How to expand a Marian legend with the verisimilitude (the female sacristan in the hands of Lope)

Abstract

The legend of the female sacristan or the renegade nun who escapes from convent with her lover, thus betraying her heavenly husband, had great success in the literary or paraliterary manifestations of the European Middle Ages and especially in the privileged sector of the miracles of Our Lady. Its development, indeed, supposes the miraculous intervention of the Virgin, who, by replacing the fugitive nun in her office during her absence, covers the scandal and favors her total reintegration into the community, once the repentant nun, later on, returns to the fold, after a long period of sinful absence. The legend of the female sacristan remained throughout the XV and XVI centuries in the safe haven of the exemplary medical records and devotional books, but in the first decade of the XVII century Lope de Vega found it apt to be transferred to the stage as a comedia nueva with the title La encomienda bien guardada (or La buena guarda in the printed version of 1621). Since then this pious medieval legend acquired the rank of literary theme and spread throughout the world of Spanish and European letters. In this essay we intend to assess the main devices set in motion by Lope to convert an ancient Marian legend – addressed in the first instance to professional readers (such as preachers) and from then on included in devotional books for the use of a devoted public by means of his high exemplary character – in a dramatic product, respectful towards the precepts of the Spanish golden age comedy and therefore designed to satisfy the demands of a much wider public, and one more attentive to the lightness of profane matters than to the heavy sacredness of the exemplary discourse.