I have written and published on women, the clergy, and religious reform the early modern Basque Country and Navarre. My articles have appeared in Church History and The Sixteenth Century Journal. Please click on the titles below to read the full papers.
o: Clerical Misbehavior, Local Community, and the Limits of Tridentine Reform.” The Sixteenth Century Journal 47, no. 1 (2016): 75-98.As bishops sought to introduce the decrees of the Council of Trent, they encountered mixed reactions and degrees of helpfulness from localities. In Navarre, parishes embraced certain aspects of reform, while roundly rejecting others. As they utilized the expanded Tridentine-era diocesan courts, local communities effectively pushed for a vision of reform on their own terms.
This article examines this process of local appropriation of reform by following the career of the frequently-absent parish priest Don Pedro de Atondo who, over the course of a forty-year tenure, developed a reputation as divinely inspired healer, wandering conjurer, and violent neighbor. Though like diocesan reformers, the parish identified their priest’s behavior as problematic and sought to enact correction, they did not always agree on the methods or urgency needed. The parish’s involvement in reforming their priest shows the extent to which the success of Tridentine reform of the parish clergy depended upon local involvement and cooperation.
ife in the Basque Country and Navarre, 1550-1769.” Church History 85, no. 1 (2016): 40-64.In the early modern period, Basque women who could not or did not want to follow the traditional paths of monasticism or secular marriage had a third option. They could become seroras, or celibate laywomen licensed by the diocese and entrusted with caring for a shrine or parish church. Seroras enjoyed significant social prestige and their work was competitively remunerated by the local community; yet despite their central place in the local religious life of the early modern Basque Country and Navarre, the seroras have attracted almost no historical study. The purpose of this article is twofold: first, it summarizes the social and spiritual context that allowed for women to experiment with the more unorthodox religious vocations like that of the seroras; and secondly, it draws from extensive primary documentation concerning the seroras in order to outline the main features of the vocation, by extension differentiating them from better-known categories of the semi-religious life such as the beguines, Castilian beatas, or Italian tertiaries.
ct, and Local Authority: The Basque Seroras.” In Devout Laywomen in the Early Modern World, edited by Alison Weber, 31-47. New York: Routledge, 2016.This chapter appears as part of Alison Weber’s new edited collection on Devout Laywomen in the Early Modern World. In this chapter, I examine the ways in which seroras and their communities interacted with one another, as well as the kinds of community conflict this special female vocation could provoke.
The volume is published by Routledge, and available on Amazon.