The Basque Seroras

The serora was a quintessential and unique part of the Basque religious landscape. Almost every church or shrine (of which there were many) had one. Seroras were the women charged with preparing the church for Mass, decorating it for feast days, ringing the church bells, and so on. Their caretaking functions were considered essential, and communities invested considerable time and effort in selecting and installing the right serora to look after their church, even providing her with a seroría to live in. To us the seroras might appear anomalous, especially in the context of Catholic Reform, but they were not unlike the deaconesses of the ancient and early medieval church. They served a role that was at once considered feminine (household tasks) and deeply religious (the handling and cleaning of crucifixes and other sacred objects). As Amanda Scott observes in this brilliant book, they performed services ‘that were by definition

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