Parergon

Unruly Women explores the interconnections between public theatre, custodial institutions, and transgressive women in early modern Spain. Margaret E. Boyle’s core argument is that women’s performances of penitence and punishment, both on and off the stage, functioned as a social commentary on the moral economy of early modern Spain. A key theme examined in this monograph is that of contradiction. While early modern moralists condemned the representation of female deviance by actresses in popular comedia, revenue generated from these productions directly funded the custodial institutions responsible for the rehabilitation and containment of real-life examples of unruly women.

The book is divided into two parts. Part I examines how gendered performances of penitence and punishment were enacted in the custodial institutions of a magdalen house and a women’s galera (jail). Boyle analyses the various methods employed by these two institutions to rehabilitate deviant women: these included marriage, religious conversion, and both corporal and concealed punishments.

In Part II, consisting of three chapters, the focus shifts from the historical to the theatrical realm. Each chapter examines an early modern Spanish comedia featuring a female protagonist engaged in a non-normative relationship. Each play offered a ‘distinct rehabilitative solution for its protagonists’ unruly behaviour, ranging in severity from marriage to social exclusion, or even death’ (p. 15). Boyle argues that these theatrical dialogues of the ‘shape-shifting widow’ Angela, ‘the back-stabbing girlfriend’ Fenisa, and the ‘amazon-like hunter turned man-hating murderess’ Gila, both informed and reflected the real-life rehabilitative experiences of women off the stage (p. 97). With limited archival material available on the individual women who underwent some form of rehabilitation in an early modern custodial institution, Boyle relies on these theatrical examples to describe the archetypes of the women perceived by society to be in need of reform and the rehabilitative processes that they encountered.

Rather than offering an exhaustive study of it, Boyle’s short 100-page study is intended to spark further inquiry into the interplay between historical and theatrical ‘bad girls’ and their early modern Spanish social context. In her Epilogue, she compares these early modern theatrical representations of transgressive women with the publicised acts of modern female celebrities that are presented to young women as either exempla or cautionary tales. Although brief, Unruly Women offers a rich discussion of [End Page 263] gendered rehabilitative practices and their performative dimensions, both on and off the stage in early modern Spain.