Faculty Author Series: Nancy Cushing-Daniels

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Breaking Boundaries, Forming Friendship: Writing and the Convent in 17th Century Spain by Nancy Cushing-Daniels,

As the keystone is essential to the structural integrity of the archways in a convent, the convent itself is the key to understanding the writing of women in 17th-century Spain. Without the convent, women writers might have experienced some success, but eventually they would have crumbled under the relentless pressure of male domination. The convent provided the building blocks for what later became a corpus of literature written by women. Cushing-Daniels' book, Breaking Boundaries, Forming Friendship: Writing and the Convent in 17th Century Spain, addresses important issues in early modern women's writing in Spain that are commonly ignored due to the frequent separation of secular writing from the convent context.

Cushing-Daniels is a professor in the Spanish department at Gettysburg College. She attended Alfred University and earned a bachelor's degree majoring in history. She then received her master's degree at State University of New York at Albany in Spanish literature and a doctorate in romance languages and literatures from the University of California at Berkeley. Specializing in Golden Age literature, she wrote her dissertation on Maria de Zayas, a 17th-century Spanish novelist. She is currently working in two different research areas: Cervantes and the 14th-century work El libro de buen amor.

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