This book provides the first modernized edition of a work about marriage by the Franciscan friar and prolific author Francisco de Osuna (ca. 1492–ca. 1540), whose volume until now has not been edited for modern audiences. Osuna's book resembles popular sixteenth-century didactic works about lifestyle choices (i.e., marriage and rearing children), such as Vives's Instrucción de la mujer cristiana (1523), which were penned by religious and scholarly men.
Osuna's advice about conjugal life comes during a period of religious reform not long before the Council of Trent created rigid rules for married life, particularly for women. He infuses his book with his observations, such as the time he counseled a husband tempted by the attractions of another woman to instead joke around with his own wife; doing so, Osuna relates, improved their relationship, and even resulted in the couple producing another child (26, 183).
Formatted as a dialogue between Osuna and his fictional nephew, Villaseñor, Norte de los estados is divided into three sections—advice for virgins (seven chapters), married people (twelve chapters), and widows (seven chapters). The book moves through time to reflect the nephew's lifespan and conjugal experiences. Each part contains dialogue between the two characters along with additional components, including an essay that summarizes proper conduct for each stage of marriage, and an essay by Villaseñor's wife in which she complains about Villaseñor's abandonment, which Osuna recommends overcoming through reconciliation. The fictional nephew requests sermons from Osuna that punctuate the book's cross-cutting themes: one on being wed, another on adultery, and another for the funeral of Villaseñor's wife. Works such as this one shed insight into the popular imaginary, in this case about marriage, while underlining the limitations of these prototypical self-help books whose authors—in this case a presumably celibate moral theologian—usually walked different paths in life than those taken by the target readership.
Osuna's marriage guide explicitly addresses women and their roles in marriage beyond the domestic and spiritual spheres, reaching into the intimate and usually taboo domain of the bedroom. Beyond sexual activity, Osuna deals with some difficult subjects, even by today's standards, including rape, gendered expectations of virginity, women's sexual desire, masculine impotence, sexual positions, and masturbation. On this last topic, when counseling Villaseñor about intercourse, Osuna reminds the husband that women's pleasure and therefore “the business of marriage” may take longer than his own: “And this would be but a small evil if it were not for the fact that their wives go on to finish by themselves, in a more harmful manner, what was started by their husbands” (35, 169–70). The author counsels the husband to attend to his wife's sexual desires and needs rather than cease efforts once his own desires are satisfied, promising that it is a husband's duty to ensure his wife does not sin through nonreproductive sexual gratification, while pointing out that doing so may also increase the likelihood of conceiving another child.
Greeting the reader of this edition is a bespoke map of its author's travels, and thus the places where he observed conjugal life, from Seville and Tripoli to Toulouse and Antwerp, and many places in between. The edition reproduces the work's title page from 1531 (64), an engraving depicting a wedding (66), and an engraving depicting an exchange between Osuna and Villaseñor (75). These illustrations are commonly excised from modernized editions; those who wished for a parallel transcription, with scans of the original pages facing the modernized content, will be disappointed, even though such an approach would have made this edition unwieldy to publish due to the length.
The quality of the transcription and subsequent modernization is well executed in that each modernized page clearly refers to the pagination of the original, which allows readers to use this edition as a wayfinding text, as its modern typeface and orthographic conventions are easier for some readers to consume. One improvement for the publisher to consider for future editions of this nature is to include some header that states the part and chapter covered on each page. Doing so will allow individuals who are already familiar with this work to find their way more easily.
