A tale of two Tolranas: Jewish women’s agency and conversion in late medieval Girona

ABSTRACT On 27 September 1391, a woman named Tolrana stood on the steps of the Gironella tower in Girona and, before Christian officials and her own Jewish representatives, refused to convert to Christianity or to remain married to her husband Francesc, who had converted during the recent attacks against the Jewish community. Almost thirty years later, in February 1419, the minor orphan Tolrana Benet appealed to King Alfons because she wanted to convert to Christianity but was being prevented by her Jewish guardians. She proposed to the king that she be put under the guardianship of her converso uncle, Lluis de Cardona. We do not know why the first Tolrana decided to end her marriage rather than convert, nor why the young Tolrana resisted familial pressures to remain Jewish. Yet both examples illustrate ways in which Jewish women exercised agency as a means of determining their own lives. This article focuses on the experiences of women to consider the intersection of agency and religious conversion in a community fraught with crisis around the turn of the fifteenth century.