Luisa de Carvajal is included her merely because she was subjected to frequent flagellation with a scourge of vihuela strings “nada blandas” as part of her training in Christian piety. The abstract of the article by Elizabeth Rhodes [rhodes1998] sums her up as “a rich noblewoman from Spain who lived from 1566 to 1614. When her parents died, Luisa stayed at the estate of her uncle, Francisco de Hurtado y Mendoza, where she was humiliated, mortified and disciplined according to the trials of Jesus Christ. She carried out various missionary work in London, England, from 1605 to 1614 such as preaching and teaching. Her counter-reformation practices and perspectives in life helped her in being accepted as a missionary”. Her upbringing, after the early death of her parents (when she was six), involved extreme if not bizarre training in discipline and piety of the severest kind. Some of the extreme practices of discipline and some of the humiliation she was subjected to as part of her education, described by her in her own writings, are scarcely to be believed from a contemporary perspective. Among the disciplines that were performed on her and the humiliations that she was forced to endure was flagellation. The only reference to her in connection with the vihuela was her governess’ use of a cat-o’-nine-tails made of vihuela strings to flagellate her. As Elizabeth Rhodes points out “Few figures of seventeenth-century Spain can vie with Carvajal's case of high drama and disturbing, zealous piety”.
Born in Jaraicejo, a small town in Cáceres (Extremadura), Carvajal was from a noble family. At the age of six, following the death of her parents, she was sent to live with a maternal aunt, María Chacón, governess of Philip II's children. She lived with her aunt at court in Madrid from 1572 to 1576, the first two in the household of Princess Juana de Austria. Rhodes reports that “Under the tutelage of her own harsh governess, Isabel de Ayllón, Carvajal was trained in severe formalistic piety and the strictest of female propriety. At the same time, she enjoyed the resources of the best educated children in Spain, the royal offspring… In 1576, the ten-year old Carvajal suffered another heavy blow when her aunt died suddenly, leaving her in the hands of an uncle, the important diplomat Francisco de Hurtado y Mendoza, Marqués de Almazán. Carvajal lived with his family on estates in Soria and Pamplona, still accompanied by Ayllón, whose harsh practices continued relentlessly.” In one of her own writings, Carvajal describes various of the disciplines to which she was subjected. The one that has relevance here does not indicate whether it occurred in Madrid or after 1576 on her uncle’s estates, but it appears that it was an ongoing practice that may have occurred many times. Carvajal indicates that “Acabada la disciplina, muchas veces me mandaba con mucho señorio que le besase lo pies; y yo, postrada en el suelo, se los besaba. Pero en esto no hacía yo nada ni en sufrir golpes de una disciplina de cuerdas de vihuela, nada blanda, tan bien dados que apenas podia sufrirlos.” [The discipline being finished, many times she ordered me very haughtily to kiss her feet, and I, prostrate on the ground, kissed them. But in this I did nothing, nor in enduring the blows of a scourge made of vihuela strings, not at all soft, so wall delivered that I could hardly stand it.] Carvajal y Mendoza, Luisa de. Escritos autobiográficos, ed. Camilo María Abad. Barcelona, 1966. 181-82, quoted in Rhodes ($$ page?). The translation is by Rhodes, except that I have restored the word vihuela which she translates as “guitar”.
The significance of the passage is firstly that it shows the availability of vihuela strings in the royal household and/or the home of the Marqués de Almazán, another of the Hurtado y Mendoza clan in whose household Alonso Mudarra was raised in Guadalajara. Their availability was evidently such that they could be used for purposes other than that for which they were intended. Secondly, Luisa’s comment that the strings were “nada blandas” indicates something about the manufacture of the strings, that they were possibly of a similar stiffness to the strings that we know today, and not of the soft and supple kind that has sometimes been discussed with reference to early plucked instruments.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luisa_Carvajal_y_Mendoza