This volume brings together eight essays on Hispanic texts from the late medieval and early modern periods by or about exemplary women. As María Morrás explains in her introduction, the essays explore a family of related genres—life-writing, chronicles, exempla, and romances—that shaped cultural identities within and beyond religious communities. Advocating an elastic notion of exemplarity, she recommends transversal readings of the genres representing virtuous women as well as aspiring saints. Exemplarity encouraged imitation as well as adaptation, according to political and institutional variables. Rather than focusing on gender-specific virtues or carismata, Morrás suggests that the gendered nature of sanctity is manifested in the negotiations required of women in order to avoid accusations of imposture, possession, or heresy.
I will comment briefly on the essays that address medieval texts and give more extensive attention to those corresponding to the early years of the Jesuit order. Part i, “Rewriting Models,” centers on how women were constructed as holy exemplars in texts written by men. Andrew M. Beresford’s essay concerns the perplexing exemplarity of the thirteenth-century Spanish poem Vida de Santa María Egipciaca (The life of Saint Mary the Egyptian), perplexing because the narrator dwells in provocative detail on the young María’s sexual allure and, in the conclusion of the poem, represents her as a saintly hermit of indeterminate sex. Beresford proposes that Mary, by transcending gender through solitary penance, signals the superiority of the eremitic over the cenobitic ascetic tradition. Readers who are not well-versed in Lacanian psychology will probably find some sections hermetic. Nevertheless, the essay raises provocative questions about the notions that linked temptation, sexuality, and gender in different ascetic traditions.
María Morrás’s essay turns to the unremittingly negative representation of Mary Magdalene in Álvaro de Luna’s Libro de las virtuosas e claras mugeres(Book of virtuous and illustrious women) (1446). She cogently argues that Luna, a powerful royal favorite, wrote this contribution to the querelle de femmes as an oblique attack on Queen María of Castile, his rival for the favor of her husband, King Juan ii. Rosa Vidal Doval addresses the Tractatus de vita spirituali, a treatise on spiritual discernment attributed to Vincent Ferrer and printed in the late fifteenth century under the auspices of Cardinal Jiménez de Cisneros (1436–1517). How are we to explain the contradiction between Cisneros’s well-known patronage of visionary women and his sponsorship of a cautionary treatise on discernment? Vidal concludes that the publication reflects Cisneros’s strategy for protecting female spirituality by placing the authority for discernment firmly in the hands of male religious.
Pablo Acosta-García’s essay considers how the late medieval versions of the life of Saint Angela of Foligno (1248–1309) were modified in texts printed under the auspices of Cisneros. He focuses in particular on the Castilian translation of Angela’s auto-hagiobiography, published in Toledo in 1510 as Libro de la bienaventurada santa Ángela de Fulgino (Life of the Blessed Angela of Foligno). Among other anomalies, this version includes an anonymous prologue that vindicates women’s prophetic charisma as compensation for men’s excessive skepticism. Acosta-García argues that by refashioning images of medieval holy women, Cisneros sought to promote models of holiness appropriate for his program of monastic reform and evangelization. Furthermore, these reworked models legitimated contemporary women visionaries and prophets such as María de Santo Domingo. Nevertheless, Angela’s Libro also reflects anxieties regarding female charismatic power, such as the slippage between the language of divine and human love and the alleged divinization of the mystic—issues that would later coalesce in the Inquisition’s definition of the alumbrado heresy. Acosta-García instructively reminds us that in order to decode sixteenth-century (re)constructions of sanctity, scholars must take into considerations the selections and omissions from multiple medieval textual traditions.
Jimena Gamba Corradine’s essay explores the spirituality practiced by women prosecuted for Lutheranism in Inquisition trials held between 1558 and 1570 in Valladolid and Seville. She underscores significant differences between the “Lutherans” and the visionary women of the first half of the century such as Juana de la Cruz and María de Santo Domingo. (I follow the author’s practice of using scare quotes to indicate the women’s partial adherence to Lutheran doctrine.) Trial records suggest that for the “Lutheran” women, the discussion and interpretation of religious texts, including Scripture, displaced the ecstasies, revelations, and prophesies that characterized the female spirituality of the earlier period. The “Lutherans” depended on male teachers and did not assume leadership roles, as had some alumbradas. If women had little autonomy or authority in “Lutheran” circles, what then, was the appeal of the forbidden new doctrine? Gamba Corradine proposes that “Luteranism” offered nuns and laywomen freedom from the demands of ascesis, but she overlooks the possibility that core concepts of Spanish philo-Protestantism—redemption and satisfaction in Christ—offered freedom from fear of damnation.
Part ii, “Inscribing Models,” addresses exemplary texts written by women. Ryan D. Giles analyzes the enigmatic story from the autobiographical writings of Leonor López de Córdoba (1363–1430), in which the author describes how the Virgin Mary protects her adopted son, an orphaned Jewish boy, from the plague, but fails to save her biological son, who dies as a result of caring for his adopted brother. Giles concludes that whereas Leonor succeeds in establishing her exemplary identification with the Virgin Mary as redeemer of Jewish children, her narrative also betrays a growing fear of the contaminating presence of converts within Christian society.
Lesley Twomey compares images of heaven in the writings of four women religious: Constanza de Castilla (d.1478), Teresa de Cartagena (c.1425–after 1478), Isabel de Villena (c.1430–90), and Teresa de Jesús (1515–82). The picture that emerges is like a Venn diagram, showing multiple overlapping characteristics unevenly distributed among the four writers. Rather than positing a distinct female tradition, Twomey suggests that certain images, such as the allegory of the soul as household or dwelling place, may have been particularly meaningful for women writers. Although the purpose of the essay is not to establish textual affiliation, the essay instructively draws attention to the eclecticism of the imagery of Teresa de Jesús. The essay also makes the interesting suggestion that image patterns can be understood as theological propositions about the nature of happiness, beauty, and the soul’s relationship with God.
Christopher van Ginhoven Rey begins his essay by citing several instances in which Teresa de Jesús appeals to the immediate addressee of her spiritual autobiography, the Dominican García de Toledo, to tear up “what appears to you to be bad” (The Collected Works of St. Teresa of Avila, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodríguez [Washington: Institute of Carmelite Studies, 1976], 1:364; cited at 252). According to van Ginhoven, this and other entreaties are not simply self-protective measures against the risks of theological error but rather “an actual desire for destruction” (253; original emphasis). Drawing primarily on the psychological theories of Jacques Lacan, he proposes that Teresa’s appeals for textual destruction are, paradoxically, a call for “a delimitation of the boundaries [. . .] of an ecstatic self, a self that is beside or outside itself” (278).
The Life, as scholars have recognized, is a palimpsest; different sections were re-written over time for a changing cast of addressees. Those sections addressed to Toledo closely resemble an intimate letter. At some point, van Ginhoven points out, Teresa began to think of her text as a potential book rather than an intimate letter. The requests that the text be destroyed express, he argues, “a desire for the kind of intimacy one associates with an epistolary exchange” (258). This intimacy induces guilt, however, since Teresa recognizes that she has become mother and teacher to Toledo. In this sense, the fantasy of textual destruction serves as a (self) “punitive mechanism,” one that is at the same time “ultimately an affirmation of freedom” (267) and an act of defiance.
Van Ginhoven instructively calls attention to Teresa’s highly charged appeals for Toledo’s intervention. Unfortunately, his thesis is undermined by extensive textual evidence. First, Teresa never asks Toledo to destroy her entire manuscript but to tear up what appears to be bad. A more plausible conclusion is that Teresa considered Toledo a protective editor and implored him to excise passages that would not pass muster in the uncertain theological climate of the 1560s. A careful reading of the Epilogue to the Life (van Ginhoven cites only a fragment) provides the best counter-argument to his thesis. Teresa requests that Toledo tear up what appears bad, because, for lack of time “some of the things are poorly explained and others put down twice.” She asks Toledo “to correct it and have it transcribed,” because she urgently wants the opinion of Juan de Ávila (Ávila had famously been vindicated after episodes of inquisitorial investigation and censorship) and has desired his opinion from the beginning of her enterprise. She fears that her handwriting will be recognized if the manuscript should fall into the wrong hands. She closes by reminding Toledo that she has entrusted him with her “soul,” “soul” arguably a metaphor for the manuscript (ed. cit., 364). These are not the words of someone for whom the destruction of her text is a “prime fixation” (253), much less “a celebration” (254), but rather the plea of a woman eager for help in shepherding her spiritual message safely toward a wider audience.
Although the Society of Jesus is not mentioned in any of the essays, the volume will be useful to scholars of the early history of the order. Collectively, the essays illuminate some of the unresolved issues the early Jesuits grappled with, such as the role of ascesis in spiritual life, the difficulties of association with charismatic women, and more generally, the uncertain boundaries of orthodoxy in a period of tremendous spiritual ferment.
