A Woman’s Worth: Liminality, Litigiousness, and Luxury in the Early Modern Iberian Atlantic World

After 1492, the Iberian woman was directly impacted by shifting frontiers; her life, family and identity were often dynamically split across the Atlantic Ocean. With the expansion of the Spanish Empire, the early modern Iberian woman similarly pushed at the boundaries of her body and contested her spatial occupation of society. This woman sent letters to her relatives in the colonies, used “New World” products in her beauty regime and wore newly acquired dyes, fabrics, and jewels from across the Atlantic. She could also file her own will, used to bequeath these new commodities, and in some cases, pursue a lawsuit against those perceived to have infringed against her property. Moving away from concerns with the aristocracy that has dominated early modern Iberian scholarship in recent years, this thesis uses literature, poetry, theatre, painting, letters, judicial lawsuits, and wills, among other sources, to garner a holistic understanding of what was at stake for the proto-bourgeois Iberian woman. In essence, by taking control of their bodies (that is to say, their appearance and their means of communication), proto-bourgeois Iberian women had a very particular kind of agency that only they shared and truly understood as a collective unit. Such a corporeal focus on the early modern Iberian woman will reveal hidden narratives of beauty, commodities, fashion, and law in the Atlantic realm.