History has been very unfair with many characters who are greatly distorted and without a doubt, one of those who have suffered the most from this phenomenon is Juana I of Castile, known worldwide as Juana la Loca. It is curious how in different informative articles that treat or list the longest reigns of our territory, these are always headed by Felipe V, who reigned 6 years less than Juana I, and she is not even mentioned.
Juana de Castilla (Master of Affligem, around 1500. National Museum of Sculpture, Valladolid)
Joan of Castile (November 6, 1479, Toledo – April 12, 1555, Tordesillas) is one of the most intriguing and ambiguous characters that exist in the history of Spain. Over the centuries, she has been seen as alienated by her love for her husband, a political puppet at the expense of the wishes of her father, her husband, and their son Carlos, or, more recently, a proto-feminist oppressed for not fitting in. the role expected of her.
The infanta Juana acceded to the Castilian throne after the death of her mother Isabel I in 1504 and to the Aragonese throne in 1516, after the death of her father, Fernando II, turning into reality the aspiration of her parents of the union of both crowns, although It was just that, a dynastic union.
Between his accession to the throne and his death, 51 years passed that were of special importance for the advancement in the conceptions of man and the world that had been held until then. When she was a child, her parents had managed to reconquer the kingdom of Granada, had expelled the Jews and had managed to reach America, but during her mature years events such as the expansion of domination over the New World, the emergence of new ramifications of Christianity and, above all, a political and cultural system was consolidated that was the germ of the current system.
Juana couldas he demonstrated during the years he was free, having been able to follow her mother’s example and become a great queena role for which she was preparing even without having been educated for it, that she was in the cultural center of the Renaissance during the 51 years that her reign lasted and that she educated the future Emperor as a king, since Carlos had chosen to succeed his grandfather Maximilian I in the same way.
However, History had another cruel fate reserved for Juana I, since she spent those 51 years locked up in Tordesillas, far from all her loved ones, deceived and used by them and very mistreated by History until her image was revised. many centuries later.
The legend of Juana I
His birth in 1479, along with those of his sisters María and Catalina, came to serve as a piece in the political game that his parents, Isabel and Fernando, since the succession was assured with his older brothers, Isabel and Juan (LARDERO, 2006:17).
The occupations of his parents, who were focused on the reconquest of Granada, kept the family away during his childhood, because both monarchs moved their children away from the battle line; even between the brothers there was a distance, since Juan was educated in a special way for being the heir and Isabel was too old to be educated together with her three younger sisters. In this way, his first years of life were certainly lonely and deeply dedicated to his education.
Portrait of Juana la Loca (John of Flanders, 1496-1500. Museum of Art History, Vienna)
Being the third in the succession line, the idea that she could accede to the throne was considered quite remote and, therefore, little is known about the details of her life until the signing of her wedding commitment with Philip of Austria. However, thanks to different documents that have been preserved, the names of some of its tutors have been known, among which are the Dominican Andrés de Miranda, Alexandro Geraldino, who was the tutor of his sisters María and Catalina, and the famous Beatriz Galindo, La Latina, her mother’s tutor in Latin. Juana was instructed not only in the traditional aspects, since her artistic training was not neglected, nor was her political training, in which her mother was involved in the first person, seeking to give her daughter sufficient skills to function in a foreign court when she contracted marriage (SAMPER, 2016: 41).
From 1490, Isabel and Fernando began to move their European alliances to arrange a double marriage between his children Juan and Juana and the Archdukes of Flanders, Margarita and Felipewith the aim of isolating France from continental politics, but these agreements were not successful until the end of 1494 (FERNÁNDEZ, 1994, 48), ending the negotiations on November 5, 1495 with the signing of the marriage contracts.
The wedding was celebrated by proxy and Juana became Archduchess of Austria and Duchess of Burgundy without having met her husband. From that moment on, Queen Elizabeth was involved in preparing her daughter’s trip to Flanders, a complicated journey to which must be added the ongoing armed conflict with France; she prepared a large group of servants to accompany her, as well as numerous luxurious furnishings that would enhance her public image. In August 1496 Juana began her journey to Laredo, from where she would depart for the expedition to Flanders, accompanied by her mother and her brothers.
The chronicles of Lorenzo Padilla date the start of the stormy voyage to August 21, 1496, which led her to garrison on the English coast until September 2 due to poor sea conditions; finally six days later, the party reached the port of Arnemuiden. There she was not received by her husband, as expected, but by her sister-in-law Margarita, together with whom she went to Antwerp, a city in which she had to rest when she became ill due to the long trip. After meeting Margaret of York at the beginning of October, she Joan went to Lierre, where she was to wait for her husband.
The spouses met on October 20, 1496 and, on Juana’s part, it was love at first sight; surely this feeling was increased by the passion that both unleashed in the moments after their religious bond. Neverthelesscontrary to what the good start of the relationship foresaw, differences between the retinues of bothespecially by the Flemish, and the numerous faults of Felipe in the economic maintenance of his wife began to cloud the relationship among the young.
In addition to the continuous ill-treatment that Juana suffered from the members of the Flemish Court, who never finished accepting her for moving away the aspirations of her territory with France, the archduchess never accepted Felipe’s continuous infidelities and his neglect in his duties. conjugal, so much so that until 1498 the first daughter of the marriage was not born. I missed Juana’s behaviorthat as a young woman she had always been a capable and intelligent woman and at that time she was annulled by her husbandso much so that he accepted his decisions that clearly harmed the kingdoms of his parents, only showing his discontent with the alliance with King Louis XII of France.
A) Yes, The figure of Juana has been one of the figures that has aroused the most interest throughout history., always surrounded by old legends, theories about her madness or her jealousy, which means that her figure has always been built halfway between real history and myth, marking her long life with ephemeral anecdotes that are the ones that have managed to perpetuate her crazy image. Her madness has been her main feature and she has managed to arouse interest in different fields, creating monographic studies about her that explore those anecdotes of her life.
The literary interest in her seems to be born in the second half of the 19th century, with Romanticism being the style that found in her black legend a gold mine to build stories about her and reconstruct the past of Spain. Already in these moments, with the advance of the philosophical systems, an evolution of the conception of his character is presented; the first to start with the change of image of the queen was Manuel Tamayo y Baus with Crazy Lovefrom 1855, which came to consider her crazy with jealousy and not simply crazy, a very reproduced image, even in painting, with the picture of Joan the Crazy by Francisco Pradilla, from 1878, which visually represents the madness of love of the queen. And despite the attempts of historians, this is the image of the queen that is still maintained, in part perhaps because it is a great claim for the public, both in the 19th and 21st centuries.
Doña Juana la Loca (Francisco Pradilla y Ortiz, 1887. Prado National Museum, Madrid)
Another new perspective is introduced by Galdós with his work Saint Joan of Castile, from 1918, which explained the queen’s misfortune by three different aspects, a new proposal with respect to the above: first, because of the rumors that arose about her behavior after Felipe’s death, and even before this fact; second, because of the interest of her father and her son in keeping her away from the government and from the enemies that her son might have in Castile and Aragon; and third because of her lack of religiosity and alleged heresy, since she always leaned towards the most humanist teachings.
The queen’s new vision
Today the queen is presented as a compendium of all these personalities, a passionate, jealous woman and a victim of everything that was plotted around her, to which we must add a new perspective, which is motivated by gender studies. This has come to mean that Juana is now presented as a proto-feminist figure, mainly because she was persecuted for not fitting the model of women of her time.
Different authors, such as E. Showalter in his work New feminist criticism: essays on women, literature and theory (1985) equates Juana’s actions of madness with excessive femininity, framed at that time by notions of weakness and emotionality that were linked to gender. Before, it had been considered that it was a female body dependent on sexual impulses that unbalanced her, but that image has changed now, since it is understood that it is in her body that Juana finds a form of expression of what happens to her.
This new vision presents a Juana intelligent and more aware of her actionswho knows how important her well-being is for the people around her and that is precisely the way she uses to speak when they deprive her of everything, she punishes herself and the rest by not eating, neglecting her hygiene or even depriving herself of sleep, since he sees that hurting himself is his only means of communication.
Despite these changes in the conception of Juana’s madness, the most repeated version is that it was caused by Felipe’s infidelities, which took the form of angry outbursts, “hunger strikes” and lack of hygiene. This is the main reason why Juana arouses interest, knowing the truth about her diagnosis.
The text interprets Juana’s madness according to Michel Foucault’s theory of madness, for which she would not be considered mad, since according to this philosopher madness is a social construction that has its…