Spanish Habsburg Women: Objects, Ritual, and Religion in the Early Modern World

This symposium focuses on the spaces and objects that structured religious life for Spanish Habsburg women— among them queens, regents, widows, infantas, and nuns—and reinforced their positions as central figures in a global empire. 

Throughout the period of Habsburg rule in Spain (1516-1700), women members of the family founded convents allied with the court, commissioned oratories destined for dynastic rites, and fomented devotion to miracle-working images and to the cults of newly canonized saints. The symposium will explore how Habsburg women thus engaged the culture of material circulation fueled by global expansion and Catholic evangelization, whether through devotional books and prints from the Spanish Netherlands, crosses made of gold from viceregal Peru, or holy relics from Christian Japan. It will also examine the ways in which Habsburg women employed sacred material culture in defining and reconstituting their roles at court, in the convent, and in public discourse. Through the exchange of luxury goods and the ritual performance of piety, the dynasty’s women mediated the linguistic, cultural, and geographical boundaries that often separated them. 

This event will include lectures by internationally renowned specialists as well as a collection presentation designed for students and scholars featuring sixteenth- and seventeenth-century books and prints from the Newberry Library’s collections.

Co-organized by the research project AGENART, La agencia artística de las mujeres de la Casa de Austria, 1532-1700. Sponsored by Carole Levin.

With the collaboration of The Art Institute of Chicago and the Instituto Cervantes Chicago.