JUDAS

Born as Juana Inés de Asbaje y Ramírez de Santillana in 1648, Juana is the reason I renamed my 'Ancient Women of Power' series to the 'Historical Women of Power' series. Despite being born far from the classical period, her feminism and strikingly modern thought were too inspirational not to include.  She was born in New Spain, Mexico, to descendants of Spanish immigrants. Despite her link to the noble Spanish, she seemed destined for a middle-class life, as she was born out of wedlock. Her father, a Spanish military officer, left her mother to raise Juana and her sisters alone. Despite her illiteracy and Mexican society's misogyny, Juana's mother successfully ran one of her father's estates and was determined on educating her children in the way she never was. It was perhaps her mother's revolutionary ideas about a woman's role in society that inspired Juana to pursue a life in scholarship.  A painting of Sor Juana, rocking what I believed were micr...

So,  in the 17th Century, the Portuguese were really into God. This meant that people were also really into being buried at their local church, cathedral, or other Christian-flavored places of worship. Over time, these place's cemeteries became full of bodies, and most churches resorted to stuffing skeletons behind the walls, underneath the floorboards, or just deeper into the cemetery. This meant that after a while, Iberian churches were just absolutely full of bodies, which wasn't exactly sustainable. Skeletons aren't exactly known for being that decomposable, even if their flesh vanishes pretty quickly, which led to churches literally overflowing with bones. During times of disasters and plague, churches would have to bury thousands of bodies at once, which left little room for other bodies.                            An ossuary in Portugal. The solution for this, the Portuguese Catholic establi...