The Basque Seroras - by Amanda L Scott (Hardcover)

About the Book

"This book looks at a largely overlooked category of devout laywomen called seroras and examines the ways women and their communities crafted surprisingly powerful religious positions for women outside of the confines of monasticism or marriage, right at the time when which we usually think of the Reformations as effectively limiting and tightly controlling female religious experimentation"--

Book Synopsis

The Basque Seroras explores the intersections between local community, women's work, and religious reform in early modern northern Spain. Amanda L. Scott illuminates the lives of these uncloistered religious women, who took no vows and were free to leave the religious life if they chose. Their vocation afforded them considerably more autonomy and, in some ways, liberty, than nuns or wives.

Scott's archival work recovers the surprising ubiquity of seroras, with every Basque parish church employing at least one. Their central position in local religious life revises how we think about the social and religious limitations placed on early modern women. By situating the seroras within the social dynamics and devotional life of their communities, The Basque Seroras reconceives of female religious life and the opportunities it could provide. It also shows how these devout laywomen were instrumental in the process of negotiated reform during the Counter-Reformation.

Review Quotes

Through meticulous archival research, Scott crafts a compelling narrative of the lives of seroras from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. The varied source materials--church records, criminal records, notarial documents, and legal cases--enable her to piece disparate accounts into a detailed history of how the seroras were critical to local religious life and reform

-- "Early Modern Women"

As Amanda Scott's excellent study shows, the seroras reveal how timeless concerns coexist with and extend beyond great institutional change. In this study of seroras, Scott combines discussions pertinent to church reform, alongside institutional, social, and women's history, in order to depict habits similar to but distinct from what many scholars know. This book is an excellent contribution to all those fields, but remains, like the seroras themselves, interesting and valuable as a rare English-language study of early modern Basque life.

-- "Renaissance and Reformation"

Scott's deep dive into three centuries of notarial and diocesan archives is truly impressive. Her writing is crisp and concise. Scott admirably succeeds in reconstructing the history of a group of exceptionally autonomous women who found purpose, esteem, and economic stability in the spaces between the religious and the secular.

-- "Bulletin of Spanish Studies"

About the Author

Amanda L. Scott is Assistant Professor of Early Modern European History at Pennsylvania State University.