Basque Seroras

Amanda L. Scott is Assistant Professor of Early Modern European History at Pennsylvania State University.

• Introduction1. The Basque Seroras and Lay Female Religious Life in the Early Modern World2. "Her Duty and Obligation": Selecting and Employing a Serora3. Local Religion and Tridentine Reform in the Early Modern Basque Country4. "Nothing More Certain Than Death": Seroras and Their Communities through Their Testaments5. The Virgin, the Witch, and the Widow: Suspicion and Transgression in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries6. Conflict and Community in the Seventeenth Century7. From Seroras to Sacristans: Reforms in the Eighteenth CenturyConclusion

Scott's deep dive into three centuries of notarial and diocesan archives is truly impressive. Her writing is crisp and concise. Scott admirably succeeds in reconstructing the history of a group of exceptionally autonomous women who found purpose, esteem, and economic stability in the spaces between the religious and the secular.(Bulletin of Spanish Studies) As Amanda Scott's excellent study shows, the seroras reveal how timeless concerns coexist with and extend beyond great institutional change. In this study of seroras, Scott combines discussions pertinent to church reform, alongside institutional, social, and women's history, in order to depict habits similar to but distinct from what many scholars know. This book is an excellent contribution to all those fields, but remains, like the seroras themselves, interesting and valuable as a rare English-language study of early modern Basque life.(Renaissance and Reformation) Through meticulous archival research, Scott crafts a compelling narrative of the lives of seroras from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. The varied source materials—church records, criminal records, notarial documents, and legal cases—enable her to piece disparate accounts into a detailed history of how the seroras were critical to local religious life and reform(Early Modern Women)