The power of a feminine network: the family, life and death of Luisa de Velasco

Documentation produced after Luisa de Velasco's death has enabled the discovery of a network of relationships among elite women, some of whom had been working as servants in the Spanish royal court in the seventeenth century. These women, who were bound to each other by a friendship cemented at the palace and by their blood ties, managed the hereditary interests of the Fernández de Velasco family. The documentation also enables us to reconstruct and analyse this network, which connected other areas of power of the Spanish Habsburg monarchy from the Court in Madrid.