Introduction: Early Modern Women’s Mobility

Summary

Abstract

The new parameters of a global world in the early modern period gave rise to spatial and social mobility for women of different social ranks. This volume investigates the journeys across the Spanish Empire of numerous women who assumed new and often unpredictable roles in distant environments. Breaking with traditional roles, noblewomen exercised political agency as ambassadresses and diplomatic spies or fled to escape political or domestic oppression. Women financiers and merchants traversed the Mediterranean to command financial enterprises in different cities. Others risked transoceanic journeys to the New World, achieving positions of colonial power or cross-dressing as soldiers in support of imperial causes, while nuns founded convents throughout the Spanish Empire as far as Peru, Mexico, and the Philippine Islands.

Keywords: women travelers, female financiers, transatlantic convent foundations, early modern ambassadresses, colonial encomenderas

The vast polycentric territories known as the Spanish Monarchy, expanded through the dynastic policies of the Habsburgs and stretched across the European continent and overseas, gave its diverse subjects, bound by religion and a distant government apparatus, possibilities of movement that allowed for imminent personal and social changes, whether in pursuit of what they thought could lead to their well-being or as an escape from that which they perceived caused them harm. The geopolitical expansion of the early modern period, intrinsically linked to both the emergent humanist understanding of past cultures and the external world, in turn fomenting self-knowledge and interiority, opened increasing opportunities for men and women of all ranks to attain an unprecedented sense of intellectual and physical freedom. While most who traveled did so on account of concrete human needs, the awareness of new worlds so recently within reach nevertheless awakened many to the realization of their potential advancement and transformation.

One of the corollaries of increased mobilization was the consolidation of the Spanish Monarchy under the Habsburg emperor Charles V. With the European counterparts of Flanders and the Aragonese kingdoms of Sardinia, Sicily, and Naples already under his rule, the recently colonized territories further extended the empire's global reach. Yet the human consequences of these migratory movements would weigh heavily on history, as they incited indigenous resistance, material exploitation, and the imposition of slavery, all the while spreading Christianity and promoting cultural transference.