Meredith Dodge and Rick Hendricks have brought together a fascinating and challenging collection of 27 late seventeenth-century letters of doña Gelvira de Toledo, condesa de Galve. These letters are housed in the Sección Osuna of the Archivo Histórico Nacional de Madrid. The condesa wrote the earliest 13 of them while in Castile, to her brother-in-law, don Gregorio de Silva y Mendoza, the marqués de Cenete, duque de Pastrana and del Infantado. The rest, including eight more to don Gregorio, date from her years in Mexico City (1688-1696), when her husband, don Gaspar, conde de Galve (don Gregorio’s younger brother), was viceroy of New Spain. A useful introduction precedes each letter, and the editors’ notes provide the necessary identifications of people, objects, and illnesses. The appendixes include poems to doña Gelvira by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, a list of members of the Galve household who made the trip to Mexico, and a list of those residing in the viceregal residence in 1695. The fourth appendix contains the transcriptions of the Castilian originals, which perhaps would have been better placed on pages facing the translations.
Introductions and notes inevitably frame the reading of documents, and the editors are impressed with the intimacy of doña Gelvira’s letters to her brother-in-law, suggesting that their relationship may have been improper to some degree. The correspondence is labeled “illicit” and doña Gelvira herself as “lovesick.” Too little is known about the condesa to challenge the interpretation.
It is becoming increasingly clear, however, that aristocratic women played a significant role in shaping a Castilian great nobility cohesive enough to sustain its disproportionate control of the kingdom’s economic resources and the political direction of a global empire. When the ruling group resided in the same city, such cohesiveness was maintained principally by mutual visitations, the organization of which was usually in female hands. But when the ruling group was geographically dispersed, written correspondence had to serve as the major linking vehicle, and this collection perhaps reveals that the role of women may have been significant here as well.
Although the failure to translate kinship terms precisely undercuts the letters’ prevailing tone, they are crowded with the stock phrases of intimacy, obligation, clientage, mutual exchange, and assistance one would expect in a rhetoric of social unification. A brief review is not the place to debate the validity of such a reading. To establish what was conventional in aristocratic correspondence would require the comparison of a variety of surviving personal letters. The editors hoped that these particular letters would reveal something about aristocratic women in the Spanish Empire; their publication may indeed open a door to the understanding of essential social and political processes in the dominant class.
