‘Si no parís, a París:’ Marie Louise of Orleans, Fertility, and Nation

“¡Qué pena! ¡Qué dolor! ¡Sin heredero!”: What shame! What suffering! Without an heir!¹

This lamentation appears in a seventeenth-century satirical Spanish dirge that decries alleged desgobierno or “dis-government” under Charles II, listing lack of succession among his perceived failures as king. Charles, who married twice yet died childless, would be the last Spanish Habsburg ruler. This essay examines the rhetoric directed at Charles II’s first wife, Marie Louise of Orleans, queen of Spain from her marriage in 1679 until her death in 1689. As queen, Marie Louise stepped into a tense political climate between her native France and her new home, Spain, marked by a series of political disputes and armed conflicts throughout her queenship. Charles and Marie Louise’s lack of offspring exacerbated the tension by inciting French ambitions to the Spanish crown so that Marie Louise faced even more pressure than most new queens to produce an heir quickly to secure the succession.² After a proxy marriage in France, Spain welcomed her with ostentatious ceremonies and spectacles in the towns she passed through. Upon her arrival in Madrid, she processed on horseback through the elaborately decorated city, entertained by displays such as masques and bullfights accompanied by laudatory poems. However, as time passed and the new queen did not become pregnant, the tide of public opinion shifted. Satirical poems decried her foreign-ness and blamed Spanish political problems on her French identity. Rhetoric reached such an extreme that she was accused of ingesting abortifacients to prevent the birth of an heir, thus clearing the way for France to lay claim to the Spanish crown. After ten years as queen, Marie Louise died childless, and a barrage of satirical poems lauded her death as a fortunate occurrence for Spain. For this queen, belonging depended in large part on her fecundity: if she could become pregnant, she would be accepted in Spain, if she could not, she was rejected as foreign. This article examines poetry written to and about Marie Louise in her time as queen. I investigate the rhetorically unstable identity of this foreign queen through the gendered, nationalized, and proto-racialized discourse used in poetry written to support or attack her. This analysis reveals that female reproductive sexuality was often a focal point for discourses of cultural and social difference and exposes the mutability of racially inflected discourses of identity. I consider Marie Louise as a “raced” queen since these poems interrogate notions such as blood, color, purity, lineage, and related markers of inheritable identity such that physiology and nationhood intersect to produce a racialized body that threatens to infect, invade, and contaminate the Spanish nation. In order to make this argument, I first examine emerging concepts of racialized difference in early modern Spain and their relationship to nationhood, gender, and reproduction, then analyze how poetry delimits Marie Louise’s integration or exclusion from Spanish identity throughout her queenship.

Conceptualizing Race, Gender, and Nation in Pre-Modern Spain

In seventeenth-century Spain, the concept of limpieza de sangre (blood purity, literally “cleanliness” of blood) guided ideas of racialized identity, lineage, and inheritance. Limpieza de sangre developed following the 1492 decree that required Jews and Muslims to convert to Catholicism or leave the Spanish kingdoms.³ Theoretically, after 1492, all Spaniards were Catholic and therefore equal; nonetheless, widespread fear that recent converts would retain heterodox customs or ideas created a culture of suspicion of and discrimination towards conversos (converts and their descendants).⁴ Conversos were excluded from certain positions, attending universities, and emigration to the American colonies. Descendants of conversos inherited their status under the argument that potentially heterodox customs and beliefs could be passed on through blood or other bodily fluids such as breast milk.⁵ Thus, the concept of blood purity, though not race in the modern sense, represents a crucial moment in the history of race-making since it defines alterity as biological, posits that impurities pass intergenerationally, and creates a hierarchical social structure based on perceived difference.⁶ Rachel Burk, for example, argues that blood purity discourse represents “a critical transition in European thought from conceiving of divisions between what had been ‘peoples’ or ‘nations’ as multivariable … to a taxonomic system based explicitly and essentially on physicality and thus reducing difference to a single, unchanging term.”⁷ In this case religious difference was reified as biological. However, to examine race-making at a particular historical moment does not imply a linear trajectory to modern racial ideologies; as Geraldine Heng points out, ideas shift, appear, morph, and die out in a “dynamic oscillations between ruptures and reinscriptions” without one necessarily leading inexorably to the present.⁸ This is not to argue that Spain was the birthplace of racism, nor that Spain was more or less racist than other European countries at the time; ⁹ rather, I examine how ideologies of blood purity and gendered identity undergirded exclusionary rhetoric at a particular historical moment.

In the same period that the obsession with blood purity developed, the word raza ( race) emerged in fifteenth-century Spanish from textile vocabulary meaning a stain or impurity in the weave, and gradually began to be applied to human difference to denote a hereditary defect, generally due to the presence of converso ancestry.¹⁰ Sebastián de Covarrubias, author of the first Spanish dictionary (1611), defines raza, when applied to humans, as follows: “raza en los linages se toma en mala parte, como tener alguna raza de Moro, o Iudio” (raza in lineages is taken as pejorative, for example to have a raza of Moor or Jew).¹¹ As this definition illustrates, in its seventeenth-century usage, raza is primarily a negative term applied to non-hegemonic groups and a quality that could lie concealed within the blood. It is the characterization of raza as a hidden deviance in its intersection with ideas of limpieza that I explore here, particularly as it converged with gendered bias toward women as sources of impurity. Blood purity was not a visible identity marker, though it coexisted with and at times justified anti-Black and later anti-Indigenous racism.¹² Though blood purity was not a visible attribute, it was linked to discourses of whiteness. Limpieza relied on figurative religious ideologies in which whiteness denoted purity and moral superiority. Notably, the term raza first denoted a flaw in the otherwise white wool produced by merino sheep in Spain.¹³ Meanwhile, throughout the sixteenth-century the Spanish began to define their own skin color as white through colonial encounters.¹⁴ In considering Marie Louise as a racialized queen, I do not examine somatic racism against non-white people, nor discrimination against conversos. Instead, I assert that exclusionary forces driven by the conceptualization of raza as a deliberately hidden flaw that could be concealed within a seemingly white exterior intersect with gendered bias toward the female body and female reproductive sexuality.

To understand Marie Louise’s status as a foreign queen, we must also examine what nationhood meant in early modern Spain. The Spanish often thought of themselves as belonging to a set of nations (Catalonia, Castille, Galicia, etc.) rather than a singular Spanish nation. Nonetheless, as Antonio Feros asserts, “for sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spaniards, there was not a Spanish natio … however, everything indicates that Spaniards truly believed that there was a Spanish people.”¹⁵ As Feros further asserts, the sense of Spanish identity emerges most clearly in conflict with a perceived external enemy such as France or an internal enemy such as conversos; documents from the period commonly discuss the Jewish or Moorish nación as a distinct identity within Spain. It is also worth noting that the Latin term natio was frequently translated as raza beginning in the fifteenth century.¹⁶ Thus, racialized discourse often overlapped with ideas of nación, creating a perceived potential internal enemy. If only those with pure Old Christian Spanish lineage belong to the true Spanish nación, the introduction of foreign wives such as Marie Louise would threaten this ethno-religious purity; indeed, she was rejected several times as a potential spouse for Charles II by the Council of State since she was not a Habsburg.

Moreover, gendered ideology pervades constructs of nationhood, race, and blood purity. Pamela A. Patton asserts that in early modern Iberia, “definitions of race often lay obscured behind the fluctuating discourses of raza, casta, linaje, nación, and natura.”¹⁷ Gender and race intertwine through reproductive sexuality and its relationship to lineage and biology. Early modern medical theories posited that the female body lacked the vital heat that gave men greater capacity for rational thought, so the female body was inferior to the male. Due to this perceived weakness, medical theorists questioned the extent to which women contributed to reproduction even as they feared that women would pass on impurities. In early modern Spanish patriarchy, succession passed through patrilineal succession, and medical theories of women’s weaker nature led to questions regarding to what extent they contributed to the child’s nature.¹⁸ Women’s capacity to reproduce placed them within the patriarchal order, and conversely “barrenness” had disastrous consequences for women’s gendered identity. As Olwen Hufton asserts, “for married women, defined as vessels for the reproduction of the species, not to have children carried with it connotations of failure and inadequacy” and indicated God’s disfavor.¹⁹ Marie Louise, as a foreign queen, gave up her family of origin, country, language, and culture upon marriage to adopt a Spanish identity that could only be consolidated by fulfilling her duty to secure the succession.²⁰

We will see that the “racing” of the foreign queen focuses on her perceived infertility, and utilizes a number of discourses related to nationhood, biology, fertility, and lineage that intersect with blood purity, serving to define Marie Louise as impure and therefore a threat to Spanish national identity. I argue that understandings of raza in the sense of a hidden stain that threatens purity of lineage subtend vitriolic attacks on Marie Louise and that gendered constructs of nationality and reproduction serve to make her (rather than her husband) the scapegoat for public anxiety over the lack of succession. As I demonstrate throughout, gendered and racialized rhetoric inflects the discourse that serves to exclude Marie Louise from the Spanish nation and pathologize her foreign identity.

Becoming Spanish

As was customary for foreign queens, Marie Louise crafted her identity and self-presentation in a public display of hispanization required to create a favorable regal public image; however, her assimilation remained incomplete. Tamar Herzog theorizes that Spanish versus foreign identity was not binary in early modern Spain, but rather was a continuum with intermediate grades of relative belonging accrued through acts such as paying taxes or military service.²¹ The examples Herzog gives are available only to males; in Marie Louise’s case, national affiliation could be consolidated through dress, language, and especially reproduction. Early modern misogyny posited that women’s weaker nature made them more able to leave behind their familial values and traditions and adopt new ones.²² Marie Louise’s entry into Spain entailed a gradual and public shedding of the French identity which she had evoked with her wedding dress decorated in fleurs-de-lis, shifting to Spanish fashion, hairstyles, and customs as she approached the Spanish border. She Hispanicized her name to María Luisa, and at the border she was transferred to a waiting litter rather than riding horseback as she had in France. She thus adapted to the more somber aesthetic of the notoriously austere Habsburg court in which the queen’s physical presence must be hidden from view. Yet, throughout the remainder of her short life, Marie Louise’s Spanish identity endured constant scrutiny; she was accused of secretly eating French foods, flouting Habsburg court norms, and, most detrimentally, of secretly advancing French political agendas. Marie Louise’s transformation was not easy since, unlike many royal alliances arranged in childhood, she had not been groomed to marry Charles and thus spoke no Spanish when she arrived. Her nuptials were planned during the brief period in which Charles’ illegitimate half-brother, John of Austria, who was less hostile to the French than most members of the Spanish court, served as minister.²³ John’s abrupt death while Marie Louise was en-route to Spain left her to enter a court that was increasingly antagonistic to the French. Marie Louise, brought up in the notoriously liberal French court, found the restrictive Spanish etiquette difficult to follow. Courtiers were forbidden to speak to her in French, and she was no longer allowed to ride astride a horse, instead riding side-saddle and only when accompanied by a retinue. As Ezequiel Borgognoni demonstrates, official portraits emphasize the queen’s Spanish identity by depicting her wearing Spanish hairstyles, the red color associated with the Spanish queen and the Habsburg family jewels, and carrying a fan as Spanish ladies did, among other such markers of Spanish identity. However, as Borgognoni has further shown, other portraits sometimes portray Marie Louise with intact remnants of French identity, as in one portrayal where her hair is curled in French style; he concludes that her “metamórfosis nunca fue completo” (metamorphosis was never completed).²⁴ Privately, she is well known to have clashed with her camarera mayor, the lady of the chamber whose task it was to teach the queen Habsburg ceremony. Marie Louise at times engaged with the court in ways that contravened expectations (for example, having the aforementioned camarera mayor dismissed). On the other hand, this incomplete hispanization process was common among foreign queens, who had to assimilate to a new nation, but sought to find ways to preserve their cultural identity.²⁵ Small expressions of French identity would likely have been overlooked had Marie Louise produced the longed-for child since, as Katherine B. Crawford explains, “attachment to her children mitigated a queen’s foreign qualities,” whereas if a queen could not produce an heir, she failed in her primary duty to the nation and therefore remained foreign.²⁶ While early in her reign her occasional failure to adhere to Spanish protocol was often overlooked, she was increasingly critiqued for being “overly French” as time went on without a successor, making the queen’s reproductive status central to nationalized rhetoric. Marie Louise’s assimilation or lack thereof appears as a constant theme in the poetry written throughout her reign that we will now examine.

Laudatory Poetry

The Spanish public, who generally despised and feared the French, initially welcomed the new queen into the nation and hoped that she would provide the desired heir.²⁷ One poem relates an onlooker’s impressions “viendo entrar a nuestra reina a la francesa … pues con traje francés y alma española … que el traje era de allá y ella de España” (watching our queen dressed in French style … with French dress and Spanish soul … for the outfit is from there, but she is from Spain).²⁸ As this poem demonstrates, although Marie Louise did not immediately adopt Spanish fashion as etiquette required and even appeared publicly in French clothing during her voyage through northern Spain,²⁹ her initial welcome was largely positive and at least one member of the Spanish public accepted her as Spanish despite her French clothing.

Early in her reign, laudatory poems extol Marie Louise’s beauty and youth as indicative of potential fertility. Of particular interest here is a discourse of female beauty, youth, and fertility expressed through the linked notions of whiteness and purity. References to Marie Louise as pure and/or white appear in several poems. For example, one romance, a traditional Spanish ballad form in octosyllabic lines, written to commemorate Marie Louise’s entrance into Madrid, begins by describing her beauty: she is a “sol” (sun), a “deidad” (deity) with a “rostro agradable, y manso” (agreeable and docile face), and concludes paradoxically that she is a “madre y donzella y virgen” (mother and maiden and virgin).³⁰ Thus, the poem stresses her role as future queen mother while also underscoring her virginal purity and youth. Marie Louise should not have been a virgin by this point, since the wedding had been performed in Northern Spain a month prior; consequently, this is a metaphorical rendering of her youth and sheltered upbringing as a preparation for marriage and motherhood.

The contradictory description of Marie Louise as simultaneously mother and virgin invokes the virgin Mary, a figure who epitomized motherhood and fertility as well as spiritual purity and whose image was often employed as a fertility aid.³¹ Moreover, as Ana Gómez-Bravo reminds us, racial ideologies permeated religious symbolism since Mary was born without original sin (often expressed as raza de pecado), and Mary herself was described as without taça ni raça (without stain or defect).³² As Gómez-Bravo concludes, “the superiority of whiteness [as indicative of moral rectitude] … would strongly factor into the discourse of clean blood in limpieza statutes.”³³ Max Hering Torres asserts that in its early articulation, blood purity did not have a discursive relationship with skin color, but in the colonial context blood purity, race, and skin color became intertwined.³⁴ As Hering Torres further contends, through colonial encounters with marginalized groups in the colonies throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Spanish colonizers began to define themselves as white.³⁵ Thus, color bias sometimes worked in tandem with ideologies of limpieza, while at other times limpieza could be an exclusionary modality centered on invisible characteristics that could be concealed. Returning to Marie Louise, poems examining her whiteness illustrate ideologies of purity as well as the sinister possibility that raza or genealogical impurity in the blood could be hidden within a seemingly pure exterior.

Discourses that idealized whiteness were especially pertinent to women since standards of beauty frequently praised extreme pallor, such as Golden Age poetry that compared women to lilies and other white flowers. In order to conform to these standards, women often sought to whiten their skin by avoiding the sun, using cosmetics such as solimán, a lead-based whitener, eating clay, bloodletting, and other methods.³⁶ The ideation of raza as a potentially hidden defect accorded with baroque stereotypes about the potential falsification of female beaty. As María Elena Martínez demonstrates, early modern Spanish preoccupation with purity of blood demonstrated a “displacement of anxieties over contamination onto women.”³⁷ Early modern misogynistic views of women as weaker and more prone to sin created stereotypes in which women were constantly suspected of deceitful appearances. Even after her sudden death at twenty-six, poetry and eulogies describe Marie Louise as pure and white.³⁸ In one acrostic ballad, for example, she is a “rosa / alba más bella / luz más pura” (a rose, beautiful dawn, most pure light).³⁹ As Marie Louise was increasingly regarded as infertile, this poetic rhetoric of whiteness, purity, and light became multivalent, at times implying that her outward appearance hid inner impurity.

This duality appears most clearly in poems written about Marie Louise that use the lily as a symbol of innocence, purity, whiteness, and her nation of origin. Lilies appear in the Virgin Mary’s iconography, therefore simultaneously evoking purity and motherhood and, as noted earlier, the Virgin’s status as without raza.⁴⁰ In both laudatory and satirical poems, lilies are a multivalent symbol with positive values that evoke Marie Louise’s role as mother to the heir, but that could also be used derisively to point to her nationality since the fleur-de-lis symbolized France. One poem examined below refers to Marie Louise as a “bella flor de lis” (beautiful fleur-de-lis/lily).⁴¹ The fleur-de-lis represented the Bourbon dynasty and could be worn only by fils de France (children of France), a royal title that referred to the monarch’s immediate family.⁴² During her proxy wedding ceremony in France, Marie Louise dressed from head to foot in fleurs-de-lis, which adorned her mantle, dress, tights, and shoes, clearly conveying the French identity she was about to relinquish.⁴³ Lilies figure in her funeral imagery as well. A written description of the funeral decorations asserts that the queen, “como cándido lilio, débil, aunque hermoso, se desvaneció de nuestra vista en un instante, sin haber descogido del todo sus reales hojas: y es de notar que aunque muchos hacen a esta flor fecunda, Ovidio, Virgilio, y otros dicen que no siempre florecen los lilios” (like an innocent lily, weak though beautiful, she disappeared from our sight in an instant, without all her royal leaves having fallen, and it is to be noted that although many call this a fertile flower, Ovid, Virgil and others say that lilies do not always flower).⁴⁴ Thus, even within a eulogy to her premature death, the poet inserts a jibe implying that she is infertile. The lily, as metaphor for Marie Louise, connotes beauty, youth and innocence, but also underscores her French identity. In the latter poem, her failure to procreate appears as a hidden flaw in her outwardly beautiful appearance. As these poems from the end of Marie Louise’s short life demonstrate, public feeling toward her was often ambivalent and fluctuated over time. Returning to an earlier period in her life, we shall see that vitriol toward her grew over time and often centered on her procreative capacity. As she failed in the task she had been brought to Spain to perform, production of an heir, she began to be portrayed as an enemy within the Spanish nation, and rhetoric became increasingly violent.

Satirical Attacks

As time passed and Marie Louise did not become pregnant, laudatory poetry increasingly yielded to anonymous satirical attacks that reject her as foreign. Poems often utilize regal infertility to critique Charles’ perceived insufficient patriarchal control and weakness as a leader; yet, even poems that critique Charles’ rule blame Marie Louise for his ineffectual leadership. Here, Marie Louise’s national allegiance fluctuates, demonstrating the malleability of women’s identity, racial or otherwise, within a culture that expected male identity to subsume that of foreign wives.⁴⁵ One poem berates Charles, saying “que estiméis a vuestra esposa / Como amante, cosa es justa, / Mas no el dominio del cetro / Sujetarse a su coyunda” (it would be appropriate to esteem your wife as a lover, but not to allow domination of the scepter by tying yourself to her apron strings).⁴⁶ Thus, the anonymous critic accuses Charles of straying from proper conjugal love into lovesickness, or inordinate love that corrodes reason. This accusation accords with contemporary depictions of lovesickness, a disease believed to have a feminizing influence that eroded manly bodily autonomy through excessive buildup of cold humors, producing melancholy.⁴⁷ Theoretically, the colder and more melancholic nature of women and racial others (such as Jews) made them less rational than the normative Christian male.⁴⁸ This humoral imbalance could destabilize the male humors during coitus, which drained heat from the body. The same poem asserts that, as a consequence of Charles’ lovesickness, “las puertas autorizadas, / Dais a naciones intrusas, / Porque el femenil imperio / Cobardemente os arresta” (You leave the doors open to intrusive nations, as you cower before the feminine empire).⁴⁹ The poem construes Marie Louise as an internal enemy to the nation who betrays Spain to the French. Perhaps there is even an implicit reference to Florinda la Cava, the Moorish beauty blamed in the Spanish ballad tradition for captivating the Visigoth King Rodrigo, who kidnapped her, thus inciting the Moorish invasion of Spain when her father, Don Julián, sought vengeance. Although Rodrigo kidnapped la Cava in this legend, medieval misogyny blamed her for betraying Spain by inciting Rodrigo’s lovesickness. Such tales of women betraying their nation express fear that women’s external submission to their husband obscures internal deviance.

The belief in lovesickness as a physical disease expresses fear of contaminating contact with women, whose bodily humors could dangerously imbalance the male body. As Joseph Ziegler explains, early modern culture lacked belief in the “biological inalterability” of individual humoral balance, making the body to some extent mutable.⁵⁰ In Marie Louise’s case, poems construe her as effeminizing Charles, for example asserting that “mientras en Francia amaga un Luis potente / Reyna España Carlos el amante / Una francesa es Reyna dominante” (While a potent Louis threatens from France, Spain is ruled by Charles the lover, and a Frenchwoman is the dominating queen).⁵¹ This verse, the beginning of a longer poem excoriating some of Charles’ validos (or favored ministers for their poor administration), contains a pun on Reyna (queen, but also the conjugated form of reinar, to govern, in early modern Spanish spelling wherein “y” and “i” were interchangeable), labelling Charles a queen. Thus, the second line attacks Charles as effeminate and dominated by a foreign wife aligned with the interests of France. Moreover, there is an implicit contrast between the “potent” Louis and Charles, though the poem stops short of explicitly labelling the latter impotent. These poems contend that Charles has failed in his patriarchal duty to bring his wife’s foreign qualities under control, using her perceived failure to fully ally with the Spanish nation as a focal point for discontent with her husband’s administration.⁵²) As the quote above demonstrates, Charles (dubbed “the bewitched”) was widely regarded as mentally and physically infirm and an incompetent ruler. Charles’ father Philip IV married his niece, Mariana of Austria, and generations of preceding Habsburgs had married cousins and other close relatives, as was common among European royals, so his infirmity may have been the result of inbreeding.⁵³ Neither of his two marriages produced a viable pregnancy so that even during his lifetime he was suspected of impotence.⁵⁴ Nonetheless, early modern culture generally ascribed infertility to deficiency in the female body, and despite Charles’ infirmity, Marie Louise was the primary target of criticism for failure to produce an heir.⁵⁵ Medical constructs of  the female body’s inferiority informed blood purity discourses that construe “women as main sources of impurity.”⁵⁶ Marie Louise was publicly vilified when she did not become pregnant, while any attack on the monarch’s virility was made in secret or anonymously.

As the public increasingly regarded the queen as infertile, laudatory poems gave way to satirical barbs questioning her affiliation to Spain or even accusing her of treachery. One such poem sung in the streets of Madrid implored:

Parid, bella flor de lis,             
Que en aflicción tan extraña,             
si parís, parís a España,                      
si no parís, a París.                             

(Give birth, beautiful fleur-de-lis
Who art in such strange affliction
If you give birth, you give birth to Spain
If you cannot give birth, go back to Paris)⁴¹

This poem leaves no doubt regarding the connection between fecundity and belonging, constructing a pun on the imperative of the verb parir (to give birth) and Marie Louise’s native Paris in an ominous threat to return her to France if she fails in her primary duty to Spain.⁵⁷ If she gives birth to an heir, she will be accepted as Spanish and become the queen mother. If she cannot become pregnant, she is unwelcome in Spain and remains French. Furthermore, this poem reflects women’s potential to carry a hidden defect, or raza, that threatens Spanish autonomy; outwardly, Marie Louise is a beautiful, white flower (though an explicitly French one) but this exterior beauty hides the interior flaw of infertility. Her failure to reproduce excludes her from Spanish identity and allies her with France. Moreover, as Gómez-Bravo demonstrates, the discourse of blood purity “aimed to expose the intentional hiding of one’s raza from the eyes of others.”⁵⁸ This perception that raza resided in the blood, particularly in women, and was purposefully obscured through exterior conformity led to volatile hatred of perceived enemies within the nation. The mistrust of the foreign queen, seen as an internal enemy, could be displaced onto her compatriots as well, who were easier targets for xenophobic violence.

Invective against the queen and her country of origin reached fever pitch in 1685, culminating in street riots and a massacre of French citizens living in Madrid. At the time, Spain and France had arrived at a fragile détente under the Peace of Ratisbona, but tension remained high with French troops posted to the northern Spanish border. Amid fear of French aggression, a palace scandal quickly escalated from petty intrigue to full-blown conspiracy theory. In 1680, following rumors that Marie Louise favored her French servants over her Spanish retinue, all of Marie Louise’s French servants were sent back to France with the exception of three: her former wetnurse, Nicole Quentin, known in Spanish as Nicola Cantín or la Cantina; Quentin’s niece Susana Duperroy; and Margarita Lautier. In 1681, Charles dismissed Marie Louise’s close friends, the French ambassador Villars and his wife, complaining in an official letter to King Louis that they were giving the queen “imprudent” advice.⁵⁹ Subsequently, scandal erupted within the palace when Quentin (a widow) became pregnant after an affair with a French groom, and mounted further when Lautier accused Quentin of secretly giving the queen abortificients in the guise of medical treatment. Quentin counter-accused Lautier’s French husband of attempting to poison the King, upon which Lautier and her husband fled the country. Despite arrest and torture by the Inquisition, Quentin insisted that she had never given the queen anything other than theriac, an early modern medical cure-all. Nonetheless, the judge overseeing the case recommended a death sentence. Madrid’s rumor mill went into overdrive, alleging that “la Cantina” had given the queen abortifacients in an attempt to impede Habsburg succession on France’s behalf. The opening lines of one satirical poem state “pregúntase qué hubo en el / caso pasado / a 20 de agosto de 1685” (One wonders what really happened in the case that occurred the twentieth of August 1685), inferring the queen’s complicity in the alleged treason. The poem poses rumors as a series of questions and responses, inquiring:

Hubo veneno? No, no hubo veneno.                                       
Hubo aborto? Fue antojo deseado.

(Was there poison? No, there was no poison
Was there abortion? It was craved and desired)⁶⁰

The Spanish aborto can mean either miscarriage or abortion, while antojo refers to pregnancy cravings. Thus, this poem implies that the queen was pregnant, but that la Cantina’s medicinal preparations terminated the pregnancy, therefore being abortificients rather than poison. The poem concludes that these rumors cannot be stated openly, exclaiming “chitón, que es pecado” (Shush! For it is a sin).⁶¹ Another anonymous poem written after this episode alleges that “Francia metió con desprecio / veneno y vicio en palacio, / Y esto se miró despacio / Para no hacer de ello aprecio. / Este veneno advertido, / … No ha de dar menos cuidado / Derramado que bebido” (France injected with disdain venom and vice in the palace, and this was only slowly perceived. This poison detected must not give less caution spilled than drunk).⁶² This poem asserts an organized French plot that, though thwarted, poses a serious and ongoing threat despite Cantina’s arrest. Following Cantina’s imprisonment, rumors continued to fly, and the queen was even accused of conspiring to poison her husband. However, gossip began to circulate that the queen’s menstruation was late. The rumor that she was pregnant at last (not the first of its kind) temporarily calmed public anger, though of course the pregnancy did not come to fruition. Meanwhile, Charles was left in a delicate position. He did not dare provoke Louis and invoke his own wife’s wrath by allowing la Cantina’s execution. Instead, he exiled la Cantina and all remaining French courtiers. The salacious scandal ignited already simmering tensions. The citizens of Madrid, enraged by perceived French duplicity, stormed the streets and slaughtered every French person they could find in the bloody riot mentioned earlier. This dramatic episode demonstrates the tenuous position in which the queen found herself throughout her reign. The Spanish public criticized her for her husband’s failings as a leader and for her uncle’s machinations on behalf of France. She was subjected to accusations of treason when she did not become pregnant and needed to avoid affinity with her French identity due to increasing tensions between her homeland and her nation. Moreover, the sudden eruption of violence demonstrates the coercive force that is part of exclusion and racial identity construction.⁶³

Vicious invective against the queen continued until, and even after, her death, pathologizing her national origin and portraying her as a disease that infected the Spanish nation. One poem chides the king, “lastimosa cosa es / Carlos, tu poco valor, / si has enfermado de amor / morirás de mal francés” (your lack of valor, Charles, is a pitiful thing. You fell ill of lovesickness, and you will die of the French disease).⁶⁴ The first known European outbreak of syphilis, or the “French disease,” occurred in 1494 during a French invasion of Naples.⁶⁵ The disease quickly spread across Europe, infecting members of all social classes. By the late seventeenth-century when these poems were written, the spread of syphilis had slowed, and it became a common derogatory slander to refer to someone as a syphilitic.⁶⁶ Moreover, the attribution of the ailment to a particular nationality became a means to assert national superiority and define the foreign as pathological.⁶⁷ By referring to Marie Louise as a French disease, satirists dehumanize her and characterize her as an invasive element that threatens Spanish purity by defiling national lineage. Prostitutes in particular were frequently accused of spreading the disease, so that the accusation that Marie Louise is a French disease is also a slur.⁶⁸ Furthermore, syphilis is a congenital malady that could be passed from mother to child, thus becoming a hereditary contagion.⁶⁹ Metaphorically, references to Marie Louise as a disease infer that her French blood infects Spain. After her death, anonymous poems joyfully celebrated her demise, asserting that “si una reina ha fallecido / todo un reino se ha salvado … lo más que ha llorado es / porque no murió mas presto …. curó nuestro mal francés” (if a queen has died, a kingdom has been saved … that which is most lamented is that she did not die sooner … to cure our French disease).⁷⁰ This vicious poem lauds her death as a cure for Spain’s national malady of infertility.⁷¹ A similar post-mortem poem reads:

Requiescat … murió la reina,  
In pace … ha quedado el reino,         
Amén … pues que Dios lo hizo,        
Jesús … que breve y a tiempo           

(rest in peace… the Queen died,
in peace … the country has rested,
amen … well God has done it,
Jesus … how short, but just in time.)⁷²

Here, her death is a blessing sent by God. These dehumanizing attacks definitively excise Marie Louise from Spanish nationhood. Her demise is lamented due to her youth, but also lauded as coming just in time, an allusion to the fact that Charles was still young enough to marry again. Indeed, within six months of Marie Louise’s death, Charles wed the German princess Maria Anna of Neuburg, though this marriage similarly failed to provide an heir. Meanwhile, Marie Louise was laid to rest in El Escorial, the monastery-palace that houses the remains of Spanish royalty, in the special chamber reserved for “infertile” queens.

Conclusion

The rhetorical arc of Marie Louise’s queenship, in which she moved from beautiful flower to vilified disease, demonstrates the gendered expectations placed on foreign queens, who had to perform Spanish-ness successfully and provide an heir to be accepted into the nation. However, as we have seen, meeting such expectations was often outside women’s control. Marie Louise’s lack of political savvy as well as her husband’s failure to govern effectively undoubtedly exacerbated tensions created by her perceived French affiliation. Nonetheless, her reproductive status was often central to rhetoric regarding her nationality, and served as a focal point to express critiques of her husband’s rule and ultimately exclude her from the nation. Her sudden death following a riding accident is still shrouded in mystery; she may have died of an intestinal complaint, or, as contemporary sources speculate, she may have been poisoned in a plot to rid the country of its “French disease.” If so, the conspiracy was fruitless since Charles’ second marriage was no more fecund than his first. His death in 1700, leaving no viable Habsburg heir, sparked the war of Spanish succession that ultimately resulted in a Bourbon king on the throne of Spain, as Marie Louise’s critics had feared.

Ironically, the drive to preserve the blood purity of Habsburg Spain led to the downfall of the dynasty. As Kathryn Burns asserts, the discourse of blood purity is intimately related to the “consolidation of the lineage of the Spanish absolutist state.”⁷³ Lineage depended on fertility, yet the attempt to keep power within the Habsburg dynasty led to generations of intermarriage between close relatives with devastating effects for the succession. Gonzalo Álvarez and Francisco C. Ceballos have shown that the last two generations of the Spanish Habsburgs exhibited low rates of infant survival.⁷⁴ Philip IV’s two wives experienced thirteen pregnancies that came to term, five of these infants were stillborn or died within a month of birth, three more died in early infancy, and one prince died at four years old, not to mention the numerous miscarriages these Spanish queens endured in the effort to produce a successor. Even in the context of high infant mortality in the early modern period, the Spanish Habsburgs had a low rate of infant survival in the last few generations.

Gendered ideologies and constructs of reproductive sexuality pervade nationalist and race-making rhetoric. Racialized and gendered identity, in the early modern sense, was made up of a number of factors including humoral balance, blood, inheritance, religious affiliation, place of origin, and more. Marie Louise was initially accepted into the Spanish nation but rejected as foreign when she failed to reproduce. Her story illustrates the intersectionality of exclusionary modalities. In early modern Spain, concepts of raza as a hidden stain fed suspicion that external conformity and whiteness could hide internal deviance, fueling xenophobic and misogynist rhetoric. Furthermore, gender bias affected public reaction; although Charles was perceived as an ineffectual ruler, Marie Louise endured constant criticism for infertility and was accused of effeminizing her husband and infecting him with lovesickness. The pathologizing of the foreign queen erupted in xenophobic violence and culminated with representations of her as a “French disease” in poems celebrating her death. As Marie Louise’s story demonstrates, early modern gendered expectations that women were responsible for ensuring succession, and that they were at fault for impurities in the bloodlines and/or failure to reproduce, could expose them to dangerous reprisals. Poetry written about Marie Louise utilizes physiology and nationhood to represent the diseased body of the foreign queen, justifying her rejection and producing a racialized body that threatened Spanish blood purity.

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1. “Endechas reales, en que se anuncia el trágico fin que amenaza a España su desgobierno,” Papeles satíricos, en verso y prosa, sobre el reinado de Carlos II, (seventeenth-century) MSS 17535, Spanish National Library, 70r. All translations are my own. I have modernized Spanish spelling and punctuation from manuscript sources. [↩]
2. Charles’ half-sister, Maria Teresa, renounced all claims to the Spanish throne and possessions upon her marriage to Louis XIV of France (Marie Louise’s uncle). However, due to Spain’s economic crisis the dowry was left unpaid, thus nullifying the stipulation in Louis XIV’s estimation, leading the French to lay claim to the Brabant and other regions of the Spanish empire, and awakened ambitions to claim the throne of Spain itself since Maria Teresa’s children were the closest blood relatives to the Spanish monarch. [↩]
3. Spain was not unified under a single crown at this point; the Catholic monarchs Isabella and Ferdinand governed Castille and Aragón separately. [↩]
4. Since the 1940s, scholars have debated whether blood purity should be considered within the history of race and racism since blood purity was an inherited characteristic, or whether it is more properly defined as ethno-religious discrimination. See Max S. Hering Torres, “Purity of Blood: Problems of Interpretation,” in Race and Blood in the Iberian World, eds. Max S. Hering Torres, María Elena Martínez, David Nirenberg (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2012), 12, for a succinct overview of this debate. [↩]
5. On the relationship of breastmilk to blood purity, see Emilie L. Bergmann, “Milking the Poor: Wet-nursing and the Sexual Economy of Early Modern Spain,” in Marriage and Sexuality in Early Modern Iberia, ed. Eukene Lacarra Lanz (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2002), 90–115. [↩]
6. Naturally, race is not a fixed category in the modern world either; race has always been “a term that has … organized notions of fixity but has never itself been stable” (Kathryn Burns, “Unfixing Race,” in Rereading the Black Legend: The discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in the Renaissance Empires, eds. Margaret R. Greer, Walter D. Mignolo, Maureen Quilligan (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007), 188). [↩]
7. Rachel L. Burk, “Purity and Impurity of Blood in Early Modern Iberia,” in The Routledge Companion to Iberian Studies, eds. Javier Muños-Basols, Laura Lonsdale and Manuel Delgado. (London: Routledge, 2017), 176. [↩]
8. Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 21. [↩]
9. As Emily Weissbourd demonstrates, the “Black Legend” creates distorted portrayals of early modern Spain as more racist than other European nations (“Translating Spain: Purity of Blood and Orientalism in Mabbe’s Rogue and Guzmán de Alfarache,” Modern Philology 111.3 (2017): 572). Similarly, Martínez warns against contributing either to a Black legend or conversely to a white legend that portrays the Spanish as less racist than other imperial powers since they intermarried and procreated with Indigenous women. See, María Elena Martinez, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 8–10). [↩]
10. Maria Rosa Lida was the first to investigate this etymology of raza (“Un decir más de Francisco Imperial: Respuesta a Fernán Pérez de Guzmán,” Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica 1 (1957): 170–177). Recent scholarship builds upon Lida’s observations: Javier Irigoyen-García relates the emergence of razato the history of Iberian sheepherding, and Ana Gómez Bravo explores this etymology in depth in her recent article “The Origins of Raza” (Javier Irigoyen García, The Spanish Arcadia: Sheep Herding, Pastoral Discourse, and Ethnicity in Early Modern Spain (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 38–59; Ana M. Gómez-Bravo, “The Origins of Raza: Racializing Difference in Early Spanish,” Interfaces 7 (2020): 64–114). [↩]
11. Sebastián de Covarrubias Orozco, Tesoro de la lengua castellana, ed. Felipe C.R. Maldonado (Madrid: Castalia, 1995), 851. [↩]
12. As Max Hering Torres and María Elena Martínez have shown, the lexicon of blood purity was later adopted into exclusionary and racist discourse in colonial society. María Elena Martínez examines in depth how Iberian constructs of blood purity were transposed onto the colonial context in New Spain, applying the lens of religion to somatic differences within the caste system; moreover, she underscores the importance of gender and control of the female body to these discourses (Genealogical Fictions).Hering Torres describes the shift from ethnoreligious discrimination toward racism based on skin color through a series of steps that differed in the Iberian and American contexts (“Colores de piel: Una revisión histórica de larga duración,” in Debates sobre ciudadanía y políticas raciales en las Américas Negras, eds. Claudia Mosquera, Austín Laó-Montes y César Garavito (Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2010), 113–160). Hering Torres and Martínez demonstrate that blood purity evolved to become “racial” in a modern sense in the colonies. On the other hand, scholars such as Baltasar Fra Molinero and Aurelia Martín Casares have shed light on the Iberian contribution to the global slave trade as well as the presence of Black Africans in Spain, refuting earlier dismissals of Spain’s role in the slave trade (La imagen de los negros en el teatro del Siglo de Oro (Madrid: Siglo veintiuno, 1995); La esclavitud en Granada del siglo XVI: Género, raza, y religión (Granada: Editorial Universidad de Granada, 2000). Nicholas R. Jones offers new insight into how to study discursive appropriation of Black voices, stating that despite anti-Black stereotypes the authors of habla de negro texts “render legible the voices and experiences of Black Africans in ways that demand our attention” (Staging Habla de Negros: Radical Performances of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain (Penn State University Press, 2019), 5); in doing so, Jones offers a means to engage with racist texts in a way that highlights Black subjectivity. [↩]
13. See Irigoyen García, The Spanish Arcadia, 42. [↩]
14. Hering Torres, “Colores,” 121–126; 153. [↩]
15. Antonio Feros, Speaking of Spain: The Evolution of Race and Nation in the Hispanic World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017), 48–49. By the seventeenth-century, Castille had gained dominance as the seat of the monarchy and through imperial expansion. [↩]
16. Gómez-Bravo, “The Origins,” 69. [↩]
17. Pamela A. Patton, “Introduction: Race, Color, and the Visual in Iberia and Latin America” in Envisioning Others: Race, Color, and the Visual in Iberia and Latin America, ed. Pamela A. Patton (Boston: Brill, 2015), 7. [↩]
18. Indeed, early modern medicine considered the male “seed” hotter and more active than the female “seed.” See Enrique García Santo Tomás, Signos vitales: procreación e imagen en la narrativa áurea (Madrid: Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2020), 36; Martínez, Genealogical Fictions, 48). As Martínez demonstrates, initial articulations of blood purity discounted maternal lineage and paternal lineage was seen as dominant. However, throughout the sixteenth-century, blood purity statutes shifted to a “dual-descent model of classification” that drew on existing gender bias of “women as main sources of impurity” (Martínez, Genealogical Fictions, 55). [↩]
19. Olwen Hufton, The Prospect before Her: A History of Women in Western Europe 1500–1800 (New York: Alfred A Knopf), 1996; 177. As Daphna Oren-Magidor and Catherine Rider point out, the history of infertility in premodern periods “is still in its infancy” (“Introduction: Infertility in Medieval and Early Modern Medicine,” Social History of Medicine, 29.2 (2016): 214). [↩]
20. On expectations of foreign queens, see Anne J. Cruz, “Introduction,” in Early Modern Habsburg Women. Transnational Contexts, Cultural Conflicts, Dynastic Continuities, eds. Anne J. Cruz, Maria Galli Stampino(New York: Routledge, 2013), especially 5. [↩]
21. Tamar Herzog, “Beyond Race: Exclusion in Early Modern Spain and Spanish America,” in Race and Blood in the Iberian World, eds. Max S. Hering Torres, María Elena Martínez, David Nirenberg (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2012), 151–168. [↩]
22. Martínez, Genealogical Fictions, 49. [↩]
23. John of Austria (1629–1679) was Philip IV’s illegitimate son with the actress María Calderona and served as general in the Spanish armed forces. He should not be confused with his more famous predecessor John of Austria (1547–1578), the illegitimate son of Charles V who served as admiral in the Battle of Lepanto. [↩]
24. Ezequiel Borgognoni, “La construcción de la imagen regia de María Luisa de Orleans,” Studia histórica: Historia moderna, 41.1 (2019): 353–377; 368. [↩]
25. Ezequiel Borgognoni, “Viaje de princesas y cambio identitario en la España de los Austrias,” Memoria y civilización 22 (2019): 617. [↩]
26. Katherine B. Crawford, Perilous Performances: Gender and Regency in Early Modern France (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 20. [↩]
27. See Henry Kamen, Spain in the Later Seventeenth Century (New York: Longman, 1980), 373. [↩]
28. “Relación en ovillejo de lo sucedido a un criado de su Majestad,” (seventeenth-century), MSS 3672, Spanish National Library, 399r. [↩]
29. See Borgognoni, “La construcción,” 362. [↩]
30. “Romance a la real entrada” in Papeles varios del reinado de Carlos II (seventeenth-century), MSS 18433, Spanish National Library, 94v-95r. [↩]
31. See María Cruz de Carlos Varona, “Entre el riesgo y la necesidad: embarazo, alumbramiento y culto a la Virgen en los espacios femeninos del Alcázar de Madrid (siglo XVII),” Arenal: Revista de historia de mujeres 13.2 (2006): 263–290. [↩]
32. Gómez-Bravo, “The Origins,” 88. [↩]
33. Gómez-Bravo, “The Origins,” 89. [↩]
34. “en su inicio, el sistema segregacionista de la limpieza de sangre no tuvo una relación discursiva con el color de la piel; pero … la limpieza de sangre y la raza se entretejieron, durante la Colonia, con el color de la piel.” Max Hering Torres, “Colores,” 127. [↩]
35. Max Hering Torres, “Colores,” 121–127. [↩]
36. On bloodletting as a cosmetic practice, see Anne J. Cruz, “Don Quijote, La Duquesa y La Crisis De La Aristocracia.” USA Cervantes: 39 Cervantistas de Estados Unidos, eds. Georgina Dopico-Black, Francisco Layna (2009): 359-386; On chewing clay, see Maríaluz López-Terrada, “‘Sallow-faced Girl, Either it’s Love or You’ve Been Eating Clay’: Representation of Illness in Golden Age Theater,” in Medical Cultures of the Early Modern Spanish Empire, eds. John Slater, Maríaluz López-Terrada and José Pardo-Tomás (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014), 167–188. [↩]
37. Martínez, Genealogical Fictions, 41. [↩]
38. Her death was so sudden it was alleged by some sources to have been the result of poisoning. See John Langdon-Davies, Carlos: The King Who Would Not Die (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1964), 147–148. [↩]
39. Alfonso Cidiel de Torres, “Romance acróstico endecasílabo a la muerte de la reina,” (1689), bdh0000142919, Spanish National Library, 2. [↩]
40. See Celia Fisher, Flowers of the Renaissance (Los Angeles: J Paul Getty Museum, 2011), 35–39. [↩]
41. Cited in Gómez Centurión Jiménez, “La sátira,” 24. [↩] [↩]
42. Borgognoni, “La construcción,” 359. [↩]
43. Borgognoni provides a description (“La construcción,” 360) and woodcut (“La construcción,” 372). [↩]
44. Diego Juan de Vera Tassis y Villarroel, Noticias historiales de la enfermedad, muerte y exsequias de la esclarecida reyna de las Españas, doña María Luisa de Orleans (Madrid: Francisco Sanz, 1690), 50. [↩]
45. Lynn T. Ramey gives the biblical examples of Moses’ Kushite wife and the Queen of Sheba, whose racial identity fluctuates in exegesis to uphold patriarchal racial identity (Black Legacies: Race and the European Middle Ages (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014), 39–63). [↩]
46. Papeles satíricos, en verso y prosa, sobre el reinado de Carlos II (seventeenth-century), MSS 17535, Spanish National Library, 66v. [↩]
47. See Joan Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 152; Emily Kuffner “‘En el tocar está la virtud:’ The Eros of Healing in La Lozana andaluza, La corónica 45.1 (2016): 75. [↩]
48. See Peter Biller, “Proto-racial Thought in Medieval Science,” in The Origins of Racism in the West, eds. Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Benjamin Isaac, and Joseph Ziegler (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 175. [↩]
49. Papeles satíricos, 66v. [↩]
50. Joseph Ziegler, “Physiognomy, science, and proto-racism 1200–1500,” in The Origins of Racism in the West, eds. Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Benjamin Isaac, and Joseph Ziegler (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 190. [↩]
51. Papeles satíricos, 167. [↩]
52. Specifically, this era saw severe food shortages and currency devaluation under the ministership of the Duke of Medinacelli that caused popular unrest (see Carlos Gómez Centurión Jiménez, “La sátira política durante el reinado de Carlos II,” Cuadernos de historia moderna y contemporánea 4 (1983): 21–24. [↩]
53. Charles battled a number of childhood diseases that left him weak throughout his life. Recent scholarship, such as Luis Ribot’s edited collection on Charles II, has reexamined the question of Charles’s infirmity to question the extent of the monarch’s disabilities (Luis Ribot, ed. Carlos II: El rey y su entorno cortesano (Madrid: Centro de estudios Europa hispánica), 2009). Several paintings depict Charles as strong and capable, and he was fond of hunting, a sport that required physical dexterity on horseback. Nonetheless, even historians such as Ribot and Mitchell recognize that in adulthood Charles had little interest in government function and was generally regarded as incompetent. [↩]
54. According to José Calvo Poyato, courtiers examined the marital bed sheets and regal undergarments for semen traces (Carlos II: El hechizado (Barcelona: Planeta, 1996), 145). The French ambassador reported Marie Louise’s assertion that “she was not really a virgin any longer, but that as far as she could figure things, she believed she would never have children,” a cryptic statement that perhaps implies Charles suffered from premature ejaculation (cited in Langdon-Davies, Carlos, 125). An anonymous satirical poem that made the rounds of the capital during Charles’ second marriage asserted that there were “tres vírgenes” (three virgins) in Madrid, mentioning two apparitions of the Virgin Mary and “la Reina nuestra señora” [our lady the Queen] (Cited in Antonio Bernat Vistarini and John Cull, “A Lily among Thorns: The Emblematic Eclipse of Spain’s Maria Luisa of Orleans in the Hieroglyphs of her Funeral Exequies,” in The Emblematic Queen: Extra-Literary Representations of Early Modern Queenship, ed. Debra Barrett-Graves, 160). To publicly accuse the king of impotence would be unthinkable, so this and similar poems were circulated anonymously and often orally. [↩]
55. On early modern conceptions of infertility, see Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages, 228–58. [↩]
56. Martínez, Genealogical Fictions, 55. [↩]
57. Indeed, this was not an idle threat; Carlos Fisas asserts that court ministers urged Charles to have the marriage annulled (Historias de las reinas de España: La casa de Austria (Barcelona: Planeta, 1992), 156). [↩]
58. Gómez-Bravo, “The Origins of raza,” 83. [↩]
59. Cited in Arturo Echavarren’s in-depth study of the scandal, “El caso de la Cantina: Un escándalo palaciego en el Madrid de Carlos II,” Cuadernos de Historia Moderna, 40 (2015): 133. [↩]
60. Cited in Mercedes Etreros, La sátira política en el siglo XVII (Madrid: Fundación universitaria española, 1993), 463. [↩]
61. Mercedes Etreros, La sátira política en el siglo XVII, 463. [↩]
62. Cited in Gómez Centurión Jiménez, “La sátira,” 25. [↩]
63. Heng, The Invention of Race, demonstrates throughout her study the extreme force of racial exclusion deployed against Muslim, Jewish, Native, and other non-normative bodies throughout Europe. [↩]
64. Cited in Gómez Centurión Jiménez, “La sátira,” 28. [↩]
65. On the history of syphilis, see Claude Quétel, History of Syphilis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); Jon Arrizabalaga, The Great Pox: The French Disease in Renaissance Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). [↩]
66. See Luis Gómez Canseco, “Dos sonetos bubosos entre Mateo Alemán y Vicente Espinel,” Revista de filología española 94 (2014): 87–105. [↩]
67. The French referred to the disease as the Italian disease (since it started in Naples) or the Spanish disease (since it was sometimes attributed to the presence of Spanish soldiers on the Italian Peninsula). [↩]
68. On the association of syphilis with prostitution, see Laura J. McGough, Gender, Sexuality and Syphilis in Early Modern Venice: The Disease That Came to Stay (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2010), 17–44. [↩]
69. Congenital syphilis is one condition attributed to Charles II (Bernat Vistarini and Cull, “A Lily,” 161). [↩]
70. Cited in María Luisa Lobato, “Miradas de mujer: María Luisa de Orleans,” in Teatro y poder en la época de Carlos II: Fiestas en torno a reyes y virreyes, ed. Judith Farré Vidal (Pamplona: Editorial iberoamericano, 2007), 40–41. [↩]
71. On the perception that infertility was endemic in late seventeenth-century Spanish society, see Emily Kuffner, “Mandrake and Monarchy in Early Modern Spain,” Journal of the History of Sexuality, 29.3 (2020): 335–363. [↩]
72. Cited in Gómez Centurión Jiménez, “La sátira,” 26 (spaces in original). [↩]
73. Burns, “Unfixing Race,” 189. [↩]
74. Gonzalo Álvarez and Francisco C. Ceballos, “Royal Inbreeding and the Extinction of Lineages of the Habsburg Dynasty,” Human Heredity 80.2 (2015): 62–68. [↩]