Writing Women in Late Medieval and Early Modern Spain: The Mothers of Saint Teresa of Avila

Renaissance Quarterly, Spring, 1997 by Sara A. Taddeo

Because each of the women felt compelled to justify breaking the Pauline-imposed silence of women in the church, Surtz places their works in the context of the querelle des femmes (17). But this invention of a new rhetoric and new authorities is only the surface representation of a distinctive "female spirituality" (11) common to all these works, which asserts woman's fitness to participate in this relationship with God, values faith over intellect, stresses the redemptive value of both suffering and nurturing (the maternal) and, not surprisingly, centers on identification with the two Marys. While the Church affirmed the orthodoxy of devotion to the Virgin and to the Saints (including the Magdalene), the Inquisition was always suspicious of personal, visionary encounters with God, and it is thus of particular interest to discover that several of these earlier writers were encouraged by Cardinal Cisneros himself, and were both popular and powerful in their day.

Surtz successfully disputes "received opinions" that there were few female authors in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (1). The life and work of Teresa of Cartagena will certainly provide inspiration for many future studies, especially given the possibility that her Jewish heritage informed her spirituality and writing. Unfortunately, mystics such as Maria de Ajofrin and Maria de Santo Domingo are not really writers but are known principally through the works of their confessors, and are more interesting as character studies of beatas, tending towards the hypocrites so often portrayed on stage rather than creative visionaries in themselves - all of which works to undercut Surtz's admirable project of rescuing the doubly marginalized. Although Maria de Ajofrin, Maria de Santo Domingo and Juana de Santa Cruz may be powerful examples of self-construction, their visions remain, essentially, curiosities. They are most interesting, perhaps, when read as a counterpoint to the Archbishop of Toledo's Corbacho. Moreover, if the "authority" these women create for themselves is a radical act, it is bound to the hallowed biblical roles of Judith, Magdalene and Mary (the subtitles of Surtz's chapters). In their own judgment, the body remained greater than the text: "Christ's inscription of his lance wound in her side [is] more significant than anything she herself may have written about the Passion . . . siendo mujer sin letras y aldeana" (88).

SARA A. TADDEO Fairleigh Dickinson University