The Female Body as Sacred Space: Materiality and Sanctity in Late Medieval Castile

Abstract

This article examines how the female body functioned as sacred space in the lives of three late medieval Castilian santas vivas: María de Ajofrín, María de Santo Domingo, and Juana de la Cruz. Existing scholarship has located sacred space primarily within churches, monasteries, shrines, and pilgrimage sites; this study contends that holy women also generated sacred environments through embodied devotional practice. Drawing on hagiographical texts, visionary narratives, and sermons, it demonstrates that the female holy body constituted sacred space by mediating divine presence, structuring devotional practice, materializing religious authority, and fostering communal participation. The argument separates two claims often conflated in this scholarship: that holy women sacralized the environments surrounding them, and that their bodies were themselves the sacred space produced. Taking the body as the accumulated deposit of its own habitual actions, the article defends the second claim. The comparative analysis identifies three modalities of sacred spatial production—enclosure, threshold, and stage—each defined by the operations producing it in place of any architectural form, and each describable processually as cultivation, transmission, and enactment. All three modalities operate in all three lives, and the points at which they strain against one another disclose the shared spatial logic by which religious authority was materially embodied and socially recognized. Sacred space in late medieval Castile, the article concludes, constitutes an embodied, relational, and performative process, irreducible to architectural or geographical category alone. Conceptualizing the female body as sacred space in this way offers a new framework for interpreting female sanctity, religious authority, and material religion in medieval Christianity.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Religions, 2026 · DOI ↗