Women and architecture

Women’s active participation in architecture has traditionally been obscured by historians. Mudejar architecture is a case in point. Both in early written sources and in later research, there are some excellent studies of some of the most important Mudejar buildings and spaces, in which authors have analyzed various aspects of patronage and the use of spaces. However, in most of these studies the gender perspective hardly appears as a means of understanding how these spaces were used, i.e. as a way of discovering which rooms were occupied by women; neither has it been used to reflect on examples of collaboration between men and women or examples of joint patronage, nor even to make comparisons between men’s and women’s approaches to architectural patronage or the different spheres in which they worked. The main aim of this book is therefore to make women visible, to recapture their historical experience of construction and spaces with a view to rethinking the history of architecture.