In Chariots of Ladies, Nuria Silleras-Fernandez lines the improvement of devotion and feminine piety one of the Iberian aristocracy from the overdue heart a long time into the Golden Age, and from Catalonia to the remainder of Iberia and Europe through the increase of the Franciscan Observant circulation. A software of piety and morality devised by way of Francesc Eiximenis, a Franciscan theologian, royal counselor, and author in Catalonia within the 1390s, got here to signify the female excellent within the maximum circles of the Iberian aristocracy within the period of the Empire. As Eiximenis's paintings was once tailored and translated into Castilian over the century and a part that undefined, it grew to become a version of devotion and behavior for queens and princesses, together with Isabel the Catholic and her descendants, who governed over Portugal and the Spanish Empire of the Hapsburgs.

Silleras-Fernandez makes use of archival documentation, letters, manuscripts, incunabula, and a variety of released fabric to explain how Eiximenis's rules on gender and devotion have been learn by means of Countess Sanxa Ximenis d'Arenós and Queen Maria de Luna of Aragon and the way they have been then replaced via his adaptors and translators in Castile for brand spanking new readers (including Isabel the Catholic and Juana the Mad), and in sixteenth-century Portugal for brand spanking new patronesses (Juana’s daughter, Catalina of Habsburg, and Catalina’s daughter, Maria Manuela, first spouse of Philip II). Chariots of Ladies casts gentle on a overlooked measurement of stumble upon and alternate in Iberia from the overdue fourteenth to the mid-sixteenth centuries.