Women and parish liturgy. Lay women's religion in the lordship of the Military Order of Calatrava in rural Castile (15th-16th centuries)

Abstract

This paper analyses some aspects of the religious life of common secular women, neither religious nor wealthy ─a topic rarely addressed in historiography─, living in rural villages of the Calatrava lordship in Castile in the 15th and 16th centuries. Additionally, it studies the attitudes of the hierarchy of the Order of Calatrava towards certain practices in which they were involved. We have selected six points of attention regarding the feminine experience of the parish liturgy: women's very attendance at liturgical ceremonies, their participation in the configuration of the sacred space of the temples, women as objects of segregation and at the same time subjects of socialisation during religious celebrations, women's initiative in the funerary setting, certain signs of Eucharistic devotion and a peculiar form of charity for certain orphan girls exercised by a comendador mayor (major commander) of the Order of Calatrava. Throughout this study, aspects as varied as the feminine taste for dressing statues or the presence of women in the male Monastery of Calatrava emerge.