The aim of "Power, spirituality, and gender (Castile, 1400-1550)" is to analyze the emergence of female authority in Castilian courts and convents, in the space of text intersection created between both fields, from the early 15th Century to the first half of the 16th century. It is focused on the ways female religious discourse is defined and used as a way in which women gain access to the public eye. There are still some big gaps in this period of time, even though it is crucial, since in these years the modalities of female authority that would be a starting point for the following period emerged. From then on female power types were designed and shaped, politics and religion converge and get mixed up, being the essential structure of textual communities and recognizable discourse practice. Spirituality, influence acquisition desire, and a woman's condition allow creating their own habitus, in which these two elements are constituted in a way of social, symbolic, and cultural capital. 

In order to understand how this model of authority is configured, the Project will focus on texts that address women ('authorized' by them by patronage or writing) as ways of comprehension and dissimilation of the discourse methods of the power group, as well as female customs of self-representation to those who attend. That will allow closeness to the reasons of success or failure for the construction of a social and cultural authority. In this analysis, writing and writing practices about, for, and by women are included, based on how useful they were in order to structure the rules of the game of female literary field. Therefore, both the models and the counter models will be addressed, based on the readings and works promoted or internalized by women in the courts and convents; the counterpoint proposed by male voices in manuals of behavior and other texts aimed at controlling - or at least channeling - models of authority, addressing the use of figures and concepts in later centuries, will also be studied. The contributions of other disciplines (history, thought, social studies, art, medicine) that enrich the understanding of texts will be taken into account.

The corpus that is the object of study will, therefore, consist of texts for women, about them or for them (chansonniers, manuals of instruction and courtesy, works directed to the Trastámara queens or other great nobles, revelations, hagiographies, texts of and about the first Castilian visionaries). This corpus would be collected in critical editions, annotated and commented, and in the writing of monographs that give an account of the texts from an interdisciplinary, historical and literary perspective.