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Throughout early modern Europe, one of the most extraordinary royal fund-raising schemes was the seizure and sale of church property to finance foreign wars. The monarchs of Habsburg Spain extended these seizures to municipal property and used the revenue to maintain their empire. They sold charters of autonomy to hundreds of villages, thus converting them into towns, and sold towns to private buyers, thus increasing the number of seigniorial lords. In Hapsburg Spain, therefore, absolutism did not mean centralization. Rather, the kings invoked their absolute power to decentralize authority...

The Mendoza family was one of Spain's most prominent Renaissance dynasties, and this collection, a groundbreaking overview of two hundred years of Spanish history, provides in-depth portraits of eight of its female members. These essays explore the lives of powerful women whose lineage gave them status within a patriarchal society designed to keep women from public life. Each of the influential and literary women discussed in this volume handled her status differently, and their concerns were not dissimilar from the concerns of feminists today: the blurring of the personal and the political,...