The Ladies of Zamora

[Linehan] paints a vivid and compelling picture of a community whose members found themselves caught up in larger conflicts of authority within the Church and between Church and State. . . . A fine example of the way in which study of the local and the particular opens out on to the wider perspectives of Castilian history and the problems a Church as a whole faced with the rise of the mendicant Orders.-Colin Thompson, Times Literary Supplement"Using exciting archival material about a moral scandal in a convent of Dominican nuns in thirteenth-century Spain, Peter Linehan has produced a fascinating study of problems in the turbulent world of religion and the difficulties facing women trying to make their way in a patriarchal society. What might have been a mere anecdote turns out to be a first-rate in-depth study that sensationally exposes the manners and philosophy of an entire community-as exemplified by the ladies of Zamora."-Jacques Le Goff"The Ladies of Zamora is a lovely book, solidly based on first-hand investigations of documents in Spanish archives. Linehan's prose is disciplined, graceful, and clear, and his scholarship is absolutely first-class."-James A. Brundage, University of KansasThe Ladies of Zamora tells the remarkable story of a scandal that occured in a Spanish convent during the thirteenth century. Peter Linehan, the foremost expert on medieval Spain, expertly sets forth the details of the affair and shows how the effects were felt not just in Spain but throughout Europe, even as far as the papal curia.Established in 1264 by two wealthy sisters, the convent of Las Dueñas soon became the focus of a bitter jurisdictional struggle between the bishop of Zamora and the local Dominican friars to whose order a faction of the sisters hoped to have their convent incorporated. In 1279, the bishop visited the convent and interrogated thirty of the sisters. The records of this inquiry, hitherto unpublished, provide the documentary basis for this book, and the