Consisting of revised versions of papers presented at the 1990 annual meeting of the Society for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies in New Orleans, this book is divided into three parts and covers: religious control and its limits in the Iberian world; images of the body in Spanish society; and women, gender and family in Hapsburg Spain. The papers address questions seldom dealt with in studies of Spanish life and letters. These range from the political and economic nature of the frontier between Christians and Moslems; the dialectical quality of 16th-century exhortations to silence for women; and the polemical appreciation of the humiliated eremitical body to tracts on superstition and witchcraft. The book also considers the psychology of 16th-century blasphemy; and issues of gender and sexual transgression inscribed in ballad variants, among other topics. The paperback edition of this text has been published under the title "Religion, Body and Gender in Early Modern Spain".