I described María de Zayas in chapter 1 as “a successful published woman author of page-turning tales of love and death.” That description, however, leaves out an important adjective: secular. She was a successful secular woman author. By “secular,” I do not mean that her stories are godless or irreligious, but that they deal with normal human life, not the life of a saint, a mystic, or another pillar of religion. She was a secular writer in an age in which one's religious faith was of paramount importance, an age of fierce conflicts between the major religions and between different segments of the major denominations. She was far from the only secular woman author, of course; Baranda and Cruz's volume makes clear the volume and diverse kinds of texts penned by Early Modern Spanish women writers, as well as guiding readers to those that now have been published or that remain in manuscript. Zayas was, however, one of the very few published in her lifetime, whose success served as a model for other writers and whose legacy endures and draws new attention today. In this chapter, I consider Zayas's religious belief and practice, her depiction of convent life, how she portrays Jews and Muslims in her novellas, and her treatment of magic and the supernatural.

Religions and Religious Life

Categorizing Zayas as a secular writer is important because of the debate over the function of religion in her own life and whether she entered a convent. Her twentieth-century editors and biographers reached different conclusions based on their reading of her texts and other documents, perhaps influenced by their own religious beliefs. Her first biographer, Lena Sylvania, while not placing Zayas herself in a convent declared her “an ardent Christian.” Sylvania wrote in her 1922 dissertation published by Columbia University that