Unruly Women: Performance, Penitence, and Punishment in Early Modern Spain examines the performance of women’s public behavior in the historical, literary, and social record of early modern Spain. Arguing that the early modern monarchy’s focus on cleansing and ordering public spaces resulted in an emphasis on rehabilitating women, Margaret Boyle suggests that this process was reflected in public portrayals of the transformation of bad into good women. Her approach situates theater and custodial houses for women as interrelated cultural, economic, moral, and social enterprises, as well as considering the underlying conceptual apparatus and implementation of efforts intended to reorient women away from sin and toward virtue. Public reenactments of repentance offered nuanced portrayals of the reintegration of women whose behavior did not meet hegemonic gender-role expectations.

An introductory chapter offers a sociocultural contextualization of hegemonic norms. It outlines the connection between theater and houses of reclusion for women. The author contends that both “create an exemplary scene, in which private acts of penance are meticulously staged in public settings” (20). The remainder of the book is organized into two sections, on custodial houses for women and representations of women embodied in female characters on stage. Finally, two bilingual appendixes present excerpts from the foundational documents of the houses of reclusion discussed in part 1. The second set is based on Isabel Barbeito Carneiro’s modern edition. Primary documents enrich the book as a whole, although the translations at times seem somewhat awkward.

In part 1, Boyle discusses two custodial houses for repentant prostitutes in Madrid, examining their purposes, similarities, and differences, and then offers a gendered analysis of the practice of reclusion. Although the first, Las Recogidas, was constituted as a magdalen house in 1601, a place to both contain wayward women (prostitutes) and to serve as their spiritual retreat, the document studied in Unruly Women was written in the eighteenth century as a guidebook for and history of the institution. Key to Boyle’s argument here is her explanation of the multiple interpretations of the verb recoger (to enclose, to withdraw) and its noun form, recogimiento, to describe the hybrid public-private spectacle of atonement encouraged by the administrators of Las Recogidas.

The second custodial institution, founded by Magdalena de San Jerónimo, was modeled more like a prison, one whose rules were specifically gendered to offer a more effective model than that of other institutions engaged in the correction of deviant women. Sor Magdalena, who had experience running a magdalen house in Valladolid, achieved success in part because of excellent connections to royalty and aristocracy. Her proposal was addressed to the king, Philip III, who approved the institution; aristocratic women such as Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza also supported the enterprise. Sor Magdalena’s ability to exert influence contributed to the realization of her goals, described in the justification excerpted in this book. It also led to the establishment of similar galeras (prisons) in other cities.

An in-depth discussion of three plays, each authored by a well-known dramatist — Pedro Calderón de la Barca, María de Zayas y Sotomayor, and Luis Vélez de Guevara — constitutes part 2 of Unruly Women. Boyle again focuses on the reenactment of images of the transformation from female sin to virtue. She argues that Calderón’s La dama duende (The phantom lady) envisions an alternative to the conventional behavior prescribed for women, especially widows. The chapter on La traición en la amistad (Friendship betrayed) explores the ways in which Zayas depicts networks of women as both reinforcing conventional norms and enacting the consequences of deviating from social mores. And the chapter on La serrana de la Vera (The hill woman of la Vera) investigates the relationship between women and violence as interpreted by the playwright and enacted on stage. Written for and performed by one of the most celebrated actors of the time, Jusepa Vaca, Luis Vélez de Guevara’s spectacle of her body “achieves an effect that is both cautionary and comic” (80).

Boyle concludes that women played starring roles in the performances of repentance and rehabilitation in theaters and custodial houses, and that the two institutions, reflecting the ways in which economic problems were reinvented as moral concerns in early modern Spain, are thus inextricably linked. Anchored in previous feminist scholarship, her book is original in its examination and juxtaposition of different kinds of written texts: plays, narratives of foundations, and legal documents. Unruly Women provides a strong foundation from which to build a more nuanced understanding of the engendering of early modern women’s roles and behaviors in Spain. This brief volume makes its argument with great clarity; it will be useful to both graduate students and scholars of early modern Spanish cultural studies.