Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 56-07, Section: A, page: 2708.

Co-Directors: Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria; Jacques Lezra.

Perfect Wivess, Other Women: Signs of Adultery and Inquisition in Early Modern Spain explores the extent to which the female body--and the wife's body in particular--was appropriated as a privileged locus upon which to project concerns over the interpretation and misinterpretation of signs and specifically, of signs of Otherness in an inquisitorial and counterreformational context. This conflation between somatic, semiotic and cultural anxieties is understood as a triple displacement that moves, roughly, from the Wife's body, to the Sign's body, to the Other's body. I argue that an early modern construction of the wife's body lends itself as a site for reading this sort of displacement not only because of the fundamental illegibility with respect to adultery (penetration by an-Other) that it encodes, but also as a result of the liminal position vis a vis categories of Same and Other that it is made to occupy, an illegibility and a liminality that could also be used to describe the symbolic body of the cultural Other--and particularly that of a racialized, converso Other.

The first chapter establishes a theoretical and socio-historical framework, based in part on analyses of early modern marriage and Eucharistic treatises and inquisitorial documents, in order to trace this triple movement. The following two chapters attend to these various intersections between somatic and semiotic registers in two early modern Spanish works that explicitly concern themselves with reading and perfecting the wife's body and, moreover, with interrogating its problematic legibility: Fray Luis de Leon's La perfecta casada (1583) and Calderon de la Barca's El medico de su honra (1629). As a kind of epilogue, I turn, in the fourth chapter, to a reading of wives' bodies in Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz's Los empenos de una casa (1683) in order to outline the form that an Americanist version of the intersection between the discourses of race, gender and interpretation might assume.