Underwire

Raise your hand if you’ve ever been a teenage girl. Okay, now raise your hand if you’ve ever been a teenage girl in the sixteenth century. 

I haven’t either, but I have a feeling it wasn’t easy. If Cate Blanchett’s two turns as Elizabeth, or the Other Boleyn Girl, or Reign, or the Spanish Princess are any accurate mark (they aren’t, but that’s alright), then the life of a noble girl is beset by restriction of free movement¹ and forging an independent path, constriction of bodily freedom, and abuse. Then, of course, there is the plague, the dungeon, and the looming threat of execution. 

But they had it (relatively) easy. They had status. They had beautiful dresses. They had prestige television dramas (okay, and CW teen dramas made with lesser care) made about the glamorous portions of their lives. They had wealth. They had education. Though women were largely excluded from formal authority, the upper class marm manipulated public memory through matronage of historiography and the production of the written word.² Commendable, but trussed by the privileges of nobility. 

For every patrician girl who relished in wearing the latest styles to banquets and parties, there were dozens of tailors, weavers, lacemakers, and the like who contributed to every outfit directly,³ not to mention the thousands more employed elsewhere in the city and countryside. For every Lisabetta, who “suffers very much as she needs a new pair of slippers,” there is someone who has to make the slippers.⁴ (This arrangement persists today: the garment industry is largely female.⁵ But now they sew at the global periphery, completely out of sight and mind, rather than down the road and to the left.) 

If you’ve ever been a teenage girl (you’ll recall you raised your hand at the beginning of this post), then you know it’s a series of negotiations. Your intelligence against your desire to be liked. Your body against your mind. Your sanity against your desire to be treated with respect.⁶ Your solidarity with your assigned gender or your seat at the lunch table. Not much of that is new. Though the specifics of the negotiations looked different, teenage girls in the sixteenth (and surrounding) centuries also lived trading off independence and acceptance. Worst case scenario, they got neither. 

In this post and the next, I pull out some stories from my personal library. Specifically, from my Herstory shelf. Below you’ll find my retelling of the life of Lucrecia de León, a middle-class-girl-turned-political-prophet (Cyndi Lauper said it best: girls just wanna have fun!). In the next, I’ll share the constructed history of the Casa della Pietà, a Florentine home for abandoned girls. 

Lucrecia’s Dreams⁷ 

Summer 1588: Lucrecia’s dream came true. No victory off Plymouth, surrender off Portland, fireships off Calais, and defeat off Gravelines. The invincible Spanish Armada was anything but. 

In February of that same year, rumors wafted across Madrid about the girl whose dreams foretold the defeat of the Armada. They spread as far as El Escorial, Philip II’s palace. Though false prophecy was only a misdemeanor to the Spanish Inquisition, Lucrecia’s dreams smelled like sedition. Everyone knows that the Spanish Armada will sweep Catholicism back into England, while Elizabeth and her fleet of traitors will sink. Maybe Lucrecia dreamed this impossible nightmare because of something she ate. Probably too much manchego before bed.

But Lucrecia’s dreams aren’t the kind of dreams that turn to haze as you rub the crust from your eyes. They were vivid, agonized by symbols of an empire coming apart at its seams. A feeble young woman, she couldn’t be trusted to understand these dreams alone. So she contracted it out. Recording her dreams (the very ones filled with rivers of blood and blood-red skies⁸) were two men with a shared grudge. 

Don Alonso de Mendoza and Fray Lucas de Allende were supporters of Miguel de Piedrola, a soldier-prophet whose rising popularity could be a useful tool to any disgruntled noble willing to provide him with talking points. Piedrola’s apocalyptic prophecies would be averted, he warned on the streets of Madrid, if el Rey handed some of his power over to a constitutional monarchy. I wonder where he heard that from. Anyway, he was arrested like so many other street preachers for heresy. After pleading insanity (his idea), Piedrola’s career ended when the Holy Office found him to be a false prophet. He left Madrid. Mendoza and Allende needed a new mouthpiece for their political project.     

Enter: the perfect pawn. A teenage girl. Lucrecia de León always had an active imagination. She started having graphic dreams as a child; her first prophecy coming to her when she was twelve. Her father was a solicitor, her mother came from a northern village, and they lived an unremarkable middle class life. While the father worked closely with the Genoese banking community in Madrid, mother and daughter (and daughter and daughter, counting Lucrecia’s sisters) alike took on odd jobs to earn some extra cash. When Lucrecia started gaining a reputation as a seer (she was an incessant yapper, like yours truly), her mother saw dollar signs: it could very well improve her marriage prospects. Plus the alms that came with visits from nobility hoping to hear a good fortune from the pretty dreamer didn’t hurt. 

Madrid was lousy with street prophets in the 1580s. Philip struggled to secure Spain against domestic and foreign enemies, and the first wave of prophets took to their corners to announce the arrival of Spain’s destruction if things did not change. But these street prophets weren’t pretty. They said the right words, but didn’t have that special something. Dissident courtiers needed a mouthpiece. Preferably fair and pliable. Lucrecia dreamed what these men dared not say out loud, and Don Mendoza and Fray Allende wrote it down for distribution. Perfect. 

False prophecy was punished with a slap on the wrist. The Inquisition understood it as a manifestation of mental illness in a time before Lexapro and in-patient care.⁹ Fostering opposition to the crown through seditious dreams that foretold the end of Spain, distributed by a secretive conspiracy of malcontents who lived in caves and wore black scapulars, well, that was no false prophecy. That was treason. Big difference. Lucrecia’s self-expression looked more like self-incrimination. 

From the outset of her trial, Lucrecia was out for herself. She declared, “it is the men who transcribed the dreams who are at fault, because they are men and I am only a woman[…]” Her Inquisitor Lope de Mendoza pitied her, falling for her ditzy act; but he had no true sympathy for her, once remarking to her “you are so beautiful that even a dead man could make you pregnant.” Flattering. Lucrecia was subsequently tortured for her confession, and eventually she was found guilty of blasphemy, falsehood, sacrilege, and sedition. Her sentence was light, and she was banished from Madrid. 

What made Lucrecia’s middle class life so unbearable that she would risk secured comfort? What was she missing? She was pretty, and if her instinct to play into stereotypes of womanhood was any indication then she wasn’t dumb (but as clever as it was, it didn’t work); she was funny too, as evidenced in this anecdote from one of her cellmates:

After listening to her cellmate describe such an object made out of sheepskin, Lucrecia noted that she preferred to make ‘the member out of a special kind of wood, with hinges and nails, and a cover of satin or velvet’ and claimed that she had a friend in Madrid who possessed once.

But even if she had everything, she didn’t have a future. On her daily walk to mass, she must have seen people crowd around the prophets, their voices ringing above the din of the city and commanding the attention of admirers. Why not hers too? 

I think Lucrecia understood she was a commodity: before her 1590 arrest, she secretly pledged herself to Diego de Vitores Texeda. They kept their union a secret. Like a sixteenth-century Korean pop idol, any hint of romantic or sexual attachment could jeopardize her career. Lucrecia was her own stage mom. She portrayed herself as an innocent, unlettered woman in front of the Inquisition. This is a classic move every girl knows. Men treat you better when you pretend to be the right kind of stupid. Men also treat you better when they realize you are useful. And being pretty doesn’t hurt.

---

1. Jacqueline Holler: Flight and Confinement: Female Youth, Agency, and Emotions in Sixteenth-Century New Spain ↩︎
2. Susan M. Johns: Noblewomen, Aristocracy and Power in the Twelfth-Century Anglo-Norman Realm ↩︎
3. Megan Moran: Young Women Negotiating Fashion in Early Modern Florence. ↩︎
4. Can’t fault her though: Lisabetta was only 12. Her mother Mattea wrote several letters imploring Benedetto Spinelli (Mattea’s husband and Lisabetta’s step-father) to procure new slippers and a chain for the girl. She had to have it: all the other young girls in the social circle had gold chains, and not having a gold chain would hurt Lisabetta’s marriage prospects. Mattea enlisted Benedetto’s family members to inquire after the status of the chain. Dowry inventories reveal Lisabetta never got it. (Moran) ↩︎
5. DIRTY THREADS, DANGEROUS FACTORIES: Health and Safety in Los Angeles’ Fashion Industry ↩︎
6. Read any number of blog posts or watch any number of videos from fat girls. Actually, just look around you: men don’t treat women they don’t find attractive with respect. They don’t treat women with respect in general, but if you are ugly, or fat, or god forbid ugly and fat, you get to cycle through the humiliation of ridicule and invisibility. ↩︎
7. All facts from this section come from: Lucrecia’s Dreams (Univ of California Press, 1995). All opining comes from me. It’s up to you to tell the difference. ↩︎
8. Here is a description of a dream from April 17, 1590, as translated and transmogrified by Richard Kagan: “Lucrecia sees a huge woman dressed as a warrior riding a bull through the center of Madrid. The arms of this amazon are covered with snakes, her breasts are bared, and she brandishes a sword to decapitate the children she finds in the streets.” Lucrecia meets the warrior again in a different dream: “On this occasion the woman is unarmed. Holding a lantern and leading a black bear on a leash, she openly laments Spain’s fate, ‘Woe unto Spain, and the Spaniards, the forgotten ones.’ On her back, inscribed in blood, are the words ‘I am the suffering of Spain and I come as a woman to show you the little strength you have to defend yourselves.’” ↩︎
9. Alessandro M. Zuccaroli: Mental Illness and the Spanish Inquisition: A Tale of Uncertainty
   and Suspicion ↩︎