My book, The Basque Seroras: Local Religion, Gender, and Power in Northern Iberia, 1550-1800, was published by Cornell University Press in March 2020. Read some of my previous publications on the seroras here.
The Basque seroras were a category of religious women active throughout northern Iberia during the early modern period. Seroras were church employees, neither nuns nor lay women, hired by the parish and licensed by the diocese to care for church property and assist the priest in a capacity much like a sacristan. The position was prestigious and competitive, and because seroras were uncloistered and took no vows like traditional nuns, the vocation gave these Basque women much more autonomy and local influence than was afforded to women elsewhere in Europe at the time. During their heyday, the seroras numbered in the thousands; every Basque parish employed one, and many had several. Yet, despite their central position in local religious life – and the potential they provide for revising how we think about the social and religious limitations placed on women during the early modern period – the seroras have received almost no historical study.
The seroras are a mechanism for understanding devotion at the local level; they epitomize what it is to talk about lived religion for all early modern people. In the medieval period, men and women experimented with a variety of different methods for finding spiritual fulfillment outside the traditional paths authorized by the Catholic Church. Some of these groups like Franciscans and Poor Clares were rapidly legitimized by the Church and pushed almost immediately into regular institutional forms; others, such as the beguines and the Italian tertiaries, retained a degree of autonomy, operating outside of monastic enclosure, though with some male ecclesiastical oversight. In Iberia, anchorites, beatas, and mystics occupied a central place within Spanish religious practice, while pushing the blurred boundaries of an orthodox religious lifestyle. Following the Council of Trent (1545-1563) and the papal decree Circa Pastoralis (1565), such so-called “third order” female religious groups were suppressed and forced to join traditional (and cloistered) monastic communities. Some individuals managed to evade reforming directives; however, on the whole, early modern religious reforms were intended to limit many of the more expressive forms of female religious life in favor of centralization and standardization. Nevertheless, the seroras managed to survive with little alteration to their vocation well into the eighteenth century.
I contend that even though the Counter Reformation program of centralization and standardization is often characterized as an immediate – and repressive – success, the seroras demonstrate the variability of local enforcement and the ways parishes could successfully press for leniency or reach tacit compromise with authorities. As devout laywomen, who straddled secular and religious spheres, the seroras emerged as catalysts within this process of negotiated reform. Though the seroras did not match up with the reformers’ visions of Reformed Catholicism, localities and diocesan officials recognized their utility and reached compromise to preserve the vocation. Local communities were adept at adopting the language of reform and deploying it effectively to litigate their own interests in diocesan court, essentially promoting a series of local visions of reform. Moreover, as I argue, this process of negotiation was built into the way in which Tridentine Reform was intended to be introduced at the diocesan level. Delegates from the Diocese of Pamplona were well-represented at Trent, and they were well-versed in the justification and parameters of the Catholic Reformation program. Nonetheless, they identified the seroras as allies in reform, rather than obstacles to it. Instead of following a strict vision of Tridentine reform, they compromised on certain aspects of reform such as the seroras, thus setting reform up to succeed through cooperation with localities.