Juana "The Mad," the Clares, and the Carthusians: revising a necrophilic legend in early Habsburg Spain.

Abstract

Historians have long associated Juana "the Mad" of Castile and Aragon (1479-1555), daughter and mother of renowned defenders of the Catholic faith, with misplaced devotion. Juana's parents, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabel "the Catholic," won fame for conquering the Islamic kingdom of Granada, expelling the Moors and Jews from their realms, and instituting a new Inquisition. The second of Juana's six children, the Emperor Charles V, spent thirty-five years combating Protestant and Turkish threats to his vast inheritance. His mother's relatively modest spiritual endeavors have never been acknowledged. This oversight stems, in part, from the fact that Juana's relatives themselves questioned her political, and hence devotional, allegiance. Following Juana's 1496 marriage to the Burgundian prince Philip "the Handsome," Queen Isabel began to evince concern about her daughter's politics and piety, which the "Catholic Monarchs" tended to conflate. Such doubts regarding Juana's devotional inclinations became magnified in subsequent "Black Legend" historiography. Evidence of Isabel's worries about her daughter provided the influential Protestant historian Gustav Bergenroth, among others, with a basis for depicting Juana "the Mad" as hostile or extremely indifferent to the Catholic Church a heretic rather than a lunatic.' Bergenroth's opponents insisted, rather, that Juana's transgression comprised simply an overwhelming passion for her unfaithful husband. Allegedly out of