THE CONGREGATION OF TORDESILLAS: NETWORKS OF FEMALE REFORM

From 1410 onwards, a reformist congregation of nunneries was created around the nunnery of Poor Clares of Santa María la Real de Tordesillas, founded in 1363 by Pedro I and his daughters. During the fifteenth century, this congregation spread over a large part of the territory of the Crown of Castile. The congregation gathered nunneries that wanted to recover the spiritual fervor lost during the crisis of the fourteenth century. This study deals with the links that shaped this monastic network to look into the factors that explain its formation. First of all, we are interested in exploring whether or not women promoted the configuration of the congregation and, if so, if this fact obeyed specific needs that we can study from a gender perspective. The work, still in progress, reviews the impact of power and the links with politics.

Here we show the results of the basic research that has led to select the nunneries that were linked to the network in one way or another. This selection, based on the Atlas Claustra where they are positioned and studied, the corresponding maps have been generated using GIS.