Spanish Habsburg Women: Objects, Ritual, and Religion in the Early Modern World
Symposium
María Eugenia de Beer, Queen Isabel de Borbón with Saints Elizabeth of Hungary and Elizabeth of Portugal, frontispiece to Juan de Palafox y Mendoza, “Discursos espirituales” (Madrid: Francisco Martínez, 1641). Newberry Library, Edward E. Ayer Collection
This symposium focuses on the spaces and objects that structured religious life for Spanish Habsburg women—among them queens, regents, widows, infantas and nuns—and reinforced their positions as central figures in a global empire.
Co-organized by the Newberry Library’s Center for Renaissance Studies and the research project AGENART, La agencia artística de las mujeres de la Casa de Austria, 1532-1700, the symposium explores how Habsburg women engaged the culture of material circulation fueled by global expansion and Catholic evangelization, whether through devotional books and prints from the Spanish Netherlands, crosses made of gold from viceregal Peru or holy relics from Christian Japan.
It also examines the ways in which Habsburg women employed sacred material culture in defining and reconstituting their roles at court, in the convent and in public discourse.
This event is free and open to the public, but space is limited and registration in advance is required.