Elizabeth Rhodes

The Economics of Salvation in El esclavo del demonio

Mira de Amescuas 1605 play El esclavo del demonio represents the passage of a male sinner, Gil, from extreme sin to sainthood, creatively articulating Catholic doctrine regarding free will via the metaphor of slavery. This study traces the texts alliance of the good woman with the slave, the one who lacks her own will, whereas the perfect man realizes his. Gils companion in transgression is the violative character Lisarda, who ultimately sells herself into slavery and then dies of sorrow. In her progression to the perfect slave, Lisarda pays not only for her original sin of disobedience, but the multiple transgressions of Gil as well, and for those payments she is rewarded not with sanctity, but with death. This unbalanced formula for salvation reflects early seventeenth-century versions of the vita of Mary Magdalen. El esclavo del demonio thus constructs the good woman as inherently slavish and thereby highly functional as the expiator of sin, particularly the sins of the men she is understood to have drawn into transgression. (ER)

Perfect Wives, Other Women: Adultery and Inquisition in Early Modern Spain (review)

This book’s title is somewhat misleading, since it treats three literary works in the light of what Dopico Black calls their authors’own Inquisitorial readings of the wife’s body,meaning expression of ideas,anxieties,and epistemology fostered or reflected by the Inquisition in early modern Spain (p. 12). None of the three texts considered represents adultery, sensu stricto; Dopico Black finds, however,that they betray an obsession with adultery,and thereby use the wife’s body as a “transcoder” for many cultural anxieties.