The Basque Seroras: Local Religion, Gender, and Power in Northern Iberia, 1550–1800

By Amanda L. Scott

The Basque Seroras explores the intersections between local community, women's work, and religious reform in early modern northern Spain. Amanda L. Scott illuminates the lives of these uncloistered religious women, who took no vows and were free to leave the religious life if they chose. Their vocation afforded them considerably more autonomy and, in some ways, liberty, than nuns or wives.

Scott's archival work recovers the surprising ubiquity of seroras, with every Basque parish church employing at least one. Their central position in local religious life revises how we think about the social and religious limitations placed on early modern women. By situating the seroras within the social dynamics and devotional life of their communities, The Basque Seroras reconceives of female religious life and the opportunities it could provide. It also shows how these devout laywomen were instrumental in the process of negotiated reform during the Counter-Reformation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Mar 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781501747502

Book preview

THE BASQUE SERORAS

LOCAL RELIGION, GENDER, AND POWER IN NORTHERN IBERIA, 1550–1800

AMANDA L. SCOTT

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

Ithaca and London

For my friends in Pamplona

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Note on Translation

Introduction

1. The Basque Seroras and Lay Female Religious Life in the Early Modern World

2. Her Duty and Obligation

3. Local Religion and Tridentine Reform in the Early Modern Basque Country

4. Nothing More Certain Than Death

5. The Virgin, the Witch, and the Widow

6. Conflict and Community in the Seventeenth Century

7. From Seroras to Sacristans

Conclusion

Notes

Glossary

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The ten years of research that went into writing this book mean that I have a lot of people to thank. I estimate that I have spent approximately ninety-five weeks in Spain and France (and probably more) over the course of research and writing for this project. Above all, I am grateful to my parents and my sister for their patience through all these absences.

In Pamplona, my first thanks go to the first archivist I ever met: Don José Luis Sales. Ever since I first set foot in the Archivo Diocesano de Pamplona (ADP) as an undergraduate, Don José Luis has been an endless source of knowledge about Navarre and a joy to have as a guide and fellow historian. Later, Teresa Alzugaray became a close friend during my many hours at the ADP; outside the archives, she introduced me to the life and culture that make Pamplona such a special place. Peio Monteano and Maripat Zacher became my family away from home while I lived in Pamplona, and with them I explored the best hiking trails, restaurants, and poteo routes of Navarre. Miriam Etxeberria, Berta Elcano, Félix Segura, and the rest of the staff at the Archivo Real y General de Navarra (AGN) have been exceptionally kind and welcoming over all these years. Thank you also to Ana Otegi and the always-smiling staff at the Archivo General de Gipuzkoa, to Ramón Suquia and Kontxi Zabaleta of the Archivo Histórico de Protocolos de Gipuzkoa, and to the staff at the Archivo Histórico Provincial de Bizkaia. The library staff and faculty at the Center for Basque Studies at the University of Nevada, Reno, have helped give this project depth and detail, and provided it with an anthropological perspective; I would like to particularly thank Xabier Irujo and Joseba Zulaika. I owe a particular debt to the various church archives I have accessed over the years and that do a great cultural service in preserving historic documentation while also making it free and available to the public. In this respect, the Archivo Histórico Diocesano de San Sebastián is a model archive and I deeply appreciate the work of María Carmen Urteaga and José Angél Garro.

Many people have talked me through research uncertainties, read drafts, or listened to conference talks stemming from this project over the years. Thank you to Kit French, Liz Lehfeldt, Sally Nalle, Alison Weber, Allyson Poska, Jennifer Mara DeSilva, Thomas Cohen, Jesús María Usunáriz, Gretchen Starr-Lebeau, Stephanie Kirk, James Amelang, Colin Rose, and Rob Clines, among many others. Bill Christian read two chapter drafts in record time while I was still in the archives and gave me the needed reassurance that I was on the right track. Celeste McNamara and Charlie Keenan have attended more of my conference talks than I can count, and their comments and complementary projects have influenced my own work immensely.

Friends at Washington University in St. Louis and the United States Naval Academy provided invaluable support as I finished this project, and I would like to particularly thank Molly Lester, Kelcy Sagstetter, Matthew Dzinniek, Rick Ruth, and Mary DeCredico; Molly deserves special praise for letting me drag her rock climbing while also listening to me ramble on about Basque history. The members of Washington University’s Early Modern Reading Group read portions of this project from beginning to end and I have incorporated many of their comments. Derek Hirst and Mark Pegg asked the most difficult questions about this project, and pushed me to be clearer in my writing and use of evidence. From her Gender in Early Modern Europe course that I took my first year of graduate school to political protests in downtown St. Louis during my last year, Christine Johnson was the model of the kind of professor I hope to become inside and outside of the classroom. I would also like to thank Bianca Lopez, Lisa Lillie, Luca Foti, Jenny Westrick, Dale Kretz, Max Forrester, and Sarah Bellows-Blakely. Thank you to Elyse Singer and Jacob Labendz for their friendship while I was away on my fieldwork year and after. James Palmer deserves a special acknowledgment for his willingness to endure my practical jokes and constant questions.

Much of the research for this project was supported by a Mellon Foundation grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR-Mellon), as well as by summer grants from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis and by the John Tracy Ellis Dissertation Prize from the American Catholic Historical Association. Writing was supported by a fellowship from Washington University’s Center for the Humanities and by a Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship, administered by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. This project would not have been possible without the determined commitment from these organizations to see projects in the humanities flourish and proceed in creative and intellectually independent ways. To protect free speech, creative thinking, and engaged research, we have a duty to promote and fund such crucial organizations, and I hope that readers will join me in doing all that we can to make sure that such funding is available for subsequent generations of students and scholars.

The final stages of this project were funded by a Junior Naval Academy Research Council grant and faculty development funds. Two anonymous readers provided much needed affirmation about the value of this project, as well as concrete suggestions about how to open up my argument and find a looser voice. I appreciate their close attention and I am grateful for their suggestions, which I have worked hard to incorporate into the final version. Similarly, thank you to Ange Romeo-Hall, Kate Gibson, Kate Mertes, and my editor, Emily Andrew, for their patience and for shepherding me through a new and unfamiliar process.

Finally, this project has been deeply shaped by the mentorship and friendship of Lu Ann Homza and Daniel Bornstein. Lu Ann introduced me to the Pamplona archives as a senior in college, taught me early modern Spanish paleography, and saw me through my first forays in attempting to make sense of religious reforms, misbehaving priests, and the violence of early modern village life. It was during these first trips to the archives that I stumbled on the seroras and realized their potential for reassessing women’s place in early modern religious history and their role in shaping, diverting, and redirecting institutional policies. Initially, this was just a study of local religious women, but under Daniel’s direction, this became a much more meaningful project about early modern Europe, the Reformations, and women as religious actors, leaders, movers, and changers. Thank you for your years of unwavering confidence and encouragement, and for being the best advisor I could have hoped for. Gracias, grazie, and eskerrik asko—I hope I can do the same for my students.

NOTE ON TRANSLATION

All translations and transcriptions are my own, unless otherwise noted.

Introduction

As the mists cleared in Hernani, bells echoed among the town’s hills, ringing out from each of the town’s nine shrines, and chasing away the thunder with each peal. Tugging at the ropes of each of these bells weren’t priests or sacristans, but rather celibate laywomen who were elderly but strong after a life of hard work caring for these remote sanctuaries. At the same time in Elorrio, a middle-aged woman and her niece moved slowly about their parish church, inventorying the jewels, books, and wax under their care. The holy water was low, and they made a mental note to refill the stoup later. Somewhat east in Deba, another woman carefully dressed an ancient black Madonna, protecting her from the cold, and carried the statue into her bedroom for the evening. Along the coast in San Sebastián, in a salt-stained parish church and under the steady light of a whale-oil lamp, two more women prayed for the safe return of the town’s fishermen. Further south, another woman consulted with the cathedral chapter of Tudela about upcoming plans to feed the city’s poor and sick; another up north in the village of Zubieta carefully polished her church’s silver and folded the white, freshly laundered altar cloths. In Sunbilla, a younger woman helped the priest into his chasuble and handed him his missal, while in nearby Etxalar, another woman swept the parish church and tried not to think about side-long glances and whispers of sorgin, or witch.

Each of these women was a serora, or a devout laywoman entrusted with caring for a parish church or shrine in the early modern Basque Country and Navarre. Every substantial village or parish seems to have had a serora; many had more than one. Despite this pervasive presence at the heart of early modern Basque society, until relatively recently, modern historians have largely ignored the seroras. This book sets out to rectify that neglect, drawing on extensive archival documentation to recover a lost way of life.

As common as seroras were in early modern northern Iberia, their prominence and geographic reach was limited to monolingual Basque-speaking lands and their bilingual neighboring areas.¹ They of course shared many things in common with other devout and semireligious women active in the late medieval and early modern periods; however, the seroras represent a powerful variation that accorded Basque women far more social prominence, economic independence, and religious status and responsibility than any of their counterparts.² The vocation was always reserved solely for women and was considered functionally separate from any role the lower male clergy might assume. In this capacity, the seroras may be one of the earliest examples of a specifically female livelihood with a salary that did not imitate or replicate male labor and that took place outside the home. Seroras complemented, and certainly facilitated, male religious work, but the two operated in tandem and were not considered interchangeable.

Moreover, seroras enjoyed close and protected ties with both their parishes and with diocesan officials. These relationships were instrumental in preserving the vocation past the Catholic reforms of the Tridentine period and well into the age of Bourbon reforms in the eighteenth century. With their enduring presence in an area that was at once at the heart of the Spanish imperial project, but that also managed to maintain a distinctive culture, the seroras provide insight into how ordinary communities confronted the local effects of increasingly centralized administrative policy and governance.³ Basque communities found it natural and efficacious to charge local women with more local religious responsibilities; diocesan officials eventually followed suit to work closely with seroras in administering and enforcing religious reform.

In this light, the seroras push us to reconsider assumptions that early modern Catholic reform was categorically repressive and restrictive for women. Indeed, in northern Iberia, it was not the Counter-Reformation that suppressed this vocation but the later enlightened Bourbon reforms that did. Examined over the long term and across three centuries, the seroras testify to considerable leniency toward female religious expression on the part of the Catholic Church, and much less so on the part of imperial administrators. Close studies of small villages, interactions between parishes and episcopal officials, and the daily lives of seroras reveal that Basque women shouldered an ongoing and central role in mediating and deflecting religious reform at the local level. Thus, incorporating the seroras into studies of early modern female religious life is not merely an exercise in adding one more name to a long list of iterations of lay female devotion; rather, it is a call to reevaluate the role women played in shaping reform and the ways they could act as catalysts for compromise.

MAP 1. The cultural Basque Country, including the three Iberian Basque provinces, Navarre, and the French Basque Country. Map by Mike Bechthold.

From a twenty-first century perspective, the historic seroras remind us that modern assumptions about women’s traditional places in the Catholic Church are merely that: modern assumptions. Indeed, historically, women periodically (and uncontroversially) held ecclesial roles of greater prominence and responsibility in the Church than they do today. Functionally, the seroras served in ways that were virtually indistinguishable from antique and medieval female deacons.⁴ Amidst various calls to permit women a greater leadership role in the Catholic Church—and to even open the priesthood to women—historic examples of women serving a liturgical role are all the more meaningful.⁵ These calls are also making headway: in 2016, Pope Francis formed a commission to study the diaconate of women (seroras included), with, many assume, the potential of someday once again opening the diaconate to women.⁶ In light of these gradual modern reform efforts, the seroras’ historic role as mediators and catalysts of reform is prescient. Reforms are cyclical, and from the perspective of reforms of female religious, the seroras help cast modern reforms as acts of overturning and returning to a world in which women’s leadership and responsibility was not just uncontroversial, but necessary.

First and foremost, however, the historic seroras’ ability to shape trajectories of early modern reform was a product of their mixed lay and religious roles. Though seroras were expected to be unmarried at time of appointment and to remain celibate, they took no formal vows, meaning that unlike traditional nuns, they were free to leave the religious service at any time. As parish communities, priests, seroras, and even ecclesiastical authorities frequently reminded one another, seroras were not professed religious, but rather [devout laywomen].⁷ This designation brought with it plenty of legal and social complications, particularly in the post-Tridentine years; however, it also necessarily left room for compromise and opportune ambiguity. Seroras and their communities played up their loosely defined statuses when it suited them, claiming more or less responsibility, obligation, or subordination to local and ecclesiastical authorities. Moreover, their lay statuses afforded them additional options in engaging with the introduction of reform and guiding their parishioners through subsequent upheavals.⁸ In this capacity, we catch a glimpse of some of the internal and external pressures that allowed women to edge into positions of greater religious and local authority. As unmarried women, unbound by traditional religious vows, the seroras straddled two worlds and helped liaise long-term local interests with the sometimes jarring and confusing reform programs.

For some women, the prestige of voicing the interests of the community or the attendant responsibilities of helping explain and introduce reform policy was undoubtedly a draw. Even those who did not find themselves at the center of debates about the efficacy or intended scope of reform still enjoyed local status and related perquisites. Seroras proudly stated how they alone were responsible for preparing the church for Mass, decorating the church for feast days, or managing subordinate church personnel. Juana de Zelaraín, serora at the shrine of Mary Magdalene in Tolosa, described how her work put her on equal footing with the male clergy of her city, and included caring for the keys, chalice, missal book, and ornamentation. As the parishioners of Tolosa would continue to argue throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the service of their church knew no gender and their seroras performed service and administration in a way comparable to the vicar[s] of [Tolosa].⁹

Moreover, seroras enjoyed financial stability and support that surpassed anything they could expect in the temporality of domestic marriage or the uncertainty of spinsterhood. Technically custodial in nature, the vocation was nonetheless prestigious and attracted women from a variety of social standings: poor orphans as well as members of the elite sought out appointment (multiple women of the elite Loyola clan, for instance, became seroras).¹⁰ Each serora brought with her a dowry, meaning that prospective seroras (or their families or other benefactors) had to have some wealth at their disposal.¹¹ Moreover, regardless of the social and religious prestige of the position, seroras maintained close ties with their natal families, working for the church while in life, but choosing to be buried with family members after death and bequeathing as much of their personal wealth as they could upon younger relatives. Ultimately, the seroría was a form of employment—and a good one at that—and it was one that sparked consistent competition and attracted interested candidates during the centuries it existed.¹²

The seroría was also not meant to be transitional and it was not held by women before or between marriages as a step on the way to a marital union. Rather, seroras underwent official examination by the diocese, and they received licenses much like parish priests and hermits. Selected by their local communities in a competitive application process and installed in their churches in ceremonies mimicking those used to install the male clergy, the role of serora was prestigious, stable, and sought after. For those lucky enough to secure an appointment, the seroría provided them with a stipend, a small house, and employment guaranteed for life. For single women who could not or did not want to join formal monastic communities, the seroría served as a respectable means of pursuing a religious calling, all the while allowing them to remain among friends, family, and familiar religious sites.

In short, the seroría provided single Basque women with a way to support themselves independently and apart from the confines of marriage and monasticism. For women drawn to the religious life in the early modern Basque Country and Navarre, formal monastic profession was a very real option, and there was no shortage in choice of location or order. The cities of San Sebastián, Pamplona, and Bilbao housed multiple large and powerful convents, drawing women from throughout the interior and maintaining economic and spiritual connections with the broader diocesan and parish communities.¹³ Paths leading to the seroría and the monastery represented a fork in the road for Basque women, however. Though groups of third-order Franciscan women in Bilbao sometimes graduated into full-fledged convents, seroras rarely if ever requested permission to transition to the monastic life.¹⁴ Conventual life physically removed women from the local community and redirected their spiritual services from the material into the representational, yet it did not spiritually remove them from the community. Rather, becoming a nun was meaningful because it renegotiated women’s relationships with their communities, prioritizing their invaluable spiritual contributions over their physical presence. Nuns served the outside world through a life of prayer; seroras served within the outside world through practical care of the sites and objects that gave life and flavor to local religious experience.¹⁵

Of course, medieval and early modern European women crafted a variety of semireligious lifestyles for themselves, with more or less community and church support. Seroras belong within the world of devout laywomen, even though they must be understood as something apart. Among these many permutations were the famous Beguines of the Low Countries, the Castilian beatas, the Italian tertiaries, and others too locally specific to be remembered by name or title. Some of these women offered simple promises later evolving into more permanent vows; others tested the waters of the semireligious lifestyle as they decided whether or not formal monastic profession was right for them. Others lived in satellite communities, apart from but under the protection of elite monastic institutions. Most were under the direct control of male clergy, who under the guise of confessors and chaplains kept an eye on these half-nuns, making sure that they did not trespass into the realms of male ecclesiastical authority. Regardless of what form these semireligious lifestyles took, nearly all were marked for reform and suppression following the Catholic reforms of the sixteenth century.

The seroras differed from all these other semireligious women, primarily because they received continued ecclesiastical protection throughout the Catholic Reformation and into the eighteenth century. This, added to the full combination of stipending, licensing, and unbinding promises only to remain chaste and single also set the seroras apart from other forms of devout laywomen; no other iteration of early modern devout female lifestyle exhibited all these features. Some wore Franciscan or Dominican habits, but no serora was bound to or in any way associated with a convent or any form of formal monastic life. Though parish communities and bishops disagreed on who exactly exercised ultimate authority over the seroras, both agreed that the seroras were church employees, essential in the task of keeping the parish running smoothly. While other regions that went through early modern reformations saw flexibility and mediation accorded to certain aspects of reform, nowhere else saw this compromise so centered on women. In the Basque lands, the seroras emerged as focal points for negotiation and local input. They slipped through the Counter-Reformation relatively unscathed, resurfacing on the other side with—if anything—more stability and protection than before.

The seroras were unique to the Basque lands, extending from Bizkaia and Gipuzkoa, through much of Araba, Navarre (Nafoarra), and into parts of the French Basque Country. Seroras were most heavily concentrated in Gipuzkoa and northern Navarre in the Cuenca of Pamplona and in the Pyrenees, but they were also employed far south in the bilingual areas of the Tudela Riviera. During the period of this study, most of this area fell under the control of the Dioceses of Pamplona and Calahorra y La Calzada. Redistricting of the dioceses in the 1560s and 1750s meant that some certain areas moved between the Dioceses of Bayonne, Burgos, Tarazona, and Santander. Today, the Archdiocese of Pamplona y Tudela and the Diocese of San Sebastián (Donostia) cover significant portions of the areas in this study; however, these are newer creations of the twentieth century. For the purposes of this study, I often use the term Basque Country in its traditional sense as the cultural geographic region of Euskal Herria, rather than a modern political province, and I use it to refer to the official administrative Basque Country, as well as neighboring Navarre. I use Basque toponyms whenever possible, except when this might be confusing or when the Castilian or English terminology is more common, such as with Navarre and Pamplona.

MAP 2. The dioceses of the Basque Country, sixteenth through eighteenth Centuries. Portions of the Diocese of Bayonne joined with the Diocese of Pamplona in 1567; similarly, portions of the Diocese of Burgos joined the Diocese of Santander in 1754. Map by Mike Bechthold.

Changes in diocesan geography, warfare, invasions (especially during the Napoleonic and Carlist wars), floods, fires, and other archival disasters mean that the records pertaining to the seroras are not evenly distributed across these provinces. Nonetheless, the archival documentation for the seroras is extensive and remains largely untouched by historians. Most of the documentation is found in church, notarial, and provincial archives across the Basque provinces, though isolated documents are also held in the Archivo Histórico de la Nación in Madrid and the Archivo de la Real Chancillería de Valladolid. Navarrese archives are the most complete and best cataloged of all these provinces, meaning that the church records used in this study are skewed toward the Diocese of Pamplona. This is also the case for criminal records (and preliminary Inquisitorial inquests), since the secular royal archives for the Kingdom of Navarre have not been dispersed over time and have long chronological completeness. Together, these two archives allow for deep and balanced study of the connections between local culture and legal consumption in the early modern period: divided into forty discreet documentation collections, the Archivo General de Navarra conserves over 25,000 meters of shelved documentation, with a continually growing collection spanning over 1,000 years. The Archivo Diocesano de Pamplona holds an estimated 120,000 trial records from the Tribunal Episcopal of Pamplona, with at least 52,000 alone produced in the mid-sixteenth to early eighteenth centuries (figure 1).

Elsewhere in the Basque Country, holdings are similarly rich, if more dispersed. The Archivo Histórico Diocesano de San Sebastián holds a range of pastoral documentation for Gipuzkoa originally housed in Pamplona, but which migrated to a new archival home in the 1970s after the dioceses split in 1950; in addition, this archive organizes many of their materials in parish boxes, leading to surprising discoveries of unique documents such as correspondence, memorials, and constitutions. Historic notarial archives for Bizkaia contain a rich trove of testamentary bequests and sales, as do the provincial archives in Araba. The notarial districts for Gipuzkoa are split between archives in Oñati and Tolosa. Both are in the process of digitizing and cataloging their notarial registers, but for the time being; only a fraction of their vast notarial records are searchable by digital catalog. Nonetheless, these archives contain important notarized memorials that record property transfers, donations, elections, and above all, possession and installation rituals. Tolosa also conserves a limited number of criminal cases pertaining to the seroras. I draw examples from as many of these archives as possible, and have worked in many others besides, even if material from the others did not make it into the final project.

FIGURE 1. Just one of the aisles of bundles of court documentation in the Archivo Diocesano de Pamplona (ADP), Sección Tribunal Episcopal, Serie de Procesos. Each bundle, or legajo, may hold as many as forty separate trial packets, or expedientes de processos. Photo reproduced with permission of the Archivo Diocesano de Pamplona (2017).

Methodologically, I should note that as part of my process of organization, I wrote drafts of many of these chapters while doing my fieldwork. While living in Pamplona during 2014–2015, I tried to visit at least three separate archives each week, which helped me see connections across source collections and geographies. I wrote the chapters simultaneously in paired groupings (chapter 4 with chapter 6, and chapter 3 with chapter 7, for instance), which also helped me see unifying themes across topics, and I hope also helped embed uniformity in voice and methodology across my narrative.

Despite their rich records, the origins of the seroras remain obscure. Dividing the seroras’ responsibilities between liturgical practice and those associated with processional activities, folklorist Roslyn Frank argues for a structural continuity between the role of women in pre-Christian Basque religious practice and the later seroras. Of course, many of the seroras’ duties did not exist in pre-Christian devotion, though women did serve as domestic priestesses for people and livestock in their households. No evidence of fixed religious spaces (temples or otherwise) have been uncovered for the early Basques, meaning that if the seroras descended from these forbears, then they might have inherited their ritual significance but probably not their functional role.¹⁶ In later periods, Frank has mapped functional and etymological connections between the seroras, saludadoras (healers), cloud-conjurors, and herb workers. In the early modern period, many of these functions were transferred from women to the male clergy, though many of these priests worked and performed closely with their serora-assistants.¹⁷ My study begins during this later stage, during which Christian devotion in the Basque Country and Europe was already dominated by the male clergy. In this context, my examination of the vocation centers on the roles that seroras played in their local communities, questions of how the seroras managed to survive suppression so much longer than did other semireligious women, and what this tells us about resistance to reforms and compromise between localities and the institutional church.

In the medieval and early modern Basque lands, a variety of names applied to the vocation interchangeably, making it further difficult to trace the seroras’ evolution, or to definitively distinguish it from more regularized forms of semimonasticism. Prior to increased diocesan intervention into the selection process in the sixteenth century, seroras were primarily identified by the kind of work they did rather than by consistent titles or regulation. The vocation was flexible and easily modified to fit local circumstances, as was its terminology. In addition, notaries and other literate officials struggled to find accurate translations from Basque into Castilian for a number of Basque cultural terms, and the seroras were no exception. Consequently, even throughout the early modern period, single documents referred to the vocation by a variety of names, included among many others serora-beata, freira, frayla, freila, sorora, humilladera, and even the inaccurate translation to simply monja (nun). In the French Basque Country, and especially Lapurdi, benoîte, marguillier, and benedicta were common. From time to time, notaries also used the spelling cerera, suggesting a possible connection between the origins of the vocation and its traditional association with collecting the funerary wax, or cera.¹⁸ The most frequent transpositions occurred with freira, frayla, and sorora, however, indicating that the term serora was most likely an example of the Latin-root words soror (sister) and fray (brother) working their way into Basque. Put in this gendered etymological context, the seroras assume an even more prominent social role, their names bringing to mind something akin to a female friar, or even a female priest.

Though references to seroras start to appear frequently in records following the middle of the sixteenth century, this was primarily a product of the expansion of the post–Tridentine era courts. Indeed, women living like seroras (even if they did not go by that name) surface periodically in secular and church documentation and literature in the medieval period. One of the earliest references that can be positively linked to the seroras is found in a poem written by Don Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada at Roncesvalles sometime between 1199 and 1215. The poem describes the foundation of the Hospital at Roncesvalles, and as he moves through his praises