Teresa de Cartagena


Teresa de Cartagena was a Spanish writer, mystic and nun who is considered to be the first Spanish female writer and mystic. She became deaf between 1453 and 1459. Her experience of deafness influenced her two known works Arboleda de los enfermos and Admiraçión operum Dey. The latter work represents what many critics consider as the first feminist tract written by a Spanish woman.
Few documents exist regarding Teresa's life. In Francisco Cantera Burgos's history of the Santa María family, the author confirms Teresa's identity as a conversa and as a member of the Santa María-Cartagena family, the most powerful converso family in late-medieval Spain. Her grandfather, Rabbi Shlomo ha-Levi, converted to Christianity around 1390 and was baptized as Pablo de Santa María, becoming bishop of Burgos in 1412.
Cantera Burgos discovered that Teresa was the daughter of Pedro de Cartagena after finding her named in the will of a later bishop of Burgos, Alonso de Cartagena, Pedro's brother and Teresa's uncle. Before becoming deaf, Teresa entered the Franciscan :es:Monasterio de Santa Clara|Monasterio de Santa Clara in Burgos around 1440. Later, in 1449, she transferred to the Cistercian Monasterio de Las Huelgas in Burgos, where she became deaf. The transfer likely occurred, as Dayle Seidenspinner-Núñez and Yonsoo Kim point out, because of family political strategy and hostility of the Franciscans, who outed conversos.
Teresa wrote her first work Arboleda de los enfermos expressing the solitude of her deafness. Approximately one to two years later, she penned a defense of her first work, called Admiraçión operum Dey, after mostly male critics claimed that a woman could not have possibly been the author of such an eloquent and well-reasoned work. Both of her writings have come down to modern readers through a single manuscript completed by the copyist Pero López del Trigo in 1481.
Important as Spain's first feminist writer, Teresa also contributed to an overall European canon of medieval feminist authors including Hildegard von Bingen and Christine de Pizan. Both Arboleda and Admiraçión are semi-autobiographical works that provide an authentic written voice of a medieval woman, a true rarity among surviving works of the Middle Ages.

''Arboleda de los enfermos''

Teresa's first work examines the effect of her deafness on her life and its spiritual development. After being devastated by the initial onset of the illness, Teresa meditates in the silent prison of her deafness and ultimately concludes that God has afflicted her in order to separate her from the distractions of everyday noise. After much reflection in the prison of echoing sounds within the cloisters of her ears, Teresa reasons that her soul would have been purer if she had never been exposed to speech at all, which makes one turn to the outside material world and forget the inner spiritual world.
The copyist, Pero López, indicates that her work was addressed to Juana de Mendoza, wife of Gómez Manrique, a poet and prominent political figure of the time, but within Arboleda, she addresses a "virtuosa señora", who may be Juana de Mendoza, suggesting a female audience at large. In contrast, the genre Teresa employs, the libro de consolaciones, was primarily authored by men and addressed a male audience. In order to humble herself strategically before male readers, the author reiterates the weakness of her intellect or "la baxeza e grosería de mi mugeril yngenio" .

''Admiraçión operum Dey''

Despite her strategies to disarm the male reader in Arboleda, men still rejected Teresa's work as plagiarized. In response to this male criticism, she composes Admiraçión operum Dey, making the argument that if God created men who could write, he could just as well have created women who could write, and while men have been writing for centuries, it does not make it any more natural for them to write but rather it seems natural because men have been writing for such a long time. In addition, simply because women have not traditionally written like men, it does not mean that female writing is any less natural.
Cleverly, Teresa argues that if God bestows a gift upon men then he can just as well bestow the same gift upon women. The following passage illustrates how Teresa viewed her relationship with God and the authorship of her writing:
People marvel at what I wrote in the treatise and I marvel at what, in fact, I kept quiet, but I do not marvel doubting nor do I insist on my wonder. For my experience makes me sure, and the God of Truth knows that I had no other master nor consulted with any other learned authority nor translated from other books, as some people with malicious wonder are wont to say. Rather, 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. He inclined His ear to me when I, besieged with great anguish and adrift in a deep sea of misfortunes, called upon Him with the Prophet, saying, “Save me, O God: for the waters are come in even unto my soul” .

Ultimately, Teresa concludes that the criticisms of her opponents call into question God's authority to distribute gifts and consequently offends him. The "virtuosa señora" addressed in the second work as in the first acts as the female addressee or reader who sympathizes with Teresa's concerns. To illustrate her points further, the author makes use of imagery and allusions to Biblical women. For example, she alludes to the Biblical story of the powerful Judith, who kills Holofernes after a whole army of men could not perform the task. Teresa also expounds upon the virtue of the interior life of the housewife.
According to Teresa, the tranquil and spiritual interior world of the household, in contrast to the exterior warring world of men, constitutes a place for reflection and intellectual growth. While strategically noting that men and women are not equal in all capacities, Teresa also remarks that masculine and feminine roles complement each other because of their differences. Her subtly feminist argument rejects commonly held medieval beliefs that women were the weaker sex, intended by God for exclusively passive and reproductive purposes.

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