Resumen de Providence and the sacred womb: La estirpe de la mariposa and women’s place in Spanish national historiography
Within the last quarter of the twentieth century and now well into the twenty-first, the historical novel has been a prolific and popular form in Spain for commentary on the dictatorship, the Transition and contemporary politics, as well as a vehicle to reimagine and revise the more distant past. This article examines La estirpe de la mariposa – poet Magdalena Lasala’s first foray into narrative fiction, published in 1999 – as a product of this period of collective rethinking. Seeking to shift the historiographical focus from men to women in medieval Iberian history, La estirpe traces the lineage of five mostly fictional women that are imagined to have shaped and influenced the great men in caliphal Córdoba. This article analyzes the mechanisms the novel employs to refocus national historical narratives on women and their historical contribution to Spanish society, identifying several specific historiographical strategies employed by canonical Spanish National Catholic histories that not only are resuscitated in La estirpe de la mariposa but are at the heart of the portrayal of the female protagonists.
