I. Introduction
Teresa de Cartagena (ca. 1425 – after 1478) was a Spanish, disabled nun who authored two spiritual treatises: the Grove of the Infirm (Arboleda de los enfermos) and The Admiration of God’s Works (Admiraçión operum Dey). In this second text, to defend herself against the male critics of her first book, she advocated for a woman’s right to author authoritative treatises and to perform abstract intellectual work with spiritual, theological, and exegetical ambitions. She was ahead of her time in such a way that she should be considered the first Spanish woman mystic and writer in Castilian, and the first to argue in Spain for the right of women to be writers.Footnote 1 Teresa’s writings emerged from the threefold challenge she faced: being from a Jewish family converted to Christianity in a highly anti-Semitic period, being a woman, and being deaf.
Teresa’s texts should be read for what they are: treatises concerned with female-authored theology and biblical criticism. Teresa blamed men for doing theology among themselves, and she claimed to be an exception to it. Refusing to take her theoretical ambitions seriously and considering her as a mere Spanish literary figure would reiterate the exclusion she suffered while living. Modern scholarship on medieval religious writing, however, tends to sort its sources into two separate corpora – two disciplinary “silos” that rarely communicate. On one side stand texts in vernacular languages, associated with women, mystical, and with the affective register of devotion; on the other, the Latin productions of the universities, the scholastic, systematic, abstract texts, almost exclusively male. Whichever shelf a medieval author is placed on determines in advance the kind of questions asked of them. This study argues that, although Teresa did not fit with the “vernacular” side, she should not be reduced to the “scholastic” side since her intellectual affirmation was grounded in her highly affective experience of marginalization and deafness. In this sense, Teresa compels us to reconsider this dichotomy that nowadays shapes most medieval studies.
Teresa’s text can be aptly described as an “autopathography” – a term coined to designate autobiographical narratives of illness or disability.Footnote 2 Medieval Hispanic disability studies remain an almost non-existent field; nonetheless, Connie Scarborough offers a strong preliminary framework by establishing a double paradigm: disabled individuals were either represented as cast off by God (disgraced) or as recipients of divine favor (graced).Footnote 3 They were therefore subjected to extreme, contradictory responses, ranging from charitable acts to persecution and impairments – a paradox that is crucial to bear in mind when considering Teresa’s individual trajectory.
My methodology also seeks to place Teresa’s texts in sustained dialogue with sources she herself mobilized, as well as placing an emphasis on her specific relationship to the Bible: that of a conversa, shaped by late medieval Spanish Jewish exegesis and visibly at ease within that non-Christian Biblical milieu.
Together, these threads sustain what forms the central axis of this study: a series of reconsiderations of the interpretive paradigms in which Teresa has been placed, whether historiographical, spatial, and disciplinary, each of which obscures her intellectual ambition, and each of which must be revised to retrieve it.
This study’s thesis will be better contextualized through a brief review of the historical record on Teresa that abounds with conflicting assumptions (Section II). The third section intends a reconsideration of the prevailing interpretative model of her writing that is based on enclosure and spatiality. In scholarship, her account of her experience of deafness is interpreted as an experience of imprisonment; a spatial confinement into her body; by doing so, all of Teresa’s experience is framed within a model based on spatial enclosure and body. To retrieve the full measure of her intellectual ambition, a better model in that regard, better rooted in the actual experience of deaf people, is the pattern of absence/presence rather than enclosure/embodiment. Then, Teresa’s intellectual ambition emerged from her experience of deafness and sadness that should be apprehended as an experience of interiorization and structuration of the self (Section III). On the basis of this transvaluation (Umwertung) of absence, to paraphrase Nietzsche since absence becomes, for Teresa, the sign of presence, Sections IV–VI read her treatises as an affirmation of herself as a biblical critic and a female theologian, before her intellectual affirmation unexpectedly culminates in a mystical experience.Footnote 4
Her intellectual affirmation can be apprehended through Teresa’s unorthodoxy vis-à-vis a threefold pattern by which scholarship tends to schematically summarize women’s contribution to spirituality and mysticism during the Middle Ages: the originality of their textual forms tends to be reduced to their use of vernacular literature, especially poetry (i); their content stands out because of its specific interest in affective emphasis (ii); and their authority results from their mystical experiences (iii). First, her originality should rather be sought in her bold biblical appropriation. Second, the content of her treatises impresses with its sapiential tone rather than a pure accentuation of affectivity. Third, Teresa’s mysticism has closer proximity to the revelation of the rational and the enlightenment of the understanding than to the darkening of the mind by the inexpressible. It would indeed be misleading to treat the Teresian use of absence as a continuation of the apophatic theological tradition, that is, the via negativa of Pseudo-Dionysios (active c. 500), notably transmitted by John Scottus Eriugena’s (d. c. 877) translations – who also developed it into his own theology, further elaborated by Meister Eckhart (c. 1260–1328) and Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464), and, in the Spanish context, later by the Franciscans Bernardino de Laredo (1482–1540) and Francisco de Osuna (c. 1497–c. 1541), before John of the Cross (1542–1591).Footnote 5 Francisco de Osuna, for example, makes the explicit connection between being blind and deaf and the negative way.Footnote 6 Nevertheless, Teresian absence is distinct, and in many ways, resolutely remains cataphatic, that is, voiced. In summary, contrary to contemporary scholarship, the present study claims that Teresa’s textual originality lies in her biblical insights more than in her literary and poetical pursuits (Section IV), that her interest is intellectual more than affective (Section V), and that her mystical narrative is embedded in her intellectualized perspective by which she distances herself from any form of negative theology usually and, with considerable justification – think of Marguerite Porete’s Mirror – associated with medieval women’s writings (Section VI).Footnote 7
II. Retrieving the Historical Teresa
The central experience of Teresa’s life was deafness, which informed the whole breadth of her writings. Much speculation has been made to know when she lost the sense of hearing, but it seems only possible to assert that she was 20 to 40 years old and that she wrote the Arboleda two decades later, around 1465–1480.Footnote 8
Teresa’s grandfather, Selemoh ha-Leví (1353–1435), was a rabbi who converted in 1390 and took the name of Pablo de Santa María before becoming bishop of Burgos and Cartagena (he even gathered two synods in 1418 and 1427). He was also well-known as a theologian, biblical commentator, as well as a poet and a historian. His wife refused to convert, and they divorced, but Pablo educated their children as Christians. It cannot be overstated that Teresa came from an educated milieu since she counted among her masculine relatives the highest circles of Spanish intelligentsia. Her first uncle, Gonzalo (1379–1448), was bishop of Astorga, Plasencia, Sigüenza, and founder of monasteries. The second, Alfonso (1384–1456), bishop of Burgos and diplomat, was a prominent figure of Spanish humanism since he was also known as a translator of Cicero and Seneca in Castilian, as a historian, biblical commentator, moralist, among much else. Her great uncle wrote chronicles for King Juan II of Castile (1405–1454). Her own father, Pedro de Cartagena (1387–1478), was a military captain and governor of Burgos (secondary since 1423, and principal after 1441). Given that, when she entered the monastery in 1445, Teresa’s father and uncle held both the political and spiritual power of Burgos for decades, it is difficult to accept without qualification Elizabeth Howe’s statement that she was “at the margin of Castilian society,” or Yonsoo Kim’s assertion that she was marginalized in her monastery.Footnote 9 A cloud of mystery will always envelop Teresa’s life, and trying to dissipate it with questionable historical hypotheses is not a step toward its elucidation. For instance, in the early 1950s, it was not yet established that Teresa was a direct descendant of Pablo de Santa María since her name is absent from the official lists of the bishop’s progeny.Footnote 10 In 1967, the archives revealed that her powerful uncle, Alfonso de Cartagena, even wrote to Pope Nicolas V (1397–1455) on Teresa’s behalf two times: in April 1449 to ask for an exemption to allow her to move to the Cistercian order although she had made perpetual vows with the Franciscans; in May 1449, to obtain the possibility that, as soon as she turned 25 years old, she might be appointed abbess.Footnote 11 The pope laconically granted these two petitions. So, in this highly antisemitic period, Teresa’s family was nevertheless privileged compared to other women of that time.
Another loaded question is to know whether or not she actually attended the University of Salamanca according to her explicit claim in the Arboleda. Footnote 12 Since this is one of the few biographical elements she deliberately emphasized, I would respectfully argue that Dayle Seidenspinner-Núñez and Yonsoo Kim may be neglecting it too easily when they assert that she rather studied in a convent in Salamanca and simply used her family library – a position also endorsed by Miriam Majuelo Apiñániz.Footnote 13 The Spanish historian María-Milagros Rivera Garretas rather considers that it is plausible to picture Teresa attending the University of Salamanca (she might have attended a public class), and Victoria Rivera-Cordero and Isabel Beceiro Pita also rally to this side of the debate.Footnote 14 Teresa probably received an exception to the usual ban on women from universities, which was especially strict in the Late Middle Ages.Footnote 15 To agree with their stance, we should add that the Admiraçión evidences knowledge of science and medicine that was not part of the education received by girls in a woman’s convent, that her uncle Gonzalo was a chair professor at the University of Salamanca, and her relatives Alvar and Alfonso also studied there.Footnote 16 In addition, Teresa seems to have been sufficiently aware of the academic context and its exclusion of women not to have made a misleading comment.Footnote 17
These hesitations surrounding Teresa’s education indicate a deeper misunderstanding of her writing project: her intellectual ambition is not taken seriously. The fact that her treatises are distinctive instances of marginalized writings may have encouraged this bias since, when it comes to medieval times, everything that is far from the university scope tends to be assigned to literature, poetry, or mystical writings, most of all when it comes from a woman. Besides, her own depreciating comments on her “weak womanly understanding (entendimiento flaco e mugeril)” with purposes of captatio benevolentiae, her successful strategies to avoid religious condemnation contribute to the neglect of this dimension of her work.Footnote 18 Finally, incited by the current state of affairs of medieval scholarship, this neglect of Teresa’s intellectual ambitions tragically misleads the commentators to interpret most of her theological stances as a way for her to surrender to the doxa of her times.Footnote 19 On the contrary, Teresa was as bold and daring as she was prudent and ironic when it comes to gender theology and claims to female authority.
Many misunderstandings about Teresa are rooted in prior historical misinterpretations that unconsciously shape the textual analysis. I would like to take the opportunity to highlight two biographical aspects of Teresa’s life, found by Apiñániz in 2008 and published in 2012 by Rivera Garretas, that may support my insistence on avoiding a caricatural Teresa, depicted as a nun outcasted by everyone, cut off from the world, and imprisoned in her monastic life.
The first is that, before entering the monastery, Teresa had been married to the lord of Hormaza, to whom she gave no children.Footnote 20 Thus far, the archive inquiries have failed to resolve the question of why her marriage ended, but the death of Teresa’s husband might not be the explanation since the lord of Hormaza was still alive in June 1446, a year after Teresa made her perpetual vow.Footnote 21 Teresa never engaged with the theme of idealized chastity; thus, it seems improbable that she left her marital life for this reason, as did various famous medieval couples: Delphina and Elzéar of Sabran, Margery and John Kempe, Mary of Oignies and her husband, John, and many others.Footnote 22 Intriguingly, the single mention of “marriage” in Teresa’s writings comes with the expression “a dangerous marriage.”Footnote 23
The second interesting “secret” of Teresa’s life concerns at least the last three decades of her existence when she disappeared from the meticulous monastic registries. It has been supposed that she transferred to a Cistercian monastery according to the papal authorization she received, but the meticulous registries invalidate that, as well as legal documents in which the order and the name of Teresa’s monastery are mysteriously absent. The first introductory lines of the Admiraçión provide a striking example of these systematic omissions: “Teresa, a nun of the order of [blank space].”Footnote 24 According to these data, Teresa might have completely left the monastic life, and she might have attended some Spanish literary circles with her friend, Doña Juana de Mendoza (1425–1493), to whom she addressed her two treatises. It is often left unnoticed that this lady was nothing less than the camarera (lady-in-waiting) of Queen Isabel la Católica (r. 1474–1504), as well as her friend, and she was married to the famous religious drama writer and poet, Gómez Manrique (1412–1490), the precursor to Spanish theater.Footnote 25 Moreover, Doña Juana de Mendoza was Diego Hurtado de Mendoza’s cousin (dates unknown), the husband of Teresa’s sister – Juana de Cartagena.Footnote 26
All the historical context presented thus far, by showing Teresa’s acquaintance with her intellectual milieu, reinforces the pertinence of the need for a coherent intellectual perspective that this study attempts to promote. These historical data also prove that, even if the real Teresa is certainly ignored, her portrait ought to be nuanced: she cannot simply be cast – following Ronald E. Surtzand and others – in the posture of splendid isolation and rejection, as a poor nun being rejected in her monastery and withdrawn from the world.Footnote 27 On this ground, we may now proceed to the textual analysis.
III. Enclosure Versus Absence/Presence Paradigm
Two liminary sentences by López del Trigo open the Arboleda and emphasize the centrality of deafness in this treatise. Then, Teresa poetically explained how she had been exiled to an island that she solemnly named: “The Scorn of Mankind and Outcast of the People.”Footnote 28 Encouraged by this sequence, Teresa’s splendid incipit is summarized as the metaphorization of the marginalization entailed by deafness, but this canonical interpretation veils two prior motivations for Teresa’s writing.
First, “the fog of sadness” and “anguished passions,” that is, something psychological, exiles Teresa.Footnote 29 Her recurrent struggle with sadness culminates in the Arboleda with the exclamation: “What destructive and somber litigation and war does sadness wage!”Footnote 30 For Teresa, sadness, like deafness, isolates human beings, but from a visual perspective. This moves us to the second motivation, the light of God that illuminated her. Since these two motivations emerge with visual connotations – sadness blinds and light illuminates – in this incipit, Teresa pictures herself more as blind than deaf. Teresa’s blindness is perennial in the Arboleda, and is also explicit in the Admiraçión when she exegeted the gospel’s healing of the blind of Jericho.Footnote 31 The incipit helps to characterize the nature of this psychological cecity by claiming that the effect of this divine light which “dissipates the fog of sadness” serves “to illuminate my understanding.”Footnote 32 Therefore, my defense of Teresa’s intellectual concerns is based on the primordial interplay between sadness and ignorance that intertwines affective and psychological sufferings with the longing for the mental light of understanding.
The image of the island, the sepulcher, expressions like “the cloisters of my ears,” and the image of Teresa as a nun imprisoned in her monastery have understandably led scholars to insist on her account of deafness as an enclosure.Footnote 33 This scheme of interpretation then explains that Teresa’s solution is to encourage her reader to inhabit the prison of one’s suffering life because consolations too are dwelling in it. This interpretative approach boils down to:
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(i) Deafness is imprisonment in a suffering body.
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(ii) By expressing this imprisonment and embodiment, Teresa spatializes her experience.
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(iii) This embodied space also becomes the space of introspection, and consciousness, in which Teresa’s self-connects to itself and to God.Footnote 34
Without trying to discredit this exegesis, I consider that it misses that Teresa’s experience began with absence even more than with enclosure. This is intimately connected with the very experience of deafness as Teresa herself pointed out with a compelling example: when someone is speaking, if the listener “is preoccupied with things other than the conversation directed to him,” the speaker will tell him: “You, friend, are not here; come to your senses or rather return to yourself.”Footnote 35 Not listening is being here but also in another place. I argue here that absence is the correct paradigm to understand Teresa’s experience. In this respect, the image of the island connotes more solitude than imprisonment. Teresa’s first complaint is that there was “no one to direct my steps,” and her island has the strange characteristic that “it cannot be populated with residents.”Footnote 36 Deafness experienced as being away is, then, coherently described as being exiled in “a shadowy banishment.”Footnote 37 The marginalized are the banished more than the imprisoned. They are nowhere at home, continually absent wherever they are: “for although it may seem that the afflicted stays still at home, he traverses more roads than we think…”Footnote 38
Thus, the whole group of the outcast is encompassed through the image of absence shaped by her intimate experience of deafness. They are those with whom she splendidly claims “to have signed a pledge of sisterhood”; those who can place their name in God’s “register” says the Arboleda’s incipit, although, like Teresa, they are absent from human registers.Footnote 39 The literature overlooks that the Arboleda, in some ways, belongs to a specific genre of didactic writings written for women in the fourteenth to fifteenth centuries. These treatises were often addressed to a specific noblewoman (Doña Juana de Mendoza for Teresa), and some used the literary topos of involving an idealized and natural place (locus amoenus) in their titles, like “Vergeles [orchards],” “Jardines [gardens],” “Luceros [stars],” “Flor [Flower],” … and, for Teresa, “Arboleda” (that is, grove, copse).Footnote 40 Beyond their specific addressee, these didactic treatises characteristically intended to give advice to a specific social group of women in late medieval societies like religious, chambermaids, women from nobility, and so on, and for Teresa, the marginalized. This perspective enhances Teresa’s intention to address the marginalized as a central literary motive, a fundamental part of her project.
Substituting the absence paradigm for the enclosure paradigm has a valuable advantage: the opposite of absence – presence – is a crucial theme in Teresa’s Treatises contrary to anything that may constitute the opposite of enclosure.Footnote 41 I distinguish two phases in her argument.
First, introduced as non-listening and within the experience of deafness, the model of absence moves to its opposite: the absent is no longer the deaf person but the one who is overwhelmed by the noises of the world and “worldly chatter.”Footnote 42 This absence is negatively described from a very intellectual perspective: this distracted person has a “scattered understanding and concentration”; the involvement in the worldly brouhaha makes them unable to understand the spiritual voices, whereas the understanding that resists this clamor shouts with “secret voices.”Footnote 43 The non-deaf seems present to everything, yet is perpetually away, driven out of oneself by the threads of distraction.
Second, she developed an understanding of presence to oneself that is shaped as a remedy to this pejoratively described absence. Initially, in the Arboleda, this remedy comes out through the form of “total silence.”Footnote 44 Teresa understood her deafness “imposed on me by the hand of God” as a curative silence.Footnote 45 Later, in the Admiraçión, Teresa introduced a new metaphor that confirms she thought primarily through presence/absence rather than enclosure/liberation. The soul was the household, and some understanding goes wandering outside the understanding’s proper dwelling, which she explained to be the soul. What did Teresa mean when she described the wandering of the understanding outside the soul? This understanding is driven out of its home by its senses that prefer external things to the inner life of the soul: “So, our understanding, as our senses withdraw from their labors at nightfall and worldly dealings and outside contact are silenced, is compelled by necessity to retire to its proper home, which is the secret meditation and soliloquy of its inward thought.”Footnote 46
This presence to oneself can be characterized in three ways:
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(i) It is described in intellectual terms since the understanding is the agent who wanders, and because the ultimate dwelling is inward thinking. She even spoke about the “inner study” of the meditating mind that consists in “knowing the human being in oneself.”Footnote 47 However, Teresa was not describing a retreat of the soul to the sole understanding far from affectivity. On the contrary, the understanding’s dwelling is the “walls of our heart.”Footnote 48 In this mutual indwelling, the human being recovers their genuine unity which is a source of peace. In fact, when the understanding remains in this sapiential peace “immediately memory and will join it,” and the three powers of the soul are reconciled and “work together.”Footnote 49
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(ii) In this whole passage, the understanding is also feminized by being compared to a “gadding woman.”Footnote 50 The commentators often point out this patriarchal metaphor to corroborate the depiction of some gender conservatism in Teresa. As it will be exemplified again later, each of Teresa’s explicitly conservative stances should raise the reader’s suspicion because of her ironic and astute method of writing. In this specific extract, it hides that she was in fact feminizing the understanding under the false appearance of consolidating the medieval equivalent to the “Kinder, Küche, Kirche” view, which describes homemakers’ models for women. The theory of “medulla” in the Admiraçión supports this interpretation by feminizing the intellectual inwardness of the human being. This theory of Teresa – which, again, should be read with Teresa’s irony and subtlety in mind – begins by stating that “valiant men” (and a ton of other meliorative adjectives) represent the “outer bark,” while women are the interior and weak medulla. Then, she departed from these statements, consilient with the spirit of her time, by explaining that this medulla “works inwardly and gives power and vigor to the bark,” that women are more valiant than men according to reason, that it is more in their reach to be eloquent than strong, etc.Footnote 51 Teresa’s feminization of the understanding at the end of the Admiraçión builds on her endeavors throughout the whole treatise to bind inwardness to women, that is spiritual depth, inner life, interior knowledge, and finally clarity of understanding. This shows how far Teresa went as the first Iberian feminist, or at least proto-feminist: she shaped anthropology to support her legitimacy to write as a woman.Footnote 52 As the intellectualization of the understanding led to the union of the three faculties, its feminization is an opportunity to reaffirm that “God made these differences and oppositions in one and the same nature.”Footnote 53
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(iii) This presence to oneself implies a Teresian theory of the spiritualization of the senses that is not explicit in her writing. By definition, the senses are directed toward the exterior, so how can the understanding “return to its senses” in order to remain inwardly?Footnote 54 How can the senses be directed elsewhere than the outer worldly things? The answer consists in Teresa’s implicit spiritualization of senses throughout her writings: “the interior sight,” “the intellectual eyes of our soul,” “the eyes of my understanding,” “the ear of my understanding,” and so on.Footnote 55 Teresa sublimates her senses until, in her deafness, she claims to “hear spiritually.”Footnote 56 Far from popular legends about deaf people, there is solid scholarship on the neural reorganization of deaf people that enables them to improve their investments in other senses or to perceive some meaningful visual illusions.Footnote 57 Moreover, since the doctrine of the “spiritualization of the senses” had a medical grounding in the fifteenth century, all this should be related to Teresa’s demonstrable knowledge of medicine through the Arboleda. Footnote 58 Teresa’s project leads to a spiritual reorganization of the senses pleading for the conversion of the understanding’s senses to the interior life. By contrast, in one of her poems, Hadewijch of Antwerp (mid-thirteenth century) wrote:
The hidden ways by which Love sends me
Are such as completely rob me of myself.
That great noise, that loud gift
Of soft stillness makes me deaf.Footnote 59
Here, deafness is presented as the result of the spiritual presence, whereas in Teresa the spiritual presence spiritualizes the senses and grants a new hearing.
To summarize, presence for Teresa articulates intellect, her identity as a woman, and sensibility. Scholars apprehend the whole narrative of Teresa’s embodiment as a front door to her thought (Rivera-Cordero, Kim, differently, Béreiziat-Lang).Footnote 60 I rather consider it should only be inserted later since it builds on the paradigm of presence/absence shaped by her deafness, which is certainly a bodily experience. Her embodied self is indeed dependent on her intellectual activity as a writer. The examples of embodiment lie in the metaphors that emerge from her intellectual creativity.Footnote 61 Therefore, Teresa’s self is embodied through her textual activity: bodiliness does not precede intellectual creativity rooted in the absence/presence paradigm but both are intimately related; the self is embodied through textuality.Footnote 62
Let us contextualize this more closely within the ongoing discussions on medieval women’s mysticism. Caroline Walker Bynum initiated the tendency in scholarship to enter women’s medieval writings through the body, arguing that the specific relationship of late medieval women to their body “mark[s] a turning point in the history of the body in the West,” and demonstrating how women use the misogynistic association of their condition with the body to their advantage for theological purposes.Footnote 63 This centrality of the body to approach women’s medieval writings was also fundamental in later work, such as the pivotal contribution of Dailey, Promised Bodies, which strengthens the connection between embodiment and literature, “linking body and letter together,” – an approach applied, as noted, to Teresa.Footnote 64
While Bynum refuses to systematically equate sexuality and body, as Amy Hollywood pointed out, she, in turn, added another layer to this model by highlighting the “transcendence of the body” in such literature, performed through language, psyche, etc.Footnote 65 Hollywood has also pinpointed the medieval discussion on whether women should identify their suffering body with Christ’s suffering body on the cross or with Mary at his feet,Footnote 66 further reflecting on the feminization of Christ’s wounded body (already advanced by Bynum), and its queering in some medieval women’s writings. Teresa’s theology, which was entrenched in her conversos’ religious background, diverges, here again, from these patterns: although she demonstrates an in-depth knowledge of the New Testament, she only mentions Christ a handful of times; she avoids promoting any kind of imitatio Christi, and she has almost no mention of Mary.Footnote 67 Her depreciating comments should be read as a cautious attitude in the context of the growing hostility toward conversos, rather than as expressions of Marian humility – unlike, for example, Hildegard of Bingen’s self-description as “a poor little figure of a woman (ego paupercula feminea forma).”Footnote 68
In our quest to retrieve the intellectual Teresa, the first crucial step was to demonstrate the primacy of the absence/presence paradigm emerging from Teresa’s experience of deafness that was permeated by an intellectualized view of the self. Contrary to the spatial/bodily model, this paradigm expresses how omnipresent the intellectual concern is, and how much more faithful it is to the actual experience of deaf people. Now, let us move on to see how Teresa lays out the process of her intellectual affirmation and how it culminates in an intriguing event in her life.
IV. The Stylist or the Exegete?
For being considered the first woman writer in Castilian, Teresa’s linguistic mastery should be emphasized.Footnote 69 Her propensity to use rhetorical devices, like the long enumerations in the Admiraçión about God’s attributes, reveals how assertive her theological stance is.Footnote 70 However, Teresa considered her writings as treatises (“tratado”), and neither as devotional prose nor poetical meditations, which would have been more prudent.Footnote 71 As mentioned earlier, the term designates didactic treatises but the exploration of this group of texts of the Late Middle Ages reveals how Teresa’s intentions are specific and original. To summarize, Teresa’s texts fulfill most of these didactic genre attributes except that she goes further on the biblical entrenchment of her discourse. She does not sprinkle biblical references as other patristic references, but she endeavors to interpret them as a woman and as an exegete.Footnote 72 Teresa’s Arboleda de los enfermos has much to do with the Vergel de consolación [Orchard of Consolation], which was widely spread in the Iberian Peninsula at that time, and Flor de virtudes [Flower of Virtues], another didactic treatise of that time.Footnote 73 Teresa distorts the metaphor of the Vergel’s prolog because of her scriptural interest that plays a role in Flor’s prologue (pers. trans. based on my own transcriptions of the manuscripts):
Vergel, Prologue (manuscript from 1511):
… this work is entitled Orchard of Consolation: thus, like in the good orchard many flowers and fruits of different shapes can be found: hence, in this work, many things can be found, which praise and wonderfully delight the heart of the one who devoutly hears them.Footnote 74
Vergel, Prologue (probably later version):
Thus, like in the good orchard many flowers and fruits can be found, and fruits of diverse and noble manners, similarly, in this book, diverse and notable things can be found that praise and delight the mind that devoutly wants to hear and read them.Footnote 75
Flor de Virtudes, Prologue (manuscript from around 1539):
Thus, I made [this text] as someone, being in a large meadow of flowers and roses, who gathers the most beautiful to compose a garland: thus, I entitled this work of mine Flower of Virtues. In this text, if any errors or vices were found, I humbly supplicate to those who might hear them that, please, they amend and pardon them. And if they found things that appear to be good, thanks be to the Holy Scripture and its authors.Footnote 76
Arboleda, Prologue (manuscript from before 1500):
It [this island] can be populated with groves of good counsel and spiritual consolation … I must recur to my books which have wondrous graftings from healthful groves … I begin to look in his [David’s] most devout songbook called the Psalter for some good consolations … I would fill my solitude with a gracious grove under whose shade my body could rest and my spirit receive a healthful breeze.Footnote 77
Although Teresa also uses the incipit to account for her title, the Arboleda emancipates itself from the rigid form of these treatises. Teresa first follows the Vergel to state that those fruits are good moral counsels, characteristics of those didactic writings, but then the trees and the fruits refer to the Psalms, the grove to the Scriptures.Footnote 78 Contrary to the Flor in which the Scriptures are perceived more as an external authority that any writer should quote, the Bible animates Teresa’s Arboleda.
As demonstrated by these late medieval didactic treatises, the scandal was not for women to have knowledge but to show creativity. The accusations that were hurled at Teresa were plagiarism – which was relatively rare given the medieval notion of authorship – and unoriginality, the same accusation as her Italian contemporary Laura Cereta received.Footnote 79 The neglected locus of Teresa’s originality is her biblical appropriation.
Her Jewish culture plays a significant role in this endeavor, but what Bible does Teresa have? Teresa’s treatises quote the Bible from Latin and Castilian. The Latin is from the Vulgate, and she does not try to provide her own Latin translation for Hebrew. However, she seems to have been much more autodidactic for the Castilian references. The Spanish context of the vernacular Bible began with King Alfonso X, who organized around 1280 a translation of the Bible into Castilian by the Toledo School of Translators. In consequence, during Teresa’s time, several vernacular versions were in circulation. Later, Gonzalo García de Santa María (1447–1521), a jurist and humanist active in Zaragoza who may have been a relative of Teresa’s, authored what is considered the first printed Spanish translation of some Bible’s extracts in 1484–1485: Evangelios y Epistolas [Gospels and Epistles]. Although the 1485 princeps of Gonzalo García’s translation is lost, for some specific passages, I attempted to compare Teresa’s quotes with Escurial’s version, Gonzalo’s translation, and with Latin.Footnote 80 It shows that Teresa may have offered her own translation from Latin since her Castilian seems (too) literal with the Latin, and still too divergent from other accessible vernacular versions I found.
What about the other vernacular Bible? One of the vernacular Bibles in Late Middle Ages Spain was the Alba Bible, also named Biblia de Arragel in reference to Rabbi Moses Arragel de Guadalfajara (died in 1493) who authored the translation from Hebrew to Castilian in 1430 (revised and annotated in 1433) at the request of the Lord Luis González de Guzmán (died in 1443). The manuscript comparison leads to the conclusion that she did not find inspiration in this text either, and again, she seems to have remained very literal to Latin in terms of both grammatical structures and vocabulary.Footnote 81 Thus, Teresa does not refer to a Hebrew text although it might be expected since her male relatives were conversant in Hebrew. Moreover, this analysis – here in accordance with Kim – allows us to answer affirmatively the so far undecided conundrum of whether she knew Latin – a conclusion that, in turn, underscores the significance of her deliberate decision to write in Castilian.Footnote 82
Still cultivating her Jewish origins, Teresa finds in the Bible her main inspiring figure: Judith.Footnote 83 The heroic Jewish widow becomes Teresa’s model of “industry and grace.”Footnote 84 She wants to be as astute as Judith to do what “the male condition might not know how to do.”Footnote 85 To avoid the canonical condemnations for such statements, she identified as “prudent Judith” and uses stratagems with ingenious creativity. Judith represents a martial icon, and in this very passage, Teresa draws the parallel between her pen and a sword.Footnote 86 Choosing Judith as an emblem reveals Teresa’s combative nature, which will be confirmed by the enduring apology the Admiraçión performs of her Arboleda. Footnote 87 Besides, from a gender perspective, Judith killed an Assyrian general who has been pictured as an archetype of brute masculinity. For instance, the painter Gustav Klimt is understood by Robert Whalen to interpret Judith’s beheading of Holofernes as expressing “a crisis of the male ego, fears and violent fantasies all entangled with an eroticized death.”Footnote 88 Even if no erotic dimension is accentuated in Teresa, turning her admiration to Judith consolidates her feministic defense.
I do not have the space here to lay out all the Scriptural finesse of Teresa. It will suffice to note that when she distinguished the literal sense from the additional meanings of the Scriptures, she drew a parallel between her inability to hear and her intention to go beyond the literal sense of the Sacred Texts. As a deaf person, she insists on reading the scriptures with the spiritual “ear of the understanding,” in order to read “with great care,” and understand “not only what every word says but also what the sentence brings with them.”Footnote 89 Teresa’s originality consists in how assertive she is in her biblical appropriations. When the biblical question she discussed dealt with gender, she often protected herself with irony:
We read in Genesis that woman is the helper of man… for God said: ‘it is not good for man to be alone: let us make him a help like unto himself’ (Genesis 2:18). And one may argue here whether the helper or the helped has the greater vigor, and you clearly see what reason would respond. But these arguments and disputes make for worldly and vain arrogance and do not so profit devotion and divert my intention from its purpose and end, which, may it please God, is not to offend the superior and honorable condition of prudent men nor to favor women…Footnote 90
More than a provocation, this passage echoes her theory of bark and medulla, as shown through the use of the term “vigor (vigor).”Footnote 91 Teresa goes to the Bible, especially the Old Testament, to demonstrate the spiritual privilege of her gender against her detractors. As her feminine model Judith, her poetical grace cannot be separated from her “industry” as an ingenuous biblical commentator.
V. Teresa, the Intellectual
From Hadewijch of Antwerp to Marguerite Porete, late medieval women tended to be severe on the rationality and intellectuality that was fascinating to the scholastics. On the contrary, scholastically educated, Teresa is not overreacting against this background. The very beginning of my analysis pointed out that Teresa places the longing for God’s enlightenment of the mind at the center of her interest. So now, let us exhibit in more depth the full implication of that early focus.
In filigree in the Admiraçión, Teresa goes as far as to picture the spiritual journey as a student’s academic experience. She invites us to the “santo estudio” translated as “holy study” by Seidenspinner-Núñez, but which can also be translated in this context as the “holy Studium,” the “holy Academy” of God’s wisdom.Footnote 92 The supreme teacher of that academy is God, whom Teresa depicts as the “Lord of Sciences (Señor de las çiençias).”Footnote 93 Then, she draws a distinction between: on the one hand, the “natural sciences” that are good but insufficient for salvation since “many of those who learned these sciences were damned, while many of those ignorant of them were saved”; and on the other hand, the “true science (verdadera çiençia)” that consists in “knowing, loving and longing for the true Good.”Footnote 94 What does it mean to attend this God’s “school (escuela)” where this true science is taught?Footnote 95 It means a process of admitting into our knowledge, that is, both “engraving in memory and continuously recalling in our understanding the goods we receive from God.”Footnote 96
Again, the bonds between the Arboleda and the Vergel de consolación help us to figure out what Teresa meant by “true science.” Learning and consolation are tightly linked in Teresa: “This alone is the truth: that God of all knowledge, Lord of all virtues, Father of mercy, God of every consolation, He who consoles us in all our tribulation, He alone consoled me, He alone taught me, He alone read me.”Footnote 97 In this passage, she tackled how she elaborated her treatises: thanks to spiritual strengths given by God’s consolation, thanks to the intellectual wisdom of God’s teaching. The association between consolation and wisdom is characteristic of consolation’s writings; among them is Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy quoted in the Arboleda. Footnote 98 Although excluded from modern research on medieval Spain, this text was well-known at the time in the Iberian Peninsula. The first Spanish translation was made in the 1360s, and it was translated into Hebrew.Footnote 99 In 1424–1425, it was even read and commented on in public at Valencia, probably in the vernacular.Footnote 100 Although the medieval Boethius was scholasticized for his logical contributions or, for example, his role in Thomas Aquinas’ definition of persona in the context of his Trinitarian theology, these historical elements lead me to consider that the Consolatio was also received as a pastoral text. Besides, it was published in a single volume along with the Vergel, which is mainly a didactic and pastoral treatise. It is not an isolated case since a 1489 edition of the Spanish Consolatio was also published with the didactic treatise Flor de virtudes [Flower of Virtues], which was discussed before.Footnote 101 Almost exactly contemporary to Teresa’s treatises, this 41-chapter treatise is very representative of the threefold pattern: affective, literary (poetical), and (less) mystical; and its theological originality is reduced to an exposé of virtues. Remnants of the theology of virtues are not absent in Teresa; however, the comparison with both the Vergel and the Flor shows that she intends to differentiate radically from these treatises structured around an exposé of the main Christian virtues. Wisdom, according to Teresa, does not consist in knowing the virtues but in knowing their divine originator through his Word. However, from all this context, she incorporates the consolation dimension deeply into her writings in such a manner that, again, the intellectuality is never entirely deprived of the affective, and the affective of the intellectual. As I shall now finally argue, however, when assessing the mysticism of her work, ultimate precedence must be accorded to the intellectual dimension.
VI. Teresa, the Mystic
Finally, Teresa had a very specific way of using mysticism to strengthen her authority as a spiritual writer: the mystical experience is displaced from a preliminary to a final position. It was the final word of her demonstration rather than the premise or the motive for authority. There is indeed no trace in her of the bridal mysticism of Mechtild of Magdeburg, in the tradition of the Song of Songs and Bernard of Clairvaux and the Cistercians – even though Teresa sought permission to become a Cistercian – and in the vein of the Brautmystik of the twelfth century.Footnote 102
Nor, moreover, did she exhibit a trace of the mysticism of the union. Usually, in the study of mysticism in medieval women, interpretation culminates in the discovery and identification of the unitive moment, which is the climax of the mystical. The unusual nature of Teresa’s mysticism also explains why various scholars have been reluctant to classify her as a mystic at all. For example, she has no place in Bernard McGinn’s monumental eight-volume history of Western mysticism, a view that reflects a substantive strand of scholarship that has taken a more or less firm stance against viewing Teresa as a mystic, precisely because she does not embody the mysticism of union we are familiar with.Footnote 103 Nevertheless, some Spanish scholars have continued to regard her as a mystic, and, as Willemien Otten has observed, “the importance of union tends to be overstated in the study of medieval mysticism.”Footnote 104
Teresa states that men’s writing abilities are natural while women writers have to receive that gift as a grace from God, and she dared to add: “it is clear that these blessings of grace are greater and more exceptional than those of nature and fortune.” For her, this duality of nature/grace echoes the opposition ordinary/extraordinary: everyone wonders if a woman writes a treatise because it is unusual, but, when a man does, “nothing is said about the glory of God, nor do I think they [the readers] remember whence came this ‘natural’ knowledge that men acquire in their studies.” In Teresa, the extraordinary, the supernatural in this sense, requires neither visions nor miracles, no more than a narrative of ineffable union; it resides in the intellectual activity itself.Footnote 105
There is a tradition of speculative or intellectual mysticism in which Teresa could be said to operate, associated primarily with male thinkers. For example, Meister Eckhart and his followers are said to be speculative mystics on account of the importance they give to intellectus/ver nünftikeit in the return to God.Footnote 106 In this negative theology which provides place to love, the intellect remains the ultimate category in which love is subsumed as illustrated by the so-called Tegernsee debate (1452–1456) – contemporaneous with Teresa’s treatises – between Nicholas of Cusa (Cusanus), and the Carthusian Vincent of Aggsbach (c. 1389–1464). Against the affective mysticism of Vincent, Nicholas argued that, even in negation, the intellect remained and what was attained beyond cognition remained an intellectual principle.Footnote 107 However tempting it might be, it is not in this sense, nor in continuity with Eckhart or Cusanus, that the present study qualifies Teresa as a speculative or intellectual mystic, for she has little in common with this tradition: she entirely lacks its ascent movement and is not a negative theologian.
I contend that Teresa offers a compelling instance of mysticism, understood not so much as primarily the consciousness of the experience of God’s presence, but as the consciousness of the experience of a supernatural attainment of spiritual truths; this precisely reflects the move from presence to meaning that her writings illustrate.Footnote 108 God is not described as the bridegroom, the lover, but as “the Lord of all knowledge”; loving God becomes a “holy study.”Footnote 109 In this sense, there is a reconfiguration of the mystical element, all the more necessary since our reading of medieval women writers has indeed sometimes suffered from a narrowed view of mysticism constructed as a contrary to intellectuality.
Teresa finally justified the exceptionality of her gift by the narration of a mystical experience comparable to what I term a Solomon’s experience.Footnote 110 She first hid what she was actually asking for, wisdom, by putting it at the end of a six-term enumeration in order to soften the boldness of this ask for supreme intellectual wisdom. However, all these different requests are concerned with light, and the final is: “Come, send, my Lord, the wisdom at the seat of your marvelous greatness.”Footnote 111 God’s lapidary response is “Have sight (Réspiçe),” like the Latin “Respice” that Christ states to the blind of Jericho.Footnote 112 She gave no further details about this experience: “the veil of darkness that blinded the eyes of my understanding was rent,” although this is a cornerstone that recapitulates much of her endeavors.Footnote 113
Three aspects merit attention as this experience concludes: first, this mystical moment asserts that the gift of wisdom, described as an enlightenment of the understanding, is the ultimate treasure. Second, this narrative at the end of the Admiraçión revisits the image of blindness that unexpectedly replaces deafness in the prologue of the Arboleda. In that way, it binds the two treatises that should be read and commented on in continuation, as it is confirmed by the absence of a true ending at the end of the Arboleda. Third, given that this concluding experience is a mystical event concerned with an intellectual longing, it articulates the two sides of medieval intellectual life that this study’s analysis of Teresa aims to bridge. For her, there is no opposition between the supernatural action of God’s grace and intellectual development. Encountering God does not necessarily annihilate the mind’s longing for understanding, but can be the culmination of its enlightenment, and that is precisely the healing that everyone needs, “the health of our soul.”Footnote 114
What authority does Teresa gain from this final mystical account? Not very much but that is not the function of the mystical element in her text. The locus for authority is rather situated in her ease in navigating throughout the Bible, in the structure of her text, in the soundness of her analogies, in the coherence of her argumentations: that is, in the whole intellectual affirmation of this first Spanish intellectual woman and theologian that her treatises evidence.
VII. Conclusion
This article assessed to what extent Teresa represents a challenge to the canonical dichotomy in medieval studies between abstract, Latin, and scholastic texts written by men and affective, vernacular, and mystical women’s writings. The shift of paradigm that I proposed substitutes the dialectics between presence/absence for the usual enclosure paradigm in which the literature enclosed Teresa. This new model accounts for the deep entanglement of her fundamental experience as deaf (affective; absence), and her promotion of presence to oneself (intellectual; presence) against a wandering intellect. Challenged and denied in her authorship, accused of being an anodyne, unoriginal plagiarist, Teresa’s genius will not be restored if it is relegated to the three-walled box – literature, affectivity, and mysticism of union – in which medieval women tend to be encapsulated. Teresa presents intellectuality in an original and positive manner: rather than a shy concession to the spirit of her time, for Teresa, this is the cornerstone of her intellectual affirmation that her treatises unfold. The plea for presence to oneself becomes the entrenchment in the spiritual interiority of her whole development as a theologian and exegete. Teresa’s intellectuality is neither out of touch with affectivity, bodiliness, and suffering, nor are her theological insights on marginality disconnected from her spiritual life. Her Solomon’s mystical experience should be seen as the culmination of these entangled appeals in her thought for the most concrete experiences as well as the most intellectual insights. Being an island, the cry that resonates throughout her one, twofold treatise, incorporates and articulates all these dimensions.
Unfortunately, this study still leaves many of Teresa’s theological insights unexplored, but it hopes to pave the way for more consistent research based on the retrieval of a different Teresa. Finally, it cannot be hidden that Teresa already stands at the threshold of modernity. Melquiades Andrés did not include her in his massive attempt to redefine classical Spanish mysticism as an “interior withdrawal (recogimiento)” that reconciled the “scholastic or scrutinizing theology and the mystical or hidden theology.”Footnote 115 In many respects, she prefigured and inspired the spiritual and sapiential tone, nourished by patristic wisdom, that would come to define the flourishing of Spanish mysticism during the Siglo de Oro.
Acknowledgments
The author is grateful to Willemien Otten and Bernard McGinn for their invaluable comments on this study; to María-Milagros Rivera Garretas, Kirsten McFarlane, and Richard Kieckhefer for guidance on particular questions; and finally, to Jessica Fantino for her comments on Late Old Spanish. Remaining errors are mine. An earlier version of this paper was awarded the Paper Prize at the 2024 Vagantes Conference on Medieval Studies, Northwestern University. In 2026, this paper also received the Tikva Frymer-Kensky Memorial Prize from the Biblical Faculty of the University of Chicago for its contribution to feminist theology and biblical studies.
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