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The Many “Lives” of Pedro de Ribadeneyra*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Jodi Bilinkoff
Jodi Bilinkoff*
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina, Greensboro
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Abstract

The important early Jesuit Pedro de Ribadeneyra (1526-1611) has the distinction of having been a biographer of men, a biographer of women, an autobiographer, and the subject of biography. As such he and his texts seem particularly apt subjects for study given the current interest by scholars in a number of disciplines in the various forms of “life-writing“ produced so abundantly in the early modern period. In this essay I briefly examine Ribadeneyra's most famous biography, that of his mentor Ignatius Loyola, as well as two little-known and virtually unstudied texts: his Life of the pious laywoman Estefanía Manrique de Castilla and his autobiography or Confessions. I focus upon the ways in which he treated issues of authority and obedience in constructing as exemplary the lives of these three Spanish nobles and explore his strategies for enlisting life-writing in the campaign for a renewed, activist Catholicism.

Type
Research Article
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 52 , Issue 1 , Spring 1999 , pp. 180 - 196
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1999

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Footnotes

*

I presented earlier versions of this paper at the Annual Meeting of the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference, Toronto, October, 1994 and at the Mid-Atlantic Hispanic Medieval and Renaissance Seminar, Charlottesville, VA, November, 1995. I am grateful to the members of these audiences for their responses. I especially thank Abel Alves, David Collins, Kenneth Mills, Sara Nalle, John O'Malley, Terence O'Reilly, Alison Weber, and Barbara Weissberger for their advice and encouragement. This research was aided by National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend FT-37279.

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