SOURCE: Grieve, Patricia E. “Embroidering with Saintly Threads: María de Zayas Challenges Cervantes and the Church.” Renaissance Quarterly 44, no. 1 (spring 1991): 86-106.

In this essay, Grieve maintains that Zayas used her writing to challenge both the secular and religious authorities of her time.

When the Spanish novella-writer, María de Zayas y Sotomayor, challenged seventeenth-century male authorities, her challenge embraced both sacred and profane canons. Zayas invests her novellas with the formal properties of hagiography while subverting the ideology of that Church-sanctioned genre. At the same time, Zayas shows herself to be a subtle reader and interpreter of one of Spain's greatest writers, Cervantes, by challenging his attitude to and treatment of women. This study compares Zayas' and Cervantes' handling of similar fictional situations and suggests that Zayas' reading of Cervantes invited her to respond to his paradigmatic novellas by exploring concerns that pervade seventeenth-century European literature and...