales. This was not an inconsiderable sum, as it amounted roughly to three times the yearly salary of a nurse at the hospital.4 And Catalina surely needed that money. Though she wore the typical black silk cloak that may have hinted at a wealthier past when she had been able to lend such a sum, it was clear she had fallen on hard times, as the cloak and many of her other garments, including her skirts, were old, worn, and partly in tatters.5 She and her husband, Miguel de Carcazedo, were probably representatives of that typical early modern population known as the shamefaced poor. These were individuals who, despite their hard work and reputable condition, either had encountered a bout of misfortune or had always found it hard to make ends meet, especially

Encounters of the Third Kind  39

in times of economic recession. With only a meager safety net to help them, the poor like Catalina lived day-­to-­day, and meal-­to-­meal, hoping against hope that the Lord would once more grace them with sustenance and favour. No matter her need of those 324 reales, however, Catalina took a momentous decision upon leaving the hospital: she would donate the money to the Church of Our Lady of Hope in the old mozarab parish of San Lucas.6 To Catalina, emerging alive and seemingly unscathed from the hell of mercury treatment, from the pain and discomfort, from the terrible sounds and smells of the hospital, from the shame and worry of finding venereal sores on her body must have seemed like a miracle worthy of tribute and homage. And thus she parted easily with capital that her family needed desperately. Upon leaving the church, Catalina probably felt she was walking on air, unburdened by sin and renewed in her faith. And yet her travails were not over. Today we assume that patients afflicted with the pox, like Catalina, would have suffered through its progressively more serious stages, given the lack of effective modern treatments. Over the years she would have probably experienced increasing pain in her joints, alopecia, loss of cartilage and bone, and eventually neurological disorders that would have ended her life. And this end was not pretty. Although the following description of a patient dying from the pox comes from renowned eighteenth-­century physician Villaroel and reflects a later medical context, its vividness only underscores the blood-­curdling spectacle of what was a difficult and painful death: Lifting a piece of curtain and sticking a bit of my face through the opening, I saw the most ugly, sad, and disgusting spectacle of all the ones suggested by the sadness of my dreams. A young man, roughly around twenty-­six years old, was drowned in sticky and foul-­smelling sweat, dishevelled [and] in distress, and overwhelmed with death throes and suffocation. The head denuded of hair, and plagued by stretches of scabs, warts, pustules, tubers, and other swellings and bumps. The mouth covered with blisters, flooded in drool, and roasted in the voracious sparks that the infernal fire of his humours threw at its circumference. The lips black, hard, and rolled up, like the edge of a tub; the nose full of bites, and so scratched and consumed that it showed through its cracks the lacrymal bones and the orbits of the eyes; he barked rather than articulated words, and even this so weakly, that it was necessary to get really close to hear the most sad and tired howls.7

40  From Body to Community

Though this horrible death likely awaited Catalina, it is uncertain how aware she would have been of this possibility on the fall day of 1656 when she left hospital. For all she knew, and based on what her physicians at the Hospital de Santiago would have told her, the illness that had so plagued her and that she had taken such pains to treat had been successfully cured. As we will see, Spanish medical theorists and physicians assumed the French disease was treatable with the harsh methods at their disposal. And though in all probability Catalina was going to be disappointed and suffer terribly over time, much of her optimism and hope upon leaving the hospital must have been connected to contemporary assumptions about the pox her doctors had transmitted to her. Medical knowledge and its application in daily life to actual patients would have had an influence on how patients understood their disease, and it is in this sense that I want to explore it. Overall, medical assumptions about the French disease remained ambiguous and, because they were often situational, rendered patient responses to treatment, contagiousness, the role of gender, and individual responsibility very malleable. Treating the French Disease Certainly an intellectual history of Spanish medical writing on the French disease would show how it reflected important Europe-­wide debates and shifts in knowledge. Questions on the nature of the illness, the rise of empiricist knowledge, and developing understandings of contagion that relied both on traditional Galenic theories and new developments exemplified by authors like Fernel and Fracastoro would have been some of the themes with which Spanish physicians grappled.8 This chapter, however, focuses on medical assumptions about the French disease from the point of view of a potential early modern patient. Thus, rather than exploring the intellectual and scientific history of knowledge of this disease, I would like to examine what the early modern concepts and assumptions of medical theory would have meant for patients and their experiences with venereal disease. One of the issues important to patients was the scientific ambivalence regarding the pox as medical category. Not only were physicians engaged in a thorough and long-­standing debate on the etiology of the illness and its characteristics, but such questions inevitably seeped into diagnostic contexts. As Claudia Stein cogently argues for Augsburg, Germany, the bodily signs that could point to pox infection were anything but stable. Because early modern notions of disease focused on individual

Encounters of the Third Kind  41

humoural imbalance, it followed that the pox would not necessarily manifest itself in the same symptoms in different bodies. Furthermore, just as symptoms were equivocal, so was the nature of the illness: the pox was thought to be able to change rapidly and mutate into other illnesses, such as dropsy and leprosy.9 Spanish medical writers likewise tempered their lists of signs that generally suggested pox infection with caveats about how various individual constitutions could alter and shape such signs as the illness affected specific humours. For instance, in his discussion of pox pustules on patients’ skin, Juan Calvo suggested that particular attention must be paid to their colour and the type of matter they might leak. If the pustules were purple with a jaundiced puss, they implied choleric imbalance; if dry and white, a phlegmatic infirmity; if red and bloody, sanguine. “Thus we know that those afflicted with the French disease do not always have their blood corrupted in the same manner: sometimes the illness becomes phlegmatic, others choleric, others melancholic, other bilious, according to the nature and temperament of the sick body,” argues Calvo.10 Even more problematically, these equivocal signs of pox could be readily interpreted as part of other skin diseases, including elephantiasis and dropsy.11 The diagnostic ambiguity surrounding the French disease meant it was not uncommon for the Hospital de Santiago to deal with changing questions about diagnosis. For example, some patients were transferred to the Hospital de Santiago from one of the largest institutions in Toledo, the Hospital del Rey: such was the case with Mariana Herrera, from the Indies, and Juan Rubio from Toledo’s outskirts.12 That patients previously admitted to the Hospital del Rey – which normally barred patients with pox – were transferred to Santiago suggests the discovery of new symptoms or reassessment of existing ones as evidence of the pox.13 The same can be said for the converse situation – that of patients suddenly transferred from the Hospital de Santiago to the Hospital del Rey. Ana Rodríguez, from La Membrilla, was treated at the Hospital de Santiago for six weeks before being transferred to the Hospital del Rey.14 So was Domingo Álvarez, who remained at Santiago for two weeks before being transferred.15 Obviously they were still sick, as patients would have normally convalesced either at Santiago itself, or the nearby Hospital del Bálsamo, specifically instituted for this purpose. More curious was the case of Pedro Rico from Toledo, who, though initially admitted into the wards at the Hospital de Santiago on 23 April 1657, was nevertheless immediately transferred due to an unspecified illness

42  From Body to Community

that became evident as the day progressed.16 That physicians decided to transfer these patients to the Hospital del Rey suggests either the appearance or re-­evaluation of symptoms that pointed to illnesses barred from the Hospital de Santiago, namely contagious or incurable ones. Ultimately, even if certain signs, such as spots on the palms of the hand, genital ulcers, or alopecia were often considered generally predictive of the pox (especially if concurrent), medical theory’s focus on individual humoural makeup meant some patients were subject to misdiagnosis and possibly treatment unsuitable to the illnesses that afflicted them. The ambivalence and shifting semiotic ground underneath the French disease was not just theoretical, but affected patients in the flesh. Another medical assumption of great consequence for patients, as we have seen, was the treatability of the pox. When the illness had first struck in epidemic fashion in the 1490s, the situation seemed dire. In Italy, the epicenter of the disease’s rapid spread, doctors seemed initially unable to help their patients.17 Contemporary chronicles stressed the virulence of a disease that seemed to progress far more rapidly and harshly than it would in later years.18 And in the midst of what was a true shock to the medical establishment of the day, much of the early literature on the disease focused on the main problem of determining its identity. Was it a new illness, as some would claim later, brought to Europe through contact with the Americas? Did it originate in the cannibalism of the French armies besieging Naples in 1495? Had the ancients already encountered the disease?19 These questions were essential for physicians and scientists trained in a Galenic tradition that heavily favoured theoretical approaches to medical practice, but there seemed to be little available in the way of preventing the bodies of the dead from piling up and the sight of the deformed from horrifying onlookers. Eventually, however, through the application of specific treatments aimed at both the humoural causes and the dermatological side-­effects of the illness, physicians started to see some positive results. Among the first to claim that the disease was curable was Gaspar Torrella, a Spanish physician working at the papal court. Indeed, in a 1497 treatise on the pox dedicated to Cesare Borgia, Torrella argued that in the space of a few months he had successfully treated various patients through methods aimed at drawing out the peccant humour from the body. Thus, through a regime of blood-­letting, purging and placing the patient in a warm enclosure to sweat out the disease, Torrella achieved good results, particularly when followed by the topical use

Encounters of the Third Kind  43

of abrasive substances, including mercury, on skin lesions. Although Torrella would later come out against the use of mercury after its considerable side effects apparently killed one of his noble patients, the use of mercury would quickly become universal in the treatment of the pox.20 The most eminent specialist practicing in Iberia in the first half of the sixteenth century, Díaz de la Isla, unwaveringly recommended mercury for its efficacy.21 Certainly some sixteenth-­century physicians, like Fernel, preferred the use of guaiac, because of its mildness, and we find this substance being used in the hospital run by the Fugger family in Augsburg and in many Italian pox hospitals.22 Regardless, most hospitals and physicians favoured mercury salivation treatment, unless patients specifically requested or required, due to poor physical condition, more gentle methods of treatment, including guaiac and sarsaparilla. In any case, physicians appeared quite optimistic about the chances of success of these treatments. “I have seen [patients] quickly recovered and well healed through [mercury] sweating, purges, and bloodletting, if necessary, and they come out more perfect and healthy than with any other treatments; and without harm or any side effects,” Luis de Lobera exclaimed confidently in his mid-­sixteenth century treatise.23 Juan Calvo, writing in 1580, argued that unlike some epidemic diseases, like the plague, that killed many, the pox killed few, despite its epidemic spread, because it was so easily treatable.24 By 1605, Andrés de León likewise was pointing out that patients who sought treatment early in the infection “would be more perfectly cured and without lesion, being treated according to medical art.”25 Although Torres, former physician to Philip IV’s wife, argued in his practical treatise on the disease that some effects of the pox, such as loss of bone density and alopecia, were incurable, he nonetheless stressed the ease of most treatments he proposed, so that most could even cure themselves at home.26 Hospitals too followed this policy on the treatability of the French disease. One need go no farther than the Hospital de Santiago, which specifically kept out individuals who might be afflicted with incurable diseases lest they infect those with the much more treatable pox. New regulations published in 1604 ordered that “the hospital shall not admit any patients with incurable diseases.” In fact, only those with “the pox and treatable humours, which is the reason for this hospital’s establishment and purpose,” were to be admitted.27 That hospitals and physicians would be so optimistic about the chances of successful treatment is not surprising. Not only would the use of mercury and other corrosive

44  From Body to Community

substances have effectively dealt with the skin lesions common in venereal infection by basically drying them out, but the pox would normally ebb and flow as it progressed from one stage to the next, so that symptoms would seem to disappear, only to come back later. Regardless of how physicians arrived at this notion of the treatability of the French disease, we can speculate as to the effect such a view would have had on patients. Just as Catalina García would have expected to have been effectively cured upon leaving the hospital, so would other patients. And if they thought they were cured, they could go merrily about their business and plan their futures without much thought to any of the long-­term consequences of the disease. Thus Andrés Romani, a youngster from Toledo treated at the Hospital de Santiago, went ahead with quite ambitious plans after his release from treatment. Indeed, he intended to obtain passage to the Americas, where he hoped, like many others, to make his dreams come true. To this end, he required evidence of a lineage untainted by Jewish or Muslim ancestry, and he thus enlisted various witnesses who could testify on his behalf for this certificate.28 No small feat, emigrating to the Americas was an enterprise fraught with peril, especially for someone like Andrés who did not seem to have a post or family awaiting him in the colonies. The travel alone would be onerous and expensive and, by 1650, immigrants would have had a harder time finding economic and social opportunity.29 Would someone who thought his disease was progressive rather than already cured have embarked on such an expedition? Other patients too, in their economic decisions and the risks they took, seemed to act as though the disease they carried had been cured. And for all intents and purposes, based on what they had been told by their physicians, they had, in fact, been cured of the pox. Consider Thomas Martínez Izquierdo and Manuela del Valle, a husband-­and-­wife team of weavers in the silk guild. Like many weavers, they worked from home and wove on contract for a major distributor. Their work was interrupted in the fall of 1663 when both had to seek treatment at the Hospital de Santiago. Undeterred by illness, however, by February of 1664 they decided to undertake a major expansion of their business. They borrowed 300 reales from Toledo merchant and alderman Nicolás Suárez de Herrera to buy a new loom that would allow them to weave a type of silk that would garner higher prices.30 Not only that, but they also contracted with Suárez de Herrera to weave silk “without limitation of quantity.”31 The couple’s decision to expand their weaving business and commit themselves to producing any required quantities to

Encounters of the Third Kind  45

their buyer squares only with the assumption of treatability of the pox. If both partners thought, based on their hospital stay, that they were cured, then why not seek to expand their business? Patient Responsibility Nonetheless, these patient exempla should not be taken to imply that assumptions regarding the curability of the pox were unproblematic. In fact, while medical views on treatability probably eased some patients’ concerns and allowed them to resume relatively productive lives soon after leaving hospital, the reality of the recurring symptoms of a progressive illness put medical theorists in a bind. How to explain the reappearance, and often worsening, of symptoms if the initial treatment had been deemed successful? Medical responses reveal that the notion of the pox’s curability, even if constantly propounded, tended to break down upon closer examination and was, ultimately, neither universal nor absolute in practice. In fact, the border between health and illness in relation to the French disease was exceedingly mutable and inconstant. Thus, while patients were given a clean bill of health upon exiting the hospital or finishing private treatment, their continuing health depended on their moral and physical balance. Based on traditional Galenic notions, physicians considered the proper behavioural management of the six non-­naturals (air, diet, rest, motions, excretions, and passions) essential to continuing health. Particularly in the first few months after treatment for pox, doctors counselled moderate behaviour, especially in terms of diet and sexual activity. So important was patient behaviour that some physicians, like Juan Calvo, considered the correction of vice the most important step in treatment. Noting that much of the post-­treatment regimen would depend on the specific patient and his or her humoural makeup, Calvo still had general recommendations to offer. Thus he counseled patients that after treatment “they must control their diet and drink.”32 Mostly this meant moderation and avoiding certain foods like bacon, fish, and legumes, as well as avoiding wine. While moderate exercise was recommended, sex should be avoided, both because it could lead to a recrudescence of the illness and because it could spread it to others if latent.33 López Pinna’s treatise of 1664 repeated Calvo’s suggestions while stressing the importance of this regimen for patients’ overall recovery and continuing health.34 While such suggestions stemmed from long-­standing and widely accepted medical practices, the focus on post-­treatment regimens of

46  From Body to Community

behaviour implied that patients had a major role to play in the lengthy process of moving from illness to health. Though they had been treated successfully at hospital, only moderate behaviour could ensure maintenance of health. As Andrés de León stated of both doctors and patients in his Práctico de morbo gálico, “each one must take up his obligations.”35 This responsibility on the part of the patient, which included taking care of the soul before starting treatment, was so important that it could even affect chances at an effective cure.36 Ultimately it was up to the patients themselves, either heeding physicians’ recommendations for moderate behavior or losing themselves in vice, to decide their fates. “With proper treatment the illness lasts only as long as it takes to treat it, restoring natural balance with chastity and good behavior: so that I have seen patients remain healthy for up to twenty years. And this has been shown by experience. But if the patient is dissolute, he will only live two or three years, and the same will happen to those afflicted with primary pox, if badly behaved and governed, and dissolute with women,” claims León in reference to successful treatment for the first and second stages of the French disease.37 This notion that a patient’s health, once he or she had been treated by a physician, ultimately depended on his or her behaviour was echoed by other practitioners. Thus, after arguing that the French disease was easily treatable and did not lead to many deaths, Juan Calvo fulminated against men who, once cured, came back with venereal symptoms due to sex with infected women.38 While physicians could treat those under their care, it was only the behaviour of the patients themselves that ensured long-­term survivability. The emphasis on personal responsibility must have placed a great deal of stress on those who, despite all precautions, found themselves naturally progressing through the different stages of the pox despite treatment. Patients returning to hospital had only themselves to blame. “I have treated and cured an infinite number of patients throughout different hospitals in Spain, in the armies and navies, and I have seen those who cared for their health end up fine while a relapse in those who misbehaved was their own fault, and so I made them admit it,” explains Dr León.39 The confessional strategy of forcing patients to admit their responsibility highlights that this must have been an area of contention between physicians and those under their care. We can certainly imagine that among the many who returned to the Hospital de Santiago for treatment, a fair number might have carefully followed physicians’ prescriptions and admonitions for correct and moderate behaviour. To

Encounters of the Third Kind  47

those patients, the only reasonable explanation for the recurrence of illness would have had to be the imperfection of the initial treatment. How these matters played out in the hospital ward itself is difficult to gauge, as no treatment journals for specific cases at the hospital have survived. Ideally, of course, patients returning with symptoms of chronic pox were to be treated equally with the rest. Hospital regulations continuously asserted that no preferences were to be given to individual patients once admitted, whether in care, in feeding, or in spiritual services. If anything, access to treatment itself should have been easier for returning patients, as the hospital was meant to prioritize those in most need of treatment, as measured by severity of illness and by poverty.40 But these provisions constituted the ideal, an imagined framework of Christian charity as clockwork: regular, disinterested, and constant. That problems persisted, that smiles and concern could turn to wicked corruption, was not ignored. Indeed, hospital regulations also stressed that staff were not to accept bribes, designed to allow those with means to enter the hospital ahead of the needy or obtain better treatment. More precisely, regarding matters relating to chronic sufferers, regulations also tried to prevent what must have been a common problem: kicking out disorderly or badly behaved patients without the approval of the administrator.41 Inasmuch as disorder was a construction heaped upon certain individuals, and considering the perceived connection between immorality and chronic pox, returning patients’ bodies and manners would have been more likely to be read in such a light. For example, we know that the hospital aimed to prevent dissolution of all sorts, including affronts to God such as blasphemy.42 Considering the difficulties of mercury treatment – the insufferable pain it fostered – such a priority seems to square with the lived difficulties of a working hospital. But if faced with actual blasphemy, how were the staff to read such an outburst? Surely the context and identity of the patient engaging in such behaviour would play a role. Would a first-­time, innocent and wide-­eyed pox sufferer be given the benefit of the doubt, his or her blasphemy read as the manifestation of a bodily penance so severe the soul would be thereby reformed of the sin that brought the illness? What about a returning patient, an unreformed sinner who, despite all the charity and work of hospital staff, was unable to manage desire, to live cleanly and modestly, and thus returned once more for treatment, all fault his or her own? Would the blasphemy be read as evidence of incorrigible corruption? Although mere questions to ponder,

48  From Body to Community

the contextual edifice that separated chronic sufferers who bore individual responsibility for recurring illness from first-­time patients who could still hope to be reformed through the fires of mercury treatment probably played a role in the way they were seen. That returning patients seemed to be singled out by the hospital as soon as they crossed its threshold could not have helped matters. For example, if a patient were to return within the same season, the hospital notary did not enter his or her name anew as a separate entry. Rather, he merely went to the patient’s initial entry in the admissions book and noted in the margin, “returned on” such and such a date. Thus, Pedro López de Ribadeneyra, a single man from Corral de Almaguer, was originally treated on the first day of the season, 9 April 1657, but returned on 5 May of the same year – this being noted merely in the margin.43 Sometimes, the marginal notation could even refer to a return date beyond the initial treatment season. For instance, Simón del Prado, also originally treated on 9 April 1657, returned to the hospital one year later, on 26 May 1658. But he did not receive a new entry; his return was merely noted in the margin of the original one.44 The most obvious reason for this procedure was to save a busy notary time in entering data. Even when returning patients were separately noted as such, the hospital notary aimed to save space and time by not listing every single item of clothing again. Thus, Clemente Terán was treated in both the fall of 1662 and the spring of 1663. Although he received a separate entry on his return, the notary merely added after his name, “who is in folio 240v, patient 139, came back on April 23 [1663] dressed in the same manner as before.”45 The reasons for identifying returning patients so clearly in the hospital admissions book may have been eminently practical, but had complex repercussions. First, it is likely that, in an attempt to save time, the notary asked patients upon admission if they had been treated at the hospital before. This probing inquiry may have been genuinely devoid of moralizing concern, but it was neither private nor meaningless. Both the hospital administrator and the head nurse would have been present during this admission process, and thereby would have learned of the patient’s return status.46 From then on, he or she was identified as a repeat patient, the ink on the admissions page effectively separating him or her from the rest; a different, perhaps colder attitude on the part of staff would presumably have reflected both oral and written markers of a chronic sufferer of the pox.

Encounters of the Third Kind  49

That patients were aware of the probability of less-­than-­ideal conditions on their return can be seen from the common practice of withholding information regarding a previous stay at the hospital. If separated by more than a season or two, patients had no reason to admit to previous treatment. Why place themselves in the mould of the irresponsible, immoral, unreformed patient? Indeed, most returning patients still made the hospital notary do all the work he tried to save via marginal notations and avoidance of repetitive entries. For example, Joan Calzado from Toledo was treated in both the spring of 1658 and the fall of 1659. All his information was the same: birthplace in Asturias, citizenship in Toledo, marriage to Magdalena Rodríguez. Even many of the items of clothing were the same: black worsted socks, wool faux damask doublet, serge sleeves, pants of black serge, black cape and hat.47 The notary, deprived of the valuable information that Calzado had had a previous stay, had to re-­enter word for word information that the hospital already had. Speculation that the moral concerns surrounding culpability for chronic disease may have played a role in Joan’s silence is not unfounded. Moreover, the focus on patient responsibility for continued health after treatment meant that despite assumptions regarding the curability of the disease, long-­term prognoses were much more ambivalent. For example, while Andrés de León assumed, just as his colleagues did, that the pox was curable, doubts as to specific patient outcomes seeped into his discourse. Thus, not only were patients who had experienced venereal infection more likely to be infected with plague, but León warned that any relapse in the disease would both make it more difficult to treat and lead to death sooner.48 More problematic for many at a time when (except for the very wealthy) most people worked long hours was the assertion that a successful long-­term prognosis depended on a patient’s ability to rest for perhaps months after treatment. León counseled his readers not to leave the home after treatment and to sleep through the morning. For some, like Diego de Chaves, a professional who worked as an estate administrator, taking it easy was not an impossible proposition. Having been treated at the hospital in the fall of 1662, Diego had between December of that year and April of 1663 delegated many of his responsibilities as administrator of the estate and charitable foundation of Doña Ana de Pacheco y Rojas. In particular, business that required him to travel to Madrid now fell to his associates Pablo Agustín Cavaña and Juan de Villalobos, who actually lived at court.49 Not everybody, however, had such plum positions that they could merely delegate

50  From Body to Community

their responsibilities. To most early modern people, a regular income meant hard work with few holidays, little secure income, and little respite from their obligations. Transmitting Disease Just as assumptions of treatability were a lot more muddled in daily practice than they were in theory, so were those regarding the transmission of the pox. Although the French disease was seen as an eminently venereal illness, theories of transmission, rooted in both traditional understandings of humoural illness and developing views of contagion, also stressed other factors.50 Indeed, both sexual and non-­venereal factors were considered to play a role in the rapid and easy transmission of this infirmity. “[I]t is not only caught through carnal knowledge but also by sleeping in the same sheets or drinking from the same cup,” declared Ruy Díaz de la Isla.51 He considered household items such vectors of illness that the good doctor even spoke of a town where the water from a pond in which the clothes of the poxed were washed infected people’s gardens, and thereafter a host of children.52 Though such an example bordered on the fantastic, the underlying assumptions regarding the extreme contagion of the French disease were mainstream and well-­reflected in other Spanish authors.53 Although much has been written about the venereal nature of the pox, and specific responses to this threat will be examined in conjunction with attitudes toward prostitution, it behooves us to explore further the cultural repercussions of this emphasis on casual transmission. Indeed, the spectre of the French disease hid behind even the most innocent and common of interactions: sharing food, garments, a bed. Accordingly, the Hospital de Santiago took appropriate measures to protect patients, families, and staff. Aside from the enjoinment that nurse assistants keep the male and female wards scrupulously clean, specific measures were to be taken when placing a new patient in a bed that had recently been occupied. Indeed, not only did the hospital prohibit bed sharing (a common practice in early modern hospitals) but clean sheets, after death or convalescence, were a must.54 Much of this focus on the washing of textiles was due to fears of transmission: thus, as soon as patients were admitted, their clothes were to be washed and scalded, thereby eliminating any possibility of re-­infection or transmission to staff.55 So dangerous was patients’ clothing considered that, even after being washed, items were placed in storage separately from

Encounters of the Third Kind  51

those of guests and visiting dignitaries who regularly stayed at the hospital on official business.56 At a time not necessarily renowned for stringent standards of cleanliness – consider the suspicion of Islamic heresy engendered by the washing of the body – the fear of contagion spread from the ill themselves to the material items they carried or touched. The concept of easy, casual pox pollution found resonance in religious literature and sermons, particularly as a means of highlighting the Christian values of charity, love, and patience. For instance, in the sixteenth century, Juan Luis Vives, in his celebrated Instrucción de la mujer cristiana, had already lauded the example of a young wife from Bruges, Clara, who personally tended to her poxed husband. “The physicians would tell her not to come close to him or touch him. Thus would [also] counsel her family and friends, suggesting that she should not treat a man who was more in the next world than this one,” recalls Vives.57 No matter the festering pustules, the constant diarrhea, and the insalubrious smells emanating from her husband’s body, Clara remained steadfast in his care until, years later, burdened by his continuous ailments, he finally expired. Neither Clara nor the children she had with her husband were infected, a sure sign, according to Vives, of the Lord’s reward for her constancy: “[B]y which [lack of infection] can be clearly seen the sheer virtue, the sheer holiness of those women who love their husbands as they should, and Our Lord rewards them even in this world.”58 In this tale, the sheer contagiousness of the pox, even beyond the venereal, emerges as an apt foil for the miraculous health of a constant, charitable wife. Sometimes the miraculous could intercede and punish through casual pox infection. Such was the message propounded in an exemplum detailed in Friar Prudencio de Sandoval’s Historia del Emperador Carlos V. More specifically, Sandoval recalls that on a Holy Thursday, during one of Charles’s absences, with the court sojourning in Madrid, a young nobleman named Francisco Ramírez approached the altar of a church to receive the Holy Sacrament. To his horror, the priest administering the Eucharist, a certain Párraga, displayed signs of infection, his hands and face covered with pustules reputed to be of venereal origin. Disgusted and unwilling to risk infection, the youth moved to a different altar to obtain the sacrament. That very night, however, Francisco would come down with the same pox that affected the priest, his face and hands a reflection of the symptoms from which he had recoiled earlier in the day. So shocked was the youth by this punishment that he died within a week. Before he expired, however, he humbly sought out

52  From Body to Community

the priest he had so despised, Párraga, to obtain the last sacrament from his pustuled hands.59 Thus was the miracle of the Eucharist reinforced – much to the chagrin, according to the author, of the enemies of the faith. As much as the possibility of casual, non-­venereal infection could provide fodder for miraculous tales of Christian virtue in the face of mortal peril, the effect of such a conceptualization of the French disease on flesh-­and-­blood patients and their families seems ambiguous, at best. Certainly, legal codes sometimes reflected fears of casual contagion. For instance, most colleges at various universities actually stipulated that the poxed, and those with other contagious infirmities, were not to be admitted. “We disqualify for admission to this college anyone who has now or has had contagious diseases such as leprosy, the pox, the malady of Saint Lazarus, or any other similar illnesses,” declared the statutes of Saint Thomas College at the famed University of Salamanca.60 Of course, few of these provisions prevented the spread of the French disease among university students: at the Hospital de Santiago alone, twenty-­two university students from all over Spain were treated.61 Likewise, as much as physicians and writers played up the perils of casual pox contagion, patients and their families and communities did not necessarily accept such warnings wholesale. Consider the case of Joan Becerril, an unmarried youth originally from the countryside but living in Toledo, who was admitted to the Hospital de Santiago on 24 April 1658. Like all the other patients, he left his clothing at the entrance to be washed and scalded, but, in an unexpected twist, family members who had seen him to the hospital “took his hat home,” as per the marginalia on the admissions book.62 While the case of a missing hat might seem inconsequential, a closer examination of the implications of this act belies the fear of casual transmission. Presumably family members took the hat home so it could be worn, a common practice in an early modern economy in which garments were often shared.63 But if casual transmission, as physicians and moralists propounded, was so common, why the easy sharing of an item as personal, and as liable to contain the very infectious qualities about which people were warned, as a hat? Were family members merely ignorant of the scientific predictions of infection upon coming into contact with the possessions of the ill? Or did experience dictate such practical attitudes? How to square, therefore, these practical everyday instances of close contact with the poxed with the common warning of casual transmission of the disease? Not only did medical and religious literature focus on ease of transmission, but writings aimed at broader-­based audiences

Encounters of the Third Kind  53

also reflected this trope. Thus, in his comic casting of pox sufferers as members of a confraternity, Toledo’s Sebastián de Horozco paid attention to the ease with which they could infect others. Referring to their ability to share a bed with others in inns and hospitals without worry of infection, Horozco takes it one step farther and argues that “rather those already members [of this group] will have the power to admit to the confraternity with little difficulty those who share their beds.”64 Mere close contact with the poxed could result in a lifelong condemnation. Ultimately, the context in which these claims for casual transmission were being offered must be taken into account. Specifically, consider the sheer spread of the French disease across genders, classes, and age groups. We cannot forget that the illness that appeared in the 1490s and quickly spread to reach families and individuals of all states and conditions was the first true venereal epidemic to strike a Christian Europe that considered sexuality a sin. Obviously Europeans had long been aware of a host of venereal diseases, but none attacked its victims with such ferocity and such reach. As Dr León, physician to Philip II, stated in the prologue to his work, “[W]e can affirm that today we find [this illness] in people as if naturalized, without excepting any individuals, princes and prelates, rich and poor, elderly, women and children.”65 The problem was explaining how a presumably Christian society found itself riddled with the pox if coitus was the main vector of transmission. In such a context, the coexistence of a public image of Christianity and infection across the social spectrum shook the very basis upon and assumptions under which such a society was constructed. Physicians, prelates, municipal officers, judges – in short, the leading political and ideological classes – could not, with a straight face, merely point to a few sinners who brought ruin upon society. Inquisitors could continue to try one, two, hundreds of people for claiming that fornication was not a sin, but when the signs of venereal infection began appearing around every corner, under every gentleman’s hat, and behind every lady’s veil, the fictions under which sexual and social order were constructed would inevitably start to crack.66 Hence the oh-­so-­useful explanation of virulent, non-­sexual, almost unavoidable contagion. If it were so easy to catch, no wonder the chaste were afflicted by it. As Díaz de la Isla, in curious circular logic echoed across the Spanish medical spectrum, would conclude, “[O]ne need not presume that the religious, maidens, infants, and most chaste persons who acquire this disease, did so through ugly or dishonest contagion.”67 Thus, the identity of the patient – whether presumed chaste or not – seems to have determined

54  From Body to Community

the mode of transmission after the fact. This belief meant that those expected to be chaste had perfectly reasonable explanations at hand for appearing in hospital bearing pox lesions. The interaction between Spanish medical views on the French disease and patient responses reveals the mutable border between illness and health that such a variable disease represented. On the one hand, medical doctors and hospital administrators pushed claims for the treatability of the illness and probably helped discharged patients to return relatively quickly to busy lives of jobs and plans previously deferred. On the other hand, facing the reality of recurring symptoms meant both transferring responsibility to patient behaviour and qualifying long-­ term prognoses to accommodate this uncertainty. Likewise, although assertions regarding treatability helped to assuage fears, and assumptions about ease of contagion helped to halt possible social repercussions of contracting the pox given its wide spread in the population without respect to class or precedence, the spectre of sexual culpability would remain a reality for specific groups such as prostitutes. The problem with the French disease that these discourses and behaviours so amply reveal remained its inconstant nature. Individuals could come down with sores and pustules that marked them as diseased one day and then soon after, thanks to treatment and the illness’s natural cycle, appear healthy. The disease could strike young and old, rich and poor, male and female, but, because of symptoms and treatment that initially obscured the reality of disease, telling the ill from the healthy remained extremely difficult. Only when progression made its presence uncontested, given the ultimate symptoms like loss of cartilage and bone density, did the disease manifest itself in its full ugliness. Until then, the pox remained shadowy, a wavering illness that struck and then seemed to disappear, raising the spectres of both sexual culpability and (guilt-­free) contagion. This liminality would be thoroughly reflected in social and cultural attitudes toward this disease.

Chapter 3

Melting Pot: The Hospital de Santiago’s Patients

On the morning of 18 September 1662, forty-­four would-­be patients waited expectantly for the Hospital de Santiago to open its doors and admit them for the fall treatment season. All of them milled about the hospital’s courtyard hopeful that, once they were inside, their venereal ailments would be cured, so they could return home and continue with their lives. Not all of them hailed from similar financial circumstances, familial networks, or even geographic origins. Men and women, Toledanos and outsiders, rich and poor found themselves sharing this intimate space, mingling with those who under normal circumstances would perhaps not have crossed their paths. In their social variability, these patients attested to the fame and renown of this august institution that turned no pox sufferer away and left none untreated. Six Patients; Six Lives Toribio Pérez fit the stereotype of what we would expect of a patient at a pox hospital. He arrived before the Hospital de Santiago’s gates without a penny to his name. Single, poor – indeed, destitute, if we go by the notary’s description of his garments: “they are not worth anything” – Toribio hailed from the impoverished region of Asturias, in the mountainous north of Iberia, and probably found himself in Toledo as part of the inchoate masses of wandering poor that crisscrossed the peninsula.1 But, although poverty certainly abounded among the hospital population, not all of those who patiently waited with Toribio for the hospital gates to open and the administrator benevolently to grant them admission shared his misfortune. Most of them hailed from outside the city of Toledo, and some had fared better than others. Consider two

56  From Body to Community

youngsters, Antonio Martínez and Juan de Ramos, from the town of Ocaña.2 That they travelled together to Toledo for treatment is possible; they entered the hospital in immediate succession. That they were kin is probable; both Antonio’s father and Juan’s mother shared the surname Martínez. That both were far from the desperate destitution of Toribio is certain. Antonio wore, among other garments, a silk doublet with taffeta sleeves, silk stockings, and the typical gentlemanly collar (valona) sitting on an under-­support (golilla).3 Likewise, Juan wore coat and pants of the top-­quality woolen known as Segovia baize, a velvet doublet, and a taffeta hat, among other garments. Considering Ocaña’s proud history (it had hosted national parliamentary meetings thrice), its importance as an administrative centre (as one of the two main holdings of the Order of Santiago, it had jurisdiction over many villages), and its relatively prosperous urban population (the town claimed that three hundred out of its three thousand households were headed by hijosdalgo), Juan and Antonio may well have hailed from prominent families.4 That both haughty youngsters were immediately ahead in line of the unfortunate Toribio, dressed in little more than rags, highlights the sheer mix of patients from all walks of life arriving at the hospital’s gate. The same can be said for those seeking entrance to the hospital from the city of Toledo itself. Consider Damiana Zazo, a married woman also awaiting treatment.5 Although she attempted to dress up by wearing the typical long silk cloak donned by urban ladies, the figure she cut betrayed the hardships of poverty. The silk cloak itself was old, and so were a couple of other garments, including her woolen doublet and apron. That she actually wore an apron also betrayed her artisanal origins, as these garments were worn by working women – no lady of leisure would be caught dead in one.6 Indeed, her father, Jusepe Zazo, was listed in a 1636 tax census for Toledo as a shoemaker, a respectable profession but one that left little room for economic well-­being, especially considering the turn for the worse in Toledo’s economy in the seventeenth century.7 Another Toledo citizen, Gaspar Cabezas, had a bit better luck than the hapless Damiana. Though he probably attended the hospital due to family connections – his father had been steward there – Gaspar waited alongside the other would-­be patients, dressed unremarkably.8 While no one would mistake him for a wealthy gentleman, as he wore no expensive silk garments but just woolens, the hospital notary did not add any descriptors when noting Gaspar’s clothing. Indeed, his garments were in a relatively good state.

Melting Pot  57

While Gaspar probably attracted little attention in his nondescript garments, the same cannot be said for Toledo’s Don Diego de Chaves.9 A long-­ term bachelor, he cut a luxurious figure: taffeta pants and sleeves, together with silk stockings to show off his calves. Likewise, Diego’s collar was adorned with expensive lace. His garments reflected his station and connections. Indeed, he had acted as executor to the will of Doña Ana Pacheco de Rojas, Lady of Romay, who had been married to Don Antonio Luna, Lord of Carrascal. Her great grandfather, Juan Pacheco, Lord of Montalbán, headed one of the most powerful noble families in Spain.10 As executor, Diego was responsible for collecting, administering, and disbursing large sums of funds: tributary rents from Toledo’s San Juan Bautista Hospital, rents from the sales tax from Toledo and its hinterland granted by the Crown, and rents from land in Montalbán applied to the chapel of Santa Epifanía in Toledo.11 In short, Diego administered one of Toledo’s great fortunes, a job for a reputable gentleman of some means. This small cross-­section of the Hospital de Santiago’s patient population highlights the variability in class, economic means, reputation, gender, and marital status among individuals seeking treatment. The typical image of poxed hospital patients – poor, young, and male – does not stack up to the more complex reality of those entering the Hospital de Santiago. Indeed, patients represented all walks of life to be found among the heterogeneous population of Toledo, its environs, and beyond. This variability rested on the hospital’s provision of free quality care, the country’s lack of private physicians, and the economic and migratory pressures touching all strata of Spanish society at the time. The Patient Population Uncovered That the patient population attending the Hospital de Santiago was anything but homogenous is reflected in hospital records. When a patient was admitted, the hospital notary recorded his or her name, place of birth and/or residence, and marital status and name of spouse, or name of parents if the patient were single. In addition, since patients had to wear a chemise during treatment, their clothes were left in consignment and were duly detailed in the patient entry book, from the type of garment and the fabric to, when it deviated from the norm, its state – whether new, old, or tattered.12 Examining the listing of patients’ places of residence provides a good indication of the various populations the hospital served. Though

58  From Body to Community Table 3.1 Hospital patients by residence and gender Men

% men by res

Women

% women by res

Total

953 (23.5) 1396 (34.5) 1522 (37.6) 98 (2.4) 83 (2.0)

Toledo (city) Toledo (province) Rest of Spain Foreign Unknown

658 (21.0) 1023 (32.7) 1284 (41.1) 94 (3.0) 68 (2.2)

295 373 238 4 15

(31.9) (40.3) (25.7) (0.4) (1.6)

TOTAL

3127

925

(100)

(100)

4052

% by res

(100)

ideally devoted to treating Toledo’s citizens, the hospital attracted an inordinate number of patients from outside the city walls – in fact, non-­ Toledanos constituted by far the largest group of people treated at the hospital. This element of the Hospital de Santiago contrasts markedly with many other institutions across Europe. For instance, hospitals in Augsburg, Germany, often stipulated that only residents of Augsburg were to receive care. The same can be said for most incurabili hospitals in various Italian jurisdictions – with Rome’s San Giacomo an important exception to the rule.13 The number of outsiders, especially men, is striking at first glance. Indeed, male patients from Toledo itself comprised only 21 per cent of the total male patient population, with the rest trekking in mostly from the surrounding countryside (32.7 per cent), or even farther afield (44.1 per cent of the total male population consisted of patients from the rest of Spain and foreigners). Granted, many of those beyond the province of Toledo seeking treatment at the Hospital de Santiago hailed from the surrounding areas, especially Madrid and Ciudad Real. For instance, many would-­be male patients came from villages close to Toledo’s borders, such as Chinchón and Colmenar de Oreja in Madrid (42 and 84 patients respectively), or Almagro or Campo de Criptana in Ciudad Real (21 and 16 patients respectively). Nevertheless, others came from much farther away. Just consider that itinerant Galician men accounted for 135 patients; male travellers from Asturias numbered 60 – and these numbers do not include the 26 men from these northern regions who had already settled in the city of Toledo and may be considered local residents. Not only was the early modern movement of people across the Iberian Peninsula, and indeed around Europe and the Mediterranean, rather common (13 Italians, 22 Irishmen, and 40 Frenchmen were among those appearing at the

Melting Pot  59

Hospital de Santiago), but the mountainous northern regions of Spain, including Galicia and Santander, seemed to have been net exporters of young men seeking fortune, or mere livelihood, due to the poor economic conditions at home.14 Many of them may simply have been passing through the city of Toledo when they became ill and sought treatment. Others, however, had chosen to settle there. Consider the case of Alonso de Lomas, originally from Galicia. Alonso was apparently well-­travelled. According to his will of 30 January 1657, he was married to Inés Rodríguez, but she lived close to Seville in Southern Spain. Like many men from Galicia, Alonso had probably travelled south in search of opportunity, but, as early as 1650, he had left his wife and moved to Toledo. Obviously he had no contact with her or his sons – the oldest being an adult by the mid-­1650s – for he stated in his will, “[N]or have I found out if my said wife and children are dead.”15 Although he was treated for the pox in the spring of 1656, Alonso was now on his deathbed.16 As befitted someone who had made a new life in Toledo, most of the outstanding debts or credits in his will concerned local neighbours: Juan Gutiérrez and his wife owed him 400 reales from the sale of a mule; Francisco de la Casa owed him 150 reales for a loan; Alonso himself owed mule driver Francisco Rodríguez 24 reales. For someone who, upon marriage, brought no capital into the partnership, the decision to leave wife and children behind had proved profitable, as he had found a degree of economic stability in Toledo. Others may have taken the opportunity of a sojourn in the Imperial City to treat their venereal sores, the added bonus of discretion and safety from prying eyes back home a not insubstantial inducement. Joan de la Casa was from Toulouse, but he resided at court in Madrid, like many Frenchmen before him.17 He seems to have had some connections, as Doña Úrsula de Soria, widow of a Toledo councilman and controller of the estate of Agustin Pérez de Úbeda, contracted him on 21 June 1657 to appear before authorities in Madrid to secure a post as administrator of the alcabalas (sales taxes) of Illescas. Apparently the town council of Illescas was not doing a good enough job of collecting these taxes and, as a major shareholder in the proceeds, Doña Úrsula wished to take more direct control over them.18 Joan must have arrived in Toledo shortly thereafter to pick up this power of attorney in person, since by 28 September he had entered the Hospital de Santiago for treatment, remaining there for 17 days.19 Business in Toledo gave Joan the opportunity to care for a venereal illness in relative privacy.

60  From Body to Community

Just like Joan, other relatively eminent travellers took time from conducting business or networking in Toledo to seek treatment at the Hospital de Santiago. Dr Juan de Leiva, chaplain to the royal chapel of the cathedral of Granada, travelled regularly to Toledo to meet his friend and contact, presbyter Dr Don Tomas Crespo de Moya, whose family hailed from Granada. Apparently, Leiva would often help the latter with business he had down south. For instance, in 1659, Leiva aided Crespo in ensuring that three of the latter’s nieces in Granadan convents received the proceeds they were owed from the rent of a mill close to Granada.20 Likewise, on 11 May 1661, Crespo gave Leiva the task of taking the church of Alfeitar, near Granada, to court over some funds it owed Crespo.21 After receiving the power of attorney, Leiva spent the rest of the summer in Toledo and, by 15 September of the same year, he had entered the Hospital de Santiago in search of treatment for a venereal disease.22 That he was hoping for some protection from wagging tongues seems clear from his attire and his lack of personal disclosure: unlike other clergymen and monks who both entered the hospital in clerical garb and had no problem with providing their titles, convents, or positions within a particular parish, Leiva never mentioned his clerical status or his doctorate, and dressed like any Tom, Dick or Harry – typical woolen garments, including an old pair of pants. He did mention that he came from Granada, and provided his parents’ names. If one had contacts with members of the hospital staff themselves, then all the better. Don Lucas de Andrade y Benavides, a minor nobleman who had served for over a decade as an officer in Spanish armies fighting in Flanders and Italy, finally hung up his arms in 1654, battered by war injuries and, most likely, the pox that would come to haunt him. As a knight of the Order of Santiago, Don Lucas was extremely lucky because he had relatively unfettered access to the hospital as a welcome, honoured guest. Furthermore, he had been born in Toledo, where his family had longstanding ties and reputation: an uncle had served as consultant to the Inquisition there; his grandfather had served as a tax judge in the city; and a maternal uncle had acted as royal notary.23 By the fall of 1656, Don Lucas surfaced at home, where he sought treatment for the French disease at the Hospital de Santiago. However, unlike other patients, he was lodged in the guest quarters, and therefore received much better care. Individuals coming from farther away than Toledo’s hinterland – whether foreign shores, the mountainous Iberian north, the Old Castilian river basins, or the lush southern plains – constituted a sizable portion

Melting Pot  61

of patients who accessed the Hospital de Santiago. But as we have seen, there is much more to patients’ choice of treatment centre than mere origin. Just as many wandering poor found succour in Toledo’s hospital as did those with business or contacts in the city. Ultimately, it is the variability of patient narratives and lives that emerges as salient. Toledo’s Hinterland The Hospital de Santiago’s sterling reputation and the lack of health care resources in the countryside meant the rural towns and villages in Toledo’s hinterland also drew many patients to the hospital. Indeed, 1396, or 34.5 per cent of patients, came from the regions surrounding Toledo. Many were from what was known as the Montes de Toledo, a series of villages under the jurisdiction of Toledo’s city council. Much of the Montes area suffered great economic hardship, partly because of the poor quality of the land, the increasing loss of forest, and the economic control and taxes that Toledo imposed on the area.24 Antonio Sánchez, from the tiny village of Nambroca, who entered the hospital in the fall of 1658, exemplified the poverty that suffused the area: his shoes were so tattered and broken that the hospital noted they were not worth anything.25 Much literary opinion imagined the French disease as a particularly urban scourge, the twin threats of dissolute morality on the part of the upper classes and overly free women who sold their bodies shaping what seemed like an unstoppable surge of venereal disease.26 It is in this context that we find nostalgic references to the rural village as an idyllic paradise free from the immorality of the day and its consequences. Without irony, Fray Antonio de Guevara built an impossible image of pastoral peace in his 1539 Menosprecio de corte y alabanza de aldea, which painted a picture of robust rustics leading healthy, full lives, free of disease, including the pox. “Oh blessed village, and blessed he who lives in it, for there no pox reaches, no scabies sticks, they do not know of cancer, they never heard of palsy, gout has no family, no kidney sufferers exist, side stich does not have a home, obstructions do not live there, spleen problems do not arise, never does the liver inflame, nobody faints, and none dies from indigestion!” praised the disenchanted friar.27 But the reality of rural life fell far behind such optimistic dreams. Other authorial assessments were more candid about the everyday threat of venereal disease in areas that were particularly noteworthy for more unfettered premarital sexuality. For instance, Miguel de Colodrero’s 1642 Golosinas del ingenio, a collection of witty epigrams

62  From Body to Community

that satirized the contradictions of village life, included a much more realistic perspective on the travails of sexuality. Speaking of a young village woman who was having a dalliance with a farm hand, Colodrero gives a sense of the threat conceived in such an encounter: Yesterday in the meadow Juana told me that a spirited youth gave her a sore and it is true that he gives it to her. Constantly she complained and one thousand times she repeated that she felt a French effect, being Spanish, the cause.28

Beyond the playful literary convention of contrasting venereal illness and health in nationalistic terms, as befitted an illness known widely as the French disease, the author’s understanding of the dangers inherent in common sexual practices reflects the facility with which a young village person’s life could be turned upside down by venereal infection. Women from the rural areas surrounding Toledo constituted a whopping 40.3 per cent of all female patients at the Hospital de Santiago (373 admissions) in the period discussed here – the largest female group by geographical region. Men from the same area accounted for 32.7 per cent of all male patients (1023 admissions), second only to men hailing from elsewhere in Spain. That Toledo would have attracted these patients from its hinterlands is not surprising given the dearth of quality health care resources available to those people. Perusing Philip II’s questionnaire on various aspects of municipal life – the Relaciones topográficas – for Toledo’s surrounding area provides a stark reminder of the sheer paucity of appropriate health care for those living in rural areas, far from large urban centers.29 Of the 168 municipalities – both towns and villages – surveyed for the region surrounding Toledo, only 76 had hospitals. More problematically, however, most of these so-­called hospitals merely provided charity for the wandering poor for perhaps one or two nights. As the village of Burguillos responded to the question on hospitals, “In this village there is a home called the Hospital of Jesus, founded and constructed by Gutierre de Carrión, a citizen of Toledo and owner of a local estate, so that the pilgrims who pass through here may sleep there, although for no more than one night.”30 A place for indigent travellers to stop, sleep, and receive a good meal and treatment for minor ailments constituted a traditional model of the rural hospital

Melting Pot  63

as provider of charity. The Hospital de Santiago, on the other hand, had moved – along with most urban hospitals – to a model of specialized health care provision.31 Of course, part of the problem for rural institutions was their sheer lack of resources. The aforementioned hospital in Burguillos actually was lucky, as it could count on an income of 3,000 maravedís. If money allowed, a mixed model of refuge for the wandering poor and medical centre could guide the institution’s mission, as was the case with the hospital in the village of Cuerva, which spent 2,250 maravedís (mrs) on food for the travelling poor but also provided medical treatment for some sick persons, paid for directly by the lords of the village.32 Of the 101 hospitals listed in the Relaciones, 20 gave no budgetary information, 39 reported no regular income save for any charity they received from individuals, 28 had yearly incomes of up to 10,000 maravedís, and 14 could boast of budgets above this figure.33 Considering that Toledo’s Hospital de Santiago enjoyed a staggering income of over 4.3 million maravedís in this time period, the gulf between it and its rural counterparts could not have been more pronounced.34 Only five of the rural hospitals – all within larger, more urbanized centers – breeched the 100,000 maravedí mark: the hospital of the town of Ocaña, which had amalgamated all its small institutions into a large one (100,000 mrs); the hospital of Puente del Arzobispo, which, given its direct control by Toledo’s archbishop, could count on substantial aid (374,000 mrs); the Hospital de la Caridad, the largest of seven hospitals in the important town of Talavera de la Reina (149,600 mrs); and both hospitals in Torrijos – the Santísima Trinidad (180,000 mrs) and the Advocación de Nuestra Señora (200,000 mrs).35 Of all these, only the last institution was known specifically to treat the pox, as mentioned by the villagers of neighbouring Noves, and suggested by records of Torrijos itself when describing the hospital.36 The budgetary discrepancy between Toledo’s Hospital de Santiago and its rural counterparts, as well as the former’s special mission to treat the French disease, meant that villagers from Toledo’s rural surroundings flocked to it. After all, where else could one obtain such good health care for the pox? The Imperial City Having considered the foreigners, Spaniards from across the peninsula, and villagers from the hinterlands who accounted for most of the Hospital de Santiago’s patients, we arrive at the Toledanos themselves.

64  From Body to Community

Though a minority, they still comprised a substantial number of admissions to the Hospital de Santiago: 295 women (31.9 per cent of female admissions) and 658 men (21 per cent of male admissions). Because supplementary sources, such as notarial records, are more readily available for patients from Toledo, we can garner a great deal more information about their daily lives, employment, and relative status. As we might expect considering the differences in income and conspicuous consumption between urban areas and the countryside, the Toledanos who attended the Hospital de Santiago seemed to have enjoyed better economic fortunes than their rural counterparts. Obviously, however, poverty was not unknown in Toledo. Recall the tale in the Introduction of hapless Joan Amador, an unemployed brickmaker who sought hospital treatment in the spring of 1655 wearing little more than rags. Economic recession and uncertainty in different trades and professions could wreak havoc on families and communities. Indeed, Joan’s own brother, Martín Amador, also came to hospital on the same day wearing clothing so tattered they were indescribable.37 The brickmaking industry had once been prosperous, but the rising costs of the charcoal and wood used to heat the ovens in which bricks were baked meant it was slowly disappearing. The problem had started in the late fifteenth century, as population growth meant Toledo’s hinterland was increasingly transformed to arable land while the native monte (woodland) dwindled. Together with slash-­and-­burn techniques and increasing demand for charcoal, this meant that deforestation soon worsened. By the mid-­sixteenth century, Toledo’s city council was attempting to fix the price of bricks, but to no avail.38 By the seventeenth century the problem was so acute and the industry so diminished that only four brick makers were listed in the 1636 Toledo census.39 The problems associated with the brick industry meant that both Joan and Martín were not only penniless but unemployed when they were admitted to hospital. Though eventually Joan would obtain a loan to start his own brickmaking business, his admission to the hospital in 1655 reflected the poverty we have come to expect from pox patients.40 But in the aggregate comparison between Toledanos and rural patients, the Amador brothers seem to constitute an anomaly. Toledanos who sought care at the Hospital de Santiago were, for the most part, better-­dressed and wealthier than their rural fellows. As we will explore in chapter 4, Toledanos wore better clothing overall: not only were fewer of their garments considered old or tattered, but they also wore more silk.

Melting Pot  65

We have already encountered Don Diego de Chaves, administrator of a noble estate, strutting into the hospital with his sartorial wealth on display like a peacock. Likewise, in 1657, Josepha Escobar, married to Tomás Martínez, entered the hospital wearing the appropriate garments for a respectable urban lady: a long silk cloak, quality woolen overskirts adorned with lace, and even silk stockings.41 No working-­ class apron for Josepha, unsurprisingly, as her father had enough means to be included among those voluntarily donating money to the Crown in 1632.42 Indeed, Josepha’s father was comfortable enough to be able to lend 5,000 reales in 1660 to a Toledo merchant, Bernardo de Aguado.43 Also consider Don Diego de las Cuevas, a patient in 1654 and 1655.44 Although he hailed from the countryside, he was living in Toledo by then, working for the dean of Toledo’s cathedral. As someone ordained in minor orders, his work probably consisted largely of administrative duties. Regardless, among other garments, he wore an imported doublet of quality woolen, a silk belt, and stockings of “pure silk” according to the notary. By 1657, he had advanced in his career far enough to receive from Toledo’s archbishop a lucrative benefice in the city of Guadalajara.45 As we encounter a host of patients, especially from Toledo, coming from the middling classes, with either familial connections or jobs in administration that left some disposable income and probably distanced them from the plight of the truly poor, a question arises: Why would these people decide to seek treatment at a venereal disease hospital – to undergo the travails of public health care and share their misfortunes with the destitute? Certainly, the course of treatment for the French disease was not for the faint-­hearted. As we will see in more detail in chapter 5, patients admitted to the Hospital de Santiago were treated for an average of two weeks. Not only were they normally weakened by preparatory bloodletting and purging, but the specific means used to rid the body of venereal skin lesions was lengthy and painful. Nurses’ aids rubbed patients’ joints with a mercury-­based ointment and thereafter bundled them up to sweat out the malignant humours. The process engendered a host of side effects, including copious salivation, and, over time, inflamed gums, joint pain, and even loss of teeth. Even when, by the late eighteenth century, physicians started seeking gentler methods for treating the French disease, the Hospital de Santiago kept to the method of salivation, as it was commonly known.46 The course of treatment

66  From Body to Community

also required a well-­planned diet. This was difficult not only because of the tenderness of the gums, which made eating and drinking much more laborious than normal, but, depending on the specific patient’s humoural makeup, specific dietary needs had to be met. Patients were also likely to suffer from decreased tolerance to light and constant fatigue, all of which necessitated rest and quiet.47 Pantaleón de Ribera – the celebrated poet afflicted with the pox – has left us with unforgettable lines on the difficult experience of the treatment course for such a patient: Like a drunk I am from Ameque48 and like a cherry are my three powers of the soul from fumeroot and magistral compound. Here, after so many jugfuls as I have suffered and after so much sweat from suffocating heater, More spit am I drooling than a reined sorrel horse. Trying with my salivation to spit out my malady. How we both drool in the bed and in the hallway the mercury ointments that, as if I were your mule, everyone says you give me. Oh, finally kill me if it is in the fates! Let the sacristan double his tolls at the funeral.49

Treatment at home with all its comforts was difficult enough; imagine what it was like in a hospital where one or two physicians cared for up to fifty patients at a time. We would thus expect patients of some means, like the aforementioned Don Diego de Chaves, to seek private treatment. But one of the problems Toledanos faced was a dearth of qualified medical personnel. Many had left for the greater opportunities to be found at court, leaving cities like Toledo and its surrounding countryside with few qualified professionals.50 Thus, in 1636, we find only six physicians and seven surgeons listed among the Toledo

Melting Pot  67

residents contributing funds to the monarchy. Many of them worked for health care and religious institutions, such as Cristóbal Bermudez, who attended the Toledo inquisitors.51 Even if these medical professionals do not account for the totality of doctors and surgeons in the city, those who could not afford to make the “voluntary” contributions to the monarchy were likely not in demand, if they were even qualified at all. The countryside suffered a worse lack of medical personnel: even though 80 to 90 per cent of Spaniards lived in rural areas, most villages did not have any physicians working there, with locals having to rely on barbers for basic medical care as late as the eighteenth century.52 Another aspect that probably contributed to the willingness of patients of some means to seek treatment at the Hospital de Santiago was the excellent care the institution was reputed to provide. Despite the economic hardship that Toledo suffered throughout the seventeenth century which meant the closure of many smaller medical institutions, the Hospital de Santiago’s good mix of rents and other forms of income allowed it to continue providing health care at a high level. Indeed, the hospital had always had an enviable reputation for high-­quality care. In one of his poems, Sebastián de Horozco provided kind words for the Hospital de Santiago and its administrator. And so that [sufferers’] devotion is not left without prize and payment their congregation their council and advocacy will take place in Toledo’s Santiago where the general superintendent and the great administrator as usual will give them what they require and all aid and favor.53

Such an assessment might have been more than literary hyperbole, and in fact based on everyday assumptions about the hospital. When Toledo reported on its hospitals to Philip II, it included a glowing panegyric to the Hospital de Santiago’s indispensable work and quality of treatment. “It is a very distinguished hospital and more necessary than all others because our sensuality is so unbridled in the sexual act, that the corruption from the French Disease strikes more easily than other illnesses, especially among young people who are taken care of in two

68  From Body to Community

seasons per year ... And they are provided better treatment and with more understanding and precautions than that which they may receive at home, even if rich.”54 Leaving aside the moralizing about licentiousness, the Hospital de Santiago enjoyed such renown that it was thought to provide better treatment than even the wealthy could afford at home. Such views seem to have been reflected in patients’ attitudes. In the late sixteenth century, Toledanos of means actually paid the institution to have their slaves who were afflicted with the pox treated there.55 Even more indicative of the hospital’s reputation, in 1656 the well-­off Joan Manuel Moreno paid for his own treatment, as mentioned by the notary on his release record.56 Joan Manuel could have, like many other people of means, simply received treatment at the hospital for free, but, perhaps guided by a sense of responsibility, he had no qualms about paying his own way here rather than having a private physician care for him. That he could afford the payment was obvious: his shoes were listed as “good” and his stockings were made from imported Genoese fabric – although it is unclear whether they were of silk or woolen thread.57 Nevertheless, we know Joan Manuel came from a local merchant family that lived in some comfort. When his father died in 1642, the estate amounted to at least 54,000 reales – 24,000 of which would be divided equally among six brothers and sisters, including Joan Manuel.58 While Joan Manuel might not have been rich, he was certainly comfortable enough to pay his way at a hospital where most, even the wealthy, obtained health care for free. Indeed, the practice of the wealthy accessing treatment at the Hospital de Santiago and, presumably, taking spots away from the needy troubled hospital administrators. The institution’s rules were clear enough on the matter: the hospital was there to treat the poor, to the point where admission was to be granted at the discretion of the administrator on the basis of the severity of the disease and the poverty of the would-­be patient.59 And yet waiting in line to enter the hospital we routinely find well-­dressed gentlemen and ladies, their probable wealth no obstacle to accessing health care. The admission of the not-­quite-­poor was a recurring problem for hospital administrators. In a 1712 letter to his superiors in Madrid, hospital administrator Ignacio de Losada refers to the continuing difficulties in changing this practice. I understand that having reformed the mode and abuse of admitting in this hospital others than the poor, as literally outlined in its constitutions and by order of the Council in 1594, I judge this issue to be of interest to

Melting Pot  69 the Council as there is need to renew this provision, because at the present there exist all the same inconveniences and motives that were in place back then when initially promulgated in order to reform the hospital personnel so that we may serve our offices and exactly comply with our obligations which at present are ignored with extreme insolence in everything so that I cannot find remedy for the situation.60

Given the relatively small and closed society of Toledo, the problem of staying within the hospital’s admissions mandate and the apparent lack of interest on the part of most hospital personnel in admitting only the poor is not surprising. Ties of kinship, economic interest, and mere neighbourly regard may well have prevented administrators like the hapless Losada from applying the regulations rigorously. Regardless, the complaints about the well-­to-­do accessing the hospital in fact reflect its good standing among Toledanos of all ranks, and their willingness to seek health care for their venereal ailments within its walls. An analysis of the patient population of the Hospital de Santiago reveals a socioeconomic, gendered, and geographic mix of individuals who, finding themselves in the terrible bind of carrying a venereal ailment, sought succour at this institution. Although scholarship has tended to group early modern hospital patients – and especially the poxed – under the all-­encompassing category of the poor, an inchoate mass of the destitute and forlorn, digging behind their illness to examine broader familial, financial, and geographic connections reveals the sheer heterogeneity of the people the Hospital de Santiago served. From foreigners and outsiders to Castile – people like Gallegos and Asturianos – to poor farmhands from rural villages and the proud citizens of Toledo itself, from the truly needy finding their way to the hospital in little more than rags to the economically comfortable sporting the latest sartorial trends, those who entered the Hospital de Santiago came from all walks of life. As much as a lack of alternative health care options, even in Toledo itself, conspired to make the hospital the place to be for the poxed, so did its renown, and the public knowledge of the good care Santiago provided to all who entered its gates. Poxed they may have been, but these patients represented a microcosm of Spanish society at large, with all its complexities, ambiguities, and differences of status.

Chapter 4

Safeguarding Reputation: Gender, Hospitalization, and Textiles

As the morning breeze brought respite from the heat that had been punishing Toledo, a good crowd gathered outside the Hospital de Santiago. The hospital followed common contemporary medical opinion in favouring treatment in temperate climes, and this morning, 15 September, marked the opening of the fall 1656 curing season. Thanks to widely read announcements, word had spread. Twenty-­five men and women from the city proper and from neighbouring villages waited patiently under the watchful eye of an imposing Santiago carved in bas relief on the hospital’s façade for hospital officials to admit them.1 Among them stood Doña Isabel Jiménez Tirado, wearing garments befitting her station: silk stockings, a woolen petticoat, a silk bodice, and two floor-­length gowns, an inner woolen one and an outer one of blue damask. The black silk cloak, indispensable to any well-­bred urban woman, completed the picture Doña Isabel wished to project – that of a reputable lady.2 The degree to which Isabel’s image corresponded with her economic reality is difficult to determine and points to the problems of considering textiles alone as evidence of status. On the one hand, some of the garments she wore would probably have been out of reach for many urban poor. In fact, the likely cost of her silk cloak alone represented almost one year’s salary for a servant woman in that time and place.3 Moreover, based on the dowry agreement Isabel’s mother had forged with her daughter’s fiancée, surgeon Juan de Frutos, just one year before, Isabel seems to have owned a host of silk garments, fine jewellery, and furniture.4 On the other hand, if we consider that almost one-­quarter of her dowry of 426 ducats and almost all the cash on hand came from a lottery for reputable maidens that Doña Isabel had

Safeguarding Reputation  71

won from a respected local convent, the spectre rises of the Jiménez Tirado family belonging to the malleable category of the shamefaced poor. Unlike the urban destitute who had little in terms of economic means, the shamefaced poor consisted of reputable families who, due to varying circumstances such as Toledo’s economic decline, found themselves unable to lead the lives their station required; the discreet charity of a convent lottery thus provided for crucial things like dowries.5 Ultimately, despite the substantial information, both material and notarial, we have on Isabel, our knowledge of her economic status remains slippery at best. But the question of whether Isabel was wealthy or not, shamefaced poor or financially comfortable, obscures the fact that her garments speak to more than just economic status; they also address the image she wished to project. Her case is thus even more interesting considering her active choices in seeking care. Her surgeon husband could have treated her at home, but she nonetheless chose hospital treatment. And in addition to wearing the urban matron’s requisite silk cloak, she chose to showcase her status by donning the damask gown listed among her dowry’s prized possessions, rather than either of the other two less-­ expensive woolen gowns she owned.6 Isabel had chosen to dress up for the occasion. And when we examine the larger patterns female patients from Toledo exhibited, we find that she was not alone in doing so. Though perhaps wealthier than other female patients, she was by no means exceptional in her efforts to showcase her resources, her status, her identity. Like Isabel, most women who sought succour for their venereal ailments at the Hospital de Santiago wore garments that, whenever possible, conveyed wealth and luxury as they were admitted. Some did so in true style, wearing reams of silk, expensive passementerie, and gold and silver accessories. Others, while wearing garments that had seen better days, still managed to have that one note of luxurious wealth – usually a long silk cloak – that conveyed respectability.7 Strikingly, this phenomenon of dressing up as one entered the Hospital de Santiago seems to have been gendered. Women tended to display greater sartorial wealth than their male counterparts, even if the realities of household economies at this time suggest that men would generally have had more readily available income to spend on clothing. Female patients from Toledo displayed such sartorial elegance and luxury upon entering the Hospital de Santiago that it behooves us to examine more closely the cultural expectations placed on them, the socioeconomic pressures they faced,

72  From Body to Community Table 4.1 Patients wearing ragged or valueless garments Men

Toledo (city) Outside Toledo

Women

N

Total Patients

%

N

Total Patients

%

95 435

658 2469

(14.4) (17.6)

35 156

295 630

(11.9) (24.8)

and the way their garments framed their public image. In a context of increasing conspicuous consumption closely tied to the representation of status, female patients’ dress constituted body scripts – how others were meant to read them – that emphasized respectability.8 Gendering Patient Sartorial Choices When we examine the detailed descriptions of patients’ garments available from the Hospital de Santiago’s admissions book, the startling pattern that jumps out is that women from Toledo were by far the best-­dressed patients. Considering their urban male counterparts could have been expected generally to enjoy greater financial means than they did, the way sartorial choices were gendered to reflect a female penchant for luxury speaks to specific choices on the part of patients. Following notarial standards that sought to approximate a value for items of clothing, the hospital notary routinely assigned descriptors such as “new,” “good,” “worn,” “old,” “very old,” and “not worth anything” to individual items patients consigned for safeguarding upon admission.9 Garments of reasonable quality received no descriptors, as notaries seem to have assumed basic wear-­and-­tear. As can be seen in Table 4.1, women from Toledo were the least likely to wear items considered valueless or tattered, descriptors that scholarship on comparable hospitals elsewhere considers a measure of rates of poverty.10 While one-­quarter of women from outside the city entered the hospital wearing at least one item in very poor condition, just over one-­ tenth of Toledanas did so. Not only that, but men from Toledo, who we would assume, given equal conditions, would have more resources at their disposal than did women, demonstrated a higher propensity (14.4 per cent) to wear valueless or tattered clothing. A similar pattern can be found when we examine the fabrics patients wore. For fabrics, as seen in Table 4.2, the crucial divide signalling sartorial luxury was that between silks and woolens. Silks were generally

Safeguarding Reputation  73 Table 4.2 Patients’ clothing by fabric

Residence and Gender Toledo Men Women Outside Toledo Men Women

Woolens (N)

Silks (N)

Total

% of Silk Items

2433 1160

388 259

2821 1419

(13.7) (18.3)

9247 2142

812 201

10059 2343

(8.1) (8.6)

more expensive than woolens and traditionally considered a sign of status. As historians of material culture have shown, silk’s desirability and the growth of consumer culture meant its consumption relative to woolens grew dramatically between 1500 and 1800.11 To many policymakers, however, the increasing appearance of silks on those deemed unworthy of its status signalled moral and economic catastrophe. The Count-­Duke of Olivares’s much-­ballyhooed reform program designed to lift Spain out of its steady decline in the 1620s emphasized preventing the conspicuous consumption of silks precisely because of this fear of what unworthy silk-­clad bodies might signal. The consistent reintroduction of sumptuary laws from the late sixteenth century well into the 1600s nonetheless points to the state’s inability to prevent the widespread use of this fabric. Not only were artisans, farmers, and laborers prohibited from wearing silk, except as part of head gear, but their wives “may only wear silk in bodices or caps, and silk trimming in their wool cloaks,” states a law originally promulgated by Charles V and confirmed nine times by his successors before 1625.12 In Toledo proper, prostitutes were strictly forbidden from wearing silk cloaks to avoid the appearance of respectability.13 Once more, Toledo’s women come out on top when it comes to the luxuriousness of the clothing they wore as they entered hospital. While only 13.7 per cent of the garments of male Toledano patients were silk, Toledanas were more inclined to luxury, with an incredible 18.3 per cent of their listed clothing items being silk.14 Given the importance of Toledo’s silk industry, the material’s higher preponderance among the city’s residents may be expected. The remarkable aspect here, however, remains not only that women were wearing more expensive clothing than men, but that they were still doing so in the midst of Toledo’s harsh economic crisis of the seventeenth century. When we consider

74  From Body to Community

that in 1618, as the crisis in Toledo’s silk industry was only starting to show, national consumption averages of silk were lower as a percentage than those exhibited by Toledanas admitted to the Hospital de Santiago by mid-­century, it speaks volumes to the commitment patients had either to keeping or investing in expensive silk garments.15 Cultural Models Affecting Female Pox Patients That the Hospital de Santiago’s female patients would consistently choose to dress so well upon admission to the institution speaks to particular bodily techniques for representing the self, as we saw with Isabel Jiménez Tirado. Women’s material culture was connected to representational strategies because public comportment and image were read closely, especially in a situation such as entering the Hospital de Santiago. Indeed, admission to the hospital was not an anonymous process. Rather than being hidden from public view outside the city walls, the hospital was located a mere fifty metres from Toledo’s main square, Zocodover. Even today, one need walk just a few steps downhill from the square to where, until its demolition in the nineteenth century, the hospital stood, perched above the city walls and overlooking the flowing Tagus below. Few, in a place so public, could have entered the hospital unnoticed. And during this time, the street served as an arena in which reputation was continuously assessed, often brawled over, and negotiated through public ritual and rules of precedence.16 The context in which female patients deployed garments as social texts to convey familial status was one of cultural pressures that informed their public access to venereal disease care. Indeed, despite the myriad examples of women like Isabel Jiménez who sought care openly, many women with the pox failed to do so.17 Husbands of female patients were 2.3 times more likely than wives of male patients to enter the Hospital de Santiago. In this vein, consider the curious case of Toledo’s Elena Rodríguez. Her husband, Juan Sánchez de Palencia was treated at the hospital in 1658. By 1663, however, we find an already-­widowed Elena herself on the verge of death and making a will. Given her husband’s pox, chances are Elena was dying of the same disease, and yet she never sought care at the Hospital de Santiago. Where did she go instead, if anywhere? A clue in her will points to the Hospital del Rey, an institution for incurable diseases that did not admit French disease patients. Although she left bequests to various charities in her will, only the Hospital del Rey received money – 300 reales. Was she indicating

Safeguarding Reputation  75

thankfulness for treatment received there despite that hospital’s policy not to admit patients with the pox?18 Although we cannot say conclusively, the evidence does at least suggest an issue on Elena’s part with seeking care at the Hospital de Santiago. The problem that women who required public treatment for the pox faced was that, from their point of view, no truly useful models of respectable female suffering of venereal disease existed. Effectively, all the cultural models that framed female pox sufferers hinged on women’s sexuality. For better or worse, no matter the instances of women’s willingness to snub prescriptions in practice, the discursive association of female sexuality with personal and familial reputation presented a disincentive to seek public treatment for the French disease. While it is obvious that the women who sought care at the Hospital de Santiago effectively did not share these prescriptive views, the ways in which the community read their very public entry into the institution potentially hindered their access to health care. None of the available models for female pox sufferers – shameless prostitute, virtuous maiden, or wronged wife – provided the needed practical framework to access health care. That all these cultural frames available to women hinged on sexuality reflects the understanding of the French disease as a venereal and moral illness from the moment it struck in epidemic fashion in the 1490s. In a 1497 treatise, physician Francisco López de Villalobos incorporated sexuality in addition to traditional theories of miasma, or bad air, into his etiology of the disease. Not only, he argued, did the humoural imbalance starting in the liver manifest itself first in the sexual organs, but those men who frequently enjoyed intercourse with women weakened their bodies, rendering them susceptible to the illness.19 Furthermore, as a Christian scientist, he agreed with theological opinions asserting that “the said illness has arrived due to the lust in which people today sin, an appropriate and most just sentence, for such the sin, such the penance.”20 Connecting sexual behaviour and disease, Villalobos not only confirmed prevalent opinion and observable data, but framed the ill as sinners. As elsewhere in Europe, the confluence of the pox and Christian notions of sin meant women were increasingly blamed.21 Specifically, prostitutes emerged as the central cultural model of female venereal disease sufferer. They represented an easy target because Renaissance physicians increasingly constructed the female body as the site of poxed infection, an object that through its pollution spread disease to innocent men. The influential Spanish writer Ruy Díaz de la Isla proposed physicians regularly examine prostitutes to prevent the spread of the French

76  From Body to Community

disease.22 Likewise, Juan Calvo chided his male readership about reinfection after treatment, saying that “if those who are cured later have it again, it is because they (like a dog to vomit) return to have sexual excess with infected women, who will once, again, and many times infect them.”23 Calvo’s paraphrasing of the biblical proverb “As a dog returns to his own vomit, so a fool repeats his folly” (Proverbs 26:11) resonates because of its debasing objectification of women. Such assessments were translated into specific policy on infected prostitutes. As early as 1502, Antoine de Lalaing, travelling with Philip the Fair’s court, visited the Valencian public brothels and remarked that two surgeons inspected the women weekly, sending those infected for treatment. By 1512, the city’s General Hospital devoted a specific ward to this end. Valencian authorities eventually required prostitutes to present health certificates before joining brothels.24 In Toledo, the city council incorporated Philip II’s 1571 provision outlining the management of brothels, and thus also participated in the bureaucratization of prostitutes’ bodies. Accordingly, the council contracted with a physician and a surgeon to visit brothels monthly, identify infected women, and send them for treatment.25 At the same time, the administrator of the Hospital de Santiago also acted as the overseer for the city’s own Magdalene house, Our Mother of Piety, founded in 1550 with the purpose reforming fallen women, thereby further cementing the public connection among pox, prostitutes, and the hospital.26 Such persistent institutional and medical identification of the French disease with female prostitution echoed in literary culture. Picaresque novels, relishing tales of the Spanish underworld, often framed prostitutes as diseased. As we saw in chapter 1, works like La Lozana andaluza and El casamiento engañoso focused on poxed prostitutes as protagonists. Even allusions in La Celestina to popular remedies for venereal sores point to a subtle undertone of venereal infection.27 Though less-­known, Juan Martí’s apocryphal Guzmán de Alfarache (1602) also provides a fascinating window into the unstable boundary between prostitute and honourable woman in relation to disease.28 Upon visiting Madrid, Guzmán takes an evening stroll along the Prado only to face both tantalizing sensuality and terrifying illness in a prostitute he encounters in a dark corner. Guzmán falls for her beautiful ivory hands and rich seductive voice, yet, unable to see her features clearly, and thereby see the truth “regarding such merchandise,” he checks himself. Eventually he moves along, for, despite his powerful desire, “I sensed such a pestilential odour when getting closer to her.” Having come so

Safeguarding Reputation  77

perilously close to woman as tempting sin and polluting disease, the protagonist then launches into an invective on female licentiousness. “Women do not care for their health or that of others, for we see that from their great excesses of vice, they all burst with bubas (pox) and infect those who touch them,” thunders Guzmán, effectively generalizing the problem of venereal infection from one prostitute to all women, and intentionally blurring the differences between the two categories.29 The focus on prostitution as the source of venereal ills did not make this model attractive to everyday women seeking treatment publicly. Not only was the Hospital de Santiago already associated with prostitution through its connection to Toledo’s Magdalene house, as we have seen, but “prostitute” constituted the most common insult that could sully a woman’s reputation. Indeed, inquisitorial defendants often accused female witnesses of prostitution or loose sexual behaviour as a way of discrediting their testimony.30 Writing on women, Toledo’s Horozco spared no harshness, calling them, among other things, “balding and hungry whores,” in reference to the loss of hair caused by the pox.31 Moreover, commenting on the royal court’s stay in Toledo in 1560, he launched into an invective against the prostitutes who descended on the city at the time and spread venereal disease.32 Not surprisingly, then, few women attending hospital wore garments identified with prostitution. With typical Renaissance zeal for outward markers of deviance, the Toledo city council had mandated that prostitutes should identify themselves with yellow mantillas, or short cloaks.33 Despite the dizzying array of colours available for women’s garments, and the thousands of items described in hospital records, few patients wore yellow.34 In fact, only two women appear wearing the yellow mantilla: Antonia Serrano, an unmarried woman, and the married María González. Both women came from Madrid, but Antonia resided in Toledo.35 It is hard to know what to make of these garments. Although Philip IV’s moralizing reforms of the 1620s had officially banned brothels throughout Spain, prostitution continued operating either clandestinely or with tacit support from city governments. These two women might very well have been prostitutes advertising their services through their clothing. Certainly others could have read these body scripts this way. Regardless, both the negative connotations of prostitution and the official crackdown on it meant that the yellow garments associated with it were rare among women admitted to the Hospital de Santiago. The deliberate avoidance of associations with prostitution makes sense considering that almost half of female patients admitted to the

78  From Body to Community

hospital were unmarried. Premarital sexuality, even if tacitly accepted under some circumstances such as a promise of marriage, remained publicly problematic and potentially detrimental to reputation.36 Fortunately, medical literature provided single women with a possible model for pox infection: the virtuous maiden who acquired the French disease through no fault of her own. Physicians had long worried about the damage such rapidly spreading venereal disease could cause to the reputations of society’s worthier members. The explanation for the widespread presence of the pox among the respectable was its ease of contagion. Physicians proposed that not only touching an ulcer but also having contact with the personal items of the ill could spread the pox. Such assessment, as a reasonable alternative to sexual transmission, was the standard disclaimer in Spanish medical discussions of the appearance of the French disease among maidens.37 How would the public have read the admission of supposed maidens into a French disease hospital? While the hospital enjoyed an excellent reputation for quality care, there are indications that some suspicion surrounded its patients. Certainly, the hospital’s connection to Toledo’s Magdalene house could not have helped matters for single women seeking care there. Moreover, the aforementioned satirical work about a poxed woman, La pícara Justina, set in Toledo and drawn from a wealth of literary and popular sources, provides a possible window into attitudes toward the hospital’s patients.38 Referring to a proverb apparently popularized in the Hospital de Santiago, “The poxed are noble ecclesiastics and sweet-­sounding birds,” Justina argues this was said because the poxed have no problem speaking of themselves and others publicly, and “with no care miss mass and without shame their reputation.”39 With the same gritty voice full of local colour as characters in other Golden Age works on the subject of the Spanish underworld, Justina’s assertion of the shamelessness of pox patients could very well have been based on real Hospital de Santiago patients. Regardless, the evidence available makes it difficult to tell whether single women at the hospital attempted to claim the virtuous maiden model of pox sufferer. Because no external markers, aside from the garments of a nun or a beguine, existed to identify the celibate, the principal drawback of the concept of the poxed maiden touted by physicians remained its interiority, the lack of practical means to assert its validity publicly. Hospital records demonstrate the difficulty of effectively constructing an image of maidenhood so dependent on the interpretive goodwill of others. The notary admitting incoming patients classified

Safeguarding Reputation  79

everyone according to the legal categories of single, married, or widowed. But interestingly enough, few women appear in the hospital record as doncellas, or maidens. Only five females fall under this category – two from Toledo and three from the countryside. Some might well have been prepubescent children infected with congenital French disease. At least one of them, however, María de Guzmán, appears in notarial records as having rented a home in 1656, five years before she sought treatment.40 In a society that encouraged celibacy, believed in non-­sexual pox infection, and suffered a sharp demographic imbalance in favour of women, it is rather surprising that so few women are identified as maidens in the hospital record. The problem for single women, even if they had wished to self-­identify as such, consisted in the medical exam all patients had to undergo before formal admittance.41 Through it, the notaries would be well aware of the infection’s often sexual nature upon recording an admission. Married women with the French disease also had an available popular and literary model – but it was complex and unstable. Given men’s common practice of seeking sexual pleasure outside marriage, one might expect women to be cast as wronged wives.42 For instance, Tirso de Molina’s Santo y Sastre places the maiden Dorotea in such a potential context. As she reads a letter from a suitor seeking marriage and describing what he will give her, a passerby interrupts and yells, “[W]ood and possessiveness!” According to Dorotea’s interlocutor, this is in reference to a jealous husband and the pox with which he will infect Dorotea, and to the use of holy wood (guaiac) to treat the disease.43 In his collection of popular proverbs, Toledo’s Horozco interprets “Ah, the times a man brings to his home the cause of his tears,” as possibly referring to the man who, having “nibbled” here and there, unfortunately brings the French disease into his home.44 Horozco’s cavalier attitude to men’s peccadillos contrasts markedly with the sharp condemnations of women he consistently plucks from popular proverbs, and underscores how easily a wronged wife could turn into a culpable one. Thus, he prefaces his cynical reading of the above proverb with a more standard assessment of the adulterous wife who cuckolds her husband after he foolishly brings a friend home. Probably a French disease sufferer himself, Horozco expressed little sympathy for wayward women in proverbs such as, “A great treasure is the good woman and a great pestilence the bad one”; these dwelled mostly on women’s ethical failings, carnal sensuousness, and the moral and bodily ruin they brought their husbands.45 Moreover, the

80  From Body to Community

one ritualized public occasion upon which a marriage’s dirty secrets were laid bare to popular ridicule was Castile’s version of the charivari, when a cuckolded husband would be paraded through the streets as his adulterous wife – who would later be shamed herself – beat him.46 Thus, although common sense would often point to philandering husbands’ culpability for venereal infection, Castilian civic culture focused on wives’ foibles and sexual sins and could only have complicated matters for women entering the Hospital de Santiago, turning their sexual lives into public fodder. The long-­standing literary tradition of the danger of adulterous wives further buttressed these assessments. Cervantes’s aforementioned work El casamiento engañoso remains the best-­known work of the era on the poxed wife. The protagonist, Lieutenant Campuzano, cuts a sympathetic figure as a man deceived by a swindling woman. Indeed, upon meeting Estefanía de Cayzedo, Campuzano immediately courts the well-­dressed lady, and eventually agrees to marry her upon the promise of a substantial dowry. The situation, however, quickly ravels, as the newlyweds are forced to leave the luxurious home Estefanía had used as a front for her scheme. Once alerted to the discovery of her ploy, she escapes after purloining what meager possessions Campuzano owns, leaving him with not a penny to his name and a venereal infection to boot. The story closes with Campuzano finishing telling his tale to a friend, just outside Valladolid’s pox hospital, wronged and deceived by a conniving woman. Cervantes’s work was part of a wider theme of sinful, swindling, and deceiving wives. Most of the great Golden Age writers, including Góngora, Calderón de la Barca, Quevedo, and Lope de Vega dealt with the theme of the adulterous wife and the ills she caused.47 Clerics, too, contributed their share of condemnation. The famous medieval conduct manual El carro de las donas, reprinted frequently in the sixteenth century, included a passage that by then would have been read in light of pox infection. Referring to wayward and prideful women, the author argues that “God sends them other miserable and terrible fates, landing them in hospitals with buboes, sores, and miseries which humble them back to earth and bring them to the point of desperation.”48 For married women, then, the French disease was a well-­deserved punishment for their pride – as were the abusive husbands who might have infected them. Married women publicly seeking treatment at the Hospital de Santiago did not have it easy. The cultural model of the poxed wife, gleaned from literary and popular sources, cast her as both victim and malefactor.

Safeguarding Reputation  81

Obviously, many women like Isabel Jiménez Tirado sought hospital care for the first time soon after marriage, a probable clue to their husbands’ culpability. Blameless though these wives may have been, however, they had yet more reputational matters to consider upon seeking hospital care. Because treatment at the Hospital de Santiago mainly took the form of mercury ointments strenuously rubbed on patients’ skin, only male nurses applied it. Although female nurses ran the women’s ward, and communication between it and the men’s ward was strictly forbidden, hospital officials were well aware of the problems raised by male nurses applying the ointment to women’s genitalia. Hospital regulations stressed that the application of mercury to female patients must “be done with the greatest honesty and modesty that is required in such shameful tasks.”49 For women who still probably relied on home remedies and female healers for gynecological care, the implications of men unknown to them touching their genitals could not have been welcome in a society increasingly concerned with sexual reputation. The above cultural models must have remained relatively unappealing to female pox sufferers because they either blamed women for infection outright or framed the issue of the French disease as dependent on women’s sexual reputation. While the connection between honour and sexual behaviour played an important cultural role during the Baroque period, this narrow, sexualized view of women’s reputation could not, and never did, account for the much fuller range of women’s behaviour and generalized attitudes toward their standing in complex social hierarchies. While present, these narrow prescriptions only coloured the wider contexts of women’s lives, which offered other options for the construction and maintenance of prestige within a community. As recent research has shown, a woman’s reputation and standing within her community was much more in her hands, thanks to the malleable nature of honour, than previously believed.50 Women’s Representation of Status and Consumer Culture Although the ways in which women were judged by their peers could hinge on those matters of sexual behaviour so favoured by clerical writers, women did have other tools that allowed them better to negotiate their standing in their wider communities. For reputation, women also could turn to familial status. It is in light of women’s attempts to claim reputational status that we can consider the tendency of female patients entering the Hospital de Santiago to wear luxurious clothing. Women’s

82  From Body to Community

choice of dress upon admission to a pox hospital was not plucked out of thin air, but rather responded to existing patterns and learned body scripts in an image-­conscious society. Certain events, such as weddings, the mass, and public feasts required women to dress up precisely because they constituted flashpoints, cultural borders at which body scripts were read and reputations judged by opinion makers at large. Entering a pox hospital for treatment, given the reputational poverty of available cultural models for female pox sufferers, was no different. As such, the clothing women wore to enter hospital was meant to frame them in the best possible light. This was public relations at its best, seventeenth-­century style. What to make, then, of the high incidence of silk in patients’, and especially women’s, clothing? Taken together with the low numbers of Toledano patients wearing tattered or valueless garments, silk consumption patterns suggest a more socioeconomically diverse urban patient population than elsewhere.51 At the same time, however, we should remain wary of strictly correlating fabric choice and individual wealth. Clothes could be borrowed or even obtained through charity;52 treasured silks could remain in an impoverished family, including those known as the shamefaced poor, precisely to maintain a certain image; patients could easily mix that one exceptional silk garment with others of lesser quality.53 Any of these possible contingencies points to the difficulty of extrapolating information about individual wealth or status from clothing items and fabrics, especially once one is beyond the truly destitute wearing clothes of little value. Yet despite these difficulties of correlating material culture and actual economic status, patients’ clothing choices when entering the hospital do speak volumes regarding the image they wished to project, the body scripts that others were meant to read. This is especially the case when we encounter female patients wearing silks. That it was female patients from Toledo rather than from the countryside reflecting this trend makes sense; aside from the higher disposable income urban women might have enjoyed, it was they, unlike their rural sisters, who were likely to encounter neighbours and family upon entering hospital, thus making the representation of their public personae all the more crucial. Although we are used to thinking of language as consisting of choices and constructions that cannot be separated from wider contexts and the exercise of power, it may be difficult to conceptualize what people wore as a deliberate choice of frame on their part, especially if we think

Safeguarding Reputation  83

of those people as impoverished. After all, early modern people did not necessarily own that many items of clothing. But if there was no intent or deliberation in what female patients wore, then why would they even bother to keep silk items, when they could easily be sold or exchanged for a greater number of woolen ones? Why wear or even hold on to a long silk cloak that was so fine it provided little in terms of protection from the elements?54 A cloak certainly was not a necessary garment for a woman being admitted to hospital, as seen by the many women who merely wore skirts, bodice, and aprons, a pattern common to the working classes.55 If patients’ apparel was not a function of choice, then there seems little reason for women to have worn more expensive, and more fragile, silk items when being admitted. That female patients insisted on wearing silks, and especially long silk cloaks, speaks to their choices, and, as such, to the body scripts or frames they wished to represent to others. Given both the public placement of the Hospital de Santiago and the cultural pressures women with the pox faced as they sought health care, it is not surprising that when they did so, they made sure to dress their best. For Toledo’s women, already reputed as gallant dressers, this meant wearing silk, as the fabric most likely to project status.56 We have already seen that much of the legislative emphasis on clothing, both nationally and in Toledo, focused on silks, precisely because some of those wearing them with increasing frequency were not entitled to enjoy the reputational benefits they conferred. It is no coincidence that when Cervantes’s Sancho Panza muses about having his daughter marry up into a ladyship, his wife’s response reveals the intimate connection between status and silk, “Nay, Sancho,” returned Teresa; “marry her to her equal, that is the safest plan; for if you put her out of wooden clogs into high-­heeled shoes, out of her grey flannel petticoat into hoops and silk gowns, out of the plain ‘Marica’ and ‘you,’ into ‘Doña So-­and-­so’ and ‘my lady,’ the girl won’t know where she is, and at every turn she will fall into a thousand blunders that will show the thread of her coarse homespun stuff.”57

When the royal court complained of women’s impudence and the “lack of distinction with which both nobles and plebeians equally wear silks, precious fabrics, and gold and silver jewelry,” it spoke to the very issue of using material culture to project status, whether deserved or not.58

84  From Body to Community

Hispanic culture was not alone in this regard, as the wider consumer revolution sweeping much of Western Europe witnessed the increased use of sartorial luxury as one way of projecting status in public life.59 The most prominent garment employed in female patients’ representational strategy remained the silk cloak. Certainly, cloaks of all types, whether silk or not, were especially useful when women ventured out in public because the practice of covering the face with the hem of the cloak allowed women a greater degree of behavioural freedom. This fashion was so popular that the women who practiced it received the moniker of tapadas or covered ones.60 For female patients, this practice could have provided a much-­needed degree of anonymity upon entering the hospital, even if the reality of living in a small town largely conspired against the hiding of identity. But a tapada merely required any type of cloak, silken or woolen, long or short. Female patients not only wore cloaks, but especially favoured long, silk ones. In fact, silk cloaks accounted for 54.5 per cent (or 251 out of 460) of all silk items women registered in the admissions book of the Hospital de Santiago; these were worn, despite their costliness, by 27.3 per cent of all female patients and 53.9 per cent of women hailing from Toledo. Long cloaks had long been a part of Spanish women’s dress. Unlike working women who wore short cloaks and aprons for freedom of movement, women not engaged in work in public usually wore these long cloaks for modesty’s sake. “For the honest widow, a long cloak,” argued José de Valdivielso in his pious work, Del Ángel de la Guarda in 1622.61 Though increasingly available in a variety of fabrics, the silk cloak was the most prized, with even noblewomen wearing them. Thus, in an account of Margaret of Austria’s marriage by proxy to King Philip III in Ferrara, in 1598, the Duke of Sesa describes the great noble ladies accompanying Her Majesty to mass – the Duchess of Frias, the Duchess of Sesa, and the Countess of Haro – all wearing, among other silken garments, the requisite silk cloak.62 These expensive long silk cloaks initially signified reputation through their appeal to both public modesty and demonstrable wealth. Because they were large, quality cloaks were measured by how little they weighed and how easily they could be folded, and even tucked into a sleeve, making the finest silks the only truly appropriate fabric for them.63 In a society in which reputation was no mere luxury but a cultural good crucial to economic relationships, female pox sufferers especially relied on the cultural advantages gained from the broad practice of wearing silks because the illness’s visibility could have devastating consequences.64 Consider the unfortunate case of María de Olivares

Safeguarding Reputation  85

from the village of Cobisa. In 1660, as an adolescent, she had entered the Hospital de Santiago for treatment. She wore no silks, let alone a long cloak, and probably had little in the way of wealth or connections. Unable to marry her off, María’s father finally managed by 1663 to secure her a contract working as a maid in the home of Toledan notable Don Agustín de Soto y Zurita. The economic consequences of venereal infection are only too apparent in the contract. Not only was María paid well below market rates at 30 per cent the salary of comparable contracts, but the employer did not assume the customary obligation of paying for any medical treatment that might arise. Thus saddled with publicly known pox infection, María suffered discrimination and was forced to accept the one option presented to her.65 Dowry lotteries represent another example of the importance for female patience of maintaining reputation. Many Toledan religious institutions granted sizable dowries to daughters of worthy families. It was not the downtrodden who obtained these monies, but rather honourable women who required financial aid for a dowry worthy of a respectable husband. The young women apparently had to maintain their reputations, as these dowries could be rescinded.66 As recipients of such grants, women unsurprisingly reinforced their status through sartorial choices upon attending the Hospital de Santiago. Our introductory example, Doña Isabel Jiménez Tirado, certainly did so. Others, like María Gutiérrez, dowry winner in 1656, and Damiana Zazo, recipient in 1661, both entered the Hospital de Santiago in 1662, donning the typical black silk cloaks that marked them as distinguished urban matrons. That none of them could claim great wealth – María had married a cloth dyer and Damiana a farmer, and both wore a few garments considered “old” – speaks to their persistence in attempting to maintain reputation.67 In the context of expanding consumer culture, women of the artisanal classes donning silk cloaks reflects the increasing instability of the association between actual social status and sartorial appearance. Although these garments were expensive, their popularity as status signifiers meant everyone sought them. Thus, sartorial respectability was increasingly within reach for the upwardly mobile working classes. Even those usually not expected to wear them came to possess them. As Don Francisco, a noble character in the Entremés de los mirones, complained, “There’s almost no ordinary wife of a skilled worker in Seville with no more than four blancas who does not go about the streets with a silk cloak costing ten ducats.”68 In the same vein, the celebrated orator Fray Alonso de Cabrera lamented that “the skilled worker must eat as good a morsel and wear as good as cape as the knight; and his wife silken skirt

86  From Body to Community

and cloak, like the lady; and in this way gossip against the rich.”69 In Toledo itself, Horozco had warned as early as 1560 of loose women trying to ennoble themselves by wearing silks.70 These complaints reflected a growing reality. Consider, for instance, the appearance of silk cloaks in some contracts between Toledo’s foundling hospital and the homes in which they placed baby girls. Among the obligations those receiving a toddler took on was that of providing her, upon adulthood, with a set of quality clothing that would prepare her for marriage. Because foundling officials were perfectly aware of the difficulty of marrying off such youngsters, especially as they could claim no dowry, they started insisting on a silk cloak as one of these garments.71 Not only were silk cloaks being worn more widely, but different ways of acquiring similar garments were common. This process can be observed in the use of the woolen anascote. In 1627 one yard of quality Toledo anascote cost 12 reales/yard, thus making it an excellent alternative to silk for weaving long cloaks, considering that Toledo silk used in cloaks cost 46 reales/yard.72 Women who aspired to public recognition but could not afford silk cloaks could thus compromise with anascote ones. These cloaks certainly appear to have been popular among patients of the Hospital de Santiago. Altogether, 50 women entered the institution wearing them, a number equal to almost one-­fifth of those wearing the more expensive silk cloaks.73 We can see how unstable the traditional connection between clothing and status had become. The desire for both better fabrics and garments that reflected the appearance of status resulted in a compromise – a woolen in a type of garment traditionally associated with silk – that exemplified the borderline nature of sartorial status, the trickling down legislators were so insistent on containing. Moreover, although long cloaks still maintained their wider association with status, their popularity led to growing concern regarding the morality of women who went about public life hidden by them. The aforementioned practice of covering the face, exemplified by the tapadas, engendered a great deal of literary and legislative anxiety. Baroque plays refer to the coquettishness and seductiveness with which women wielded their cloaks, simultaneously hiding and showing their desires.74 As early as 1570, and foreshadowing national provisions promulgated in the seventeenth century, Toledo’s corregidor prohibited women from covering their faces with their cloaks.75 In the context of changing consumer culture and increased prescriptive concerns regarding the border between public appearance and private reality – the sticky theme of deception and undeception so important in Baroque culture – it is not surprising that attention turned to cloak-­clad women.76 We have

Safeguarding Reputation  87

here yet another trope of the dangerous woman, ready to mislead men down the road of sin. Ironically, it was probably the very success of silk cloaks as markers of respectable status that popularized them and eventually led to moralizing concern. When we read the ways in which women were dressed upon admission to the Hospital de Santiago as social texts, we encounter complex representations of status that belie the cut-­and-­dried poverty we have come to expect of hospital patients. While many patients may in fact have been poor, both the cultural pressures that specifically affected women when it came to venereal disease and the increasing ability of the artisanal classes to obtain silk garments meant Toledanas being admitted to hospital found it both possible and desirable to dress well and display familial status for others to see. In the public arena in which entry into the Hospital de Santiago played out, representing and performing material wealth mattered because the images conveyed through sartorial presentation played an important role in determining public opinion and status. That women entering hospital specifically chose to dress up in much greater numbers than their male counterparts speaks precisely to the significance they granted to this culture of representation as one of the ways in which they could manufacture reputation. At the same time, the social images female patients from a variety of backgrounds presented point to the increasing availability of sartorial wealth that underscored the growing ambivalence surrounding these images and the disconnect between textiles and actual economic status. When contemporaries spoke in harried tones of their difficulty in telling a washerwoman from a noble lady, a prostitute from a reputable matron, they referred, even if through hyperbole, to the anxiety surrounding the differences between public image and private reality. Considering this breakdown between sartorial appearance and the poverty we have come to expect from hospital patients, reading their garments as social texts can open up new avenues of inquiry into patients’ material culture and the ways they represented their social selves that emphasize the interrelationship between health care and patients’ sociocultural contexts. While degree of illness, quality of health care, and wealth may have played central roles in patients’ decisions to seek hospital care, we cannot forget that female patients were also daughters, wives, and neighbours enmeshed in wider stories, concerns, and dreams that informed their public personae and persisted once they left hospital. If anything, their garments reflect this wider social world in which they lived.

Chapter 5

Between Body and Soul: Treatment at the Hospital de Santiago

In the last chapter we encountered the resourcefulness, the wiles, and the determination of women like Isabel Jiménez Tirado who, faced with the unenviable prospect of publicly entering an institution devoted to treating venereal disease and thereby giving fodder to clacking tongues, chose to highlight their stations in the best way they knew how: through dress. But regardless of these individual strategies for self-­preservation, Isabel, together with other patients of all ages and both sexes eventually had to cross the threshold of the hospital and enter an unknown world with its own rules, ethos, and objectives. There they would remain for about two weeks, accommodating themselves not only to the rigours of bodily treatment and the specific diets attentive physicians planned for them, but also to a broader culture of moral reform and religious instruction. The patient experience at the Hospital de Santiago was more than the sum of its parts. It spoke to ingrained assumptions about Christian charity, sin, and health care that strove to make better men and women of those who crossed into this peculiar world. Of Hospital Gowns One by one, the garments that signalled Isabel’s station peeled off easily, like petals from a rose. The fine black silk cloak gone; the woolen doublet gone; the prized blue damask gown gone; the silk stockings gone too. Everything that distinguished her from the rural women who milled about the changing room grinning toothlessly had disappeared, and she was now just one of what hospital personnel called “poor patients.”1 Patients might have come from a variety of backgrounds, from

Between Body and Soul  89

faraway places and from the heart of the city, from family lives as diverse and complicated as any modern-­day soap opera, but once across the threshold of the Hospital de Santiago they all shared in the condition of Christian poor. In theory at least, this meant poor financially, as the hospital piously gave precedence to those in need, no matter how many silk-­clad, gold-­wearing individuals slipped by the administrator’s lazy gaze, and presumably poor morally, given the venereal condition of their ailment.2 No matter their place in the complex social hierarchies of the outside world, all patients emerged from the changing room equal in their near-­ nakedness. Because all the garments they had been wearing upon admission were taken to be washed and stored, patients now wore only clean undergarments – the typical early modern Spanish camisa which referred equally to a man’s undershirt or a woman’s chemise – which they had either brought with them for this purpose or which the hospital provided. Besides these undergarments, the hospital also made available long gowns (ropa larga) to be worn when out of bed and walking about.3 Such a simple item, this long linen gown marked and separated those to be treated physically and reformed morally from those who, in their wisdom, scientific knowledge, and experience – hospital personnel, no matter how untrained – provided services to both patients and the broader Christian community. Uniformed patients could be now prodded, directed, contained, and eventually released. But to reach this freedom, they had to pass through the eye of the needle of institutional control; they had to leave behind the chaotic and sinful urban space beyond the hospital walls and mould their bodies to the regimes that the institutional apparatus deemed appropriate for them. Of course, patients were not innocent, oblivious, or unwilling participants in this process of institutional control and standardization. Though the municipality had probably at one time actually rounded up infected prostitutes and sent them to the hospital whether they wanted treatment or not, the official abolition of prostitution as a result of Philip IV’s reforms meant the state had fewer avenues to control it, and little incentive to seek out, categorize, and treat infected sex workers.4 Now, perhaps the only involuntary patients left were the prepubescent children sent to hospital by their parents. Those who, like Isabel Jiménez Tirado, found themselves wearing just a hospital gown during the day and wondering where they were to be herded next, presumably did so of their own volition. A lack of

90  From Body to Community

qualified physicians, the expense of private treatment, and the promise of free, high-­quality health care meant the freedom and agency Castilians so cherished were cheerfully thrown aside for the duration of their hospital stay.5 And so, just like the women around her, Isabel Jimenez Tirado shed her past and her family and prepared to enter the now of mercury treatment. Confession Before undergoing the privilege of suffering through the agonizing travails of mercury treatment, all incoming patients, now clad in their hospital uniforms, had to undertake confession with one of the two chaplains in charge of the hospital’s religious duties. Although the Council of Trent had stimulated the appearance of confessional boxes in churches throughout Christendom, the new fad seemed not to have reached the Hospital de Santiago by the early seventeenth century.6 A review visitation in 1603 detailing every piece of furniture, fabric, and pharmaceutical fails to mention a confessional box.7 Presumably after exiting the clothes check, patients were perhaps guided into one of the chaplain’s chambers beside it, where, kneeling on the stone floor before Him who would judge their sins, they opened their contrite souls to examination, penance, and, ultimately, grace.8 Considering confessional boxes had been instituted less for aesthetic reasons than to prevent the all-­too-­common tendency of priests to mistake spiritual aid for a physical closeness that sullied the sacrament, it seems strange that even the possibility of sexual contact between confessor and penitent would not be avoided in a venereal disease hospital.9 And reading hospital staff members’ letters of complaint to superiors in Madrid only underscores the all-­too human fallibility of the individuals staffing the hospital.10 The more layers we peel away, the more open spaces we find between the clear contours of hospital regulations and the murky waters of personal behaviour. But whether problematic or not, confession before one of the chaplains was meant to purify and prepare the patient who entered hospital grounds sullied by the sins of the city outside. This was not an altogether irrational expectation, both spiritually and medically. Hospitals at the time were not mere institutional machines for healing bodies, for taking patients in, treating their ailments, and returning them to lives of productivity. On the contrary, they were institutions whose work affirmed basic Christian assumptions about society and the self.

Between Body and Soul  91

First and foremost, they ideally provided charity for the downtrodden, a refuge in which the unfortunate could heal their bodies and repair their souls.11 That not all patients arrived crawling in a haze of misery does not matter, as we are speaking here of the institution’s self-­image, its ideal mission of Christian charity. Second, and especially considering the venereal nature of the disease the hospital treated, helping patients who had so obviously sinned with their bodies also presented an opportunity to right their souls, to reform the wayward and make better Christians out of them.12 There was thus a need to have them confess soon after they crossed the hospital’s threshold. Despite the Catholic practices of the day, and patients’ Christian education, administrators could not assume that newly admitted patients would have been to confession immediately before entering hospital. Indeed, they would be lucky if many of them had undertaken such self-­examination even at Easter!13 No, better to have them experience this spiritual judicial process whereby the penitent is both self-­accuser and witness, both open and contrite, in order to eventually emerge in a state of grace.14 Imagine the sheer good work of helping those so unfortunate they had probably laughed carelessly, blinded to the effects of their actions on their immortal soul while they sinned with their flesh but a few days or weeks beforehand. Like aimless leaves swaying in the fall wind, caught by a steady hand and given a home between the safe pages of a book, those struck by the pox and admitted to hospital now had some hope of everlasting life. It might not seem like much, but there is always a beginning. All the better that the start of such a spiritual journey was also medically recommended. Since balance was the hallmark of the humoural theory that had informed medicine from the times of the Ancient Greeks, it is not surprising that emotional and mental balance would be translated, in a Christian context, into spiritual health.15 Treating venereal disease was not just a physical, bodily process, but one that involved patients’ souls, for ultimately their state of mind could make the difference between successful and unsuccessful treatment. According to Andrés de León, in his Práctico de morbo gálico, patients should pay heed to taking good care of the souls before treatment, for such behaviour could greatly affect the chances of an effective cure.16 Ultimately it was up to the patients themselves, by heeding or rejecting physicians’ recommendations of moderate behaviour, to decide their fate. If upright Christian behaviour was crucial to ultimate health care success, confession was the first step in this long process. It might have been a baby step, but without it walking was thought to be impossible.

92  From Body to Community

On to the Wards Even if confession had not left scared, uncertain patients in a state of balance, they were at least, bureaucratically speaking, ready to be formally admitted and given a bed in one of the wards.17 As with many early modern hospitals, men and women were consciously segregated into different areas. Considering that the Hospital de Santiago was a venereal disease hospital, separation by gender was all the more important. Men were to have their own ward, with male nurses, while women had theirs, staffed by female nurses; communication between the two was forbidden. Even family members of opposite sexes who were being treated at the same time were not allowed to speak, let alone see each other. Of course, actually keeping relatively mobile patients confined within gendered pens in an understaffed institution could not have been easy, and so hospital regulations provided a bit of an out: “the communication and contact between the men’s and women’s wards shall be prevented as much as possible even for recovering patients, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, and male patients and female nurses unless on those occasions when this cannot be prevented.”18 This institutional doublespeak maintained enough ambiguity around gendered segregation to allow for the occasional slipup while seeming correctly orthodox to superiors in Madrid. Whether or not it was truly able to maintain a distance between the genders meant to ensure honesty, the hospital at least boasted a layout that conspired as much as possible against improper contact. While the principal men’s ward was located close to the hospital’s entrance, overlooking the central patio, the main women’s ward was accessible only via an internal corridor and located on a mezzanine level.19 Considering the theoretical requirements that pox wards be of moderate temperature and have appropriate ventilation, the women’s ward appears to have been almost an afterthought, an unexpected addition to the hospital.20 True, women made up only a third of all patients as late as the seventeenth century, but the placement of their ward probably reflects underlying medical attitudes that both condemned female patients as utterly culpable for their illness and also ignored them, as most medical texts assumed a majority of patients were male.21 Regardless of the wards’ placement within the institutional and moral geography of the hospital, patients of either sex could have expected to encounter similar sights upon entering their wards. Although men had 108 beds available to them, they were dispersed between two different

Between Body and Soul  93

wards, so that the total number of beds in the principal men’s ward was probably close to that of the 48 beds found in the women’s ward. Unlike the rough beds found in inns that were the bane of Iberian travellers, each hospital bed not only had a straw mattress but the added comfort of a woolen mattress on top of that.22 Because of patient turnover, as well as the potential for mishaps and soiling as the ill were made to purge and sweat profusely, the available pillows, sheets, and blankets greatly exceeded the number of beds. All these linens were housed in appropriately large pine chests and on tables strewn throughout the wards. The normal panoply of objects such as candles, water pitchers, bedpans, small wooden stools and so forth rounded out the materials that give a glimpse of the daily necessities, challenges, and routines of hospital treatment.23 Finally, all wards had a least some windows or other forms of ventilation to ensure the dissipation of the potentially pestilential air that suffused these spaces full of sick patients. If there were variances in the material makeup of the male and female wards they were to be found, curiously enough, in the religious artefacts and art that graced them. A painting of Christ hung alone on a wall and presided over the main men’s ward. Perhaps more germane to patients’ comfort as well as religious instruction was the mobile wooden altar, including a crucified Christ, on which the host was placed when brought directly to patients. Presumably, and ideally, female patients could also have received the host in such a manner if unable to walk to the hospital’s chapel. But no altar was kept in the women’s ward, and no pictures of Christ graced its walls either. On the contrary, only two stern crucifixes adorned the female ward, while pride of place was given to a picture of Our Lady of Sorrows.24 Although individual men and women might have had complex relationships to concepts of Christ and the Virgin Mary that often transcended gender stereotypes, the architectural design and adornment of the hospital attempted to reinforce typical, almost trope-­like understandings of Christian femininity and masculinity.25 We should be wary, however, of assuming that this fixed, clear image of institutional structures and gendered expectations reflected the rougher reality of the everyday. Regulations, reviews, and inventories – the sources providing a sense of hospital structure – tend to present a too-­orderly picture that reflects only expectations. Daily reality often travelled far from these ideals. Consider the problematic situation hospital officials faced in 1732. Aided by a niece of one of the chaplains, who was staying for free at the hospital, one of the female nurses spent more time raiding the kitchen, cooking for the chaplain, and cleaning his room

94  From Body to Community

than attending the female patients under her charge.26 While the administrator wrote to superiors in Madrid, concerned about the increasing animosity, fighting, and swearing going on between the two aforesaid women and the hospital’s cook, one does wonder about the consequences such things had for patients. With the nurse gone half the time, how was the women’s ward correctly supervised? Likewise, a few years later, the administrator lodged a complaint against the hospital’s accountant for, among other things, scandalizing the women’s ward by yelling and swearing at the administrator for having ordered the cook to prepare different food after patients had raised concerns about the amount of garlic.27 Although order, modesty, and a strict separation of the sexes were institutionally expected, human frailty, ire, and blasphemy regularly pierced the veil of regulations under which the hospital laboured. Despite these incidents, the institutional expectations of architecture and design reveal the ideals which guided hospital and royal policy over time. Although male and female wards were roughly equivalent functionally, institutional spatial design and decor were meant not only to separate the sexes from each other, but also to reinforce the crystal-­clear gender expectations that clerical administrators carried. Men were to be men, women to be women, their health care spaces and spiritual succour well-­delineated and bounded within obvious borders. Daily reality might have been more ambiguous, but institutional aims glided through decades unchanged. Feeding the Body While the hospital might not have been especially welcoming to female patients, or have taken their needs into consideration, all patients, regardless of gender, received similar health care. And for the time period, and considering it was free, the services provided were quite good. The Hospital de Santiago was a specialized institution catering to a specific health care need. It was far removed from the embryonic medieval hospitals that had acted more as shelters for the poor and downtrodden than institutions devoted to patients’ medical needs. No two or three people to a bed at Santiago – on the contrary, each patient had the privilege of a private bed that included clean linens, a pillow, a blanket, a footstool, and a bedpan. Free meals were served twice daily with the help of the nurses, who were to ensure each patient was provided with the appropriate ration, a bed-­table, and his or her own cutlery and napkin, all of which were

Between Body and Soul  95

put away in small armoires at the foot of the bed so that they would not be mixed with those of others.28 While this was partly done to prevent the possibility of cross-­infection, we can only imagine what such service could have meant to many patients who had arrived at the hospital on empty stomachs and wearing little more than rags. Not only were patients, ideally at least, served in a forthright and upstanding manner, but the quality of the food appears to have been high. The same flour used to make bread for hospital officials was also used for that of patients. Based on dispensary accounts, normal meals for patients included lamb, fish, eggs, fruits, vegetables, and desserts, as well as extras such as almonds, raisins, and honey. Meals were seasoned with salt, saffron, and other spices.29 Because diets specifically tailored to each patient’s humoural makeup or stage of treatment were crucial to the long-­term prognosis, doctors could order special meals to be delivered to individual patients. So highly was patients’ gustatory satisfaction prized that some accounts of hospital procedure even emphasize patient choice in the matter of food. Thus, once properly treated and awaiting discharge as convalescents, patients were moved to a different ward (or sometimes a separate building, the Hospital del Bálsamo) where comfort reigned. Nurses would diligently approach every patient each morning and request what he or she would like to eat that day. As long as the meal was not prohibited by doctors, the hospital acquiesced. True, the cost per ration could only go as high as those expected under normal circumstances, but patients could ask for anything from chicken and potato stew to eggs, ham, or marzipan.30 After the travails of mercury treatment, every comfort was well-­deserved. Ultimately, feeding the bodies of patients dovetailed perfectly with the Hospital de Santiago’s charitable and health care aims. Feeding the poor was no mere Christian trope, a repeated slogan with little meaning outside of our usual expectations of Catholic behaviour. In an early modern world of strained resources, stagnant technology, and periodic harvest failures, the type of hunger that gnaws at the entrails was all too common among the Spanish population.31 Starvation was a daily reality for many, especially in times of economic need. To be fed at all, and to be fed well, with meat, fruits, and vegetables of all sorts, must have seemed like a dream, the fabled land of Cockaigne manifested in the improbable setting of a pox hospital.32 Even the middling classes who attended the institution must have been satisfied by what was essentially a few weeks of free, high-­quality meals. When budgets were tight and every ducat had to be watched, the ill could ask for no better treatment.

96  From Body to Community

At the same time, the daily feeding ritual and the attention physicians paid to patient diet were part and parcel of providing adequate health care. Mired in a Galenic model that saw all disease as some type of imbalance of the body’s humoural makeup, diet was paramount in the painstaking process of restoring health.33 Although all were infected with venereal disease, illness manifested differently depending on the individual’s humoural makeup, and thus required appropriate treatment, including diet. While physicians tended to stress moderation and the avoidance of certain foods, they also emphasized the need to personalize a patient’s diet. For instance, Pedro López Pinna advised against most patients eating fish and salty foods because of the thick humours they produced, and also noted that patients with a natural excess of bile were to eat foodstuffs that increased humidity, while phlegmatic patients were, on the contrary, to be fed those such as toasted almonds that were conducive to dryness.34 The hospital dutifully followed this model, and the head nurse would write down any specific dietary recommendations the physician noted for individual patients during his daily rounds. The quantity, quality, and attention to the food the hospital provided to its patients reflected the care with which treatment and charity were freely given. The variety of foodstuffs available in the hospital kitchens as stipulated in the hospital’s account books corresponds well with the recommendations published medical professionals gave to all types of patients, whether rich or poor, who were mired in private or public health care treatment. Lamb, almonds, marzipan desserts, and quality bread might not have been the typical fare for most patients, who were making ends meet as best they could, but once they crossed the hospital threshold they received the best diet science knew and charity could buy. Feeding the Soul Just as great care was taken with patients’ diet, much attention was paid to the care of their immortal souls. The entrance requirement that they receive confession was not a haphazard measure but part and parcel of an institution built around spiritual and bodily care. After all, like any other venereal disease hospital, this one in Toledo faced uncomfortable challenges. On the one hand, the hospital relied on a long tradition of social welfare for the poor and the sick that was central to the tenets of a broader Christian community. On the other hand, since 1500 the hospital had been devoted by royal order to treating infirmity born of venereal sin. Could these two Janus-­like aspects be reconciled?

Between Body and Soul  97

Many throughout Europe argued they could not. When the epidemic of the French disease first crossed the continent, ravaging lives and leaving fear in its wake, many physicians, clerics, and health care institutions felt that to treat those who had brought the affliction on themselves through the sins of their bodies would be tantamount to opposing God’s will. Better to let the disease trample sinners, to teach a lesson by letting their bodies rot in righteous punishment for their disobedience and concupiscence. Even when admitted to hospitals for treatment, the poxed faced currents of moralizing concern: not only were venereal sores to be treated but so were the souls of the ill, for just as God’s rightful punishment worked itself out on their skin, so they might work out and reform their wayward ways while in hospital. Some hospitals went as far as punishing in a ghastly public ritual those who returned for further treatment with yet more evidence of sexual sin written on their bodies.35 European institutions thus wavered between the objectives of treatment as Christian charity and reform of sinners. When the initial outbreak occurred in France, patients were unceremoniously tossed out from Paris’s Hôpital Dieu – an unwanted pestilential population that could only bring havoc to the community.36 When the French finally got around to establishing a hospital for the poxed at Bicêtre in 1690, it became more of a prison into which the condemned were thrown, never to be seen again, than a normal health care institution.37 Although royal hospitals in London treated pox patients from the sixteenth century, it would not be until 1622, when St Bartholomew’s Hospital centred its venereal operations in two former leper houses, that institutions would focus solely on the French disease. In the meantime, debates on the appropriateness of treating the sinful, amidst strong currents of reform, continued unabated.38 In Italy – where the disease seems to have struck hardest at first – disputations abounded as to its origin and etiology, as well as how to remedy it. Many peninsular jurisdictions set up incurabili hospitals meant to house and treat poxed patients exclusively. Given the sinful nature of the illness, however, these hospitals had a strong undercurrent of moral reform practices aimed at patient populations, including corporal punishment when necessary.39 Toledo’s Hospital de Santiago had none of the elements associated with bodily punishment or containment. Although likewise concerned with moral rectitude, the Hospital de Santiago favoured encouragement rather than punishment as the favoured technique for improving patients’ souls. Thus, no punishments are stipulated throughout the hospital’s regulations for any patient misbehaviour, even if the

98  From Body to Community

administrator as temporal and spiritual father had complete control over everybody within its walls. But while methods of reform were not explicit, they still crept into the hospital’s mission surreptitiously. Indeed, while the Hospital de Santiago was more relaxed around the reality of sin than many of its European counterparts, institutional design ensured a consistent and unavoidable echo of spirituality would reach patients’ ears. First, a great number of the hospital’s officers were clerics. Certainly all the positions of power within it, except for physicians and surgeons, were filled by clerics, from the administrator and the chaplains to the foreman and the head nurse. Only minor staff members like nurses, cooks, wardrobe attendants and doormen could be secular, and, even then, the hospital preferred them to be single, and presumably chaste.40 Mass was said daily without fail – thus the two chaplains who could substitute for each other in case of illness. On Sundays and feast days, mass was sung.41 All of this took place in the space containing the richest inventory of the whole hospital, the chapel, which contained silver, gold, and luxurious textiles.42 Even if some patients, such as those unable to get out of bed, did not attend mass, religiosity entered their daily lives without fail. Each meal was properly blessed, and the chaplains later returned to conduct a prayer after everyone had finished eating. Among the administrator’s top concerns was to prevent “blasphemy, swearing by God or the Saints, dishonest living, gambling or any other disorderly behaviors.”43 Thus, to promote moral living, spiritual lectures were conducted in the wards themselves, by either the in-­house clerics or invited speakers. In short, those behaviours clerics routinely railed against as unbecoming to Christian culture were actively discouraged and policed within the walls of the hospital. The act of taking Communion was especially ritualized to emphasize the awe of the miracle of transubstantiation. Not only were patients regularly enjoined to confess and to take Communion, but before the host was to enter any ward, chaplains were to assemble any unoccupied staff to accompany it in solemn procession. The entrance of the host to the ward also had to be prepared for properly; nurses were asked to clean the ward, make the beds, ensure patients were in their proper places, and perfume the room so that it would smell pleasant. Only then would the mobile altar enter in proper solemnity and the Eucharist be given to one or more patients.44 Unlike the normal routine of health care treatment – the meals, the purging, the smelly ointments, the collection of urine for the inspection of physicians and so forth

Between Body and Soul  99

– care for the soul in the form of the Eucharist was properly ritualized to emphasize its importance, its miracle, its centrality. Likewise, and although few patients actually died at the hospital, much attention was paid to the sacrament of extreme unction, the souls of dying patients, and the proper treatment of their bodies after death. All these were crucial aspects of Christian devotion. Chaplains were thus particularly instructed to counsel and take care of patients in danger of dying, for their souls were at a crucial point between salvation and purgatory. Death was no mere cold event, but central to the way the hospital understood itself and its Christian mission.45 Thus, not only were nurses required to prepare the bodies of the dead for burial in the hospital cemetery, but funerals were to be attended by all hospital staff. Likewise, regardless of their social or financial status, all patients who died in hospital were to receive a proper requiem mass for the respite of their souls. So much attention was paid to the moment of death because the proper treatment of the soul and the hope that it would be saved by the deceased’s good works and faith along with Christ’s grace were crucial elements in the mission of the hospital. Yes, it was there to cure bodies of venereal infection, but ultimately hospital officials hoped that by treating the body and caring for the soul, better Christians would eventually emerge from this mass of sinners. Treating venereal disease born of sin might have been morally uncomfortable, but, from the point of view of hospital officials, it presented a unique opportunity to reach and save more souls who would have otherwise remained in the darkness of sin. Treating the Body Despite the consistent institutional preoccupation with Christian education that emerges through the Hospital de Santiago’s regulations, most patients sought something more primal and basic: relief for the venereal sores that ailed them. Confession, Communion, and all the other rituals of a Christian health care institution would not have surprised them but, ultimately, what they truly required was appropriate care for their bodies. And although the Hospital de Santiago enjoyed a good reputation as a more than competent health care institution, patients must have approached the threshold of treatment with some trepidation. After all, the travails of the typical course of mercury treatment were legendary.

100  From Body to Community

As Anastasio Pantaleón de Rivera mused in a poem detailing his treatment for the French disease, the ointments I fear, and so much I worry waiting for them that without even reaching the unguent I see myself by mercury bewitched.46

Likewise, the protagonist of the anonymous La vida y hechos de Estebanillo González from 1646, suffers so acutely from the mercury ointments that he forswears, at least temporarily, the wine that had put him in such a situation: “I was treated twice to learn how to be a doctor’s guinea pig, salivating all day. Seeing myself so tormented and upset, I made a solemn vow before the nurses and many other witnesses to never again drink wine, for because of it I had come to be as I was and to suffer what I was enduring.”47 Part of the problem was that applying mercury ointments to patients’ skin not only produced pain but also induced an often-­intolerable salivation. Physicians throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries argued that this salivation was important and necessary because only thus would the bad humours be expelled from the sick body. For patients, however, this meant bad breath, ulcerated gums, and loosened teeth, on top of the loss of hair and joint pain the treatment caused. By the late eighteenth century, physicians at the Hospital de Santiago, in accordance with new theories arriving from across the Pyrenees, were engaged in a heated debate over “the barbarous, cruel, and inhuman” problem of this salivation, with some hoping of replacing it with a more moderate application of mercury.48 Such relief, however, was generations away for our patients receiving treatment at the Hospital de Santiago in the seventeenth century. For them, mercury ointments and subsequent salivation were the expected course to be endured. But as much as patients were subjected to specific institutional regimes that many feared, and as much as the travails of mercury salivation might have been considered by some as just punishment for sinful sexuality and appropriate precursor to moral reform, patients were not completely devoid of agency before the force of medical control. Mercury salivation might have been preferred, but hospital administrators and physicians recognized that there existed a range of possible treatments for venereal infection. Some, like mercury ointments, were thought to be harsher and more rapidly effective, while others, such as

Between Body and Soul  101

sarsaparilla and guaiac concoctions, were considered milder but not as quickly effective.49 Unlike mercury ointments and the salivation they produced, sarsaparilla and guaiac were prepared by effectively cooking these types of barks (together with various other medicinal elements, depending on the specific recipe used) to concoct a type of tea that patients drank to produce ample sweating and thus expel the evil humours from the body. The hospital counted both these alternative, or sometimes even supplementary, treatments among its medicinal arsenal. Indeed, both account books and hospital regulations mention both of these non-­mercury treatments.50 Which patients could receive these milder alternatives? Ideally, those who were too weak to receive mercury treatment, or whose disposition prevented them from undergoing the stress of mercury ointments and the subsequent salivation. It is here where the patients’ own voices were critical. Physicians made recommendations for the treatment and diet of individual patients after their daily rounds; this meant that everything from what the patient should eat to whether he or she should receive a purgative or be bled depended on this crucial interaction between patient and physician. A quick perusal of any of the main practical textbooks detailing treatment for venereal disease at the time reveals the import of personalized, individual attention. For example, López Pinna, in his 1664 Tratado de morbo gálico, skillfully demonstrates the interaction between normative methodologies and the numerous individual dispositions to take into account. Normal treatment started with bloodletting, but here variations are already apparent. Some doctors argued against it, but the Hospital de Santiago seems to have followed this medical tradition, as it employed a barber specifically for this purpose.51 According to López Pinna, however, men were to be bled from the arm while women were to undergo the same procedure from the ankle.52 Likewise, many important differences applied to application of the next usual step in treatment: purgatives meant to prepare the body for mercury ointments. Here again, López Pinna advises purgatives, but only when a change of diet cannot be employed to the same end; otherwise, the patient might end up too weak to undergo further treatment. In terms of the laxatives themselves, López Pinna even provides recipes adjusted for different types of patients: cholerics, phlegmatics and melancholics.53 The complexity of treatment courses that had to be adjusted to various conditions and types of patients so as to not upset their specific humoural makeup reveals the tension between standardization of treatment and

102  From Body to Community

personalized regimens. For the Hospital de Santiago, this meant employing a capable and learned pharmacist who knew not only how to prepare the various remedies and treatments, but when and to what patients they would be best applied. Finally, when López Pinna arrives at the specific treatments aimed at dealing with venereal infection, caveats abound. Four main ingredients could be used to treat venereal sores: china root, sarsaparilla, guaiac, and the king of treatments, mercury.54 Although López Pinna did not favour china root because he considered it is not as effective as the other treatments, he did find it helped patients moderate some of the side effects of venereal infection, including alopecia, gum irritation, and joint paint. Normally he recommended using china root together with other concoctions, and he provided a variety of recipes tailored to specific types of patients.55 Guaiac, also known as holy wood, from the Americas, was particularly useful as a mild treatment for the French disease and also helped to alleviate some of the secondary symptoms.56 López Pinna recommended using it in conjunction with other medicines tailored to the specific body part or symptom treated. Thus, for ailments of the head, one would use it together with rosemary and sage, while liver problems suggested a combination with chicory and wormwood. The amount of holy wood and the specific recipe used to prepare the medicine depended on the patient’s strength and age, and the progression of venereal infection in the patient. Sarsaparilla, also from the Americas, was prepared in a similar fashion to holy wood. It was particularly useful for venereal skin lesions and ulcers. The latter were treated not by the drinking of sarsaparilla tea, but by applying a stronger sarsaparilla infusion to them. This sarsaparilla infusion, however, could smell very bad, and produce gynecological problems for women. Thus, López Pinna recommended the elegant solution of throwing sarsaparilla powder on a brazier placed in an enclosed room while the patient was made to inhale the fumes.57 Finally, the most important treatment, and that to which López Pinna devoted most of his book, was mercury.58 Although there were tremendous differences as to the properties physicians attributed to it (arguing whether, in humoural terms, it were hot and dry or cold and wet, for example), most seemed to believe it was the best treatment for the pox.59 The basic method of application, after a mercury ointment was prepared (for which various recipes were provided), was to rub the

Between Body and Soul  103

ointment on the twelve main joints of the body. Patients would then sweat and salivate off the bad humours. It sounds simple, but López Pinna provided one whole chapter on the side effects. Among these he included immoderate salivation, itchiness, black teeth, incontinence, fainting, hemorrhoids, vomiting, gynecological problems, fever, insomnia, constipation, and hemorrhaging.60 López Pinna accordingly provided many options and warnings for those afflicted by these symptoms. Ointments were only to be applied in spring and fall, usually at night so that sleep would fortify the patient. Unless the aforementioned side effects occurred, ointments were to be applied daily for about a week. Until they started salivating, patients were to have wine and meat, while honey was employed to aid with any stomach problems. Mercury might have been considered very effective in combating the pox, but its side effects and the myriad different patients to be treated meant an almost endless combination of treatment possibilities. Sarsaparilla, guaiac, and mercury were, in practice, not oppositional treatments – no matter the heated debates over their relative efficacy – but complementary. Thus, López Pinna recommended drinking sarsaparilla or holy wood infusion while receiving treatment with mercury ointments. If patients feared excessive salivation, they could, likewise, be provided guaiac in combination with innovative mercury skin patches. The treatments chosen ultimately depended on the physician, but were not without patient input. Yes, patients’ blood and urine were examined, after being duly collected by nurses’ aids, to help determine treatment. Yes, patients’ symptoms and generally observable condition could have steered physicians toward certain recommendation. But aside from these processes, the crucial thing was the patient interview, and here the afflicted themselves could have an influence on their course of treatment. This was not a mere protocol sideshow or an intake interview never to be repeated or referred to. On the contrary, because what we would call medical charts were not yet in use, physicians were obliged to interview every patient each day, so as not to forget each person’s specific ailments and condition and to ensure that any accidents or side effects from treatment were specifically tackled. Thus, regardless of the power of institutional forces, patients who might have unduly suffered through the travails of mercury-­induced salivation had a daily chance, depending on their articulateness, charm, and effectiveness, to steer their attending physicians toward alternative treatments that the hospital was well-­prepared to provide. Going through the torment of

104  From Body to Community

mercury treatment must have been a hellish experience, as is evident from most eye witnesses’ descriptions, but ultimately this process was shaped by both physicians and patients. The Hospital de Santiago and the experience it afforded patients spoke to global concerns about charity, reform, and the body that went well beyond their constitutive parts. All the hospital’s patients, no matter their station in the deceitful and sullied world beyond the hospital walls, came together as poor supplicants to receive health care and direction for a balanced lifestyle, and, implicitly, also to receive moral guidance. Treating sinners such as these may have been uncomfortable for the pious clerics running the institution, but the effort must have seemed well worth it. The two-­week-­long sojourn in this world separate from the cares of the city outside was meant to bring together both bodily and spiritual care to fashion new men and women, to draw out not only the bad humours that ailed them but also the sin that had brought them low in the first place. Treatment was not only individualized, but envisioned the person, the medical and spiritual subject, in global terms, with an eye both to health and salvation.

Chapter 6

Getting Hitched: Pox, Sexuality, and Marriage

For Joseph de Yepes, a young officer in Toledo’s silk guild, the summer of 1659 would be memorable, but not in a good way.1 This particular July evening had brought little respite from the day’s heat. Pounded for hours by the Castilian sun, the hospital ward where he now lay felt like an oven despite the wide-­open windows. Not a trail of a breeze, not a drop of rain graced the dusk. Joseph felt the undershirt, drenched in his stinking sweat, sticking to his flesh. Surprised that his body still contained any fluid after the agony of his day in the sudadero [sweating room] where, rubbed in mercury, he had been placed to sweat and salivate out the bad humours ailing him, Joseph prayed to the Virgin Mary for succour. We can only speculate how Joseph, an unmarried young man, came to find himself infected with venereal disease and suffering the travails of treatment at Toledo’s Hospital de Santiago. But in a society in which prostitution was common,2 and in which confident playboys boasted of the pox acquired from sexual conquests,3 it is not surprising that he joined the unmarried men who made up a large majority of the hospital patients. What does jangle modern sensibilities so attuned to personal responsibility in the age of AIDS is that Joseph became a happy newlywed a mere six months later.4 Indeed, the choice to marry made four hundred years ago by a pox sufferer seems alien to us. Did people not worry about the transmission of their venereal disease to their spouses and future children? Would it not have made sense for the poxed to remain celibate? Was not early modern Spain, in fact, a time and place with ample opportunity for the afflicted to enter the priesthood or other religious orders? These questions speak to our modern understanding of responsibility and our conceptions of disease, sexuality and marriage, which were not

106  From Body to Community

necessarily equivalent to those that resonated centuries ago. The difference, amplified by the weight of centuries of sociocultural change, rests in unique early modern assumptions far from our own. The usual assessment of such attitudes, especially when one examines their literary construction, has been to highlight the undercurrent of misogyny they carried.5 Certainly, the ease with which men spoke of women as tools for cures or culprits for venereal disease, with little concern for their well-­ being, points to the ubiquity of discriminatory attitudes. Nonetheless, as much as we can identify some of these gendered undercurrents in social discourse overall, we know little of the everyday sexual lives of pox patients. Likewise, despite a wealth of literature on the shifting scientific understanding of the French disease and the increasing medicalization that sought, at times, to control both illness and sexual sin, we know little of how attitudes to sex and the pox played out for patients in the long run, especially in relation to marriage. Both of these gaps require a movement beyond hospital walls and questions of treatment to encompass the sexual and marital lives of the poxed. In a context of increasing attempts to control sexuality that were only partially successful in the face of long-­standing behaviours, both the sexuality of single patients and the medical discourses informing it reflected the conflicting pressures and ambiguity between prescription and practice inherent in this broader battle. And in this context, the ability of the poxed to marry did not depend on highly equivocal medical and popular ideas on the possible transmission of disease to a partner but rather on outside variables such as wealth and community. Overall, the ambiguous messages and behaviour concerning disease, infection, and sexuality reflected tensions inherent in a Christian society coming to terms with a widespread venereal epidemic. Sexuality, Pox, and Singles The pox, as a venereal disease, carried a stigma. The presumably chaste – single people and clerics – displayed ambiguous attitudes toward accessing public health care that were dependent on factors such as gender, residence, and individual ability to withstand reputational pressures. On the one hand, consider the specific case of clergymen. In total, 69 clerics, or 2.2 per cent of male patients, sought care at the Hospital de Santiago between 1654 and 1665.6 Considering that the clergy constituted roughly 1.5 per cent of the Castilian population, clerics seem to be overrepresented among the patient population of the Hospital

Getting Hitched  107

de Santiago.7 Even if we grant that Toledo might have enjoyed a larger clerical demographic given its importance as the top archiepiscopal seat in the nation, the number of clerics seeking treatment for the French disease remains substantial.8 Equally fascinating is these clerics’ willingness to enter the hospital publicly in clerical garb, effectively admitting to onlookers their infection. Thus, though the hospital notary normally noted details of entrants’ clothing in his notes for their safekeeping, he had little work to do with most friars, merely commenting, “[H]e came in with his habit.”9 While priests and friars seem to have had few problems in publicly admitting to the pox, consider the gendered silence of having no nuns cross the hospital threshold in these years. While rates of infection among nuns might have been lower, sexual activity within convents was not unheard of.10 That no nuns sought treatment at the Hospital de Santiago might speak to a variety of factors, including the greater emphasis on their enclosure and strict reform following the Council of Trent, as well as the reputational pressures a nun infected with the French disease might have faced.11 Just as with clergy, the number and gender composition of single people among the aggregate patient population at the hospital suggests at once the extent of premarital sexuality and the gendered and geographical fault lines along which attempts to control sexuality were taking hold. Patterns of premarital sexuality and willingness to admit publicly to pox infection were highly dependent on gender and location. Although married women outstripped single women in number, giving some weight to the prescriptive and reputational pressures that female sexuality faced, single women still represented a sizable tranche of the hospital population. Not only did they account for 33.9 per cent of female patients from Toledo, but they constituted 41 per cent of women coming from elsewhere. These figures fit well with the historical literature that has revealed how traditional patterns of sexuality that allowed for premarital sex appeared to have been more persistent in rural areas, since the onslaught of Tridentine moral and educational reforms had less reach there.12 Nonetheless, the number of single urban women entering the hospital and thus publicly admitting to sexual activity and venereal disease upends today’s popular image of the Spanish Baroque as a time of unyielding sexual repression. Some of these single women, especially from Toledo, came from well-­established and respectable families, the very type of household that at this time would have felt more heavily the emerging pressure toward the enclosure of women and the control of their bodies. However,

108  From Body to Community Table 6.1 Hospital patients by marital status and residence Toledo Men %

Non Toledo

Women %

Men %

Unknown

Women %

Men %

Women %

Married 304 (46.2) Single 332 (50.4) Widowed 7 (1.1) Unk 15 (2.3)

156 100 38 1

(52.9) 772 (32.2) (33.9) 1539 (64.1) (12.9) 57 (2.4) (0.3) 33 (1.4)

294 248 64 9

(48.6) 13 (41.0) 55 (10.6) 0 (1.5) 0

(19.1) (80.1) -­ -­

7 5 3 0

(46.7) (33.3) (20.0) -­

TOTAL

295

(100) 2401 (100)

605

(100) 68

(100)

15

(100)

658 (100)

accessing public health care required personal strategies, as we saw in chapter 4, designed to play up broader social reputation as a shield against the wagging tongues of gossips. Thus, María de Ávila, daughter of pharmacist Diego de Villegas, entered the hospital in the spring of 1660 wearing a new silk cloak meant to signal status.13 That she could afford such an expensive item of clothing is reflected in her family’s business dealings. That same year, her father had bought land in the cigarrales, the hills across the Tagus overlooking Toledo’s cramped urban space, to which the city’s elite retired in the hot summers.14 An estate in the cigarrales, while providing private respite from the hustle and bustle of Toledo’s teeming masses, was also meant to signal economic status. Like many up-­and-­coming clans, and like much of Spanish society in the Baroque period, the Villegas’s image went far because reputation rested on what others saw, on how the community read an individual’s and a family’s public behaviour and displays. That María, so cognizant of the many eyes gazing on her, chose both to highlight her familial status with her silk cloak – something meant to be worn in public, to be seen by others – and publicly enter a pox hospital speaks again to the ambiguity surrounding questions of sexuality and disease. Male patients too displayed a similar ambiguity. As one would expect, based on popular notions of masculinity and accepted sexual practices, single men far outnumbered any other group seeking care at the Hospital de Santiago. Not only does this mean that young men were generally more prone to engaging in premarital sex, but, given the location of the hospital, those who sought care did not seem to worry overtly about the possibility of their disease becoming public knowledge. In circles of gallant youngsters and courtiers, venereal infection might well have been a badge of honour as evidence of sexual

Getting Hitched  109

conquests. Yet despite these trends, it is noteworthy that among those patients from within Toledo itself, single men barely outnumbered their married counterparts. Thus, whereas 64.1 per cent of male patients from outside the city were single, only 50.4 per cent of their urban counterparts were unmarried. Were Toledo’s young men, living so close to one of the most powerful centres of the Church, more affected by the consistent drone of preachers’ sermons and the moralizing emphasis of conduct manuals? As difficult as it is to approximate the thought processes of long-­dead individuals who have left no diaries or letters explaining their behaviour, we may tentatively answer in the affirmative, given circumstantial evidence. As did those in other urban centers, Toledo’s young men would have lived in the midst of a comparatively greater number of clerics than did people in the countryside. Moreover, as the seat of an archbishop, an inquisitorial tribunal, and a powerful cathedral chapter, Toledo itself would have been more rapidly subjected to the prescriptive pressures and legislative plans flowing from Tridentine reforms.15 Since Toledo’s young men were most likely, on average, better-­educated and wealthier than their rural counterparts, they probably had more awareness of the prescriptive literature that had, for at least a century, hammered home the notion of a chaste Christian masculinity. Finally, consider that the phenomenon of single people and male clerics accessing a venereal disease hospital reflected conflicting messages on disease and sexuality. Certainly, concerned moralists and satirists generally argued the poxed had lost all sense of shame, as they reveled in their sinful disease.16 But despite the amount of medical and literary discussion of the pox as a venereal illness, medical theory’s concurrent focus on more casual modes of transmission meant that there remained enough ambiguity surrounding contagion to discount venereal transmission at times. And these cases of non-­venereal transmission seemed to be most eagerly discussed when referring to single, and presumably chaste, people who had contracted the illness. Indeed, the disease was thought to be so contagious that it could spread through the clothing and household items of the ill. So widespread was this notion of non-­sexual contagion that Andrés de León, physician to King Philip II and head medical chief of the Spanish navy, calmly stated as fact a fantastical tale of poxed vegetables. According to him, the town of Baeza in Andalucía suffered an outbreak of the French disease when the clothes of a few ill persons were washed in the pond from which water was drawn for the town’s

110  From Body to Community

garden plots. As a consequence, many legumes, and especially Brussels sprouts, were infected with the pox. From these it was a short step to the town’s children and a consequent epidemic.17 The assertion of hyperbolic stories by such a respected physician, while requiring context, does point to cultural fault lines around the pox and sexuality in a Christian society. Certainly, the notion of the spread of illness via household items squared well with traditional humoural theory. Likewise, the structure of Andrés de León’s tale – its length, edifying message, and references to the fantastical or miraculous – points to long traditions born of religious literature and incorporated into medical texts. In particular, the medieval use of exempla, or short tales, meant to instruct and edify a largely illiterate and simple-­ minded population through powerful images comes to mind as a precursor to León’s tale. And most early modern medical texts reveal the ubiquity of exempla as rhetorical strategy.18 But the use of such strained exempla should also alert the reader to the underlying realities that required such rhetorical juggling. The focus on casual transmission helped to provide a ready-­made, reasonable explanation for the wide reach of a disease often considered venereal. If one could catch the French disease as easily as touching the clothes of the ill, then the presumably chaste had a public “out,” a coherent (if largely fictional) excuse for showing up at a pox hospital smack in the centre of Toledo. Perhaps no one was truly fooled about the cause of infection, but in a Christian society so preoccupied with both sin and appearances, all that was required to prevent others from making public accusations of licentiousness was the smallest theoretical possibility of casual transmission. Much of this rhetoric was probably window dressing, a useful public proposition to explain the infection of the otherwise reputable. Indeed, this medical legerdemain of pretending the chaste were always infected via innocent means squared well with ever-­increasing educational pressure for Spaniards to conform to Christian values. Remember, mid seventeenth-­century Toledo was far from the days of the relatively lax medieval church, which had plenty on its plate merely trying to get the flock to attend mass once per year without worrying overly about sexual sin.19 On the contrary, this was the height of the Counter-­ Reformation, a time when both church and state increasingly sought to control women’s sexuality, manage family ties, and create good, obedient subjects who demonstrated self-­control over their sexual bodies.20

Getting Hitched  111

Nonetheless, public messages regarding sexuality, especially those aimed at single people, whether clerics or not, remained relatively muddled and thus only reinforced the ambiguous connection between pox and sexuality we have explored. For instance, clerical sexuality constituted a grey, shadowy area in which competing concepts and disjointed messages on correct clerical behaviour were being played out in early modern times. Because there was a long tradition of clerical concubinage which the church had tackled only with half-­measures, clergymen had become specific targets of new regulations by the late 1500s. After the Council of Trent in particular, bishops gained greater authority to control the clergy, both secular and regular, of their dioceses. And since one of the main bones of contention with Protestants remained the clergy’s celibacy – or lack thereof, if we are guided by the Protestant pamphlet literature attacking priests’ lasciviousness – much of the counter-­reformed effort went toward enforcing stricter standards of morality for clergy. Not only did inquisitorial tribunals start cracking down on clerical abuses, including sexual harassment during confession and sexual relations with adolescents but national and provincial synods quickly set up a legislative framework attempting to control priestly concubinage.21 In Toledo itself, the church quickly moved to adopt Tridentine moral standards for the clergy. Thus the Toledo synod of 1565–6, which was national in character, forged a specific provision against priestly concubinage, while the synod of 1582 continued the trend with regulations regarding the morality, garb, and behaviour of clergymen.22 That this process of disciplining and controlling the sexual bodies of clergymen continued unabated for decades precisely because rules proved difficult to enforce highlights the ambivalence that surrounded clergy who sought care for the French disease in the mid-­seventeenth century. To parishioners who from time immemorial had known of their pastors’ natural children, to friars who had long been accustomed to enjoying libidinal pleasures with nary but a slap on the wrist, to the authorities who, more often than not, had looked the other way, the issue of clerical sexuality must have seemed more of an ideal in the process of being enforced than a practice to be expected automatically. Similarly to their clerical counterparts, and because they too received conflicting messages on sexuality, unmarried men and women who were ideally expected to refrain from sexual activity seem to have heeded prescriptions on this matter only partially. The advent of printing

112  From Body to Community

and Christian humanism’s emphasis on education had resulted, by the middle of the sixteenth century, in an explosion of conduct literature aimed at both genders. As tools for the education of upright Christian men and women, much of this genre insisted on chastity until marriage. Boys were routinely advised to stay as far away as possible from women and the temptations their voices and bodies wrought. Likewise, young women were enjoined to treasure their chastity, obey their parents and, increasingly, remain enclosed within the safety of the home. Though much of this effort initially only reached the literate, conduct manuals were becoming increasingly popular by the seventeenth century as rates of literacy increased and Tridentine reforms aimed at controlling public morality continued to be promoted.23 Certainly, similar arguments on the treasure of a young person’s chastity would have been heard from pulpits in parishes around the nation. Finally, popular notions sometimes reinforced the sense of sexuality as problematic. Toledo’s own Sebastián de Horozco wrote a collection of proverbs that includes warnings to men on the dangers of women. Referring to the proverb, “A great treasure is the good woman and a great pestilence the bad one,” Horozco recalled how he saw from his window adolescent boys speaking to and kissing bad women under the guise of darkness and following them home without knowing their souls were in danger.24 Likewise, Hernán Nuñez in his posthumous Refranes de la lengua española (1555) included a proverb intended to stress the necessity of mewing up a daughter: “I had rather suffer my daughter to be constantly eating and gossiping than to be always showing herself at the window.”25 On the other hand, notions that separated good and worthy women from bad and forward ones did tend to promote penetrative sex to young men. While a long tradition of bawdy sexual literature, including the wildly successful Carajicomedia (Cockcomedy), celebrated male sexual exploits, the prevailing custom of municipal brothels also sanctioned sexual activity among young men.26 Much of this winking and nodding at men’s libido fit easily with late medieval Christian notions that considered it best to provide men with at least some sexual outlet in the form of prostitution lest they stray into worse sins like sodomy. Regardless, the expansive and quite open celebration of a masculinity of sexual penetration went hand-­in-­hand with the construction of the female sex into a dichotomous structure of good and bad women. While women could move from one category to another, and institutions like Toledo’s own Magdalene house were specifically created to aid in the process of creating good women out of repentant prostitutes, there was

Getting Hitched  113

little conceptual or discursive middle ground to be had.27 Thus, rape victims often suffered blame for the very assault they suffered. As the popular saying went, “If the woman does not want it, there is no one who can force her,” implying, as Horozco discusses, that there is no such thing as rape because a woman who does not wish to have sex will by definition be able to fight off her attacker.28 While popular notions of masculinity strongly encouraged young men to engage in heterosexual activity despite clerical prohibitions, some traditions rooted in practice also supported sexual activity in young women. Not only, as many authors have discussed, was premarital sex quite common in many parts of Europe, including Spain, but based on long-­standing understandings of the definition of marriage, women could and did have sex with their fiancés.29 In this regard, a promise of marriage between two parties was considered as good as the final ceremony, and sex followed soon thereafter. Of course, sexual activity between fiancés could still be wrought with conflict. A man’s false promise of marriage could often lead to a civil court case if the sexual act ensued, as the woman whose reputation was in peril sued to have her honour publicly restored through either the enforcement of the marriage contract or the payment of a dowry for a future marriage.30 The issue of a man’s promise of marriage as a ploy to bed young women was a site not only of legal contestation but of cultural discourse. One need go no farther than one of the most important passages in Cervantes’s Don Quixote, in which Dorotea, a young woman, is tricked into having sex through a promise of marriage, and finds herself involved in a love triangle.31 The mix of post-­ Tridentine attempts to proscribe sexual activity among clerics and young people and popular traditions that specifically outlined acceptable instances in which libido could be deployed signified an unresolved push-­and-­pull. Together with the ambiguous assessment of the pox as venereal depending on the identity of the sufferer, these discourses on sexuality and disease allowed enough leeway for sexual behaviour among the presumably chaste to be expressed to a certain degree, even if that meant public admission to infection with the French disease. Pox and Marriage Just as single patients demonstrated ambiguity in their approaches to sexuality and to public treatment, so too did they reflect conflicting

114  From Body to Community

pressures and messages when it came to marriage. Many single patients of the Hospital de Santiago did not marry. Of the unmarried patients who returned to the hospital for another round of care at least one year or more after initial treatment, most were still single. In fact, based on a combination of hospital entrance records and notarial sources, we know that 35 patients came back married, while 98 returnees were still single. While remaining single for one year or more after initial treatment does not necessarily mean these patients never married, the rate of celibacy of this group upon their return to hospital was 73 per cent, much higher than that expected in the broader population. Studies on marriage and celibacy rates for early modern Spain have generally shown negligible rates of celibacy in the countryside and increasing rates in urban centers. In the latter category, life-­long celibacy might have reached as high as 19 per cent for either men or women.32 The inability of so many single pox sufferers to marry alerts us to the difficulties patients may have encountered in finding long-­term partners. Nonetheless, absent pox infection, many of these patients appear as excellent prospective spouses. Consider Francisco Cruz, from Toledo. He entered the hospital for treatment in the fall of 1660 and then returned in the spring of 1661, and once more in the spring of 1662.33 He remained single throughout. Considering solely his economic situation and reputation, however, he must have been a good catch. Not only was he a merchant, but he was successful enough to act on behalf of a plaintiff from Navarre bringing a civil case in a Toledo court in 1657. He was the guarantor for the plaintiff and also steered the case through the city’s court and bureaucracy, a feat that required good contacts, as he was able to obtain a favourable judicial order in merely one week.34 Francisco was obviously an established citizen in Toledo. Likewise, Juan Ruano from the village of Mocejón, who entered the hospital in the fall of 1657 and once more in the spring of 1664, probably enjoyed the promise of a solid economic future required to establish a successful household. Unlike many landless farmers, Juan’s father owned agricultural land in Mocejón.35 Moreover, as late as 1660 the father obtained a major contract with Archbishop Sandoval of Toledo to provide his household with 180 loaves of bread per day.36 As the son of a successful farmer and businessman, Juan Ruano could probably count on familial resources to attract marriageable women. How do we explain the continuing singlehood of such otherwise marriageable people? And to what extent did infection with the pox play a role in their status? Again, because of our lack of information

Getting Hitched  115

about the historical actors’ internal thought processes, we must rely on contextual and circumstantial evidence. Certainly, many factors outside of health could have played a role in this process. First, many patients, regardless of venereal infection, may well have chosen to remain single. Celibacy, expressed publicly by refraining from marriage, remained more than ever a viable choice. Not only had the divide in Christendom that was the Reformation strengthened the commitment of the Catholic church to the concept of celibacy among clerics, but celibacy was increasingly touted as a viable alternative to marriage even for those not interested in joining the church.37 Successful lay celibates, the Catholic church believed, would explicitly challenge Luther’s famous belief regarding the impossibility of celibacy as a choice. In fact, the concept of celibacy delineated so clearly the fault lines of Catholic-­ Protestant debates – the role of the priesthood, free will, good works as conducive to salvation – that it was almost inevitable that the more militant Counter-­Reformation church of the seventeenth century would push celibacy as an alternative to marriage. As we have seen, celibates were increasingly common in Spain’s large urban centers, so such a choice would presumably not have turned heads. Moreover, the reality of the French disease could only have strengthened the viability of singlehood as a choice. Thus, while not necessarily a determinative factor in people’s marriage choices, the pox nonetheless probably gave otherwise-­marriageable people a reason to consider remaining single. Patients would surely have been aware of the possibility of transmitting the pox to their offspring were they to marry, as the plight of children suffering from the disease was not unknown.38 Although long-­term singlehood appears to have been the outcome for most unmarried pox patients, some managed to marry, and marry well. And based on the familial and social contexts in which early modern subjects lived, those who contracted this illness might have sought marriage for a variety of sensible reasons, including medical. Thus we can encounter someone like Juan de Córdoba, an unmarried repeat patient at the hospital from La Puebla de Montalbán, appearing in a service contract from 1659 as married. Indeed, his new wife, María Gómez, traveled to Toledo to receive an orphan who was entering the couple’s household. While they would be expected to provide food and shelter to the boy, the contract stipulated the youngster was to work for the couple until he reached maturity.39 Since his wife required a special license from Juan to enter into this contract, he was presumably unable to travel, probably because of the advanced stage of a disease for which

116  From Body to Community

he had first sought treatment in 1654. For a man with increasing difficulties due to the French disease, having a wife as well as a youngster who could care for him made utter sense. Another area that we should highlight when exploring both pox sufferers’ reasons to marry and their capacity to do so is the conception of disease in the early modern period. For example, the fantastical tale popularized by the eminent humanist Juan Luis Vives, of a man who was cured of venereal illness after having sex with a virgin, was well-­ known and accepted throughout Europe.40 As well, though physicians normally referred only to “scientific” treatments for the pox, mainly involving the use of mercury and guaiac, their writing remained ambivalent on these matters. Consider Pedro de Torres, physician and surgeon to Phillip II’s sister the Empress María of Austria, who returned to Spain in 1576 upon the death of her husband Emperor Maximilian II. Dr Torres published one of the most influential Spanish books on the French disease, Libro que trata de la enfermedad de las bubas, in 1600 – known mainly for its clarity, knowledge of international scientific trends and, most importantly, practical recommendations to the reader. So influential was this work that it was republished in 1626 and 1715. Referring to the difficulty in establishing concrete patterns of transmission of this disease, Torres effectively gives some credence to the notion that sex itself could lead to a cure: Three things are required in all natural actions: an acting cause, a subject ready to receive it, and approximation. Thus I say that, when he who is damaged by this illness approaches her who is subject to receive it, she can be so apt to receive and he so robust to shed it, that she remains with the whole infection and he free of it, or the other way around.41

A patient reading this eminent physician, considered one of the utmost authorities of his day on the French disease, could easily have merged Torres’s proposition on how the illness could flip from one body to another together with Vives’s famous tale of curative sexuality, and then decided that marriage might be justified. Not only did medical assessments mix uneasily with popular notions of disease regarding the transformation of illness, but they also conceptualized the pox as both curable and preventable, further promoting the idea that illness need not hamper future sexuality. Torres himself speaks to both male and female readership on this matter and argues that washing the penis in hot water, or at the worst urine, would effectively prevent

Getting Hitched  117

transmission after intercourse with an infected person.42 Likewise, women were urged to introduce cotton threads saturated with hot water into the vagina immediately following coitus. “And doing this, not only shall no infection be feared, but even if there were one, it will be removed as long as this remedy is applied within four days,” muses Torres.43 We must recall as well that the pox, at least in Spain, was considered a treatable illness, one whose recrudescence was owed to the patient’s imbalance, poor habits, or new infection. Medical notions providing pox patients with reasons to seek marriage were all well and good. Finding a marriage partner was another matter. Regardless of medical theories about treatment and curability, a broader understanding of venereal disease did assume that sex would lead to infection. Sebastián de Horozco argued in the opening poem of his Cancionero on the poxed that one of the benefits of the disease was exempting the ill from fulfilling their marital debt.44 Furthermore, because the French disease progressed in stages, with symptoms coming and going depending on a variety of factors, people knew that the illness could be hidden, but it remained a threat. In fact, the issue of the poxed (especially female) and the deception they wrought was well-­trodden in Spanish literature. For instance, Diego López in his Declaración magistral de los emblemas de Andrés Alciato from 1615 refers to a daughter who scolds her father for marrying her to a husband who turns out to be poxed without her being aware of it.45 It is thus altogether possible that some of the patients who married did so without their partners’ knowledge of their venereal infection. Of course, symptoms and signs of illness eventually caught up to the sufferers. Not only would they suffer increasing pain, but many exhibited outward signs: loss of teeth due to mercury poisoning, loss of hair, malformation of leg bones which made walking more difficult, and the loss of cartilage, most notably in the nose, which left patients with a characteristic look.46 Signs of disease mattered, especially in terms of marriage, because they publicized illness, thus effectively rendering someone damaged goods. That venereal infection could have consequences for a person’s chance to marry is particularly underscored by the single women who attended the Hospital de Santiago. Unlike their male counterparts who, despite lagging behind the general population, often managed to marry, almost no unmarried women patients with the French disease seem to have done so. Of the 353 single women who sought treatment at the Hospital de Santiago, only four appear later as married: Eugenia Rodríguez from Malagón, Inés Rodríguez from Sonseca, Antonia de Aguirre from Toledo,

118  From Body to Community

and María Flores from Mejorada.47 Indeed, although initially single, all four women returned to the hospital in later seasons with husbands.48 Such a small sample of female pox sufferers going on to marry does not allow us to generalize. Nevertheless, the paucity of single women with this disease who later found husbands suggests the incredible difficulties female pox sufferers faced in entering the marriage market. Not only did the gender imbalance of early modern Spanish society in which women outnumbered men render competition for husbands all the more difficult, but single men would have been less-­inclined due to financial pressures to agree to marry a partner saddled with the French disease.49 Single men, though perhaps more successful in finding marriage partners, still did not have it easy in this regard and often had to go to considerable lengths to achieve this goal. For instance, in the spring of 1656, Juan Pérez, a young man from the village of Mazarambroz, travelled to Toledo for treatment of the pox. Over a year and a half later, in November of 1657, his father retained the services of Juan López Cavezuelo, the papacy’s representative in Toledo, to obtain a marriage dispensation for his son. Juan Pérez sought to marry his cousin Gabriela Delgada.50 Although dispensations were a common practice, they could only be provided for very specific reasons, and, at 20 ducats – the average yearly rent of a home in Toledo – they were not cheap.51 That a pox patient, at a point at which symptoms would have probably been visible, sought such a dispensation suggests the probable difficulty he had in contracting a marriage. Regardless of medical assurances regarding transmission and the possibility that the illness could be hidden, single patients should have been at a comparative disadvantage in the marriage market, given both the long-­term consequences of the French disease and the risks associated with it. Certainly many factors, including love, lust, and simple luck could play a role in facilitating marriage for these patients, but, at the same time, it is not surprising to find that the 32 single patients of the Hospital de Santiago who eventually found marriage partners were relatively well-­off. A good indication of their wealth and status relative to those of the average patient consists of the ratio of woolens to silks they wore, as discussed in chapter 4. If anything, it is this body script they presented to their peers that counted heavily when they sought marriage partners. When considering silk and woolen clothing, silk garments accounted for 9.97 per cent of items worn by patients at the Hospital de Santiago.52 Single patients who later went on to marry, however, wore silks at the higher rate of 16.13 per cent, effectively parading their wealth upon entrance to the hospital.

Getting Hitched  119

That this select group of single patients who later married tended to be wealthier than the average is underscored by the notarial records they have left behind. Many of the men who later married despite venereal infection appear to have been gainfully employed, not a small feat in a Toledo that was wracked by economic crisis. Among the jobs these men held included stone mason, tailor, construction worker, silk guild officer, and master barber, representing a good cross-­section of the artisanal and service industries crucial to the viability of urban centers. Others, like Eugenio Barranco from Polán, easily managed to marry despite venereal infection because he was a farmer who either owned or rented large tracts of agricultural land.53 Land ownership had always been an advantage in the marriage market, and this still held true for pox patients. Pedro Fernández, from the town of Salas in the northern region of Asturias, had sought a better life, like many of his countrymen, and headed south to Toledo. We find him in the spring of 1656 seeking care at the hospital de Santiago for venereal disease. By then, however, he was already a full legal citizen of Toledo, and since he was single and his parents had no connection to the city, this would have meant that he had at least ten years of uninterrupted residence there.54 Like many immigrants, Pedro toiled to make a better life for himself, and we know that by 1661 he was already married and in the employ of Don Pedro Ortiz Vidal y Rivadeneira, city councilman. Since his parents had died and he was so far away from home, he had decided to sell his part of his inheritance, including homes, land, and other real estate, to his brother Juan for 54.5 ducats, or 599 reales, an important sum for a working man.55 In the interim, between his treatment in 1656 and the first evidence of his marriage in 1661, we can only speculate as to the factors that aided or hindered him in his life path. If his treatment at the Hospital de Santiago had been known, or his symptoms had started to show, his marital prospects would presumably have dimmed. At the same time, he had the support of a sizable community from northern Spain – witnesses from Asturias testified to his identity when he sold his property – and it would not be surprising if his wife were also Asturian, although her identity is unknown. Another factor in his favour would have been his employment, even as a servant, under a city councilman. This would have provided him with a certain cachet, as the household retainers of prestigious families generally basked in the reflected public status of their employers. The prospect of an inheritance of real estate would have further boosted his marriage prospects.

120  From Body to Community

Nicolás del Rio’s story also reflects the centrality of community, property, and employment for those poxed seeking marriage. He too hailed from northern Spain – Caboalles de Abajo, a mountain village in León – and had moved south in search of the fortune and opportunity so sorely lacking at home. Coincidentally, on the same day as Pedro Fernández did in 1656, Nicolás, unmarried and no older than twenty, sought treatment at the Hospital de Santiago. Just five years later, in 1661, he was married and working as a driver for city councilman Don Pedro Vidal. Nicolás was engaged at the time in selling real estate he’d inherited for the hefty sum of 1,650 reales. Even for a youth infected with the French disease, Nicolás’s claim to property and the capital it represented could only have aided him in the marriage market. The property’s buyer, superintendent for the convents of San Pablo and Santa Clara, Juan Blanco, not only moved in important circles given his job but also hailed from the same village as Nicolás, even if he was by then an established citizen of Toledo.56 Had Blanco acted as young Nicolás’s patron when he initially moved to Toledo? Had he helped Nicolás to obtain his job in a prestigious household? In a world with no safety net and in which kinship and local ties carried across oceans and mountains, such a scenario is quite plausible. Historians have regularly stressed the importance of local and familial networks, even as people moved across long distances, whether in Spain or the Mediterranean as a whole. What fascinates in the case of the French disease is that networks, especially when mixed with economic considerations, often seem to have trumped any disadvantage the illness might have brought. Consider Juan Sánchez Simón, a young bureaucrat in the Archbishopric Council.57 Originally from the town of Harta de los Montes, both his capital and connections won him a suitable marriage. In November of 1658 he signed a contract to marry Doña Micaela González. That she was the daughter of Simón González, the head bureaucrat at the Council and Juan’s superior, underscores the importance of networks in the formation of matrimonial alliances. Again, just as in previous cases, Juan brought more than goodwill into his marriage. Indeed, while Micaela’s dowry amounted to 650 ducats, Juan’s bride gift or arras totaled 300 ducats, or 3,300 reales, an amount reflective of his relative wealth. Since Juan had already sought treatment at the Hospital de Santiago in the spring of 1655, we can only wonder whether the sizable gift constituted an incentive for the bride’s family. At almost one-­half of the size of the dowry, the bride gift was higher than those specified

Getting Hitched  121

in comparable contracts.58 More importantly, a groom’s bride gift was legally limited to one-­tenth of his worth.59 Having already received his inheritance, as he entered the hospital in 1656 wearing a “mourning cape,” Juan’s worth ascended to 2000 ducats, which would have entitled him to gift his future wife with no more than 200 ducats. Because he had agreed to pay 300 ducats, the contract required a special provision allowing Juan to claim the ten per cent allowable by law from his present and future capital worth. Probably a bit of notarial legerdemain, this provision nonetheless points to payments Juan made beyond the legal norm in order to marry Micaela. Although we cannot ascertain absolutely that this constituted compensation for the family’s risk in marrying a daughter to a man afflicted with the pox, it nonetheless constitutes a probable explanation for it, given the facts of the case. Poxed patients who managed to marry did so thanks to their economic status, familial networks, and strong personal or professional credentials. At the same time, considering the common fears people had of unknowingly marrying a person with the pox, factors beyond the economic also played a role. The mutable signs of the illness and its remission for years after initial infection meant such fears were not unfounded. Moreover, the ambiguity surrounding the signs of the disease was reflected in medical literature and could have shaped attitudes toward sexuality and marriage. Patients expected that treatment would cure them. Some even expected to be cured through sexual activity itself. In a society in which the sexuality of the presumably chaste, such as unmarried lay people and clerics, remained a bone of contention, the decision to marry a pox sufferer reflected ambiguous attitudes toward sexuality that were common at the time. The necessities of a marriage partnership, so crucial to early modern familial economies, could easily trump considerations of venereal disease and its transmission, not because people had no sense of personal responsibility or fear of illness, but rather because medical culture and popular attitudes toward the pox and sexuality sent mixed messages. It is in these liminal cultural spaces between illness and sexuality that patients forged as best they could lives that included sex and marriage. Mixed messages regarding sexuality, marriage, and the pox meant ambiguous patient responses as well. Sexual activity could be condemned in Baroque prescriptive literature, but the culture encouraged young single men to seek sexual partners. Likewise, despite Spanish society’s increasing attempts to control sexual impropriety, clerics and unmarried women could draw on specific contexts in which the expression of sexuality was

122  From Body to Community

acceptable. These broader cultural views on sexuality only reinforced ambiguous messages concerning the pox as a venereal disease. On the one hand, it was generally considered to be sexually transmitted, and thus authorities acted accordingly through the imposition of greater restrictions on the practice of prostitution. On the other hand, venereal infection could be discounted in favour of innocent contagion in the cases of those who could not readily admit to sinful sexual activity. The wide spaces between prescription and practice, between medical theory and popular expectations meant a murky individual response from pox sufferers. While some seemed to have little problem in admitting to venereal infection publicly, others, such as men and women from urban areas, seemed to have been more affected by the moralizing concerns current at the time. Ultimately, the French disease epidemic that raced across Europe from the 1490s onwards settled in as an uncomfortable daily reality in Christian societies. While some responded by rendering infection tremendously noxious to reputation because of its connection to sexuality, Spanish responses, as evidenced in Toledo, seem to have taken a middle road. While venereal infection was emphasized, enough ambiguity remained to allow individuals expected to be chaste some measure of face-­saving response; while single sufferers may have faced problems in finding marriage partners, ambiguous medical theories meant that, if the resources or connections were there, a wife or a husband could be found for a poxed person. Lack of theoretical and prescriptive clarity seems to have been conducive to a greater range of individual responses.

Chapter 7

Making Ends Meet: Disease, Work, and Family

When twenty-­two-­year-­old Don Luis Ortiz de Soto entered the Hospital de Santiago in the spring of 1663, his future seemed uncertain.1 For ten years he had dutifully apprenticed in the notarial office that had belonged to his grandfather, Joseph de Soto, and that was later run by notary Francisco Álvarez de Soto, an uncle to Luis by marriage.2 Luis had grown up amidst the hustle and bustle of endless paper trails and impatient clients. Had he not been left a minor orphan when both his grandparents died, he might have already been a notary. Everyone knew the notarial office had been destined for him, “having grown up in its practice ... and having assisted the said notary Francisco Álvarez ten continuous years in the exercise of this office.”3 Fully apprenticed, Luis was more than ready to take over his rightful place. Unfortunately, his grandfather had left the business to his wife, Doña María Ortiz de Cisneros, who, upon her own demise in 1659, willed it to Luis’s aunts, beatas (holy women) Doña Felipa and Doña Leonor Ortiz. The pious, unmarried, and impoverished sisters were thus afforded a regular source of income by effectively renting the office. When would Luis be able to fulfil the training he had acquired? Would he need to wait for his aunts to tire of the current holder of the office? Everything seemed bogged down in interminable legal wrangling over his grandmother’s will. Although an inventory of her estate had been completed amicably, the two beatas had yet to reach an agreement with Luis and his younger siblings. Nearing the age of majority, Don Luis could only wait for the wheels of testamentary justice to turn slowly. As it happened, his illness accelerated events. Less than half a year after his hospitalization, he had signed an agreement with his aunts, and effectively bought the notarial office. Luis was to pay the two sisters

124  From Body to Community

12,773 reales over twenty years, an accessible sum considering he had inherited property in the village of Arges from his father, which he mortgaged. Had Luis, cognizant of the uncertainties of venereal infection, approached his pious aunts yet again to secure a future? Did the beatas wish to move the matter forward before Luis could no longer work? A web of individual interests and familial favour coloured the deal between the parties. The aunts, no matter their immersion in spiritual matters, drove a hard bargain that assured them the necessary income to continue their religious devotions undisturbed. Considering Luis’s brush with debilitating illness, they held a strong hand. Thus, an added clause to the agreement stipulated that “for the added security of the said Doña Felipa and Doña Leonor Ortiz,” Luis’s failure to pay just one of the yearly instalments would result in their repossession of the office.4 After all, if Luis came down with illness once more, how were the beatas to survive? But no matter their misgivings, their grant to Luis reflected the bonds of familial obligation that tied them together. Family members might come to metaphorical blows over property, but letting it pass outside the kinship group remained unthinkable to most. Blood was thicker than water. To seal the deal, and as a necessary legal precursor, Luis obtained a certificate of his lineage, including the stipulation that his blood was not stained with Jewish or Moorish ancestry. Befitting a family that, although not terribly wealthy or powerful, knew most of the players in Toledo, a noble city councilman, a parish jurado (alderman), and a knight of the Order of Santiago and secretary to the Holy Office all attested to Luis’s impeccable genetic credentials.5 One wonders what passed through Luis’s mind as, under the portico of the cathedral where notaries did business, he held in his hand the signed certificate necessary for his accession to notarial office.6 Considering that only recently he had been languishing in an apprenticeship more fit to a beardless youth than the man he was becoming, he must have savoured a moment that more than made up for the pain of mercury treatment at the hospital. It was not, certainly, that venereal infection had caused his good fortune, for he had always been destined to become the notary his grandfather had envisioned. Rather, illness may have mobilized the web of familial interests and contact with the broader community necessary for his advancement. Like a safe harbour in the midst of a sudden storm, family and community had provided Luis with the necessary tools, aid, and succour that would now allow him to sail into his future.

Making Ends Meet  125

For pox patients, their illness presented both challenges and opportunities. As they left the hospital and immersed themselves in work, their ability to deal with a debilitating illness, cover the visible tracks of disease, and interact with those closest to them immersed them in a subtle game in which mutual interests, personal fortitude, and familial obligations would largely determine their fate. Pox Patients and the Labour Market Most early modern people breathed work. With only a weak social safety net, work did not just constitute a calling for most, but was an utter necessity to fend off poverty. The agonized rictus of the emaciated corpses displayed in the corner of Toledo’s main square, Zocodover, to attract charitable donations for their interment testified to the fragility of early modern familial economies. A bad harvest here, a lost contract there; a recession here, a bout with illness there – all could, at the snap of a finger, reduce middle class families to destitution. Granted, some institutions did their best to provide food and even subsidies to the worthy poor. But the objective of Christian charity was not to rescue individuals from need permanently but rather to allow them to subsist.7 The whole system probably perpetuated structural poverty and, indeed, required the daily performance of poverty and rites of supplication to legitimize charity. On top of labour issues, familial economies, even for the wealthy, were often dependent on financial instruments such as juros and censos. Although these provided a fixed income, inflation tended to eat away at real earnings.8 Many people were no strangers to poverty in Baroque Spain – and its portrait has been immortalized in much picaresque literature.9 For Toledo and its environs, economic and demographic decline only served to exacerbate existing social and economic problems.10 In half a century, the city had gone from a bustling metropolis of almost 70,000 souls to an overgrown village, its 15,000 inhabitants representing the few who had not fled in the wake of the utter implosion of the urban economy.11 Not only that, but the countryside as well had lost great numbers of people – entire hamlets disappeared – and production of even basic foodstuffs and products had dwindled.12 The problem for Toledo and the agricultural region surrounding it was twofold: Madrid, capital of Spain and its overseas empire since 1561, had grown in an unnatural fashion, its unproductive court and royal bureaucracy hungry for resources that its countryside could barely produce. In effect, Toledo

126  From Body to Community

and Madrid shared the same environs and depended on the same rural villages and towns to produce the wheat, wine, and wool essential to their survival. In a competition with the new capital, Toledo could only lose; slowly, as Madrid’s population grew, that of Toledo declined. When, after 1630, Madrid started declining as well, given the untenable weight of imperial ambitions, taxation, and inflation, Toledo’s circumstances only worsened, caught in the spiral of a wider supply crisis that affected both cities.13 The countryside fared no better than Toledo itself. Scholars have actually documented a profound economic crisis in the rural regions surrounding the city. Between 1600 and 1640, both population and the production of wheat – the most important product in rural Toledo – fell by 40 per cent. Not only did the region experience an economic crisis of great magnitude, but the agricultural economy suffered a type of structural regression as methods of agriculture devolved to more primitive ones, and any former specialization in production or diversity in the market was increasingly stifled and almost wiped out.14 The complexities of navigating this early modern economy fell on everybody – from snooty city councilmen and wealthy merchant families to artisanal guild members and even day laborers. Suffice it to say that economic balance was especially precarious for those unfortunate enough to suffer from chronic illnesses such as the pox. Because this disease progressed over stages that could include severe symptoms, often spanning years, patients treated at the Hospital de Santiago reentered economic life upon leaving its walls and faced unenviable dilemmas. What to do if one were too sick to work? How to sustain a family with worsening symptoms that could affect everything from bone density and strength to appearance and brain function? How to pay for the inevitable secondary complications of the French disease – problems that went beyond the hospital’s mandate to treat skin lesions? Patients, of course, did not emerge from the Hospital de Santiago as blank slates, unaware of the webs of work and family that informed people’s lives. Pox treatment was a hiatus in lives already defined by work, contacts, and familial finances. Tracking patients’ occupations – and for women, mostly those of their immediate family members – from both hospital records and notarial sources reveals their various walks of life. From shoemakers and weavers to clerics and administrators, from farm laborers and peddlers to merchants and minor noblemen, the poxed were more than just patients defined by illness and sin.

Making Ends Meet  127 Table 7.1 Profession of patients or immediate family members by socioeconomic sector15 Noble Church Admin16 Army Skilled Retail Artisanal Services17

Food/ Unsk Agric Labor

6

56

8

14

18

13

47

30

31

Women 3

2

2

1

5

1

21

2

7

Men

We can see from Table 7.1 that male and female patients demonstrate a certain occupational variability. The importance of both the artisanal and the church sectors fit Toledo’s context given the relative weight of its textile industry and the continuing influence of the church – as Toledo held an archiepiscopal seat – as employer. These numbers also give a rough sense of the variety of patients seeking care.18 Yes, the poor in desperate straits were admitted. But so were others who, though financially comfortable, saw value in the care the hospital offered. Consider Doña María Fernández de Avilés, who entered the hospital in 1662. While María’s husband, Don Joan de Salinas, administered his family’s charitable foundation, María was the financial partner in a business venture with the baker for one of Toledo’s main monasteries.19 That she was literate – still a rarity for women – only solidified her position. Her admission to the hospital wearing an assortment of woolens in good state, but also silk stockings and the requisite large silk cloak, only confirms her relative economic comfort.20 Unfortunately, María did not leave further records after her stay at the hospital to reveal how her business venture fared. Regardless, once a chronic venereal disease entered the picture, many former patients faced challenges as they sought to reintegrate themselves into everyday society. Pox, Symptoms, and Work For the Hospital de Santiago’s many patients – whether poor or not – the aftereffects of treatment and the chronic nature of the French disease presented difficult challenges to their working lives. Among the many symptoms of infection, overall physical weakness constituted a chronic problem difficult to treat. Pedro Torres, following Italian medical texts, pointed out that symptoms such as breathing difficulties and emaciation were common among chronic sufferers and largely untreatable.21 Andrés de León, in his 1605 work, asserted that pox sufferers

128  From Body to Community

tended to become “lazy, heavy, and sleepy” – conditions that surely would not aid them at work.22 Another problem was the ideal post-­treatment regimen doctors prescribed. Because they would require time to restore humoural balance, patients were to remain at home, abstain from sexual intercourse and certain foods, go to bed early and sleep in the mornings, and try to avoid cold and humidity.23 While noblemen and rentiers might have been able to follow these prescriptions, working men and women surely had no such luxury. Ultimately, this period of convalescence, which could last months, was not conducive to work. Juan Calvo went as far as dubbing the poxed the walking dead: “Others call the pox the dead disease, and with reason, because [patients] die by living, and for anything they are as good as dead, for it is surely such a pity to see the miserable life they lead, full of ulcers, pustules, pains, lame, with bad complexions and their snub noses.”24 Although all physicians agreed that the French disease could be treated, they considered many symptoms persistent and stressed the great risk for relapse. Furthermore, not only was the convalescence period lengthy, but, even when treated, the French disease left deep marks on patients’ bodies that could limit their ability to engage with their families and communities. Considering this difficult prognosis, what were patients leaving the Hospital de Santiago to make of their chances to continue making a living? The initial relief at having weathered treatment was probably replaced by troubling questions. How could one follow the physicians’ strict recommendations, considering the necessity of work? How would one deal with the weakness, the tiredness, the incessant pain? In such a depressed economy as that of mid-­seventeenth century Toledo, it surely did not escape patients that just a slip in their work habits could land them among the unemployed, as lines of eager, younger, and healthier workers would snap at any opportunities. The increased pressure of trying to regain increasingly elusive health while continuing to work could prove deleterious to convalescents. Consider the case of a Toledo master stone mason, Juan de la Fuente, who had been treated at the Hospital de Santiago on 28 December 1659.25 His admission outside the regular treatment seasons suggests the illness had struck quickly and severely. More problematically for Juan, his work in the first half of 1600 after he left the hospital suffered greatly. He had been commissioned to construct a new stone portal to a principal Toledo residence inhabited by Don Gabriel Niño de Guzmán. Evidence suggests that Juan had started this job soon after being released from

Making Ends Meet  129

hospital. However, despite Juan’s expertise as a master stone mason, the Toledo regulators responsible for a type of quality control in local construction – the alarifes – had issued a report by late spring panning the quality of Juan’s work on the Niño de Guzmán house. By 11 June, Juan had been ordered to demolish the portal and reconstruct it at his own cost.26 Whether the effects of infection and treatment played a role in Juan’s poor workmanship is impossible to assert. Nevertheless, circumstantial evidence points that way. Not only did Juan begin this contract right after leaving the hospital, when weakness and related symptoms would have been lingering, but it also seems that until then, he had worked in an exemplary manner. For instance, a contract he held in early 1659 to construct a mill’s stone wheel in the village of Magán was finished with no intervention by regulators or complaints from the clients.27 Juan’s discharge from hospital followed closely by an unfavourable report from Toledo regulators and the ensuing costs to his business in both materials and lost wages suggests the difficulties weakened patients such as Juan may have encountered over the long period of convalescence. Former patients were further challenged by worsening health problems in the long term. It was one thing to suffer a bout of lethargy or a period of terrible joint pain for a couple of months, but having to contend with such symptoms and worse over years with little relief could have broken even the most resilient. Furthermore, the hospital basically treated skin sores, leaving patients to their own devices when it came to less-­obvious but more pernicious symptoms. Dealing with them required changes to diet and money for medical care and pharmaceuticals. It was thus not rare for former hospital patients to endure financial hardships years after initial treatment. We thus encounter unusual situations not normally reflected in typical notarial contracts. Juan de Segura was a tanner initially treated for the pox in 1654.28 Eight years later, we find him in a financial hole. Starting in 1660 he had been renting a modest home, owned by Juan de la Cerda y Mendoza – a local oligarch – in the appropriately named tanners’ quarter in Toledo. Cerda must have taken a liking to Segura, because the latter lived in the property for two years with only an informal understanding rather than a contract. Unfortunately, Juan de Segura was likely jobless over this period, as he paid only two ducats of rent in a year and a half. By 1662, the property owner had asserted his rights by retroactively officialising a rental contract starting in 1660 and extending for four years.29 Juan

130  From Body to Community

was to pay in cash all the money owed and then continue with regular disbursals. If he did not come through, the owner could evict him or take him to court. Two issues stand out with this case. First, consider Juan’s apparent inability after so many years of suffering from chronic venereal disease to keep a regular job that would afford him even a meager living, despite his obvious attempts to continue in his line of work by renting a home where he would most likely find job opportunities. Granted, recession could also have caused his unemployment. But one wonders, had the symptoms of the French disease progressed to the point where he could not perform his job properly? Did the effects of the disease start marking him publicly as poxed and thus liable to be discriminated against by potential employers? Eight years after initial infection, the disease would have surely progressed far enough to cause severe problems. Second, note the help Juan received from his landlord – a ray of light if ever there were one. An informal rental contract was extremely unusual, to say nothing of the second chance afforded him to remain in his home even though he had hardly paid any rent. The ill might have faced tremendous financial hardships, but good Christian souls willing to lend a helping hand remained. While not necessarily leading sufferers to financial ruin, the French disease could affect a person’s ability to work. Juan Mateos had a pretty good life – he was young, single, and owned roughly one hectare of land in Almonacid del Tajo. However, his treatment at the Hospital de Santiago in the fall of 1657 turned his luck irreversibly.30 Although he was able to find a wife, the challenges of agricultural work only mounted as his disease worsened. By 1662, he was forced to come to the hospital yet again.31 Upon his exit, unable to tend properly to his land, Juan sold it to his brother.32 What had seemed like a promising life had in half a decade turned bleak. Even former patients far removed from the daily hustle of artisanal or farm work suffered consequences. Lorenzo de Soria was a Toledo chaplain at the city’s cathedral. As a member of that church’s choir, he would have been entitled to a regular income. This income may have been insufficient for Lorenzo’s needs, as when he first entered the Hospital de Santiago in the fall of 1661, the notary considered many of his garments to be “old.” Lorenzo was probably dealing with some financial difficulties at the time he first sought treatment, challenges that could have come from myriad sources, including lost ecclesiastical income due to cathedral politics, or something more nefarious such as

Making Ends Meet  131

gambling debts. Regardless, by the time he re-­entered the hospital in the spring of 1662, the evidence of his poverty was too strong to ignore – the notary deemed it unnecessary even to list some of his garments, considering them in too poor a condition to be worth anything.33 Whether infection had played a role in Lorenzo’s increasing financial difficulties is hard to tell. But certainly the French disease and its effects could not have helped what was clearly already a problematic situation. By March of 1663, Lorenzo had incurred debts totaling the staggering sum of 6,110 reales. Only the intervention of friends at the cathedral saved him from total ruin. Two prebendaries as well as the general agent for the cathedral chapter acted as guarantors for a loan of the sum provided by another prebendary at the cathedral, Manuel de la Vermeja, “to make up for certain obligations [Lorenzo de Soria] has incurred.”34 That Lorenzo had found himself in a precarious financial situation was obvious. That his colleagues had come to his aid even though he was poxed spoke once more to the willingness of some to lend a helping hand to those afflicted with this pernicious disease. Typically, it was myriad physical problems that hampered patients’ ability to conduct business and work. Consider the strange case of Pedro Tornero, who came from the village of Arges, close to Toledo, and who had sought treatment at the hospital in the spring of 1661 and once more in the fall of 1662.35 Obviously his illness was progressing, and by 1664, he might have been in need of further treatment. That year, Pedro and his wife rented a home in the city.36 The move must have been urgent because they rented the home not from the usual date of September, but from 1 May 1664, all the way through the end of August 1665. What is curious about the case is that the owner applied conditions not normally seen in these types of rental contracts. First, he stipulated that if he or an associate had to travel to Arges to collect the rent, Pedro Tornero and his wife would have to pay for the costs of travel and lodging. This sense that the couple might not always reside in their Toledo home seems to support the suggestion that they intended it to be a temporary base for any health care treatments Pedro might require. Even more strangely, the couple had to mortgage a property they owned in Arges for surety of payment of rent. Such a clause hardly ever appears in Spanish rental contracts of the period, because the surety was usually provided by guarantors. Such guarantees were a basic glue of social relations in Toledo and the surrounding countryside, and even villagers trying to do business in Toledo would usually have recourse to them through familial or business connections. Why could Pedro

132  From Body to Community

and his wife not find a guarantor? Had outward signs of infection began to manifest themselves so many years after initial treatment? Had the disease progressed to a stage where potential guarantors thought it possible they would be left holding the proverbial bag by Pedro’s death? The confluence of the French disease, the possible manifestation of secondary-­stage symptoms, and the odd structure of the rental agreement – which was beyond cautious – suggests that this was probable. Work and the Signs of Disease Beyond the usual physical and financial hardships that constrained the ill, a grave potential threat to a patient’s ability to earn a living stemmed from the eventual appearance of visible signs of venereal infection. These markers could put sufferers at a distinct disadvantage in any work context because they implied not only physical but also moral corruption. Recall the case of María de Olivares discussed in detail in chapter 4. Although treated for the pox in 1660, María was able to secure work as a maid to a notable Toledan by 1663. That her illness was public – and likely marked on her body – is obvious from the contract offered her: a salary 30 per cent below market rates and the absence of the employer’s customary obligation to pay any of the employee’s medical bills.37 At the same time, while some signs of the French disease – especially such unmistakable ones as the loss of nose cartilage – could wreak havoc on a person’s working life, other markers could be interpreted in various ways. Pox sufferers could thus use the ambiguity around the bodily signs of the pox to obfuscate their infection. Enter Melchor de Molina, apostolic notary of the archiepiscopal court, who had received treatment at the Hospital de Santiago in the fall of 1662.38 By the spring of the following year, Melchor received a power of attorney from Toledo’s inquisitor, Don Alonso Santiso Y Neira, to collect rents for Toledo’s cathedral throughout the archbishopric. Considering Melchor’s notarial work, such power of attorney fit the norm. However, since Melchor suffered from a chronic illness that over time would have shown outward markers, his description in the power of attorney raises some eyebrows: “[Molina] is a tall man up to thirty-­six years old with freckles on his face, a wound above his right eyebrow, dark curly hair and signs of broken bones on his left leg.”39 All these could point to signs of the French disease. The small black pimples that afflicted sufferers could be easily mistaken for freckles. Likewise, the more substantial facial wound could have been the product of a pox ulcer. Finally, the broken

Making Ends Meet  133

limb could point to a typical effect of the French disease as it attacked bone structure. But just as these signs remain equivocal for us, so they could have been interpreted at the time as mere accidents unrelated to the French disease. The problem remained that so many of this illness’s markers could be mistaken as signs of other ailments or of individuals’ general constitutions. Regardless of the fact that a different power of attorney granted later that same year reveals no “freckles” on Melchor’s face, new potential employers would not have had the benefit of hindsight and were probably liable to interpret all but the most obvious of pox signs as caused by something else.40 In the same vein, consider Pedro de Aranda. A few months before he sought treatment at the Hospital de Santiago in the spring of 1657, Pedro seems to have been showing some of the traditional signs of infection – namely markings on his palms, as described in his own power of attorney.41 Such pockmarks were considered typical of smallpox, though everybody would have expected them to appear all over a person’s body.42 That in Pedro’s case they only appeared on his palms helped to dilute suspicion of illness, even if we now know them to be a common sign of the pox. Thus, the administrators of Toledo’s cathedral did not hesitate to grant him a contract that very spring to travel throughout the archbishopric and collect a variety of ecclesiastical rents owed.43 Disease, Work, and Family The financial pressures of an early modern economy meant pox sufferers had to display guile, perseverance and sometimes luck to make ends meet. But aside from these factors, the support of family could prove crucial to their long-­term survivability and success. The Spanish family, like that of other early modern European nations, was central to an individual’s economic and social space in tight-­knit communities. What made the early modern family irreplaceable was the way its members relied on support for advancement. Everything from marriage alliances and the transmission of property to community contacts and jobs were made easier by familial support. Not only was the family envisioned as the basic unit of the early modern polity, but in a society so used to face-­ to-­face interactions, the importance of reputation, of someone’s credit and good word, depended largely on family. It is for this reason that families so jealously guarded, hid and, if public, punished individual transgressions against propriety, for it was everybody’s honour that was at stake. The fault of one could easily become the downfall of all.44

134  From Body to Community

In such a context, it is not difficult to find the poxed relying on family for advancement. Because those afflicted with the French disease took advantage of the same benefits and opportunities granted to family members everywhere, whether ill or not, it is not easy to connect illness directly with aid. Consider, for instance, the case of Magdalena de Rivera, a married woman from Toledo who had been treated for the French disease in the fall of 1660.45 Two years later her brother, Licentiate Juan de Arellano, a chaplain in Toledo’s cathedral, died and left an annuity to their mother.46 He stipulated that after his mother’s death, the annuity should pass to Magdalena, whether or not she was married (and thus presumably in good financial stead). Only after she died would the annuity revert back to the church.47 What to make of this arrangement? On the one hand, one may speculate that the deceased chaplain had decided upon this as a way to aid his sister, especially considering her illness. At the same time, however, such arrangements were not out of the ordinary. Annuities, rents, and incomes were often bequeathed to family members before falling to outside parties, or in this case, an institution. The financial dealings of chronic pox sufferers so easily mirror those of the broader population that it can be difficult to ascertain what role illness played in such arrangements. That sufferers could so easily blend in with everybody else and make use of the same resources and strategies of familial support as others renders them culturally stealthy and ambiguous. In fact, the familial support patients of the Hospital de Santiago sought generally fell under the ordinary arrangements that were common to most families, thereby allowing these people to remain anonymous in their illness, if visible symptoms had not yet appeared. Thus in 1664 we find a long-­term pox sufferer, Matías Fernández del Saz, tapping into his family’s resources to obtain an important position. Matías had first appeared as a French disease patient at the hospital back in 1657, and by now his illness would have progressed to more difficult stages. Nevertheless, over the years he had managed to do well for himself, moving to Toledo and obtaining citizenship.48 His admission to the convent of Santa Clara as steward constituted a reward for years of effort. As with any positions involving the handling of funds, potential employers required a guarantor, an individual who would answer for any losses due to mismanagement.49 For Matías, the guarantor could be no other than his mother, an illiterate woman from the countryside who nevertheless held substantial farmland which she mortgaged to help obtain her son this employment.50 Considering the wealth of potential candidates for the position in a city that was the seat of an archbishopric, the convent would not likely

Making Ends Meet  135

have hired Matías had any symptoms of his illness been evident. That a family member stepped up as guarantor for his employment would have fallen under everyday familial expectations. Matías could thus enter employment commensurate with his abilities and could presumably keep any chronic infirmities hidden. The travails, shame, and challenges of the French disease could stay a familial secret while patients managed to obfuscate – a wig here, an excuse there – broader evidence of their illness. That patients of the hospital availed themselves of the same familial, economic, and transactional strategies as others speaks to pox sufferers’ social flexibility. As much as commentators would have liked to encapsulate them into a distinct social category symbolizing the ailments of society, sufferers carried with them complex ties to socioeconomic groups.51 Extracting the poxed from the artisan, the councilman, the wife, remains impossible. Better to read their actions in light of the broader trends suffusing the Castilian family. As such, the aid provided to patients by family members was not the sole response to the infection of loved ones. Condemnation, even subtle, was not unknown. Given venereal infection and its moral implications, family members wielded great leverage. Consider the case of Fernando García de Cifuentes, a hard-­drinking, womanizing youth who ended up seeking treatment at the Hospital de Santiago in the spring of 1662.52 Fernando was not the typical patient – his mother was a leading lady in town who had enjoyed, apparently for a few years, an affair with Julián García de Cifuentes, accountant for Toledo’s Holy Office. The couple had two sons whom the father naturalized – Fernando and his older brother Julián, who had already taken holy orders.53 Because of this complicated family situation, Fernando’s father had, just before his death in 1661, left most of his estate to three clerical colleagues. Apparently the deal was that they would renounce the estate in favour of the two naturalized sons. Whether this was done for propriety’s sake or because of the dying accountant’s personal eccentricities we cannot ascertain. What we do know is that both Fernando and his brother Julián remained in legal limbo for at least a couple of years after their father’s death; the transfer of his estate to them had never been completed. Such was their need that they even requested the city authorities order the cleric who controlled the estate to pay them support until the matter could be settled. It was in such a context of poverty – even if relative for a youth of respectable lineage – that Fernando sought treatment at the Hospital de Santiago. He probably just could not afford the ministrations of a

136  From Body to Community

physician at home. It also seems, however, that Fernando’s behaviour had been a long-­standing issue of concern to his father, and even if the youngster were not poxed at the time the estate was being transacted, his easy living, womanizing, and sheer refusal to settle into remunerated work touched on all the issues that clerics and commentators condemned as particularly iniquitous in the youth of the day, including the poxed. In question was not only the life of sin Fernando led, soft and pleasurable, but the accompanying matter of laziness. Many, indeed, thundered at what they considered the modish lifestyles of too many young men who preferred to lead a life of pleasure than work hard and persevere in the face of adversity. Ultimately such choices were not only a matter of familial economy and remuneration, but were considered directly inherent to sin. As Father Pedro Guzmán argued, “Among other vices, lust especially goes together with idleness.”54 Indeed, urban life, so full of distractions – gaming, theatre, dancing – was thought to have engendered a generation of lazy youths whose lack of interest in honest toil could only lead to sexual sin. “The second cause is vice, which is forged in youth and grows with the idleness that pushes the careless into the illness of disorderly love. And if idleness by itself fosters such sexual desire, it will do it all the more so feeding off abundance and excess of goods,” proposed Juan Pérez de Moya in 1585.55 Fernando, his father considered, had such a problem – a too-­easy life, punctuated with dissolute pleasure instead of piety and work. In his will, therefore, the patriarch instituted a chaplaincy to be held by the older brother Julián and, only after his death, Fernando.56 The father also provided 300 ducats so that Fernando could dress according to his station and move out into the world, even ordering that part of the estate be used to buy the youth the title of royal notary. After all, Fernando would eventually have to provide for himself somehow. But – and here was the catch – Fernando was to receive none of the funds meant for sartorial elegance unless he took the steps necessary to make something of his life. Fernando’s father had, from his deathbed, exercised what leverage he had against his wayward son. No work? Then no money. Of course, that Fernando had even a couple of years later still not obtained the notarial position expected of him and had entered a public pox hospital where he shared a stinking room with paupers and prostitutes suggests it was all for naught. In Fernando’s tale we can see not just the tensions and contradictions brought about by the fact of venereal infection, but the accompanying behaviours and lifestyles that to many at the time seemed worthy of

Making Ends Meet  137

only uncompromising condemnation. Youths against their elders, gaiety against responsibility, sensuousness against work – sexuality and the reality of venereal disease highlighted fault marks in the bosom of the early modern family. The burden of guilt for the pox, as a moral disease, did not just fall on the ill themselves and their sin; rather, it was families – especially parents – who, as guardians, educators, and protectors of familial reputation, bore the ultimate responsibility for such turns of events. For instance, the scourge of prostitution and its accompanying venereal illnesses were not just considered byproducts of poverty or necessity. On the contrary, such sins and ills could afflict any family, no matter how wealthy or reputable. As Juan Luis Vives argued in his classic Instrucción de la mujer cristiana, “From whence so many prostitutes? So many evil public women? And daughters of honourable and good parents? From whence so many ulcerated and poxed women in the hospitals?”57 Likewise, young men who suffered venereal outbreaks were considered, if anything, a product of the libertine attitudes common among courtiers and the upper classes. Another clerical commentator, Juan de Pineda, righteously thundered, Look well at the sons of the so-­called great gentlemen – even if they owe more than what they could pay in a lifetime – who are raised to eat, play, dress and fornicate. And many of them, so rotten from the pox, seem to be stepping on spiny burrs when walking on carpets, their faces full of freckles, the legs of bandages, and the joints with ointments. And the parents show no concern about letting them live in such contempt of God. They will pay for this in hell, especially since they place them in positions where they commit offenses against God and their fellow man because, after all, boys will be boys and their deeds boyish.58

Because boys inevitably would wander, it was the parents who were at fault when the youths dishonoured the family through profligacy and sinful disease. Ultimately, family members, and parents especially, had as much riding – socially and culturally speaking – on the health of their progeny as did the youngsters themselves; hence the pressure to conform. And were they to stray, families, parents, and guardians had many cards to play to express their displeasure. Not surprisingly, other patients of the Hospital de Santiago also seem, if not altogether dispossessed by morally severe families, at least benignly ignored. One patient’s mother, María de Vargas, a widow

138  From Body to Community

from the village of El Viso in Toledo’s hinterland, exemplified the resolute character of the Castilian matron who, against all odds, navigated the shoals of single parenthood and successfully raised a family on her own.59 Indeed, three children under the age of majority had been left under her care upon her widowhood: Joan, Antonio, and Mateo de Brasa. In 1659, she had a stroke of luck. A Toledo acquaintance, Licentiate Eugenio de Cabañas, had left her some clothing and household objects in his will.60 While she was not going to rise from pauper to wealthy with such a bequest, the garments and other sundries were more than useful for any struggling family. Granted, much of the clothing had seen better days – old velvet pants and old silk stockings – but others were in good condition, including two new winter coats, the provision of which in any household could eat away at money quickly. María thus kept the one luxury granted to her, a silver salt shaker, and passed on a series of garments, a breviary, and a book to her sons Antonio and Mateo. But what of Joan? The black sheep of the family, he did not even receive a mention in his mother’s notarized transfer of the bequest.61 Granted, the willful omission of Joan could have been due to any number of reasons, but that Joan could have used some of the garments his brothers received is not in question. When he sought treatment at the Hospital de Santiago he shuffled into its main foyer looking somewhat disheveled and worse for wear, with an old black hat without lining, old shoes, and even an old set of woolen sleeves on his doublet.62 He did not cut a vision of wealth. The fact that his mother did not even leave him one of the six pairs of stockings bequeathed to her suggests the possibility of a falling out between the two, perhaps exacerbated by the shock of Joan’s venereal infection. If we also consider that María’s late husband, Antonio de Brasa, had enjoyed the prestigious position of Inquisition familiar in the village where the family lived, the discomfort and shame brought about by Joan’s venereal disease would be evident. While being a familiar brought with it a measure of respect for the rights such men enjoyed – the right to participate in inquisitorial processions, to carry arms, to enjoy inquisitorial jurisdiction in criminal cases – it also ushered in higher expectations for personal and familial decorum, as the position was the public face of inquisitorial power.63 In a society in which people not only left goods (to say nothing of actual estates) to family members but also engaged in daily economic transactions with them – loans, sharing income from financial instruments, acting as guarantors, renting or selling property on behalf of another – many relationships and familial webs of economic interest showed up

Making Ends Meet  139

in wills. Although most of an estate was usually accounted for through automatic inheritance by children or spouses, the remnant was often used to settle small loans and make good on promises. And because such transactions were so common and involved family more often than not, a good sense of familial interactions can be gleaned from testaments. Roque Sánchez de Palencia’s will exemplifies the commonality of such arrangements, duly crystallized at the time of death.64 After disbursing his estate to his wife and children, Roque noted that 600 reales were to be given to his niece. Likewise, although a brother-­in-­law, husband of his sister María, had owed him money, Roque reduced the debt and allowed his sister, now widowed, to pay in easy instalments. All in all, Roque fitted the typical pattern for a Spanish family man, at least as he comes across in his will – supportive, kind, and looking out for relatives’ interests. And yet here again there is no mention of a brother, Juan Sánchez de Palencia, who had been treated for the pox in 1658.65 Maybe Juan had been doing well for himself; maybe any dealings he had with Roque were now closed. Regardless, his invisibility in his brother’s will, given how common minor financial arrangements were within families, suggests that, no matter the wealth of evidence exemplifying familial support for the poxed, such was not necessarily a universal response. The equivocal attitude of family members toward French disease patients – support, (sometimes tepid, sometimes full-­hearted), indifference, or subtle condemnation – speaks to the anxieties venereal disease wrought. No mere common illness, the pox ushered in questions of morality that spoke to broader fears about social stability and order. The spectre of improper sexuality held connotations, not just for the ill themselves, but for their families and communities. Certainly, most commentators believed such an illness could not be kept hidden for long. “Who does not see that while a youth flowers and blooms in spring and summer, winter then comes and withers his color, thins his flesh and throws him into bed with a thousand ailments and aches that grow together so that, even if private, his neighbors will find out that he is full of pox?” argued San Juan Bautista de la Concepción.66 In such a close-­knit society, the French disease and the accompanying sin could only remain hidden from wagging tongues for so long. How people responded to the appearance of sin, especially if it were prone to become public knowledge, revealed more generalized attitudes to the cultural changes underscoring early modern Spanish life. As we have seen in chapter 4, some venereal disease sufferers went out of their way to avoid public treatment at the Hospital de Santiago;

140  From Body to Community

others bore such public show with stoic emphasis on familial status. Likewise, some commentary at the time suggested the poxed had lost any of the shame expected of them, and flaunted their disease for all to see; others pointed to the stratagems by which the ill obfuscated the reality of disease. It was only fitting that such questions of morality, public propriety, and reputation would play out in family life as well. The variability of responses family members expressed suggests the wider cultural fault lines drawn by venereal infection. The pox was not a socially neutral disease, for it evoked cultural attitudes that spoke to gender and even racial tensions as well as fear of subversion. In a celebrated sermon, Fray Alonso de Cabrera equated a poxed prostitute whom a husband frequented in lieu of his honourable wife as a diabolical black woman who had bewitched him.67 Likewise, the aforementioned pox-­ themed novella La Pícara Justina alluded to the connection between heresy and the pox: “[Heretics and sorcerers] are like the poxed who want to drink from every cup so that all inherit their pox.”68 At a time when many feared the rising tide of heresy, ungodliness, and sheer epistemological uncertainty, the French disease could act both as shorthand for the problems that befell Christendom and as signifier of a liberalized, devil-­may-­care attitude satirized as typical of courtiers but, given the reality of venereal infection, also common in smaller towns and villages. We see, in turn, the ambiguous family reactions to the pox in their midst. A Two-­Way Street Another issue to consider when examining the role of family in the life of those struck with venereal disease concerns the fact that aid was not necessarily just a one-­way street, a shining example of Christian piety, forgiveness, and charity for the less-­fortunate, even if the latter were egregious sinners. On the contrary, many of the notarial transactions that occupied Hospital de Santiago patients and their families greatly benefitted both parties. When the inability to work or the need for liquid wealth made the management of property more difficult for the ill, they could often turn to family members to resolve such matters, thereby benefiting both. Ana Sánchez from Toledo was surely grateful for any help she could obtain, for she had endured a 1658 anyone would want to forget. Not only had she come down with the French disease and needed treatment at the Hospital de Santiago, but her husband died that year.69 Up until then, both husband and wife had rented farmland just outside the city

Making Ends Meet  141

belonging to the cathedral, but her illness and her husband’s untimely demise meant she could no longer work the land and make her rent payments. So who should come to her aid but her son-­in-­law? Indeed, by February 1659, Ana had transferred the rental of the property to him. She would be relieved from making any payments, and he would obtain prime land just outside the city of Toledo. Both she and her family made the best of an unfortunate situation.70 Indeed, the management of property was perhaps hit hardest by the pox, for not only did it require time, resources, and energy – all sorely lacking among sufferers – but it tied up capital in less-­than-­liquid wealth at a time when patients often needed cash. Under those circumstances, it only made sense to sell or lease property to other family members. Pedro Fernández, originally from Asturias but having moved to Toledo to work in the household of city councilman Pedro Ortiz Vidal y Ribadeneira, found himself in such a difficult situation. He had become infected with venereal disease as early as 1656, and in the interim his parents had passed away, leaving him and his brother Juan a series of homes, farmland, and furniture.71 As Pedro said plainly in the notarial contract with his brother, “he [Pedro] cannot administer or govern the said estate” for he had to remain in the city of Toledo.72 Unnamed was the spectre of chronic infection, its travails, and the difficulty of managing property from so far away. Pedro therefore sold his share of his inheritance to his brother for 52 ducats, to be paid not in the usual instalments, but in cash, a factor that reveals Pedro’s need for liquidity. Juan, while helping his brother in his time of need, also benefitted greatly for, given the economic conditions of the northern Iberian provinces at the time, he was obtaining a good deal. Pedro therefore lost the dream of landed property, but at least got some hard cash he could use. Of course, not all such familial understandings involving property and its management glinted of cold self-­interest. Family members were often more than willing to spend time and resources helping a son, a brother, or a husband to succeed, regardless of the pox. When it mattered most, family often stepped up. Alonso Sánchez, for example, was a relatively successful tailor from Toledo: he had risen to master in the guild and owned his own business. Unfortunately, while he sought treatment for the French disease in the fall of 1661, it seems the illness had been eating away at his health for years, for the physicians could do little there but alleviate basic symptoms.73 Indeed, by the following spring he was on his deathbed, a sudden and terrifying decline that had caught him unawares, for “due to the gravity of my illness I cannot prepare a will.”74

142  From Body to Community

The matter of a will, difficult for a very ill person to prepare yet crucial in such a legalistic society for the orderly transition of an estate, fell to Alonso’s father and his mother-­in-­law, Ana Durán. Alonso’s father could hardly complain about having to help his son arrange his estate; after all, he was to be named Alonso’s universal heir after any debts were paid. The more curious case is that of Alonso’s mother-­in-­law. She had nothing to gain, as Alonso had already stipulated that his wife’s dowry should be returned to her. Ana Durán could not be blamed if she felt some resentment, for, despite the income amassed jointly by the couple, her daughter was to receive nothing other than her original dowry. Regardless, however, she agreed to act in Alonso’s name, even going so far as to make decisions regarding the details of his burial. Even if a French disease patient were to fall out with his immediate family such as siblings and parents, he or she could usually count on spouses. We have already seen that, despite the difficulties, some Hospital de Santiago patients married. A partnership of this sort was crucial to success in early modern life, not just because of the economic resources it pooled, but particularly because of the support, trust, and forbearance it could provide in times of need. It certainly must have been difficult for a non-­infected spouse to continue viewing his or her partner with benevolence after the pox reared its head, and there are literary allusions to complaints from people (mostly women) who unknowingly married pox sufferers.75 That venereal disease implied sexual activity outside the marriage must have been another stumbling block in the affections a wife had for a pox-­afflicted husband. Overall, the attitudes of the spouses of pox sufferers to the French disease appear inconstant and fraught with pitfalls. From the stereotypical complaints and anger at unknowingly having married a pox sufferer, to the Christian exhortation to minister to the sick, responses were complex. María Rodríguez, a healthy young matron, possibly suffered conflicting emotions when her husband showed symptoms of rampant pox and required treatment at the Hospital de Santiago.76 It could not have come at a worse time – the couple was about to move. They were to rent a home and run its adjoining tavern and shop. With her husband barely out of hospital and still convalescing and weak, María had to take matters into her own hands and obtain a power of attorney to go out into town, sign the rental agreement, and engage in the interminable arrangements required to move and start a new business.77 Such matters would usually have been left to a husband; that María was undertaking them constituted no small favour on her part,

Making Ends Meet  143

another burden to add to any wife’s already heavy load of household management, cooking, cleaning, weaving, and other employment. Of course, like many of the arrangements we have seen, the other side of the coin was somewhat favourable to María. A power of attorney to deal with her husband’s affairs was no small matter. Technically, upon marriage, each member of a couple kept any capital he or she had brought into the partnership, such as the dowry, legally separate. In practice, it was more often than not the husband who would obtain a power of attorney from the wife to deal with not only their joint property, but their individual estates. We see this commonly, for instance, when husbands pick up funds granted to their wives through charitable dowry lotteries.78 In this case, however, roles were reversed. With a sick husband at home, María would have to manage all their affairs, both for them as a couple and for her husband individually. Such leverage should not be underestimated – it was the same power that, for instance, widows held over their children. In such a legalistic culture a power of attorney could truly place someone at the helm of another’s life. So for María, perhaps all the added worries and work eventually paid off. When we examine the complicated confluence of pox, work, and family, an ambiguous picture emerges. While the physical effects of a chronic venereal disease were largely unavoidable and created great hardships in terms of both the ability to conduct work and the fear of public recognition of disease, the responses of those closest to patients were multiple and heavily dependent on context. Family members, indeed, often supported their sick offspring, siblings, and marriage partners – especially as long as any signs that would have marked them publicly as pox sufferers remained hidden or obfuscated. On the other hand, support did not always arrive open-­handed – a transactional spirit often tinged such arrangements. In the worst scenarios, disavowal of those who had shamed the family also reared its head. This equivocal mix of responses as patients and families navigated the complex world of work and community relations reflected broader tensions as a sinful disease encountered long-­standing assumptions about familial aid and succour.

Chapter 8

Playing Nice with Others: Pox and Community

Gathered in plenary session on 24 May 1628, Toledo’s city councilmen solemnly listened to an impassioned speech extolling the city’s virtues by Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, knight of the Order of Santiago, steward of the Queen’s household, and scion of one of the most honoured noble lineages in all of Spain. Hurtado de Mendoza had come to know the city well in the seven years in which he had served as royally appointed corregidor (mayor) and, though an outsider, he warmed the hearts of Toledo’s councilmen with a flourish of compliments to this metropolis, which still boasted of the title “Imperial City,” spoke first in the Castilian parliament, and seated the Spanish Primate in its archiepiscopal palace. Hurtado de Mendoza walked his audience through Toledo’s prominence, from business and industry to churches and confraternities, a mix of prosperity and sanctity suffusing the city’s streets and spires. So blinding was Toledo’s greatness that it was necessary to add that “Toledo is not Rome,” lest someone confuse the two. But among all the institutions that exemplified the city’s primacy, it was its health care and social service providers, mostly hospitals and some confraternities, that stood out in his mind. Indeed, Hurtado de Mendoza actually listed, one by one, the twenty-­seven institutions that through their charitable work sanctified and glorified the Imperial City. Among them stood the Hospital de Santiago, “which treats more than three hundred people with the pox per year.”1 In Hurtado de Mendoza’s speech we can observe how the Hospital de Santiago was imagined as part of a broad urban landscape of poor relief and health care services to those in need. Indeed, as Linda Martz has shown, charity stood at the centre of Toledo’s polity, a foundation stone for community-­building in an early modern urban arena filled

Playing Nice with Others  145

with disparities of wealth yet in search of a common identity.2 The treatment of the French disease therefore served as a plank in a wider platform of communal welfare. The poxed may have been derided, feared, or ignored by passersby and regular citizens, but they constituted part of the urban landscape. Not only were they immersed in families and working relationships, but they also lived and suffered in neighbourhoods and communities, their everyday interactions revealing as much about the conceptualization of disease as about the wider ties that bound Toledanos together. The Hospital de Santiago: Community Resource Unlike other health care institutions in the city which normally fell under episcopal jurisdiction, the Hospital de Santiago owed its name to the homonymous military order and was accordingly ruled from afar, namely Madrid’s Council of Military Orders. So crucial was business at court for the hospital’s everyday function that it actually employed a full-­time lawyer in Madrid to deal with both the inevitable bureaucratic machinations and any potential legal wrangles. The hospital also paid a solicitor in Valladolid who could manage any appellate court cases at the Royal Chancery.3 At times, it seems as if the hospital’s attention was drawn to anywhere but Toledo. Consider the constant correspondence between successive administrators and their Madrid superiors on the matter of customary payments owed to the Military Order of Santiago’s home in Uclés, or monies promised for the ransom of captured Christians languishing among heathens in North Africa.4 The hospital’s gaze often lingered on objects far beyond the provincial concerns of its host city. Nowhere is the connection to the hospital’s medieval past as an institution immersed in the Reconquest more evident than in the issue of resources devoted to the ransom of Christian captives. It was precisely for this reason that Don Francisco Antonio de Morante left the comforts of hearth and home in Madrid and travelled to Toledo to meet with the hospital’s administrator on 11 February 1662.5 As befit a noble guest, he was housed in the rooms the hospital kept for the purpose of hosting visiting dignitaries. Though far away from the treatment wards, the inevitable rancid fumes of urine, sweat, and mercury would have still reached him and left their unpleasant tinge on the serge sheets of his bed.6 Likewise, the customary dinner he would have shared with the administrator probably left much to be desired. But it was all worth it. After months of negotiation, supplication, and a royal intervention,

146  From Body to Community

he had in his possession 802 reales and 30 maravedís his host, hospital administrator Don Antonio Palomino, had transferred to him. By the next morning he would be back in the saddle, headed home, with money that would go a long way toward paying his family’s creditors. It was not every day that one spent such sums rescuing a brother like Don Eugenio de Morante from Moorish captivity. The travails his family had endured since that fateful day when his brother was captured by infidels en route to Rome were almost over. A Christian captive. A ransom. Bureaucratic wrangles. It all reads more like the subject of a complicated Baroque play than anything to do with a venereal disease hospital. One can try to stretch the mind to find a connection between the myriad patients seeking relief for venereal sores and the drama of noble captives in a fluid Mediterranean world, but few would be forthcoming. In fact, the ransom of Christian captives was a remnant, a memory from earlier times when the hospital’s functions were rooted in a medieval context and the life of the military order that it served. Indeed, the hospital was obligated by law, dating back to royal grants of incomes in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, to remit yearly funds to its superiors in Madrid for the ransom of captives. Administrators never liked their obligations in this regard, and they often tried to get around them, to the point where an actual recipient, as we saw with Don Antonio, was actually forced to go to Toledo and collect the funds personally.7 These payments persisted as a shadow of a quickly disappearing world that nonetheless shaped the hospital historically, economically, and publicly. The shackles of the past may seem insignificant to the hospital’s mission of treating venereal disease, but they point to the broader context in which the hospital operated, the political and bureaucratic mazes it had to navigate. Indeed, the hospital’s connection to a pan-­Spanish military order was no mere atavistic jurisdictional remnant, but rather coloured its relations to the community in which it was anchored. The hospital stood in Toledo’s Santa María Magdalena parish.8 Normally, charitable institutions would fall under episcopal and parish jurisdiction, but because of the hospital’s ties to the Military Order of Santiago, it remained almost like an alien body within an otherwise self-­contained parish. After many years of wrangling between hospital administrators and the parish, they arrived at an agreement in 1545 that underlined the hospital’s jurisdictional independence as provided by apostolic bulls.9 Such independence had practical implications, mainly whenever the

Playing Nice with Others  147

parish as corporate body needed to enter the hospital either for yearly events such as the feast of Santiago, which brought the local community to the institution, or for specific occurrences such as funerals. Thus the parish priests of Santa María Magdalena were never to set foot in the hospital bearing their standards lest anyone conclude any jurisdictional supremacy over the hospital on the part of the parish corporate body. Agreements notwithstanding, both sides prodded and pushed their limits over the years, as matters of jurisdiction were inherent to a body’s corporate honour. Public rituals, including mannerisms, dress, and symbols carried great significance, since they could be read as a code for hierarchical relationships, not only by participants, but also by the public at large.10 Therefore, by 1659, the hospital and the parish were yet again at odds over this interminable matter.11 Indeed, the question of how parish priests were to conduct themselves upon crossing the hospital’s threshold was so charged that it had reached the Council of Castile. But before any decision could be taken, events conspired to place both sides in a practical conundrum: one of the hospital’s chaplains had passed away and he had stipulated burial outside the august institution. Accordingly, it was the job of the parish priests to enter in procession and accompany the body to its burial ground. Neither side would budge. The hospital administrator adamantly refused to let the parish priests enter in procession and carry their cross – a formal sign of their corporate identity. The parish priests of Santa María Magdalena, for their part, claimed they could only perform their solemn duty as a corporate body, publicly and formally displaying their symbols. Fearful that the body of the deceased chaplain would begin to decompose if they left things too long, both sides came to a grudging understanding: the local priests would, indeed, assist the burial as a duly constituted parish, carrying their cross into the hospital. In turn, the administrator officially protested before an apostolic notary that he did not consent to such a ritual and that it did not constitute any sign whatsoever of jurisdictional superiority. No precedent was to be claimed from the event. A fragile, impermanent truce had been achieved, and the burial proceeded without incident. Ultimately, the hospital’s jurisdictional attachment to a military order signified attention split between local community and national matters. At the same time, the sheer weight of its geographical position and the inevitable relationships it built with Toledo’s leaders, citizens, and neighbours meant that the Hospital de Santiago played an important

148  From Body to Community

role in its community. Everyday interactions ensured that no matter how far away its attention was drawn, the hospital’s gaze inevitably returned to the Imperial City and its people. Aside from its health care mission, the hospital constituted an influential economic player in the city and its surrounding countryside. In fact, thanks to generous medieval grants from Castilian kings who had wished to support the original mission of the institution to redeem captives in Muslim hands and treat those members of the Military Order of Santiago injured in war against the infidel, Toledo’s citizens effectively paid for much of this free health care through taxes and rents.12 For instance, the hospital owned a string of homes, mostly adjacent or close to it, rented to various families and businesses. These lodgings varied from basement rooms the poor could afford to more spacious homes available to the middling classes. In 1603, an inventory of the hospital’s assets taken by outside reviewers described one of the homes Juan de Vargas rented as “having a hall as one enters and then a small room. Above, on the first floor a kitchen and three rooms, as well as a walkway to a mezzanine and another small room and hallway. A floor above, where there is a chimney, one enters two other rooms.”13 This home was rented for 2,625 reales per year, a figure close to the average rent of the over twenty lodgings the hospital owned. Altogether, and taking into account variances from year to year, these homes accounted for 6 to 13 per cent of the hospital’s total yearly income. The rest of the hospital’s resources, used so effectively for treating patients who would not be likely to find succour in other health care institutions, were also drawn from the largest communities – Toledo and its environs – it served. A variety of censos (emphyteutic leases), both perpetual and temporary, were collected from properties strewn across the urban and rural landscape and accounted for over 6 per cent of the hospital’s income. Likewise, many of these properties, especially rural ones in which the hospital ruled as lord, provided healthy slices of taxes – mostly décimas (one tenth of agricultural production) and alcabalas (sales taxes) that, normally collected for the Crown, had instead filled the hospital’s coffers. The most sizable portion of the hospital’s budget (around 70 per cent), however, came from multi-­year rentals of productive land, from pastures and wheat farms to vineyards and forests.14 Throughout this period, rural villagers and Toledo’s citizens could count on the regularity of town criers announcing both the start of the spring and fall treatment seasons as well as duly scheduled public auctions of productive lands. The former drew patients, the latter savvy

Playing Nice with Others  149

businessman and wealthy farmers. The hospital was, as much as a health care institution, an economic force, an engine for enterprise and a vacuum of monetary obligations that bound it as tightly as any other charitable institutions to the communities it served in an inescapable financial embrace.15 At the same time, as much as the hospital took from these communities, it also gave back, not just in terms of its most obvious contribution of health care but also as a major employer. While health care and charitable institutions around Toledo had inevitably been sucked into the maelstrom of economic recession that savaged the region in the seventeenth century, the Hospital de Santiago continued to maintain a sizable, if diminished, budget. While this financial strength meant the hospital could afford to treat a variety of patients, even from beyond Toledo, it could probably count itself lucky: not only were other hospitals in Toledo and elsewhere in the peninsula subject to greater budgetary constraints, but so were other institutions devoted to treating the pox across Europe.16 The hospital’s ability to keep up in hard times made the opportunities for employment it offered all the more important, given the labour market disruptions that had accompanied Toledo’s recession. For that alone, many in the community would have undoubtedly been grateful. The hospital employed around fifty people, drawn mostly from Toledo, in a variety of functions that ranged well beyond health care work. The administrative staff ensured the hospital ran with a modicum of efficiency, especially pertaining to financial matters, and included the administrator, the hospital steward, foremen for two highly prized rural areas, Yegros and El Campo de Montiel, an accountant, and a host of lawyers working in Toledo, Madrid, and Valladolid. Others watched over the essential religious mission of the institution, so inextricably linked to health care; these included four chaplains (two at the hospital and two in rural areas) and a sacristan. The largest number of employees coordinated the provision of health care: a head nurse, a physician, two surgeons and a pharmacist, a specialist in preparing distilled palo santo (holy wood, guaiac) and sarsaparilla water, and a slew of male and female nurses who attended patients in their separate wards. Finally, a doorman, cooks, a wardrobe assistant, and guards for rural properties constituted essential support staff that rounded out the hospital’s workforce.17 The Toledanos who worked alongside each other in the complex institution that was the hospital practically entered a different world there, entailing both the inevitable vagaries of interpersonal and

150  From Body to Community

staff-­administration relations as well as the defined benefits spelled out in the 1604 hospital regulations. Petty jealousies and rivalries were known to bubble up among the staff, often necessitating directives from Madrid. Indeed, most of the hospital’s correspondence on its daily function dating from the late seventeenth century through the eighteenth century focuses on staff issues – from political intrigue and personal enmities to near-­open rebellion against the attempts of new and eager administrators to reform some of the incongruences and inefficiencies that lingered in this public institution.18 Not only were personal relationships often frayed, but the very nature of the health care work – backbreaking, indecorous, filthy, and dangerous due to the mercury ointments staff handled – meant the hospital had a high rate of turnover, particularly among the non-­specialized nurses’ assistants. A review of hospital accounts reveals a host of nurses who worked not even the full term of the spring or fall treatment seasons: In 1594 – the most detailed year in terms of staffing – Diego López worked for two months, brothers Romero and Juan Bautista served a month and twenty five days, and María Alonso could only handle one month in the job.19 This high turnover constituted a recurring headache for the hospital. Indeed, its 1604 regulations, aimed at reforming practices, stipulated that experienced nurses’ assistants be kept on staff even after the majority of patients seeking treatment had come and gone during spring and fall. For the rest of the year, it was more efficient to keep them on the payroll, “because it is better to pay the salary and ration to those who are already trained in this work for that small amount of time than having to go looking for staff later on and not being able to find those who know how to do it.”20 Part of the problem in keeping a regular staff probably stemmed from the hospital’s tendency not to pay salaries in a timely fashion. Although its budget was healthy, cash flow could be problematic, as the reliance on rural and urban rents meant much of the hospital’s cash was paid in late summer and early fall, as was typical of most rental contracts. May, June, and July were usually difficult months for much of the staff, and particularly those of lowly condition, as the hospital awaited an infusion of cash. Nevertheless, sizable benefits accompanied employment at the hospital. Aside from competitive salaries – even for female assistants, who received the same salary as their male counterparts until well into the seventeenth century – all staff were allotted a daily food ration.21 Some, if owed money, could even obtain a home from the hospital, usually on appeal to Madrid, in lieu of payment. Finally, the hospital’s sterling reputation meant staff members forged a certain

Playing Nice with Others  151

corporate identity, a pride in their workplace, to the point where they not only defended their rights vociferously but also looked with suspicion upon outsiders, such as the time when one of the administrators brought a niece to live at the hospital.22 Despite the hospital’s preoccupation with national matters, its location within Toledo and its connection to rural villages and properties meant it was immersed in its immediate, local communities. A pride of Toledo, a major employer and a property owner, the hospital functioned daily within a broader web of local concerns and relationships. When patients were treated there, they were not really crossing its threshold into a world separate from their everyday social and economic interactions; on the contrary, they were using a resource that was already part of their communities. Poverty, Charity, and Community The imagination of health care as part of broader communal objectives of poor relief permeated the Hospital de Santiago’s sense of mission and place within Toledo. Not only was the institution well-­acquainted with the travails of poverty, but its mandate centred specifically on aiding the poor. Hospital account books and regulations, notarial records and letters all stressed poverty to such an extent that the term “patient” can rarely be divorced from it. Indeed, statements aimed at safeguarding resources for patients, such as “all the hospital’s income and its staff are dedicated to the service of the poor patients,”23 exemplify the extent to which health care was conceptualized as poor relief. While it might be tempting to chalk up the equation of poor relief to health care as mere rhetorical device, the Hospital de Santiago took this matter to heart as both the needy and the financially comfortable sought treatment behind its walls. Ideally, the hospital was to prevent freeloaders from gaming the system and taking the place of those truly in need of health care, who otherwise would have been unable to pay for private physicians. Indeed, Diego López Mejía, the cleric who conducted a thorough external review of the hospital’s budget, inventory, and everyday practices in 1574, ordered that [t]he hospital should not deviate from the regular order to admit the poor with illnesses other than [the pox] treated in this institution, especially asthmatics given the danger they might die from the [mercury] treatments given to the poxed. And those admitted to the hospital must be those who

152  From Body to Community are most ill and disabled, without allowing those who are less needy to cut in line through favors or the like … It is ordered that all incoming patients are to be listed in the admissions book, noting the most needy and sick, so that upon examination by the administrator, head nurse, and physician, the most deserving are chosen.24

Considering the good reputation of the hospital and the increasing demands of patients seeking treatment at a time of demographic pressure, it is not surprising that the new regulations promulgated in 1604 also stressed the twin requirements of financial need and certifiable illness for admission. “No individuals sick with infirmities other than treatable pox shall be admitted … No patient who has enough income to be treated at home or in another place outside this hospital shall be admitted,” curtly pronounced the reformed constitutions.25 While this ideal may have rarely been followed, based on the sheer socioeconomic variability of the patient population examined in chapter 3, it gives an inkling of the perceived connection between illness and poverty in the hospital’s mission. Moreover, the hospital’s connection to Toledo’s poor was not limited to the ill. On the contrary, since its inception the hospital had often distributed alms and bread to the indigent, whether sick or not, who crowded its gates. The extent of this charity was a matter of controversy among administrators and the hospital’s superiors in Madrid. Indeed, many felt that resources should be saved as much as possible to devote exclusively to health care activities. As late as the 1590s, the hospital still practiced regular almsgiving, mainly by distributing the bread that had gone uneaten during the day to the waiting crowds outside and by more formalized acts of charity on feast days and during public events. The needy, the maimed, the indigent and the starving received copious amounts of bread from the institution. For instance, in 1580 – a year for which we have good accounts – the food distributed as alms amounted to about 22 per cent of the cost of bread for patient meals, not a negligible expense.26 Nevertheless, as patient needs continued to grow and pressures on income increased, the hospital reform of 1604 intended to limit almsgiving. Thereafter food could be formally distributed only on the feast day of Saint James, the hospital’s patron, although patients’ leftovers could still be given daily to the hungry crouched just outside the hospital’s gates.27 Such careful emphasis on marshaling resources solely for the aid of the poxed poor reflected the pressure placed on hospital resources toward the end of the sixteenth century. Indeed, account

Playing Nice with Others  153

books from the 1570s and ‘80s suggest the hospital treated anywhere from 600 to 1200 patients per year, well above the average of 321 we find in the mid-­seventeenth century, once Toledo had entered a demographic decline.28 At the same time, the conceptualization of the poxed patient as poor and the careful tending to such an image also spoke to broader communal attitudes toward the ill, especially since the French disease was seen to be born of sin and iniquity. Consider that debates about the treatment of the pox had raged throughout the European continent for decades.29 At issue were the consequences of sinful lust. Would not curing the poxed merely reward sin? Should not they be left to linger in the suffering they brought upon themselves through lust? As late as 1558, well after the Hospital de Santiago was reformed to provide succour to the poxed, Toledo’s archbishop Bartolomé de Carranza insisted on conceptualizing the disease as welcome divine punishment: “In this age God has found a new remedy, never before heard, to punish lust: a new type of leprosy that they call buboes or French disease.”30 Given the tension among sin, illness, and treatment, communal conceptualizations of the poxed could, indeed, mark them as outsiders unworthy of Christian charity. We have already seen in chapter 1 how Spanish discourses around the French disease tended to focus on groups considered alien to the experience of everyday people: prostitutes and nobles at court. No matter the soiled reality of pox in the midst of artisanal and urban families, it was easier to think of the French disease as a disease of the Other. Even the archetype of the heretic was equated with the pox; after all, French disease sufferers, just like heretics, were thought to pollute the body social willfully.31 Heresy, treason against God, and the pox went together naturally, a threat to a Christian polity. In such a context, the focus on the poverty of pox patients – while not actually based on the socioeconomic realities and complexities of the patient population – effectively justified the treatment of the poor at public expense. It also provided the poxed a place within the moral geography of community: sinners they may have been, but as misguided poor who knew no better, they could fruitfully receive the largesse of Toledanos. In this sense, the poverty so usually associated with patients was not only pecuniary but moral as well, a difficult feature to be sure, but one with remedy. Patience, charity, and education, alongside health care treatment, might just bring those wayward souls back into the communal fold – hence the focus on spiritual care alongside physical treatment at the Hospital de Santiago.

154  From Body to Community

Pox Patients and Urban Community In the wake of the discursive battle between the pox sufferer as dangerous outsider deserving punishment and wayward soul in need of reform, the way patients effectively engaged their communities in daily life at once reflected these tensions and evinced more complex interactions. A venereal disease sore might disappear thanks to the magic of mercury ministrations but as patients left the hospital they still had to interact with their peers and neighbours, make ends meet, and generally lead their lives in broader communities whose concerns went far beyond the French disease. How did pox sufferers insert themselves into these urban worlds? What were the implications of relationships built over time with other community members? Whether their illness was public knowledge or not, patients still required the support of neighbours, contacts, and networks to achieve broad goals. Nobody in an early modern society in which reputation and face-­to-­face relationships were so crucial could go it alone.32 Transactions of all sorts, even beyond the work-­related, necessitated that patients tap into these connections. Indeed, these relationships allowed patients to pursue various goals and reveal that, notwithstanding venereal infection, they were still part of a local community, in the same ways as any of their brethren who were not ill. Consider the case of Andrés de Romani, an eighteen-­year-­old who had been treated for the French disease in May 1660. Just as his case reveals how assumptions of curability played out, as discussed in chapter 2, it also points to the centrality of community connections to pox sufferers. The black-­haired, lanky youth – so described in notarial documents – apparently decided, upon leaving the hospital, to change his life radically and seek passage to the Indies, although he had been a lifelong resident of the city of Toledo, just as his parents and grandparents had. To this end, he sought a duly notarized report by September 1660 on the quality of his person and purity of his blood – royal requirements for any would-­be passengers to the Americas, as the Crown had instituted laws that ideally prevented those descended from Jews or Moors from travelling to the New World.33 A cross-­section of Toledo citizens provided testimony on his behalf, including a jurado (alderman), a merchant, a familiar for the Holy Office, and a cleric at Toledo’s cathedral. All of them had known his parents for years, and the boy since birth; they had seen him grow up among friends and neighbours in Toledo, and could thereby attest to the quality of his person. Only the

Playing Nice with Others  155

merchant, Francisco de Cisneros, had not been particularly close to his maternal grandparents, but could nevertheless testify to Andrés’s and his family’s blood purity, as “it was demonstrated and very well understood from their good relations, upstanding lives, and honest habits.”34 The comment on Andrés’s unimpeachable habits strikes us as ironic, considering his recent release from a venereal disease hospital. Whether the merchant was aware of this reputational taint or not, it nevertheless seems likely that Andrés would have been able to travel to the Americas unimpeded, even had his illness come to light in the testimony. In fact, travel accounts to the Americas, mainly from conquistadors, reveal how common it was for travellers to have this affliction.35 The testimony on Andrés’s lineage, behaviour, and customs reveals the ambiguous conceptualizations of reputation: a prostitute or unmarried woman could be singled out and rhetorically pilloried for venereal infection; a youth from an upstanding family like the Romanis need not necessarily have feared such invective. In addition, the quality and variability of the witnesses the youth presented on his own behalf, drawn from the ranks of political, clerical and business oligarchies, speak to the importance of local networks, expanded over many years from the familial nucleus and fostered through daily interactions, that allowed Andrés, a pox sufferer, to obtain such a favourable testimony, and, presumably, passage to the Indies and a new life. These local networks, often built through friendships and contacts within parishes, also imposed an unavoidable condition on even the most mundane transactions. Although contracts were enforceable, parties almost always required further sureties in the form of a guarantor for almost any agreement involving a financial exchange. Thus, even the otherwise normal process of renting a home – whether palatial or a mere unhealthy basement – required renters to have someone who could vouch for them. Indeed, we have seen that family members often fulfilled such a role. But in a society in which travel and migration in search of work and opportunity were quite common, sometimes this support had to come from friends.36 Pox sufferers, regardless of their sojourns at a venereal disease hospital that ideally meant to separate them from healthy and presumably morally upright citizens, could still rely on such networks built over time. Diego del Castillo lived in Toledo’s Santo Tomé parish, best-­ known as the site of the church housing El Greco’s The Burial of the Count of Orgaz. A master barber, Diego had many fruitful contacts in his parish. Indeed, although he was treated for the French disease in the

156  From Body to Community

spring of 1662, upon leaving the hospital he married Ana Pablona, and was fortunate enough to collect a lottery dowry by late summer from Toledo’s cathedral valued at 20,000 maravedís.37 Needing a new, more spacious home for his growing family, Diego rented a house owned, perhaps not coincidentally, by the cathedral chapter. That this home was a principal one in the parish can be gleaned from the relatively high rent of 27 ducats per year, well above the average of rental contracts one finds for the city of Toledo in the period. Diego’s guarantor, a neighbour he probably saw every day, was a parish tobacco seller named Pedro de Galves.38 Housed in a well-­appointed home, at the top of his profession, and just married, Diego exemplified the image of a leading citizen of his parish community, able to rely on the support of networks built over time, regardless of his venereal infection, whether that was public knowledge or mere private yoke. Because the poxed were not defined merely by their illness but participated in broader communal structures, they too could come to the aid of neighbours, friends, and contacts. Indeed, the French disease was by no means a condemnation to poverty or ostracism. Upon leaving the hospital, patients merely continued their lives where they had left off, building and fostering networks and generally getting on with lives fully immersed in local matters. Juan Gamero certainly did so. A married man, originally from Fuensalida though a citizen of Toledo by 1655, he had sought treatment at the Hospital de Santiago that very spring. His bout with illness had apparently neither sullied his reputation nor dented his personal worth, for by January 1656 he had agreed to act as guarantor on 1,080 reales two farmers from Rielves committed to pay to Toledo’s cathedral chapter for the rental of land. Rielves stands about seven kilometers from Fuensalida, so the two renters, Miguel Pérez and Pedro Sánchez, probably knew Juan Gamero from the time he had still lived in that rural area. That by 1660 Juan would be forced to act on his guarantee and pay the cathedral chapter the owed money, plus 190 reales in penalties, as both farmers had defaulted on their obligation, only emphasizes that he continued to prosper and maintain his relationships. Indeed, Juan “offered the payment and effectively did it from his own funds.”39 Although guarantors did not always come through and such promises could be contested in court, Juan chose to fulfil his commitment to his friends from the countryside without a fight.40 Personal interactions with varied networks were important to patients, whether for aid or as part of broader strategies of relationship-­building. At the same time, patients could also tap into formal community institutions,

Playing Nice with Others  157

just as many early modern people did, for support. Just as the Hospital de Santiago provided the necessary aid for health care problems, these community resources could help assuage the broader financial and personal difficulties that Toledanos encountered. For instance, couples of good social standing could take a foundling into their care. The Hospital de Santa Cruz, founded in 1499 by Cardinal Pedro González de Mendoza, looked after foundlings from the city of Toledo and surrounding areas. Because of a lack of resources, the hospital normally placed children (some just toddlers) who survived the perilous years of infancy under the care of a family that committed to housing, clothing, and educating the child, as well as treating him or her for any illnesses, in exchange for work around the home.41 Note that this service in menial housework – at least as stipulated in notarial contracts, even if not specified in the foundling home regulations – usually went unremunerated until the child reached at least the age of ten, when a nominal salary lower than that of a regular maid or servant would be paid.42 Ideally, all parties benefitted: the hospital saved resources by placing a foundling with a family, the child received protection and an education, and the family itself obtained a free or very cheap source of labour. Given these parameters, it is not surprising to find couples in which one of the partners was afflicted with the French disease seeking such an arrangement. As stipulated by the foundling hospital, such a couple would be childless, and the work of the boy or girl could greatly aid a family already strained by the needs of caring for an ill member. For instance, María Gómez travelled from La Puebla de Montalbán to Toledo to sign an agreement with the hospital’s administrator for the care of an infant. All this was done with the express permission of her husband, Juan de Córdoba, who remained at home, still convalescing from the treatment he had received for the pox at the Hospital de Santiago in the spring of 1658. Indeed, it is likely that Juan was suffering from an advanced stage of the French disease and was thus unable to travel, as he had already sought treatment at the Hospital de Santiago in 1655 and 1657.43 However, the foundling home provisions, reaffirmed in later eighteenth-­century regulations, that children were only to be placed with people of good moral standing and capable of teaching them a trade seemed not to have been enforced with particular care, at least in this case and that of other poxed who also “contracted” these foundlings, such as Juana Rodríguez – patient at the Hospital de Santiago – and her husband, who took on a two-­year old girl in 1660.44 Neither of these cases made mention of training in a reputable trade, just a

158  From Body to Community

rudimentary education. Likewise, despite the foundling home’s extensive provisions outlining the necessity of hiring morally upright and healthy nursemaids, as well as ensuring the children’s well-­being and health in the fostering family (to the point where administrators could theoretically take back a child who was being raised in an improper or unhealthy environment), little effort seems to have been made in practice to inquire after the health of these prospective foster parents. Would the foundling home administrator have sent these toddlers to a home housing a pox sufferer had he been aware of it? The sources, both notarial and administrative, remain silent on the matter. Nevertheless, the ease with which those afflicted with a disease that could supposedly be transmitted through non-­sexual contact could benefit from these types of arrangements speaks to the invisibility of illnesses like the pox, so easy to hide, once outside the realm of hospital treatment. No matter its chronic and contagious nature, venereal disease was a mere nuisance compared to the much graver problems of poverty and destitution that coloured how institutions such as the foundling hospital made their decisions. It was through these cultural and social cracks that pox patients could slip and use community resources to their own benefit. Dowry grants – drawn from the charitable bequests of wealthy ­patrons upon their deaths – constituted another community resource on which patients from the Hospital de Santiago relied. These bequests were usually meant to allow worthy young women of modest means to obtain a reputable marriage, lest their poverty drive them into concubinage or worse. Usually they were administered by religious institutions that preselected worthy candidates and then held a ceremony in which lots were drawn for these not-­insubstantial funds.45 However, as a means of ensuring compliance and as a reflection of the gendered expectations that coloured social conventions, the lucky women who won these dowries did not necessarily receive the funds right after the draw. Rather, it was their future husbands who, once married to the winners, would approach the managing institutions and obtain the actual payment on behalf of the newly minted couple. This wrinkle in the bureaucracy of dowry bequests means that we often get to know who these maidens married and how long after their lottery wins they did so. These are important distinctions, as a majority of the patients of the Hospital de Santiago who took advantage of these charitable bequests were young men who, when single, had sought treatment at the hospital and afterwards married one of these lucky women.

Playing Nice with Others  159

Although the ability of the poxed to marry raises important questions regarding the assumptions surrounding venereal disease that are addressed in chapter 6, if we examine the issue from the point of view of the religious institutions granting these dowries, it is clear that they saw marriage constituting the ultimate goal for most citizens, no matter what compromises had to be made to get to that point. As we have seen, the fear that single women had of being unwittingly married to pox sufferers was widespread, and reflected in popular literature. But, as long as the young maidens used the bequeathed dowry to obtain a husband, the groom’s health did not seem to matter or was never really checked. Indeed, these poxed newlyweds had no problems presenting their proud countenances before the clerics holding the purse strings and obtaining these funds. Joseph de Yepes, single and treated for the pox in July 1659, received 15,000 maravedís from the bequest of Canon Gabriel de Cárdenas, awarded to his new wife, María Lorenza López, by December of the same year.46 Juan Joseph Hermoso, still single, was treated for the French disease in the spring of 1658; meanwhile, the impoverished Francisca García lucked out and obtained a dowry from the bequest of Isabel de Castilla valued at 17,000 maravedís, drawn solemnly in 1659 at Toledo’s cathedral.47 Now armed with a dowry, Francisca could find a husband. The fact that the marriage market was likely saturated with young women seeking the attention of fewer men, as reflected in the demographic gender imbalance that plagued Spanish society, might account for her choice of Juan Joseph Hermoso.48 He might have been poxed, but he could boast of reasonable career expectations as a tailor. By 1660, once the couple was married, Joseph approached the canons of the Cathedral and obtained the payment promised to his wife. These dowry lotteries were flexible enough even to allow women who had fallen on difficult times – including probable pox infection – to obtain support. Regardless of the lotteries’ idealized goal of supporting virtuous but impoverished young women, the realities of hard lives marred by loss and destitution allowed some leeway in the way these dowries were granted. María de Cañízares had been married for a few years to a long-­term pox sufferer, Tomás de Espinosa, who had been treated at the Hospital de Santiago in 1656 and 1657.49 Although she does not appear in the hospital records as a patient, the nature of the illness would have made it unlikely that she remained free of it. Furthermore, the couple did not seem to enjoy the best financial situation, even if

160  From Body to Community

they could boast of a sterling social reputation. When Tomás had sought treatment at the hospital the contradictions between his apparent social standing and economic reality came to the fore: though he wore the valona (collar) and golilla (support under the collar) typical of well-­heeled urban men, his doublet was old, as were his socks. Adding insult to injury, it seems he could not even afford a normal undershirt, for the one he brought to the hospital was homespun, probably at the hands of María herself.50 Poor, and ill with the French disease, Tomás apparently met his maker soon thereafter, for, by 1658, we find María winning a dowry lottery of 15,000 maravedís from the bequest of Doña Teresa de Aro, and administered by the cathedral canons.51 While she may have been able to hide any illness she had contracted from her departed husband, her widowhood and her husband’s bout with the pox must have been common knowledge in the small society of Toledo. Maybe Tomás’s illness had allowed María to keep her virginity intact. Maybe clerical administrators saw fit to reward her Christian charity in caring for a husband ill with a communicable disease. Regardless, that the lottery administrators still chose to include her among dowry candidates speaks to the flexibility of such institutional charities in doling out funds. Thus helped, by 1660 María married Simón Perez, a master bricklayer who duly collected the money promised to her. Toward a Poxed Community One of the most intriguing aspects of following the lives of pox patients beyond hospital care remains the encounters and connections they crafted with each other in service of various economic and transactional pursuits. Whether through friendships forged in the shared fire of mercury treatment or through mere happenstance given the sheer number of poxed walking the streets, French disease sufferers aided each other and interacted fruitfully well after initial treatment. Can we speak of a distinct community of venereal disease sufferers, however? Did a shared sense of common identity emerge through these connections? If we are to believe most early modern commentators who lived with the spectre of a pox pandemic, those afflicted with this disease constituted a group separate from the rest of society. Though difficult to pin down and classify based on mere visual recognition, as the symptoms of the pox could be hidden, sufferers were generally marked by writers as non-­normative, as the antithesis of the healthy, and thereby as a continuous threat. López de Úbeda’s aforementioned La pícara Justina,

Playing Nice with Others  161

whose narrator publicized her infection, spoke to precisely this sense of venereal disease sufferers as constituting a group apart, the ties of infectious illness superseding all others, whether familial or neighbourly. “Us poxed have this consolation: that if once we had hair and now we only have it on our palms (God be praised), we can say that we made pillows to sleep with the hair we lost, while the healthy go to mass and sermons, imitating flies that, throughout winter, belong to the confraternities of the seven dreamers,” mocks Justina.52 To our anti-­ heroine, the French disease constituted a freedom that she and others who shared her plight rightly brandished over the meekness of ordinary proper Christians. While Justina’s statements should be taken with a grain of salt (the work was meant to moralize and paint a picture of the poxed as dangerous, irresponsible, and reflective of the general moral bankruptcy of the age), more neutral writers also proclaimed a sense of a pox community. Perhaps the best-­known allusion to it is Sebastián de Horozco’s aforementioned poem titled “Los Privilegios de la Cofradía del Grillimón.” Although the term grillimón could be understood as a reference to the shackles (grillos) placed on the feet of those in prison, it was also a well-­ known reference to the pox.53 The term cofradía del Grillimón had already appeared in a 1552 poem on the French disease, from which Horozco probably drew inspiration.54 Of interest to the notion of poxed community is the conceptualization of venereal disease sufferers as part of a confraternity, one of the basic identitary institutions of early modern society. The illustrious congregation and general confraternity of that saint Grillimón most plenary indulgence grants you on this day because all those who are or from now on may be part of this faction and reputation may suffer with greater devotion the travails they may encounter.

Thus Horozco opens his poem.55 In the rest of the work, the poxed are united by their travails – joint pain, alopecia, mercury treatments – and the subsequent dispensations – eating meat on prohibited days, wearing

162  From Body to Community

winter clothes in summer, not needing to tip their hat when saluting someone on the street. Without distinction of class or gender, all who are afflicted with this disease are admitted to this confraternity; all can recognize each other and know of the pain they suffer and the remedies that might help; all ultimately know that only another sufferer can truly understand his or her plight. Horozco proposes a matter-­of-­fact, if somewhat satirical, iteration of the ins and outs of venereal infection, aspects that unite sufferers in a common venture. But poetic license and literary devices were one thing: real pox infection, lived in the midst of a broader social hive of the healthy, all wagging tongues and disapproval, was another. As La pícara Justina’s protagonist astutely remarks, “[T]he discreet write the notice of their health on the bodies of the sick.”56 No matter the connections that patients at the Hospital de Santiago built with others sharing their plight, however, no effective public associations emerged to group them in a common pursuit. Nevertheless, individual relationships, which sometimes transcended the hospital stay itself, did emerge. Some of these interactions between patients could have been the product of sheer chance, given the widespread reach of an illness that knew no social boundaries. For instance, in 1662, a poxed couple, Luis de Loaisa, master carpenter, and his wife María de Carbajal, transferred the rental of a home in Toledo to Pedro Izquierdo, whose guarantor, master tailor Miguel Martín, was also afflicted with venereal disease.57 However, the couple and the master tailor had not met each other at the hospital, as they received treatment in different seasons – the couple in 1657 and Miguel Martín in 1658.58 The probability these pox sufferers knew each other, despite a common treatment at the Hospital de Santiago, remains slim. Other patients, however, seem to have established relationships upon their stay at the hospital that survived and prospered in common arrangements afterwards. For example, in 1660 the widow Catalina Rodríguez transferred the rental agreement on a Toledo home to Don Antonio de Loarte.59 Both had coincidentally been admitted for treatment of the French disease at the Hospital de Santiago on 2 September 1659. In fact, Catalina was only two spots in line behind Don Antonio.60 Even if they were to remain separated during their hospital stay due to regulations preventing communication between the male and female wards, a brief conversation and incipient friendship forged as both awaited admittance seems to have resulted in a later financial transaction that benefited both. Likewise, in 1661, a former patient from the Hospital de Santiago, Nicolás del Rio, sold the estate he had inherited from his parents in León to Juan Blanco, the financial superintendent of the convents of Santa

Playing Nice with Others  163

Clara and San Pablo in Toledo, for 1,650 reales.61 We discussed Nicolás’s case in chapter 6 in terms of his marriage between his treatment for the pox in 1656 and this sale of real estate. But what are intriguing regarding the buyer of this property are the multiple connections his family had with Nicolás. Both hailed originally from the same village in Leon, Caboalles de Abajo, and we may thus presume that Nicolás had relied, from the moment he had arrived in Toledo, on this common origin for networking.62 More important here, however, is that fact that both Nicolás and a daughter of Juan Blanco’s, Magdalena Millán (married to a local accountant), had been treated for the French disease at the Hospital de Santiago at same time in the spring of 1656.63 While it is easy to imagine a relationship between buyer and seller stemming from a shared identity as leonenses finding fortune in Toledo, the common experience of pox treatment Nicolás and Magdalena endured that spring may also have informed this eventual transaction between the families. Although unheralded, the ties forged among venereal disease sufferers who had undergone experiences so alien to the rest of the population may have provided yet more reasons for future transactional aid. Considering both families likely knew each other, due to their common origin, before the advent of the French disease in their midst, the sympathy engendered by undergoing such a harrowing experience as mercury treatment and the subsequent difficulties of living with the pox could well have prodded Magdalena to utter a helpful whisper in her father’s ear when it came time for Nicolás to sell his estate. After all, networks were based on common identities built on the back of experiences, social positions, kin relations, and geographical origins. Venereal infection was merely another factor pushing together people with common interests. Sometimes the shared bonds of pox infection resulted in contractual transactions that were slightly altered to reflect the knowledge, in their own flesh, that these sufferers had of the difficulties of illness. The specific culture of the poxed body, so eloquently described by authors like Sebastián de Horozco, could subtly shift the standardized expectations of legal transactions. Pedro Meléndez, like many at this time, came from an impoverished village in Asturias and had moved to Toledo to find his fortune. He worked as a servant for cardinal and archbishop Baltasar Moscoso y Sandoval, but had contracted the French disease, and received treatment in 1660 and again in the fall of 1663.64 Shortly after his first sojourn at hospital, in May 1661, he entered into an agreement with another pox patient, Juan Fernández, a Toledo cartwright, to train a youngster Pedro had in his care.65

164  From Body to Community

Whether Pedro and Juan had actually met beforehand and knew of each other’s venereal plight is not clear. Nevertheless, their experience with such a harsh disease certainly coloured this contract. For the most part, the training and work agreement followed convention in terms of pay and length. However, a clause that specifically spoke to disease was changed from the standard – namely, the expectation that the employer, Juan Fernández, would provide the youth with health care. Normally, such a clause was open-­ended. In this case, with two venereal disease sufferers forging the agreement, the contract stipulated that Juan Fernández only owed his would-­be trainee two weeks of health care every four years. If the youth’s illness exceeded two weeks, Juan Fernández could continue to provide health care, but the costs would be deducted from the boy’s salary.66 Having been treated at the Hospital de Santiago, both Juan and Pedro knew that a typical course of mercury treatment ran two weeks. They must have also been aware of the continuing costs associated with chronic venereal disease and the difficulties inherent in treatment, as the Hospital de Santiago only managed the outward appearance of venereal lesions, but not any continuing problems such as joint pain, loss of cartilage, and so forth. Whether Juan and Pedro had recognized each other as fellow travellers on the difficult road of chronic infection we cannot know. The special health care provision contained in the contract nevertheless spoke to their knowledge of how the French disease affected everyday life. They thereby transmuted their understanding of the body and disease into a specific contractual agreement that would have made sense to pox sufferers. Most venereal disease patients probably never forged associations designed to protect their interests, even when popular culture grouped them together into a definable moral space within early modern society. The shared experience of the French disease and the small world of the early modern city, however, meant patients often interacted fruitfully once reinserted into their communities after treatment, bringing common outlooks and objectives to bear on the problems of everyday life. Pox patients navigated the hardships and opportunities of social relationships in complex early modern communities in much the same way others did. Venereal disease sufferers often relied on each other. After all, what better than a contact who could commiserate with a situation marred by illness? They also relied on long-­standing networks of support that spoke to common understandings of kinship, parish, work contacts, and socioeconomic status. Such social webs were indispensable to early modern life and had probably shaped patients’ outlooks

Playing Nice with Others  165

and opportunities well before they had come down with venereal disease. If anything, these networks demonstrate the continuities in lives marked by disease but not radically transformed by it. Finally, patients also used institutional community resources to serve their needs, all the more so considering the infirmity and health repercussions that coexisted with venereal infection. The way in which the poxed interacted with their communities suggests that, even if popular culture coloured the social space afforded to the French disease morally, personal relationships mattered. The pox need not define a person more broadly embedded in social and identity relationships. Patients of the Hospital de Santiago thus emerge as liminal subjects, at once objectified and separated from community while integrally part of it.

Conclusion

Patients as People: Disease, Society, and Beyond

Don Lucas de Andrade y Benavides could not count himself lucky. In fact, by the fall of 1656, when he entered the Hospital de Santiago in his hometown of Toledo for venereal treatment, he was a broken man.1 At forty-­nine years old, the flower of his youth had withered away and the verve and valor with which he had served king and country in countless battles across Europe had not gained him the recognition and respect he so desired.2 He was a knight of the Order of Santiago, a position of great honour that would have afforded him special treatment at the hospital, tended to in the guests’ quarters away from the rabble filling the infirmaries – but as the son of a noble lineage with decades of military and bureaucratic service to the Crown, this was not how his life was supposed to turn out, with him languishing with the French disease in a hospital. As a guest at the Hospital de Santiago, Don Lucas might have at least avoided the shame of publicly acknowledged infection. In private, however, the scourge of the pox only capped an uphill, and ultimately unsuccessful, competition with his older brother Joseph. Joseph was all that Lucas was not: successful, recognized, a family man, healthy, meritorious, and in the graces of the Crown. As the sons of the esteemed Licentiate Lucas de Andrade, auditor general for the Spanish navy, the Benavides brothers had always been subject to great expectations. Not only could they count inquisitorial notaries and consultants on both sides of the family, but they were also related to the Count of Lemos. As the older brother, however, Joseph had always been a step ahead of Lucas. He had become a knight of the Order of Santiago well before his brother, he had obtained the lordship of the town of Salas de Ribera in Galicia and, by 1650, he was named mayor of the town of Cuenca in Peru.3 He had also been married twice, and could count three

Conclusion: Patients as People  167

sons who would continue his lineage, including Luis, who would serve the Crown in the Americas and inherit his father’s lordship. Lucas, on the other hand, had not achieved all the goals he had pursued. Granted, he had served heroically in Flanders, Italy, and Catalonia, twice receiving serious injuries and suffering imprisonment at the hands of Barcelonian rebels in 1648. But he had remained a bachelor, his will naming a younger brother, Don Rodrigo, as his heir.4 On leave from the army by September 1650, he returned to Spain, whether already infected with the French disease or not unclear. Regardless, so much animosity coloured his relationship with his older brother Joseph that by 1651 he had brought an unsuccessful civil case against him at the Royal Council of Military Orders for the lordship of Salas de Ribera.5 The treatment for the pox he received at the Hospital de Santiago in 1656 was yet another reminder of how he had not lived up to expectations. As has been argued throughout this book, Don Lucas’s case suggests that the experience of the French disease cannot be reduced to just the vagaries of illness and hospitalization. To separate disease from the broader familial, economic, and communal contexts shaping early modern patients’ lives would leave out much of the social texture that rendered the pox especially problematic to sufferers. The French disease might have been a physical hardship to be endured, but much more than the suffering of the body was at stake: networks and relationships bounded by reputation, financial stability, even familial expectations and personal goals could all be affected by pox infection. Granted, hospital officials and broader culture, as we have seen, often sought to categorize the ill as a specific social subtype. Thus one encounters the poxed patient, perceived as poor and in need of charity and reform. Or we find the dangerous poxed, a shadowy figure intent on infecting good and honest Christians with sinful disease. The stereotypes go on: the poxed whore, the wronged wife, the libertine courtier, the careless youth. But these concepts were no more than tropes, a type of cultural shorthand that helped to explain the extent of venereal infection in an early modern Christian society that at once condemned and lived with sexual sin. The everyday reality of venereal infection, however, was much more ambiguous and fluid than such easy categorizations suggest. Whether farmer or artisan, cleric or wife, those afflicted with chronic venereal disease were immersed in complex relationships and social spaces that could not be separated from family histories, communal networks and sociocultural identities. While medicalization and hospitalization

168  From Body to Community

greatly shaped people’s experience of the French disease, family and community played as important a role in determining how both pox sufferers and those around them coped with this illness, from marriage and sexuality to work and reputation. Given these circumstances, patients deployed a variety of strategies to cope with the shock of chronic venereal infection. Hiding or obfuscating part of the body could highlight ambiguity and effectively hide public knowledge of infection. Familial support could help sufferers realize long-­held career projects. Networks with helpful neighbours might give the poxed a leg up when most needed. There also existed recourse to charitable institutions that could provide a helping hand. Finally, associations with other pox patients who could commiserate with the struggle might provide much-­needed succour from pressing financial and personal problems. The strategies available to pox sufferers who lived within webs of complex social and communal relationships suggest not only individual resilience, but also the flexibility of the institutional, bureaucratic and familial structures around them. A chronic disease, even a shameful one like the pox, could be confronted and need not lead to destitution or ostracism, because sufferers had access to resources that helped them navigate such trials. Individual grit surely counted for much among those whose pox would quickly progress to the point of death. At the same time, however, such perseverance required extrinsic anchors – whether familial, communal, or institutional – on which they could rely. After all, such aid could make the difference between life and death – not necessarily because of the infirmity itself, but rather because of the economic pressures placed on these people in early modern cultures. A second aspect to highlight remains the open space between the characterizations of pox sufferers, the tropes that highlighted their presumed difference from the rest of society and the flexibility of everyday life. As we saw, patients were often able to move deftly around the shame of infection and its resulting economic and social consequences. Whether by highlighting familial status through dress, obfuscating symptoms to minimize suspicions of pox infection, or relying on supportive family members, patients could make lives for themselves. Indeed, their stay at the Hospital de Santiago appears as a mere roadblock in social and economic lives that continued thereafter, even if more challenging than before. In short, patients may have been poxed, but they were also people defined by broader social relationships and hierarchies. While this

Conclusion: Patients as People  169

mixture of disease and social life could prove problematic at times, it also afforded many of these individuals the necessary tools to manage chronic disease successfully. The examination of hospital and medical experiences alongside financial circumstances, work, family, and community relationships contained in notarial sources points to the centrality of broader sociocultural contexts in making sense of the early modern experience of disease. Patients at the Hospital de Santiago suffered from the pox, but also carried with them a wealth of experiences, social know-­how, and dreams for a better life. The French disease was a death sentence at the time, but Toledo’s patients consistently searched, often in inventive ways, for the means to improve their condition and gain security in a complex early modern world that at once feared them but also provided for them as friends, relatives, and neighbours. These findings open up avenues of inquiry relevant to patient-­centred histories of disease. As much as hospitalization, medicalization, health choices, and scientific changes can aid in uncovering the experience of disease, a broader sociocultural history of patient experiences can help to crystallize the often-­ambiguous interaction between society and illness. After all, at the heart of such intersection were patients themselves, in all their complexity and ambiguity. While suffering from the pox was in large part a somatic experience, moving beyond the hospital walls to uncover the private lives of patients can help to provide a more complete picture of how early modern people reacted to illness. This is especially true for chronic illnesses that affected bodies not only at the moment of treatment, but continued to have repercussions much later. Such inquiries could be particularly useful for research into early modern diseases. A sustained encounter with archival sources beyond the institutional and medical, specifically notarial, could help further to contextualize and problematize the experience of illness, especially chronic illness, as eminently social and not just somatic. This approach could thereby fruitfully intersect with other patient-­centred scholarship that has taken a special interest in the social webs shaping the experience of disease. Consider, for instance, Julie Livingston’s excellent work Debility and the Moral Imagination in Botswana, which explores “how local meanings of debility are negotiated through relationships.”6 In Botswana, as elsewhere, the meanings of infirmity are shaped through the dynamic intersection of somatic and social processes. That modern disease sufferers in Botswana would undergo processes similar to those of early modern pox patients in making sense of and

170  From Body to Community

living with disease speaks to the universal cultural factors undergirding any individual’s encounter with debilitating illness. Family, community, and society all seem to shape how persons respond to chronic disease and their ability to withstand extraneous pressures in the face of it. Conversely, time-­and place-­specific contexts also seem to play an inordinate role in how these general factors and processes play out. For early modern Toledanos who suffered from the pox, their ability to live with such an illness depended heavily on specific familial and social contexts, from attitudes toward venereal disease to community institutions that could aid them. Ultimately, it is these connections across space and time, tenuous yet recognizable, that make the study of chronic illness and its experience so interesting. Shaped by our own experiences and understandings of illness, we can approach and sense what it must have been like to s­ uffer from the pox in early modern Europe. We can imagine the pain of disease, the pressure of shame, the relief of a familial hand. At the same time, the irreconcilable differences in attitude and context between long-­dead individuals and ourselves invariably stretch our understanding. Can we truly imagine the travails of mercury salivation, the pressures of an economy with few safety nets, the marriage of a pox sufferer unconcerned with a partner’s possible infection? Chronic disease and its experience between the somatic and the social speak simultaneously to universality and to historical specificity. Exploring such ambiguous ground can not only yield a better understanding of historical experiences, but also offer us valuable material for self-­reflection.

Notes

Preface 1 Archivo de la Diputación Provincial de Toledo [hereafter ADPT], libro H-­55. 2 On Hispanic legal culture and the proliferation of suits see Richard L. Kagan, Lawsuits and Litigants in Castile, 1500-­1700 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981). For notarial culture see Antonio Eiras Roel, Historia y documentación notarial: El Madrid del Siglo de Oro (Madrid: Consejo General del Notariado, 1992); and Robert I. Burns, Jews in the Notarial Culture: Latinate Wills in Mediterranean Spain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). Introduction 1 Claudia Stein, Negotiating the French Pox in Early Modern Germany (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 66. 2 Early modern medical conceptualizations of the French disease included both stages similar to syphilitic progression as well as symptoms for some forms of gonorrhea. On such conceptualizations and the prevalent early modern debates on the pox see Jon Arrizabalaga, John Henderson, and Roger French, The Great Pox: The French Disease in Renaissance Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), ch. 1; Stein, French Pox in Early Modern Germany, ch. 1. 3 Ann G. Carmichael, “Syphilis and the Columbian Exchange: Was the Disease Really New?,” in The Great Maritime Discoveries and World Health, ed. Mario Gomes Marques and John Cule (Lisbon: Escola Nacional de Saúde Pública, 1991), 187–200; Anna Foa, “The New and the Old: The

172  Notes to page 4

4

5 6

7 8 9

10

Spread of Syphilis (1494–1530),” in Sex and Gender in Historical Perspective, ed. Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 26–45. For current scientific debates on the origin of this illness see Brenda J. Baker and George J. Armelagos, ”The Origin and Antiquity of Syphilis: Paleopathological Diagnosis and Interpretation,” Current Anthropology 29, no. 5 (1988): 703–37; Francisco Guerra, “The Dispute over Syphilis: Europe versus America,” Clio Medica 13 (1978): 39–62; David Malakoff, “Columbus, Syphilis, and English Monks,” Science 289 (4 August 2000): 723; Carl Zimmer, “Can Genes Solve the Syphilis Mystery?,” Science 292 (11 May 2001): 1091; Mark Rose, “Origins of Syphilis,” Archaeology 50, no. 1 (Jan/Feb 1997): 24–5; Piers D. Mitchell, “Pre-­Columbian Treponemal Disease from 14th Century AD Safed, Israel, and Implications for the Eastern Mediterranean,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 121 (2003): 117–24. Darin Hayton, “Joseph Grünpeck’s Astrological Explanation of the French Disease,” in Sins of the Flesh. Responding to Sexual Disease in Early Modern Europe, ed. Kevin Siena (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2005), 81–106. William Eamon, “Cannibalism and Contagion: Framing Syphilis in Counter-­Reformation Italy,” Early Science and Medicine 3, no. 1 (1998): 1–31. Jon Arrizabalaga, “Los médicos valencianos Pere Pintor y Gaspar Torrella, y el tratamiento del mal francés en la corte papal de Alejandro VI Borja,” in El hogar de los Borja, ed. Arrizabalaga et al. (Valencia: Consorci de Museus de la Generalitat Valenciana, 2000), 141–58; Jon Arrizabalaga, “Medical Responses to the ‘French Disease’ in Europe at the Turn of the Sixteenth Century,” in Sins of the Flesh, ed. Siena, 33–55. Stein, French Pox in Early Modern Germany, ch. 3. Arrizabalaga, Henderson, and French, The Great Pox; Claude Quétel, History of Syphilis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990). Kevin Siena, Venereal Disease, Hospitals, and the Urban Poor: London’s Foul Wards, 1600–1800 (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2004); Robert Jütte, “Syphilis and Confinement: Hospitals in Early Modern Germany,” in Institutions of Confinement: Hospitals, Asylums, and Prisons in Western Europe and North America, 1500–1950, ed. Norbert Finzsch and Robert Jütte (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 97–115; María Luz López Terrada, “El tratamiento de la sífilis en un hospital renacentista: la sala del mal de siment del Hospital General de Valencia,” Asclepio: archivo iberoamericano de historia de la medicina y antropología médica 41, no. 2 (1989): 19–51. Roze Hentschell, “Luxury and Lechery: Hunting the Great Pox in Early Modern England,” and Mary Hewlett, “The French Connection: Syphilis

Notes to page 5 173 and Sodomy in Late-­Renaissance Lucca,” in Sins of the Flesh, ed. Siena, 133–57 and 239–60 respectively. 11 Siena, Venereal Disease; Laura J. McGough, Gender, Sexuality and Syphilis in Early Modern Venice: The Disease that Came to Stay (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Winfried Schleiner, “Infection and Cure through Women: Renaissance Constructions of Syphilis,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 24, no. 3 (Fall 1994): 499–517. 12 I also discuss how studies on the pox fit within the larger field of the social history of medicine in my “Textiles as Social Texts: Syphilis, Material Culture and Gender in Golden Age Spain,” Journal of Social History 44, no. 3 (Spring 2011): 785–810. For the state of the field see Randall McGowen, “Identifying Themes in the Social History of Medicine,” The Journal of Modern History 63, no. 1 (1991): 81–90; Roger Cooter, “The Traffic in Victorian Bodies: Medicine, Literature, and History,” Victorian Studies 45, no. 3 (Spring 2003): 513–27. For Spain itself see Esteban Rodríguez Ocaña, “Social History of Medicine in Spain. Points of Departure and Directions for Research,” Social History of Medicine 13, no. 3 (2000): 495–513. 13 For instance, David Gentilcore has done some excellent work on the diversity of healing professionals, including both his Healers and Healing in Early Modern Italy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), and Medical Charlatanism in Early Modern Italy (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). For Spain, see María Luz López Terrada, “Las prácticas médicas extraacadémicas en la ciudad de Valencia durante los siglos XVI y XVII,” DYNAMIS. Acta Hispanica ad Medicinae Scientiarumque Historiam Illustrandam 22 (2002): 85–120; Rosa Ballester, María Luz López Terrada, and Alvar Martínez Vidal, “La realidad de la práctica médica: el pluralismo asistencial en la monarquía hispánica (ss. XVI–XVIII). Introducción,” DYNAMIS. Acta Hispanica ad Medicinae Scientiarumque Historiam Illustrandam 22 (2002): 21–8; Michael R. McVaugh, Medicine before the Plague: Practitioners and their Patients in the Crown of Aragon, 1285–1345 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 14 The manner in which the state has mobilized against the threat of disease has been most often studied for epidemics such as the plague, and has led to such classic studies as John T. Alexander, Bubonic Plague in Early Modern Russia: Public Health and Urban Disaster (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980); Ann G. Carmichael, The Plague and the Poor in Renaissance Florence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). For the medieval and early modern period, moreover, health care, poverty, and the role of both state and private institutions, often at the municipal level, were part and parcel of the wider issue of social welfare, resulting in

174  Notes to page 5 a cornucopia of scholarship. Just for Spain itself, representative monographs in English include Linda Martz, Poverty and Welfare in Hapsburg Spain. The Example of Toledo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Maureen Flynn, Sacred Charity: Confraternities and Social Welfare in Spain, 1400–1700 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988); James William Brodman, Charity and Welfare: Hospitals and the Poor in Medieval Catalonia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998). In the case of the French disease itself, see Arrizabalaga, Henderson, and French, The Great Pox; Laura J. McGough, “Quarantining Beauty: The French Disease in Early Modern Venice,” in Sins of the Flesh, 211–37; McGough, Gender and Syphilis in Venice. 15 Arrizabalaga, Henderson, and French, in The Great Pox, ch. 1, have led the way in demonstrating how the early modern pox was a complex construction that included symptoms from a variety of diseases, and how this construction shifted over time, incorporating new ontological understandings of illness itself. For the construction of the pox as a heterosexual disease, and the consequent silencing of same-­sex desire in early modern medical literature, see Cristian Berco, “Syphilis and the Silencing of Sodomy in Juan Calvo’s Tratado del morbo gálico,” and Kevin Siena, “The Strange Medical Silence on Same-­Sex Transmission of the Pox, c.1660–c.1760,” both in The Sciences of Homosexuality in Early Modern Europe, ed. Kenneth Borris and George Rousseau (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 92–113 and 115–33 respectively. In terms of a sophisticated theoretical balance between disease as a biological reality and a socially constructed entity, consult J.N. Hays, The Burdens of Disease: Epidemics and Human Response in Western History (New Brunswick, NJ.: Rutgers University Press, 1998). 16 Roy Porter, in “The Patient’s View: Doing History from Below,” Theory and Society 14 (1985): 175–98, argued for the viability and necessity of a patient’s history. Also see Dorothy Porter and Roy Porter, Patient’s Progress: Doctors and Doctoring in Eighteenth-­Century England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989). The methodological approach to patients through the concepts of James Scott, Weapons of the Weak (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985) has continued in other works focusing on patients, including Siena’s Venereal Disease. The assessment of Porter’s work as revisionist in Paul K. Longmore and David Goldberger, “The League of the Physically Handicapped and the Great Depression: A Case Study in the New Disability History,” The Journal of American History 87, no. 3 (December 2000): 888–922, takes place in the context of another subfield within the history of medicine that has received scant attention: the history of people with disabilities.

Notes to pages 5–6 175 Though scarce in comparison to works in other subfields, recent monographs on patients’ histories have received accolades for innovation and analytical depth. See, for instance, Barbara Duden, The Woman Beneath the Skin: A Doctor’s Patients in Eighteenth-­Century Germany (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1991); Mary E. Fissell, Patients, Power, and the Poor in Eighteenth-­Century Bristol (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991); McVaugh, Medicine before the Plague. 17 An exception is Claudia Stein’s brief discussion of patient stories as they sought to enter Augsburg’s Blatterhaus: many of these narratives include references to family attitudes and work. Stein, French Pox in Early Modern Germany, 123–36. 18 Extensive scholarship has been produced on the provision of health care and hospitals in Spain. Important works include Luis García Ballester, Historia social de la medicina en la España de los siglos XIII al XVI (Madrid: Akal, 1976); Teresa Huguet-­Termes, Jon Arrizabalaga, and Harold J. Cook, eds., Health and Medicine in Hapsburg Spain: Agents, Practices, Representations (London: The Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL, 2009); Juan Ignacio Carmona, El sistema de hospitalidad pública en la Sevilla del Antiguo Régimen (Seville: Diputación Provincial de Sevilla, 1979); Luis S. Granjel, La medicina española renacentista (Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca, 1980); Samuel S. Kottek and Luis García Ballester, eds., Medicine and Medical Ethics in Medieval and Early Modern Spain (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1996). On Toledo’s hospitals, including Santiago, see María Inés Melero Fernández, “El Hospital de Santiago de Toledo a fines del siglo XV,” Anales Toledanos 9 (1974): 3–116; Olga Pérez Monzón, “El Hospital de Santiago de Toledo en el siglo XVI,” in 1992: El Arte español en épocas de transición. Actas, ed. Comité Español de la Historia del Arte (León: Universidad de León, 1992), 355–66. On Toledo’s health care resources more broadly, see Julián Montemayor, “Una ciudad frente a la peste: Toledo a fines del siglo XVI,” En la España medieval 7 (1985): 1113–32; María Luisa Rodríguez Zamorano, Historia del Hospital San Juan Bautista de Toledo durante el siglo XVI (Madrid: Editorial de la Universidad Complutense, 1993); Hilario Rodríguez de Gracia, El Hospital del Rey de Toledo (Toledo: Instituto de Asistencia Social, 1985); Alonso López-­Fando Rodríguez, “Los antiguos hospitales de Toledo,” Toletum 1 (1955): 96–118; Rafael Sancho de San Román, “La medicina en Toledo. Notas para una historia de la medicina toledana,” Toletum 5 (1972): 35–61; Rafael Sancho de San Román, “El Hospital del Nuncio de Toledo en la historia de la asistencia psiquiátrica,” Anales toledanos 17 (1983): 55–72. 19 Samuel Ruiz Carmona, Los caminos medievales de la Provincia de Toledo (Toledo: Archiviana Ediciones, 2002) constitutes an excellent source on

176  Notes to pages 6–8

20

21

22

23

24

25 26 27

28 29

travel in Toledo and its environs. The best early modern account of the infrastructure for travel in Spain remains Pedro Juan de Villuga, Repertorio de todos los caminos de España (Medina del Campo: Pedro de Castro, 1546; repr., New York: Krauss Reprint Corporation, 1967). On the connection between Madrid’s rise and Toledo’s decline see David Ringrose, Madrid and the Spanish Economy 1560–1850 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), ch. 11; Michael R. Weisser, “The Agrarian Depression in Seventeenth Century Spain,” Journal of Economic History 42 (1982): 149–54. See Ángel Santos Vaquero, “Puntualizaciones sobre la puerta de Bisagra de Toledo,” Anales Toledanos 42 (2006): 147–58 for the debates on the timing of the gate’s construction. The best early modern description of the city remains Pedro de Alcocer’s Historia o descripción de la Imperial Ciudad de Toledo (Toledo: Juan Ferrer, 1554). Biblioteca Nacional [hereafter BN], R-­4805. An excellent modern analysis of Toledo’s urban space and its people during the early modern period can be found in Hilario Rodríguez de Gracia, El Toledo que vió Cervantes (Ciudad Real: Ediciones de Castilla-­La Mancha, 2006). Toledo’s municipal brothel had been moved in 1577 to the Antequeruela neighbourhood, where prostitutes plied their trade even after the closing of the brothel proper in 1623, according to Rodríguez de Gracia, El Toledo que vió Cervantes, 45. For the general inefficacy of the 1623 national prostitution ban see Isabel Ramos Vázquez, “La represión de la prostitución en la Castilla del siglo XVII,” Historia, Instituciones, Documentos 32 (2005): 263–86. For Toledo’s trade from the point of view of merchant families see Francisco José Aranda Pérez, “Los mercaderes de Toledo en el Seiscientos: bases económicas y status sociopolítico,” Investigaciones Históricas 12 (1992): 72–96. Joaquín de Villalba, Epidemiología española (Madrid: Don Mateo Repulles, 1802), 1: 121–2. Juan Ignacio Carmona, Enfermedad y sociedad en los tiempos modernos (Seville: Universidad de Sevilla, 2005), 233–4. Ibid., 254. On the regulation of medicinal practice later in the sixteenth century see Michele L. Clouse, Medicine, Government and Public Health in Philip II’s Spain: Shared Interests, Competing Authorities (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011). López Terrada, “El mal de siment,” 133. José Antonio Álvarez y Baena, Compendio histórico de las grandezas de la coronada villa de Madrid (Madrid: Antonio de Sancha, 1786), 214–15.

Notes to pages 8–13 177 30 On this transition from a hospital devoted to treating knights of the order to a pox institution see Melero Fernández, “El Hospital de Santiago.” 31 Ángela Madrid y Medina, “Los comienzos de la hospitalidad santiaguista: El Hospital de Ávila,” Espacio, Tiempo y Forma, Serie III, Historia Medieval 17 (2004): 371–9; José Vicente Matellanes Merchán, “La hospitalidad en la Orden de Santiago: un proyecto ideológico o económico (1170–1350),” Studia Historica-­Historia Medieval 11 (1993): 125–40; Daniel Rodríguez Blanco, “La reforma de la Orden de Santiago,” in La España Medieval, ed. Miguel Ángel Ladero Quesada and Claudio Sánchez Albornoz y Menduiña (Madrid: Editorial de la Universidad Complutense, 1986), 5: 929–60. On the changes affecting early modern hospitals see John Henderson, The Renaissance Hospital: Healing the Body and Healing the Soul (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). 32 ADPT, libro H-­55, Spring 1655, patient no. 101. 33 Ibid., Fall 1659, patient no. 21. 34 Ibid., Spring 1662, patient no. 119. 35 Ibid., Fall 1658, patient no. 13. 36 The Hospital regulations found in Archivo Histórico Nacional [hereafter AHN], Órdenes Militares, libro 70, 67r–96r detail everything from treatment seasons and medical procedures to be followed to the institution’s spiritual mission and staffing structure. 37 Archivo Histórico Provincial de Toledo [hereafter APT], P-­3170, 673r. 38 On the sub-­segment of rich farmers in village society see María Asenjo González, “Labradores ricos: nacimiento de una oligarquía rural en la Segovia del siglo XV,” En la España medieval 4 (1984): 63–86. Note, however, that the issue of social stratification in early modern rural societies remains relatively obscure, as discussed in José Ángel García de Cortazar and Pascual Martínez Sopena, “La historia rural de la sociedad hispanocristiana,” Historia Agraria 31 (2003): 57–86. For literacy and socioeconomic backgrounds see Serafín de Tapia Sánchez, “Niveles de alfabetización en una ciudad castellana del siglo XVI: sectores sociales y grupos étnicos en Ávila,” Studia Historica. Historia Moderna 6 (1988): 481–502; Marie-­Christine Rodríguez and Bartolomé Bennassar, “Firmas y nivel cultural de los testigos y acusados en los procesos de la Inquisición del Tribunal de Toledo (1525– 1817) y del Tribunal de Córdoba (1595–1632),” Caravelle 31 (1978): 17–46. 39 On the importance of reputation in daily financial transactions see Scott Taylor, “Credit, Debt, and Honor in Castile, 1600–1650,” Journal of Early Modern History 7, nos. 1–2 (2003): 8–27. 40 APT, P-­151, 292r. Cleric Tomás Martínez had entered the hospital in June 1659 (ADPT, libro H-­55, Spring 1659, patient no. 169).

178  Notes to pages 13–22 41 Indeed, by 1658, Joan shows up at the hospital a married man (ADPT, ­libro H-­55, Fall 1658, patient no. 13). 42 See, for instance, the poem on the poxed, “La Cofradia del Grillimón” by Toledo’s own Sebastián de Horozco, Cancionero, ed. Antonio Martín Gamero (Seville: Imprenta de D. Rafael Tarascó y Lassa, 1874), 1–4. 43 For the brothers see ADPT, Libro H-­55, Spring 1655, patient nos. 101 and 102; the sister Francisca was admitted in Fall 1659, patient no. 3. 44 ADPT, libro H-­55, Spring 1659, patient no. 136 (Dominga); Fall 1660, patient no. 105 (María). 45 For Madrid’s Sala de Alcaldes de Casa y Corte see Fabio López Lázaro, Crime in Early Bourbon Madrid (1700–1808): An Analysis of the Royal Court’s Judicial Casebook (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2008). The literature is vast for London’s eighteenth-­century criminal history; representative works include Robert Shoemaker, The London Mob: Violence and Disorder in Eighteenth-­Century England (London: Hambeldon and London, 2004) and Tony Henderson, Disorderly Women in Eighteenth-­Century London: Prostitution and Control of the Metropolis, 1730–1830 (London: Longman, 1999). 46 Duden, The Woman Beneath the Skin; Michael Stolberg, Experiencing Illness and the Sick Body in Early Modern Europe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Michael Solomon, Fictions of Well Being: Sickly Readers and Vernacular Medical Writing in Late Medieval and Early Modern Spain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). 47 Julie Livingston, Debility and the Moral Imagination in Botswana (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2005); Arthur Kleinman, The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing and the Human Condition (New York: Basic Books, 1988). 1  Getting Sick: Signs, Sin, and Social Worth 1 APT, P-­150, 495r. 2 ADPT, libro H-­55, Spring 1656, patient no. 52. 3 For overviews on Spanish medical literature on the French disease see Luis S. Granjel’s introduction to Luis de Lobera, Libro de las cuatro enfermedades cortesanas, ed. Luis S. Granjel (Burgos: Biblioteca de clásicos de la medicina española, 1992); for something broader, including both theory and treatment, see Granjel, La medicina española renacentista and Granjel, La medicina española del siglo XVII (Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca, 1978); Juan Riera, “El tema de la sífilis en la literatura médica del siglo XVIII,” Biohorm. Sección Medicina e Historia 14 (Sept. 1965): 3–15; López

Notes to pages 22–3 179

4

5

6

7

Terrada, “El mal de siment”; Carmona, Enfermedad y sociedad, 201–21. Some of the physicians and surgeons who shaped Spanish knowledge of the French disease in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries include Francisco López de Villalobos, El sumario de la medicina con un tratado de las pestíferas bubas, ed. María Teresa Herrera (Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca, 1973); Ruy Díaz de la Isla, Tratado contra el mal serpentino (Seville: Dominico de Robertis, 1539) [BN, R-­28825]; Luis de Lobera, Libro de las cuatro enfermedades cortesanas; Juan Calvo, Primera y segunda parte de la cirugía universal: Tratado segundo del morbo gálico (1580; repr., Valencia: en casa de Chrisostomo Garriz por Bernardo Nogues, 1647) [BN, R-­5581]; Pedro de Torres, Libro que trata de la enfermedad de las bubas (Madrid: Luis Sánchez, 1600) [BN, R-­3612]; Andrés de León, Práctico de morbo gálico (Valladolid: Luis Sánchez, 1605) [BN, R-­4929]; Pedro López Pinna, Tratado de morbo gálico (Seville: Juan Gómez de Blas, 1664) [BN, R-­5793]. Quétel, The History of Syphilis, 10–16. Siena, in Venereal Disease, 64, has found that almost one-­quarter of all patients in some London hospitals in the sixteenth-­century were treated for the pox. In Toledo itself, over one thousand different residents sought treatment at the hospital in the span of the ten years for which we have available data (1654–65) – a sizable sample considering Toledo had a population of somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 people in the mid-­seventeenth century. For detailed statistics on Toledo’s population see Appendix F in Ringrose, Madrid and the Spanish Economy, 372. “E ha sido tan dañosa que no siento pueblo en toda la Europa que fuesse de cien vezinos que no ayan muerto de la dicha enfermedad y dolencia diez personas. E a mi noticia ha venido aver muerto reyes y duques y grandes señores de la dicha enfermedad; y ha seydo la tercia parte de la gente inficionada de la dicha dolencia.” Díaz de la Isla, Tratado contra el mal serpentino, 3v. Spanish excerpts also published in Ian Michael, “Celestina and the Great Pox,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 78 (2001): 103–38. “Han venido las bubas a hacerse familiares y domésticas … Y más se ha de considerar que son tan generosas las bubas que no se contentan con entrar en los cuerpos de las fregonas placeras y mozas de cántaro, sino de bellas damas gallardas y encrespadas.” Cristóbal Mosquera de Figueroa, Paradoxa en loor de las bubas, ed. Valentín Nuñez Rivera (Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca, 2010), 210, 213. “Gentes de todos estados / reciben aquesta hermandad / mancebos, frayles, casados, / reyes, señores, perlados / y de qualquier dinidad: / y está ya tan estendida / que casi nadie se escapa / es la entrada permitida / mas despues á la salida / no basta bula del Papa.” Horozco, Cancionero, 1.

180  Notes to pages 23–5 8 Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quijote de la Mancha (Madrid: Real Academia Española, 2004), 274–88. 9 As Francisco J. Aranda Pérez details in his Poder y poderes en la ciudad de Toledo. Gobierno, sociedad y oligarquías en la Edad Moderna (Toledo: Universidad de Castilla-­La Mancha, 1999), 285–9, thirty-­one noble households could count family members as officers in municipal governance. Toledanos were reputed to dress very well, especially since the silk industry had its home in the city. Sebastián de Horozco, El libro de los proverbios glosados, ed. Jack Weiner (Kassel: Edition Reichenberger, 1994), 1: 298 describes the sartorial gallantry of Toledo’s ladies in his interpretation of the proverb that plays with the Spanish words for damask (damasco), lady (dama), and repugnance (asco). 10 “[G]entil hombre toledano, / muy polido palanziano.” Horozco, Cancionero, 66. 11 Ibid., 13–14, 19. 12 Ángel Santos Vaquero, La industria textil sedera de Toledo (Cuenca: Universidad de Castilla-­La Mancha, 2010). 13 Renato Barahona, Sex Crimes, Honour, and the Law in Early Modern Spain: Vizcaya, 1528–1735 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), ch. 1. 14 Sara T. Nalle, God in La Mancha: Religious Reform and the People of Cuenca, 1500–1650 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 66–7; for Toledo see Jean-­Pierre Dedieu, “La défense du marriage chrétien,” in L’Inquisition espagnole, XVe–XIXe siècles, ed. Bartolomé Bennassar (Paris: Hachette, 1979), 318–27. 15 On cultural attitudes, legislation, and the practice of prostitution in the seventeenth century see Ramos Váquez, “La represión de la prostitución.” For cultural products reflecting the Spanish crisis of masculinity in the seventeenth century see José Reinaldo Cartagena Calderón, Masculinidades en obras: el drama de la hombría en la España imperial (Newark, NJ: Juan de la Cuesta, 2008). Elizabeth A. Lehfeldt, in “Ideal Men: Masculinity and Decline in Seventeenth-­Century Spain,” Renaissance Quarterly 61, no. 2 (Summer 2008): 463–94, examines the rise of chastity, among other things, as new masculine ideals to follow in the context of the seventeenth-­ century crisis. Also see Edward Behrend-­Martínez, “Taming Don Juan: Limiting Masculine Sexuality in Counter-­Reformation Spain,” Gender and History 24, no. 2 (August 2012): 333–52. 16 Horozco, Cancionero, 118–19. 17 On the cultural connection between the figure of the courtier and the galán see, for instance, Miguel Zugasti, “De galán vergonzoso a galán ingenioso:

Notes to pages 25–6 181

18

19 20

21

22

23

24

el tema del secretario enamorado de su dama en el teatro de Tirso,” in El ingenio cómico de Tirso de Molina: Actas del II Congreso Internacional, Pamplona, Universidad de Navarra, 27–29 de abril de 1998, ed. Ignacio Arellano Ayuso, Blanca Oteiza and Miguel Zugasti (Pamplona: Instituto de Estudios Tirsianos, 1998), 343–57. “La quarta enfermedad cortesana que es mal frances o bubas por otro nombre: la cual es tan común, que por ser de todos muy conocida, y por nuestros peccados usada escusare prolixidad y dexare de poner todas las señales della, pues son tan conocidas.” Lobera, Libro de las cuatro enfermedades cortesanas, 74r. Ibid. As noted in Daniel Eisenberg, “Did Cervantes Have a Library?” in Hispanic Studies in Honor of Alan D. Deyermond: A North American Tribute, ed. John S. Miletich (Madison: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 1986), 93–106. Jesús Ponce Cárdenas, “De burlas y enfermedades barrocas: la sífilis en la obra poética de Anastasio Pantaleón de Ribera y Miguel Colodrero de Villalobos,” Criticón 100 (2007): 115–42. On Pantaleón’s works and life see Kenneth Brown, Anastasio Pantaleón de Ribera (1600–1629): ingenioso miembro de la República Literaria española (Madrid: Porrúa Turanzas, 1985). “Don Hernando de Guzmán, de quien se afirma elogiosamente que ‘todo lo rinde y lo ronda’; ‘el conde de Puñoenrrostro’, con quien ‘ni en el limbo, ni el tablado / tienen segura su honra / las niñas y las farsantas’; don Enrique de Toledo y Alagón, ‘que a bofetadas negocia’ y con tan extraño tipo de cortejo va ‘martirizando beldades’; el duque de Lerma y su hermano, sableados sin piedad por las busconas; don Rodrigo de Tapia; don Antonio de Aguiar y el señor Gobernador de Orán, que ‘festeja una dueña quintañona / de belleza datilada / y de hermosura pilonga.’” Ponce Cárdenas, “De burlas,” 125. “Érame yo executoria / pero ya soy sambenito / que en la zarza me revuelco / y en cada trago me pincho.” Anastasio Pantaleón de Ribera, “Al Excelentísimo señor duque de Lerma, estando el poeta enfermo del achaque de que murió …” in Obras de Anastasio Pantaleón de Ribera (Madrid: Diego Díaz de la Carrera, 1648), 124r [BN, R-­17223]; also cited in Ponce Cárdenas, “De burlas,” 132. Note the play between the ejecutoria, a patent of nobility that confers honour, and the sambenito, the garments inquisitorial penitents wore, which signaled disgrace. As López Terrada argues in “El mal de siment,” sarsaparrilla was commonly prescribed by physicians as a treatment for the French disease, even if hospitals in Valencia did not carry it in the sixteenth century due to its

182  Notes to pages 27–30

25

26 27

28

29

30

31

32

prohibitive cost. On the other hand, by the 1580s the Hospital de Santiago in Toledo did treat patients with this American medicine, as seen in the inventory of its pharmacy in AHN, Órdenes Militares. Archivo Histórico de Toledo, número 9113, no numeration. Even a regional hospital such as San Antolín in the city of Palencia carried sarsaparilla, as shown in Magdalena Santo Tomás Pérez, La asistencia a los enfermos en Castilla en la baja edad media (PhD thesis, Universidad de Valladolid, 2002), 445. Francisco López de Úbeda, La pícara Justina (Paris: Beaudry, 1847), 9–10. Marcel Bataillon, Pícaros y picaresca: La pícara Justina (Madrid: Taurus, 1969) constitutes a seminal work on this book. For a more contemporary analysis that places Justina in the context of broader discourses on the Other, both gendered and racial, in Baroque Spain, see Anne J. Cruz, Discourses of Poverty: Social Reform and the Picaresque Novel in Early Modern Spain (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), ch. 4. Cited in Carmona, Enfermedad y sociedad, 209. “Ir vestido de bayeta, llevar guantes de olor, preciarse de mal regido, tener poca memoria, y tener algo ofendida la salud con cualquier achaque, y si fuere de bubas será más importante.” Salvador Jacinto Polo de Medina, Obras completas (Murcia: Academia Alfonso X el Sabio, 1948), 101–2. “Asi amor por galardon / regala con mal frances / y no se tiene en los pies / el galán sin su bordon.” Don Juan Nicolas Böhl de Faber, ed., Floresta de rimas antiguas castellanas (Hamburg: Perthes and Besser, 1821), 368–9. “L’on s’entretient de cette maladie chez le Roi, et parmi les femmes de la première qualité, comme de la fièvre ou de la migraine, et tous prennent leur mal en patience sans s’en embarrasser un moment.” Madame d’Aulnoy, Relation du voyage en Espagne (The Hague: Henry Van Bulderen, 1693), 85–6 [BN, 2–67558]. “[E]stán tambien muy malos, con calentura continua y crecimientos, y entrambos á dos tan llenos de bubas, que no pueden tenerse en pie ... A la Duquesa dicen le quieren cortar una pierna, y el Duque tiene flujo de sangre.” Jerónimo de Barrionuevo, Avisos de Madrid (Madrid: Antonio Paz y Melia, 1892–3), 3:155. “Y ansí estarás advertido que, cuando por la calle quitares la gorra al caballero o a la dama, la mitad de aquel acatamiento se hace a la persona y la otra mitad a las bubas que lleva.” Gaspar Lucas Hidalgo, Diálogos de apacible entretenimiento, ed. Julio Alonso Asenjo and Abraham Madroñal (Valencia: Universitat de Valencia, 2010), 162. Francisco de Quevedo, “Tomando estaba sudores” and “A Marica la Chupona” in Obras de D. Francisco Quevedo Villegas, ed. Pablo Antonio de Tarsia (Madrid: Joachin Ibarra, 1772), 4:414, 497 respectively.

Notes to pages 30–2 183 33 Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Novela del casamiento engañoso, in Obras completas de Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. Novela ejemplares, ed. Rodolfo Schevill and Adolfo Bonilla y San Martin (Madrid: Gráficas Reunidas, 1925), Vol. III; López de Úbeda, La pícara Justina; Francisco Delicado, La Lozana andaluza (Madrid: M. Rivadeneyra, 1871); Horozco Cancionero, 31. 34 Cruz, Discourses of Poverty, 155. 35 On this juxtaposition see James Crosby, ed., Nuevas cartas de la última prisión de Quevedo (Rochester, NY: Tamesis Books, 2005), 250. 36 For the broader connection between venereal disease and conversos see Carolyn Wolfenzon, “La Lozana andaluza: judaísmo, sífilis, exilio y creación,” Hispanic Research Journal: Iberian and Latin American Studies 8, no. 2 (2007): 107–22. 37 McGough, Gender and Syphilis in Venice; Siena, Venereal Disease; Mary Hewlett, “The French Connection: Syphilis and Sodomy in Late-­ Renaissance Lucca,” in Sins of the Flesh, ed. Siena, 239–60. 38 Allyson Poska, in Regulating the People: The Catholic Reformation in Seventeenth-­Century Spain (Leiden: Brill, 1998), argues that rural Galicia saw very little success in terms of post-­Tridentine Christianization, including in the area of premarital sexuality. Likewise, Barahona, Sex Crimes, shows the extent of sexual activity among unmarried couples, even if circumscribed by questions of reputation. On sodomy see Cristian Berco, Sexual Hierarchies, Public Status: Men, Sodomy and Society in Spain’s Golden Age (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007). 39 I expand on the issues of hairlessness and its repercussions in my “The Great Pox, Symptoms, and Social Bodies in Early Modern Spain,” Social History of Medicine 28, no. 2 (2015): 225–44. 40 “Concedo que soy pelona, doscientas docenas de veces.” López de Úbeda, La pícara Justina, 8. 41 “Motejando a uno de pelado.” Horozco, Cancionero, 41. 42 Antonio Paz y Melia, Sales españolas: o agudezas del ingenio nacional (Madrid: Sucesores de Ribadeneyra, 1902), 2:266–7. 43 On this work by Cervantes see Alban K. Forcione, Cervantes and the Mystery of Lawlessness: A study of El casamiento engañoso y El coloquio de los perros (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); Stephen Rupp, “Cervantes and the Soldier’s Tale: Genre and Disorder in ‘El casamiento engañoso’,” The Modern Language Review 96, no. 2 (April 2001): 370–84. 44 “Mudé posada, y mudé el pelo dentro de pocos dias: porque començaron a lo pelarseme las cejas y las pestañas, y poco a poco me dexaron los cabellos, y antes de edad me hize calvo, dandome una enfermedad que llaman lupicia, y, por otro nombre mas claro, la pelarela. Halleme verdaderamente

184  Notes to pages 34–5

45 46

47

48 49

50

51

52 53

hecho pelon, porque ni tenia barbas que peynar, ni dineros que gastar. Fue la enfermedad caminando al paso de mi necessidad … llegado el tiempo en que se dan los sudores en el hospital de la Resurreccion, me entré en el, donde he tomado quarenta sudores.” Cervantes Saavedra, El casamiento engañoso, 238v. ADPT, libro H-­55. Israel Lasmarías Ponz, “El traje popular en el siglo XVII,” Ars Longa 18 (2009): 133–42; Carmen Bernis, El traje y los tipos sociales en el Quijote (Madrid: El Viso, 2001), 42–3; Estrella Ruiz Gálvez, “Poner en escena la cortesía. Signos, gestos y modos del arte de dar a conocer y del saber reconocer. (España, siglo XVI),” Tonos Digital 18 (December 2009): 1–31; Jimena N. Rodríguez, “‘Reconociendo los brutos la generosidad de sus amos’: El vestido en el auto general de la fe de 1659,” Romance Quarterly 57, no. 2 (2010): 105–15. On mannerisms and hierarchy more broadly see John Walter, “Gesturing at Authority: Deciphering the Gestural Code of Early Modern England,” Past and Present 203 (2009): 96–127. “Porqu’ andais muy abrigado / de paños y galotillas, / y aun estoy certificado / que tambien andais cinchado / con faxas y con mantillas. / No debeis disimular / con ese mal tan añejo / que si se logra arraigar / será malo de sanar/ vistiendo ya tan de viejo.” Horozco, Cancionero, 54–5. “Lo baxo andando solado / de bota y de sobre-­bota / y lo alto tan tapado / el humor qu’ está enzerrado / no os quexeis porque no brota.” Ibid., 55. Laura R. Bass and Amanda Wunder, “The Veiled Ladies of the Early Modern Spanish World: Seduction and Scandal in Seville, Madrid, and Lima,” Hispanic Review 77, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 97–144. For a more specific discussion of female dress, including long cloaks, see chapter 4 of this work. Michael Kwass, “Big Hair: A Wig History of Consumption in Eighteenth-­ Century France,” The American Historical Review 111, no. 3 (June 2006): 631– 59; María Ángeles Eugenio Martínez, La Ilustración en América (siglo XVIII). Pelucas y casacas en los trópicos (Madrid: Anaya, 1988). Some scholars, however, have even denoted references to more rudimentary hairpieces in early seventeenth-­century Spanish literature. See Joaquín de Entrambasaguas, Estudios sobre Lope de Vega (Madrid: CSIC, 1967), 2:584. Philip K. Wilson, Surgery, Skin, and Syphilis: Daniel Turner’s London (1667– 1741) (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), 179, note 18. The critique of female makeup represented long-­standing condemnation among Spanish moralists, as discussed in Alicia Martínez Crespo, “La belleza y el uso de afeites en la mujer del siglo XV,” DICENDA. Cuadernos

Notes to pages 35–7 185 de Filología Hispánica 11 (1993): 197–221. By the seventeenth century, makeup was increasingly connected to decline in Spain, though defenders of the artifice of makeup also started to be heard, as seen in Isabel Colón Calderón, “De afeites, alcoholes y hollines,” DICENDA. Cuadernos de Filología Hispánica 13 (1995): 65–82. 54 “El adereço que se pone a alguna cosa para que parezca bien, y particularmente el que las mujeres se ponen en la cara, manos, y pechos para parecer blancas y rojas, aunque sean negras y descoloridas, desmintiendo a la naturaleza, y queriendo salir con lo imposible, se pretenden mudar el pellejo.” Sebastián de Covarrubias, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española (Madrid: Luis Sánchez, 1611), 17r [BN, R-­6388]. 55 “Cosa debe ser muy cara / sustentar la delantera, / pues que vemos á la clara / que por curar de la cara / traeis el rabo de fuera.” Horozco, Cancionero, 25. 56 See, for instance, James O. Crosby’s commentary on this issue in his edition of Franciso de Quevedo, Sueños y discursos (Madrid: Editorial Castalia, 1993), 2:1230–7. 57 “En regalos, en anillos, en preseas, en olandas, en perfumes y cosas semejantes, se les va la hazienda; y aunque los criados lo padezcan, la mujer lo llore, y los hijos lo ayunen, para que ellas lo coman y gozen, de nada se duelen; todo se gasta, todo se consume, y con ello la vida y la salud de todos; y al fin, bubas, dolores, carça y palo santo.” Mateo Luján de Sayavedra, Segunda parte de la vida del pícaro Guzmán de Alfarache (Brussels: Roger Velpius, 1604), 238 [BN, R-­6989(2)]. 58 “[P]or mi vida, que se os parece que estais pellejadas de mano de otrie que de la Lozana, así lo quiero yo, que me conozcais, que pagais á otrie bien por mal pelar; por vida de Rampin, que no tengo de perdonar á hija de madre, sino que me quiero bien pagar.” Delicado, La lozana andaluza, 240. 59 “Mirá qué ceja ésta, no hay pelo con pelo, y quien gastó tal ceja como ésta, por vida del Rey, que merecia una cuchillada por la cara porque otra vuelta mirara lo que hacia.” Ibid., 240–1. 60 Also discussed more fully in Berco, “Symptoms.” 61 On the stereotypical connection between blackness and ugliness see Mar Martínez-­Góngora, “La invención de la blancura: el estereotipo y la mímica en ‘Boda de Negros’ de Francisco de Quevedo,” MLN 120, no. 2 (March 2005): 262–86; Alejandro E. Gómez, “El estigma africano en los mundos hispano-­ atlánticos (siglos XIV al XIX),” Revista de História 153, no. 2 (2005): 139–79. 62 See, for instance, the recipes using solimán in Alicia Martínez Crespo, ed., Manual de Mujeres (Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca, 1995). On

186  Notes to pages 37–9 women’s broader domestic practices involving health care see Teresa Ortíz Gómez and Montserrat Cabré i Pairet, “Mujeres y salud: prácticas y saberes,” DYNAMIS 19 (1999): 17–24. 63 Calvo, Cirugia, 264. 2  Encounters of the Third Kind: Medical Assumptions and Patients 1 ADPT, Libro H-­55, Fall 1656, patient no. 45. 2 On the pain of treatment, including mercury-­induced salivation, see Pantaleón de Ribera, “Al Excelentísimo señor duque de Lerma,” 124r– 126r; Siena, Venereal Disease, 24–7. For the treatment procedures followed at Toledo’s Hospital de Santiago see AHN, Órdenes Militares, libro 70, 65r–80v. Physician Pedro Torres, in his Libro que trata de la enfermedad de las bubas, 98, commented on the dolorous side-­effects of mercury-­induced salivation, including pain in the mouth, rotting of the tongue, and loss of teeth so that some patients “verse tan afligidos que desean la muerte por no pasar tanto dolor, ardor, y pesadumbre.” 3 Catalina notarized her good works following her hospital stay in APT-­ 3426, 677r. 4 Nurses at the Hospital de Santiago were paid 4000 maravedís or 117.64 reales per year, plus a daily food ration as per hospital regulations established in 1604 (AHN, Órdenes Militares, libro 70, 93v). Note that as late as 1795 they were earning this same yearly salary (AHN, Órdenes Militares, legajo 4009, no. 3). 5 ADPT, Libro H-­55, Fall 1656, patient 45. 6 APT-­3426, 677r. 7 “Levantando un trozo de cortina y asomando yo por la abertura un tarazón de cara, vi el más feo, melancólico y asqueroso espectáculo de cuantos me han fingido las horribles tristezas de mis sueños. Estaba anegado en pegajoso y fétido sudor, revuelto en congojas, y tragado de agonías y sofocaciones un mozo, que su edad tocaría en los veinte y seis años. La cabeza monda de cabello, y plagada a trechos de costras, verrugas, postillas, tubérculos y otros promontorios y chichones. La boca cubierta de vejigas, encharcada en babas, y turrada de las voraces chispas que arrojaba a su circunferencia el infernal fuego de sus humores. Los labios negros, duros y arremangados, como el borde de un barreño; la nariz llena de mordiscones, y tan arañada y comida, que enseñaba por sus roturas los huesos de los lacrimales y las órbitas de los ojos, ladraba en vez de articular voces, y ya tan débil de facultades que era necesario acercarse bien para percibir sus tristísimos y fatigados aúllos.” Diego Torres de Villarroel, Los

Notes to pages 40–2 187 desahuciados del mundo y de la gloria, ed. Manuel María Pérez López (Madrid: Editoria Nacional, 1979), 133. 8 The problem of determining the means of transmission of the pox, explaining the results of empirics, and grappling with the nature of the disease as it acted on a patient’s body were all interrelated, as discussed in Arrizabalaga, Henderson, and French, The Great Pox, 70–81 and 234–51. More specifically, on the contribution of Spanish physicians such as Gaspar Torrella and Pere Pintor see Arrizabalaga, Henderson, and French, The Great Pox, 115–33; and Arrizabalaga, “Los médicos valencianos.” On other Hispanic responses to these issues influencing treatment see López Terrada, “El tratamiento de la sífilis”; María Jesús Pérez Ibáñez, “Un problema médico y terminológico (sífilis en el siglo XVI),” Voces 6 (1995): 61–79. 9 Stein, French Pox in Germany, 44–56, 175–8. 10 “De aqui entendemos que los que tienen morbo galico, no siempre la massa sanguinaria se vicia de una misma manera, antes bien unas veces declina a plegmatica, otras a colerica, otras a melancolica, otras a atrabiliaria, segun la naturaleza y temperamento del cuerpo enfermo.” Calvo, Cirugía, 572–3. For more on Juan Calvo, who studied both medicine and surgery in Valencia and later travelled throughout Europe, including to Montpellier, see José Luis Fresquet Febrer, “Materia médica americana en textos médicos españoles del siglo XVI,” Cirugía y Cirujanos 63, no. 2 (March–April, 1995): 77–8; J. Aguilar y Lara, Recuerdo apologético de Juan Calvo (Valencia: Instituto Médico Valenciano, 1879). 11 Calvo, Cirugía, 564–5. 12 ADPT, libro H-­55, Mariana Llerena (Spring 1655, patient no. 29) and Juan Rubio (Spring 1664, patient no. 228). 13 It was common practice in many European jurisdictions for general hospitals to bar pox patients. See the case of Augburg in Stein, French Pox in Early Modern Germany, 77–80, or Bologna in Arrizabalaga, Henderson, and French, The Great Pox, 149–50. Other institutions like Valencia’s General Hospital established specific wards to deal with the pox, as discussed in López Terrada, “El tratamiento.” 14 ADPT, libro H-­55, Ana Rodríguez (Spring 1657, patient no. 130). 15 Ibid., Domingo Álvarez (Fall 1657, patient no. 58). 16 Ibid., Pedro Rico (Spring 1657, patient no. 83). 17 Arrizabalaga, Henderson, and French, The Great Pox constitutes the best discussion of medical and institutional responses to the French disease in the Italian peninsula. 18 On the initial virulence of the disease and later transformation see Robert J. Knell, “Syphilis in Renaissance Europe: Rapid Evolution of an

188  Notes to pages 42–4

19

20 21 22

23

24 25

26 27

28 29

Introduced Sexually Transmitted Disease?,” Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B (Suppl.) 271 (2004): S174–S176; Eugenia Tognotti, “The Rise and Fall of Syphilis in Renaissance Europe,” Journal of Medical Humanities 30, no. 2 (2009): 99–113; Quetel, History of Syphilis, 50–1. On the issue of the nature and age of the pox see Arrizabalaga, Henderson, and French, The Great Pox, 70–83; Carmichael, “Syphilis and the Columbian Exchange”; Foa, “The New and the Old.” Arrizabalaga, Henderson, and French, The Great Pox, 131–40; Arrizabalaga, “Los médicos valencianos.” Díaz de la Isla, Tratado, 2r. Spanish excerpts also published in Ian Michael, “Celestina and the Great Pox.” Arrizabalaga, Henderson, and French, The Great Pox, 102, 240. For specific discussion of the Fuggers and guaiac use in Augsburg see J.L. Flood, “The Price of the Pox in 1527. Johannes Sinapius and the Guaiac Cure,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 54, no. 3 (1992): 691–707; Stein, French Pox in Germany, 101–4. “Los he visto sanos y bien curados en breve con sudores de exercicio y purgas y sangrias segun dixe si son necessarias y quedan mas perfectos y sanos que con otra ninguna cura: y sin daño ni quedar reliquia alguna,” Lobera, Libro de las quatro enfermedades, 74v. Calvo, Cirugía, 563. “[L]os quales los que primero se empeçassen a curar, essos serian mas perfetamente sanos, y sin lision, curandose, segun arte, sangrando, jatopando, purgando y sudando a cada uno conforme tuviere la necefsidad, con discrecion letras y esperiencia: y a estos tales, que al principio se curaron, he visto y curado con felices sucesos, quedar muy sanos con el orden de las curas que yran enseñadas en nuestro libro, con mucha perfecion.” León, Práctico de morbo gálico, no numeration (prologue to work). Torres, Enfermedad de las bubas, 2–3. “Item, que no se reciba en el hospital enfermos ningunos de enfermedad incurable por que no se ocupen camas que puedan ser de provecho para muchos curables de otras enfermedades sino fuera de bubas y humores curables que es el efecto para que instituido y destinado está el dicho hospital y la cura del.” AHN, Órdenes Militares, libro 70, 67v. APT, P-­3170, 640r. As discussed in Antonio García-­Abásolo, “Andalucía y México. Emigración y mundo privado de los pobladores andaluces en Nueva España,” in Aportes humanos, culturales y artísticos de Andalucía en México siglos XVI–XVIII. Separata de la publicación, ed. Antonio García-­Abásolo, Fernando Quiles, and María Ángeles Fernández (Seville: Junta de

Notes to pages 44–8 189

30

31 32 33 34 35 36 37

38

39

40 41 42

43 44

Andalucía, 2006), 51. Travel to the Americas cost around 30 to 40 ducats. Likewise, María del Carmen Martínez, La emigración castellana y leonesa al nuevo mundo, 1517–1700 (Valladolid: Junta de Castilla y León, 1993) and García-­Abásolo, “Andalucía y México,” suggest various possibilities for the sharp decline in Spanish migration to the Americas in the second half of the seventeenth century, including fewer economic opportunities and the continuing context of warfare and rebellion in the peninsula. They bought a loom known as “de fondo” or deep. Based on the finding in Aranda Pérez, “Los mercaderes de Toledo,” 91, silk woven on these looms was sold for five reales per piece by the early eighteenth century, just below the price of the best possible silk used for cloaks, which was sold at six reales per piece. APT, P-­3429, 373. “En el comer, y bever han de guardar buen regimiento.” Calvo, Cirugía, 575. Ibid., 576. López Pinna, Tratado de morbo gálico, 15r–16v. “Cada uno de su parte ha de cumplir con su obligacion.” León, Práctico de morbo gálico, 27r. Ibid. “Con cura propia dura la enfermedad, lo que dura la cura, restaurando à naturaleza con castidad y buen govierno: con lo qual yo los he visto durar hasta 20 años: y esto nos ha mostrado la experiencia: y si el hombre fuere vicioso, vivira de dos a tres años: y lo mismo les sucedera à los de la primera, siendo mal regidos, y governados, y viciosos de mugeres.” Ibid., 6v. “Y si despues los que estan curados buelven a tenerla, es porque ellos (como perro al vómito) buelven a tener exceso con mugeres infectas, las quales les bolverá una, y muchas vezes a inficionar.” Calvo, Cirugía, 564. “He curado, y sanado infinidad de enfermos en Hospitales diferentes de España, Exercitos, y Armadas, y he visto quedar buenos los que estimavan su salud, y los desordenados que recayan, era por culpa suya, afsi se lo hazia confesar.” León, Práctico de morbo gálico, 21v. AHN, Órdenes Militares, libro 70. Ibid., 68r. “[El administrador] no permita que en el dicho hospital se blasfeme ni jure el nombre de Dios ni de sus santos ni se viva desonestamente ni se juegue ni se hagan otras cosas descompuestas so las penas que al administrador le pareciere justa según el esceso.” Ibid., 76v–77r. ADPT, libro H-­55, Spring 1657, patient no. 25. Ibid. Spring 1657, patient no. 16.

190  Notes to pages 48–52 45 46 47 48 49 50

51

52 53 54 55 56 57

58

59

60

61

Ibid. Fall 1662, patient no. 139 and Spring 1663, patient no. 49. AHN, Órdenes Militares, libro 70. ADPT, libro H-­55, Spring 1658, patient no. 24 and Fall 1659, patient no. 34. León, Práctico de morbo gálico, 11r, 21 r. APT, P-­170, 737; P-­161, 1005r. For the changing understanding of contagion and disease between the Middle Ages and the early modern period, including its cultural manifestations, see Vivian Nutton, “The Seeds of Disease: An Explanation of Contagion and Infection from the Greeks to the Renaissance,” Medical History 27 (1983): 1–34; Ann G. Carmichael, “Contagion Theory and Contagion Practice in Fifteenth-­Century Milan,” Renaissance Quarterly 44 (1991): 213–55; Claire L. Carlin, ed., Imagining Contagion in Early Modern Europe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Eamon, “Cannibalism and Contagion.” “[N]o solamente se apega por carnal ayuntamiento pero por dormir en una misma ropa y bever con el mismo vaso se puede apegar,” Díaz de la Isla, Tratado, 5v. Ibid., 3v. Torres, Enfermedad de las bubas, 5–6; León, Práctico de morbo gálico, 11v; Calvo, Cirugía, 569–70. AHN, Órdenes Militares, libro 70, 69r. Ibid., 68r. Ibid., 86v. “Decíanle los Médicos que no se llegase tanto a él, ni le tocase: lo mismo le aconsejaban sus parientes y amigos, poniéndole en conciencia, que no curase tanto á un hombre que era ya mas del otro mundo que de éste.” Juan Luis Vives, Instrucción de la mujer cristiana (Madrid: Don Benito Cano, 1793), 257. “[E]n lo que se ve claro quánta sea la virtud, quánta la santidad de aquellas que aman á sus maridos como deben, á las cuales nuestro señor aun en este mundo se los agradece.” Ibid., 259. Prudencio de Sandoval, Historia del emperador Carlos V, ed. Carlos Seco Serrano, Biblioteca de autores españoles, no. 81 (Madrid: Ediciones Atlas, 1956), 91. “Item, damos por inhábil para entrar en este Colegio a cualquiera que … tuviese o hubiera tenido enfermedad contagiosa como lepra o bubas, o de San Lázaro, o otra alguna semejante.” Luis Sala Balust, ed., Constituciones, estatutos, y ceremonias de los antiguos colegios seculares de la Universidad de Salamanca (Madrid: CSIC, 1966), 4:123. ADPT, libro H-­55.

Notes to pages 52–7 191 62 Ibid., Spring 1658, patient no. 32. 63 As an example, consider the case of patient María Enriquez, treated in 1657, who entered the hospital with a cloak described as “not hers.” Ibid., spring 1657, patient no. 151. 64 “[Á]ntes ternan facultad, / los que ya cofrades fueren, / de meter en la hermandad / con poca dificultad / quantos con ellos durmieren.” Horozco, Cancionero, 3. 65 León, Morbo gálico, 1r. 66 Also discussed in Berco, “Sex and Marriage.” 67 Díaz de la Isla, Tratado contra el mal serpentino, 13v. 3  Melting Pot: The Hospital de Santiago’s Patients 1 ADPT, libro H-­55, Fall 1662, patient no. 29. On the extent of Asturian emigration to the south see, for instance, the example of Madrid, where Asturianos represented the largest group of migrants to the city in the last quarter of the seventeenth century, as shown in Jesús Bravo Lozano, “La emigración a Madrid,” in Madrid en la época moderna: espacio, sociedad y cultura, ed. Virgilio Pinto Crespo and Santos Madrazo Madrazo (Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 1991), 131–58. 2 ADPT, libro H-­55, Fall 1662, patients nos. 27 and 28. 3 See Aileen Ribeiro, “Dress in the Early Modern Period, c. 1500–1780,” in The Cambridge History of Western Textiles, ed. David Jenkins (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 673, for translations of valona and golilla. 4 Salvador de Moxó, Los antiguos señoríos de Toledo (Toledo: Instituto Provincial de Investigaciones y Estudios Toledanos, 1973), 130–1; Carmelo Viñas Mey and Ramón Paz, Relaciones histórico-­geográficas-­estadísticas de los pueblos de España hechas por iniciativa de Felipe II: Reino de Toledo (Madrid: CSIC, 1951), 2: 175–88. 5 ADPT, libro H-­55, Fall 1662, patient no. 42. 6 Bernis, El traje, 252–3. 7 Archivo General de Simancas [herafter AGS], Contadurías Generales, Legajo 3251, libro 18. 8 ADPT, libro H-­55, Fall 1662, patient no. 15. Gaspar’s father, Francisco Cabezas, was listed as mayordomo for the Hospital de Santiago in Toledo’s 1636 tax census; found in AGS, Contadurías Generales, Legajo 3251, libro 18. 9 ADPT, libro H-­55, Fall 1662, patient no. 26. 10 On Ana Pacheco’s family see Don Pedro de Rojas, Discursos ilustres históricos y genealógicos (Madrid: Juan Ruiz de Pereda, 1636), 192r [BN, R-­167448];

192  Notes to pages 57–61 Don Luis Vilar y Pascual, Diccionario histórico, genealógico y heráldico de las familias ilustres de la monarquía española (Madrid, Don Miguel Guijarro, 1866), 152–3. 11 APT, P-­3425, 966r; P-­161, 1005r; P-­170, 737r. 12 For procedures followed see AHN, libro 70, 68r–68v. 13 Stein, French Pox in Early Modern Germany, 76; Arrizabalaga, Henderson, and French, The Great Pox, chs. 7–8. 14 On the importance of migration – whether seasonal, urban, or permanent – as a pattern of early modern European life see Jan Lucassen, Migrant Labour in Europe: The Drift to the North Sea (London: Croom Helm, 1987); Leslie Page Mooch, Moving Europeans: Migration in Western Europe since 1650 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992); Klaus J. Bade, Migration in European History (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), ch. 1; Jan Lucassen and Leo Lucassen, “The Mobility Transition Revisited: What the Case of Europe Can Offer to Global History,” Journal of Global History 4 (2009): 347–77. For inter-­Spanish migration, especially from the north, see Brazo Lozano, “La emigración”; Lanza García, “De norte a sur”; Pascual Sánchez, “Migraciones tradicionales.” 15 APT, P-­3162, 215r. 16 ADPT, Libro H-­55, Spring 1656, patient no. 66. 17 On French immigration to Spain, including Madrid, during the seventeenth century see Gloria Nielfa Cristóbal, “A propósito de las migraciones en la historia,” Cuadernos de Historia Moderna 9 (1988): 216–27; Jesús Bravo Lozano, “La sombra de un burro. Inmigrantes franceses en Madrid,” Historia 16, no. 104 (1984): 37–44. 18 APT, P-­3407, 147r. 19 ADPT, Libro H-­55, Fall 1657, patient no. 72. 20 APT, P-­155, 800r. 21 APT, P-­158, 176r. 22 ADPT, Libro H-­55, Fall 1661, patient no. 11. 23 For Andrade y Benavides’s career see AHN, Estado, legajo 817, no. 68 which contains a summary of the services he and his family had provided to the Crown for the purposes of receiving financial aid when he retired in 1654. More information on his family comes from the genealogy he presented in 1641 upon entering the military order of Santiago; see AHN, Órdenes Militares, Caballeros de Santiago, expediente 422. 24 Michael R. Weisser, The Peasants of the Montes: The Roots of Rural Rebellion in Spain (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1976). On the montes as well as the rest of Toledo’s hinterland see Julián Montemayor, Tolède entre fortune et déclin (1530–1640) (Limoges: PULIM, 1996), chs. 4 and 6.

Notes to pages 61–4 193 25 ADPT, libro H-­55, Fall 1658, patient no. 31. 26 See the discussion on these themes in chapter 1. 27 “¡Oh bendita tú, aldea, y bendito el que en ti mora, pues allí no aportan bubas, no se apega sarna, no saben que cosa es cáncer, nunca oyeron decir perlesía, no tiene allí parientes la gota, no hay confrades de riñones, no tiene allí casa la ijada, no moran allí las opilaciones, no se cría allí bazo, nunca allí se escalienta el hígado, a nadie toman desmayos y ningunos mueren de ahítos!.” Fray Antonio de Guevara, Menosprecio de corte y alabanza de aldea, ed. Asunción Rallo Gruss (Madrid: Cátedra, 1984), 171. 28 “Ayer me dijo en la vega / Juana que un mozo alentado/ una pupa le ha pegado / y es cierto que se la pega. Lamentábase sin pausa / y mil veces repetía / que efecto francés sentía, siendo española la causa.” Cited in Ponce Cárdenas, “De burlas y enfermedades,” 138. 29 Enrique Perdiguero Gil, “The Popularization of Medicine during the Spanish Enlightenment,” in The Popularization of Medicine, 1650–1850, ed. Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1992), 162. 30 “Hay en este lugar una casa, que se intitula el hospital de Jesús, la cual labró y fundó un vecino de Toledo, heredero en este dicho lugar, que se llamaba Gutierre de Carrión, para que los peregrinos y romeros que por este lugar pasaren, se acojan a el a dormer, con que no puedan hacer mas que una noche en el dicho hospital.” Viñas Mey and Paz, Relaciones histórico-­geográficas-­estadísticas, 1:159. 31 On the shift to specialization in the late Middle Ages for Castilian urban hospitals see Santo Tomás, La asistencia a los enfermos, 423–4. Also note that specialized treatment in hospitals had arisen in the Middle Ages via attempts to control leprosy and bubonic plague as discussed in Jon Arrizabalaga, “La enfermedad y la asistencia hospitalaria,” in Historia de la ciencia y de la técnica en la Corona de Castilla, ed. Luis García Ballester (Valladolid: Junta de Castilla y León, 2002), 1:603–27. 32 Viñas Mey and Paz, Relaciones histórico-­geográficas-­estadísticas, 1:340. 33 Ibid., vols. 1–3. 34 In 1580, the Hospital de Santiago had an income of 4,355,255 maravedís (AHN, Órdenes Militares, carpeta 328, no. 33). 35 Viñas Mey and Paz, Relaciones histórico-­geográficas-­estadísticas, 2:187, 285, 465; 3:328. 36 Ibid., 2:167; 3:328. 37 ADPT, Libro H-­55, Spring 1655, patient nos. 101 and 102. 38 Antonio Martín Gamero, ed. Ordenanzas para el buen régimen y gobierno de la muy noble, muy leal e imperial Ciudad de Toledo (Toledo: José de Cea, 1858), 147. On the lack of brick due to its great price see Fernando Jiménez de

194  Notes to pages 64–7

39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

47 48

49

50

51

Gregorio, “Toledo a mediados del siglo XVIII,” Toletum 3 (1964): 19. On the broad problems regarding cultivation and deforestation see David E. Vassberg, Land and Society in Golden Age Castille (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), ch. 6. AGS, Contadurías Generales, Legajo 3251, libro 18. For Joan’s loan see APT, P-­151, 292r. ADPT, libro H-­55, Spring 1657, patient no. 143. Josepha’s father, Juan de Escobar, voluntarily provided 650 reales to the Crown in 1636. AGS, Contadurías Generales, Legajo 3251, libro 18. APT, P-­157, 724r. ADPT, libro H-­55, Fall 1654, patient no. 81 and Fall 1655, patient no. 29. APT, P-­3165, 552r. A debate at the Hospital de Santiago erupted between two physicians in 1791 regarding French trends that proposed doing away with the salivation induced by mercury ointments in favor of a regimen of mercury pills that tended to be less harsh. After obtaining information on the matter, however, the royal council in charge decided to maintain the salivation method. AHN, Órdenes Militares, legajo 3587, no. 1. Ibid. Also see AHN, Órdenes Militares, libro 70, 65r–80v. Ameque was a medicine as listed in Miguel Ángel Ladero Quesada, “El abastecimiento de las Indias a comienzos del siglo XVI,” Boletin de la Real Academia de la historia 203, no. 3 (2006): 285–380. “Como un zaque estoy de Ameque / y como una guinda están/ mis tres potencias del alma / de fumaria y magistral. / Aquí, tras tanto jarrillo / como te he sufrido y tras / tanto sudor apajado / de estufa canicular, / más babas estoy vertiendo / que enfrenado un alazán, / procurando en mis salivas / escupir mi enfermedad. / Como los dos babeamos / en la cama y el zaguán, / las unciones que a tu mula / dicen todos que me das. / ¡Oh, acaba ya de matarme, / si de los hados está! / Que doble sus esquilones / en mi entierro el sacristán.” Anastasio Pantaleón de Ribera, “Estando enfermo el poeta hizo este romance al médico que le curaba…” in Obras de Anastasio Pantaleón de Ribera, 43r–43v; also cited in Ponce Cárdenas, “De burlas,” 126–7. As shown in Sancho de San Román, “La medicina en Toledo,” 49–50, the renowned Toledan surgeon, Juan Fragoso, ended up by 1570 working for the royal family at court in Madrid. Likewise, Francisco Hernández, from the town of La Puebla de Montalbán, in Toledo’s hinterland, was contracted by the monarchy to conduct extensive botanical studies in the Americas between 1570 and 1577. AGS, Contadurías Generales, Legajo 3251, libro 18.

Notes to pages 67–70 195 52 Perdiguero Gil, “The Popularization of Medicine,” 162. 53 Y porque su devocion / no quede sin premio y pago / será su congregacion / su junta y advocación / en Toledo en Santiago; / do el general comisario / y el grand administrador / como se haze ordinario / les dará lo necesario / y toda ayuda y favor.” Horozco, Cancionero, 4. 54 “[E]s hospital muy insigne, y mas que todos los demás necesario, porque como nuestra sensualidad ande tan desenfrenada en el acto carnal, mas fácilmente viene la corrupción del mal francés que de las demás enfermedades, mayormente a gente moza que en este dicho hospital con muy diligente cura en dos temporadas del año es remediada … y se les haze mejor cura y con mas acuerdo y providencia que en sus casas aunque fuesen ricos podrían recevir.” Viñas Mey and Paz, Relaciones histórico-­geográficas-­estadísticas, 3:556. 55 AHN, Órdenes Militares, carpeta 328, no. 33. 56 ADPT, libro H-­55, Spring 1656, patient no. 86. 57 Ibid. 58 APT, P-­157, 647r. 59 AHN, Órdenes Militares, libro 70, 68r. 60 “[C]omprendo que reformado el modo y abuso de recibir en este hospital a otros que a pobres como literalmente lo previenen sus constituciones y consta de dicha provisión del consejo del año de 1594, la que asimismo remitiré con dicho legajo y la juzgo también digna de la noticia del Consejo y haber de renovarla por existir de presente todos y algunos mas inconvenientes y motivos que hubo entonces para expedirla y reformados todos los ministros deste hospital de manera que sirvamos como debemos nuestros oficios y cumplamos exactamente con nuestra obligación a que de presente se falta con extrema insolencia en un todo y yo no le descubro remedio.” AHN, Órdenes Militares, carpeta 328, no. 34, 35r–36r. 4  Safeguarding Reputation: Gender, Hospitalization, and Textiles 1 The description of the hospital’s façade is taken from a visitation conducted in 1603 and is found in AHN, Órdenes Militares, libro 7. 2 Doña Isabel Jiménez Tirado’s record occurs in ADPT, libro H-­55, Fall Season 1656, patient no. 21. According to Bernis, El traje, 432–3, long silk cloaks signaled the respectability of upwardly mobile urban women. 3 For instance, in 1661, María de la Cruz entered a contract with a local Toledan notary as a servant, the salary amounting to 12 ducats per year, or just over three ducats less than the price of a silk cloak (APT, P-­158, 21r). 4 The original dowry contract can be found in APT, P-­150, 90r. A grant for honourable maidens from the respected convent of San Pedro Martir

196  Notes to pages 71–2 accounted for most of the cash on hand (100 out of 109.1 ducats). Clothing totaled 62 ducats, and included the silk cloak (9.1 ducats) and the damask gown (13.6 ducats) she would wear when she entered the Hospital de Santiago. Jewellery – mostly gold and silver – valued at 68.1 ducats also counted toward the capital she brought into the marriage, while the rest of the dowry (186.8 ducats) consisted of quality furniture. A merchant daughter’s dowry signed at the same notary’s totaled 745 ducats in 1660 (APT, P-­157, 647r). 5 On the shamefaced poor in Spain see Flynn, Sacred Charity, 79–80; for Toledo see Martz, Poverty and Welfare, 5, 9. 6 The clothing listed in Isabel’s dowry (APT, P-­150, 90r) mostly included the damask gown she would later wear to the hospital, among other quality silk garments, and two woolen gowns. 7 For more specific information on the state of clothing and fabrics women wore to enter the Hospital de Santiago, see Tables 4.1 and 4.2. 8 I derive the term “body scripts” from my reading of both the notion of the performativity of gendered bodies in Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1989) and the concept of body techniques first discussed by Marcel Mauss in his seminal essay “Les techniques du corps,” Journal de Psychologie 32, no. 3–4 (1934): 271–93, and later modified by Nick Crossley as Reflexive Body Techniques in The Social Body: Habit, Identity, and Desire (London: Sage Publication, 2001). 9 The Hospital notary’s descriptors used for clothing were similar to those used in notarial inventories. Both tended to employ descriptors sparingly, as they only noted exceptional quality or lack thereof. As a matter of comparative reference, consider the garments included in the notarial inventory for a respected member of Toledan society, Julián García de Cifuentes, notary and accountant to the Holy Office of the Inquisition and owner of an estate beside that of alderman Alonso de Cisneros: of the 19 total garments (10 of which were silks), none warranted exceptionally good descriptors such as “good,” or “new.” In fact, 17 garments can be considered unremarkable, as no descriptors were attached, and the other two were described as “old” (APT, P-­170, 187r). 10 For the notary’s responsibilities as he admitted patients see Órdenes Militares, libro 70, 68r and 80r. Arrizabalaga, Henderson, and French, The Great Pox, 215–17 show that in Rome, anywhere from 27 to 42 per cent of patients who entered the incurabili hospital wore ragged clothing, while in late medieval Florence, a general hospital recorded twice as many women as men without itemizing their garments, effectively deeming them valueless.

Notes to page 73 197 11 On the wider consumer revolution of the early modern era, see Jan de Vries, “Between Purchasing Power and the World of Goods: Understanding the Household Economy in Early Modern Europe,” in Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. John Brewer and Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1993), 85–132; Fernando Díez, “La apología ilustrada del lujo en España. Sobre la configuración del hombre consumidor,” Historia Social 37 (2000): 3–25. For the shift from woolens to silks see Belén Moreno, “Pautas de consumo textil en Cataluña del siglo XVIII. Una visión a partir de los inventarios post-­ mortem,” in Consumo, condiciones de vida y comercialización. Cataluña y Castilla, siglos XVII–XIX, ed. Jaime Torras Elías and Bartolomé Yun Casalilla (Valladolid: Junta de Castilla y León, 1999), 71–88; Lidia Torra Fernández, “Comercialización y consumo de tejidos en Cataluña, 1650–1800,” Revista de Historia Industrial 11 (1997): 177–96; Máximo García Fernández, “El consumo manufacturero textil en las ciudades castellanas, siglos XVI–XVII y XVIII,” Torre de los Lujanes 45 (Oct 2001): 173–91. 12 “Mandamos que los oficiales menestrales de manos, sastres, zapateros, carpinteros, herreros, tejedores, pellejeros, tundidores, curtidores, zurradores, esparteros, especieros, y de otros cualesquier oficios semejantes a estos mas bajos, y obreros y labradores, y jornaleros, no puedan traer seda algunas, excepto gorras, caperuzas o bonetes de seda, y sus mujeres solamente puedan traer sayuelos o gorretes de seda, y un ribete en los mantos que trajeren de paño.” Novisima Recopilación, Libro VI, Título XIII, Ley 1. A royal edict from 1680 establishing maximum prices for fabrics consistently lists silks among the most expensive. Thus satin was priced at 28 reales per vara (a Castilian measurement equal to three feet), damask at 29, picote at 18, taffeta at 11, and piñuela at 40. In contrast, consider that ordinary woolens like jerguilla and cordellate were priced at around four reales/vara (this information can be found in the eighteenth-­century versions of the Real Academia’s Diccionario de Autoridades, currently available online at www.rae.es, where the definitions for these fabrics include the prices established in a 1680 decree). Silk, then, represents a good indicator of wealth and status. For the importance and variability of silk products see Bernis, El traje, 276–80; Peter Boyd-­Bowman, “Spanish and European Textiles in Sixteenth Century Mexico,” The Americas 29, no. 3 (Jan 1973): 334–58. The correlation between luxurious fabrics and perceptions of status was part of a wider European phenomenon. See, for example, the articles by Oksana Sekatcheva, “The Formation of Russian Women’s Costume at the Time before the Reforms of Peter the Great,” and Tessa Storey, “Clothing Courtesans: Fabrics, Signals, and Experiences,” both in Clothing Culture, 1350–1650, ed. Catherine Richardson (Burlington, VT: Ashgate,

198  Notes to pages 73–6

13 14 15

16

17

18

19 20 21

22 23 24

25 26

2004), 77–91 and 95–107. These articles deal partly with the social meanings Russian women, Italian prostitutes, and observers attributed to types of clothing and fabrics, including silk. Martín Gamero, ed. Ordenanzas, Tit 93, p. 153. ADPT, libro H-­55. My calculation, based on raw totals provided by José Ignacio Andrés Ucendo, “Algunas notas sobre el consumo y comercialización de tejidos en Castilla a comienzos del siglo XVII: La encuesta de 1618,” Revista de Historia Económica 23, no. 1 (2005): 13–46, shows that on average, 10.2 per cent of Castilians wore silk. For an excellent study of the way individuals in Toledo’s hinterland negotiated, constructed, and maintained public reputation through rhetorical strategies embedded in ritual, insults, and sometimes violence, see Scott K. Taylor, Honor and Violence in Golden Age Spain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). Though older histories argued that the pox enjoyed a gender-­disparate pattern of infection that reflected large numbers of men infected by a few prostitutes, recent research has shown both that the disease was more widespread than originally believed and that patterns of infection tended to be similar between men and women, thus making the issue of gendered differences in patient numbers more closely related to access than to rates of infection. See Siena, Venereal Disease, 4, 165–6; and Laura McGough, “Demons, Nature, or God?.” In fact, the Hospital del Rey normally remitted patients with the French disease to the Hospital de Santiago. At least two patients between 1654 and 1665 underwent this process. Elena’s will can be found in APT, P-­170, 114r. López de Villalobos, El sumario de la medicina, 162. Ibid., 155. Winfried Schleiner, “Infection and Cure through Women,” remains the best work detailing Europe-­wide attitudes that connected women with the French disease. Díaz de la Isla, Tratado contra el mal serpentino, 13v. Spanish excerpts also published in Michael, “Celestina and the Great Pox.” Calvo, Cirugía, 564. María Amparo Vidal Gavidia, La casa de arrepentidas de Valencia: origen y trayectoria de una institución para mujeres (Valencia: Generalitat Valenciana, 2001), 39–41. Gamero, ed. Ordenanzas, 193. Alcocer, Historia o descripción de la Imperial Ciudad de Toledo, 118r–118v.

Notes to pages 76–7 199 27 Michael, “Celestina and the Great Pox”; María Luisa García Verdugo, La Lozana Andaluza y la literatura del siglo XVI: la sífilis como enfermedad y metáfora (Madrid: Editorial Pliegos, 1994); Wolfenzon, “La Lozana Andaluza.” 28 Although most literary historians consider the apocryphal Guzmán de Alfarache of much lower quality than Mateo Alemán’s work of the same name, it should be noted that the former enjoyed great success due in large part to its early publication, before Alemán could publish his second volume in 1604. In fact, the apocryphal version was reprinted seven times across the Iberian Peninsula in 1603, while also reaching Milan that same year, and Brussels in 1604. See Rosa Navarro Durán, ed., Novela Picaresca (Madrid: Fundación José Antonio de Castro, 2005), 2: xlii. 29 Luján de Sayavedra, Segunda parte de la vida del pícaro Guzmán de Alfarache, 236–8. The passage reads, “[P]ense que el tacto y olfato me querian engañar y que solo tenia el oyr verdadero y buen amigo; los ojos, en aquella ocasion no eran de provecho por la escuridad, aunque en semejante mercaduria son quanto dañosos y sobornados si es buena, desengañadores y verdaderos si es mala. Bien pudiera yo considerar que no tenia su dueño por buena la ropa, pues la puso en tienda tan escura, como mercader de lienços y que no queria sobre la vista el precio, pero dixelo por no sentir tan pestilencial hedor como prove llegandome mas cerca … No reparan las mujeres en su salud, ni en la agena, pues vemos que del grande exceso del vicio todas se inchen luego de bubas, y inficionan a los que se les llegan, como vemos cada dia en aquella Corte; que con la codicia de ganar torpemente, todo lo levan por un rasero, como el fuego.” 30 The practice of claiming female witnesses were prostitutes or had been involved in a fight with the defendant over public insults relating to prostitution seems to have been widespread as a judicial strategy when it came to present tachas or disqualifiers against witnesses in inquisitorial cases. It is routine in the trials transcribed in Haim Beinart, ed., Records of the Trials of the Spanish Inquisition in Ciudad Real, vol. 3, The Trials of 1512–1527 in Toledo (Jerusalem: Israel National Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1981). Such a tactic can also be seen in the Toledo case against Marina Gonzalez and translated in Lu Ann Homza, ed., The Spanish Inquisition, 1478–1614. An Anthology of Sources (Indianapolis: Hacket Publishing Company, 2006), 40–1, when Francisco de Toledo attempts to disqualify his servant Mayor as a witness because she had been involved in a public spat with his wife, with insults of “whore” being traded by both women. The gravity of “whore” as an insult levelled against women seems to have been widespread throughout Europe. As Merry E. Wiesner argues in Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge

200  Notes to pages 77–8

31 32

33 34

35

36

37

38

University Press, 2000), 40, “[F]or all women, honor was a sexual matter. In most parts of Europe, women of all classes were allowed to bring defamation suits to court for insults to their honor, and it is clear from court records that they did this frequently; such records also indicate that the worst things a man could be called was ‘thief’ or ‘coward’ while for women it was ‘whore’.” “Contra la multitud de las malas mugeres que hay en el mundo … putas pelando hambrientas.” Horozco, Cancionero, 30–1. “Destas hay tantas á hecho, / qu’ aunqu’ acá buen cobro había, / há la corte tantas hecho / que como sienten provecho / hay muy grande putería. / Va la cosa tan corruta / y hay tanta disolucion, / que la menos disoluta / no se escapa de ser puta / de obra, ó de coraçon. / Pero no me maravillo / que dó hay tantos forasteros / y tanto del moçalvillo / se pesquen con el cebillo / de presentes y dineros. / Ellas los saben chupar, / y ellos saben dar sin asco, / así qu’ en este lugar / no puede agora dexar / de muy bien arder el tasco.” Horozco, Cancionero, 183. Gameso, ed. Ordenanzas, Tit 93, 153. Thirty colours were documented in women’s clothing, including such specific tones as mauve, turquoise, rosemary, and olive, as well as checkered patterns. ADPT, H-­55; Antonia Serrano (Fall 1655, patient no. 16) and María González (Fall 1661, patient no. 33). Outside of the aforesaid mantillas, yellow appears in only three skirts and a pair of socks among all women’s garments. Poska, Regulating the People, ch. 5 finds that Gallegan women in rural areas quite commonly had children out of wedlock. Barahona, Sex Crimes, ch. 5 shows that women who suffered public shame due to premarital sex often sought remedies through the court system. Spanish authors generally agreed that, while sexual intercourse led as the cause of contagion, the pox could also be acquired by merely coming into contact with articles belonging to the diseased. See Calvo, Cirugía, 570, where he even went as far as arguing that the breath of the afflicted was also a conduit for contagion. Torres, Libro que trata de la enfermedad de las bubas, 6; López Pinna, Tratado de morbo gálico, 5r; León, Práctico de morbo gálico, 6v. On the issue of the popular influences shaping La pícara Justina see Julián Sevilla Muñoz, “Fuentes paremiológicas francesas y españolas de la primera mitad del siglo XVII,” Revista de Filología Románica 10 (1993): 361–73 and Bruno M. Damiani, “Las fuentes literarias de ‘La Pícara Justina’,” Thesaurus 36, no. 1 (1981): 44–70.

Notes to pages 78–80 201 39 The whole passage reads, “Y viene esto bien con el refran de los del hospital de la folga, en Toledo, que dice: ‘los pelados son hidalgos eclesiásticos y pájaros harpados.’ Y dícenlo, porque los de nuestra facción sin pena pierden la misa y sin vergüenza la fama. Dicen de todos más que relator en sala de crímen, y aun de sí no callan; y si una vez dan barreno á la cuba del secreto, hasta las heces derrama. Para decir de los otros son como galeotes en galera, y para pregonar su casa son como gallinas ponedoras, que para un huevo atruenan un barrio.” In López de Úbeda, La pícara Justina, 9–10. Note Justina’s use of pelados or “bald” as a derogatory term for the poxed, and her identification of the institution in which the saying originated as “hospital de la folga” or the party hospital. Considering that the work continuously chides the poxed for their carefree bon vivant ways, and Santiago’s status as Toledo’s only pox hospital, the proverb probably referred to the Hospital de Santiago. 40 María de Guzmán sought treatment in 1661 (ADPT, libro H-­55, Spring 1661, patient no. 265) and entered as a doncella or maiden. In 1656, however, she appears as an emancipated single woman renting a home in Toledo (APT, P-­3159, 60r). 41 As instituted in the Hospital’s 1604 regulations found in AHN, Órdenes Militares, libro 70, 67r. 42 For an excellent interpretation of the widespread literature on sexuality, and specifically marital infidelity, in Golden Age Spain, see Félix Cantizano Pérez, El erotismo en la poesía de adúlteros y cornudos en el Siglo de Oro (Madrid: Editorial Complutense, 2007). 43 Tirso de Molina. Santo y Sastre, vol. 2, Obras Completas. Cuarta parte de comedias, ed. Ignacio Arellano (Pamplona: Instituto de Estudios Tirsianos, 2003), 640, ll. 250–65. 44 Horozco, Proverbios glosados, 2:403. 45 Weiner, the utmost authority on Horozco and editor of his Proverbios glosados, certainly suspects Horozco’s many references to the pox had to do with a probable venereal disease with which he had to contend. Horozco, Proverbios glosados, 1:25, note 6. 46 Ibid., 2:522 provides a description of the Castilian charivari applied by local authorities as part of popular custom, for Horozco argues that no law existed on the books directing such shaming. 47 Cantizano Pérez, El erotismo en la poesía, ch. 4. 48 The whole passage reads, “Porque, como dize sant Augustín, que nuestro Señor Dios castiga la persona sobervia de coraçón y de trages sobervios. E por esta causa permitte que cayga en pública luxuria y aun haze que ella sea menospreciada y tenida en poco de todos. E assí, quando la triste

202  Notes to pages 80–2 donzella cae en offensa de Dios nuestro Señor, dale un marido que la menosprecia y la tracta como a estiércol. Y con esto le da largas y feas enfermedades, porque las tales de aquí adelante no se ensobervezcan con la vanidad de su hermosura, porque ya no ay en ellas sino miseria y dolor. E a las tales haze Dios venir en gran pobreza, de manera que por grado o por fuerça se han de humillar a demander limosna e les embía Dios otros casos miserables y terribles, poniéndoles en hospitales con bubas y llagas y miserias, las quales las humillan hasta la tierra y las traen a punto de desesperación.” Carmen Clausell Nácher, ed., Carro de las Donas (Valladolid, 1542): estudio preliminar y edición anotada (PhD thesis, Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, 2005), 100. Though “bubas” meant plague bubo in the fifteenth century, by the sixteenth century the term was commonly used to refer to pox boils, and would have been read that way. 49 “[Y] para hacer y dar las unciones a los enfermos y enfermas aya doce enfermeros barones pues las enfermeras mugeres no tienen la suficiente fuerza para hacer y dar a sus enfermas las dichas unciones pero esto se aga con la mayor onestidad y modestia que se requiere en ministerios tan bergonzosos,” AHN, Órdenes Militares, libro 70, 70r. 50 As recent scholarship has argued, rather than a factor that constrained individuals’, and especially women’s, lives, reputation and honour were much more ambivalent, malleable, and open to negotiation by both men and women than argued in earlier scholarship. For the early literature that argued for a much more rigid honour system that was especially pernicious to women’s opportunities see Julian Pitt-­Rivers, “Honour and Social Status,” in Honour and Shame: The Value of Mediterranean Society, ed. Jean G. Péristiany (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson,1965), 21–95; José Antonio Maravall, Poder, honor y élites en el siglo XVII (Madrid: Ariel, 1979); Bartolomé Bennassar, The Spanish Character: Attitudes and Mentalities from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), ch. 8. Revisionist works that have highlighted individual, and especially women’s, agency in shaping reputation and honour include Taylor, Honor and Violence, ch. 8; Barahona, Sex Crimes, Honour; Abigail Dyer, “Seduction by Promise of Marriage: Law, Sex, and Culture in Seventeenth-­Century Spain,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 34, no. 2 (2003): 439–55. For similar trends elsewhere in Europe see Elizabeth S. Cohen, “Honor and Gender in the Streets of Early Modern Rome,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 22, no. 4 (Spring 1992): 597–625. 51 The poverty of pox patients has been frequently remarked upon in the scholarship. See Arrizabalaga, Henderson, and French, The Great Pox, 217 on the greater poverty of female patients. For England see Siena, Venereal

Notes to pages 82–4 203

52

53

54 55

56

57

58

59

Disease, 3–14 on poverty and 31–4 on the shame associated with the pox. For Spain see López Terrada, “El tratamiento de la sífilis.” For Germany see Jütte, “Syphilis and Confinement.” For example, we encounter María de Arcay, a single woman from the far northwestern region of Galicia, entering the hospital in 1660 and wearing garments so tattered the notary deemed them “not worth anything.” Yet she also wore a new shirt (ADPT, Libro H-­55, Fall 1660, patient no. 105). Considering that the indigent were often the recipients of charity in the form of garments, this juxtaposition between worthless and new should not be that surprising. See Maureen Flynn, “The Charitable Activities of Early Modern Confraternities,” in Early Modern Europe: Issues and Interpretations, ed. Karen L. Taylor and James B. Collins (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 104–5. Petronila Palacios, from Ajofrín, entered the hospital wearing eleven items. Of these, an underskirt and her shoes were considered old, another underskirt was deemed very old, the shirt was new, and the other seven, including a silk skirt, were in normal condition (ADPT, Libro H-­55, Spring 1655, patient no. 77). Bernis, El traje, 252–3. Ibid., 442. In fact, female patients seem to have rarely worn both long cloaks and aprons: whereas 253 patients wore aprons and 251 wore long silk cloaks, only 29 wore both. Horozco, in Proverbios glosados, 1:298, describes the sartorial gallantry of Toledo’s ladies in his interpretation of the proverb that plays with the Spanish words for damask (damasco), lady (dama), and repugnance (asco). “Eso no Sancho – respondió Teresa – : casadla con su igual, que es lo más acertado; que si de los zuecos la sacáis a chapines, y de saya parda de catorzeno a verdugado y saboyanas de seda, y de una Marica y un tú a una doña tal y señoría, no se ha de hallar la muchacha, y a cada paso ha de caer en mil faltas, descubriendo la hilaza de su tela basta y grosera.” Cervantes, Don Quixote de la Mancha, segunda parte, capítulo V, 583. For the English version, I have relied on a modified version of John Ormsby’s classic translation available at http://cervantes.tamu.edu/V2/CPI/index. From a 1679 royal order to the Mexican viceroy cited in Pilar Gonzalbo, “De la penuria y el lujo en la Nueva España, Siglos XVI–XVIII,” Revista de Indias 56 (1996): 49–75. On the rise of consumer culture and personal strategies of manipulating luxury as a status marker see Lorna Weatherhill, Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in Britain, 1660–1760 (London: Routledge, 1988), as well as Edith Snook, “The Greatness in Good Clothes: Fashioning Subjectivity in

204  Notes to pages 84–5 Mary Wroth’s Urania and Margaret Spencer’s Account Book,” The Seventeenth Century 22, no. 2 (Autumn 2007): 225–59. Aside from the seminal work by Bernis¸ El traje, recent scholarship on Hispanic culture has also examined the intimate relationship among material culture, public status, and individual representational strategies in daily life. In this vein, consider Isabel de la Cruz de Amenabar, El traje: transformaciones de una segunda piel. Serie Arte y Sociedad en Chile 1650–1820 (Santiago: Ediciones Universidad Católica de Chile, 1996); Teresa Ferrer Valls, “Vestuario teatral y espectáculo cortesano en el Siglo de Oro,” El vestuario en el teatro español del Siglo de Oro, Cuadernos de teatro clásico, 13–14 (2000): 63–84; Bass and Wunder, “The Veiled Ladies.” For a perspective on the same process rooted in economic history see Máximo García and Bartolomé Yun Casalilla, “Pautas de consumo, estilos de vida y cambio político en las ciudades castellanas a fines del Antiguo Régimen” in Imágenes de la diversidad. El mundo urbano en la corona de Castilla (s. XVI–XVIII), ed. José I. Fortea (Santander: Universidad de Cantabria, 1997), 245–82. 60 Bernis, El Traje, 257–8. 61 José de Valdivielso, Teatro Completo, eds. Ricardo Arias y Arias and Robert. V. Piluso (Madrid: Isla, 1975), 701. 62 Antonio Rodríguez Villa, ed., “Correspondencia de la Infanta Archiduquesa Doña Isabel Clara Eugenia de Austria con el Duque de Lerma, Apéndice,” Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia 49, no. 1 (July 1906): 15–16. 63 Bernis, El traje, 252–3. 64 On the connection between reputation and economic considerations see Taylor, “Credit, Debt, and Honor.” 65 María de Olivares (ADPT, libro H-­55, Spring 1660, patient no. 152) received a contract well below normal expectations. Her agreement (APT, P-­160, 77r) stipulated a salary of 12 ducats for four years, or three ducats/year, and her employer assumed no medical costs. Contrast this with the service contract for fifteen-­year-­old orphan Catalina Ruiz, signed a mere month after María’s at the same notary. Her employer, procurator Mateo de Ávila, promised to pay Catalina 10 ducats/year and to pay for “the cure of her illnesses” as customary in service contracts of this type (APT, P-­160, 175r). 66 Eugenia Peláez, for instance, lucked out and obtained a dowry administered by the Hospital de Misericordia in 1655 after the administrators of the grant rescinded it from Catalina González two years before. APT, P-­149, 1269r. 67 María Gutiérrez (ADPT, libro H-­55, Spring 1662, patient no. 107) obtained a dowry grant of 20,000 maravedís from the Toledo cathedral in 1656 (APT, P-­3160, 727r). Damiana Zazo (ADPT, libro H-­55, Spring 1662, patient

Notes to pages 85–6 205

68

69

70

71

72

73 74 75

76

no. 56, returning in Fall 1662, patient no. 42) received a dowry of 17,000 maravedís from the same church in 1661 (APT, P-­3172, 358r). “Ni más ni menos es eso que no haber casi en Sevilla mujer ordinaria de oficial que tenga cuatro blancas, que no ande por las calles con un manto de lustre, que cuesta diez ducados.” “Entremés de los mirones,” in Don Adolfo de Castro, ed., Varias obras inéditas de Cervantes (Madrid: A. de Carlos e Hijo, editores, 1874), 50. “Empecemos por los pobres y gente plebeya. Induraverunt facies suas supra petram et noluerunt reverti. Todos perdidos. Corazones más que de piedra, impacientes, soberbios, mentirosos; aquí jurando, acullá maldiciendo. El oficial ha de comer tan buen bocado y traer tan buena capa como el caballero; y su mujer saya de seda y manto de lustre, como la señora; y con eso murmurar de los ricos.” Fray Alonso de Cabrera, “De las consideraciones sobre todos los evangelios de la Cuaresma (1598),” in Sermones del padre fray Alonso de Cabrera, ed. Miguel Mir (Madrid: Bailly, 1906), 144. “Y con esto se han alçado / las putas con presuncion, / y todas se han endonado / que ninguna no ha quedado / que no se haya puesto don. / Han tenido que tundir / largamente todo este año, / y despues de bien muflir, / han jurado no vestir / ropa ni cosa de paño. / Todas se han tornado seda, / rasos, damascos, velludos, / aunqu’ el majadero rueda / por que ninguno no pueda / ofrecer menos de escudos.” Horozco, Cancionero, 183. Whether service contracts included a silk cloak seemed to have depended on how willing one was to negotiate for them. Thus in 1659 Domingo Ramos negotiated a contract for his daughter, Isabel, to serve in the home of Sebastian de Pallares, yet only obtained a promise for a woolen cloak (APT, P-­3168, 338r). On the other hand, in 1660 the administrator of Toledo’s foundling hospital of Santa Cruz and canon of the cathedral, Don Alonso de Castro y Andrada, negotiated a similar contract for a toddler, Manuela, that included a silk cloak (APT, P-­3169, 520r). For the prices of various types of fabrics from Toledo and elsewhere in 1627 see Imanol Sorondo, “Arancel General de precios en la venta de mantenimientos y mercadurías, año 1627,” Zainak. Cuadernos de Antroplogía-­ Etnografía 5 (1987): 251–92. ADPT, libro H-­55. Bass and Wunder, “Veiled Ladies.” According to Horozco, Cancionero, 243, Corregidor Tello promulgated this law after he heard Friar Antonio Navarro’s fiery sermon on the “great evils of this modern trend of covering [the face] with cloaks.” On the Spanish Baroque’s sensitivity to issues of image in the context of debates on deception/undeception see the classic work by José Antonio

206  Notes to pages 89–90 Maravall, Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure, trans. Terry Cochran (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), as well as Jeremy Robbins, “Knowledge, Self and Honour,” Bulletin of Spanish Studies 82, no. 8 (2005): 157–76; William Egginton, “Gracián and the Emergence of the Modern Subject,” in Rhetoric and Politics: Baltasar Gracián and the New World Order, ed. Nicholas Spadaccini and Jenaro Talens (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1997), 151–69. 5  Between Body and Soul: Treatment at the Hospital de Santiago 1 ADPT, libro H-­55, Fall Season 1656, patient no. 21 (Isabel Jiménez Tirado). Four other women – three of them from the countryside – entered the hospital together with Isabel. Unlike her, they wore no silken cloaks and one of them, María Diaz from Cedillo, was so poor the notary listed her garments as “not worth anything.” 2 Although many patients, such as Isabel Jiménez Tirado, entered the hospital dressed in garments that belied their poverty, the institution went as far as stipulating that only those who could not afford private treatment were to be admitted. Moreover, regulations constantly used the term “pobres” (or “poor”) as a synonym for “patients.” 3 Although the 1604 regulations in AHN, Órdenes Militares, libro 70, stipulate that both the undergarments and the long gowns were to be provided by the hospital, it seems at least some patients listed in the mid-­century admissions book found in ADPT, libro H-­55 brought with them their own extra pair of undergarments for this purpose. 4 Toledo municipal regulations in the sixteenth century mandated that physicians examine prostitutes in the municipal brothels and send those infected with pox to the Hospital de Santiago for treatment. Martín Gamero, ed., Ordenanzas Tit 93, 153. For the 1623 prohibition of prostitution in Spain and its concommitent repression, see Ramos Vázquez, “La represión de la prostitución.” 5 As we saw in chapter 3, like much of Castile, Toledo suffered from a regular lack of qualified physicians, which probably made private care more expensive. 6 Stephen Haliczer, Sexuality in the Confessional: A Sacrament Profaned (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 100. 7 AHN, Órdenes Militares, libro 7. 8 Ibid., for the description of the floor plan and location of various chambers. 9 Haliczer, Sexuality in the Confessional, 90–100. 10 Most of the surviving letters between the hospital and superiors on the Council of Military Orders in Madrid date from the eighteenth century and

Notes to pages 91–2 207 often reveal the animosities, divided loyalties, and confrontations that plagued hospital officials and probably detracted from the provision of health care. Among others, consult AHN, Órdenes Militares, legajo 3586, no. 3 on the 1694 fight between the hospital’s administrator and a group led by the pharmacist over how best to manage the hospital accounts and incomes; legajo 3586, no. 19 on a 1711 conflict with the local parish priest over jurisdiction; and legajo 3586, no. 20 on the problem of an official who, due to mercury poisoning, had gone mad and was unable to perform his duties. 11 Martz, Poverty and Welfare. Also note that the reformation of poor relief throughout Europe at the behest of humanists introduced greater degrees of control, containment, and spiritual reform to these institutional processes. For a succinct overview see Robert Jütte, “Poor Relief and Social Discipline in Sixteenth-­Century Europe.” European Studies Review 11 (1981): 25–52. 12 The connection between health care and moral reform of the poxed seems to have been especially strong in Catholic Europe. Not only did Toledo’s Hospital de Santiago focus on spiritual care and moral reform as central to its mission, but so did Seville’s pox hospital, El Espiritu Santo, as discussed in Juan Ignacio Carmona, Enfermedad y sociedad, 249–50. Similar patterns are found in Italy and discussed in Arrizabalaga, Henderson, and French, The Great Pox, 176. 13 Nalle, God in La Mancha, 84–7; John Bossy, “The Social History of Confession in the Age of the Reformation,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Fifth Series, 25 (1975): 21–38. 14 For an excellent examination of how confession and communion changed over the course of the early modern period to reflect rising notions of individuality and privacy see W. David Myers, Poor Sinning Folk: Confession and Conscience in Counter-­Reformation Germany (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996). For changes in Spain see Haliczer, Sexuality in the Confessional, chs. 1 and 2. 15 For the complex phenomenological connection Renaissance medicine made between physical and mental aspects, including emotion and perception, see Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-­Wilson, Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); F. David Hoeniger, Medicine and Shakespeare in the English Renaissance (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1992), part III, “Physiology and Psychology.” 16 León, Morbo gálico, 27v. 17 AHN, Órdenes Militares, libro 70, 68r–68v. 18 Ibid., 68v–69r. “[S]e escuse quanto buenamente se pudiere el trato e comunicación de las enfermerías de los honbres con las de las mugeres ansi

208  Notes to pages 92–5

19 20

21 22

23 24 25

26 27 28 29

estando enfermos como convalecientes aunque sean hermanos o marido y muger ni entre los mismos enfermos y enfermeras sino fuere en las ocasiones que no se puedan escusar.” Italics in text are mine. AHN, Órdenes Militares, libro 7. AHN, Órdenes Militares, libro 70, 70r. López Pinna, Tratado de morbo gálico, 33r argued that treatment should only happen in spring and fall because those seasons were more conducive to the use of mercury. In winter, mercury might not enter the body properly because pores would be closed, and in summer patients might overheat via fever and die. Schleiner, “Infection and Cure.” On assumptions of male readership see Arrizabalaga, Henderson, and French, The Great Pox, 123–4. AHN, Órdenes Militares, libro 7. Cervantes’s Don Quijote, 138, has, in its reference to the bed Don Quijote is given for the night, one of the best descriptions of what travellers could expect in a typical Iberian inn: “[S]olo contenía cuatro mal lisas tablas sobre dos no muy iguales bancos y un colchón que en lo sutil parecía colcha, lleno de bodoques, que, a no mostrar que eran de lana por algunas roturas, al tiento en la dureza semejaban de guijarro, y dos sábanas hechas de cuero de adarga, y una frazada cuyos ­ hilos, si se quisieren contra, no se perdiera uno solo de la cuenta.” AHN, Órdenes Militares libro 7. Ibid. On the complex conceptualizations medieval women had of Christ’s spirituality and humanity see Carolyn Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). On Marianism in Hispanic culture see Linda B. Hall and Teresa Eckmann, eds., Mary, Mother and Warrior. The Virgin in Spain and the Americas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004); William A. Christian, Local Religion in Sixteenth Century Spain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 182–3. AHN, Órdenes Militares, legajo 3586, no. 24. AHN, Órdenes Militares, legajo 3586, no. 40. AHN, Órdenes Militares, libro 70, 88r. The last external review conducted of the hospital in 1603 included data for 1594 on the following expenses for patients’ food: 158,307 maravedís (mrs) were spent to feed 533 patients. This money was spent largely on lamb, fish, and the aforementioned foodstuffs. Expenses common to both patients and officials included 14,487 mrs for honey, 36,123 mrs for olive oil, 18,894 mrs for raisins, 21,692 mrs for almonds, 35,794 mrs for sugar, 4,277 mrs for saffron, salt, and other spices, 81,396 mrs in wheat for bread

Notes to pages 95–8 209

30 31

32

33

34 35

36 37

38 39 40 41 42 43 44

(includes both bread bought and produced from the hospital’s own lands), and 66,030 mrs on wine (includes both wine bought and produced by the hospital). AHN, Órdenes Militares, libro 7. AHN, Órdenes Militares, legajo 3587, no. 1. The rural area surrounding Toledo experienced a perceptible decline in the production of wheat in the seventeenth century, especially accelerated between 1630 and 1650. Years of extreme shortages included 1649, 1664, and 1684, as discussed in Jerónimo López-­Salazar Pérez and Manuel Martín Galán, “La producción cerealista en el arzobispado de Toledo. 1463–1699,” Cuadernos de historia moderna y contemporánea 2 (1981): 21–103; Martz, Poverty and Welfare, 219. Just as in the rest of Europe, Spanish authors also dabbled in sumptuous tales of a land of gastronomical plenty, as discussed in Paul N. Morris, Roasting the Pig: A Vision of Cluny, Cockaigne and the Treatise of Garcia of Toledo (Boca Raton: Dissertation.com, 2001). Paul Albala, Eating Right in the Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), ch. 8; María Estela González de Fauve and Patricia de Forteza, “‘Del beber con moderación’: usos y aplicaciones del vino según los tratados médicos de la España bajo-­medieval y de la temprana modernidad,” Historia. Instituciones. Documentos 32 (2005): 175–91. López Pinna, Tratado de morbo gálico, 15v–16r. On the connection between pox and moral reform see Linda F. Merians, ed., The Secret Malady: Venereal Disease in Eighteenth-­Century Britain and France (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1997); Peter Lewis Allen, The Wages of Sin: Sex and Disease, Past and Present (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000). For the early Parisian reaction to it see Allen, The Wages of Sin, 42 and Quétel, History of Syphilis, 24–5. Quétel, History of Syphilis, 100–1; Jean Delamare and Thérèse Delamare-­ Riche, Le grand renfermement. Histoire de l’hospice de Bicêtre, 1657–1974 (Paris: Maloine, 1990). On London pox hospitals in the seventeenth century see Siena, Venereal Disease, ch. 3. Arrizabalaga, Henderson, and French, The Great Pox. AHN, Órdenes Militares, libro 70. Ibid. AHN, Órdenes Militares, Archivo de Toledo, exp. 20154, 240v–244v. AHN, Órdenes Militares, libro 70, 76v–77r. Ibid., 84r–84v.

210  Notes to pages 99–103 45 Ibid., 69r. On the centrality of the rituals surrounding death see Carlos M.N. Eire, From Madrid to Purgatory: The Art and Craft of Dying in Sixteenth Century Spain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 46 “Las unciones temo, y tanto / Con esperarlas me aflijo, / Que sin llegar al ungüento / Brujo de azogue me miro.” Anastasio Pantaleón de Ribera, “Al Excelentísimo señor Duque de Lerma, estando el poeta enfermo del achaque de que murió..” reproduced fully in Ponce Cárdenas, “De burlas y enfermedades barrocas.” 47 “[M]e dieron las dos unciones para que aprendiese a ser mula de doctor, babeando todo el día. Viéndome tan atormentado y afligido, delante de los enfermeros y de otros muchos testigos hice en alta voz juramento solene de no beber más vino, pues por su causa había llegado a verme como me veía y a padecer lo que estaba padeciendo.” La vida y hechos de Estebanillo González, in Relato extenso, novela, y otras formas similares, ed. Antonio Carreira and Jesús Antonio Cid (Madrid: Cátedra, 1990), 2:325–6. 48 This reference to the barbarity of mercury-­induced salivation comes from Dr Bartolomé Piñera in a 1791 report to superiors in Madrid about the problems of salivation. AHN, Órdenes Militares, legajo 3587, no. 1. 49 On the use of guaiac, also known as holy wood, see Arrizabalaga, Henderson, and French, The Great Pox, 102, 240. 50 AHN, Órdenes Miliatres, libro 7 (inventory from 1603); the hospital also employed someone to specifically prepare “the sarsaparilla, holy wood, and other waters as directed by the physicians.” AHN, Órdenes Miliatres, libro 70, 87v. 51 AHN, Órdenes Militares, libro 70. 52 López Pinna, Tratado de morbo gálico, 17r. 53 Ibid., 18r–20r. 54 Ibid., 20v–36v. 55 Ibid., 20v–21v. 56 Ibid., 22–25r. On the reception of American medicines, such as sarsaparilla and holy wood, in European scientific and medical practice see María Teresa Huguet-­Termes, “New World Materia Medica in Spanish Renaissance Medicine: From Scholarly Reception to Practical Impact,” Medical History 45, no. 3 (2001): 359–76. 57 López Pinna, Tratado de morbo gálico, 25r–30r. 58 Ibid., 30v–44r. 59 On the use of mercury for treating the pox see Arrizabalaga, Henderson, and French, The Great Pox, 131–40; Arrizabalaga, “Los médicos valencianos”; Siena, Venereal Disease, 22–6; Quétel, History of Syphilis, 58–63. 60 López Pinna, Tratado de morbo gálico, 39–44r.

Notes to pages 105–7 211 6  Getting Hitched: Pox, Sexuality, and Marriage 1 ADPT, Libro H-­55, Spring season 1659, patient no. 181, Joseph de Yepes. 2 Ramos Vázquez, “La represión de la prostitución” shows that prostitution remained a problem despite its 1623 national ban. 3 On the desirability of the pox as a courtier’s disease, see the reference in Salvador Jacinto Polo de Medina, Academias del jardín (1630) in Obras Completas, 101–2. 4 APT, P-­3168, 693r. Dec. 1659 receipt of dowry lottery awarded to María Lorenza López, newly married to Joseph de Yepes. 5 Schleiner, “Infection and Cure.” 6 Based on the Libro de enfermos, ADTP, H-­55, this number was composed of 37 friars, 23 secular clergymen, and 9 minor clergymen. Many minor clergymen still lived secular lives, notwithstanding the vows, including chastity, they undertook. See R. Báñez, “Instituciones y costumbres eclesiásticas en Cervantes,” Anales Cervantinos 19 (1991): 73–92. 7 These figures are based on the 1591 census and can be found in James Casey, Early Modern Spain (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 237. 8 Casey, Early Modern Spain, 237 provides the figure of 1800 friars, priests, and nuns in Toledo out of a population of 50,000, making up 3.6 per cent of the total population. At the same time, we should recall that a majority of patients at the Hospital de Santiago came from the countryside. If we restrict ourselves to clerics as a percentage of patients only for the city of Toledo, we find eight friars, two fully ordained clerics, and one minor cleric, for a total of 11 out of 628 Toledo male patients, or 1.75 per cent of the male Toledano population – lower than the city average, but still substantial. 9 ADPT, Libro H-­55. 10 For examples of the sexuality of nuns see Lisa Vollendorf, “Good Sex, Bad Sex: Women and Intimacy in Early Modern Spain,” Hispania 87, no. 1 (2004): 1–12. 11 The Council of Trent called on bishops to “make it their special care that the enclosure of nuns be carefully restored, wheresoever it has been violated, and that it be preserved, wheresoever it has not been violated, repressing by ecclesiastical censures and other penalties, without regarding any appeal whatsoever, the disobedient and gainsayers, and calling in for this end, if need be, the aid of the secular arm,” in J. Waterworth, ed., The Canons and Decrees of the Sacred and Oecumenical Council of Trent (London: Dolman, 1848), 240 [25th Session, 4 December 1563, ch. V]. The reform of the Carmelites undertaken by Teresa of Ávila is discussed succinctly by Alison Weber, “Spiritual Administration: Gender and Discernment in the

212  Notes to pages 107–9

12

13 14 15

Carmelite Reform,” Sixteenth Century Journal 31, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 123–47. The best work on this reform and how it affected the city of Avila is Jodi Bilinkoff, The Avila of St. Teresa: Religious Reform in a Sixteenth-­Century City (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989). For the encroachment on nunneries’ independence see Silvia Evangelisti, “‘We do not have it, and we do not want it’: Women, Power, and Convent Reform in Florence,” Sixteenth Century Journal 33, no. 3 (Fall 2002): 735–69. For Hispanic experiences see Margaret Chowning, “Convent Reform, Catholic Reform, and Bourbon Reform in Eighteenth-­Century New Spain: The View from the Nunnery,” Hispanic American Historical Review 85, no. 1 (Feb 2005): 1–37. Stephen Haliczer, Between Exaltation and Infamy: Female Mystics in the Golden Age of Spain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 54–5 discusses, among other cases, those of nuns whose mysticism caused headaches to reforming religious authorities. Poska, Regulating the People shows high rates of premarital sexuality in rural Galicia even after the Council of Trent. Likewise see R. Po-­chia Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal, 1540–1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 121–4 on the slower efforts to reform the sexual lives of the clergy in rural areas, and 222–4 on the diffusion of the confessional box in the countryside. At the same time, studies of Castile have demonstrated better catechization and reform outcomes in the countryside. See Sara Nalle, God in La Mancha, and Jean-­Pierre Dedieu, “Christianisation en Nouvelle Castille. Catéchisme, communion, messe et confirmation dans l’archevêché de Tolède, 1450–1650,” Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez 25 (1979): 261–94. For an excellent overview of the church’s long-­term effort to effectively Christianize rural Europe see Louis Chatellier, The Religion of the Poor: Rural Missions in Europe and the Formation of Modern Catholicism, c. 1500– c. 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). ADPT, Libro H-­55, spring 1660, patient no. 50. APT, P-­158, 317r. Much of the history of Toledo’s relationship to the Counter-­Reformation has been conducted through the lens of the Inquisition or well-­known figures such as Archbishop Carranza. See José Ignacio Tellechea Idígoras, “Carranza y la reforma católica,” Anuario de Historia de la Iglesia 18 (2009): 123–35; Jean-­Pierre Dedieu, L’Administration de la foi: L’Inquisition de Tolede (XVIe–XVIIIe siècle) (Madrid: Casa Velázquez, 1989); Jean-­Pierre Dedieu, “Les inquisiteurs de Tolede et la visite du district,” Mélanges de la Casa Velázquez 13 (1977): 235–56; Jesús Perezagua Delgado, El tribunal de la Santa Inquisición de Toledo (Madrid: Latorre Varios, 2008); C. Wagner, “Los

Notes to pages 109–11 213 luteranos ante la Inquisición de Toledo en el siglo XVI,” Hispania Sacra 46 (1994): 473–507; Hilario Rodríguez de Gracia, “Bienes y rentas de la Inquisición de Toledo en 1646,” Anales Toledanos 26 (1989): 277–300. 16 The Archbishop of Toledo, Carranza, lamented in 1558 that “[m]atters have taken on such a state that now a man does not lose authority or honour for having this leprosy of bubas [pox], rather it is a court fad to have them.” Cited in Carmona, Enfermedad y sociedad, 209. The female protagonist of López de Úbeda’s famous satire, La pícara Justina, argued that pox sufferers like herself had little shame, for they publicized their disease without much care for reputation. These worries about the sexuality of pox sufferers reflected the broader understanding of the disease as venereally transmitted, as seen in López de Villalobos, El sumario de la medicina, 162; Arrizabalaga, Henderson, and French, The Great Pox, 120–3. 17 León, Práctico de morbo gálico, 4v. 18 For an analysis of the use of exempla and personal anecdotes in Latin medical texts see Nancy G. Siraisi, Medicine and the Italian Universities, 1250–1600 (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 51–4; for a more extensive analysis of their use in the framework of medicinal writing techniques see Siraisi, History, Medicine, and the Traditions of Renaissance Learning (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), ch. 2. On Spain, see Antonia Carré and Lluís Cifuentes, “Éxito y difusión de la literatura de problemas en la Castilla del siglo XVI: la traducción castellana de Il Perché de Girolamo Manfredi (Zaragoza, 1567),” Asclepio. Revista de Historia de la Medicina y de la Ciencia 58, no. 1 (2006): 149–96. 19 The church had moved from a largely penitential solution to the problem of sexual sin to systematic legislation on the matter by the eleventh and twelfth centuries. For an excellent overview of this process see James A. Brundage, “Sex and Canon Law,” in The Handbook of Medieval Sexuality, ed. Vern L. Bullough and James A. Brundage (New York: Garland, 1996), 33–50. 20 As Alison Weber argues in Teresa of Avila and the Rhetoric of Femininity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 17–41, the revival of misogyny during the Counter-­Reformation put holy women on the defensive. For recent trends focusing on popular agency in shaping the Counter-­ Reformation see Mary Laven, “Encountering the Counter-­Reformation,” Renaissance Quarterly 59, no. 3 (Fall 2006): 706–20. 21 On the effort to curb priestly solicitation during confession see Haliczer, Sexuality in the Confessional. Allyson Poska, Women and Authority in Early Modern Spain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 84 refers to seventeenth-­century synodal provisions against priests who had relationships with concubines. For another perspective on how Trent was applied

214  Notes to pages 111–13 in Spain see Daniel Tirapu Martínez and Juan Manuel Matés Barco, “Reforma y renovación religiosa en la Edad Moderna. Los sínodos de Jaén (1478–1628),” Anuario de historia de la Iglesia 1 (1992): 139–60. 22 For the 1565–6 synod of Toledo see Primitivo Tineo, “La recepción de Trento en España (1565). Disposiciones sobre la actividad episcopal,” Anuario de Historia de la Iglesia 5 (1996): 241–96; see 283 for synod chapter XIX against priestly concubinage, conducted in the third session. On the 1582 council consult Ángel Fernández Collado, Historia de la Iglesia en España: Edad Moderna (Toledo: Instituto Teológico San Idelfonso, 2007), 214. 23 Most work on conduct manuals has focused on women. See Georgina Dopico Black, Perfect Wives, Other Women: Adultery and Inquisition in Early Modern Spain (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), ch. 2; Emilia Navarro, “Manual Control: ‘Regulatory Fictions’ and Their Discontents,” Cervantes 13, no. 2 (1993): 17–22. Important conduct manuals that focused on young men include P. Gaspar Astete, Instrucción y guía de la juventud cristiana (Burgos: Casa de Philippe de Iunta, 1592) [BN, R-­25926] and Gutierre González, Libro de doctrina cristiana … para instrucción de los niños y moços (Zaragoza: n.p., 1532) [BN, R-­31816]. 24 Horozco, Proverbios glosados, vol. 2, proverb 288, 348–63. 25 “Sufriré hija golosa y alvendera, mas no ventanera.” Hernán Nuñez, Refranes o proverbios (Madrid: Don Mateo Repullés, 1804), vol. 4, 308. The term alvendera seems to be derived from the Arabic fend meaning trifling, vain words as per Stephen Weston, Remains of Arabic in the Spanish and Portuguese Languages (London: S. Rousseau, 1810), 67. 26 Carajicomedia in Frank Dominguez, ed., Cancionero de obras de burlas provocantes a la risa (Valencia: Ediciones Albatros, 1978). For masculine culture emphasising the importance of sexual intercourse see Richard Trexler, Sex and Conquest: Gendered Violence, Political Order and the European Conquest of the Americas (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995). 27 For prostitution and Magdalene houses in Spain see Vidal Gavidia, La casa de arrepentidas; Ramos Vázquez, “La represión de la prostitución”; Andrés Moreno Mengíbar and Francisco Vázquez García, “Poderes y prostitución en España (siglos XVI–XVII): el caso de Sevilla,” Criticón 69 (1997): 33–49; Mary Elizabeth Perry, Gender and Disorder in Early Modern Seville (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), ch. 7. For Toledo’s own Magdalene house see Alcocer, Historia o descripción de la Imperial Ciudad de Toledo, 118r–118v. 28 “Si la mujer no quiere, no hay quien la fuerze.” Horozco, Libro de los proverbios, vol. 1, proverbio 260, 324. 29 Guido Ruggiero, “Marriage, Love, Sex, and Renaissance Civic Morality,” in Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe, ed. James Grantham Turner

Notes to page 115 215

30 31 32

33 34

35 36 37

38

(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 18; John Witte and Robert McCune Kingdon, eds., Sex, Marriage and Family in Calvin’s Geneva (Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 2005), 424; Poska, Women and Authority, ch. 3. Barahona, Sex Crimes, ch. 5; Dyer, “Seduction by Promise.” Cervantes, Don Quijote de La Mancha, ch. 28. Although no studies on celibacy rates exist for the city of Toledo, demographic scholarship on both rural and urban areas points to certain trends. As argued by Juan Soler Serratosa, “Demografía y sociedad en Castilla La Nueva durante el Antiguo Régimen: la villa de los Molinos, 1620–1730,” REIS 32 (Oct–Dec 1985): 141–90, the rural village of Los Molinos, close to Madrid, enjoyed very low rates of celibacy for men (3.8 per cent) and women (1.8 per cent) in the seventeenth century. This was explicitly compared to rates of celibacy for Madrid of 19 per cent for men and nine per cent for women. María del Carmen Ansón Calvo, Asturias en la España de Carlos III: Demografía y sociedad (Oviedo: Universidad de Oviedo, 1998), 168 quotes rates of celibacy for Spain as a whole of 19 per cent for women and 15 per cent for men. ADPT, Libro H-­55, Fall 1660, patient no. 81; Spring 1661, patient no. 171; Spring 1662, patient no. 21. There is a series of notarial documents outlining everything from the initial power of attorney given to Francisco de la Cruz to the favourable results he obtains in Toledo city court. APT, P-­3427, 29r, 31r, 83r, 85r. The father’s land appears to be mentioned in a 1658 sale within Mocejón in APT, P-­152, 189r. APT, P-­156, 473r. On Spain’s push for clerical celibacy see Haliczer, Sexuality in the Confessional, 152–5, and his Between Exaltation and Infamy, 168–71. On the effects of Toledo’s economic decline on the provision of dowries see the arbitrista and reformer Francisco Martínez de Mata, Memoriales y disursos, ed. Gonzalo Anes (Madrid: Editorial Moneda y Crédito, 1971), 198. For the consistency of celibacy as an option for individuals and families see María Jesús Gimeno Sanfeliu, Patrimonio, parentesco y poder. Castelló (XVI–XIX) (Castellón de la Plana: Universitat Jaume I, 1998), 201–4; Ramón Lanza García, “El vecindario de 1683: una fuente inédita para el estudio de la población en la Corona de Castilla,” Revista de Historia Económica 23, no. 2 (2005): 335–70. For example, both Torres, Enfermedad de las bubas, 7 and León, Práctico de morbo gálico refer to children with the French disease. Moreover, at least a few children appear as patients at the Hospital de Santiago: Domingo Machado from Toledo, aged 11 (Spring 1655, patient no. 36), María Serrano

216  Notes to pages 115–18

39 40 41

42 43

44

45 46

47

48

49 50 51

from Madrid, aged 11 (Fall 1655, patient no. 35), and María Roraba from Ocaña, aged 10 (Fall 1654, patient no. 88). APT, P-­3167, 531r. Schleiner, “Infection and Cure.” “Y afsi digo, que de la mesma manera que en todas las acciones naturales se requieren tres cosas, que aya causa que haga, sujeto dispuesto à recebir, y aproximacion: pues agora digo, que el que està dañado deste mal, allegandose à aquella que està sujeta à recebir, puede ella estar tan dispuesta à recebir, y el tan robusto para arrojar, que quede ella con toda la infeccion, y el libre, ò al reves.” Torres, Enfermedad de las bubas, 101. Ibid., 16–17. “Y es de manera, que haziendo esto, no solamente no avra que temer infeccion alguna, pero si alguna huviere, se quitara con que se haga el remedio dentro del quarto dia.” Ibid., 17. “Iten: que siendo casados / contra el deudo marital / puedan dormir apartados, / y en esto sean escusados / por evitar mayor mal.” Horozco, Cancionero, 4. Diego López, Declaración magistral sobre los emblemas de Andrés Alciato (1615, republished Madrid: Real Academia Española, 2003), 458v. For Toledo proper consider the satirical poem “Motejando á uno de pelado” by Horozco, Cancionero, 41 referring to a man who is balding as a sign of the pox. ADPT, libro H-­55, Spring 1656, patient no. 105 (Eugenia Rodríguez); Spring 1657, patient no. 1 (Inés Rodríguez); Spring 1661, patient no. 27 (Antonia de Aguirre); Fall 1661, patient no. 53 (María Flores). ADPT, libro H-­55, Spring 1665, patient no. 204 (Eugenia Rodríguez, married to Juan Carro); Fall 1662, patient no. 3 (Inés Rodríguez, married to Francisco Quirós); Fall 1663, patient no. 108 (Antonia de Aguirre, married Antonio de Burgos); Spring 1655, patient no. 50 (María Flores, married to Gerónimo de la Iglesia). On the gender imbalance in Spanish society see Martz, Poverty and Welfare, 105 as per Luis Hurtado’s Memorial, 498. Juan Perez (ADPT, libro H-­55, Spring 1656, patient no. 136); marriage dispensation request in APT, P-­3427, 1041r. In the case of Juan and Gabriela, the dispensation was ostensibly provided to protect her reputation because “saviendo los susodichos ser parientes en el dicho grado se han comunicado familiarmente entrando el uno en casas del otro de que ha resultado sospecha de cópula y sino se casasen ella quedaría gravemente infamada y sin remedio de casarse y podrían resultar graves escándalos.” Ibid. For the range of rents usually charged at this

Notes to pages 118–24 217

52 53 54

55 56 57 58

59

time see the list of properties and rental prices the Hospital de Santiago charged, found in AHN, Órdenes Militares, carpeta 328, numero 33 bis. The global figures include 14,982 woolens and 1,660 silks. ADPT, libro H-­55. APT, P-­3171, 764r. Mariano García Ruipérez, “Vecino de Toledo durante la Edad Media y Moderna: Las cartas de vecindad,” Archivo Secreto 4 (2008): 186–91. Although the 1490 regulation of Toledo’s citizenship seems to have required outsiders also to own property in the city, García Ruipérez states in footnote 8 that the meaning of the provision is unclear, as some sources state residence and/or ownership. For more on the meaning of citizenship in early modern Hispanic culture see Tamar Herzog, Defining Nations: Immigrants and Citizens in Early Modern Spain and Spanish America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003). APT, P-­3171, 425r. ADPT, Libro H-­55, Spring 1656, patient no. 12; land sale in APT, P-­3172, 638r. ADPT, libro H-­55, Spring 1655, patient no. 100. APT, P-153, 713r. The raw figures provided for over 40 Madrid contracts in María Ángeles Ortego Agustín, Familia y matrimonio en la España del siglo XVIII: ordenamiento jurídico y situación real de las mujeres a través de la documentación notarial (PhD thesis, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 2003), 279–81 yield an average ratio of dowry to bride gift of four-­to-­one. Juan Beneyto Pérez, Una historia del matrimonio (Madrid: Editorial Eudema, 1993), 45.

7  Making Ends Meet: Disease, Work, and Family 1 ADPT, Libro H-­55, Spring 1663, patient no. 26. 2 The following events are gathered from a series of notarial documents outlining Luis Ortiz de Soto’s agreement with his aunts. APT, P-­162, 984r– 994r; P-­3429, 1122r. 3 APT, P-­162, 987r. 4 APT, P-­162, 994r. 5 The witnesses testifying on Luis’s behalf were Don Bernardo de Robles Gorbalán, city councilman holding one of the seats reserved for nobles; Don Luis de Lira y Sotomayor, knight of the Order of Santiago and secretary to the Holy Office; and Gaspar Ramírez de Dueñas, parish jurado. Note that the Robles Gorbalán and Lira y Sotomayor families were among the most important in Toledo, or what Aranda Pérez in his Poder y poderes,

218  Notes to pages 124–5 328–32 calls the elite of the elite, due to the sheer number of honorary positions they held. 6 Rodríguez de Gracia, El Toledo que vió Cervantes, 54 explains that, by virtue of a 1537 royal provision, Toledo’s public notaries had the right to do business under the cathedral entrance, alternatively known as the portico of David, of Hell, or, given its popular use, of Notaries. 7 On the raging debate about what to do with poverty see Felix Santolaria Sierra, El gran debate sobre los pobres en el siglo XVI (Barcelona: Ariel, 2003); Martz, Poverty and Welfare examines the application of charity in Toledo. 8 For bonds and other credit instruments see Ramón Sánchez González, “El crédito rural: los censos,” Revista de Historia Económica 9, no. 2 (1991): 285– 313; Pilar Toboso Sánchez, La deuda pública castellana durante el Antiguo Régimen (juros) y su liquidación en el siglo XIX (Madrid: Instituto de Estudios Fiscales, 1987); Antonio Miguel Bernal, ed., Dinero, moneda y crédito en la monarquía hispánica (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2000). 9 Cruz, Discourses of Poverty. 10 Martz, Poverty and Welfare analyses the already severe problem of poverty in Toledo in the late sixteenth century. On the socio-­demographic effects of the seventeenth-­century economic crisis in Toledo see Juan Sánchez Sánchez, Toledo y la crisis del siglo XVII (Toledo: Caja de Ahorro Provincial de Toledo, 1981); Hilario Rodríguez de Gracia, Pobreza y beneficencia en la provincia (Toledo: Diputación Provincial, 1983). Despite an improvement in the local economy during the eighteenth century, poverty continued to be an issue of great concern to Toledo’s authorities, as discussed by Ángel Santos Vaquero, “Pobreza y beneficencia en el Toledo ilustrado. Creación de la Casa de Caridad,” Espacio, Tiempo y Forma, Serie IV, Historia Moderna 6 (1993): 295–332. More specifically on the issue of poverty and health care see Teresa Huguet-­Termes, “Madrid Hospitals and Welfare in the Context of the Habsburg Empire,” Medical History Supplement 29 (2009): 64–85; Kristy Wilson Bowers, “Balancing Individual and Communal Needs: Plague and Public Health in Early Modern Seville,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 81, no. 2 (Summer 2007): 335–58. 11 For Toledo’s urban crisis as Madrid siphoned resources, including figures on its demographic decline, see Ringrose, Madrid and the Spanish Economy, ch. 11. For a comparative perspective see Lynn Hollen Lees and Paul M. Hohenberg, “Urban Decline and Regional Economies: Brabant, Castile and Lombardy, 1550–1750,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 31 (1989): 439–61. 12 Weisser, “The Agrarian Depression.”

Notes to pages 126–8 219 13 Ringrose, Madrid and the Spanish Economy, ch. 11. For the broader crisis ­affecting Spain at this time see I.A.A. Thompson and Bartolomé Yun Casalilla, The Castilian Crisis of the Seventeenth Century: New Perspectives on the Economic and Social History of Seventeenth-­Century Spain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 14 See Michael Weisser, “The Decline of Castile Revisited: The Case of Toledo,” Journal of European Economic History 2 (1973): 615–40. 15 Based on data from the hospital’s book of patients and that found in the notarial books for Toledo’s two most prolific notaries in the years 1654–65: APT, P-­3122, and the series P-­3156 through P-­3176 inclusive (Rodrigo de Hoz, notary); APT, P-­149 through P-­164 inclusive, P-­170 and P-­3425 through P-­3429 inclusive (Eugenio de Valladolid, notary). 16 “Admin” includes those working in local government and non-­clerics in church administrative positions. 17 “Skilled Services” includes notaries, accountants, lawyers, and health professionals. 18 Caveats obviously remain, for economic sectors do not always neatly fit with social reputation. Thus servants of illustrious households in the city, who fall under the category of unskilled labour, could enjoy a certain cachet given their connection to reputable households. For example, Catalina Díaz (ADPT, libro H-­55, Spring 1659, patient no. 53), a woman from Fuensalida treated in 1659, had previously worked in Toledo as a servant to a knighted city councilman, Don Alonso Fernandez de Madrid. In fact, when Catalina’s mother had set up the contract of service she obtained a comparably higher salary of 13 ducats per year than similar ones (APT, P-­3425, 761r). Moreover, though as a servant she was not expected to dress luxuriously, Catalina did manage to enter the hospital wearing solid woolen garments in good condition, including a quality underskirt of renowned serge from the Basque Country, and a woolen overskirt adorned with a lace hemline. 19 Payments by Toledo’s cathedral chapter to Joan de Salinas’s foundation in 1660 are recorded in APT, P-­157, 541r. In the same year, María, together with the aforesaid baker, rented a large property (at 13 ducats per year) on the “Ovens” street, named after the bakery ovens that populated it (ADPT-­ P-­3170, 415). 20 María Fernández de Aviles (ADPT, libro H-­55, Spring 1662, patient no. 77). 21 Torres, Libro que trata de la enfermedad de las bubas, 2. 22 “Y los enfermos se hacen perezosos, pesados y soñolientos.” León, Práctico de morbo gálico, 12v.

220  Notes to pages 128–33 23 Ibid., 23v–24r. 24 “Otros llaman a las bubas mal muerto, y con razon, porque los tales viviendo mueren, y para cualquier cosa buena estan muertos; que cierto es lastima ver la vida miserable que pasan, llenos de ulceras, pustulas, dolores, coxos, con mal color, con las narizes romas, principalmente cuando el hueso dellas se consume.” Calvo, Cirugía, 568. 25 ADPT, libro H-­55, Fall 1659, patient no. 129. 26 APT, P-­3169, 662r. 27 APT, P-­154, 10r. 28 ADPT, libro H-­55, Spring 1654, patient no. 107. 29 APT, P-­160, 25r. 30 ADPT, libro H-­55, Fall 1657, patient no. 74. 31 Ibid, Spring 1662, patient no. 211. 32 APT, P-­161, 342r. 33 ADPT, libro H-­55, Fall 1661, patient no. 89; Spring 1662, patient no. 208. 34 APT, P-­3174, 226r. 35 ADPT, libro H-­55, Spring 1661, patient no. 258; Fall 1662, patient no. 86. 36 APT, P-­3429, 793r. 37 ADPT, libro H-­55, Spring 1660, patient no. 152. For her contract, see APT, P-­160, 77r. 38 ADPT, libro H-­55, Fall 1662, patient no. 110. 39 APT, P-­170, 221r. 40 Ibid., 722r. 41 ADPT, libro H-­55, Spring 1657, patient no. 9; APT, P-­3162, 333r. 42 “Hoyo” in Diccionario de Autoridades (1734) (www.rae.es). 43 I also discuss María de Olivares’, Melchor Molina’s, and Pedro de Aranda’s cases in Berco, “Symptoms.” 44 There is a vast literature on the role of the early modern family on aspects as varied as networking, economic transactions, guardianship, corporate honour, and gender relations. Notable works for Spain include Grace Coolidge, Guardianship, Gender and the Nobility in Early Modern Spain (Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2010); Ángel Rodríguez Sánchez, “El poder familiar: la patria potestad en el Antiguo Régimen,” Chronica Nova 18 (1990): 365– 80; James Casey, Family and Community in Early Modern Spain: The Citizens of Granada, 1570–1739 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). On the city of Toledo specifically see Stephanie Fink De Backer, Widowhood in Early Modern Spain: Protectors, Proprietors, and Patrons (Leiden: Brill, 2010); Linda Martz, A Network of Converso Families in Early Modern Toledo (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003); Aranda Pérez, Poder y poderes.

Notes to pages 134–6 221

45 46

47

48 49

50 51 52 53 54

55

On broader European patterns see Raffaela Sarti, Europe at Home: Family and Material Culture 1500–1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002); Beattrice Gottlieb, The Family in the Western World from the Black Death to the Industrial Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); David R. Green and Alastair Owens, eds., Family Welfare: Gender, Property and Inheritance since the Seventeenth Century (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2004). ADPT, Fall 1660, patient no. 11. APT, P-­161, 1095r. A censo was an annuity to be paid to redeem a capital loan or as payment for full possession of real estate. Thus, even when families bought properties from institutions, they still had censos to pay on these properties in order to enjoy full rights over them. Buenaventura Pellisé Prats, ed., Nueva Enciclopedia Jurídica (Barcelona: Editorial Francisco Seix, 1981), 4:9–10. In 1664, for instance, Toledo’s Francisco Ruiz de Salcedo donated an annuity he had inherited from his family to the Confraternity of San Pedro de Toledo. Real Academia Española, Banco de datos (CORDE) Corpus diacrónico del español. “Dación de censo a favor de la Hermandad y Congregación San Pedro de Toledo por parte del racionero Francisco Ruiz de Salcedo” (http://www.rae.es). ADPT, Fall 1657, patient no. 47. Administrators of institutions were commonly charged for any losses or accounting discrepancies. The administrator for the Hospital de Santiago was, therefore, charged 46,914 maravedís in 1596 by his superiors who conducted a review of the hospital accounts. AHN, Órdenes Militares, libro 7 (no numeration). APT, P-­3429, 343r. For more on intellectual constructions of the poxed, see chapter 1. ADPT, Libro H-­55, Fall 1662, patient no. 245. Information on the García de Cifuentes brothers and their father’s will can be found in APT, P-­3122, 1r. “Entre los demas vicios, singularmente el de la luxuria anda anexo al de la ociosidad.” Pedro de Guzmán, Bienes del honesto trabajo y daños de la ociosidad (Madrid: Imprenta Real, 1614), 77 [BN, R-­14188]. “La segunda manera es de vicio, y éste se engendra en la juventud, y críase con la ociosidad que hace caer a los descuidados en la enfermedad del desordenado amor; y si la ociosidad por sí mueve los tales deseos venéreos, mucho más lo hará, cebándose con abundancia y sobra de bienes.” Juan Pérez de Moya, Philosophia secreta de la gentilidad, ed. Carlos Clavería (Madrid: Cátedra, 1995), 302.

222  Notes to pages 136–40 56 APT, P-­3122, 1r. 57 “¿De dónde hay tantas cantoneras? ¿Tantas públicas malas mujeres, y de ellas hijas de honrados y buenos padres? ¿De dónde tantas ulceradas y bubosas por los hospitales?” Vives, Instrucción de la mujer cristiana, 173. 58 “Mirad bien en los hijos de los que se llaman grandes señores, aunque deban más que podrán pagar en toda su vida, que los crían con comer, jugar, vestir y fornicar, y muchos dellos, de podridos en bubas, andando por lo entapizado, parece que pisan sobre abrojos, las caras llenas de pecas y las piernas de botanas, y las coyunturas enlardadas de unturas; y no forman consciencia sus padres de les dejar vivir con tanto menosprecio de Dios, y pagaránlo ellos en el infierno, y más poniéndolos en gobernaciones donde cometen excesos contra Dios y contra sus prójimos, porque, en fin, los muchachos muchachos son y sus obras son muchacherías.” Juan de Pineda, Diálogos familiares de la agricultura cristiana, ed. Juan Meseguer Fernández (Madrid: Atlas, 1963), 3:328. 59 Fink De Backer, Widowhood provides an excellent window into the resilience and agency of Toledo’s widows. 60 APT, P-­154, 716r. 61 ADPT, libro H-­55, Spring 1658, patient no. 144. 62 Ibid. 63 On familiares see Gonzalo Cerrillo Cruz, Los familiares de la Inquisición española (Valladolid: Junta de Castilla y León, 2000); José Enrique Pasamar Lázaro, Los familiares del Santo Oficio en el distrito inquisitorial de Aragón (Zaragoza: Institución Fernando el Católico, 1999). 64 APT, P-­160, 596r. 65 ADPT, Libro H-­55, 1658, patient no. 66. 66 “¿Quién no ve que vive un mancebo en la primavera y en el verano florido y colorado, y luego viene un invierno y marchítale el color, enjúgale las carnes y échalo en una cama con mill ajes y ayes que se alcanzan unos a otros, que aunque no quieran sus vecinas han de saber que está cargado de bubas?” Juan Bautista de la Concepción, Obras del beato Juan Bautista de la Concepción (Paris: Impr. de Leopoldo Bourlié, 1830), 220. 67 “¿[P]ues cómo, fulano, á vuestra mujer dejáis, noble, hermosa, virtuosa, temerosa de Dios, madre de vuestros hijos, cuerda, cuidadosa de vuestra casa y de vuestra honra, por esta mala hembra, por esa ramera sucia, bubosa, endiablada? ¿Por esa mulata hedionda, asquerosa? Sin duda que estáis enhechizado.” Cabrera, Sermones, 313. 68 “[C]a es muy propio de hereges y brujos desear herederos de su profesion. Son como los bubosos, que quieren beber por todos los vasos porque here­ den todos sus bubas.” López de Úbeda, La pícara Justina, 200.

Notes to pages 140–5 223 69 70 71 72 73 74 75

ADPT, libro H-­55, Fall 1658, patient no. 74. APT, P-­3167, 158r. ADPT, libro H-­55, 1656, patient no. 9. APT, P-­3171, 475r. ADTP, Libro H-­55, Fall 1661, patient no. 91. APT, P-­160, 384r. “Quéjase una hija de su padre, porque la casó con un hombre lleno de bubas.” López, Emblemas de Andrés Alciato, f. 458v. 76 ADPT, libro H-­55, Spring 1655, patient no. 115. 77 APT, P-­149, 1226r. 78 For instance, when Agueda García won a dowry lottery from the chapel of Don Gabriel de Cárdenas in 1662, it was her husband who took possession of the funds. APT, P-­3173, 241r. In fact, all the dowry lotteries I have encountered in Toledo’s notarial archives were given in person to the husbands of the winners. 8  Playing Nice with Others: Pox and Community 1 Esmeralda Álvarez Navarro, “Discurso de Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, Corregidor de Toledo (año 1628),” Archivo Secreto 3 (2006): 217–23. 2 Martz, Poverty and Welfare. On confraternities and welfare see Flynn, Sacred Charities. For other types of social welfare in Spain see Elena Maza Zorrilla, Pobreza y asistencia social en España, siglos XVI al XX: aproximación histórica (Valladolid: Universidad de Valladolid, 1987); Joan Sherwood, Poverty in Eighteenth-­Century Spain: The Women and Children of the Inclusa (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988); Montserrat Carbonell i Esteller, Sobreviure a Barcelona: dones, pobresa i assistència al segle XVIII (Vic: Eumo Editorial, 1997). 3 AHN, Órdenes Militares, carpeta 328, no. 33 bis, 102v. The hospital made good use of these lawyers, with various cases over assets and incomes won in the mid-­seventeenth century, as detailed in ADPT, legajo 82, no. 4; legajo 86, no. 29; legajo 87, no. 3; legajo 78, nos. 9, 10, 11. 4 By royal provision, the hospital collected half the income from the tax on goods traversing Toledo’s New Gate of Bisagra; in exchange, administrators were to pay 50,000 maravedís to the Trinitarians for the redemption of captives in Muslim hands, and also a tenth of this income to the military order of Santiago’s convent in Uclés. Letters on the lack or lateness of payments span two centuries from 1513 to 1715 and can be found in AHN, Órdenes Militares, carpeta 328, no. 34. 5 APT, P-­160, 165r.

224  Notes to pages 145–9 6 The guest room, its furniture, and amenities, along with the rest of the hospital, are inventoried in AHN, Órdenes Militares, libro 7. 7 See for instance the letter from the hospital administrator, Fernán Losa, in 1574 detailing the history of these obligations, and including copies of the original grants of half the tolls charged at Toledo’s New Gate of Bisagra in 1180 and the land of Yegros in 1219 in AHN, Órdenes Militares, carpeta 328, no. 4, 1r–4v. 8 For more on Toledo’s sacred geography see Juan Carlos Vizuete Mendoza and Julio Martín Sánchez, eds., Sacra loca toletana: Los espacios sagrados en Toledo (Cuenca: Universidad de Castilla La Mancha, 2008). 9 APT, P-­3315, 763–64r. 10 Many scholars have noted the connection among civic ritual, honour, and hierarchy in early modern Spanish society. See José Antonio Maravall, “Función del honor y régimen de estratificación social en la sociedad tradicional,” in Maravall, Poder, honor y élites, 11–145; José Manuel Nieto Soria, Ceremonias de la realeza. Propaganda y legitimación en la Castilla Trastámara (Madrid: Nerea, 2000); Katie A. Harris, From Muslim to Christian Granada: Inventing a City’s Past (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 93–7. On Toledo itself see Aranda Pérez, Poder y poderes, 333–40. 11 APT, P-­3315, 763–64r. 12 Important royal donations to the hospital, such as that of half the taxes on trade transit in Toledo’s New Gate of Bisagra (1180) and control over the fabulously productive rural land of Yegros (1219), can be found in AHN, Órdenes Militares, Carpeta 328, no. 34, 6r–7v. 13 “Otra casa en que vive Juan de Vargas tiene a la entrada un portal y luego un aposentillo. En alto en el primer suelo una cocina y tres aposentos y un tránsito para otro aposento que está algo más bajo como entre suelo y otro aposentillo pequeño y un corredorcillo y en otro suelo más alto hay una chimenea y desde él se entra a otros dos aposentos que hay en el mismo suelo.” AHN, Órdenes Militares, libro 7, no numeration. 14 Ibid. 15 Not only was the hospital wealthy and influential, but it could also wield power effectively to maintain its financial interests. For instance, in 1658, administrator Francisco Serrano had Bartolomé Becerra Torrado arrested and placed in city jail because he owed over 30,000 reales in rental payments for the pasture of La Alameda (this accounted for about two years’ rent). After a few months of imprisonment, both parties arrived at an agreement and Bartolomé was freed. APT, P-­3315, 4r. 16 Consider, for instance, the difficulties encountered by another of Toledo’s preeminent institutions, the Hospital del Rey, during the seventeenth

Notes to pages 149–54 225

17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26

27 28 29

30

31 32 33

century, as discussed in Rodríguez de Gracia, El Hospital del Rey. On the balance between treatment possibilities and budgetary constraints in Valencia’s General Hospital pox ward see López Terrada, “El tratamiento.” Likewise, Augusburg’s Blatterhaus suffered financial problems from exploding costs in the late sixteenth century as discussed by Stein, French Pox in Early Modern Germany, 86. London’s St Barts and St Thomas specifically suffered diminution in income due to the 1666 London fire, which damaged many of their rental properties, as seen in Siena, Venereal Disease, 72–6. AHN, Órdenes Militares, libro 7. AHN, Órdenes Militares, legajo 3586, nos. 3, 7, 8 19, 20, 21, 23, 24. AHN, Órdenes Militares, libro 7. “[P]orque es mejor darles aquellos que saben el oficio su salario y ración por ese poco tiempo que no andar a buscar después y no hallar por ventura quien lo sepa hacer.” AHN, Órdenes Militares, libro 70, 70v. AHN, Órdenes Militares, libro 7 and libro 70. AHN, Órdenes Militares, legajo 3586, no. 24. “Toda la hacienda y oficiales del dicho ospital están diputados para el servicio de los pobres enfermos.” AHN, Órdenes Militares, libro 70, 69r. AHN, Órdenes Militares, Archivo de Toledo, no. 19786, 249r. AHN, Órdenes Militares, libro 70, 67v. The hospital spent 8 fanegas [a Castilian measure equating one to two bushels] of bread on poor relief and 36 fanegas on patient meals. AHN, Órdenes Militares, carpeta 328, no. 33, 36v–37r. AHN, Órdenes Militares, libro 70, 75v. AHN, Órdenes Militares, Archivo de Toledo, no. 19786; ADPT, libro H-­55. On the issue of whether the French disease constituted a divine just punishment for sin or an illness necessitating treatment in public institutions see Arrizabalaga, Henderson, and French, The Great Pox, ch. 3, and Allen, The Wages of Sin, 42–3 and 57–8; although as Siena, Venereal Disease has shown, London institutions provided treatment much earlier than thought; Quétel, The History of Syphilis, 12–16. “En esta nuestra edad ha hallado Dios un remedio nuevo, nunca oído, para castigar la lujuria, y es un nuevo linaje de lepra que llaman bubas o mal francés.” Bartolomé de Carranza, Catechismo Cristiano, cited in Carmona, Enfermedad y sociedad, 209. “Son como los bubosos, que quieren beber por todos los vasos porque hereden todos sus bubas.” López de Úbeda, La pícara Justina, 200. Taylor, “Credit, Debt, and Honor.” Recopilación de las Leyes de Indias, libro IX, Título XXVI, “De los pasajeros y licencias para ir a las Indias, y volver a estos reinos.” These laws,

226  Notes to pages 155–6

34 35

36 37 38 39 40

nevertheless, often proved ineffective, as large communities of conversos, especially Portuguese-­born, managed to cross the Atlantic and settle in the major urban centres such as Mexico City. For more on American conversos see Stanley M. Hordes, “The Inquisition as Economic and Political Agent: The Campaign of the Mexican Holy Office against the Crypto-­Jews in the Mid-­Seventeenth Century,” The Americas 39, no. 1 (July 1982): 23–38; Eva Alexandra Uchmany, La vida entre el judaismo y el cristianismo en la Nueva España, 1580–1606 (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1993). On the confluence of notions of purity of blood aimed at conversos and Moors and the racialization of black people as polluters of the body politic in Mexico see María Elena Martínez, “The Black Blood of New Spain: Limpieza de Sangre, Racial Violence, and Gendered Power in Early Colonial Mexico,” The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series 61, no. 3 (July 2004): 479–520. On this matter, also note that laws prohibited Spanish blacks and biracial people, whether free or enslaved, to travel to the Indies without a special licence (Leyes de Indias, Libro IX, Título XVI, Ley XVII and Ley XVIII). Although Toledanos were not particularly prone to travel to the Indies, at least 2000 of them seem to have done so, including some conversos, as discussed in Javier Malagón-­Barceló, “Toledo and the New World in the Sixteenth Century,” The Americas 20, no. 2 (Oct 1963): 97–126. APT, P-­3170, 640r. According to Sandoval, Historia del emperador Carlos V, Biblioteca de autores españoles, ed. Carlos Seco Serrano, no. 80 (Madrid: Ediciones Atlas, 1955), 129, many of Pizarro’s men were suffering from the pox by the time they arrived in Peru. Bernal Díaz del Castillo likewise refers to the pox in Cortés’s men in his Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España, ed. Joaquín Ramírez Cabañas (Mexico City: Editorial Pedro Robredo, 1939), 1:335. Eiras Roel and González Lopo, eds., Movilidad interna en la península Ibérica. APT, P-­3122, 474r. APT, P-­3122, 109r. APT, P-­3169, 712r. For instance, as guarantor to Gaspar de Fuensalida, general receiver to Toledo’s Cathedral, Pedro Pérez found himself owing funds to cover improper expenses cathedral administrators attributed to Gaspar. Although he was legally obliged to pay these monies as guarantor, he never did so, the Cathedral eventually suing his widow, and the case reaching the Chancery Court in Valladolid by 1600. Archivo de la Chancillería de Valladolid, Pleitos Civiles, Pérez Alonso (F), Caja 1555, 2.

Notes to pages 157–61 227 41 For Toledo’s foundling home see Laura Santolaya Heredero, “Las constituciones del Hospital de Santa Cruz (Toledo),” Espacio, Tiempo y Forma, Serie IV, Historia Moderna 3 (1990): 317–66. On foundling homes and orphanages in Spain see Valentina Tikoff, “‘Not All Orphans Really Are’: The Diversity of Seville’s Juvenile Charity Wards in the Long Eighteenth Century,” in Raising an Empire: Children in Early Modern Iberia and Colonial Latin America, ed. Ondina E. González and Bianca Premo (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007), 41–74; Sherwood, Poverty in Eighteenth-­Century Spain. 42 APT, P-­3167, 531r. 43 Ibid. 44 APT, P-­3169, 520r. 45 See, for instance, the detailed description of the ritual lottery associated with one of Toledo’s most famous charitable dowry bequests, that instituted by Blanca de la Cerda, in Fink De Backer, Widowhood, 270–2. 46 ADPT, Libro H-­55, Spring 1659, patient no. 181. APT, P-­3168, f. 693r. 47 ADPT, Libro H-­55, Spring 1658, patient no. 9; APT, P-3169, f. 129r. 48 Martz, Poverty and Welfare, 105 makes the point, following Luis Hurtado’s Memorial, 498 that Toledo’s women outnumbered men, a factor especially relevant in terms of the large number of religious homes for women founded in the sixteenth century. 49 ADPT, Libro H-­55, Fall 1656, patient no. 3 and Fall 1657, patient no. 66. 50 Ibid. 51 APT, P-­3169, 7r. 52 “Los pelados tenemos este consuelo, que si algun tiempo fuimos gente de pelo, y ahora no le tenemos, mas que por la palma (Dios sea loado), podemos decir que del pelo hicimos almohada para dormir, mientras los sanos estan en misa y sermon, imitando las moscas, que todo el invierno son de la cofradía de los siete durmientes,” López de Úbeda, La pícara Justina, 9. 53 “Grillimón o cofrades del grillimón: los que están en la prisión con grillos en los pies, o los bubosos.” César Oudin, Tesoro de las dos lenguas francesa y española (Paris: Veuve Marc Orry, 1616), no pagination, section “Vocabu­ lario de gerigonça.” 54 “Chiste de la cofradía del Grillemón” in Segunda parte de la silva de romances (Zaragoza: S.G. de Nájera, 1552), discussed in Anthony J. Farrell, “Sebastián de Horozco y la tradición de la cofradía del Grillimón,” Hispanófila 73 (1981): 1–10. Other references to Grillimón include “Capítulos y ordenaciones para los cofrades del muy poderoso balaguer o grillemón, ordenado por Juan de Angulo, a ruegos de una señora toledana que pretendía (no dándole Dios salud) ser cofradesa,” in La poesía erótica del Siglo de Oro, ed. Pierre

228  Notes to pages 161–9

55

56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66

Alzieu, Robert Jammes, and Yvan Lissorgues (Barcelona: Editorial Crítica, 2000), 306–7; La pícara Justina, 9. For more on this tradition see Jean Dangler, Mediating Fictions: Literature, Women Healers, and the Go-­Between in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia (London: Associated University Presses, 2001), 132. “La insigne congregacion / y general cofradia / de aquel santo Grillimon, / pleníssima remission / os concede en este dia; / porque todos los que son, / ó de aqui adelante fueren / deste bando y opinion / sufran con mas devocion / los trabajos que tuvieren,” Horozco, Cancionero, 1. Pérez de Úbeda, La pícara Justina, 9. APT, P-­161, 181r. ADPT, libro H-­55, Spring 1657, patient nos. 141 and 142 (Luis de Loaisa and María de Carbajal); Spring 1658, patient no. 35 (Miguel Martín). APT, P-­3169, 804r. ADPT, libro H-­55, Fall 1659, patient nos. 65 (Antonio de Loarte) and 67 (Catalina Rodríguez). APT, P-­3172, 638r and 718r. Ibid. ADPT, libro H-­55, Spring 1656 patient nos. 12 (Nicolás del Rio) and 51 (Magdalena Millán). ADPT, libro H-­55, Spring 1660, patient no. 131 and Fall 1663, patient no. 130. APT, P-­3174, 449r. Juan Fernández was patient no. 17 in the Spring of 1661 (ADPT, libro H-­55). Ibid.

Conclusion 1 ADPT, libro H-­55, Fall 1656, patient no. 33. 2 On Andrade y Benavides’s service in Flanders and Italy see AHN, Estado, legajo 1282, no. 229; AHN, Estado, legajo 817, no. 68; AHN, Estado, libro 262, 32r. 3 AHN, Órdenes Militares, Caballeros Santiago, no. 422. 4 AHN, Estado, legajo 817, no 68. 5 AHN, Órdenes Militares, Archivo de Toledo, no. 884. 6 Livingston, Debility and the Moral Imagination, 28.

Bibliography

Primary Sources Archival and Library Sources Archivo de la Chancillería de Valladolid, Pleitos Civiles. Pérez Alonso (F), Caja 1555, 2. Archivo de la Diputación Provincial de Toledo. Legajo 82, no. 4; Legajo 86, no. 29; Legajo 87, no. 3; Legajo 78, nos. 9, 10, 11. Archivo de la Diputación Provincial de Toledo. Libro H-­55. Archivo General de Simancas, Contadurías Generales. Legajo 3251, no. 18. Archivo Histórico Nacional, Estado. Legajo 817, no. 68; Legajo 1282, no. 229. Archivo Histórico Nacional, Estado. Libro 262. Archivo Histórico Nacional, Órdenes Militares. Archivo de Toledo, nos. 884, 9113, 19786, 20154. Archivo Histórico Nacional, Órdenes Militares. Caballeros de Santiago, Expediente 422. Archivo Histórico Nacional. Órdenes Militares. Carpeta 328, nos. 4, 33, 33 bis, 34. Archivo Histórico Nacional. Órdenes Militares. Legajo 3586, nos. 3, 7, 8 19, 20, 21, 23, 24; Legajo 3587, no. 1; Legajo 4009, no. 3. Archivo Histórico Nacional. Órdenes Militares. Libro 7, Libro 70. Archivo Histórico Provincial de Toledo. P-­149, P-­150, P-­151, P-­152, P-­154, P-­155, P-­156, P-­157, P-­158, P-­160, P-­161, P-­162, P-­170, P-­3122, P-­3159, P-­3160, P-­3162, P-­3165, P-­3167, P-­3168, P-­3169, P-­3170, P-­3171, P-­3172, P-­3173, P-­3174, P-­3315, P-­3407, P-­3425, P-­3426, P-­3427, P-­3429. Biblioteca Nacional. Alcocer, Pedro. Historia o descripción de la Imperial Ciudad de Toledo. Toledo: Juan Ferrer, 1554. R-­4805.

230 Bibliography Biblioteca Nacional. Astete, P. Gaspar. Instrucción y guía de la juventud cristiana. Burgos: Casa de Philippe de Iunta, 1592. R-­25926. Biblioteca Nacional. Aulnoy, Madame d’. Relation du voyage en Espagne. The Hague: Henry Van Bulderen, 1693. 2–67558. Biblioteca Nacional. Calvo, Juan. Primera y segunda parte de la cirugía universal: Tratado segundo del morbo gálico. 1580. Reprint, Valencia: en casa de Chrisostomo Garriz por Bernardo Nogues, 1647. R-­5581. Biblioteca Nacional. Díaz de la Isla, Ruy. Tratado contra el mal serpentino. Seville: Dominico de Robertis, 1539. R-­28825. Biblioteca Nacional. González, Gutierre. Libro de doctrina cristiana … para instrucción de los niños y moços. Zaragoza: n.p., 1532. R-­31816. Biblioteca Nacional. Guzmán, Pedro de. Bienes del honesto trabajo y daños de la ociosidad. Madrid: Imprenta Real, 1614. R-­14188. Biblioteca Nacional. León, Andrés. Práctico de morbo gálico. Valladolid: Luis Sánchez, 1605. R-­4929. Biblioteca Nacional. López Pinna, Pedro. Tratado de morbo gálico. Seville: Juan Gómez de Blas, 1664. R-­5793. Biblioteca Nacional. Luján de Sayavedra, Mateo. Segunda parte de la vida del pícaro Guzmán de Alfarache. Brussels: Roger Velpius, 1604. R-­6989(2). Biblioteca Nacional. Orozco Covarrubias, Sebastián de. Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española. Madrid: Luis Sánchez, 1611. R-­6388. Biblioteca Nacional. Oudin, César. Tesoro de las dos lenguas francesa y española. Paris: Veuve Marc Orry, 1616. RI/32 V. 1. Biblioteca Nacional. Pantaleón de Ribera, Anastasio. Obras de Anastasio Pantaleón de Ribera. Madrid: Diego Díaz de la Carrera, 1648. R-­17223. Biblioteca Nacional. Rojas, Don Pedro de. Discursos ilustres históricos y genea­ lógicos. Madrid: Juan Ruiz de Pereda, 1636. R-­167448. Biblioteca Nacional. Torres, Pedro. Libro que trata de la enfermedad de las bubas. Madrid: Luis Sánchez, 1600. R-­3612. Published Sources Álvarez Navarro, Esmeralda. “Discurso de Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, Corregidor de Toledo (año 1628).” Archivo Secreto 3 (2006): 217–23. Álvarez y Baena, José Antonio. Compendio histórico de las grandezas de la coronada villa de Madrid. Madrid: Antonio de Sancha, 1786. Balust, Luis Sala, ed. Constituciones, estatutos, y ceremonias de los antiguos colegios seculares de la Universidad de Salamanca. Vol. 4. Madrid: CSIC, 1966. Barrionuevo, Jerónimo de. Avisos de Madrid. 4 vols. Madrid: Antonio Paz y Melia, 1892–3.

Bibliography 231 Beinart, Haim, ed. Records of the Trials of the Spanish Inquisition in Ciudad Real. Vol. 3, The Trials of 1512–1527 in Toledo. Jerusalem: Israel National Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1981. Böhl de Faber, Juan Nicolás, ed. Floresta de rimas antiguas castellanas. Hamburg: Perthes and Besser, 1821. Cabrera, Fray Alonso de. Sermones del padre fray Alonso de Cabrera. Edited by Miguel Mir. Madrid: Bailly, 1906. Carreira, Antonio, and Jesús Antonio Cid, eds. Relato extenso, novela, y otras formas similares Madrid: Cátedra, 1990. Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de. Don Quijote de la Mancha. Madrid: Real Academia Española, 2004. – “Entremés de los mirones.” In Varias obras inéditas de Cervantes, edited by Don Adolfo de Castro, 23–88. Madrid: A. de Carlos e Hijo, editores, 1874. – Novela del casamiento engañoso. In Obras completas de Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, edited by Rodolfo Schevill and Adolfo Bonilla y San Martín, vol. 3. Madrid: Gráficas Reunidas, 1925. Clausell Nácher, Carmen, ed. Carro de las Donas (Valladolid, 1542): Estudio preliminar y edición anotada. PhD thesis, Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, 2005. Concepción, Juan Bautista de la. Obras del beato Juan Bautista de la Concepción. Paris: Impr. de Leopoldo Bourlié, 1830. Crosby, James, ed. Nuevas cartas de la última prisión de Quevedo. Rochester, NY: Tamesis Books, 2005. Delicado, Francisco. La lozana andaluza. Madrid: M. Rivadeneyra, 1871. Díaz del Castillo, Bernal. Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España. Edited by Joaquín Ramírez Cabañas. Vol. 1. Mexico City: Editorial Pedro Robredo, 1939. Dominguez, Frank, ed. Cancionero de obras de burlas provocantes a la risa. Valencia: Ediciones Albatros, 1978. Guevara, Fray Antonio de. Menosprecio de corte y alabanza de aldea. Edited by Asunción Rallo Gruss. Madrid: Cátedra, 1984. Hidalgo, Gaspar Lucas. Diálogos de apacible entretenimiento. Edited by Julio Alonso Asenjo and Abraham Madroñal. Valencia: Universitat de Valencia, 2010. Homza, Lu Ann, ed. The Spanish Inquisition, 1478–1614. An Anthology of Sources. Indianapolis: Hacket Publishing Company, 2006. Horozco, Sebastián de. Cancionero. Edited by Antonio Martín Gamero. Seville: Imprenta de D. Rafael Tarascó y Lassa, 1874. – El libro de los proverbios glosados. Edited by Jack Weiner. Kassel: Edition Reichenberger, 1994.

232 Bibliography Lobera, Luis. Libro de las cuatro enfermedades cortesanas. Edited by Luis S. Granjel. Burgos: Biblioteca de clásicos de la medicina española, 1992. López, Diego. Declaración magistral sobre los emblemas de Andrés Alciato. Nájera: Juan de Mongastón, 1615. Reprint, Madrid: Real Academia Española, 2003. López de Úbeda, Francisco. La pícara Justina. Paris: Beaudry, 1847. López de Villalobos, Francisco. El sumario de la medicina con un tratado de las pestíferas bubas. Edited by María Teresa Herrera. Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca, 1973. Martínez de Mata, Francisco. Memoriales y disursos. Edited by Gonzalo Anes. Madrid: Editorial Moneda y Crédito, 1971. Martín Gamero, Antonio, ed. Ordenanzas para el buen régimen y gobierno de la muy noble, muy leal e imperial Ciudad de Toledo. Toledo: José de Cea, 1858. Molina, Tirso de. Santo y Sastre. In Obras Completas. Cuarta parte de comedias, edited by Ignacio Arellano, vol. 2. Pamplona: Instituto de Estudios Tirsianos, 2003. Mosquera de Figueroa, Cristóbal. Paradoxa en loor de las bubas. Edited by Valentín Nuñez Rivera. Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca, 2010. Novisima Recopilación de las leyes de España. 4 vols. Los códigos españoles concordados y anotados, nos. 7–10. Madrid: Rivadeneyra, 1850. Nuñez, Hernán. Refranes o proverbios. Madrid: Don Mateo Repullés, 1804. Pérez de Moya, Juan. Philosophia secreta de la gentilidad. Edited by Carlos Clavería. Madrid: Cátedra, 1995. Pineda, Juan de. Diálogos familiares de la agricultura cristiana. Edited by Juan Meseguer Fernández. Madrid: Atlas, 1963. Polo de Medina, Salvador Jacinto. Obras completas. Murcia: Academia Alfonso X el Sabio, 1948. Quevedo, Francisco de. Obras de D. Francisco Quevedo Villegas. Edited by Pablo Antonio de Tarsia. Vol. 4. Madrid: Joachin Ibarra, 1772. – Sueños y discursos. Edited by James O. Crosby. Vol. 2. Madrid Editorial Castalia, 1993. Recopilación de Leyes de Indias. Vol. 3. Madrid: Boix, Editor, 1841. Rodríguez Villa, Antonio, ed. “Correspondencia de la Infanta Archiduquesa Doña Isabel Clara Eugenia de Austria con el Duque de Lerma, Apéndice.” Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia 49, no. 1 (July 1906): 5–87. Sandoval, Prudencio de. Historia del emperador Carlos V. Biblioteca de autores españoles, ed. Carlos Seco Serrano, nos. 80–1. Madrid: Ediciones Atlas, 1955–6. Torres de Villarroel, Diego. Los desahuciados del mundo y de la gloria. Edited by Manuel María Pérez López. Madrid: Editoria Nacional, 1979. Valdivielso, José de. Teatro Completo. Edited by Ricardo Arias y Arias and Robert. V. Piluso. Madrid: Isla, 1975.

Bibliography 233 Villuga, Pedro Juan de. Repertorio de todos los caminos de España. Medina del Campo: Pedro de Castro, 1546. Reprint, New York: Krauss Reprint Corporation, 1967. Viñas Mey, Carmelo, and Ramón Paz, eds. Relaciones histórico-­geográficas-­ estadísticas de los pueblos de España hechas por iniciativa de Felipe II: Reino de Toledo. Madrid: CSIC, 1951. Vives, Juan Luis. Instrucción de la mujer cristiana. Madrid: Don Benito Cano, 1793. Waterworth, J., ed. The Canons and Decrees of the Sacred and Oecumenical Council of Trent. London: Dolman, 1848. Secondary Sources Aguilar y Lara, J. Recuerdo apologético de Juan Calvo. Valencia: Instituto Médico Valenciano, 1879. Albala, Paul. Eating Right in the Renaissance. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Alexander, John T. Bubonic Plague in Early Modern Russia: Public Health and Urban Disaster. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980. Allen, Peter Lewis. The Wages of Sin: Sex and Disease, Past and Present. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000. Alzieu, Pierre, Robert Jammes, and Yvan Lissorgues, eds. La poesía erótica del Siglo de Oro. Barcelona: Editorial Crítica, 2000. Andrés Ucendo, José Ignacio. “Algunas notas sobre el consumo y comercialización de tejidos en Castilla a comienzos del siglo XVII: La encuesta de 1618.” Revista de Historia Económica 23, no. 1 (2005): 13–46. Ansón Calvo, María del Carmen. Asturias en la España de Carlos III: Demografía y sociedad. Oviedo: Universidad de Oviedo, 1998. Aranda Pérez, Francisco José. “Los mercaderes de Toledo en el Seiscientos: bases económicas y status sociopolítico.” Investigaciones Históricas 12 (1992): 72–96. – Poder y poderes en la ciudad de Toledo: Gobierno, sociedad y oligarquías en la Edad Moderna. Cuenca: Ediciones de la Universidad de Castila-­La Mancha, 1999. Arrizabalaga, Jon. “La enfermedad y la asistencia hospitalaria.” In Historia de la ciencia y de la técnica en la Corona de Castilla, edited by Luis García Ballester, Vol. 1, 603–27. Valladolid: Junta de Castilla y León, 2002. – “Los médicos valencianos Pere Pintor y Gaspar Torrella, y el tratamiento del mal francés en la corte papal de Alejandro VI Borja.” In El hogar de los Borja, edited by Jon Arrizabalaga, 141–58. Valencia: Consorci de Museus de la Generalitat Valenciana, 2000. – “Medical Responses to the ‘French Disease’ in Europe at the Turn of the Sixteenth Century.” In Sins of the Flesh: Responding to Sexual Disease in Early

234 Bibliography Modern Europe, edited by Kevin Siena, 33–55. Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2005. Arrizabalaga, Jon, John Henderson, and Roger French. The Great Pox: The French Disease in Renaissance Europe. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997. Asenjo González, María. “Labradores ricos: nacimiento de una oligarquía rural en la Segovia del siglo XV.” En la España medieval 4 (1984): 63–86. Bade, Klaus J. Migration in European History. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003. Baker, Brenda J., and George J. Armelagos, “The Origin and Antiquity of Syphilis: Paleopathological Diagnosis and Interpretation.” Current Anthropology 29, no. 5 (1988): 703–37. Ballester, Rosa, María Luz López Terrada, and Alvar Martínez Vidal. “La realidad de la práctica médica: el pluralismo asistencial en la monarquía hispánica (ss. XVI-­XVIII). Introducción.” DYNAMIS. Acta Hispanica ad Medicinae Scientiarumque Historiam Illustrandam 22 (2002): 21–8. Báñez, R. “Instituciones y costumbres eclesiásticas en Cervantes.” Anales Cervantinos 19 (1991): 73–92. Barahona, Renato. Sex Crimes, Honour and the Law in Early Modern Spain: Vizcaya, 1528–1735. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. Bass, Laura R., and Amanda Wunder. “The Veiled Ladies of the Early Modern Spanish World: Seduction and Scandal in Seville, Madrid, and Lima.” Hispanic Review 77, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 97–144. Bataillon, Marcel. Pícaros y picaresca: La pícara Justina. Madrid: Taurus, 1969. Behrend-­Martínez, Edward. “Taming Don Juan: Limiting Masculine Sexuality in Counter-­Reformation Spain.” Gender and History 24, no. 2 (August 2012): 333–52. Beneyto Pérez, Juan. Una historia del matrimonio. Madrid: Editorial Eudema, 1993. Bennassar, Bartolomé. The Spanish Character: Attitudes and Mentalities from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979. Berco, Cristian. Sexual Hierarchies, Public Status: Men, Sodomy and Society in Spain’s Golden Age. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007. – “Syphilis and the Silencing of Sodomy in Juan Calvo’s Tratado del morbo gálico.” In The Sciences of Homosexuality in Early Modern Europe, edited by Kenneth Borris and George Rousseau, 92–113. New York: Routledge, 2008. – “Syphilis, Sex, and Marriage in Early Modern Spain.” Journal of Early Modern History 15, no. 3 (2011): 223–53. – “Textiles as Social Texts: Syphilis, Material Culture and Gender in Golden Age Spain.” Journal of Social History 44, no. 3 (Spring 2011): 785–810.

Bibliography 235 – “The Great Pox, Symptoms, and Social Bodies in Early Modern Spain.” Social History of Medicine 28, no. 2 (2015): 225–44. Bernal, Antonio Miguel, ed. Dinero, moneda y crédito en la monarquía hispánica. Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2000. Bernis, Carmen. El traje y los tipos sociales en el Quijote. Madrid: El Viso, 2001. Bilinkoff, Jodi. The Avila of St. Teresa: Religious Reform in a Sixteenth-­Century City. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989. Bossy, John. “The Social History of Confession in the Age of the Reformation.” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Fifth Series, 25 (1975): 21–38. Boyd-­Bowman, Peter. “Spanish and European Textiles in Sixteenth Century Mexico.” The Americas 29, no. 3 (Jan 1973): 334–58. Bravo Lozano, Jesús. “La emigración a Madrid.” In Madrid en la época moderna: espacio, sociedad y cultura, edited by Virgilio Pinto Crespo and Santos Madrazo Madrazo, 131–58. Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 1991. – “La sombra de un burro. Inmigrantes franceses en Madrid.” Historia 16, no. 104 (1984): 37–44. Brodman, James William. Charity and Welfare: Hospitals and the Poor in Medieval Catalonia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998. Brown, Kenneth. Anastasio Pantaleón de Ribera (1600–1629): ingenioso miembro de la República Literaria española. Madrid: Porrúa Turanzas, 1985. Brundage, James A. “Sex and Canon Law.” In The Handbook of Medieval Sexuality, edited by Vern L. Bullough and James A. Brundage, 33–50. New York: Garland, 1996. Burns, Robert I. Jews in the Notarial Culture: Latinate Wills in Mediterranean Spain. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1989. Bynum, Carolyn Walker. Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. Cantizano Pérez, Félix. El erotismo en la poesía de adúlteros y cornudos en el Siglo de Oro. Madrid: Editorial Complutense, 2007. Carbonell i Esteller, Montserrat. Sobreviure a Barcelona: dones, pobresa i assistència al segle XVIII. Vic: Eumo Editorial, 1997. Carlin, Claire L., ed. Imagining Contagion in Early Modern Europe. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Carmichael, Ann G. “Contagion Theory and Contagion Practice in Fifteenth-­ Century Milan.” Renaissance Quarterly 44 (1991): 213–55. – The Plague and the Poor in Renaissance Florence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

236 Bibliography – “Syphilis and the Columbian Exchange: Was the Disease really New?” In The Great Maritime Discoveries and World Health, edited by Mario Gomes Marques and John Cule, 187–200. Lisbon: Escola Nacional de Saúde Pública, 1991. Carmona, Juan Ignacio. Enfermedad y sociedad en los primeros tiempos modernos. Seville: Universidad de Sevilla, 2005. – El sistema de hospitalidad pública en la Sevilla del Antiguo Régimen. Seville: Diputación Provincial de Sevilla, 1979. Carré, Antonia, and Lluís Cifuentes. “Éxito y difusión de la literatura de problemas en la Castilla del siglo XVI: la traducción castellana de Il Perché de Girolamo Manfredi (Zaragoza, 1567).” Asclepio. Revista de Historia de la Medicina y de la Ciencia 58, no. 1 (2006): 149–96. Cartagena Calderón, José Reinaldo. Masculinidades en obras: el drama de la hombría en la España imperial. Newark, NJ: Juan de la Cuesta, 2008. Casey, James. Early Modern Spain. London and New York: Routledge, 1999. – Family and Community in Early Modern Spain: The Citizens of Granada, 1570–1739. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Cerrillo Cruz, Gonzalo. Los familiares de la Inquisición española. Valladolid: Junta de Castilla y León, 2000. Chatellier, Louis. The Religion of the Poor: Rural Missions in Europe and the Formation of Modern Catholicism, c. 1500–c. 1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Chowning, Margaret. “Convent Reform, Catholic Reform, and Bourbon Reform in Eighteenth-­Century New Spain: The View from the Nunnery.” Hispanic American Historical Review 85, no. 1 (Feb. 2005): 1–37. Christian, William A. Local Religion in Sixteenth Century Spain. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981. Clouse, Michele L. Medicine, Government and Public Health in Philip II’s Spain: Shared Interests, Competing Authorities. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011. Cohen, Elizabeth S. “Honor and Gender in the Streets of Early Modern Rome.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 22, no. 4 (Spring 1992): 597–625. Colón Calderón, Isabel. “De afeites, alcoholes y hollines.” DICENDA. Cuadernos de Filología Hispánica 13 (1995): 65–82. Coolidge, Grace. Guardianship, Gender and the Nobility in Early Modern Spain. Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2010. Cooter, Roger. “The Traffic in Victorian Bodies: Medicine, Literature, and History.” Victorian Studies 45, no. 3 (Spring 2003): 513–27. Crossley, Nick. The Social Body: Habit, Identity, and Desire. London: Sage Publication, 2001. Cruz, Anne J. Discourses of Poverty: Social Reform and the Picaresque Novel in Early Modern Spain. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999.

Bibliography 237 Cruz de Amenabar, Isabel de la. El traje: transformaciones de una segunda piel. Serie Arte y Sociedad en Chile 1650–1820. Santiago: Ediciones Universidad Católica de Chile, 1996. Damiani, Bruno M. “Las fuentes literarias de ‘La Pícara Justina’.” Thesaurus 36, no. 1 (1981): 44–70. Dangler, Jean. Mediating Fictions: Literature, Women Healers, and the Go-­Between in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia. London: Associated University Presses, 2001. Dedieu, Jean-­Pierre. L’Administration de la foi: L’Inquisition de Tolede (XVIe-­ XVIIIe siècle). Madrid: Casa Velázquez, 1989. – “Christianisation en Nouvelle Castille. Catéchisme, communion, messe et confirmation dans l’archevêché de Tolède, 1450–1650.” Mélanges de la Casa Velázquez 25 (1979): 261–94. – “La défense du marriage chrétien.” In L’Inquisition espagnole, XVe–XIXe siècles, edited by Bartolomé Bennassar, 318–27. Paris: Hachette, 1979. – “Les inquisiteurs de Tolede et la visite du district.” Mélanges de la Casa Velázquez 13 (1977): 235–56. Delamare, Jean and Thérèse Delamare-­Riche. Le grand renfermement. Histoire de l’hospice de Bicêtre, 1657–1974. Paris: Maloine, 1990. Díez, Fernando. “La apología ilustrada del lujo en España. Sobre la configuración del hombre consumidor.” Historia Social 37 (2000): 3–25. Dopico Black, Georgina. Perfect Wives, Other Women: Adultery and Inquisition in Early Modern Spain. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. Duden, Barbara. The Woman Beneath the Skin: A Doctor’s Patients in Eighteenth-­ Century Germany. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1991. Dyer, Abigail. “Seduction by Promise of Marriage: Law, Sex, and Culture in Seventeenth-­Century Spain.” The Sixteenth Century Journal 34, no. 2 (2003): 439–55. Eamon, William. “Cannibalism and Contagion: Framing Syphilis in Counter-­ Reformation Italy.” Early Science and Medicine 3, no. 1 (1998): 1–31. Egginton, William. “Gracián and the Emergence of the Modern Subject.” In Rhetoric and Politics: Baltasar Gracián and the New World Order, edited by Nicholas Spadaccini and Jenaro Talens, 151–69. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1997. Eiras Roel, Antonio. Historia y documentación notarial: El Madrid del Siglo de Oro. Madrid: Consejo General del Notariado, 1992. Eire, Carlos M.N. From Madrid to Purgatory: The Art and Craft of Dying in Sixteenth Century Spain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Eisenberg, Daniel. “Did Cervantes Have a Library?” In Hispanic studies in honor of Alan D. Deyermond: A North American Tribute, edited by John S. Miletich, 93–106. Madison: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 1986.

238 Bibliography Entrambasaguas, Joaquín de. Estudios sobre Lope de Vega. Vol. 2. Madrid: CSIC, 1967. Eugenio Martínez, María Ángeles. La Ilustración en América (siglo XVIII). Pelucas y casacas en los trópicos. Madrid: Anaya, 1988. Evangelisti, Silvia. “‘We do not have it, and we do not want it’: Women, Power, and Convent Reform in Florence.” Sixteenth Century Journal 33, no. 3 (Fall 2002): 735–69. Farrell, Anthony J. “Sebastián de Horozco y la tradición de la cofradía del Grillimón.” Hispanófila 73 (1981): 1–10. Fernández Collado, Ángel. Historia de la Iglesia en España: Edad Moderna. Toledo: Instituto Teológico San Idelfonso, 2007. Ferrer Valls, Teresa. “Vestuario Teatral y espectáculo cortesano en el Siglo de Oro.” El vestuario en el teatro español del Siglo de Oro, Cuadernos de teatro clásico, 13–14 (2000): 63–84. Fink De Backer, Stephanie. Widowhood in Early Modern Spain: Protectors, Proprietors, and Patrons. Leiden: Brill, 2010. Fissell, Mary E. Patients, Power, and the Poor in Eighteenth-­Century Bristol. Cambridge, GB: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Flood, J.L. “The Price of the Pox in 1527. Johannes Sinapius and the Guaiac Cure.” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 54, no. 3 (1992): 691–707. Flynn, Maureen. “The Charitable Activities of Early Modern Confraternities.” In Early Modern Europe: Issues and Interpretations, edited by Karen L. Taylor and James B. Collins, 101–20. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006. – Sacred Charity: Confraternities and Social Welfare in Spain, 1400–1700. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988. Foa, Anna. “The New and the Old: The Spread of Syphilis (1494–530).” In Sex and Gender in Historical Perspective, edited by Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero, 26–45. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. Forcione, Alban K. Cervantes and the Mystery of Lawlessness: A Study of El casamiento engañoso y El coloquio de los perros. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984. Fresquet Febrer, José Luis. “Materia médica americana en textos médicos españoles del siglo XVI.” Cirugía y Cirujanos 63, no. 2 (March–April, 1995): 77–8. García, Máximo, and Bartolomé Yun Casalilla. “Pautas de consumo, estilos de vida y cambio político en las ciudades castellanas a fines del Antiguo Régimen.” In Imágenes de la diversidad. El mundo urbano en la corona de Castilla (s. XVI–XVIII), edited by José I. Fortea, 245–82. Santander: Universidad de Cantabria, 1997. García-­Abásolo, Antonio. “Andalucía y México. Emigración y mundo privado de los pobladores andaluces en Nueva España.” In Aportes humanos,

Bibliography 239 culturales y artísticos de Andalucía en México, siglos XVI–XVIII. Separata de la publicación, edited by Antonio García-­Abásolo, Fernando Quiles, and María Ángeles Fernández, 19–192. Seville: Junta de Andalucía, 2006. García Ballester, Luis. Historia social de la medicina en la España de los siglos XIII al XVI. Madrid: Akal, 1976. García de Cortazar, José Ángel, and Pascual Martínez Sopena. “La historia rural de la sociedad hispanocristiana.” Historia Agraria 31 (2003): 57–86. García Fernández, Máximo. “El consumo manufacturero textil en las ciudades castellanas, siglos XVI–XVII y XVIII.” Torre de los Lujanes 45 (Oct 2001): 173–91. García Ruipérez, Mariano. “Vecino de Toledo durante la Edad Media y Moderna: Las cartas de vecindad.” Archivo Secreto 4 (2008): 186–91. García Verdugo, María Luisa. La Lozana Andaluza y la literatura del siglo XVI: la sífilis como enfermedad y metáfora. Madrid: Editorial Pliegos, 1994. Gentilcore, David. Healers and Healing in Early Modern Italy. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998. – Medical Charlatanism in Early Modern Italy. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Gimeno Sanfeliu, María Jesús. Patrimonio, parentesco y poder. Castelló (XVI– XIX). Castellón de la Plana: Universitat Jaume I, 1998. Gómez, Alejandro E. “El estigma africano en los mundos hispano-­atlánticos (siglos XIV al XIX).” Revista de História 153, no. 2 (2005): 139–79. Gonzalbo, Pilar. “De la penuria y el lujo en la Nueva España, Siglos XVI– XVIII.” Revista de Indias 56 (1996): 49–75. González de Fauve, María Estela and Patricia de Forteza. “‘Del beber con moderación’: usos y aplicaciones del vino según los tratados médicos de la España bajo-­medieval y de la temprana modernidad.” Historia. Instituciones. Documentos 32 (2005): 175–91. Gottlieb, Beattrice. The Family in the Western World from the Black Death to the Industrial Age. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Granjel, Luis S. La medicina española renacentista. Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca, 1980. – La medicina española del siglo XVII. Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca, 1978. Green, David R., and Alastair Owens, eds. Family Welfare: Gender, Property and Inheritance since the Seventeenth Century. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2004. Guerra, Francisco. “The Dispute over Syphilis: Europe versus America.” Clio Medica 13 (1978): 39–62. Haliczer, Stephen. Between Exaltation and Infamy: Female Mystics in the Golden Age of Spain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

240 Bibliography – Sexuality in the Confessional: A Sacrament Profaned. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Hall, Linda B., and Teresa Eckmann, eds. Mary, Mother and Warrior. The Virgin in Spain and the Americas. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004. Harris, Katie A. From Muslim to Christian Granada: Inventing a City’s Past. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. Hays, T.J.N. The Burdens of Disease: Epidemics and Human Response in Western History. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998. Hayton, Darin. “Joseph Grünpeck’s Astrological Explanation of the French Disease.” In Sins of the Flesh. Responding to Sexual Disease in Early Modern Europe, edited by Kevin Siena, 81–106. Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2005. Henderson, John. The Renaissance Hospital: Healing the Body and Healing the Soul. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. Henderson, Tony. Disorderly Women in Eighteenth-­Century London: Prostitution and Control of the Metropolis, 1730–1830. London: Longman, 1999. Hentschell, Roze. “Luxury and Lechery: Hunting the Great Pox in Early Modern England.” In Sins of the Flesh: Responding to Sexual Disease in Early Modern Europe, edited by Kevin Siena, 133–57. Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2005. Herzog, Tamar. Defining Nations: Immigrants and Citizens in Early Modern Spain and Spanish America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. Hewlett, Mary. “The French Connection: Syphilis and Sodomy in Late-­ Renaissance Lucca.” In Sins of the Flesh: Responding to Sexual Disease in Early Modern Europe, edited by Kevin Siena, 239–60. Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2005. Hoeniger, F. David. Medicine and Shakespeare in the English Renaissance. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1992. Hollen Lees, Lynn, and Paul M. Hohenberg. “Urban Decline and Regional Economies: Brabant, Castile and Lombardy, 1550–1750.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 31 (1989): 439–61. Hordes, Stanley M. “The Inquisition as Economic and Political Agent: The Campaign of the Mexican Holy Office against the Crypto-­Jews in the mid Seventeenth Century.” The Americas 39, no. 1 (July 1982): 23–38. Hsia, R. Po-­chia. The World of Catholic Renewal, 1540–1770. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Huguet-­Termes, Teresa. “Madrid Hospitals and Welfare in the Context of the Habsburg Empire.” Medical History Supplement 29 (2009): 64–85. – “New World Materia Medica in Spanish Renaissance Medicine: From Scholarly Reception to Practical Impact.” Medical History 45, no. 3 (2001): 359–76.

Bibliography 241 Huguet-­Termes, Teresa, Jon Arrizabalaga, and Harold J. Cook, eds. Health and Medicine in Hapsburg Spain: Agents, Practices, Representations. London: The Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL, 2009. Jiménez de Gregorio, Fernando. “Toledo a mediados del siglo XVIII.” Toletum 3 (1964): 19. Jütte, Robert. “Poor Relief and Social Discipline in Sixteenth-­Century Europe.” European Studies Review 11 (1981): 25–52. – “Syphilis and Confinement: Hospitals in Early Modern Germany.” In Institutions of Confinement: Hospitals, Asylums, and Prisons in Western Europe and North America, 1500–1950, edited by Norbert Finzsch and Robert Jütte, 97–115. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Kagan, Richard L. Lawsuits and Litigants in Castile, 1500–1700. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981. Kern Paster, Gail, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-­Wilson, eds. Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Kleinman, Arthur. The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing and the Human Condition. New York: Basic Books, 1988. Knell, Robert J. “Syphilis in Renaissance Europe: Rapid Evolution of an Introduced Sexually Transmitted Disease?” Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B (Suppl.) 271 (2004): S174–S176. Kottek, Samuel S. and Luis García Ballester, eds. Medicine and Medical Ethics in Medieval and Early Modern Spain. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1996. Kwass, Michael. “Big Hair: A Wig History of Consumption in Eighteenth-­ Century France.” The American Historical Review 111, no. 3 (June 2006): 631–59. Ladero Quesada, Miguel Ángel. “El abastecimiento de las Indias a comienzos del siglo XVI.” Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia 203, no. 3 (2006): 285–380. Lanza García, Ramón. “De norte a sur: la emigración de la fachada cantábrica en la España Moderna.” In Movilidad interna y migraciones intraeuropeas en la península Ibérica, edited by Antonio Eiras Roel and Domingo L. González Lopo, 17–54. Santiago de Compostela: Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, 2002. – “El vecindario de 1683: una fuente inédita para el estudio de la población en la Corona de Castilla.” Revista de Historia Económica 23, no. 2 (2005): 335–70. Lasmarías Ponz, Israel. “El traje popular en el siglo XVII.” Ars Longa 18 (2009): 133–42. Laven, Mary. “Encountering the Counter-­Reformation.” Renaissance Quarterly 59, no. 3 (Fall 2006): 706–20. Lehfeldt, Elizabeth A. “Ideal Men: Masculinity and Decline in Seventeenth-­ Century Spain.” Renaissance Quarterly 61, no. 2 (Summer 2008): 463–94.

242 Bibliography Livingston, Julie. Debility and the Moral Imagination in Botswana. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2005. López-­Fando Rodríguez, Alonso. “Los antiguos hospitales de Toledo.” Toletum 1 (1955): 96–118. López Lázaro, Fabio. Crime in Early Bourbon Madrid (1700–1808): An Analysis of the Royal Court’s Judicial Casebook. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2008. Longmore, Paul K., and David Goldberger. “The League of the Physically Handicapped and the Great Depression: A Case Study in the New Disability History.” The Journal of American History 87, no. 3 (December 2000): 888–922. López-­Salazar Pérez, Jerónimo, and Manuel Martín Galán. “La producción cerealista en el arzobispado de Toledo. 1463–1699.” Cuadernos de historia moderna y contemporánea 2 (1981): 21–103. López Terrada, María Luz. “El mal de siment en la Valencia del siglo XVI: imágenes del morbo gallico en una ciudad mediterránea europea.” DYNAMIS. Acta Hispanica ad Medicinae Scientiarumque Historiam Illustrandam 11 (1991): 119–46. – “Las prácticas médicas extraacadémicas en la ciudad de Valencia durante los siglos XVI y XVII.” DYNAMIS. Acta Hispanica ad Medicinae Scientiarumque Historiam Illustrandam 22 (2002): 85–120. – “El tratamiento de la sífilis en un hospital renacentista: la sala del mal de siment del Hospital General de Valencia.” Asclepio: archivo iberoamericano de historia de la medicina y antropología médica 41, no. 2 (1989): 19–51. Lucassen, Jan. Migrant Labour in Europe: The Drift to the North Sea. London: Croom Helm, 1987. Lucassen, Jan, and Leo Lucassen. “The Mobility Transition Revisited: What the Case of Europe Can Offer to Global History.” Journal of Global History 4 (2009): 347–77. Madrid y Medina, Ángela. “Los comienzos de la hospitalidad santiaguista: El Hospital de Ávila.” Espacio, Tiempo y Forma, Serie III, Historia Medieval 17 (2004): 371–79. Malagón-­Barceló, Javier. “Toledo and the New World in the Sixteenth Century.” The Americas 20, no. 2 (Oct 1963): 97–126. Malakoff, David. “Columbus, Syphilis, and English Monks.” Science 289 (August 4, 2000): 723. Maravall, José Antonio. Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure. Translated by Terry Cochran. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. – “Función del honor y régimen de estratificación social en la sociedad tradicional.” In Poder, honor y élites en el siglo XVII, edited by José Antonio Maravall, 11–145. Madrid: Ariel, 1979.

Bibliography 243 Martínez, María del Carmen. La emigración castellana y leonesa al nuevo mundo, 1517–1700. Valladolid: Junta de Castilla y León, 1993. Martínez, María Elena. “The Black Blood of New Spain: Limpieza de Sangre, Racial Violence, and Gendered Power in Early Colonial Mexico.” The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series 61, no. 3 (July 2004): 479–520. Martínez Crespo, Alicia. “La belleza y el uso de afeites en la mujer del siglo XV.” DICENDA. Caudernos de Filología Hispánica 11 (1993): 197–221. – ed. Manual de Mujeres. Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca, 1995. Martínez-­Góngora, Mar. “La invención de la blancura: el estereotipo y la mímica en ‘Boda de Negros’ de Francisco de Quevedo.” MLN 120, no. 2 (March 2005): 262–86. Martz, Linda. A Network of Converso Families in Early Modern Toledo. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003. – Poverty and Welfare in Hapsburg Spain. The Example of Toledo. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Matellanes Merchán, José Vicente. “La hospitalidad en la Orden de Santiago: un proyecto ideológico o económico (1170–1350),” Studia Historica-­Historia Medieval 11 (1993): 125–40. Mauss, Marcel. “Les techniques du corps.” Journal de Psychologie 32, no. 3–4 (1934): 271–93. Maza Zorrilla, Elena. Pobreza y asistencia social en España, siglos XVI al XX: aproximación histórica. Valladolid: Universidad de Valladolid, 1987. McGough, Laura. “Demons, Nature, or God? Witchcraft Accusations and the French Disease in Early Modern Venice.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 80, no. 2 (2006): 219–46. – Gender, Sexuality and Syphilis in Early Modern Venice: The Disease that Came to Stay. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. – “Quarantining Beauty: The French Disease in Early Modern Venice.” In Sins of the Flesh. Responding to Sexual Disease in Early Modern Europe, edited by Kevin Siena, 211–37. Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2007. McGowen, Randall. “Identifying Themes in the Social History of Medicine.” The Journal of Modern History 63, no. 1 (1991): 81–90. McVaugh, Michael R. Medicine before the Plague: Practitioners and their Patients in the Crown of Aragon, 1285–1345. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Melero Fernández, María Inés. “El Hospital de Santiago de Toledo a fines del siglo XV.” Anales Toledanos 9 (1974): 3–116. Merians, Linda F., ed. The Secret Malady: Venereal Disease in Eighteenth-­Century Britain and France. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1997. Michael, Ian. “Celestina and the Great Pox.” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 78 (2001): 103–38.

244 Bibliography Mitchell, Piers D. “Pre-­Columbian Treponemal Disease from 14th Century AD Safed, Israel, and Implications for the Eastern Mediterranean.” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 121 (2003): 117–24. Montemayor, Julián. Tolède entre fortune et déclin (1530–1640). Limoges: PULIM, 1996. – “Una ciudad frente a la peste: Toledo a fines del siglo XVI.” En la España medieval 7 (1985): 1113–32. Mooch, Leslie Page. Moving Europeans: Migration in Western Europe since 1650. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992. Moreno, Belén. “Pautas de consumo textil en Cataluña del siglo XVIII. Una visión a partir de los inventarios post-­mortem.” In Consumo, condiciones de vida y comercialización. Cataluña y Castilla, siglos XVII–XIX, edited by Jaime Torras Elías and Bartolomé Yun Casalilla, 71–88. Valladolid: Junta de Castilla y León, 1999. Moreno Mengíbar, Andrés, and Francisco Vázquez García. “Poderes y prostitución en España (siglos XVI-­XVII): el caso de Sevilla.” Criticón 69 (1997): 33–49. Morris, Paul N. Roasting the Pig: A Vision of Cluny, Cockaigne and the Treatise of Garcia of Toledo. Boca Raton: Dissertation.com, 2001. Moxó, Salvador de. Los antiguos señoríos de Toledo. Toledo: Instituto Provincial de Investigaciones y Estudios Toledanos, 1973. Myers, W. David. Poor Sinning Folk: Confession and Conscience in Counter-­ Reformation Germany. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996. Nalle, Sara T. God in La Mancha: Religious Reform and the People of Cuenca, 1500–1650. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Navarro, Emilia. “Manual Control: ‘Regulatory Fictions’ and their Discontents.” Cervantes 13, no. 2 (1993): 17–22. Navarro Durán, Rosa, ed. Novela Picaresca. Vol. 2. Madrid: Fundación José Antonio de Castro, 2005. Nielfa Cristóbal, Gloria. “A propósito de las migraciones en la historia.” Cuadernos de Historia Moderna 9 (1988): 216–27. Nieto Soria, José Manuel. Ceremonias de la realeza. Propaganda y legitimación en la Castilla Trastámara. Madrid: Nerea, 2000. Nutton, Vivian. “The Seeds of Disease: An Explanation of Contagion and Infection from the Greeks to the Renaissance.” Medical History 27 (1983): 1–34. Ortego Agustín, María Ángeles. Familia y matrimonio en la España del siglo XVIII: ordenamiento jurídico y situación real de las mujeres a través de la documentación notarial. PhD thesis, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 2003.

Bibliography 245 Ortíz Gómez, Teresa, and Montserrat Cabré i Pairet. “Mujeres y salud: prácticas y saberes.” DYNAMIS 19 (1999): 17–24. Pascua Sánchez, María José de la. “Migraciones tradicionales: Gallegos y otras gentes del norte en Cádiz durante los siglos XVII y XVIII.” In Movilidad interna y migraciones intraeuropeas en la península Ibérica, edited by Antonio Eiras Roel and Domingo L. González Lopo, 55–78. Santiago de Compostela: Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, 2002. Pasamar Lázaro, José Enrique. Los familiares del Santo Oficio en el distrito inquisitorial de Aragón. Zaragoza: Institución Fernando el Católico, 1999. Paz y Melia, Antonio. Sales españolas: o agudezas del ingenio nacional. Vol. 2. Madrid: Sucesores de Ribadeneyra, 1902. Pellisé Prats, Buenaventura, ed. Nueva Enciclopedia Jurídica. Barcelona: Editorial Francisco Seix, 1981. Perdiguero Gil, Enrique. “The Popularization of Medicine during the Spanish Enlightenment.” In The Popularization of Medicine, 1650–1850, edited by Roy Porter, 160–93. London: Routledge, 1992. Perezagua Delgado, Jesús. El tribunal de la Santa Inquisición de Toledo. Madrid: Latorre Varios, 2008. Pérez Ibáñez, María Jesús. “Un problema médico y terminológico (sífilis en el siglo XVI).” Voces 6 (1995): 61–79. Pérez Monzón, Olga. “El Hospital de Santiago de Toledo en el siglo XVI.” In 1992: El Arte español en épocas de transición. Actas, edited by Comité Español de la Historia del Arte, 355–66. León: Universidad de León, 1992. Pitt-­Rivers, Julian. “Honour and Social Status.” In Honour and Shame: The Value of Mediterranean Society, edited by Jean G. Péristiany, 21–95. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson,1965. Perry, Mary Elizabeth. Gender and Disorder in Early Modern Seville. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. Ponce Cárdenas, Jesús. “De burlas y enfermedades barrocas: la sífilis en la obra poética de Anastasio Pantaleón de Ribera y Miguel Colodrero de Villalobos.” Criticón 100 (2007): 115–42. Porter, Dorothy, and Roy Porter. Patient’s Progress: Doctors and Doctoring in Eighteenth-­Century England. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989. Porter, Roy. “The Patient’s View: Doing History from Below.” Theory and Society 14 (1985): 175–98. Poska, Allyson. Regulating the People: The Catholic Reformation in Seventeenth-­ Century Spain. Leiden: Brill, 1998. – Women and Authority in Early Modern Spain. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

246 Bibliography Quétel, Claude. History of Syphilis. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. Ramos Vázquez, Isabel. “La represión de la prostitución en la Castilla del siglo XVII.” Historia, Instituciones, Documentos 32 (2005): 263–86. Ribeiro, Aileen. “Dress in the Early Modern Period, c. 1500-­1780.” In The Cambridge History of Western Textiles, edited by David Jenkins, vol. 1, 659–89. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Richardson, Catherine, ed. Clothing Culture, 1350-­1650. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004. Riera, Juan. “El tema de la sífilis en la literatura médica del siglo XVIII.” Biohorm. Sección Medicina e Historia 14 (Sept. 1965): 3–15. Ringrose, David. Madrid and the Spanish Economy 1560–1850. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. Robbins, Jeremy. “Knowledge, Self and Honour.” Bulletin of Spanish Studies 82, no. 8 (2005): 157–76. Rodríguez, Jimena N. “‘Reconociendo los brutos la generosidad de sus amos’: El vestido en el auto general de la fe de 1659.” Romance Quarterly 57, no. 2 (2010): 105–15. Rodríguez, Marie-­Christine, and Bartolomé Bennassar. “Firmas y nivel cultural de los testigos y acusados en los procesos de la Inquisición del Tribunal de Toledo (1525-­1817) y del Tribunal de Córdoba (1595–1632).” Caravelle 31 (1978): 17–46. Rodríguez Blanco, Daniel. “La reforma de la Orden de Santiago.” In La España Medieval, edited by Miguel Ángel Ladero Quesada and Claudio Sánchez Albornoz y Menduiña, vol. 5, 929–60. Madrid: Editorial de la Universidad Complutense, 1986. Rodríguez de Gracia, Hilario. “Bienes y rentas de la Inquisición de Toledo en 1646.” Anales Toledanos 26 (1989): 277–300. – El Hospital del Rey de Toledo. Toledo: Instituto Nacional de Asistencia Social, 1985. – Pobreza y beneficencia en la provincia. Toledo: Diputación Provincial, 1983. – El Toledo que vió Cervantes. Ciudad Real: Ediciones de Castilla-­La Mancha, 2006. Rodríguez Ocaña, Esteban. “Social History of Medicine in Spain. Points of Departure and Directions of Research.” Social History of Medicine 13, no. 3 (2000): 495–513. Rodríguez Sánchez, Ángel. “El poder familiar: la patria potestad en el Antiguo Régimen,” Chronica Nova 18 (1990): 365–80. Rodríguez Zamorano, María Luisa. Historia del Hospial San Juan Bautista de Toledo durante el siglo XVI. Madrid: Editorial de la Universidad Complutense, 1993.

Bibliography 247 Rose, Mark. “Origins of Syphilis.” Archaeology 50, no. 1 (Jan/Feb 1997): 24–5. Ruggiero, Guido. “Marriage, Love, Sex, and Renaissance Civic Morality.” In Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe, edited by James Grantham Turner, 10–30. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Ruiz Carmona, Samuel. Los caminos medievales de la Provincia de Toledo. Toledo: Archiviana Ediciones, 2002. Ruiz Gálvez, Estrella. “Poner en escena la cortesía. Signos, gestos y modos del arte de dar a conocer y del saber reconocer. (España, siglo XVI).” Tonos Digital 18 (December 2009): 1–31. Rupp, Stephen. “Cervantes and the Soldier’s Tale: Genre and Disorder in ‘El casamiento engañoso’.” The Modern Language Review 96, no. 2 (April 2001): 370–84. Sánchez González, Ramón. “El crédito rural: los censos.” Revista de Historia Económica 9, no. 2 (1991): 285–313. Sánchez Sánchez, Juan. Toledo y la crisis del siglo XVII. Toledo: Caja de Ahorro Provincial de Toledo, 1981. Sancho de San Román, Rafael. “El Hospital del Nuncio de Toledo en la historia de la asistencia psiquiátrica.” Anales toledanos 17 (1983): 55–72. – “La medicina en Toledo: Notas para una historia de la medicina toledana.” Toletum 5 (1972): 35–61. Santolaria Sierra, Felix. El gran debate sobre los pobres en el siglo XVI. Barcelona: Ariel, 2003. Santolaya Heredero, Laura. “Las constituciones del Hospital de Santa Cruz (Toledo).” Espacio, Tiempo y Forma, Serie IV, Historia Moderna 3 (1990): 317–66. Santos Vaquero, Ángel. La industria textil sedera de Toledo. Cuenca: Universidad de Castilla-­La Mancha, 2010. – “Pobreza y beneficencia en el Toledo ilustrado. Creación de la Casa de Caridad.” Espacio, Tiempo y Forma, Serie IV, Historia Moderna 6 (1993): 295–332. – “Puntualizaciones sobre la puerta de Bisagra de Toledo.” Anales Toledanos 42 (2006): 147–58. Santo Tomás Pérez, Magdalena. La asistencia a los enfermos en Castilla en la baja edad media. PhD thesis, Universidad de Valladolid, 2002. Sarti, Raffaela. Europe at Home: Family and Material Culture 1500–1800. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. Schleiner, Winfried. “Infection and Cure through Women: Renaissance Constructions of Syphilis.” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 24, no. 3 (Fall 1994): 499–517. Scott, James. Weapons of the Weak. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.

248 Bibliography Sevilla Muñoz, Julián. “Fuentes paremiológicas francesas y españolas de la primera mitad del siglo XVII.” Revista de Filología Románica 10 (1993): 361–73. Sherwood, Joan. Poverty in Eighteenth-­Century Spain: The Women and Children of the Inclusa. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988. Shoemaker, Robert. The London Mob: Violence and Disorder in Eighteenth-­Century England. London: Hambeldon and London, 2004. Siena, Kevin, ed. Sins of the Flesh. Responding to Sexual Disease in Early Modern Europe. Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2007. – “The Strange Medical Silence on Same-­Sex Transmission of the Pox, c.1660–c.1760.” In The Sciences of Homosexuality in Early Modern Europe, edited by Kenneth Borris and George Rousseau, 115–33. New York: Routledge, 2008. – Venereal Disease, Hospitals, and the Urban Poor: London’s Foul Wards, 1600– 1800. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2004. Siraisi, Nancy G. History, Medicine, and the Traditions of Renaissance Learning. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007. – Medicine and the Italian Universities, 1250–1600. Leiden: Brill, 2001. Snook, Edith. “The Greatness in Good Clothes: Fashioning Subjectivity in Mary Wroth’s Urania and Margaret Spencer’s Account Book.” The Seventeenth Century 22, no. 2 (Autumn 2007): 225–59. Soler Serratosa, Juan. “Demografía y sociedad en Castilla La Nueva durante el Antiguo Régimen: la villa de los Molinos, 1620–1730.” REIS 32 (Oct.–Dec. 1985): 141–90. Solomon, Michael. Fictions of Well Being: Sickly Readers and Vernacular Medical Writing in Late Medieval and Early Modern Spain. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. Sorondo, Imanol. “Arancel General de precios en la venta de mantenimientos y mercadurías, año 1627.” Zainak. Cuadernos de Antroplogía-­Etnografía 5 (1987): 251–92. Stein, Claudia. Negotiating the French Pox in Early Modern Germany. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009. Stolberg, Michael. Experiencing Illness and the Sick Body in Early Modern Europe. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Tapia Sánchez, Serafín de. “Niveles de alfabetización en una ciudad castellana del siglo XVI: sectores sociales y grupos étnicos en Ávila.” Studia Historica. Historia Moderna 6 (1988): 481–502. Taylor, Scott. “Credit, Debt, and Honor in Castile, 1600-­1650.” Journal of Early Modern History 7, nos. 1–2 (2003): 8–27. – Honor and Violence in Golden Age Spain. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008.

Bibliography 249 Tellechea Idígoras, José Ignacio. “Carranza y la reforma católica.” Anuario de Historia de la Iglesia 18 (2009): 123–35. Thompson, I.A.A., and Bartolomé Yun Casalilla. The Castilian Crisis of the Seventeenth Century: New Perspectives on the Economic and Social History of Seventeenth-­Century Spain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Tikoff, Valentina. “‘Not all Orphans Really are’: The Diversity of Seville’s Juvenile Charity Wards in the Long Eighteenth Century.” In Raising an Empire: Children in Early Modern Iberia and Colonial Latin America, edited by Ondina E. González and Bianca Premo, 41–74. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007. Tineo, Primitivo. “La recepción de Trento en España (1565). Disposiciones sobre la actividad episcopal.” Anuario de Historia de la Iglesia 5 (1996): 241–96. Tirapu Martínez, Daniel, and Juan Manuel Matés Barco. “Reforma y renovación religiosa en la Edad Moderna. Los sínodos de Jaén (1478–1628).” Anuario de historia de la Iglesia 1 (1992): 139–60. Toboso Sánchez, Pilar. La deuda pública castellana durante el Antiguo Régimen (juros) y su liquidación en el siglo XIX. Madrid: Instituto de Estudios Fiscales, 1987. Tognotti, Eugenia. “The Rise and Fall of Syphilis in Renaissance Europe.” Journal of Medical Humanities 30, no. 2 (2009): 99–113. Torra Fernández, Lidia. “Comercialización y consumo de tejidos en Cataluña, 1650-­1800.” Revista de Historia Industrial 11 (1997): 177–96. Trexler, Richard. Sex and Conquest: Gendered Violence, Political Order and the European Conquest of the Americas. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995. Uchmany, Eva Alexandra. La vida entre el judaismo y el cristianismo en la Nueva España, 1580–1606. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1993. Vassberg, David E. Land and Society in Golden Age Castille. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Vidal Gavidia, María Amparo. La casa de arrepentidas de Valencia: origen y trayectoria de una institución para mujeres. Valencia: Generalitat Valenciana, 2001. Vilar y Pascual, Don Luis. Diccionario histórico, genealógico y heráldico de las familias ilustres de la monarquía española. Madrid: Don Miguel Guijarro, 1866. Villalba, Joaquín de. Epidemiología española. Vol. 1. Madrid: Don Mateo Repulles, 1802. Vizuete Mendoza, Juan Carlos, and Julio Martín Sánchez, eds. Sacra loca toletana: Los espacios sagrados en Toledo. Cuenca: Universidad de Castilla-­La Mancha, 2008. Vollendorf, Lisa. “Good Sex, Bad Sex: Women and Intimacy in Early Modern Spain.” Hispania 87, no. 1 (2004): 1–12. Vries, Jan de. “Between Purchasing Power and the World of Goods: Understanding the Household Economy in Early Modern Europe.” In

250 Bibliography Consumption and the World of Goods, edited by John Brewer and Roy Porter, 85–132. London: Routledge, 1993. Wagner, C. “Los luteranos ante la Inquisición de Toledo en el siglo XVI.” Hispania Sacra 46 (1994): 473–507. Walter, John. “Gesturing at Authority: Deciphering the Gestural Code of Early Modern England.” Past and Present 203 (2009): 96–127. Weatherhill, Lorna. Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in Britain, 1660– 1760. London: Routledge, 1988. Weber, Alison. “Spiritual Administration: Gender and Discernment in the Carmelite Reform.” Sixteenth Century Journal 31, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 123–47. – Teresa of Avila and the Rhetoric of Femininity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. Weisser, Michael R. “The Agrarian Depression in Seventeenth Century Spain.” Journal of Economic History 42 (1982): 149–54. – “The Decline of Castile Revisited: The Case of Toledo.” Journal of European Economic History 2 (1973): 615–40. – The Peasants of the Montes: The Roots of Rural Rebellion in Spain. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1976. Weston, Stephen. Remains of Arabic in the Spanish and Portuguese Languages. London: S. Rousseau, 1810. Wiesner, Merry E. Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Wilson, Philip K. Surgery, Skin, and Syphilis: Daniel Turner’s London (1667–1741). Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999. Wilson Bowers, Kristy. “Balancing Individual and Communal Needs: Plague and Public Health in Early Modern Seville.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 81, no. 2 (Summer 2007): 335–58. Witte, John and Robert McCune Kingdon, eds. Sex, Marriage and Family in Calvin’s Geneva. Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 2005. Wolfenzon, Carolyn. “La Lozana andaluza: judaísmo, sífilis, exilio y creación.” Hispanic Research Journal: Iberian and Latin American Studies 8, no. 2 (2007): 107–22. Zimmer, Carl. “Can Genes Solve the Syphilis Mystery?” Science 292 (11 May 2001): 1091. Zugasti, Miguel. “De galán vergonzoso a galán ingenioso: el tema del secretario enamorado de su dama en el teatro de Tirso.” In El ingenio cómico de Tirso de Molina: Actas del II Congreso Internacional, Pamplona, Universidad de Navarra, 27–29 de abril de 1998, edited by Ignacio Arellano Ayuso, Blanca Oteiza and Miguel Zugasti, 343–57. Pamplona: Instituto de Estudios Tirsianos, 1998.

Index

Academias del Jardín (1630), 27 admissions records (Hospital de Santiago), 9 adoption contracts, 86 adultery, 31, 79–80 Advocación de Nuestra Señora (Torrijos), 63 Aguado, Bernardo de, 65 Aguirre, Antonia de, 112 Agustín Cavaña, Pablo, 49 Alcántara Bridge, 6 Alcázar (Toledo), 6 Alemán, Mateo: Guzmán de Alfarache, 199n28 Alonso, María, 150 alopecia. See hair loss Álvarez, Domingo, 41 Álvarez de Soto, Francisco, 123 Amador, Francisca, 14 Amador, Joan, 9–11, 12–13, 14, 16, 64 Amador, Martín (father), 9 Amador, Martín (son), 14, 64 ameque, 66, 194nn48–9 Americas (North and South America), 4, 44, 154–5, 189n29 Andrade, Lucas de, 166

Andrade y Benavides, Joseph, 166–7 Andrade y Benavides, Lucas de, 60, 166, 192n23, 228n2 Andrade y Benavides, Rodrigo, 167 Antequeruela (Toledo), 7, 176n23 Aranda, Pedro de, 133, 220n43 Aranda Pérez, Francisco J., 180n9, 189n30, 217–18n5 Arcay, Dominga de, 14 Arcay, María de, 14, 203n52 Arcay, Pedro de, 14 archival records: hospital records, xi–xii, 9–12, 57; judicial records, 14–15; notarial records, xiii, 9–10, 11–13, 14–15, 20; wills and testaments, 138–9 Arellano, Juan de, 134 Arges, 124 Aro, Teresa de, 160 Arrizabalaga, Jon, 3, 4, 174n15, 187n8 artisans: garments of, 3, 73, 85; in marriage market, 119; as pox sufferers, 56, 127t, 128–30 Asturias, 55, 58 Augsburg. See under Germany Aulnoy, Madame d’, 28–9

252 Index Ávila, María de, 108 Ávila, Mateo de, 204n65 Baeza, 109–10 baldness. See hair loss Barahona, Renato, 24, 183n38, 200n36 barbers, 67, 101 Barranco, Eugenio, 119 Barrionuevo, Jerónimo de, 29 Bautista, Juan, 150 Bautista, Romero, 150 Becerra Torrado, Bartolomé, 224n15 Becerril, Joan, 52 Benito, Alonso, 21 Bicêtre, France, 97 Blanco, Juan, 120, 162 blasphemy, 47 Blatterhaus (Augsburg), 3, 4, 40, 43, 175n17, 225n16. See also under Germany bloodletting, 43, 65, 101 body scripts, 72, 77, 82–3, 118, 196n8 Brasa, Antonio de (father), 138 Brasa, Antonio de (son), 138 Brasa, Joan de, 138 Brasa, Mateo de, 138 brickmaking industry, 64 brothels: banning of, 24, 77, 176n23; and masculine sexual conquest, 112; medical control of, 4, 76, 206n4; in Toledo, 7, 76, 206n4. See also prostitutes Brothers Hospitallers, 8 bubonic plague, 43, 49, 173n14, 193n31, 202n48 Burguillos, 62–3 Cabañas, Eugenio de, 138 Cabezas, Francisco, 191n8 Cabezas, Gaspar, 56–7, 191n8

Cabrera, Alonso de, 85, 140 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro, 80 Calvo, Juan, 41, 43, 45, 46, 76, 128 Calzado, Joan, 49 camisa (chemise), 57, 89 Campo de Montiel, El, 149 Cañízares, María de, 159–60 cannibalism, 4, 42 Carbajal, María de, 162 Carcazedo, Miguel de, 38 Cárdenas, Gabriel de, 159, 223n78 Carmichael, Ann G., 4 Carranza, Bartolomé de, Archbishop, 27, 153, 212–13n15, 213n16 Casa, Francisco de la, 59 Casa, Joan de la, 59 Castilla, Isabel de, 159 Castillo, Diego del, 155–6 celibacy, 105, 114, 115, 215n32 censos (emphyteutic leases), 125, 148, 221n46 Cerba, Dominga de, 14 Cerda y Mendoza, Juan de la, 129 Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de, 25, 35; Don Quixote, 23, 83, 113, 208n22; El casamiento engañoso, 30, 32, 76, 80 charity and poor relief. See under poverty charivari, 80, 201n46 Chaves, Diego de, 49, 57, 65, 66 children: adoption of, 86, 115–16, 157–8, 205n71; hospital treatment for pox, 79, 89, 115, 205–6n38 china root, 102 Church of Our Lady of Hope (Toledo), 39 Cisneros, Alonso de, 196n9 Cisneros, Francisco de, 155 clerics: celibacy for, 111, 115; condemnation of women, 80; as

Index 253 hospital administrators, 94, 98; pox infections of, 60, 107–8, 127t, 130–1; sexuality of, 106–7, 111 clothing: colours of, 200n34; fabrics for, 72, 73t, 197n12; fashion trends, 23–4, 34–5, 36–7; hospital garments, 57, 89; hospital records of, 72, 82–7, 196n9; image projected by, 70–2; pox contagion from, 200n37; ragged or valueless garments, 72t. See also silk garments and cloaks; wool garments Cobisa, 85 Colodrero, Miguel de, 61–2 communities: and health care, 4, 173n14; impact of pox infection on, 19–20; institutions and resources of, 156–8, 165, 168; role of Hospital de Santiago in Toledo community, 148–51 conduct manuals, 80, 109, 112, 214n23 confession, 46, 90–1, 96 confraternity of pox sufferers, 23, 161–2 consumer culture, 73, 81, 84–6, 203–4n59 contagion of pox: ambiguity surrounding, 109–10, 121–2; assumptions and claims about, 50–4, 78, 109–10, 121–2, 200n37; broad understanding of, 118, 122, 213n16; with “chaste” individuals, 78–9, 110–11, 121; with children, 105, 115; fear of, 50–1, 121, 159; legal regulations concerning, 52; “miraculous” protection from, 51–2; “prevented” or “cured” by sex, 116–17; between spouses, 79–80, 105, 115–16, 142, 158–60

contagious diseases, 42, 52 convalescence (after hospital treatments), 38, 95, 128–9 convents. See nuns and convents conversos, 30, 226n33 Córdoba, Juan de, 115, 157 Cortés, Hernán, 226n35 Council of Military Orders (Madrid), 145–6, 167, 206–7n10 Council of Trent. See under Roman Catholic Church Counter-Reformation. See under ­Roman Catholic Church courtiers and libertines, 22–8, 108, 137, 140, 167, 180n17 Crespo de Moya, Tomas, 60 Cruz, Francisco de la, 114, 215n34 Cruz, María de la, 195n3 Cruz de Amenabar, Isabel de la, 204n59 Cuerva, 63 Cuevas, Diego de las, 65 Ciudad Real, 58 curability of pox. See under physicians and early modern medical knowledge death (from pox), 3, 39–40, 99 Delgada, Gabriela, 118 Díaz, Catalina, 219n18 Díaz, María, 206n1 Díaz del Castillo, Bernal, 226n35 Díaz de la Isla, Ruy, 75; on contagion of pox, 50, 53, 75; on hospitals for pox sufferers, 8; on mercury treatments, 43; on spread and severity of pox, 22 Díaz de Vivar Gómez de Sandoval y Mendoza, Rodrigo, Duke of the Infantado, 29

254 Index dietary requirements. See food and dietary regimes disease (general): ambiguity surrounding, 108–9, 121; early modern conceptions of, 106, 116; patient-centred histories of, xi–xii, 5, 169; and sexuality, 108–9; state mobilization against, 4, 173n14 dowries and dowry contracts: archival records relating to, 9, 18; bequests and lotteries for, 70–1, 85–6, 156, 158–60, 223n78, 227n45; clothing detailed in, 195–6n4; as incentive with pox infection, 120–1; legal arrangements with, 142–3. See also marriage dropsy, 41 Duden, Barbara, 15 Durán, Ana, 142 Eamon, William, 4 economic and financial issues: consumer culture, 73, 81, 84–6, 203– 4n59; economic decline in Spain, 6, 71, 73, 125–6, 149, 153, 209n31; financial impact of pox infection, 85, 129–31, 164; financial resources of Hospital de Santiago, 63, 67, 148–9, 150, 152, 223n4, 224nn7, 12; medical expenses, 129–30 El Viso, 138 elephantiasis, 41 emaciation, 127 employment. See work and employment England: court records, 15; pox sufferers in, 4, 5, 30, 35, 79, 97, 179n4, 224–5n16, 225n29 Enriquez, María, 191n63 Escobar, Josepha, 65

Escobar, Juan de, 194n42 Espinosa, Tomás de, 159–60 fabrics. See under clothing families: and lineage, 26, 44, 124, 144, 166–7; and pox contagion, 52; responses to pox sufferers, 14, 124, 134–9, 167; Spanish family structure, 133–4; support provided by, 123–5, 137, 139, 140–3, 168 farmers and agricultural workers, 73, 130–1 fashion trends, 34–5, 36–7 female hospital patients. See women Ferdinand, king of Spain, 8–9 Fernández, Juan, 119, 141, 163–4 Fernández, Pedro, 119, 120, 141 Fernández de Avilés, María, 127, 219n19 Fernandez de Madrid, Alonso, 219n18 Fernández del Saz, Matías, 134 Fernel, Jean, 39, 43 financial issues. See economic and financial issues Flores, María, 118 Foa, Anna, 4 food and dietary regimes (for pox sufferers), 45, 66, 95–6, 103, 152, 208–9n29 foundling hospital. See Hospital de Santa Cruz Fracastoro, Girolamo, 40 Fragoso, Juan, 194n50 France and French attitudes: French nationals at Hospital de Santiago, 58–9; hospitals and pox treatment, 97, 194n46; Madame D’Aulnoy’s memoirs, 28–9; and siege of Naples, 3, 42

Index 255 French, Roger, 3, 175n15, 187n8 French disease. See venereal disease friars. See clerics Frutos, Juan de, 70 Fuensalida, Gaspar de, 226n40 Fuente, Juan de la, 128–9 galán, 23–5, 28 Galenic medicine. See humoural and Galenic theories of medicine Galicia, 14, 58–9, 203n52, 212n12 Galves, Pedro de, 156 Gamero, Juan, 156 García, Agueda, 223n78 García, Catalina, 38–9, 40, 44 García, Francisca, 159 García de Cifuentes, Fernando, 135–6 García de Cifuentes, Julián, 135–6, 196n9 García Ruipérez, Mariano, 217n54 General Hospital (Valencia), 8, 76, 187n13, 225n16 Germany: Blatterhaus in Augsburg, 3, 4, 40, 43, 175n17, 225n16; hospitals in, 4, 43, 58 Gómez, Mari (wife of Joan Amador), 13 Gómez, María (wife of Juan de Córdoba), 115, 157 Góngora, Luis de, 80 gonorrhea, 3, 171n2 González, Catalina, 204n66 González, Maria, 77 Gonzalez, Marina, 199n30 González, Micaela, 120–1 González, Simón, 120 Granada, 8, 60 Greco, El (Doménikos Theo­ tokópoulos), 155

guaiac (holy wood): as alternative to mercury, 43, 101; combined with mercury, 103; effectiveness of, 102; literary references to, 36, 79; physicians views of, 4, 116; preparations made with, 101, 149, 210n50 guarantors: family members as, 134–5, 155; friends as, 155–6; pox sufferers as, 162, 226n40; support given by, 12–13, 131–2 Guevara, Fray Antonio de, 61 Gutiérrez, Juan, 59 Gutiérrez, María, 85, 204n67 Gutiérrez, Petronila, 10 Guzmán, María de, 79, 201n40 Guzmán, Pedro de, 136 Guzmán de Alfarache, 35–6, 76–7, 199n28 hair loss (baldness, alopecia): with chronic pox, 39, 42, 43, 102, 161; as cultural shorthand for pox, 31–3, 201n39; obscured by head coverings, 34–5; and plucked eyebrows, 36 Hayton, Darin, 4 health care (general): ambiguous attitudes to, 106; and moral reform, 207nn11–12; in rural areas, 62–3, 67; state measures for, 4, 173n14 Henderson, John, 3, 175n15, 187n8 Hentschell, Roze, 4 heresy, 51, 140, 153 Hermoso, Juan Joseph, 159 Hernández, Francisco, 194n50 Herrera, Mariana, 41 Hewlett, Mary, 4 Hildago, Lucas, 29 holy wood. See guaiac

256 Index honour. See reputation and honour Hôpital Dieu (Paris), 97 Horozco, Sebastián de: on baldness, 31, 34, 216n46; on charivari, 201n46; on dress and public image, 23–4, 180n9; on galán, 24–5; on marriage, 117; on pox confraternity, 23, 161–2; on pox contagion, 53; pox infection of, 79, 201n45; on rape, 113; on women, 24–5, 35, 77, 79, 86, 112, 113, 180n9 Hospital del Bálsamo (Toledo), 41, 95 Hospital de la Caridad (Talavera de la Reina), 63 Hospital del Espíritu Santo (Seville), 8 Hospital de Misericordia (Toledo), 204n66 Hospital de Nuestra Señora del Amor de Dios (Madrid), 8 Hospital del Rey (Toledo), 41–2, 74, 198n18, 224–5n16 Hospital of San Salvador (Seville), 8 Hospital de Santa Cruz (foundling hospital, Toledo), 86, 157–8, 205n71 Hospital de Santiago (Toledo): administration of (see under Military Order of Santiago); admission record book (1654–65), 9, 48–9, 55, 72, 78–9, 82–7, 196n9; admission rules and procedures, 16–17, 48–9, 68–9, 70–87; charitable and povertycentred mandate, 68, 88–9, 144–5, 151–3; clerics and employees at, 60, 94, 98, 147, 149–51; guest quarters, 60; as “hospital de la folga” (party hospital), 201n39; income and resources, 63, 67, 148–9, 150, 152, 223n4, 224nn7, 12; lawyers for, 145, 149, 223n3; location of , 17, 74, 83; and Our Mother of Piety

(Magdalene house), 76, 77, 78, 112; physicians and medical staff, 65–6, 149, 150, 186n4; prostitution associated with, 76–7; “public” aspect of treatment at, 74–6, 83, 107, 139–40; regulations of, 43–4, 47; reputation of, 67–8, 99–100, 152; role in community of Toledo, 148–51; specialization of, 8–9; spiritual and moral reform mission, 90–1, 97–9, 149, 153, 207n12; two-week treatment routine at, 65–6, 88–104; wards and furnishings, 92–4. See also patients Hospital Santísima Trinidad (Torrijos), 63 hospitals (general): charitable aims of, 90–1, 95; incurabili hospitals, 58, 74, 97, 196n10; for pilgrims and wandering poor, 62–3; pox care in, 8, 40–1, 47, 74–5, 187n13; reforms under Ferdinand and Isabel, 8–9; in rural areas, 62–3; specialization in, 193n31; in Toledo, 144. See also specific institutions humanism and humanists, 112, 116, 207n11 humoural and Galenic theories of medicine: diet regimes based on, 95–6; and pox contagion, 110; and pox recrudescence, 117; pox treatment based on, 3, 4, 40–3, 45, 100; and spiritual health, 91. See also physicians and early modern medical knowledge Hurtado, Luis, 216n49, 227n48 Hurtado de Mendoza, Diego, 144–5 Illescas, 59 incurabili hospitals, 58, 74, 97, 196n10

Index 257 Inquisition (Spanish Inquisition): accusations of, 24, 53, 77, 199– 200n30; autos de fe, 7; familiars of, 138; records of, 14, 27; sambenito for penitents of, 27, 181n23; in Toledo, 67, 109, 138, 166, 196n9, 212n15; trials of, 111, 199–200n30, 212n15. See also Roman Catholic Church Isabel, queen of Spain, 8–9 Italy: attitudes to pox in, 4, 30, 187n17, 207n12; hospitals and pox treatment in, 43, 58, 97, 196n10; pox outbreak in, 3, 42, 97; Rome, 4, 58, 144, 196n10 Izquierdo, Pedro, 162 Jews and Jewish ancestry, 30–1, 44, 124, 154 Jiménez, Juan, 12 Jiménez Tirado, Isabel, 70–1, 74, 81, 85, 88–90, 195n2, 196n6, 206nn1–2 joint pain and broken bones (with pox), 10, 39, 65, 100, 102, 129, 132–3, 161, 164 judicial records, 14–15 Jütte, Robert, 4 Kleinman, Arthur, 15 Lalaing, Antoine de, 76 land ownership, 119–20, 140–2 lawyers, 145, 149, 223n3 Leiva, Juan de, 60 León, Andrés de: on patients’ posttreatment behaviour, 46, 91; on pox contagion, 53, 109–10; on pox curability, 43, 49; on pox symptoms, 127–8 leprosy, 41, 52, 153, 193n31 Lerma, Duke of, 23, 26

libertines. See courtiers and libertines lineage certificates, 154–5 Lira y Sotomayor, Luis de, 217n5 Livingstone, Julie, 15, 169 Loaisa, Luis de, 162 Loarte, Antonio de, 162 Lobera, Luis de, 25, 43 Lomas, Alonso de, 59 London: court records in, 15; hospitals and pox treatment in, 35, 79, 97, 179n4, 225nn16, 29; poverty in, 5 Lope de Vega, Félix, 25, 35, 80 López, Diego (author), 117 López, Diego (nurse assistant), 150 López, Maria Lorenza, 159, 211n4 López Cavezuelo, Juan, 118, 191n8 López Mejía, Diego, 151 López Pinna, Pedro, 45, 96, 101–3, 208n20 López de Ribadeneyra, Pedro, 48 López Terrada, María Luz, 4, 181–2n24 López de Úbeda, Francisco: La pícara Justina, 27, 30, 31, 78, 140, 160–2, 182n25, 201n39, 213n16 López de Villalobos, Francisco, 75, 213n16 Losa, Fernán, 224n7 Losada, Ignacio de, 68–9 Lozana andaluza, La, 30, 36, 76 Lucca, Italy, 30 Luna, Antonio, Lord of Carrascal, 57 Luther, Martin, 115 Machado, Domingo, 215n38 Madrid: court records for, 15; Hospital de Nuestra Señora del Amor de Dios, 8; pox patients from, 58, 59, 77; royal court in, 28,

258 Index 51, 59; Toledo compared to, 6, 23, 125–6. See also Military Order of Santiago Magán, 129 Magdalene houses, 76, 77, 78, 112 makeup, 35–7, 184–5n53 male hospital patients. See men marriage: and adultery, 31, 79–80; vs celibacy, 115; as critical partnership, 142, 158–60; false promises of, 24, 113; for female patients, 117–18, 159–60; for male patients, 105, 118–21, 158–9; marital status of hospital patients, 108t; marriage dispensations, 118; pox contagion with, 80, 105–6, 117, 121, 142, 159; of pox sufferers, 17–18, 114–22, 142–3, 158–60; reasons for, 115–17, 158–60; and socioeconomic class, 83–4. See also dowries and dowry contracts Martí, Juan: Guzmán de Alfarache, 76 Martín, Andrés, 10 Martín, Miguel, 162 Martín, Pascual, 9–12, 13, 16 Martínez, Antonio, 56 Martínez, Tomás, 13 Martínez Izquierdo, Thomas, 44–5 Martínez de Mata, Francisco, 215n37 Martz, Linda, 144, 218n10, 227n48 Mateos, Juan, 130 Mazarambroz, 118 McGough, Laura J., 5, 198n17 medicine and medical knowledge. See physicians and early modern medical knowledge Meléndez, Pedro, 163–4 men: abusive husbands, 80; clothing fabrics for, 73t; courtiers (galanes) and single young men, 22–8, 105,

108–9, 135–7, 140, 167, 180n17; demographics of male hospital patients, 58–61, 58t, 72t, 73t, 108t, 127t; insults for, 200n30; marriage after pox treatment, 105, 118–21, 158–9; men’s wards at Hospital de Santiago, 81, 90–3; pox as celebration of sexual conquest, 22–6, 25, 105, 108–9; sexual freedom of, 24, 112–13 Méndez de Loyola, Pedro, 25 mercury and mercury treatments: applied by nurses and assistants, 81, 150; combined with other substances, 102; dietary regimes with, 103; in makeup, 37; milder alternatives to, 43, 65, 100–1; ointment form, 38, 65–6, 81, 99–101, 102–3, 150, 194n46; and pale complexions, 36–7; physicians’ views on, 4, 43, 65, 102–3, 194n46; pill form, 186n2, 194n46; salivation with, 65, 100, 186n2; seasons for, 208n20 Military Order of Santiago: administration of Hospital de Santiago, 68–9, 94, 98, 145–50, 167, 206– 7n10, 221n49; convent in Uclés, 145, 223n4; knights of, 6, 60, 124, 144, 166, 217n5; Ocaña held by, 56; royal control of, 8–9 Millán, Magdalena, 163 Mocejón, 7, 114, 215n35 Molina, Melchor, 132–3 Molina, Tirso de, 79 Molinos, Los, 215n32 Montes de Toledo, 7, 61 Morante, Eugenio de, 146 Morante, Francisco Antonio de, 145–6 Moreno, Joan Manuel, 68 Mosquera de Figueroa, Cristóbal, 22

Index 259 Nambroca, 61 Navarro, Antonio, 205n75 networks of support (for pox sufferers), 13, 119–21, 154–60, 164 Niño de Guzmán, Don Gabriel, 128–9 nobility: households in Toledo, 23; pox as a disease of, 26–9, 153, 166; silk cloaks worn by, 84 notarial records, 9–10, 11, 12, 14–15, 20 Nuñez, Hernán, 112 nuns and convents, 70–1, 107, 211–12n11, 213n20, 227n48; San Pablo convent, 120, 163; Santa Clara convent, 120, 134, 162–3. See also women nurses, 81, 92, 93–4, 149, 150, 186n4 Ocaña, 56, 63, 216n38 Olivares, Count-Duke of, 73 Olivares, María de, 84–5, 132, 204n65 Ontiveros, Clara de, 38 Order of Santiago. See Military Order of Santiago Ortiz, Felipa, 123, 124 Ortiz, Leonor, 123, 124 Ortiz de Cisneros, María, 123 Ortiz de Soto, Luis, 123–4, 217n2 Ortiz Vidal y Rivadeneira, Pedro, 119, 141 Our Mother of Piety (Magdalene house, Toledo), 76, 77, 78, 112 Pablona, Ana, 156 Pacheco, Juan, Lord of Montalbán, 57 Pacheco de Rojas, Ana de, 49, 57, 191n10 Palacios, Petronila (patient from Ajofrín), 203n53

pale complexions, 36–7 palo santo, 149 Palomino, Antonio, 146 Pantaleón de Ribera, Anastasio, 25–7, 66, 100 patient admissions book (Hospital de Santiago): clothing descriptions in, 72, 82–7, 196n9; patient information in, xi, 48–9, 55, 78–9; significance of, 9 patients (of Hospital de Santiago): agency of, 89, 100–1, 103–4; celibacy for, 105; centrality of treatment for, 17; charitable donations from, 39; children as, 79, 89, 115, 205–6n38; clerics as, 60, 107–8, 127t; contacts and relationships among, 23, 160–5; demographics of, 17, 57–61, 58t, 70–87, 72t, 73t, 107, 108t, 127t, 206nn1–3; experiences and stories of, 9–10, 169, 175n17; by gender, 58t, 72t, 73t, 108t, 127t; networks of support for, 13, 119–21, 154–60, 164; “poor patients,” 88–9, 151–3, 167; post-treatment behaviour and returns to hospital, 17, 45–50, 91, 114; residence of, 58–61, 58t, 72t, 73t, 108t; from rural areas, 61–3, 82–3; secrecy or discretion for, 59–60; socioeconomic sectors of, 20, 58–61, 127t; from Toledo, 56–9, 58t, 63–9, 72t, 73t, 81–7, 108t, 109; travellers to Toledo, 59–60; wealthy patients, 60, 65–9, 89, 118–21, 127, 151–3. See also Hospital de Santiago Peláez, Eugenia, 204n66 Pérez, Juan, 118, 216n50 Pérez, Miguel, 156

260 Index Pérez, Pedro, 226n40 Perez, Simón, 160 Pérez, Toribio, 55 Pérez de Montalván, Juan: No hay vida como la honra, 27 Pérez de Moya, Juan, 136 Pérez de Úbeda, Agustin, 59 Peru, 166, 226n35 physicians and early modern medical knowledge: assumptions about pox contagion, 50–4, 78, 109–10, 121–2, 200n37; assumptions about pox treatability, 32, 40, 43–4, 45–50, 116–17, 121; interviews with patients, 101, 103; knowledge and descriptions of pox, 21–2, 25, 75–6; prostitutes examined by physicians, 75–6, 206n4. See also humoural and Galenic theories of medicine La pícara Justina. See under López de Úbeda, Francisco Pintor, Pere, 4, 187n8 Pizarro González, Francisco, 226n35 plague. See bubonic plague Ponce Cárdenas, Jesús, 25, 26 Porter, Roy, 5, 174n16 poverty: charity and poor relief, 125, 130, 144–5, 151–3, 207n11; moral vs pecuniary poverty, 153; and necessity of work, 125–7, 128; “poor patients,” 88–9, 151–3, 167; of pox sufferers, 38–9, 55, 64, 68–9, 151–3; shamefaced poor, 70–1, 82; silk garments and, 82–3 power of attorney, 142–3 pox. See venereal disease Prado, Simón, 48 premarital sex. See under sexuality priests. See clerics

prostitutes: families of, 137; Magdalene houses for, 76, 77, 78, 112; medical examinations and treatment for, 4, 75–6, 89, 206n4; pox identified with, 29–31, 54, 75–7, 153; silk forbidden for, 73; women accused as, 77, 199– 200n30; yellow mantillas for, 77. See also brothels; women Protestantism, 111, 115 Puebla de Montalbán, La, 115, 157, 194n50 purgatives and purging, 38, 42, 43, 65, 93, 98, 101 Quevedo, Francisco de, 25, 29, 30, 35, 80 Ramírez, Francisco, 51–2 Ramírez de Dueñas, Gaspar, 217n5 Ramos, Domingo, 205n71 Ramos, Isabel, 205n71 Ramos, Juan de, 56 rape, 33, 113 reputation and honour, 70–87; for adoption of foundlings, 157–8; as ambivalent or malleable, 202n50; for dowry lotteries, 85; of families, 133–8; gendered conceptualizations of, 155; impact of pox on, 16, 59–60 research studies: on disease and chronic illness, 15–16; patientcentred histories of disease, xi–xii, 5, 169 Rico, Pedro, 41 Rio, Nicolás del, 120, 162–3 Rivera, Magdalena de, 134 Robles Gorbalán, Bernardo de, 217n5 Rodríguez, Ana, 41

Index 261 Rodríguez, Catalina, 162 Rodríguez, Elena, 74–5, 198n18 Rodríguez, Eugenia, 117 Rodríguez, Francisco, 59 Rodríguez, Inés (wife of Alonso de Lomas), 59 Rodríguez, Inés (wife of Francisco Quirós), 117 Rodríguez, Magdalena, 49 Rodríguez, María, 142 Rodríguez de Gracia, Hilario, 176nn22–3, 218n6 Roman Catholic Church: CatholicProtestant debates, 111, 115; Council of Trent and Tridentine reforms, 107, 109, 111–13, 211–12n11, 212n12; CounterReformation, 110–11, 115, 212n15, 213n20; friars, nuns, and priests in Toledo, 211n8; sacraments in Hospital de Santiago, 90, 93, 98, 99; Toledo Cathedral, 124, 218n6, 226n40. See also Inquisition Romani, Andrés de, 45, 154–5 Rome, 4, 58, 144, 196n10 ropa larga (hospital robe), 89 Roraba, Maria, 216n38 Ruano, Juan, 114 Rubio, Juan, 41 Ruiz, Catalina, 204n65 Ruiz de Salcedo, Francisco, 221n47 rural areas: economic crisis in, 126; health care in, 62–3, 67; hospital patients from, 61–3, 82–3; premarital sex in, 107, 113; Toledo hinterland, 6, 58, 61–3 St Bartholomew’s Hospital (London), 97, 225n16 Salas de Ribera (Gallicia), 166

Salazar, Eugenio de, 31–2 Salinas, Joan de, 127, 219n19 salivation. See under mercury and mercury treatments San Giacomo hospital (Rome), 58 San Juan Bautista Hospital (Toledo), xii, 57 San Pablo convent (Toledo), 120, 163 Sánchez, Alonso, 141–2 Sánchez, Ana, 140–1 Sánchez, Antonio, 61 Sánchez, Pedro, 156 Sánchez de Palencia, Juan, 72, 139 Sánchez de Palencia, Roque, 139 Sánchez Simón, Juan, 120–1 Sandoval, Baltasar Moscoso y, Archbishop, 114, 163 Sandoval, Prudencio de, 51, 226n35 Santa Clara convent (Toledo), 120, 134, 162–3 Santa Epifanía chapel (Toledo), 57 Santa María Magdalena parish (Toledo), 146–7 Santiso y Neira, Alonso, 132 sarsaparilla: as alternative to mercury, 43, 101; combined with mercury, 103; preparations of, 102, 149, 210n50; use for pox treatments, 26, 36, 101, 102, 181–2n24 Schleiner, Winfried, 5, 198n21 Segura, Juan de, 129–30 Serrano, Antonia, 77 Serrano, Francisco, 224n15 Serrano, Maria, 215n38 servants: for prestigious families, 119, 219n18; salaries for, 21, 70, 85, 157, 195n3 Seville, 8 sexuality: adultery, 31, 79–80; ambiguity and mixed messages

262 Index with, 108–9, 111–13, 121–2; for clerics, 106–7, 111; linked with sin, 75; male sexuality and conquest, 25, 112–13; pox “cured” by sex, 116–17; for pox sufferers, 17–18, 213n16; premarital sex, 61–2, 78, 107, 113, 183n38, 200n36, 212n12; rape, 33, 113 shame (with pox infection), 27–8, 75, 78, 106, 109, 137–40 shamefaced poor, 70–1, 82 Siena, Kevin, 4, 5, 179n4, 198n17, 225n29 silk garments and cloaks: face covering and anonymity with, 34, 84, 86; image and status of, 70–2, 73–4, 82–5, 197n12; legal restrictions on, 73, 83; prices of, 197n12; silk industry in Toledo, 24, 44, 73, 180n9, 189n30; vs wool clothing, 10, 56, 73t, 84, 86, 118; worn by women for hospital admission, 70–2, 82–7. See also clothing Silva y Guzmán, María de, 29 sin: laziness associated with, 136; pox associated with, 16, 26–7, 47, 75–6, 91, 96–9, 153, 225n29 smallpox, 133 socioeconomic sectors: blamed for prostitution and pox, 137; dowry lotteries and, 85; of hospital patients, 127t; and marriage, 83–4; reach of pox across class, gender, and age, 22–3, 53–4, 69; and silk garments, 82–7; and wealthy pox sufferers, 60, 65–9, 118–21, 127 solimán paste, 37 Solomon, Michael Ray, 15 Soria, Lorenzo de, 130–1 Soria, Úrsula de, 59

Soto, Joseph de, 123 Soto y Zurita, Agustín de, 85 Stein, Claudia, 3, 4, 40, 175n17, 225n16 Suárez de Herrera, Nicolás, 44 symptoms, signs, and stages of pox, 21–37; after hospital treatment, 45–50; ambiguity surrounding, 40–2, 132–3, 167–8; and bodily adornment, 35–7; chronic stages and conditions, 6, 12–13, 18–20, 46, 47–50, 129–32; fatigue and weakness, 127–8; final stages and death, 3, 39–40, 99; invisibility of, 158; moral corruption implied by, 132; periods of remission, 44, 131–2; physicians’ knowledge of, 21–2, 40–2; and pox sufferers’ ability to work, 127–32; visibility and strategies for hiding, 33–7, 84, 117 syphilis, 3, 22, 171n2 Tagus River, 6, 74, 108 Talavera, Catalina de, 9 Talavera de la Reina, 63 tapadas, 84, 86 Terán, Clemente, 48 Teresa of Ávila, 211–12n11 Terrada, López, 181–2n24 tocas, 34 Toledo: demographics of, 6–7, 118, 211n8, 227n48; economic and demographic decline, 23, 71, 73, 125–6, 153, 209n31, 218n10; gender imbalance in, 118, 227n48; Hurtado de Mendoza’s praise of, 144–5; location of, 6–7; New Gate of Bisagra, 4, 7, 223n4, 224n7; notarial records for, 9, 14–15 Toledo, Francisco de, 199n30

Index 263 Toledo Cathedral, 124, 218n6, 226n40 Toledo hinterland, 6, 58, 61–3 tooth loss, 38, 65, 100, 117, 186n2 Tornero, Pedro, 131–2 Torrella, Gaspar, 4, 42–3, 187n8 Torres, Pedro de, 43, 116–17, 127, 186n2 Torrijos, 63 transmission of pox. See contagion of pox travellers: in the Americas, 155; in Toledo, 6, 59–60, 93 treatments for pox, 17, 88–104; common experience for all patients, 18, 88; convalescence after, 38, 49– 50, 66, 95, 128–9; dietary regimes, 66, 95–6; hospital care limited to skin lesions, 129; at hospital vs home, 66–7; length and side effects of, 65–6, 88, 99–100, 164; medical aspects of, 99–104; patients’ agency in, 103–4; patients’ responsibility for, 45–50; public vs private, 74–6, 83, 139–40; spiritual or moral aspects of, 45–50, 90–1, 96–9; variety and range of, 100–2. See also physicians and early modern medical knowledge; specific treatments and substances urban areas: poverty in, 70–1; pox as an urban disease, 17, 61–2; pox sufferers from, 61–3, 82–3, 154–65; premarital sex in, 107 Valdivielso, José de: Del Ángel de la Guarda, 84 Valencia General Hospital, 8, 76, 187n13, 225n16 Valera, Luis de, 21, 23

Valle, Manuela del, 44–5 Vargas, Juan de, 148 Vargas, María de, 137–8 Vega, Lope de, 25, 35, 80 venereal disease (French disease, pox): ambiguity and fluidity of, 41–2, 167–8; appearance and epidemic nature of, 3–4, 22, 31, 32, 42, 75, 97, 122; cultural markers or models, 4–5, 16, 75–6; as disease of the Other, 30–1, 153, 182n25; early modern conceptions of, 22–31, 116; historiography on, 5; local definitions of, 3; names for, 3, 62; political responses to, 7–8; social contexts for, 15–17, 20, 167–70; as urban vs rural, 17, 61–2 Venice, 30 Vermeja, Manuel de la, 131 Vida y hechos de Estebanillo González, La, 100 Vidal, Pedro, 120 Villalobos, Juan de, 49 Villegas, Diego de, 108 Vives, Juan Luis, 51, 116, 137 Weber, Alison, 213n20 Weiner, Jack, 201n45 Wiesner, Merry E., 199–200n30 wigs, 34–5 witchcraft, 140 women: abusive husbands of, 80; ­accused of prostitution, 77, 199– 200n30; and adultery, 31, 79–80; blamed for pox, 75–6, 92; classified in patient admissions book, 78–9; clothing for hospital admission, 70–87; cultural models for pox sufferers, 75–6; demographics of female hospital patients,

264 Index 58t, 70–87, 72t, 73t, 108t, 127t, 206nn1–3; false promise suits, 24, 113; girls adopted from foundling hospital, 86, 157–8, 205n71; “good” vs “bad,” 112–13; maidens (doncellas), 78–9; makeup worn by, 35–7, 184–5n53; marriage after pox treatment, 117–18, 159–60; marriage to pox-infected men, 79–80, 142; married women in hospital, 79–81, 107; medical attitudes to, 92, 93; nuns and convents, 70–1, 107, 211–12n11, 213n20, 227n48; public aspect of pox treatment, 74–6, 83; rape victims, 33, 113; reputation and status, 70–87, 202n50; single women, 78–9, 107–8, 117–18; from Toledo, 81–7; and Toledo’s gender imbalance, 118, 227n48; treated by male nurses, 81; “virtuous maiden” model, 75, 78; women’s ward at Hospital de Santiago, 38,

81, 90–4; “wronged wife” model, 75, 79, 167. See also nuns and convents; prostitutes wool garments, 10, 56, 73t, 84, 86, 118. See also clothing work and employment, 123–43; after hospital treatment, 128–30; impact of pox on ability for, 18, 127–32; necessity of, 125–7, 128; lower wages for pox sufferers, 132; and marriage market, 119–20; labour market and unemployment, 64, 129–30 Yegros, 7, 149, 159, 224nn7, 12 Yepes, Joseph de, 105, 159, 211n4 Zazo, Damiana, 56, 85, 204n67 Zazo, Jusepe, 56 Zocodover square (Toledo), 7, 17, 74, 125

TORONTO IBERIC

Co-­e ditors: Robert Davidson (Toronto) and Frederick A. de Armas (Chicago) Editorial board: Josiah Blackmore (Harvard); Marina Brownlee (Prince­ ton); ­Anthony J. Cascardi (Berkeley); Justin Crumbaugh (Mt Holyoke); Emily Francomano (Georgetown); Enrique Garcia Santo-Tomás (Michigan); Jordana Mendelson (NYU); Joan Ramon Resina (Stanford); Kathleen Vernon (SUNY Stony Brook) 1 Anthony J. Cascardi, Cervantes, Literature, and the Discourse of Politics 2 Jessica A. Boon, The Mystical Science of the Soul: Medieval Cognition in ­Bernardino de Laredo’s Recollection Method 3 Susan Byrne, Law and History in Cervantes’ Don Quixote 4 Mary E. Barnard and Frederick A. de Armas (eds), Objects of Culture in the Literature of Imperial Spain 5 Nil Santiáñez, Topographies of Fascism: Habitus, Space, and Writing in Twentieth-­Century Spain 6 Nelson Orringer, Lorca in Tune with Falla: Literary and Musical Interludes 7 Ana M. Gómez-­Bravo, Textual Agency: Writing Culture and Social Networks in Fifteenth-­Century Spain 8 Javier Irigoyen-­García, The Spanish Arcadia: Sheep Herding, Pastoral Discourse, and Ethnicity in Early Modern Spain 9 Stephanie Sieburth, Survival Songs: Conchita Piquer’s Coplas and Franco’s Regime of Terror 10 Christine Arkinstall, Spanish Female Writers and the Freethinking Press, 1879–1926 11 Margaret Boyle, Unruly Women: Performance, Penitence, and Punishment in Early Modern Spain

12 Evelina Gužauskyte, ˙ Christopher Columbus’s Naming in the diarios of the Four Voyages (1492–1504): A Discourse of Negotiation 13 Mary E. Barnard, Garcilaso de la Vega and the Material Culture of Renaissance Europe 14 William Viestenz, By the Grace of God: Francoist Spain and the Sacred Roots of Political Imagination 15 Michael Scham, Lector Ludens: The Representation of Games and Play in Cervantes 16 Stephen Rupp, Heroic Forms: Cervantes and the Literature of War 17 Enrique Fernandez, Anxieties of Interiority and Dissection in Early Modern Spain 18 Susan Byrne, Ficino in Spain 19 Patricia M. Keller, Ghostly Landscapes: Film, Photography, and the Aesthetics of Haunting in Contemporary Spanish Culture 20 Carolyn A. Nadeau, Food Matters: Alonso Quijano’s Diet and the Discourse of Early Modern Food in Spain 21 Cristian Berco, From Body to Community: Venereal Disease and Society in Baroque Spain