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WRITING AS RECONSTITUTIVE ACT: HEALING AND SELF-
EXPRESSION IN EARLY SPANISH WOMEN’S WRITING

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WRITING AS RECONSTITUTIVE ACT: HEALING AND SELF-EXPRESSION IN
EARLY SPANISH WOMEN’S WRITING
By

Donna M. Goodin

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy

Department of Spanish and Portuguese

2008

ABSTRACT

WRITING AS RECONSTITUTIVE ACT: HEALING AND SELF-EXPRESSION 1N
EARLY SPANISH WOMEN’S WRITING
By

Donna M. Goodin

This study focuses on the relation between the experience of trauma and women’s
writing in the Spanish fifteenth and early sixteenth-centuries, with particular emphasis on
three women writers. The first of these is Leonor L6pez de Cordoba, who was born in
Calatayud near Aragon (sometime between December 1362 and January 1363) to a noble
family in the circle of the court of Pedro I of Castile. I then consider the two essays of
Teresa de Cartagena, born to an illustrious literary converso family in Burgos sometime
between 1420 and 1435. Lastly, I consider the visionary writings of Madre Juana dc la
Cruz, born to farmers in 1481 in Azafia, near Toledo. These three writers share a number
of common characteristics. Each wrote prose: Leonor wrote an autobiographical memoir,
Teresa wrote two essays that combine autobiographical and religious themes and address
male/female issues of her time; and Madre Juana was the author of a series of religious
sermons and the recipient of mystical visions. Each lived and wrote during the fifteenth
and early sixteenth century in Castile, during a time in which the region was still reeling
from the social and political upheaval of the previous century. Finally, each experienced

some intense form of suffering that would alter the course of her life.

In this study I explore the notion that this suffering, as displayed in the writings of
these women, can be read today as the literary representation of trauma. I begin by
providing a brief overview ofthe biographical information available to us. Drawing on
psychological and literary scholarship, this study proceeds to analyze these authors‘ texts
as a testament to the dual-nature of trauma, that of having escaped the original, traumatic

events, and that of having to rebuild a life amid their aftermath.

To Scott Perlenfein

In Memoriam

iv

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

There are several people to whom I would like to express my gratitude for their
contributions to this dissertation.

First, I would like to acknowledge the work of Professor Ronald Surtz of Princeton
University. It was his work on the writing of Madre Juana de la Cruz that put me on this path,
and aided me in both the initial conceptualization and further development of the issues treated
in this study.

There are of course a number of individuals at Michigan State University to whom I am
indebted. My thanks to professors Nancy Marino and Teresa Melendez for agreeing to serve on
my committee, and for their feedback on the work presented here. Second, I would like to thank
Professor Julia Holdemess for assistance during the early stages of this dissertation. She
provided valuable resources for the research of this project, and I am particularly appreciative of
her suggestions of French texts that might provide areas for future research. Her enthusiasm for
this project at a time when I had reservations about its viability was invaluable. Lastly, I would
like to express special thanks to Professor Douglas Noverre for assistance with administrative
issues.

Several friends and family members also deserve mention here. My heart-felt thanks to
all of you who have provided comfort, consolation and encouragement along the way. I extend
special thanks to Teresa Kent for insisting that this could and Should happen. Thank you also to
Dr. Ruth F ink of the University of Colorado, whose emails still reside in my Saved Messages

Folder. My parents, Robert and Carol Pugh, also provided much encouragement—and wisely

also knew when not to do so. I am grateful to my father-in-law, George Goodin, Professor
Emeritus of English at Southern Illinois University, for his willingness to share the wisdom he
has acquired during his many years of distinguished service to the academic community. Last but
certainly not least, much loving appreciation goes to my husband, Sam Goodin, for so many
things: moral support, advice, and many hours spent commuting, just to name a few.

Finally, this would never have been possible without my co-directors, Professors Joseph
T Snow, and Rocio Quispe-Agnoli. To you I offer my deepest gratitude. Thank you for your
support, your patience, and for challenging me to rise to higher expectations. I wish that all
graduate students could be so fortunate in their dissertation directors, and hope that some day I

can have the impact on my students’ lives that you have had on mine.

vi

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ........................................................... l
l. Rewriting the Self: Trauma and Literary Expression ......................... 20
1.1 Historical Context ................................................... 21
1.2 Modern Definitions of Trauma ......................................... 27

2. A Home of One’s Own: Writing as Self-Justification in Leonor Lopez de Cordoba . 62

2.1 From Palace to Prison and Beyond ...................................... 62
2.2 The Text ........................................................... 74
2.3 The Memorias and Trauma ............................................ 84
3. Writing as Reconciliation: Teresa de Cartagena ............................ 101
3.1 Teresa’s Life and Her Social Context ................................... 103
3.2 Deafness, Literacy, and Orality ........................................ 1 11
3.3 The Texts: Consolation and Reconstitution ............................... 116

4 The Unspeakable: Vision As Traumatic Memory in the Sermons of Madre Juana de

la Cruz ........................................................... 142
4.1 From Orphan to Abbess ............................................. 143
4.2 Some Textual Considerations ......................................... 147
4.3 The Creation Sermon ............................................... 155
4.4 The Vision of the Nativity ........................................... 165
Conclusions ......................................................... l 82
References .......................................................... l 99

vii

Introduction

In his excellent study Writing Women In Late Medieval Spain Ronald Surtz
observes the relative dearth of women writers in the Iberian peninsula prior to the writing
of the Sixteenth-century mystic Teresa de Avila, (ca. 1515-1582) (1995, 4). He points out
that Spain, unlike other European nations did not produce a Hildegard of Bingen, a
Heloise, or a Marie de France. Alan Deyerrnond makes a related observation, when he
points out that even as recently as the 19703, little to no attention was given to those
women from the Iberian peninsula who did write (1983). However, in the latter decades
of the twentieth century the field of early modern women’s writing in the Iberian
Peninsula has received increasing attention by scholars from disciplines ranging from
history to literature to religious studies, Hispanic studies being no exception.

Thus, in recent decades contemporary feminist scholarship has been focusing on women
writers who have hitherto been given little or no attention in the Spanish literary canon,
either because their work was unknown or because it was deemed by the established
patriarchal system to be of inherently inferior quality to works produced by their male
contemporaries.

In this study I propose to focus on the relation between the experience of trauma
and women’s writing in the Spanish fifteenth and early sixteenth-centuries, with
particular emphasis on three women writers. The earliest of these is Leonor Lopez de
Cordoba, who was born in Calatayud near Aragon (sometime between December 1362
and January 1363) to a noble family in the circle of the court of Pedro I of Castile.
Second, I will consider the two essays of Teresa de Cartagena, born to an illustrious

1

literary converso family in Burgos sometime between 1420 and 1435. Lastly, I will
consider the later visionary writings of Madre Juana de la Cruz, born to farmers in 1481
in Azafia, near Toledo. These three writers share a number of common characteristics.
Each wrote prose: Leonor wrote an autobiographical memoir, Teresa wrote two essays
that combine autobiographical and religious themes and address male/female issues of
her time; and Madre Juana was the author of a series of religious sermons and the
recipient of mystical visions. Each experienced some intense form of suffering that would
radically alter the course of her life, and, as I hope to demonstrate in this study, influence
her decision to engage in literary production.

Additionally, each of these women, unlike many of her sisters, wrote of her own
volition, rather than at the mandate of a confessor. Ronald Surtz recognizes the control
imposed on many women’s writing by male confessors who first ordered them to write,
and then edited the finished product until it conformed either with church doctrine, or in
some cases with the confessor’s agenda. In the introduction to his book The Guitar of
God: Gender, Power and Authority in the Visionary World of Mother Juana de la Cruz
he writes: “needless to say, writing was for these religious women seldom either a
vocation or even an avocation. About a third of the nuns wrote because they were ordered
to by their confessors so that the Inquisition could determine the orthodoxy of their
religious experiences” (1995, 1). Hence, a nun writing at the behest of her confessor
would be required to adopt the structure and viewpoint of male ecclesiastical authorities,
who would have their own intended purpose for the woman's writing, and would be
trying to promote those ends while insuring that the text could withstand the orthodoxy

imposed by the Inquisition.

Richard Kagan and Alison Weber provide us with two examples of this directed
writing. In her essay, "The Three Lives of the fid_a: The Three Uses of Convent
Autobiography", Alison Weber amplifies our understanding of this type of writing with
her detailed description of the various treatments meted out to the [161g of Teresa De
Jesus, by her confessors, by the Inquisition, and ultimately by Fray Luis de Leon. As
Weber points out, spiritual autobiographies are frequently characterized as Vidas por
mandato, or lives written by mandate. She then demonstrates how early versions of
Teresa's Vida were ordered by her confessors, so that her visions and mystical
experiences could be scrutinized to protect her from accusations of Alumbradismo by the
Inquisition. Weber describes how much of Teresa's writing is actually the product of
dialogue between Teresa, and three different confessors, each with different motivations:
Teresa wanting to share her ideas about spiritual reform, and her spiritual directors
strategizing to present Teresa's writing in such a way that it would not attract the attention
of the Inquisition. Subsequent to this period, there followed a struggle between those who
would keep Teresa's manuscript from circulation, and those who were determined to
obtain copies, either for personal or convent use. It appears that Teresa may have been
exasperated by the radical manipulation her text underwent at the hands of others.
Translating the testimony of one of Teresa's prioresses, Ana de J esus Lobera, Weber
writes: "When copies came to her hands, she would say: ‘May the Lord forgive my
confessors who give out what they order me to write, and those who copy them and
change words, because this isn't my wording and this isn't mine,’ and then she would
erase their words and correct in her own handwriting between the lines what had been

changed" (Weber, 1 l4).

Nor did Teresa's death end the process of textual mutation. In his turn, Fray Luis
would attempt to restore the text to Teresa's original words and meaning. However, as
Webber explains, Fray Luis de Leon altered the language of the Vida, correcting Teresa’s
coloquial language and spelling, as be deemed such colloquialism to be inappropriate to
the elevated subject matter. Thus, we have many different recreations of the Vida, each
undertaken to suit a different author/copyist's agenda. One can speculate that of all the
voices heard in this document, Teresa's may be among the faintest.

A second example of this type of writing can be found in the dream registers of
the young madrilefia Lucrecia de Ledn (ca. 1568). At the injunction of her confessors,
she dictated a series of prophetic dreams of a highly political nature, decrying the
decadent state of Spain under Felipe II’s rule, and predicting the monarch’s death. One of
the ambiguities of Lucrecia’s case is the extent to which she was merely the pawn of her
confessors, as she claims in her trial of 1590, or whether she was using her dreams to
gain self-recognition and to achieve her own political ends (Kagan 1995). Lucrecia's case
differs from other female writers mentioned here in significant ways. First, as she is not a
nun, she would not have been ordered to write as part of her spiritual practice. There are
also questions about how the process of recording her dreams was initiated. One
explanation posits that Lucrecia and her mother called her visions to the attention of the
clergy. We know that Lucrecia was not literate, and therefore would have dictated her
dreams to her confessor, who in turn recorded them. As Kagan writes, both Lucrecia and
her confessors would have had their reasons for advancing Lucrecia's case as a visionary.
For Lucrecia, such fame would mean a "career" and, as such, an escape from her family's

poverty. For her confessors, and possibly for her as well, her dreams appear to provide an

opportunity to take a political stand against Spain's decay under Felipe II by invoking
God's condemnation of the monarch's reign. Although the extent to which Lucrecia is the
author of her dream registers may never be ascertained, Kagan demonstrates clearly that
she was encouraged to write by her spiritual directors, and that they, owing to either
spiritual or political motives, or both, guided the writing of her text, and the promotion of
Lucrecia as visionary.

Though both Teresa of Avila and Lucrecia de Leon wrote much later than the
authors studied here, the conditions of writing "por mandato" and the issues of textual
manipulation are equally relevant for them, and make the deliberate choice of authorship
by these women all the more remarkable. For some reason, each chose to commit her
message to paper, and also desired that it would reach a reading audience. In choosing to
write as a deliberate, voluntary act, they maintained creative control and were thus able to
make the text conform to their own purpose, a phenomenon highly unusual in a period
during which female literacy was virtually nonexistent, and where it did exist, was
limited to women of the upper classes. As Beth Miller describes the situation of women
in the seventeenth century, “Knowing that as a group women in the seventeenth century
fell below unskilled male laborers in their rate of literacy, we marvel at those
extraordinary women writers and scholars of whose achievements we have any notice”
(4). The level of literacy of the three earlier women writers varied widely, and there are
issues, which I will discuss later, concerning differing degrees of authorship. Moreover, it
should not be overlooked that they were still writing from the disadvantaged position of
the minority voice within the dominant culture. Nonetheless, I believe that their

deliberate choice to commit their works to written form, however that task was

accomplished, also clearly establishes them as the primary agents of their literary
production. Writing was considered to be of little use outside the demands of the home,
and the notion that a woman would take it upon herself to produce her own literary text
was thus well outside of conventional norms and expectations. We need ask, therefore, in
a society where women’s writing was not the norm, what it was that motivated these
women to dare take up the pen and attempt to enter the male world of public discourse?
AS I have indicated previously, I believe that a very likely answer to this question
is to be found in these women’s personal histories, and the expression of that history and
related themes in the texts they authored. In point of fact, it is worth noting that the
circumstances of these writers are not unique to them. For example, it is well-known that
the French writer Christine de Pisan (1364-1430), born to an upper-class family and, like
Leonor, affiliated with court circles, began to write professionally only upon her
husband’s death, when she found herself confronted for the first time with the need to
support herself, her children, and her mother. Though her husband’s death would hardly
be considered a trauma, it certainly was for Christine a life-altering event. Thus, Though
for reasons of space and time I must limit the scope of this study to the Iberian Peninsula,
I believe that it may have implications for other women writers as well. Before
proceeding to a discussion of the organization of this study, it will be useful to offer some
general considerations regarding the historical and social contexts of women's writing.
The rigid rules of conduct that governed the lives of early modern women have
been well-documented by Constance Jordan and Ruth Kelso among other scholars. As
Ruth Kelso demonstrates in her book Doctrine For The Lady of the Renaissance, these

rules of comportment promoted values which restricted women’s freedom of expression.

Kelso cites five traits or virtues most valued in women: chastity, humility, temperance,
modesty, constancy, the latter four serving to undergird chastity, which was of greatest
importance (25). In so doing, they minimized women's role as subject, and emphasized
women’s relational role to husband and father, as daughter and later as wife. Kelso
demonstrates consistently the subjugation of women to the males who had responsibility
for them, and also the ferocious cultivation of those traits which perpetuated their
submission to male authority and ownership.

We do know, however, that due to the historical and political circumstances of the
peninsula during the late Middle Ages, women's role was somewhat less restricted than it
was for her European neighbors. Heath Dillard presents a thorough exploration of this
difference, which she attributes to the unique demands placed on Spanish society by the
reconquest of Moorish territories] These territories represented an unsettled frontier, a
situation which distinguished Spain from her already settled European neighbors, and
brought it unique challenges which resulted in an expanded role for women. According to
Dillard, foremost among these challenges was the essential need to repopulate the newly
Christianized lands. It was therefore paramount that women be encouraged to settle in the
new territories, to raise families, build towns, and establish infrastructure. And, as her
husband would frequently be required to be absent from the home, she could not be
afforded the luxuries of the staid domesticity expected of women in the already settled
areas of the region, and so had to assume many traditionally masculine roles. When her
husband was called upon to go to the war front, it would fall to the woman to assume the

management of his domestic and business affairs. In such a Situation, it would be

 

' Dillard, Heath. Daughters of the Reconquest. Women in Castilian Town Society, I 100—1300.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, I984.

7

impossible for her to limit her activities to the interior spaces of the home. This situation
resulted in a gradual expansion of women's rights in the new territories. She could
manage and even own property, work outside the home in a trade or as an artisan, and
sell her wares in the market-place (Dillard, 12).

A second issue, that of education and literacy, is closely linked to social conduct.
Among critics of female education, the prevailing view is best summed up by the 15th-
century Castilian poet Carvajal in his famous lines:

Amad, amadores, muger que non sabe, a quien toda cosa paresca ser nueva; que

quanto mas sabe muger, menos vale segund, por exiemplo lo hemos de Eva, que

luego comiendo del fructo de la Vida, rompiendo el velo de rica inocencia, supo su

mal e su gloria perdida. Guardaos de muger que ha platica e sciencia.2
The poet calls all lovers to avoid the learned woman in favor of she who knows nothing,
she to whom all things seem new. The learned woman, he tells us, is of lesser value. The
implied message here is that a learned woman will be less awed by whatever a man
places before her, and thus a man who weds a learned woman will be faced with the
challenges of a situation where he is less in control. Offering Eve as an example, he tells
how the woman who seeks knowledge, or tastes of the fruit of life, rends the veil of
innocence, leaving only her weakness and her lost glory.

Those women who did receive any formal education were only educated
according to the level and knowledge that male society deemed necessary or appropriate
to her social status. This generally resulted in a curriculum focused almost exclusively on
the reading of prayer books and religious texts, and that which would be useful in

household management. Education, like many other aspects of a woman’s life, was

 

2 Carvajal, Poesia, ed. Emma Scoles (Roma: Ateneo, I967) l28-129.

8

intended either to be ornamental in the case of upper class women, or to support the
patriarchal social structure by teaching women only as much as was necessary so that she
could provide aid to her husband by managing the domestic affairs of his household.
Thus she might be expected to read well enough to keep records or lists, to record
household expenditures, and, if she were upper-class to follow along in a prayer book.

Despite Carvajal's stern remonstrance and the paucity of women writers, there did
exist opportunities for female learning. Rocio Quispe-Agnoli adds an important
distinction to the discussion of women's education in her article “Teaching, Learning,
Reading, Writing: Educational Tools From Women for Women in Fifteenth Century
Spain.” Here she writes of the difference between formal education, direct transmission
of knowledge as through a tutor to a pupil, and informal or infused knowledge which
occurs in more private spaces such as the home or the convent. According to Quispe-
Agnoli, this second type of knowledge has several means of infusion: mystical
revelations, Spiritual reflection based on a religious text—which of course presupposes a
certain level of literacy—as well as through hearing of sermons, and familiarity with
iconography (46). Particularly in convent life the shared group experience of reading
texts aloud would have been a central part of daily routines. Ronald Surtz has argued that
nuns would have had extensive familiarity with these texts, and that this familiarity
could have resulted in activities such as the rewriting of biblical episodes (Surtz, 16).

As we shall see, the women under consideration here were believed to have
possessed varying levels of literacy. Teresa de Cartagena is believed to have received a
high level of education. She claims, though it has never been verified, to have studied at

Salamanca, and she would certainly have had access to her family’s extensive library,

regardless of the amount of formal training she received. There are differing views on
Leonor’s level of literacy. AS I shall explain in more detail in Chapter 2, Alan
Deyermond and Louise Mirrer have espoused contradictory theories regarding this issue,
Deyermond believes her to have been illiterate, which would have made it necessary for
her to dictate her text to a scribe or other third party. Mirrer, on the other hand,
hypothesizes that she may have in fact learned to read and write during her stay in a
convent, thus raising the possibility that she was responsible not merely for dictating, but
also for the actual writing of the Memorias. As previously stated, Madre Juana de la Cruz
is known to have been illiterate, her sermons and visions having been copied by a fellow
nun who acted as scribe. Thus, in order to clarify the relationship between these women
and their texts, it will be necessary to arrive at a working definition of what constitutes
literacy. Roger Wright offers some interesting observations here. Wright echoes Surtz's
view that due to the extensive oral transmission of texts, particularly the Bible and the
lives of Saints, many who could not actually read the printed word would have a much
greater familiarity with written texts than would an illiterate individual of the twenty-first
century. Based on this assessment, he suggests a redefinition of the term literate within its-
early modern context, that would include aural/oral familiarity with literature (Wright,
174-175).

Similarly, A. J. Minnis explores writing as a hierarchical series of practices,
beginning at the lowest level with the act of simple copying, and ending with writing with
divine authority, or auctoritas. As he explains, according to the medieval

conceptualization of authorship, there are varying levels of literary authority, dependent

10

upon the level of involvement with the text's creation and the closeness of the author to

Divine understanding or enlightenment. He explains this structure as follows:
The method of making a book is fourfold. For someone writes the materials of
others, adding or changing nothing, and this person is said to be merely the scribe.
Someone else writes the materials of others, adding, but nothing of his own, and
this person is said to be the compiler. Someone else writes both the materials of
other men, and of his own, but the materials of others as the principal materials,
and his own annexed for the purpose of clarifying them, and this person is said to
be the commentator, not the author. Someone else writes both his own materials
and those of others, but his own as the principal materials, and the materials of
others annexed for the purpose of confirming his own, and such must be called
the author.
The auctor contributes most, the scriptor contributes nothing, of his own. The
scribe is subject to materials composed by other men which he should copy as
carefully as possible, nihil mutando. The compilator adds together or arranges the
statements of other men, adding no opinion of his own (addenda, sed non de suo).
The commentator strives to explain the views of others, adding something of his
own by way of explanation. Finally and most importantly, the auctor writes de
suo, but draws on the statements of other men to support his own views (Minnis,
94-95).
As we will see, in the writings of Leonor, Teresa, and Juana, multiple levels of

writing are present, and the lines between them often seem tenuous. In each case,

however, there is a complicating circumstance. In the Memorias it is as yet unknown

 

ll

whether Leonor is writing or dictating, and consequently whether her text has been
altered by the work of a scribe to whom she orally dictated her memoirs. Minnis's theory
is of particular importance to the writings of Teresa and Juana, whose texts lay claim to
spiritual authority. Both women claim authorship, based on empowerment by or
communication with the Divine, thus elevating their authorial status to the highest level,
that of auctor. Teresa claims to be specially empowered by God to write, drawing on
biblical examples such as that of Judith to substantiate her claim. Juana claims to be the
vessel of God’s visions, each of which she follows with an interpretation that has been
given to her directly from God. These ingenious textual maneuverings would lend their
works the highest level of auctoritas, thus allowing them to assume a higher level of
authority than many, if not most, of their male contemporaries. This presents an
obviously problematic dynamic which gives rise to questions regarding the intent with
which the women make their claims, and to the authenticity of their texts.

When Teresa penned the Arboleda, the predominant criticism was that a woman
could not have been its author. It is from this criticism that the Admiragion took its name
and to which Teresa responds in that essay. The situation becomes further complicated in
J uana’s writing, because, while Teresa merely claims to have been empowered by God,
Juana claims to be directly relaying his words. Nonetheless, there still exists the problem
of filters: the intervention of the nun/scribe to whom she dictated her sermons while in
trance, as well as possible intervention on the part of her confessor. So, while God may
have endowed Juana with His visions, it was another who set those visions to paper, and

therefore would also have exercised some control. over their written contents and style.

12

Let us now proceed to a discussion of the chapters to follow. This study will be
divided into five chapters. In Chapter I, I will present some basic concepts relating to
trauma in its modern sense, and considerations that are essential to the application of
trauma in an Early Modern context. These include it’s semantic origins, an overview of a
period understanding of human personality makeup and imbalances, contemporary
definition and understanding of trauma, it’s symptoms, and how these can be related to
literary texts, particularly literature that was produced so long before the work of Freud
and the inception of trauma as an area of study.

The three subsequent chapters will be dedicated to exploring themes related to the
experience of trauma in the three authors selected for this study. In Chapter 2, I will
consider the issue of writing as self-justification, as exemplified in the one extant text of
Leonor Lopez de C6rdoba, her Memorias, estimated to have been written around the year
1412, shortly before her death. In this work, Leonor presents a fragmented narration of
events of her early life. As shall be seen, the first part of the text tells of her stay in the
Atarazanas prison, the torture she and her relatives experienced there and the deaths of
many of her family members, her subsequent release from prison and her husband’s
disappearance shortly thereafter. The remainder of the text addresses leeonor’s attempts
to reestablish herself and reclaim her titles and property, in essence, her struggle to
rebuild her life. This text presents at least three critical problems: (1) the nature and
circumstances of its composition, (2) the content Leonor chose to present in her text, and
(3) the possibility of Leonor’s re-establishment in her social context.

In addition to the issues of authorship which I have already touched upon, the text

raises a number of seminal questions regarding the content of the composition. Why, for

13

instance, does Leonor choose to write, and why does she limit her narrative to this short
fragment of her life story? The narrative ends seemingly in media res, when Leonor is
forced to leave her aunt’s family in Aguilar for Cordoba after bringing the plague to the
place where she and her family are staying. The choice, if it was a choice, to end the
narrative here, leaves out what was perhaps the most interesting and successful period of
Leonor’s life, that of her time serving as advisor to Queen Catherine of Lancaster. It is
generally believed that the Memorias were written after Leonor’s banishment from court,
so the absence of these events from the text is noteworthy. I will therefore examine the
autobiographical elements of the text, that is, the extent to which it adheres to and differs
from the autobiographical genre and other women’s autobiographical writing.

Like Leonor, Teresa de Cartagena also strives to redefine herself in relation to her
environment, but for her the question proceeds beyond that of mere self-justification to an
attempt at internal reconciliation. Chapter 3, then, will be dedicated to a treatment of the
two works of Teresa de Cartagena, Arboleda de los Enfermos (ca. 1450) and Admiraeion
Operum Dei composed some years after the Arboleda. Central to this discussion will be
several previous analyses of Teresa’s writing, in the works of Ronald Surtz, Dayle
Seidenspinner Nunez, and Clara Castro-Ponce. The first of these treatises is Teresa's
attempt to write about her experience of deafness, and the changes that her disability
imposed upon her. The second, written in response to male critics of the Arboleda, is
Spain’s first known defense of one woman’s ability to write and of her right to enter the
public, masculine space of the written word.

The stated, though not altogether convincing purpose of the Arboleda is to share

her gratitude that God chose to remove her from the “chatter of the world” and force her

14

to listen to his word. However, her text is not convincing. While on the one hand she
praises God for his gifi of silence, on the other, she bitterly laments having been forced to
enter into what Dayle Seidenspinner has translated as the “exile and shadowy
banishment” of a silent, life behind cloister walls (23). Thus, though Teresa's stated
objective is to Show how the curse of deafness was actually a blessing from God, I
propose that her own words betray her, revealing a woman who is still grieving over all
that she has lost: participation in a socially prestigious family, social and physical
freedom of movement, a probable good marriage, and the chance to be a part, even from
the disadvantaged place of the feminine, of events at the center of Spain’s political,
intellectual and religious life. I will therefore explore how Teresa’s own use of language
undermines her stated purpose, belying her on-going preoccupation with and grief at her
changed fortune.

Though the thematic focus of the Admirag'io'n Operum Dei turns from the issue of
suffering to take up that of Teresa’s fitness as a writer, I believe it is here that Teresa
actually manages to achieve what she hoped to accomplish in the Arboleda. When
confronted with the scorn and disbelief of the male literate world that she, a woman,
could have been the author of the Arboleda, Teresa responds with a subtly sharp, well-
crafted defense of her writing and she rebukes those who would discredit her. Her
deafness may have limited her ability for verbal exchange, but here she has reclaimed her
voice. While in the first treatise her language refuses to support her intended message.
here she is able to manipulate language and argumental strategies to achieve a glowing
victory not only over her external attackers, but also over her own inner shadow, that

part that would keep her silenced and isolated. She herself, in the A rboleda de los

15

enfermos credits God, through her deafness with having forced her to listen. She also
states that one reason for penning the Arboleda was to combat idleness. It stands to
reason, being from the literary family that she was, that it would be essential for Teresa to
find a way in which to express the turbulent emotions she experienced as she adjusted to
her newly imposed encloisterrnent, and the unanticipated and unsought confinement of
the convent. I suggest here that not only does her deafness force her to listen/read, it also
becomes her only mechanism for self-expression, thereby also being the impetus behind
adopting the role of author.

AS with Teresa de Cartagena, Madre Juana also finds the pen to be a tool for
reintegration. However, unlike Leonor and Teresa the pen brings Juana an elevation in
status within the public arena. Chapter 4 will be devoted to the sermons of Madre Juana
de la Cruz.3 AS I have previously stated, Surtz speculates about the possibility that She
may have experienced childhood sexual abuse, he also tells us that in order to enter the
convent against her uncle’s wishes she left home dressed in men’s clothing, and how,
once Abbess at the convent of Santa Maria de la Cruz, the role she occupies seems to be a
blur of the feminine and the masculine. Due to a benefice granted by Cardinal Cisneros,
she not only fulfilled the traditional duties of convent Abbess, but also exercised spiritual
jurisdiction over a nearby parish. When the annexation of the parish became a threat,
Juana engaged in quintessentially male activity when she took it upon herself to attempt
to secure a papal bull in order to ensure this benefice and thus the financial well-being of

the convent.

 

3 As there is currently no edition available of the complete sermons, I will rely on Ronald Surtz’s two
excellent studies of her writing, found in Writing Women in Late Medieval Spain (1995), and The Guitar 0!
God. Gender; Power, and Authority in the Visionary World ofMother Juana de la Cruz (I990).

16

In Juana’s visions, we find an unlikely amalgam of blurred gender imagery, erotic
content, suffering, and struggle for power. I will consider two of her visions that I believe
best exemplify these features: “The Creation Sermon” and the “Vision of the Nativity.”
The first of these is a sermon narrating the creation story in a rendering quite different
from the Genesis telling. Unlike the biblical account, Juana's recounting is permeated
with sexual tension. Rather than being the virtuous keeper of God's command, Adam is
cast as a jilted lover and sexual predator as he chases Eve through the garden in pursuit of
sexual favors. By inverting the established order of events, Juana raises several possible
new interpretations. Adam becomes seductor rather than Eve, and the fall occurs when
Eve refuses to yield to him, rather than as a precipitant to sexual activity.

This same sexually charged atmosphere is also found in the “Vision of the
Nativity.” In this vision God the Father takes the Virgin Mary into Heaven, where he
turns her into a naked little girl, and bids her to dance before him. He then proceeds to
engage in what Surtz has termed “Divine foreplay” asking her to give him her breasts so
that he can fondle them. Mary does not give in, pleading modesty, and asking favors in
return from God. She finally consents, but only on condition that he go with her to a
garden where she can give him her breasts in secret, as it would not be fit for her to do so
in public, a direct allusion to the forbidden nature of the act (1995, 108-120).

It is here that Surtz directly addresses the possibility of the connection between
Juana’s visions and earlier sexual abuse when he writes: “Certainly, the episode in which
the Father tries to touch Mary's breasts suggests a displaced instance (or several
instances) of sexual abuse from J uana's childhood. It is not uncommon for such incidents

to be repressed and then revealed much later in the form of dreams or other symbolic

l7

representations. Was the abuser her uncle? Was it her father? Is that the explanation for
Juana's removal from the parental home?” (125). These “displaced instances” where
trauma is repressed and later revealed, are a hallmark of the condition that we today call
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. One might well ask, why this would be of any
consequence at all in a literary study. If we accept Surtz’s speculations for our purposes
here as a temporary working theory, then it becomes possible to interpret Madre Juana‘s
visions in a radically different light, that of flash-back, or recurring traumatic experience,
rather than mystic experience. This interpretation has dramatic ramifications for our
understanding of the production of the Libro del C onorte. Established interpretations
typically portray Juana either as a mystic, or as a woman in control of a text which she is
creating to enhance her own ecclesiastical status. If, however, her text is the result of
recurring dreams or flash-backs, Madre Juana would have had little control over the
creation and structure of her sermons.

I believe that by exploring the content and imagery employed in her visions and
what is known about her life, we will find that this seeming condition, which in modern
terms would be regarded as negative, actually empowered Juana. Instead of having to
wrestle with the modern label of “disorder” she became a visionary, and her visions,
whatever their source, allowed her to accumulate power, status, and authority. I theorize
that this in turn enabled her to move back and forth between established gender roles,
occupying a space in between where rules and norms could be bent and blurred to suit
J uana’s purposes. This seems to have brought her many advantages. It got her into the
convent, and probably strengthened her powers as abbess. I propose that it also

empowered her to engage in literary production. Surtz discusses how she controls the

18

“reading” of her visions by including in each an interpretation she claims was given
directly by God. As we have seen in the theory of A. J. Minnis, the incorporation of this
feature in her visions elevates Juana to the highest level of Auctoritas. It is also an
attempt to preclude the possibility of anyone challenging or discrediting the content or
the message of her visions. This act of establishing herself as being the vessel of
auctoritas, and taking control not only of the writing of her text but also of it’s reading, is
a quintessentially masculine activity which further reflects the fluidity with which Juana
seems to move between established gender roles. I propose, therefore, to explore the
ways in which the language of Juana’s visions/texts reflect, albeit subconsciously, themes
related to trauma. I will also consider how Juana controls the reception of her visions
which consequently increases her own authority as prioress and as public persona.

In the final section, Conclusions, I will provide a summary of this study and its
findings and offer some thoughts about what they may contribute to the area of early
modern women’s writing. If this study is successful in connecting the experience of
trauma with the act of literary production, a number of questions arise. These include
consideration of the role of trauma in other literary texts, exploring the issue across
geographic borders, as well as across gender.During the final section I will discuss these
areas of further study, and also present areas of future investigation in the work of the
authors presented here.

Let us now proceed to our discussion of the authors under consideration here, as

we begin with an overview of historical and modern conceptualizations of trauma.

l9

Chapter 1

Rewriting the Self: Trauma and Literary Expression

The central question of this study is why, when so many of their Sisters did not,
did these three women choose to take up the pen and enter the public domain of the
written word. There are many questions that follow from this first one, but it is here that
this analysis must begin. As I have discussed in the introduction, each of the authors
featured here experienced a painful, life-altering event or series of events, that today we
would accept as cause for psychological trauma. Leonor Lopez de Cordoba experienced
torture, imprisonment, and the death of many family members, Teresa experienced late-
onset deafness, and for purposes of this study, I will employ the working theory that
Madre Juana de la Cruz experienced childhood sexual abuse. It is my contention that this
suffering directly contributed to these women’s decision to write, and that their texts,
though different from one another in style and genre, can be read as the literary
expression of a traumatic past.

In order to explore the causal and effectual relationship of trauma to these authors
and their texts, I will employ both early modern and contemporary scholarship. I will
begin my consideration by reviewing first the early modern view of trauma and the
human physiognomy, and then briefly summarize what contemporary scholarship tells us
about the effects of trauma on the individual, particularly in regard to the victim’s
internal processing of the traumatic event, and what symptoms, or other external
expressions of trauma accompany the victim’s internal struggle. Following from this
discussion I will consider possible functions of writing for these authors, such as the

20

cathartic, the testimonial, the self-consolatory, and that of tool for increased ecclesiastical

authority and personal power.

1.1 Historical Context

Since the field of trauma as we understand it today—that is, as a defined
psychological syndrome with a Specific array of causes, symptoms, and treatments--did
not have its inception until the nineteenth century and the clinical studies of Sigmund
Freud and Pierre Janet, it is essential to distinguish between contemporary definitions of
that term, and the fifteenth-century understanding of the phenomenon of mental
disturbance. The early modern model, rather than being psychologically based, was
regarded as a physiological problem. There was nonetheless a prevailing view that mental
imbalance did exist, not necessarily in conjunction with a specific external event, but
rather as the result of imbalances of fluids within the body itself. Thus, as it was not
distinguished in any way from physical ailments, issues of mental imbalance could also
be treated by addressing disequilibrium in the physical body.

During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, understanding of mental and physical
health was governed by Galenic, Hippocratic, and Aristotelian models. As this subject
has been explored by a myriad of scholars, MacLean (1982), Gottfried (1983), Garcia-
Ballester (1972 and 1992), and Garza (2001) among many others, I will limit my
discussion to a brief review. Physical and emotional well-being was dependent on the
individual’s maintenance of a balance of four primary substances known as humors,
which were considered to comprise the basic components inherent in the makeup of the

cosmos. As Randal Garza points out, according to these theories, the body was regarded

21

as a kind of microcosm of the external world, in that the body was thought to contain the
same elements that comprise the macrocosm of the universe.

Each humor was associated with a specific organ, and a corresponding element,
whose attributes and characteristics were said to reside in that humor. Thus, the humor
blood, came from the heart, corresponded to the element air, and was considered to be hot
and moist. Phlegm, which came from the heart, corresponded to water, and was therefore
considered cold and moist. The two dry humors, yellow and black bile, were hot and cold
respectively, yellow bile being associated with the liver and the element of fire, and black
bile coming from the spleen, was associated with that of earth (Garza, 61. Optimal mental
and physical health, a state known as Eukrasia, was attained by maintaining the correct
balance of all four, as an excess of any one humor was believed to result in physical
illness and/or emotional imbalance. Diagnosis and treatment of either emotional or
physical conditions for both men and women was therefore focused on identifying the
humor or humors which were either too abundant or too scarce, and then either increasing
or decreasing the level of the humor in question, so as to restore the desired humoral
balance.

There are of course a number of salient problems that are immediately apparent in
the implementation of this treatment modality. First, the ability to maintain humoral
balance was primarily regulated by diet. The ability to exert such control over what type
of food one ate, was a privilege enjoyed only by the upper classes. Thus, the poor or
lower classes, and in all likelihood, those imprisoned, would have had no recourse to
treatment. This limitation would have impacted both Leonor during her incarceration, and

Juana. who came from a farming family.

22

Another interesting dimension to this medical model is Garza tells us, physicians
were not surprisingly always men, and were typically members of the clergy. This
ecclesiastical connection provided a context for healing that had little to do with the
clinical studies and “hard” science that it is associated with today, placing it instead in a
context of religion, magic and the supernatural. I will return to this point later in this
chapter, but for now, suffice it to say that this view of healing as being spiritual or

magical is germane for each of the writers under consideration in this study.

In addition to the limitation of class mentioned earlier, as scholars such as Ian
MacLean (1980), Bethany Aram (2003), and Constance Jordan (1990) have
demonstrated, this understanding of human physiology was also predisposed toward a
negative view of women as being innately emotionally unstable. Their natural condition
was believed to be one of imbalance, as they were regarded as having an excess of cold
and moist humors. It was this identification with the cold and moist humors that was said
to account for women’s inherent inferiority, her frailty, her tendency toward emotionality,
and her propensity for lascivious behavior. Ian MacLean, in an explication of a
seventeenth-century treatise, provides an excellent comparative analysis of the virtues of
hot versus cold humors. Drawing on current models of embryology, he explains that the
male is born from a more perfect strain of semen, a strain which is hotter, thus producing
a male, rather than a female child. He further explains the attributes with which the male
is imbued, as a consequence of this additional heat: “The male grows faster in utero, is of
darker and harder flesh, more hirsute, more able to sustain extremes of temperature, has
larger arteries and veins, a deeper voice, is less prone to disease, more robust, broader,

comes to full maturity more slowly and ages less quickly than the colder female. He may

23

be ambidextrous whereas she rarely is, and has mental characteristics which may also be
attributed to body heat : courage, liberality, moral strength, honesty. The female on the
other hand, being colder, is characterized by the deprivation or opposite of these features
(32).

It would seem logical to conclude from this that the presence of additional hot
and/or dry humors in the female would be regarded positively, as it would endow her
with more of the qualities so prized in men, and which she is faulted for not possessing.
Would one not, after all, hope that one’s wife or daughter would be more robust, and less
prone to disease? Would one not look for a wife or value a daughter who is honest,
courageous, and possessing of moral strength? Certainly given that one of a female’s
most important features would have been her beauty, it would seem logical that a wife
who would age—and thus lose that beauty—more slowly, would be highly desirable.
Were this the case, it would follow that some female flaws might be addressed by
treatment designed to increase the presence of hot and dry humors in the body. But
Bethany Aram, in her article “Representing madness: Text, Gender and Authority in
Early Habsburg Spain” indicates that the contrary is in fact the case. As she aptly
demonstrates, woman is caught in a medical double-bind. She is considered flawed for
her preponderance of the mysterious, cold, moist humors and their corresponding traits.
However, should her behavior indicate an elevated presence of dry humors, prescribed
medical treatment would aim to restore her to the expected state of imperfection. Aram
provides an excellent example of this in the case of Queen Juana of Castille’s lady-in-
waiting, dofia Isabel de Albomoz (d. 1531): “However clear in theory, in practice

humoral medicine embodied certain contradictions, especially with respect to women.

24

Although women were supposed to be colder than men, when Isabel de Albomoz began
experiencing attacks of "frenzy" (frenesi), including spasms and numbness, humoral
principles suggested the need to extract and counteract the surges of hot humors
overpowering her brain. A cleric of the village of Contrasta, Ruy L6pez, recommended
shaving Isabel's head and draining blood from her "frenetic" five or six times. Such
blood-letting, a standard treatment for fury, would at least weaken the patient and enable
others to dominate her (79). More over, not only does Aram present inconsistencies in
treatment applications, she also shows how the humors themselves produce differing
results in men and women. Not only are the same traits not valued across genders, but
while a particular humor might elicit a positive response in a male, it may produce
negative effects in women: “Of all of the humors, sixteenth-century medical theorist Juan
Huarte de San Juan labeled melancholy black bile the coldest and driest. Although
dryness could make the understanding sharper and more perceptive, Ruarte found
coldness, especially predominant in women, "useless for all of the works of the rational
soul.” Thus melancholy humors, which the Renaissance linked to Saturn, could produce
artistic genius in the case of certain men, or dejection and despair among certain women”
(79-80).

To summarize, women’s natural state, even given a proper harmony of the
humors, was regarded as being lacking, incomplete or inferior. In addition, the medical
system which purported to understand and be able to treat her medical needs was biased
against her, first in that it emphasized treatment approaches that denied her the more
highly valued, hardier, robust character traits, and second in that the interpretations of

humoral levels were inconsistently applied so as to enforce the presence of qualities

25

deemed less desirable, moral and physical weakness, as well as despair, and moodiness.
The “positive” masculine humors and their corresponding characteristics were not
accorded the same esteem in a woman. Moreover, even if she were able to bring about an
increase in dry or hot humors, these humors would likely result in a less desirable
behavioral change. She had no hope of receiving the benefits that certain humors instilled
in her brothers, but neither was it desirable for her to aspire to the more perfect state
enjoyed by her male contemporaries. As Aram suggests, one can’t help but wonder as to
the role that the need for female domination played in early modern medical practices. Be
that as it may, it is clear that such treatment focused on the modification of behavior to
produce more socially acceptable results, than on considering the circumstances that may
have conspired to produce the behavior in the first place.

Needless to say, the actual word “trauma” never entered into these discussions of
humoral imbalance. Nonetheless, it appears that there were tools of language that did
address the concept of enduring injury, and encompassed not only physical wounding but
emotional damage as well. There is evidence that in Spanish, the physical and
social/psychological concept of an enduring injury, did in fact exist during the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries. The Diccionario de la Legua Espaiiola of the Real Academia
Espafiola, which offers the word herida as a synonym, presents the following two
definitions: 1. “Lesion duradera producida por un agente mecanico, generalmente
extemo” and 2. “Choque emocional que produce un dafio duradero en el inconsciente.”4
It would appear that the word trauma had not yet made its way into use in Spanish by the

fifteenth-century, as it does not appear in sources such as Covarrubias, or Corominas. I

 

’ All citations from the Diccionario de [a Lengua Espanola are taken from the online dictionary at the the
Real Academica’s website: http://buscon.rae.es/diccionario/drae.htm

26

was unable to determine the exact moment at which the word trauma did come into use,
but one could logically conclude that it would have been sometime during the nineteenth
century. Drawing then, on the synonym herida or wound, we find the following: in
Corominas, “golpear” or “dar con algo” (905; in Covarrubias, we find a more ample
definition, “herir. Vale golpear, maltratando; Herir de agudo 0 de punta, dar estocada,
golpe propio de espafiol, que de ordinario suele ser mortal. porque siempre encara al
rostro o pecho. Herir de agudo, por alusion, tocando en la honra” (482). Thus, there is
sufficient evidence to suggest that both Covarrubias and the Diccionario de Autoridades
define the word wound/herir/herida as an injury whose nature and effects encompass
both the physical and psychological/social, and that the Diccionario de la Lengua
Esgafiola offers it as a synonym for the word trauma. Therefore, I believe it can
reasonably be concluded that, while the modern term “trauma” would have been
unknown in the fifteenth century, the concept of an enduring wound/herida, that
expanded beyond the physical into the emotional realm was not, and thus a consideration
of trauma/wound and it’s impact on literary production during the fifieenth century is not
without merit. It is within that context that I offer this analysis of the relation between

psychological trauma and the literary production of these authors.

1.2. Modern Definitions of Trauma

In English, the word trauma first appeared in the Oxford English dictionary in the
year 1656 (Young, 1995), and referred exclusively to physical bodily wounds. According
to Allan Young, it appears to have retain this definition into the nineteenth century, when

surgeons such as John Erichsen published On Railway and Other Injuries of the Nervous

27

System (I 866) and Edwin Morris followed shortly after with Practical Treatise on Shock

 

filer Surgical (Lucrations and Injuries (1867), treatises that expanded the term's usage to
include physical or emotional damage resulting from a severe blow or injury.

Some three decades later in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the
concept of trauma began to be studied in psychological circles in the work of Sigmund
Freud, Jean-Martin Charcot, and Pierre Janet, whose work expanded the concept of
trauma from railway injury to the inclusion of psychological causes as well. During the
first half of the twentieth century, the study of trauma was closely identified with the
treatment of war veterans, when Abram Kardiner further defined and classified the
disorder based on his treatment of veterans during the 19205. In 1980, the concept of
Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) became formally legitimized, when it made its

debut in the third edition of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and

 

Statistical Manual. According to this source, now in its revised fourth edition, we find the

following description of traumatic events and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, the

syndrome resulting from exposure to a traumatic event:
The essential feature of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder is the development of
characteristic symptoms following exposure to an extreme traumatic stressor
involving direct personal experience of an event that involves actual or threatened
death or serious injury, or other threat to one's physical integrity; or witnessing an
event that involves death, injury, or a threat to the physical integrity of another
person; (. . .) Traumatic events that are experienced directly include, but are not
limited to, military combat, violent personal assault (sexual assault, physical

attack, robbery, mugging), being kidnapped, being taken hostage. terrorist attack,

28

torture, incarceration as a prisoner of war or in a concentration camp, natural or

manmade disasters, severe automobile accidents, or being diagnosed with a life-

threatening illness. For children, sexually traumatic events may include
developmentally inappropriate sexual experiences without threatened or actual
violence or injury. Witnessed events include, but are not limited to, observing the
serious injury or unnatural death of another person due to violent assault,

accident, war, or disaster. (484-485)

The presence of many of the causes of trauma cited above from the DSM-IV can
be seen with only a cursory glance at Leonor's and Teresa's lives. Leonor we know,
experienced both incarceration as a prisoner of war, and witnessed the serious injury or
unnatural death due to violent assault as a result of war, of her brother, father, and other
relatives. Teresa de Cartagena experienced chronic illness, which though not life-
threatening, was certainly life-altering. If we accept Madre Juana's text as testimonial, or
at least as narration of a flashback resulting from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, one can
argue the presence of developmentally inappropriate sexual experiences.

Psychiatrist Judith Lewis Herman takes the reader beyond a mere cataloging of
events that can produce Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, by offering an in-depth
consideration of the impact that traumatic experiences can have on the life—and I argue
by extension the literary production-- of the victim. While literature, even autobiography
can at best be regarded as a Simulacra of real life, I am also not the first to consider the
relationship between trauma and literary production. As we shall see further on, Sigmund
Freud was an early champion of the view that there is a connection between trauma and

literature. Building on his original considerations, Cathy Caruth expands the idea of

29

literature as manifestation of what Freud terms the “Repetitive Impulse”, i.e. the need to
re-enact the trauma over and over again. Literature, Freud and later Caruth argue, is but
one manifestation of this phenomenon, others of course being nightmares, flash-backs,
and so on. If we accept this approach to the texts of these writers, the question that
logically follows is what the impact of trauma would have been, and thus, what would be
the content or focus of Freud’s repetitive impulse in their writing. Though of course
working in a contemporary context, Herman has worked with trauma victims for several
decades and has dedicated her career to the study of that field, with a particular emphasis
on its effects on women. In her 1992 text, Trauma and Recovery, she discusses the
manifestations and impact of trauma on victims of captivity and physical abuse.
According to Herman, trauma has the ability to disrupt most aspects of the victim’s life,
her feelings about safety and security, her sense of self, and her relation to the external
world. These events rupture the systems in which she had previously functioned,
breaking family and social attachments, and cause the victim to question not only her
place in those systems and relationships, but also her concept of self. Herman further
explains:
The damage to relational life is not a secondary effect of trauma, as originally
thought. Traumatic events have primary effects not only on the psychological
structures of the self but also on the systems of attachment and meaning that link
individual and community. Mardi Horowitz defines traumatic life events as those
that cannot be assimilated with the victim's "inner schemata" of self in relation to

the world. Traumatic events destroy the victim's fundamental assumptions about

30

the safety of the world, the positive value of the self, and the meaningful order of

creation. (51)
This notion of a disruption of the schemata of self in relation to the world can be seen as
a prominent feature of each of these women’s life experiences, and is in turn revealed
within their texts. For each, predefined concepts of a “natural or divine order” have been
violated, and assumptions about security, status, and family affiliation must be re-
evaluated. Male family members who are supposed to protect and provide safety cannot
do so. Concepts of self as a daughter at court, or as an articulate member of a highly
verbal, highly educated family must be re-evaluated. New relationships must be formed
with a community that would have hitherto been considered undesirable: Leonor, first
orphaned and then abandoned by her husband, must look to relatives associated with the
very same political faction responsible for Leonor and her family’s imprisonment and
torture. Teresa must make her peace with a new family, that of the infirmed or
marginalized. Madre Juana’s sense of sex and gender roles is disrupted, seeking new
outlets and expression through visions and attempts at ecclesiastical status. It is my
contension that this wounding cannot help but be reflected, whether directly or indirectly
in the work of these authors, two of whose writings contain intentional autobiography,
while the other is comprised of material taken while the author was in a trance state.

Though I have touched on the origins of these authors' trauma, it seems useful to
provide a brief history at this juncture. As I have stated, for Leonor LGpez de Cordoba,
the traumatic event was that of years of prolonged incarceration and torture, and her
ensuing struggle to reclaim her former social and economic position. The fight for the

throne between Pedro I and his illegitimate half brother Enrique de Trastamara would

31

prove to be a major factor in shaping not only Leonor’s childhood, but much of her adult
life as well. When Enrique murdered Pedro and usurped the throne in 1369, Leonor’s
father, who had been a supporter of Pedro I, was executed, and his family imprisoned in
the Atarazanas prison in Seville. There Leonor would spend the next nine years of her
young life, watching as many of her family members were tortured and died. Leonor
takes great pains in the opening of her text to establish her connections to the court of
Pedro 1. Upon her release from the Atarazanas, however, she must face the stark reality
that those connections of which she is still so proud are an encumbrance rather than an
asset. She enters prison as the daughter of a well-positioned family, and leaves a
penniless woman affiliated with a murdered king. Her text clearly demonstrates the
tension between her birth status and her circumstances following her incarceration, as
evidenced in her description of her petition to her aunt for a private gate into her home, so
that she need not be seen entering from the street like a common pauper: “por que no
viniésemos por la Calle a comer a su mesa, entre tantos Cavalleros que havia en
Cordoba” (22).5 (So that we need not be seen coming in from the street just like any
common men of Cordova who come to dine at her table.) Though Leonor may be without
means of her own, she clearly views herself as belonging to a higher class, and wishes
others to view her in this way as well, and her text reflects the tension between these two
realities throughout.

Though not linked to the royal conflict, Teresa was also a product of this era, as the

daughter of a converso family that had to contend with the anti-Semitic religious climate

 

5 All citations of the Memorias will be taken from the edition of Reinaldo Ayerbe-Chaux (Journal of
Manic Philology 2 (1977-78): 1 l-33. All English translations will be taken from Amy Katz Kaminsky
and Elaine Dorough Johnson, "To Restore Honor and Fortune: “The Autobiography of Leonor Lopez de
Cordoba.” The Female Autograph. Ed. Domna C. Stanton. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.

32

that would eventually lead to the establishment of the Inquisition (1481) and the
expulsion of the unconverted Jews from Spain (1492) during the reign of the Catholic
kings. Teresa’s grandfather, Salomon Halevy, was chief rabbi of Burgos. In 1390 he
chose to convert to Christianity, adopted the name Pablo de Santa Maria, and eventually
became bishop of Burgos. Her family produced a number of writers, and ecclesiastical
and civic leaders. They rose to great power, enjoying membership in Spain’s emerging
middle-class, and accruing considerable political, intellectual, and ecclesiastical status.
For Teresa, the disruptive element is the onset of deafness during her late teens or early
twenties, an event that would render her unmarriageable, and remove her from the
intellectual and social circles of her family. She would be sent to a convent, and for many
years would struggle with feelings of isolation and familial rejection. As she writes in her
Arboleda de los Enferrnos, “Los plazeres que en e'l son del todo nos haborescen: la salut
nos desanpara, los amigos nos olvidan, los parientes se enojan, e aun la propia madre se
enoja con la hija enferma, y el padre aboresce al hijo que con continuas dolerias le
ocupare la posada” (142).6 7

With this single event, then, Teresa is transformed from an educated, intelligent,
articulate daughter of a highly positioned converso family, into an infirm socially isolated
young woman, with no prospects for marriage, or life in the secular intellectual world in
which she had been born, and must have expected to live out her days. Her first treatise,

Arboleda de los Enfermos (Grave of the Infirm), poignantly reveals her struggle to come

 

6 For the essays of Teresa de Cartagena I will rely on the excellent critical edition of Clara Castro-Ponce,
Edicion critica singular. Brown University, Ph.D. dissertation, 2001.

7 Worldly pleasures despise us. health forsakes us, friends forget us, relatives get angry, and even one's own
mother gets annoyed with her sickly daughter, and one's father despises the son who with chronic
afflictions dwells in his home (46). All English translations of Teresa de Cartagena will be taken from
Dayle Seidenspinner-Nunez, The Cloisters of my Ears: The Writings of Teresa de Cartagena. Cambridge:
D.S. Brewer, I998.

33

to terms with her removal from her former life and to accept her new circumstances, a
silent life behind cloister walls. Though some may question whether deafness constitutes
a loss of the ability to speak, Teresa strongly suggests to us that it has, or at least that has
taken away her desire to do so. She writes of her frustration at the one-sidedness of not
being able to hear her interlocutor in the Arboleda, indicating that the ability to physically
move one’s lips is only a small part of a conversational exchange. Responding to friends
who suggest that she continue to visit former friends she writes:
E bien conosco que se me dize con buena amistat e sinpleza apartada de toda
malicia, mas ni por esto dexo de me enojar, conosciendo claramente qu'el ablar es
prolixo sin el oir, se puede dezir fe sin obras. Ca asi como la fe sin las obras es
muerta y no aprovecha al que la tiene, antes le obliga a mayor pena, asi el fablar
sin el oir no vale nada nin faze otro bien sino acrecentar tormento a su duefio
(105).8
Thus for Teresa, with the option of what she perceives to be a one-sided verbal exchange
being of decreased interest, she turns to the communicative venue that has not been
diminished for her. Oral communication is replaced with the written word, as she enters
into an exchange between the theological texts with which she is familiar, and her
reflections on her deafness and entry into the convent.
While Juana differs from Leonor and Teresa in that she was born to a farming
family of low socio-economic status, she nonetheless was able to rise to a position of

great power as abbess of the convent of Santa Maria de la Cruz in Cubas. located

 

8 And while I understand that this is said in good friendship and innocence without any malice, nevertheless
it still annoys me, knowing as I do that speech is pointless without hearing, like faith without works. For
just as faith without works is dead and leads to greater pain than profit, so speech without hearing is worth
nothing and only increases one's torment (27).

34

between Madrid and Toledo. During her tenure as Abbess, Madre Juana oversaw the
spiritual jurisdiction of the parish of Cubas, even securing a papal bull in order to retain
both her leadership of the parish and the financial support it provided to her convent,
confronting head-on challenges by other ecclesiastics to the right of a woman to hold
such power. Unfortunately, the biographical data on Madre Juana is limited, and that
which did survive comes from an account written by her confessor in an attempt to
promote J uana’s canonization. This makes any speculation about the circumstances of

J uana’s life difficult at best. Nonetheless, I concur with Ronald Surtz’s suggestion that
there may be sufficient evidence in her text to support the hypothesis that she may have
experienced some form of sexual abuse or trauma earlier in her life (1995). Juana’s text,
El Libra del Conorte consists of a series of sermons dictated to a fellow nun while Juana
was in a mystical trance state. In his chapter on her creation sermon, Surtz tells of Juana’s
mother’s death when she was approximately seven years of age (124-25). He states that
Juana lived with her father for some time afterward, but was eventually removed from
her home to reside with an aunt and uncle. She eventually flees from the uncle’s home,
dressed in men’s attire to join the convent against her relatives’ wishes. For Surtz, and for
me, this raises a series of questions. Why would she have been removed from her father’s
home? What was Juana's motivation in fleeing her uncle’s home to enter the convent
despite family opposition? Obviously, this action could simply have been the result of
religious devotion. But as Surtz suggests, there could have been other factors motivating
the young Juana: “Perhaps such speculations (of childhood trauma) can be linked to the
timing of Juana's acting on her desire to become a nun. At the age of fifteen, in the face

of attempts by her relatives to marry her off, Juana escaped from her uncle's house,

35

dressed in male attire, and sought refuge in the convent. Her relatives would not have
attempted to arrange her marriage had Juana not already undergone puberty. Did her own
sexual awakening precipitate her decision to become a nun? While Juana had long
desired to take the veil, puberty itself may have signaled that it was time to go (126).
While there is no documentation to verify Juana’s having experienced such abuse, I
intend to examine the textual evidence that supports the existence of such experiences,
not with the aim of proving definitively the existence of sexual abuse, as that will not be
possible without additional biographical information. Rather, I will approach her texts as
an observer, considering how and where J uana’s writings bear out Surtz’s hypothesis, and
with an eye to understanding how such experiences may have impacted Juana’s literary
production and, as I will discuss later, her professional career as well. Unlike Teresa and
Leonor, who actively struggle to reconstitute their subjectivity in relation to the other,
Juana appears to use her visions as a means to attain dominance over the male
ecclesiastical hierarchy. Are J uana’s trances/texts, then, merely the presentation of what
is today a well—documented symptom of trauma, or are they a bid for power, or perhaps,
a bit of both.

It can readily be seen then, that Judith Herman’s suggestion that trauma is of a
binary or reciprocal nature, that is, that it involves a “disruption of the schemata of self in
relation to the world”, is critical to each of the authors being studied here. Covarrubias
also offers a similarly relational context in his definition of “herida” or wound, as not
being limited to the wounded subject, but taking into account the subject’s place within
his/her community. As has already been stated, the definition he provides describes

wounding not only in it’s physical dimension of inflicting bodily injury. but also as

36

potentially having an impact on one’s honor, a concept which is implicitly communal. In
true Spanish fashion, the individual becomes social. To be wounded is not merely a
private, individual experience, but often a social phenomenon as well, not only causing
internal distress, but also resulting in a reordering and redefinition of one’s relationship to
family and community. This concept is abundantly represented in both Medieval and
Golden Age Spanish literature, a fact which would seem to support both Covarrubias and
Herman. It is therefore worth taking a moment to consider how the communal aspects of
injury, and dishonor, are treated in other early modern literary texts.

A cursory glance at canonical literature of the Iberian Peninsula from the twelfth
to the seventeenth century reveals the ubiquitous presence of issues pertaining to honor,
appearances, and one's relationship to one's community. The differing styles of earlier
works—thejuglaresque, epic style of the Cantar de Mio Cid, the religious and didactic
nature of works such as Alfonso X’s Cantigas de Santa Maria and Gonzalo de Berceo’s
Milagros de Nuestra Sefiora—necessarily present these themes in a different light than
one finds in later works. These themes are still present, however, though often as a
secondary rather than a primary focus.

An early example of a work where honor and relationship to community are
central features can be found as far back as the twelfth-century Cantar de Mio Cid. Of
course it is well-known that this work opens with Ruy Diaz falling into disfavor with
King Alfonso, and his departure from the city of Burgos which begins his exile. What
follows in the first Cantar is El Cid’s earning back the favor of his King, and in so doing,
re-establishing and even improving his place within the social structure. Thus issues of

justice, reputation and relationship are placed squarely at the work’s center. Once this has

37

been achieved, he faces yet another task, which also deals with injury and honor, that of
restoring his daughters’ honor after it has been violated by the Infantes de Carrion.
Though he is the hero and central figure of the work, he is nearly always seen in a
relational context, with his King, with his family, and with his vassals.
In the later T ragicomedia de Calixto y Melibea, attributed to Fernando de Rojas
(1499) and often considered to be a transitional work between the Middle Ages and the
Baroque, Melibea’s transition from dutiful daughter, to her rejection of that role in favor
of the pursuit of her passion for Calixto takes center stage. Alisa’s unfortunately tardy
admonition to her daughter warns Melibea not only of her own danger in succumbing to
Celestina’s wiles, but also of the community suspicion that she risks if she is seen too
frequently in Celestina’s company:
Guardate, hija, della, que es gran traydora, que el sotil ladron siempre rodea las
ricas moradas. Sabe ésta con sus trayciones, con sus falsas mercadurias, mudar los
propositos castos; dafia la fama; a tres vezes que entra en una casa, engendra
sospecha” “Take care with her, daughter, for she is very treacherous, and the
subtle thief always circles the dwellings of the rich. She knows how, with her
treachery and her false ways to alter one’s chaste intentions, she damages
reputations. If she enters a house three times, she evokes suspicion. (X, 247).
At this point in the work, Alisa is still unshaken in her confidence in her “bien guardada
hija”. Her concern is less about Melibea’s actions, than it is about what the neighbors will
think should Celestina be seen coming and going from the family home. Much too late
will she learn that her real concern should have been her daughter, who has disregarded

her honor and that of her family with fatal consequences when Melibea chooses to join

38

her lover in death rather than live a life that would bring dishonor to both her and her
family.

This trend reaches its zenith in the Golden Age, where both theater and prose
works are replete with tales of perceived and actual social injury. In the anonymous
picaresque novel Lazarillo de Tormes, (1554), the reader is introduced to a cast of
characters who, though not necessarily dealing with trauma, are preoccupied with either
navigating or managing their place within the community. First, we are introduced to the
impoverished nobleman, who has no money and nothing to eat but nonetheless, dons his
nobleman’s attire, so as to conceal the true state of his financial affairs and preserve the
appearance of his noble status. Then of course, there is the infamous “caso” which is at
the novel’s center. Here, ironically, the cure lies not in a cathartic retelling, but rather in a
quiet fait accompli. Much as I believe our authors do when they step outside the
prescribed female silence, Lazarillo’s resolution lies in the violation of established norms.
If Lazarrillo will keep silent, and turn a blind eye both to his wife’s activities in the
bishop’s house, and to the wagging tongues of his gossiping neighbors, his wife gains
legitimate married status, and in payment, the bishop will provide the couple with a
comfortable living.

Lastly, since this study is concerned with women telling their own stories, Maria
de Zayas y Sotomayor’s Desengaiios A morosos (1647) are worthy of mention as they
offer a distinctly feminine view of honor and community. In ten framed tales, Zayas’s
narrators relate brutal episodes of violence against women, all of which have only two
possible forms of resolution, death or the convent. Zayas’s position is unequivocal.

Unless she removes herself from subjection to male authority, woman’s fate is likely to

39

be a grim one. At the conclusion of the sarao, the occasion for these dark tales, the
protagonist Lisis refuses the marriage proposal of don Diego, and, along with her mother
and several female friends and relatives, removes herself to a convent in order to live free
of male domination. In Lisis’s farewell speech, Zayas frames directly the moral that the
preceding tales depicted:
Pues si una triste vidilla tiene tantos enemigos, y el mayor es un marido, pues,
(“,quién me ha de obligar a que entre yo en lid de que tantas han salido vencidask,
y saldran mientras durare el mundo, no siendo mas valiente ni mas dichosa?
Vuestros méritos son tantos, que hallaréis esposa mas animosa y menos
desengafiada; que aunque no lo estoy por experiencia, lo estoy por ciencia. Y
como en el juego, que mejor juzga quien mira que quien juega, yo viendo, no solo
en estos desengafios, mas en lo que todas las casadas me dan, unas lamentandose
de que tienen los maridos jugadores; otras, amancebados, y muchas de que no
atienden a su honor, y por excusarse de dar a su mujer una gala, sufren que se la
dé otro. Y mas que, por esta parte, al cabo de desentenderse, se dan a entender,
con quitarles la vida, que fuera mas bien empleado quitarsela a ellos, pues fueron
los que dieron la ocasion, estoy tan cobarde, que, como el que ha cometido
algun delito, me acojo a sagrado y tomo por amparo el retiro de un convento,
desde donde pienso ver lo que sucede a los demas. Y asi, con mi querida dor’ia
Isabel, a quien pienso acompafiar mientras viviere, me voy a salvar de los engafios
de los hombres. Y vosotras, hermosas damas, si no os desengafia lo escrito,
desengafieos lo que me veis hacer. Y a los caballeros, porc despedida suplico

muden de intencion y lenguaje con las mujeres, porque si mi defensa por escrito

40

no basta, sera fuerza que todas tomemos las armas para defendemos de sus malas

intenciones y defendemos de los enemigos, aunque no sé qué mayores enemigos

que ellos, que nos ocasionan a mayors ruinas que los enemigos. (508-509)9
As one can readily imagine, a thorough discussion of Zaya’s texts goes well beyond the
scope of this study. But as we can see, her perspective on community is a uniquely
female one. She takes the strident position that for women, living in the larger community
is simply not possible. The best option for women is to separate from the larger
community, and create a safe and nurturing female microcommunity within the protective
walls of the convent.

This is not, of course, to say that trauma, honor, and community membership are
inexorably linked. One’s status in the community may change simply as the result of
marriage, or the death of a spouse, and thus be unrelated to questions of trauma or honor.
One’s honor can likewise be compromised in situations where trauma is not present. As

in the case of Madre Juana, trauma can occur within a private setting, thus having

 

9 "Well, if one weary little life has so many enemies, the worst of whom is a husband, then why should I
enter the fray in which so many have been vanquished and will keep on being vanquished as long as the
world lasts, when I am no braver or more fortunate? Your merits are such that you will find a wife who's
more courageous and less disenchanted. While I may not be disenchanted from personal experience, I am
from knowledge. "As in any game, the one who knows who his partners are plays best. I've learned not
only fi'om these disenchantments but fiom the example all married women give. Some lament that their
husbands gamble, others that they keep mistresses, many that their husbands don't take care of their honor
and, to keep from buying their wife a new dress, they let somebody else do so. Then, after feigning
ignorance, suddenly they open their eyes and kill the wife when they'd do better to kill the man for, afier
all, it was the man who caused the offense in the first place. as I see happening in Madrid. Even since the
first day of this soiree, which was the [Sunday] before Lent of this year, 1646, there have been many
scandalous affairs. 1 am such a coward that, like a person who's committed some crime, I shall take refuge
in sanctuary. I plan to retire to a convent, from where, as from behind a safety barricade, I intend to observe
what happens to everybody else. With my beloved doi’Ia Isabel, whom I intend to accompany as long as I
live, I'm going to save myself from the deceptions of men. You, beautiful ladies, if you're not disenchanted
by what's been written. let my example disenchant you. I beg you men, by way of farewell, to change your
thinking and your language with regard to women. If my written defense doesn't suffice, then we'll all have
to take up arms to defend ourselves against your evil intentions, to defend ourselves against our enemy. We
have no worse enemy than men, for they cause us greater injury than any invading soldier." (Maria de
Zayas y Sotomayor. Disenchantments of Love. Translated by H Patsy boyer, State University of New York,
Press, 1997.

41

potential psychological consequences for the individual, but be unknown to the outside
community, thus reducing or removing the risk of any accompanying damage to one’s
reputation. Moreover, relationship to community may change without there being any
concomitant questions of damage to one’s reputation or status. Teresa de Cartagena’s
case offers an excellent example of social displacement without dishonor. The onset of
her deafness certainly altered her relationship to her community. Prior to the onset of
deafness, it seems likely that her membership in such a prominent family would have
made her an attractive candidate for marriage. But marriage would now be removed from
her array of options. Though we have little information regarding Teresa’s entry into the
convent, her writing certainly suggests that convent life would not have been the life of
her choosing, and that she was placed there as the result of her deafness. this would place
hitherto unknown limitations on her communication with others, causing her to rely more
extensively on writing rather than verbal exchange. As was demonstrated earlier, this
shift would undoubtedly have an impact on at least some of her former relationships, if
for no other reason than Teresa’s own frustration with the difficulties her deafness posed
in social interactions. but her status as the daughter of an important family would not
have been diminished, and her personal reputation was never compromised. However,
change in community relations constitutes a key component of each of these authors’
experiences, and will be considered in more detail in the following chapters.

The questions that follow from these broader considerations pertain to how this
fragmentation, this disruption of the schemata of self and the schemata of the world
would manifest itself, both in clinical symptomatology, and then in the representational

forms of this clinical picture that one could expect to find in the literary text. Allan

42

Young addresses the first part of this question in his description of how the trauma victim
goes about assimilating the traumatic experience, providing three different mechanisms
for coping with trauma, reframing, revision, and emptying. As he tells us, these processes
are typically cyclical in nature, often taking many repetitions before the trauma has truly
been assimilated. He describes three primary types of responses to the cognitive

dissonance occasioned by the traumatic event. Victims may

reframe their traumatic memories, making the memory content consistent with
their preexisting cognitive schemas. They can attempt to revise the cognitive
schemas, making them consonant with their memories. Or they can try to empty
the memories of their salience and emotional power, by assimilating them
(responses one and two) or erecting defenses against them via denial, efforts at
avoiding the stimuli that trigger recollections, generalized emotional numbing,
and so on.... The psychological process through which dissonant memories are
assimilated is believed to consist of phases and cycles: (1) the conscious mind
engages the traumatic memory, this encounter generates anxiety (2) the conscious
mind disengages from the memory, through denial, self-dosing with alcohol or
drugs, et cetera (3) the level of anxiety is reduced, the conscious mind reengages
the traumatic memory and attempts to process it (via responses one and two) -
anxiety increases, and a new cycle begins. Normally, cycling and processing
continue until the memory is metabolized, at which point it becomes part of the

individual's inactive memory. That is, it is retrievable but no longer intrusive

(8-9).

43

I suggest that we will see each of these responses represented in these authors. The
question of revision in the Memorias is an interesting one, and requires exploration on
multiple levels. Within the context of Young’s description of how victims process
traumatic memory, one must of course consider how Leonor may have revised her
experiences, and also her schemata of self, both internally and on paper, so as to vindicate
herself and her family and to uphold her claims to a higher social position and the
accompanying material comforts she desires. Equally significant, however, are any
revisions that may have been made by a scribe, as it has not yet been definitively
determined whether Leonor wrote or merely dictated her text. The struggle for political
power at the core of Leonor's story, opens a plethora of possibilities for revisionist
agendas, both by Leonor, opposed to the Trastamara throne, and by her scribe, who may
well have supported it.

While Leonor—and arguably Madre J uana--probably would meet modern criteria
for Post-Traumatic-Stress Disorder, Teresa de Cartagena in all likelihood would not. She
does, however, engage in some activities common to PTSD survivors, such as those
associated with Young’s response number two, the reframing of cognitive schemas. As
will be seen in Chapter Three, Teresa’s first essay focuses almost exclusively on arriving
at an understanding of the purpose of her deafness, as she attempts to reframe the pain of
her hearing loss within a religious and consolatory context, working to place it in a
positive framework that will create the smallest possible disruption for her previously
held assumptions about her self and her environment.

Madre Juana offers an interesting example of one who may be seen to engage in

response number one, reframing of memory content, and also response number three, the

44

erection of defenses to weaken the memory’s potency, the latter strategy of emotional
numbing and avoidance of stimuli. She is also arguably the most symptomatic of the
three authors. She is the only one who can be said to have experienced so-called “flash-
backs”, a frequent symptom of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, which the DSM-IV
defines as
“recurrent and intrusive recollections of the event or recurrent distressing
dreams during which the event can be replayed or otherwise represented In
rare instances, the person experiences dissociative states that last from a few
seconds to several hours, or even days, during which components of the event are
relived and the person behaves as though experiencing the event at that moment”
(485).
It is these “dissociative episodes” which I argue are seen by Juana and her fellow nuns
and her confessors as trances which produce the mystical visions for which she becomes
famous. The great irony of Madre J uana’s case, is that on the one hand, she presents the
most active and severe symptomatology, and it would appear, from the scant information
available, that her symptoms persisted through out her life, indicating a failure to reach
Young’s goal of assimilating the traumatic memory. On the other hand, she is also the
most successful, at least if one interprets success to mean an accumulation of status and
recognition.
Though each of these authors processed their traumatic experiences in different ways,
religion was a key component for all three. Within the trauma context, religion can be
seen as serving two primary functions, that of providing the victim with a sense of control

over his/her environment, and that of numbing the victim to the pain of the traumatic

45

events. As Young points out in his discussion of processing trauma, the cycle of engaging
and disengaging from the traumatic memory, often involves various strategies for
numbing oneself to the trauma memory. These numbing behaviors can range from simply
avoiding stimuli related to the trauma, to self-dosing/abuse of alcohol or other drugs. I
suggest that for the fifteenth or sixteenth-century individual, devout religious practice
served a function not altogether dissimilar to the contemporary numbing practices
described by Young. Freud is among the first to explore a related phenomenon known as
magical thinking. The contemporary definition, provided in the Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual is “The erroneous belief that one's thoughts, words, or actions will cause or
prevent a specific outcome in some way that defies commonly understood laws of cause
and effect” (864). One may engage in this behavior in attempt to replace an undesired
reality with an alternate reality, corresponding with a wish or need, the restoration of an
ill loved one, or other remedy to a situation that causes pain. For Freud, magical thinking
is a central characteristic of religious practice, though it can occur in nonreligious
contexts. This is not to cast aspersions on religious devotion. As noted earlier in this
chapter, the healing arts were in fact frequently the purview of the church, and thus
carried an inherent connotation of the magical or supernatural. This connection would no
doubt have been part of the inner schemata of each of these authors, and would therefore
have provided them with both a framework for inner healing and for addressing painful
aspects of their external lives that they might wish to change. Religion, then allowed
these authors a mechanism for explaining her circumstances, and also a tool to try and
reshape her situation into one that fit with her desired vision of how the world Should be.

and of her place within it.

46

Leonor’s employment of prayers, and even charity, provide an excellent example
of magically trying to force her reality into conformity with her will. Although she is the
only laywoman among the three, religion plays a role in Leonor’s text equally important
to that in the texts of Teresa and Juana. She begins her text with a formulaic declaration
that the events she narrates are all true, and that she writes her story for the honor and
praise of Jesus and his mother the Virgin Mary. Though such formulaic statements are
quite common in literature of the period, we will see this religious theme reflected
throughout Leonor’s text, long after any attempt at maintaining formulaic structures is
seen to be necessary. When Leonor finds herself desirous of obtaining her own home, she
tells us that she undertakes an impressive prayer regimen of saying three hundred Ave
Marias for thirty nights in a row. Then, just in case this were insufficient, she also adopts
a Jewish orphan whom she then raises as Christian. In return for her devotion, Mary gives
her a vision of the house that is to be hers with the help of her maternal aunt. Though
Leonor’s progress toward restoration is temporary, she sees this short-lived victory as the
Virgin taking her part in her struggle to return to the life into which she was born, and she
repays the Virgin with yet another litany of prayer:

entonzes echa esta merced alze los ojos a Dios, y ala Virgen Maria, dandole

gracias por ello; y ende llego a mi un Criado del Maesire mi Senor é Padre, que

vive con Martin Fernandez Alcayde de los Donzeles, que alli estaba oyendo misa,

y enbiele a pedir con aquel Criado suyo, para que como Pariente le diese las

gracias ala Sefiora, mi tia déla merced que me havia echo, y a plugiole mucho y

asi lo hizo con buena mensura diciendole: que esta merced recevia El por suya; E

dadome la Posecion abri una Puerta en el sitio, y Lugar que havia visto el arco,

47

que la Virgen Maria me mostro, é a los Abades les peso que me entregasen el
dicho Solar, por que Yo era de grande Linage, y que mis hijos serian Grandes, y
Ellos eran Abades, y que no havian menester Grandes Cavalleros cabe Si, y Yo
tubelo por buen proberbio, y dijeles esperaba en Dios que asi seria, y concerteme
con Ellos, de tal manera, que abri la Puerta en aquel Lugar donde yo queria, é
tengo que por aquella Caridad que hize en criar aquel Huérfano en la fee de Jesu
Christo, Dios me ayudo a darme aquel comienzo de Casa, e de antes de estos, yo
havia ido treinta dias a Maytines ante Sonta Maria el Amortecida, que es en la
Orden de Son Pablo de Cordoba con aguas y con vientos descalza, e’ rezabale 63
vezes esta Oracion que se sigue con 66 Aves Marias, en reverencia délos 66 afios
que Ella vivio con amargura en este mundo, por que Ella rne diese Casa, e' la me
dio Casa, y Casas, por su misericordia, mejores que Yo las merecia, y comienza la
Oracion. Madre Santa Maria —- de Vos gran dolor havia vwesiro fijo bien criado
— vistelo atormentado con su gran tribulacion, amorteciose vos el Corazon,
después de su tribulacion, puso vos consolacion, ponedle vos a mi Senora, que

sabe'is mi dolor (21-22).10

 

'0 This favor done, I raised my eyes to God and to the Virgin Mary, giving her thanks. And then there came
a servant of the Grand Master, my lord and father, who lives with Martin Fernandez, Castellan of 105
Donceles, who was there hearing mass: and I sent him a request with that servant that as a kinsman he give
thanks to my lady aunt for the favor she had done for me. And he was very happy to do so, and did it
graciously, saying to her that he received this favor as if it had been done for him personally. The title
having been given me, I cut open a door on the very site where I had seen the arch the Virgin showed me.
And it disturbed the abbots that they should hand the lot over to me because I was of grand lineage and my
sons would be great, and they were abbots and had no need of great knights near them. But I took it for a
good Sign, and told them I hoped in God it would be thus, and I came to an agreement with them so that I
placed the door where I wanted it. I believe that for the charitable act I performed in raising that orphan in
the faith of Jesus Christ, God helped me in giving me the beginning of a house. Before this time, I had gone
barefoot in the wind and rain for thirty days to morning prayer to [the shrine of] Maria el Amortecida,
which is in the order of San Pablo de Cordoba. and I prayed to her sixty-three times this prayer which is
followed by sixtysix Hail Marys, in homage to the sixty-six years that she lived with bitterness in this
world, that she might give me a house: and she gave me a house, and because of her mercy, houses better
than I deserved. And the prayer begins: "Holy Mother Mary, great pain did you feel because of your son-

48

Religion, then, or specifically the Virgin Mary in this case, is the great comforter
in time of trial, and also the remedy for righting the situation, granting Leonor that which
is her just due.

Teresa too, turns to her faith to fill the void of human silence. In fact, a central
theme in the A'rboleda de Los Enfermos is the idea that she was so immersed in worldly
chatter “el tropel de las fablas” that it was necessary for God to silence her so that she
would listen to what he wished to say to her. Where Teresa might have been lefi with an
empty silence, she was instead given the pleasure of God’s communication to her, and
thus was spared the pain of having to confront an insufferable silence.

As I have already mentioned, the religious and ecclesiastical frameworks were, if
not the most important, certainly a key factor in allowing Madre Juana to frame the
trauma symptoms she experienced in a positive light that gained her spiritual authority
and recognition. Her entry into the convent, though undoubtedly motivated at least in part
by religious dedication, also served to remove her from men, either relatives or a
prospective husband, with whom she would have been expected to engage in sexual
relations.

Cathy Caruth has conducted extensive investigation into the literary aspects of
representing trauma. As she points out in her book Unclaimed Emperience, Trauma,
Narrative and Unclaimed Histont, Freud himself was fascinated with the appearance of
what he called the repetitive impulse in literature, and she continues the study of
representations of trauma in various theoretical and literary texts. As has already been

mentioned, a well-documented trauma symptom is that of reexperiencing or reliving the

 

you saw him tormented with his great suffering. and your heart came close to death. After his agony he
gave you comfort, so intercede with my lady, for you know my pain” (78).

49

traumatic event, through nightmares, flashbacks, and so on. Caruth regards literature as
yet another manifestation of this repetition, with the end goal of resolving a struggle
between polar experiences, the known and the unknown, or even life and death, She
writes of the relationship between trauma and literature: “If Freud turns to literature to
describe traumatic experience, it is because literature, like psychoanalysis, is interested in
the complex relation between knowing and not knowing. And it is, indeed at the Specific
point at which knowing and not knowing intersect that the language of literature and the
psychoanalytic theory of traumatic experience precisely meet” (5).

Literature, then, can be seen as having a therapeutic dimension. Just as one does
when sitting in a therapist’s office, in literature a primary component is the telling of
one’s story. In therapy, it is considered that through this telling healing can begin, owing
either to the therapist’s skill at interpreting the story, or due to the client’s enhanced
awareness of feelings, and general catharsis that is considered to accompany the telling.
In fact, in many contemporary therapies, joumaling and other written exercises are used
for a variety of different outcomes, including helping the client recover his/her story,
expression of emotions to move catharsis forward in between sessions, or increasing
awareness of situations that elicit specific emotions or reactions. Though in the
therapeutic setting these exercises are crafted with specific therapeutic goals in mind,
throughout history, joumaling, autobiography, and other forms of writing have been used
either for Specific goals such as instruction or catharsis or for more general, and perhaps
less defined purposes such as to combat idleness, to preserve one’s story, or to record
one’s spiritual reflections. Though of course all these types of writing were practiced

across genders, as Carolyn Bynum points out, there are distinctive differences between

50

men and women’s writing in the Middle Ages (1991). Men, she tells us, were more prone
to making gender distinctions in their writing, with the female representing abnegation of
the male world of wealth and power. Female writing, on the other hand, tends not to be so
dichotomous in its treatment of gender, but does tend to be more colloquial and internally
directed:
Women writers used imagery more fluidly. Personal and social characteristics
were more often shared by the two genders in women's writings. The female was
a less marked category; it was more often simply a symbol of an almost
genderless self. When women did give the female content taken from the
traditional idea of asymmetrical genders, they saw it as physical and bodily (175)
part of the reason for the more open, experiential style of women's writings is
the fact that women usually wrote not in the formal scholastic Latin taught in
universities, but in the vemaculars —that is, in the languages they grew up
speaking. The major literary genres available in these languages were various
kinds of love poetry and romantic stories: the vocabulary provided by such genres
was therefore a vocabulary of feelings (198).
This distinction implies that women may typically have engaged in a more
inwardly-directed type of writing, writing that was focused more closely on feelings
and day-to-day experience, while men’s writing can be seen as tending more toward
an external contextualization. If one accepts this hypothesis, one possible
consequence of this stylistic difference could be a predisposition of female writing
to bear witness through writing to the subjective trauma experience. It would follow

logically then, that trauma could serve as an impetus to write. Moreover, in those

51

cases where there is a connection between writing and trauma, that trauma would be
more likely to occupy a prominent place in their texts.

Both Cathy Caruth and Kathryn Robson have written on literary expression of
trauma. Both regard the writing of trauma as a kind of writing through rupture. For
Caruth, this rupture consists of a series of oppositions that create tension in the text: the
hearing and the telling, the known and the unknown, the past in the future. For her, even
the location or definition of what constitutes the trauma events is difficult to define, as it
shifts between the story of the past, and the story of the present:

The story of trauma, then, as the narrative of a belated experience, far from telling

of an escape from reality—the escape from a death, or from its referential force—

rather attests to its endless impact on a life The crisis at the core of many
traumatic narratives often emerges, indeed, as an urgent question: Is the trauma
the encounter with death, or the ongoing experience of having survived it? At the
core of these stories, I would suggest, is thus a kind of double telling, the
oscillation between a crisis of death and the correlative crisis of life: between the
story of the unbearable nature of an event and the story of the unbearable nature
of its survival. These two stories, both incompatible and absolutely inextricable,

ultimately define the complexity of what I refer to as history in the texts that I

read (7).

This tension is clearly visible in the writings of Leonor and Teresa. In both cases, both
stories are told, that of the traumatic events, and that of living with the consequences of
survival, which for both women prove to be nearly as challenging as the survival of the

original event. And as Caruth indicates, they are inextricable. Leonor painstakingly

52

recounts her own suffering and that of her loved ones during her incarceration, and her
sorrow and indignation at watching those same family members be tortured and killed.
finally, when upon his death Enrique orders that Leonor and her family be released from
prison, It would seem that the traumatic event would be over. But in fact, one trauma is
ending, and another beginning. Leonor’s husband now leaves her, trying without success
to reclaim the family’s estate, and Leonor is left on her own to try and make her way as
best she can. She has some temporary successes, thanks to the benevolence of a maternal
aunt, but her struggle not only to reclaim her place in the social order, but to survive,
continues throughout much of what we know of the rest of her life. Thus, she must not
only recover from the trauma of her imprisonment, but from the ongoing tragedy of the
financial and social ruin her imprisonment caused.

Teresa’s writing also tells two stories, that of how she came to the convent, and
that of her continued struggle to forge a life there. She openly discusses the pain she
experienced as a result of her long and frequent illness which ultimately resulted in her
deafness, and also of her lengthy adjustment and ultimate acceptance of life in the
cloister.

As usual, in the sermons of Madre Juana the task is a more difficult one. Though
one must look more carefully, I believe that this oscillation can be seen, but here, it is a
tension between what is told, and what is not told. What Juana’s texts record are her
mystical visions. But her autobiography, and other documentation tell at least a partial
story of a woman who may have been fleeing an extremely difficult family environment.
in the tension between Juana the dutiful medium of God’s message, and Juana who

consistently crosses, or at least blurs the gender barrier, in her dress upon entering the

53

convent, in her “literary” authority, and in her broad rule as prioress, in which capacity

she attained a papal bull, and managed property, tasks which, As Surtz (1990)

demonstrates, are not typically permitted to a prioress.
In time, Juana was dismissed from the position of abbess as a result of an incident
that demonstrates dramatically the limits imposed on the authority that women
were allowed to exercise within the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Two of the few
extant documents associated with Mother Juana are orders written by Cardinal
Cisneros and dated March 9 and December 28, 1510. In both orders Cisneros
answers a petition by the parish priest of the village of Cubas, who, having
secured another parish, requests that the one he is leaving be annexed to the
convent of Santa Maria de la Cruz. Cisneros grants the priest's request, for it turns
out to be a convenient way to remedy the convent's precarious financial situation
and to ensure that cloistered nuns not have to resort to begging for their
sustenance.
According to Cisneros's orders, the nuns would acquire not only the profits from
the parish's property but also the privilege of appointing a chaplain to oversee the
spiritual well-being of the parishioners. This was an almost unheard-of situation,
for the privilege of naming a chaplain involved the question of whether a woman
could be empowered to exercise spiritual jurisdiction. In any case, in time
certain ecclesiastics tried to take the benefice of Cubas away from the convent,
arguing that women, even if they were nuns, were not suited to exercise spiritual
care over lay people. the episode of the benefice of Cubas demonstrates the

extent to which serious questions were raised by the granting of extraordinary

54

powers to a woman, no matter how extraordinary the woman herself may have

been. In effect, the episode boiled down to a question of power, it is evident

that it was considered improper for a woman to exercise a jurisdiction deemed the

exclusive prerogative of ecclesiastics, that is, of the male sex (4-5).

However, if trauma narrative were merely a question of oscillation between two
competing stories, it would be logical to assume a lack of progression, a narrative
pendulum that could simply swing back and forth continuously until forced to stop. If
that were the case, such narrative would have little point. It would bring no benefit either
to the writer/teller, or to the reader. What then is the role of writing/narration of the
trauma story? As we will see presently, one function of this act is that of recreating the
story, which is essential to the ultimate goal of departure from the trauma.

Kathryn Robson also sees the trauma narrative as occurring within a rupture, but
she bases her analogy on the model of the physical wound. This distinction is significant,
because implicit in the physical schema is a progression from unwell, to well. Where
Caruth sees a pendulum, Robson sees a scar, pointing in two directions, back to the
wound, and forward to recovery. Moreover, unlike Caruth’s more fluid dialectic Robson
views the trauma narrative as springing out of a suspended moment in time, the opening
between injury and healing: “The wound is a visceral image, the mark of violence on the
skin, before healing has taken place. It remains after the initial moment of rupture,
pointing back to the moment of violence and forward to the possibility of healing.
Narratives of trauma, emerge from the wound, from a time between injury and
healing, a time when the effects of trauma remain as powerful and as insistent as ever

(28). She acknowledges, however, that the healing of an emotional wound is not nearly

55

so straight forward a process as the healing of a physical wound, and Describes a cyclical
process of recovery similar to that presented earlier by Allan Young. Eventually, as
healing begins, the wound becomes a scar, but a scar that will be continually reopened,
causing the subject even greater pain: “To remember and narrate trauma means, then, to
attempt to write in and through wounds, through the holes within memory that represent
the incursion of the past into the present” (27-28). The wound, then, can be seen not
merely as the ugly evidence of injury. Inherent in its broken appearance, is also the
evidence of healing that has already begun, and the hope for completion of the healing
process.

Finally, as both Young’s cycle of assimilation and Robson’s wound/scar imagery
suggest, the wound is both a symbol of brokenness and of eventual restoration. Thus, I
will conclude my consideration of each author with an examination of the issue of
departure. According to Allan Young, assimilation is the ultimate goal of reliving and
reprocessing of the trauma experience. Cathy Caruth casts the same message in a more
narrative context when she writes: " To listen to the crisis of a trauma [...] is not only to
listen for the event, but to hear in the testimony the survivor's departure from it: the
challenge of the therapeutic listener, in other words, is how to listen to departure " (1995,
10). This raises several questions. What constitutes departure? Does departure necessarily
mean healing or assimilation of the trauma? If not, what can be inferred from a departure
without integration? Where is the departure in these texts, and what does that departure
tell us?

Judith Herman provides a point of departure for the first of these questions. She

outlines the process of recovery of trauma in three phases: “establishing safety,

56

reconstructing the trauma story, and restoring the connection between survivors and their
community” (10). Each of these phases addresses issues already put forth in this chapter.
Before writing, each of these authors—with the possible exception of Leonor Lopez de
Cordoba--had already established at least some level of safety. In writing, they had begun
to recreate their story. Our task, then, in considering departure, will be to consider the re-
creation of the stories, and examine the connection with community at the narrative’s
close. I believe we can see three very different kinds of departure in these three cases. In
the Memorias, Leonor’s story simply drops off after she is forced to leave her aunt's home
in Aguilar and return to Cordoba, after bringing the plague to the very place to which
they had gone to flee it’s presence in Toledo. This is a departure without resolution. We
know nothing from her writing about what befell her next, all knowledge we have of the
last years of her life comes from other document sources. This is all the more curious,
given that what follows Leonor's departure from Aguilar is perhaps the most fruitful,
happy period of her life, a time when at last she gains many of the things she is seeking
throughout the Memorias, her tenure as confidante to Queen Catherine of Lancaster.

In Teresa's case, there are actually two departures, one following the Arboleda,
and one following the Admiracion Operum Del. The first, in my opinion, is less
conclusive. Though Teresa appears to want to convince the reader that she has resolved
the issues surrounding her deafness and achieved a spiritual peace with her new
circumstances, I do not find her language to be convincing, and. would argue that when
departing, she leaves the door ajar even as she tries to turn away. It is in the Admiracio'n,
I would argue, that we have a more conclusive and convincing departure. Here, in place

of a woman struggling to accept an unwanted fate foisted upon her by her own body, we

57

find a woman who sees herself as uniquely empowered by God, one of a line of
precursors that include the old testament figures of Judith and Esther. Though her
deafness is still present here as the great agent of change, Teresa has moved on to focus
on her divinely authorized right to author a religious treatise.

As with all issues related to this study, departure for Madre Juana is more
complicated. As her sermons and V_td_a_ are written as religious texts and as such do not
directly address either J uana's wounds or her departure from them, we will again have to
try and glean those things from her text and other documentation. We know that Juana
achieves a high level of ecclesiastical success, and that following her death, there are two
attempts to have her canonized. I suggest that her success in the ecclesiastical arena is in
effect a form of departure, though perhaps not in the same sense that it occurs with

Teresa and Leonor.

In conclusion, the following chapters will explore the interrelation between
trauma and literary production and the expression of its various functions in the texts of
these authors. I will begin by looking at the literary expression of the trauma experience
itself, and will proceed by considering the issues presented above and their impact on
these writers. I will consider both the individual and the social aspects of the traumatic
experience, its social context and societal ramifications, and Caruth's notion of the
disruption of the schemata of self and the world as reflected in these texts.

On the individual level, some issues that arise include: Attempt at self-
justification, the role of religious practice in mitigating trauma, social/verbal isolation, the

negation of socially prescribed gender/sex roles and the employment of the literary text

as power source. On the social level, I will consider how the trauma impacts the author's

58

interaction with society, the issue of "honra" raised in the definition of herida cited earlier
from Covarrubias, as well as the resulting disintegration or other alteration in each
authors interactions with her community. Following from this, I will examine the text
from the perspective of Cathy Caruth's "double telling" the tension between the pain of
the actual experience, and the pain of having survived it. I will also consider each author's
process of assimilating trauma, according to the model set forth by Allan Young,
refraining, recycling, or emptying the trauma of it's power. And lastly, I will "listen" for
departure, whether or not there is departure, and how departure is achieved.

Each of these writers was able to achieve differing degrees of restoration and
reintegration via her text. For Leonor Lopez de Cordoba the psychological outcome of
writing is, to some extent, unknown due to the abrupt ending of her text, and to her death
which is believed to have occurred within a couple of years of the text’s production. But,
while long-terrn personal transformation or goal attainment may be uncertain, she was
able to tell her story, to relate her struggle, and to justify the choices that she made, all of
which appear to be primary motivations of her memoir. In Teresa’s texts, literary
expression takes the place of verbal communication of which she has been deprived by

her deafness, and I think, finally, in Admiracion Operum Dey, does allow her to find her

 

“voice” and come to terms with her deafness and her new life. In the case of Madre Juana
de la Cruz, her visions appear to have been well received, despite their seeming
unorthodoxy. They resulted in an increase in her socio/religious status that nearly led to
her canonization. This is not to say that Juana’s trances and the resulting sermons did not

also have a cathartic value, but that is more difficult to substantiate. given the dearth of

59

available information regarding her psychological makeup when outside of the mystical
experience.

I expect that the work of literary critics, scholars of women’s writing, and trauma
specialists such as Caruth, Robson, Bynum, Freud, and Herman, will provide an ample
theoretical framework that will help to contextualize Leonor, Teresa, and Juana’s texts,
this osci llation between past and future, traumatic event and the life that remains,
recycling and departure, and the ways in which I believe these women used the pen to
bridge these gaps. Expression in the text provided a tool for reintegration and
reconstitution of the self, for realigning the schemata of self with the schemata of the
environment. At the core of this effort is, of course, the will to survive, and even to
thrive, Wh ether it be via the preservation in writing of a life, the struggle to accept
infirmity and find an outlet for communication, or the rise from humble beginnings to a
POSition Of power that circumvents the effects of life in a patriarchal society.

I began this chapter by asking the question why did these women write? It is my
hope that the content of this chapter, and the more detailed analysis of the ensuing
chapters will shed significant light on these questions. Alecta Arenal and Stacey Schlau
offer 1Lheir own general conclusions about why women in the Middle Ages wrote, which

summari ze eloquently many of the issues that have been presented here:

They observe that their relationships with their Sisters have changed, and that

they themselves have a stronger sense of self because they write. They note other
benefits of writing, including recovery from ill health, development of telepathic
and prophetic gifts, achievement of inner peace, and, often, a respected status

among their Sisters. Recognition of these advantages enabled them to overcome

60

what Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have termed the "anxiety of authorship”.
They did this by presenting themselves as mouthpieces for their inner voices, which
belonged to God, Christ, Mary, or the saints. They also declared their writing to
be an act of obedience to their earthly superiors confessors, other male
ecclesiastics, or the Mother Superior (20).

Schlau and Arenal also point out that little of women’s writing was written for
publicati on. As we can see from the list of benefits they describe, the primary reward
would seem to have been either personal, or intended for a small group of people, family,
friends, other nuns in one’s convent. Clearly, Teresa and Juana sought and received
many of these benefits in their writing. Teresa found a way to grapple with her illness,

and achieve inner peace in the process, and she may well have achieved increased status
among her sisters, she definitely did capture the attention of a noblewoman—believed to
be Juana de Mendoza—to whom she speaks directly in both the Arboleda de Los
Enfermo S and the Admiracitin Operum Dei. Juana’s writing most certainly increased her
Status, not only among her sisters, but among some church authorities as well. Any
benefits that Leonor may have incurred remain more elusive due to the incompleteness
and fragmentation in her text, and we may never know with certainty why she wrote, or
What Plu‘pose writing may have served for her. However, as these issues will serve as the
focus for the next chapter, let us move on now from these general considerations of

trauma and writing to explore its role in the works of these three authors, beginning with

Leonor Lopez de Cordoba.

61

Chapter 2
A Home of One’s Own: Writing as Self-Justification
in Leonor Lopez de Cordoba

Iceonor Lopez de Cordoba is unique among the authors considered here in several
respects - She is of the most noble lineage ofthe three. and thus her life is most directly
and draITiatically impacted by political power-struggles and intrigues. She is the only one
ofthe three who does not take up a religious profession, and therefore the only one to
marry a tad bear children. She is the only one whose writing does not have a primarily
religious context and focus. and similarly. the only one who makes blatant her aspirations

to world I )r gain and political advancement. While Teresa de Cartagena and Madre

Juana‘s \N‘ ritings have a clearly defined purpose. The reason for Leonor’s recording of her
i"I'/t’lllt)l'l( 1.x: continues to perplex scholars. providing one of the many questions

surround ing her text. However. before proceeding to textual considerations. it is useful to

rcV'WW ‘- }ae inlormation that we do have of Leonor’s life.

2-1° Fr‘(hm Palace to Prison and Beyond

R’Iany scholars have already provided a thorough compilation of what is known
about the life ofthis daughter of the court, among them Reinaldo Ayerbe-chaux. Carmen
Marimt’nl-Llorca. Alan Deyermond, and Amy Katz Kaminsky and Elaine Dorough
JOhnSOh - I rely on their excellent work for the information provided here.

Leonor w as born in Calatayud either in December of l 362 or January of 1363. In
the Vtr‘lnnrius she tells us that her father was Don Martin Lopez de Cordoba. nephew to

C10“ Juan Manuel. Grand Master ofCalatrava and Alcantara. Carmen Marimon-Llorca

I0

6

adds to this that he was also King Pedro l’s highest Chamberlain, and that he served as
Pedro’s Ambassador to England. Her mother, Dona Sancha Carrillo, was also well-
connected, as King Pedro’s niece, and sister to several of his courtiers. Given her
family’s strong connections, Leonor would seem to have been destined to lead a
comfortable life amid the royal court. Following Leonor’s birth, she and her mother went
with the royal princesses, Leonor’s godmothers, to the Alcazar in Segovia. Leonor tells
Us that shortly after their arrival, her mother died, “de edad que nunca la conoci” (I I).11
It appears that Leonor remained with the royal princesses, and that it was in this
environment that Leonor would spend her all too brief childhood. At the age of seven, an
age consi dered early even for the period, She was married to Ruy Gutierrez de
Henestro sa, son of a court Chamberlain. In the Memorias, Leonor attributes her somewhat
early Wedding to the untimely death of her mother. However, one cannot help but wonder
if Leonor’ s father, who would most certainly have been aware of the conflict between
Pedro arld his half brother, and the subsequent fragility of Spain’s political situation, had
an inkling of what might be to come, and arranged the marriage in an attempt to secure
his daughter’s future.

Upon her marriage, Leonor went to the fortified city of Carmona, again, with the
Infantas’ as well as several members of her own family, and her new husband’s family.
unfortunately, her stay in Carmona would prove to be but a brief calm before the storm.
In that same year of 1369 would also bring the fratricidal murder of Pedro I by his half-
bmthel‘ Enrique de Trastamara, an event which would dramatically alter the course of
Leonor’ S life. Don Martin, Leonor’s father, defended the city of Carmona until mid 1370,

but in tiI‘ne he could hold the city no longer. He posed two conditions as part of the
-——\

II I was
of such an age that I never knew her (77).

63

surrender - First, that the princesses be allowed to travel to England in safety. The second,

was that he, his family, and vassals be pardoned, and considered loyal. The first of these
conditions was honored, the princesses did receive safe passage to England. But don
Martin and his family did not fare so well. Don Martin was betrayed and beheaded. His
family, including his eight-year-old daughter Leonor, were ordered by the King to be
apprehended and taken to the Atarazanas prison, thus bringing to a conclusive end the
privileged years of Leonor’s childhood.

Leonor would remain imprisoned for the next nine years. She would spend what
could arguably be considered the most formative period of her life, that period which
today would be considered late childhood and adolescence incarcerated. Though her
description of those years occupies but a few brief lines of her text, Leonor offers a vivid
and movi ng account of the horrors to which her young eyes were forced to bear witness.
She rec30111'its the agony of the male members of the family who were placed in heavy
irons, and especially that of her brother Don Lope Lopez, who she says was forced to
wear Se\Ienty pounds of additional chains. She tells of the torture of her young husband
who, because of his relation to the royal princesses, was placed in a hunger tank and
starved for six or seven days. When the family is struck by plague, she watches as two
Siblings, her brother-in-law, and her father’s vassals die, and how, upon their deaths they
are taken out to the iron-smith to have their irons removed “como moros después de
muertoS” (just like dead moors) (19).] 2lt is here where Leonor inserts a particularly

moving account of her sadness at her family’s suffering. The same don Lope Lopez. her

fl—\

,
1“ It Should be noted that this is not simply a deprecatory comment, but rather, as Alan Deyermond points
05‘" a refIection of the practice of removing chains from a dying Christian prisoner to reflect the freedom of
ms SOL“- Moorish prisoners, on the other hand, were forced to die enchained, in symbolism of their eternal
condemnation as infidels. Thus, her observation here reflects not only a physical circumstance of death but
a Spmtual treatment as well.

64

brother, of whose beauty she has already spoken and of whom she is apparently quite

fond, is among those taken by the plague. Before his death, he beseeches the jailer not to

shame him by taking him to the iron-smith to remove his irons in public. His request is
denied, his soul leaves his body, and he is taken out on a wooden plank, and given the
same treatment his kinsmen had received. By the time that she and her husband are
finally released from the Atarazanas, they are the only two members of the family left
alive.

Leonor and her husband’s release from the Atarazanas was secured only on King
Enrique ’ 3 death. He had included in his will that Leonor and her husband Should be
pardoned, and their estates restored to them. The first of these conditions was met, the
second would prove to be considerably more elusive. At this point, her husband sets off

to try and recover their property, but meets with no success.

Interestingly, as Amy Katz Kaminsky and Elaine Dorough Johnson point out, it is
at this .ILlncture in the work that gender roles make a considerable reversal shift. During
the fir St part of Leonor’s text, events are largely shaped by the men in her world. Her
father e njoys both personal and professional success. He manies well, and progressively
Climbs the ranks at Pedro I’s court. He arranges an advantageous marriage for Leonor
that, W’ere it not for the royal feud. would have guaranteed her her own place at court.
After Ki ng Pedro’s murder, he valiantly defends Carmona, and he arranges the safe
escape of the royal princesses. His betrayal and death are noted as pivotal memories for
the young Leonor.

Following his death, Leonor’s attention shifts to the male members of her

household. particularly her husband, her brother. and her father’s high Chamberlain.

65

During the family’s imprisonment, Leonor provides a detailed description of her
brother’s nobility and heroism, and of the devotion of the High Chamberlain Sancho de
Villendra, who vows, “Hijos de mi Senor: Rogad a Dios que os viba yo, que si yo os
(vivo) nunca morire’is pobres” (19).]3 And of course, on a more public level, the struggle
for the tllrone between Pedro and Enrique could be considered perhaps the single-most
important event in determining the course of Leonor’s life.
However, following Leonor’s imprisonment, when her husband returns home
Unable to reclaim his family’s future, this patrifocal orientation is abandoned. Rui
Gutierrez occupies but a few lines, which tell of his complete failure to recuperate his and
Leonor’ 8 lost fortunes, and thus, his inability to assume the role of provider for his
family. This episode constitutes a rather amazing and ironic material triumph for Leonor.
While he is shown to be impotent, she, on the other hand, is able to obtain first food and
comfortable shelter, and later even a private home for the family. As Katz Kaminsky and
Dorough Johnson suggest, this is in all likelihood demonstrative of the fact that she
seems to have inherited her father’s political acumen, though Leonor’s temper
undoubtedly limited her success in this arena. Regardless of the reason, this shift in
power and economics pushes her from the passive, private feminine spaces into the
Public: active role of fighter and provider. Leonor tells us in the Memorias, “Mi marido
fue a demandar sus Vienes, y los que lo tenian preciaronlo poco, por que no tenia estado,
“i mane ra para los poder demandar, e’ los derechos ya sabéis como dependen a los
Lugares que han conque se demandar, é asi perdiose mi marido, é andubo siete afios por
el mundo, como Desbenturado, y nunca hallo Pariente, ni Amigo que bien le hiziese, ni

__\

I3 it
My lot‘d's children: Pray God that I live, for if I do, you will never die poor”(74).
66

huviese piedad de El” (19-20). 14 From this point forward, female agency becomes the
norm. Leonor’s last remarks concerning her husband tell of how, upon learning that his
wife is living quite comfortably, he returns to her in Cordoba to enjoy the beneficence of
Leonor” 5 female relatives: “a cabo de siete afios, estando Yo en Casa de mi Sefiora mi tia
Dofia Maria Garcia Carrillo, dijeron a mi Marido, que yo estaba mui bien andante, que
me havian echo mucho bien mis Parientes, Cavalgo encima de su mula, que valia mui
pocos dineros, e lo que traia vestido no valia treinta maravedis; y entrose por la puerta de
mi sefiora tia” (20). 15 Though this would seem to imply that he does continue to live
with her, all subsequent description of Leonor’s family life focuses either on her
relationship with her aunts and cousins, or on Leonor and her sons, including an adopted
Jewish orphan.

I n contrast to her husband’s impotence, the women in Leonor’s life, specifically
her aunts, and eventually Queen Catherine of Lancaster, become the primary shapers of
events. While Ruy Gutierrez wanders the world penniless and pitiful, Leonor lives
Comfor1121ny with her maternal relatives. Upon her husband’s departure, she goes to stay
With her aunt Dona Maria Garcia Carrillo in Cordoba. From Leonor’s recounting we
know tl'tat her mother’s family had taken the part of King Enrique, with the result that
their f0I'tunes had not diminished. Thus, it is the female members of the maternal line,

who make a myriad of decisions ranging from disposition of property and the

’\
4 .c
| my husband went to reclaim his property and those who held it esteemed him little, because he had no

rank .nor means to claim it, and you well know how rights depend on the station you have on which to base
a claim_ And thus was my husband lost, and he wandered seven years through the world, a wretched man,
fineVCF did he find a relative or friend who did him a good turn or had pity on him” (76).

"d at the end of seven years, they told my husband, who was in Badajoz with his uncle Lope
Fernandez de Padilla in the War of Portugal, that l was doing very well in the house of my lady and aunt
Dona Maria Garcia Carrillo, that my relatives had done me much kindness. He rode on his mule, which was
worth Very little money, and what he wore was not worth thirty maravedis. And he came through the
doorway of my lady and aunt” (75).

67

construction of houses, to arrangements for Leonor’s entry into the convent at
Guadalaj ara. It is Leonor’s aunt who is initially most instrumental in aiding Leonor, when
her niece arrives on her doorstep, impoverished and disenfranchised, fresh from the
Atarazanas prison. She provides Leonor with a house “unas casas” on her own property,
and later provides the funds for Leonor to build a private entrance to that house, so that
she need not suffer the public humiliation of having to go to her aunt’s house to eat.
Another way in which Leonor benefits from the female authority of her mother’s
family i s when she seeks entry into the convent. Her husband having been gone for some
Years, Leonor apparently decides to join the order of Guadalajara, founded by her great-
grandparents for female members of her family. To do so, she seeks the aid of another
aunt, dofia Teresa F emandez Carillo: “trate’ con mi Senora mi tia hermana de mi Senora
mi Madre, que le decian Dofia Theresa Fernandez Carrillo (estaba enla Orden de
Guadala-Xara, que la hicieron mis Bisabuelos, é dotaron precio para quarenta Ricas
Hembras de su Linaje que viniesen en aquella Orden) embiele a demandar le plugiese que
YO fuese acogida en aquella Orden, pues por mis pecados mi Marido é Yo eramos
perdido S, y Ella, y toda la Orden alcanzaronlo en dicha, por que mi Senora Madre se
havia Cri ado en aquellos monasterios ...” (20).]6 It is at this point that her husband
returns from his wanderings, and so it would seem that Leonor’s stay in the convent is a
short One. But as we shall see later, however brief it may have been, it may play a critical

1016 in determining the authorship of the Memorias.

N

‘6 I conSulted with my lady and aunt, sister of my lady and mother, whose name was Dona Teresa
Fernandez Carrillo (she was in the Order of Guadalajara, which my great grandparents founded and
endowed with the money for forty rich females of their lineage to come into that order). I asked her to
request t1'lat I please be admitted into that order, since, for my sins, my husband and l were undone. And

511882? the entire order were happy to do it, because my lady mother had been raised in those monasteries

68

Despite the rumors that she is “bien—andante” Leonor is still living in what must
have seemed to her an impoverished condition. As I have mentioned previously, though
her aunt provides her a place to live, Leonor must still go to her aunt’s house to eat, a
condition which causes her great shame. Determined to rectify this problem, she begins
saying three-hundred Hail Marys each night on her knees, and asks her aunt to purchase
property for her. Perhaps due to conflict with her aunt’s servants, who according to
Leonor had convinced her not to grant Leonor the private entrance, her aunt refuses. Not
to be thwarted, Leonor decides she must accrue more credit with the Virgin, and so
adopts a Jewish boy orphaned by the pogroms of 1391, though interestingly, we shall see
later that Leonor refers to him as servant rather than as her son. She has him baptized and
raises him in the Catholic faith. It is about this time when Leonor learns that the Friars of
San Hipc’) l ito are selling some stables and farmland, and she appeals to her other aunt,
Dofia Mencia, asking that they be purchased for her. Her aunt agrees, finally landing for
her niece the coveted home of her own. However, as one can imagine, going from
“corral” to “casa” is a long journey. Leonor must work to convert the property into fit
living Space, as she tells us, “. .. plugiese que el Ayuda de mi Sefiora mi tia, y de labor
demis IPianos hize en aquel Corral dos Palacios, y una huerta, é Otras dos, o tres Casas
Para servicio (22). 1 7 As Carmen Marimon-Llorca points out (88), if we accept Leonor’s
accounting of time, the year is 1396, making Leonor a thirty-three-year—old woman when

the nightmare that began when she was eight years old seems to finally be coming to an

end.

\

l7“ .
... wlt

garden I" the help of my lady aunt and of the labor of my hands I built in that courtyard two palaces and a

and another two or three houses for the servants” (78).

69

But Leonor’s lucky star cannot hold against what would seem to be the
conspiratorial forces of a destiny determined to deprive her of her happy ending.
Sometime after the construction of Leonor’s houses, Cordoba is struck by the deadly
plague of 1400-1401. Leonor takes her household to Santa Ella to flea the plague. Santa
Ella is home to many of her father’s former vassals, and she is warmly welcomed there,
and given comfortable accommodations. These are soon taken from her however, when
her relations decide to follow her to Santa Ella. And, to worsen matters, the same Jewish
orphan whom Leonor took in, hoping to increase her standing with the Virgin, becomes
infected with the plague, introducing it for the first time into Leonor’s family. Needless to
say, this displeases her cousins, with whom Leonor’s relationship seems to have already
been strained. All three people whom Leonor asks to care for the child die. As difficult as
her time i n the Atarazanas undoubtedly was, this seems to be an especially bitter moment
for Leonor, and she makes a gruesome choice. She prays to God that if one of her
children i s to die, it should be her eldest son: “si alguno obiese de llevar, llebase el mayor
POT que era mui doliente; (24). 1 8 So, the next night when no one will care for the sick
Child bficause all the other caregivers have died, Leonor assigns the task to her
understandably reluctant son:

“plugo a Dios que una noche no fallaba quien velase aquel Mozo Doliente, por
que havian muerto todos los que hasta entonzes le havian velado,

é vino a mi aquel mi fijo, qwe le decian Juan Fernandez de Henestrosa, como su
Abuelo, que era de hedad de doze afios, y quatro meses é dixome: Senora no ay
Quien vele a Alonso estanoche? é dijele: Velarlo vos por Amor de Dios; y

respondiome: Senora agora que han muerto Otros quere’is que me mate? é yo
\

13 “.
'fany Of them had to be taken away, it should be the older one for he was in great pain (79).

70

dixele: por la Caridad que yo fago, Dios habra piedad de mi; é mi hijo por no salir
de mi mandamiento lo fue a velar, é por mis pecados aquella noche le dio la
pestilencia e otro dia le enterré (24).]9
In her son’s dying moments, Leonor’s cousin Teresa, angry at Leonor for bringing
the plague into the family circle, orders Leonor to take her son from the house, despite his
pleas that she let him stay, as he will shortly be dead. Teresa also refuses to have the child
buried in the village, forcing Leonor to carry him outside the town for burial. As the
funeral procession wends through the town before a crowd of mourners—vassals loyal to
Leonor’ s father—the crowd seems to sum up Leonor’s entire life when they cry out:
“Salid Sefiores, y vere’is la mas desventurada desamparada, é mas Maldita muger del
mundo” (24).20
The Jewish orphan of course survives the plague, a fact which only serves to further
alienate Leonor from her relatives. At this point, they seem to have had enough of their
difficult cousin. The Memorias end with Leonor’s banishment from her family, and her
departure in sadness for the houses in Cordoba, given to her by her aunt.
However, though the text ends here, Leonor’s story does not. The afore-
mentioned trend of female dominance reaches its zenith when some time following the
period Covered in the Memorias, Leonor becomes chief counselor to Queen Catherine of

Lancaster: who is Pedro I’s granddaughter, and regent to her son Juan II. It is unclear

 

\
l9 .

b And 1‘ Was God's will that one night I could not find anyone to watch over that suffering young man.
Jscause all those who had watched over him up to then had died. And that son of mine whose name was

an Fernandez de Henestrosa, after his grandfather, and who was twelve years and four months of age,

Same to me and said: "My lady, is there no one who will watch over Alonso tonight?" And 1 said to him:

dzou Watch over him for the love of God." And he answered me: "My lady, now that the others have-died,

mew: Want it to kill me?" And I said to him: "For the charitable act I am performing. GOdOWlll take pity on

Came dnd my son, so as not to disobey me, went to watch over him, and because of my suns, that night he
own with the plague and the next day l buried him (80).

20 ..
WEST: Out, good people, and you will see the most unfortunate. forsaken and condemned woman in the
9 80)

71

hm

fleet
hem
.irag
lllllié
[0 ha.

Clara

 

how exactly Leonor comes to occupy such an honored position at Catherine’s court, but
Clara Estow suggests that it may have come about by Rui Gutie'rez’s distant connection
to the Queen. She suggests that following Leonor’s expulsion from the family at Santa
Ella, she and her husband may have used his connections to petition the Queen’s
assistance. Whatever the origins may have been, once at court, Leonor swiftly rises in the
queen’s favor, eventually becoming the “camarera mayor.” In her article “Leonor L6pez
de cordoba: Portrait of a Medieval Courtier” Clara Estow tells us of Leonor’s stay in

Queen Catherine’s court:

I f she [Leonor] disagreed, no other thing was done but what she wanted." In
addition, we learn, Leonor prevented easy accessibility to the Queen, screening
for profit those she selected, placing her relatives and friends in the most lucrative
positions, and accumulating great personal wealth. She is credited with
encouraging the Queen to resist the implementation of the tutorial clause of
Enrique's will, and is considered, even by the distinguished modern historian Juan
Torres Fontes, to have been the "real arbiter of Castile’s internal policies for some

ti me (35-36).

U nfortunately, as with the rest of Leonor’s life, good fortune was once again
fleeting. She was disliked by many at the court and criticized for exacerbating problems
between the Queen and Fernando, King Enrique’s brother, co-regent and future king of
Aragém Fernando would eventually mount a campaign against Leonor. Amid court
intrigue and jealousy of Leonor’s enormous power, Catherine would eventually be forced
to banish Leonor from court. Little is known of Leonor’s life following her departure.

Clara Estow points out that there is evidence that for a while Leonor and the queen

72

seemed to have maintained a fondness, which she demonstrates through the existence of
letters exchanged between the two women. Additionally, Fernando, despite any earlier
antipathy, appeals to Leonor to serve as his intermediary with the queen, when he is in
need of funds to continue the siege of Antequera. Leonor, still hoping for a return to
court, agrees to aid Fernando, and successfully intervenes with the Queen to obtain the
desired funds. However, it seems that somewhere around this time, the Queen’s attitude
toward Leonor changes. Citing a letter from the archive of Santo Domingo el Real, Clara

Estow summarizes Leonor’s final fall from favor:
It is at this point that the Queen’s cordiality toward (Leonor) disappears. In the
two years that Leonor had been away from court, her dual post of counselor and
favorite had been filled by someone else. And while Catalina had no grievance
against Leonor, she made it increasingly clear that her physical presence at court
would not be tolerated. From the archives of Santo Domingo el Real of Toledo,
we have a letter, written by Catalina, cir_ca 1411, wherein she orders one of her
trusted officials to send spies to gather information on Leonor's whereabouts and
commands him that if he finds her traveling to the court, he should twice warn her
to desist. If she ignores these warnings, he must confiscate her possessions and
imprison her. Leonor must have been well aware of the Queen's wishes and,
giving up hope of personally arranging for her return, she called upon Fernando to
repay his debt by intervening with Catalina on her behalf. The Queen's response
to this approach was even more adamant than to the first; Catalina threatened

Fernando that if Leonor came anywhere near her, she would be burnt (37-38).

73

And here ends what we know of this turbulent life, so beleaguered by suffering
and misfortune. Leonor is estimated to have died between the years of 1412-1414, some
few years following her last attempt to return to court. It has been theorized by most
scholars that it was during these last years of her life that the Memorias were penned.
What has never been ascertained is who actually put pen to paper, and to what end

Leonor decided to write/dictate her memoirs. It is to these questions that I now turn.

2.2. The Text

It can readily be argued that Leonor’s memoir raises more questions than it
answers. Who wrote it, when it was written, why it was written, and why certain
seemingly important events were omitted, are among the issues that continue to challenge
scholars today. Though this study cannot hope to provide any of these answers,
consideration of the questions has bearing on our exploration of the Memoirs as a literary
representation of trauma, and also on the larger questions surrounding the literary
production of Early-Modem women.

The text Leonor has left us is at best unwieldy, challenging the reader to piece
together a disorganized, at times stream-of-consciousness collection of fragments and
flash-backs. It is a series of meandering thoughts not chronologically organized, and
connected only by commas and semicolons. The pronouns often have ambiguous
referents, and particularly during the segment of the text following Leonor’s
imprisonment, she transitions seemingly randomly between events. As Alan Deyermond
points out in his article “Spain’s First Women Writers”, purpose is clearly evident in the

Memorias but organization is not. In fact, for Deyermond this distinction seems to

74

separate Leonor’s text from the genre of autobiography, “Her narrative method gives
some support to Zimmermann's contention that "it is the sense of organization and
purpose which distinguishes true autobiography from garrulous recollections” (34). This
view runs counter to the designation given the Memorias by some scholars as Spain’s
first true autobiography (Katz Kaminsky and Dorough Johnson, 70).

Before continuing to a discussion of the text, it is necessary to take a moment to
provide an overview of how the text came to us in its modern version. Again, in
constructing the work, we are forced to confront significant ambiguity, which modern
scholars, Reinaldo Ayerbe-Chaux in particular, have had to piece together, in order to
arrive at our current understanding of the work’s origins. However, as many scholars
have already addressed these issues in detail, I will here provide but a brief overview.

The first difficulty present in the analysis of this work is the fact that the original
manuscript, which was located in the archives at the convent of San Pablo de Cordoba
has disappeared. Reinaldo Ayerbe-Chaux has attempted to locate this manuscript,
unfortunately without success. However, he tells us that it is known that the manuscript
was intact as late as the eighteenth century, for it was during that century that two copies
were produced. The first of these has been preserved, and today is housed in the
Biblioteca Colombina. According to Ayerbe-Chaux, it was this copy that served as the
basis for the first edition of the Memorias, that of J osé Maria Montoto (1775). Although
Montoto states that his edition was based on a manuscript found in the Archives of the
convent of San Pablo de Cordoba, Ayerbe-Chaux’s analysis of the work supports its basis

in the Colombina manuscript.

75

A second edition of the Memorias, dated at 1733, would appear just eight years
later, this one seeming to have resided in the library of one don Teodomiro Ramirez
Arellano. This copy would eventually form the basis for the edition produced by the
Marques de F uensanta del Valle (1883), and ironically for the edition by don Teodomiro
Ramirez himself, which is based on Fuensanta’s edition, rather than on the original
manuscript in his possession. This manuscript however, seems to have disappeared, and
has only been verified by Ayerbe-Chaux’s comparative analysis of the Fuensanta and the
Montoto editions along with the Colombina manuscript. As Ayerbe-Chaux explains, the
discrepancies between the two early editions are striking, and point definitively to the
existence of two eighteenth-century copies of the original manuscript:

La comparacion del manuscrito de la Colombina con la edicion de Fuensanta

basada en la copia de 1733, revela tantas variantes y algunas tan significativas que

permite suponer la existencia de dos copias distintas del siglo XVIII. Pasando por
alto aquellas variantes que son quizas debidas alas preferencias de Fuensanta para
regularizar y modemizar el texto, hay correcciones que afectan el significado de
la frase y son probablemente debidas a un copista del original no tan

experimentado como el de la Colombina” (13).

Though other editions followed these, most notably that of Adolfo Castro (1902),
Ayerbe-Chaux has given us the most complete edition, drawing on all the above sources.
It is therefore his edition which provides the basis for the current analysis. However, his
very comprehensive presentation of the textual discrepancies makes clear that this is not a
text that can be read as an accurate preservation of the original document, a condition that

makes consideration of many of the questions that follow difficult at best to resolve.

76

The next question to which we turn pertains to the work’s authorship. Though it
cannot be answered definitively, it is a question of central importance to this study. If on
the one hand, Leonor’s text was dictated to a notary, while one might still consider it an
autobiography, or at least an autobiographical document, it would have to be treated as a
text manipulated by a male hand. It’s authenticity as being representational of the female
voice would at best be questionable. Conversely, if Leonor is not merely dictating but
also writing her memoirs, she is free to exercise control over her text. While she will still
have to position her text within male-dominated norms and conventions, as we shall see,
she will nonetheless be able to advance the female voice within her document. The
predominant view among many scholars, first espoused by Alan Deyermond, is that the
Memorias were dictated by Leonor to a scribe or notary. Deyermond discusses this
problem in his essay “Spain’s First Women Writers,” where he briefly addresses the issue
of the authorship of the Memorias. He posits that the scribe, to whom he suggests Leonor
dictated her memoirs, may have begun by trying to follow notarial conventions of the
period, but quickly became overwhelmed by Leonor’s meandering style and gave up,
simply writing as the words flowed forth: “I have a clear vision of the unfortunate notary,
trying desperately to keep everything on a proper level of legal phraseology, being
overwhelmed by Leonor Lopez' flood of words, and realizing with a sigh that he had
better reconcile himself to writing the story just as she told it” (31).

Deyermond bases this theory of authorship on the text’s opening, which he
describes as a statement made on oath. As many scholars have discussed, the text’s
beginning lines consist of a compilation of notarial formulae common to legal documents

of the period. And, the Memorias do in fact begin with an oath: “Sepan quantos esta

77

Esscriptura vieren, como yo Dofia Leonor Lopez de Cordoba, fija de mi Sefior el Maestre
Don Martin Lopez de Cordoba, é Dona Sancha Carrillo, a quien dé Dios gloria y Parayso.
J uro por esta significancia de t21 en que Yo adoro, como todo esto que aqui es escrito, es
verdad que 10 vi, y paso por mi (16).22 The first part of the text would seem to support
this view, as it continues to read in the manner of a legal testament, presenting first a
geneology of Leonor’s noble lineage, and then a detailed accounting of the content of
Leonor’s and Ruy Gutiérez holdings upon their marriage: a mi Marido quedaronle
muchas vienes de su Padre y muchas Lugares, y alcanzaba trescientos de a Cavallo suyos,
e’ quarenta madejas de Aljofar, tan grueso como garvanzos, é quinientos moros, é moras,
y dos mil marcos de plata en bajilla, y las Joyas, y preseas de su Casa, no las pudieran
escrevir en dos pliegos de papel, a mi me dio mi Padre veinte mil doblas en
Casamiento” (l 7).23 It is at the conclusion of this listing of Leonor and Ruy’s
possessions, that the testamentary structure falls away, as Leonor begins to recount the
events leading up to the siege of Carmona, a fact not altogether surprising, given that it is
here where the emotional content of Leonor’s narrative is first encountered.
It is probably safe to say that most scholars concur with Deyermond’s theory.

However, Louise Mirrer holds a different view, which she discusses in her article

“Leonor Lopez de Cordoba and the Poetics of Women’s Autobiography.” She sets forth

 

2' Alan Deyermond has translated “significancia de t” to mean the sign of the cross, which seems a likely
translation. I therefore employ it here as well.

22 Therefore, know all who see this document, how 1, Dona Leonor Lopez de Cordoba, daughter of my
Lord Grand Master Don Martin Lopez de Cordoba and Dona Sancha Carrillo, to whom God grant glory
and heaven, swear by this sign I which I worship, that all that is written here is true for I saw it and it
happened to me,

23 My husband inherited many goods from his father and many offices. And his men on horseback
numbered three hundred, and forty skeins of pearls as fat as chickpeas, and five hundred Moors, men and
women, and two thousand marks of silver in tableware, and the jewels and gems of his household you
could not write down on two sheets of paper. To me, my father gave twenty thousand gold coins upon
marriage (74).

78

several I think convincing, hypotheses that support the possibility that Leonor did in fact
pen her own autobiography. She begins by refuting what has traditionally been the basis
for Deyermond’s position, that the opening lines are comprised of legal formulae utilized
by notaries in testamentary documentation of the period, a fact which has already been
demonstrated here. Mirrer has compared the opening of the Memorias with
approximately two-hundred Spanish legal documents, and points out that in none of the
other texts she examined was there the dense collection of formulae that is found in the
Memorias. In fact, she even suggests that Leonor’s extensive use of these topoi has a
“caricature” effect when compared along side other documents (1 l).

Mirrer offers what I find to be a highly plausible reason for this over-usage. As a
noblewoman and member of the court, Leonor would certainly have been aware that such
phrases were the requisite conventions utilized in both historical and literary texts to
establish validity. As Mirrer points out, such opening invocations are to be found not only
in legal documents, but in many literary works such as the Romancero, thus Leonor
would have encountered these statements of oath in a variety of different contexts, both
official and literary. Moreover, as a female venturing into the male world of testimonial
discourse, she would also undoubtedly have been aware of the importance of producing a
text that would have validity for a male audience, and therefore would have been likely to
try and imitate other texts with which she was familiar. As Mirrer points out, this fusion
of legal verbiage is not unique to Leonor, but can also be found in two of her English
contemporaries Margery Kempe (ca. 1373) and Julian of Norwich (ca 1343), and will
even be found on the American continent some three-hundred years later in the Respuesla

a Sor F ilotea of Sor Juana Ine's de la Cruz (1651-1695). This pattern among early women

79

writers supports the notion that each felt a need to validate her own work by emulating
topoi common to male discourse, and thus makes credible the possibility that Leonor, too,
could have deliberately employed this tactic in the writing of her text.

A second issue raised by scholars is the shift from notarial statements to the more
free-flowing, rambling style associated with the rest of the work. Mirrer argues, and I
concur, that such a shift is not atypical of women’s writing. A shift from masculine to
feminine modes of discourse is present in each of the female authors mentioned above.
And Leonor herself prepares the reader for this in her own text. She clearly states a dual-
purpose in writing her memoirs which she presents in the opening lines. The first, is to
provide hope to those who suffer, and encourage them to commend themselves to the
Virgin for succor, and the second, to provide a testimony to the events which she and her

family endured:

Juro por esta significancia de t en que Yo adoro, como todo esto que aqui es
escrito, es verdad que 10 vi, y paso por mi, y escribolo a honrra, y alabanza de mi
Senor Jesu Christo, é déla Virgen Santa Maria su Madre que lo pario, por que
todas las Criaturas que estubieren en tribulacion sean ciertos, que yo espero en su
misericordia, que si se encomiendan de Corazon a la Virgen Santa Maria, que Ella
las consolara, y acorrera, como consolo a mi; y por que quien lo oyere sepan la
relacion de todos mis echos e’ milagros que la Virgen Santa Maria, me mostro, y

es mi intencion que quede por memoria (l6).24

 

2" I swear by this sign t which I worship, that all that is written here is true for I saw it and it happened to
me, and I write it to the honor and glory of my Lord Jesus Christ, and of the Holy Virgin Mary his mother
who bore him so that all creatures who suffered might be certain that I believe in her mercy, that if they
commend themselves from the heart to the Holy Virgin Mary she will console and succor them as she
consoled me. And so that whoever might hear it know the tale of my deeds and miracles that the Holy
Virgin Mary showed me, it is my intention that it be left as a record.

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This statement clearly speaks to Leonor’s cognizance of the comingling of purposes in
her text, and even seems to warn the reader to anticipate that a shift will occur. By
including in her stated purpose both testimony and consolation, she prepares her reader
for the presence of both the male, what Foucault calls the “J uridical Discourse”, and the
female discourse of religion, consolation, and self-effacement. Given her own textual
awareness, and the presence of similar shifts in other early-modem women writers, it
seems reasonable to attribute the departure from notarial formulae to some more
deliberate cause than the simple exhaustion of an overwhelmed male scribe.

Mirrer also highlights a number of textual characteristics that would seem to
indicate Leonor’s own awareness of herself as a woman writer. As I have noted above,
the early parts of the text demonstrate both the power exercised by the men in Leonor’s
life, and the premature termination of that power by death. Even her husband, though he
does not die physically, withers into a state of invisibility, when he is no longer able to
play a role in providing for his family. The remainder of the text is occupied by women,
and is set within the female spaces of the convent, Leonor’s aunts’ homes, and her own
private house.

Leonor’s text is gynocentric not only in it’s physical spaces, but in its invocation
to “foremothers” as Mirrer calls them. On the earthly plane, these include her aunts, and
one cannot help but wonder if Leonor also thinks of Queen Catalina. On a celestial plane,
Leonor’s text is dedicated to the Virgin Mary, who also plays a central role in aiding
Leonor in her quest for material gain. Again, Leonor’s awareness of this is evident. As
Mirrer shows, Leonor writes not only in the name of masculine “santos” but makes a

point of including the word “Santas” (female saints) as well (16). As Mirrer further

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demonstrates, Leonor combines this invocation of both the male and the female once
again with a juridical referent, when she writes, Santos y Santas déla Corte del Cielo (16).
For Mirrer, this is significant, as it represents a designation of spiritual equality for both
men and women, “Thus women, in the Memorias, are firmly established as bona fide
members, along with men, of both heavenly and legal precincts” (15). For Mirrer, it is
this location of her text within both the female realm of hagiographical discourse, and the
male realm of legal discourse, that most strongly supports the text as being authored by a
woman.

One final but important question concerns whether Leonor would actually have
been taught to write. As I indicate in the Introduction, it was not uncommon for a woman
not to receive formal education, or for her to receive a limited education targeted to her
need to manage a household. This circumstance supports other scholars’ conjecture that
she would have needed a scribe, as she would not have possessed the necessary
knowledge of writing to have actually written the work herself. Dictation was not an
uncommon practice, even for male writers. As A.J. Minnis demonstrates in his book
Medieval Theory of A uthorship, there were in fact considered to be varying levels of
authorship, the lowest of which was that of scribe or copyist, whose role it was to simply
take down or copy another’s words, whether written or verbally transmitted.

If dictation was a common practice among male authors, it certainly seems likely
that women would be even more dependent on this method of writing, given their more
limited exposure to formal education. Thus, dictating one’s text would not necessarily
invalidate one’s role as author. It does however change the relation between text and

author, as it now involves a filter, a second pair of hands through which the text passes.

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This presents unique challenges for women. Whereas a scribe writing on behalf of a male
author would not be likely to try and exert control over the finished product, a scribe
writing for a woman might be inclined to do so for many reasons. The most innocent of
these could simply be an unconscious male bias as to what would be considered
appropriate content for a woman. The most egregious, would be a misogynistic attempt to
control textual content to conform with his own ecclesiastical or political agenda.

As indicated in the introduction, this exertion of control was common in the texts
of nuns ordered to write by their confessors. Both Teresa de Avila and Lucrecia de Leon
serve as examples of women whose writing was manipulated by men to such an extent
that the original intended purpose or meaning is unclear.

Thus, the question of Leonor’s authorial role is an important one, as it offers some
perspective on how much control she would have been able to exert over her work.
Certainly it seems unlikely that she would have learned to write while in prison, and the
period preceding her incarceration was too brief for her to become skilled in writing,
even if she were being taught. Regardless of what other education she may have received,
Mirrer highlights her stay in the convent as being a place where she would most certainly
have received formal learning. Unfortunately, Leonor is vague in the Memorias about her
days in the convent. It is not clear how long she was there prior to the return of her
husband. Mirrer is correct in her view that it would be helpful to more firmly establish
Leonor’s connection to the convent, as it would provide more conclusive proof of her
literacy, and thus her physical ability to have put pen to paper, and so to create a text that

is an authentic representation of her own voice.

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In light of the issues presented above, Deyermond’s view that her text was
dictated to a male scribe who quickly lost control of his subject, I think does a disservice
to both said scribe and to Leonor herself. Though at this time we are unable to
conclusively prove Leonor’s role as author, Mirrer provides convincing evidence to
support her theory that Leonor may have authored her own text. First, if a notary had
been responsible for the text’s opening oaths, one would expect it to conform more
closely to the other texts that Mirrer reviewed, i.e. that it would lack the exaggerated and
heavy-handed application found in the Memorias, and more closely parody other texts of
the period. Additionally, Mirrer presents convincing evidence of Leonor’s awareness of
herself as female author. Though perhaps clumsily at times, she is able to draw on textual
conventions that will give her text credibility within male spheres, while incorporating a
distinctly female style and voice. Leonor’s success here would seem to be vindicated by
the fact that the Memorias were initially valued as a historical document, particularly as
providing the only eye-witness account of the 1370 siege of Carmona. The following
discussion of the role and functions of trauma within the Memorias will therefore proceed

based on the premise of Leonor as author.

2.3. The Memorias and Trauma

To begin our consideration of trauma in the Memorias we must first address the
question of the location of the traumatic event. Superficially, it would appear that the
traumatic event was Leonor’s incarceration during her childhood and adolescence, and
the events—death and torture—that occurred in the Atarazanas. This however, seems too

facile an explanation. Even prior to Leonor’s imprisonment, she lived under siege. and

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witnessed the betrayal and death of her father, both of which, were in her mind events
important enough to be recorded in her memoir. Moreover, the life that awaited her upon
her release, though less violent, would prove to be no less arduous. Both Teresa de
Cartagena and Madre Juana, though undeniably facing their own challenges, are not
forced to strive to meet basic survival needs, and both find a secure place in convent life.

Unlike her sisters, Leonor’s life remains tenuous until it’s very end, and that
tenuousness is evident in her text. Leonor exemplifies the dilemma described by Cathy
Caruth between living and surviving trauma, “the oscillation between a crisis of death
and the correlative crisis of life: between the story of the unbearable nature of an event
and the story of the unbearable nature of its survival (7). Considered within the context of
trauma, I think it is plausible to suggest that in many ways, Leonor’s world was more
undefined following her release from prison.

While her life in prison would be considered difficult, perhaps even unbearable,
the conditions of her existence were firmly drawn and clearly established. This
predictability of her environment would make life in the Atarazanas in some respects
more manageable. Leonor’s place, while undesirable, was clear. But once she is released,
all predictability vanishes. Upon her release, she must not only face the work of survival,
but also find a way to explain the fact that she survived while the rest of her family did
not. This point is never addressed directly in her text, but I suggest that her strong desire
to vindicate herself and her family is at least in part the result of survivor’s guilt,
particularly at the time of the writing of the Memorias. By this time, Leonor would be
well aware that vindication through her own success and recuperation of status and

fortune would not come to pass. Thus. her text is her only vehicle of honoring, even in a

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small way, those of her family who perished as a result of the conflict between kings
Pedro and Enrique.

The fragmentation discussed earlier in Leonor’s writing style is thus a textual
reflection of Leonor’s tumultuous life. And interestingly, it carries over into Leonor’s
self-representation as protagonist. I have already discussed the intellectual challenges
faced by Leonor’s readers as they struggle to make sense of this rambling text, breaking
apart long run-on sentences, grappling with referential vagaries, and working to
reconstruct a disjointed and poorly organized chronology. However, along with sorting
through this literary quagmire, the reader is forced to navigate a sometimes confusing
jumble of emotional reactions to Leonor’s narrative.

As we read of her father’s betrayal and death, her imprisonment and the deaths of
those she loved, and her husband’s misfortunes when he tries to reclaim their estate, we
feel a profound sympathy for this innocent victim of Spanish politics. Then, just a few
lines later, our schema is abruptly modified when we read of Leonor’s treatment of the
aunt’s ill-fated servant who opposes Leonor’s petition for the private house: “fui tan
desconsolada, que perdi la paciencia, e' la que me hizo mas contradicion con la Senora mi
tia se murio en mis manos, comiéndose la lengua (21).25 Leonor’s actions seem all
the more horrifying because of her subsequent chillingly fluid shift from describing the
servant’s death to her continued prayers to the Virgin. Though perhaps somewhat more
cautiously, we nonetheless continue to feel sympathy for her and her struggle, pulling for
her as she tries to regain what she has lost. We’re given one final shock before the

Memorias end, when Leonor sacrifices her son rather than caring for the sick Jewish

 

2’ I was so disconsolate I lost my patience, and the one who had most set my lady aunt against me died in
my hands, swallowing her tongue (76).

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orphan herself. One can but imagine the melodrama of the scene within her aunt’s home,
the grief-stricken Leonor, the angry cousins and sister-in-law, and Leonor’s exit in
disgrace.

Though Leonor’s tenure with Queen Catherine is not recorded in the Memorias an
observer cannot help but approach that situation with the understanding that Leonor is a
complicated woman, in many ways admirable for her spirit and tenacity, yet also
someone who could be difficult, perhaps even frightening when faced with opposition. In
this way, Leonor’s text guides the reader through an emotional journey probably not
altogether dissimilar from her own, as she constantly attempts to make sense of ever-
changing physical, political, and psychological landscapes.

Alan Deyermond is perhaps among the first to consider Leonor’s text as the
product of trauma, or as he describes it, “life (that) scarcely conduced to serene reflection
(34). He further points out a similar stylistic phenomenon in the writing of a twentieth-
century female autobiographer, Nadezhda Mendelstam, whose husband had been one of
Stalin’s victims. As he tells us, reviews of her memoir, while generally favorable, were
critical of the work for being “rambling and disjointed.” He clearly sees a connection
between the styles of these two writers, which he attributes to both having been survivors
of what I am calling trauma: “In both cases, a woman caught up in great events and
surveying them from the wreckage of her personal life prefers the vividness and
authenticity of recollection to the requirements of formal structure” (34).

Carolyn Walker Bynum (1991 observes a similar phenomenon, but places it in the
broader contexts of Early-Modem women’s writing, and of Walter Ong’s theories of oral

expression: “the prose of a female writer such as Julian of Norwich. which tends to

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circle around its point, evoking a state of being, displays exactly those traits Walter
Ong has seen as characteristic of oral thought and expression (198).

Thus, while this rambling and disjointed style, this lack of formal structure may
well be reflective of writings other than those related to trauma, it does coincide with the
definitions of trauma and the descriptions of trauma symptoms set forth in Chapter 1. As
I have demonstrated, historians, psychologists, and literary scholars such as Cathy Caruth
and Catherine Robson concur on the presence of Freud’s repetitive impulse, observing
the trauma victim’s need to revisit the traumatic event, though they do not necessarily do
so in a manner that would appear logical or orderly to the outside observer. I suggest that
one explanation of this may be found in the phenomenon of the disruption of the victim’s
inner schemata of self, as described by Judith Lewis Herman. As she tells us, one effect
of trauma is that it destroys the victim’s previously held beliefs about the world and about
their place in it. The result is that the victim is forced to repeat earlier developmental
tasks in order to create a new schemata in which the traumatic event can be
contextualized. She writes: “Thereafter, a sense of alienation, of disconnection, pervades
every relationship, from the most intimate familial bonds to the most abstract affiliations
of community and religion A secure sense of connection with caring people is the
foundation of personality development. When this connection is shattered, the
traumatized person loses her basic sense of self. Developmental conflicts of childhood
and adolescence, long since resolved, are suddenly reopened. Trauma forces the survivor
to relive all her earlier struggles over autonomy, initiative, competence, identity, and

intimacy” (53).

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Identity, initiative, autonomy and intimacy are, I think, pivotal to Leonor’s
struggles during her life following her incarceration. Autonomy and initiative will be key
if she is to be restored to her former wealth and status. But, much like a child testing the
waters in the world around her, Leonor has to forge connections in a landscape radically
different from the one that existed prior to her stay in the Atarazanas. The privileged
daughter of the court is thrust into a world where the power has shifted. She enters this
world much as a child, with the balance of power being completely in the hands of her
former enemies, and like a child she has to learn to navigate in her new world. To do this
she must re-evaluate who her allies are, and learn about the limits of their support as well
as how to deal with those who will stand in her way.

Clara Estow observes that Leonor seems to have possessed the same political
acumen possessed by her father, but as she also points out, like her father, Leonor’s
efforts often seem to end in disaster of one sort or another. Leonor is able to garner the
support of her maternal aunts, but not her cousins. Moreover, not only is she not able to
establish positive relationships with them, it would seem that she may not be politically
astute enough—or, to put it in psychological terms—may not have found constructive
ways to exert her autonomy or express her own initiative, without being threatened by the
autonomy and initiative of those who oppose her. I think it can safely be argued that this
inability on her part constitutes a key factor in Leonor’s final expulsion from the family.
Perhaps out of love or duty for Leonor’s mother, perhaps out of a true fondness, Leonor’s
aunt supports and aids her, but this support ultimately creates a schism which will force
the aunt to choose between her niece and her daughters. As we see at the end of the

Memorias, Leonor is banished from the family following the death of her son: “Sobrina

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Senora no puedo dexar de hazerlo, que a mi Nuera y a mis fijas e' prometido por que son
echas en uno, y en tanto me han afligido que os parta de mi, que selo ove otorgado, é esto
no se que enojo hace’is a mi Nuera Dor’ia Theresa que tan mala intencion os tiene”
(24).26

As the above discussion indicates, intimacy also proves to be a struggle for
Leonor. As already mentioned, there is no sense of intimacy present between Leonor and
her husband. This impression could of course be explainable through a myriad of
different circumstances. First, one cannot overlook the fact that theirs, like most, was a
marriage arranged not for love, but for political advantage. Against that backdrop, the
harshness of the years in the Atarazanas would in all likelihood not have been conducive
to the development of what one might consider a healthy marital relationship. Even once
out of prison, neither would be afforded the opportunity to resume the role that each
would have expected at the time of their marriage, and it would seem that Leonor was
more adept in transitioning into her new role than was her husband. Whatever the reason,
there is little textual evidence that they ever worked together in the process of restoring
their fortunes. Once Rui Gutiérrez’s attempts to restore the family’s fortune fail, her
husband seems to become at best an invisible presence rather than a partner to Leonor.
All of her other post-imprisonment relationships seem to be fractious, some vacillating
between periods of intense connection and rupture as in the cases of her aunts and later
Queen Catherine, while others seem to simply be fraught with tension, as with her

cousins, the servant, and even, perhaps, her eldest son.

 

26 "Lady niece, I cannot fail to do so, as 1 have promised my daughter-in-law and my daughters who are of
one mind; since they have pressed me to remove you from my presence, I have granted it to them. I do not
know what vexation you have caused my daughter-in-law, Dona Teresa, that she feels such ill will toward
you”(80)

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At least insofar as one can determine from current documentation, it would seem
that Leonor did not have one consistently positive relationship subsequent to her stay in
the Atarazanas. To blame this entirely on Leonor would be over-reaching of course. We
do not know the basis of Leonor’s cousins’ opposition to her. In addition, as other
scholars have indicated, documentation exists that suggests that Leonor’s fall from the
queen’s favor may be largely due to the intrigues of another of the queen’s ladies-in-
waiting, Inés de Torres, who aspired to supplant Leonor as the queen’s favorite, and who,
like Leonor, would eventually fall.27 However, Leonor repeatedly shows a level of
ineptness in negotiating these conflicts, which were an inherent part of life, certainly at
court, and even within the circle of an upper-class family. Leonor’s murder of the
servant, her quarrels with her cousins, her communication with Queen Catherine and her
failed attempt at mediation through Enrique are the flailing final stands of a desperate
woman trying to hang onto what she has lost, not the sophisticated negotiations of a
confident family-member and courtier.

A consequence of all these issues is that Leonor’s global identity construct seems
always to be in a state of flux. Clearly, she never loses sight of the fact that she is of
noble stock, and never loses her view that she is entitled to a place in that world. This is
evident in the proclamation of her lineage and the account of her marriage settlement that
open her text, as well as in her indignation at having to enter her aunt’s home to eat from
the street, and the vehemence with which she fights to improve her circumstances.

But if we consider Leonor’s descriptions of herself in the Memorias, we find the

 

27 See Clara Estow, "Leonor Lopez de Cordoba: Portrait of 3 Medieval Courtier." Fifteenth Century Studies
5 (1982): 23-46. Also Amy Katz Kaminsky and Elaine Dorough Johnson. "To Restore Honor and Fortune:
“The Autobiography of Leonor Lopez de Cordoba.” The Female Autografi. Ed. Domna C. Stanton.
Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.

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following: “yo estaba muy bien andante” (20) “por mis pecados era perdida (20), “porque
yo era de grande Linage y que mis hijos serian grandes (22) “e por mis pecados aquella
noche le dio Ia pestilencia e otro dia le enterré”(22), “Salid Sefiores, y vere’is la mas
desventurada desamparada, é mas Maldita muger del mundo, (24).28 The extreme
oscillation of Leonor’s self-concept is evident in these comments. At one moment, she is
living comfortably, of grand lineage herself and the mother of great sons, at the next,
people are dying because of her sins, and she is “the most unfortunate, forsaken and
condemned woman in the world" (80). While it could certainly be argued that the events
Leonor endured justify these bleaker reflections, they also reflect a lack of stability, both
in Leonor’s circumstances and in her self-concept, suggesting Leonor’s trauma is
ongoing, rather than being limited to her actual imprisonment.

Yet another textual aspect of Leonor’s representation of trauma, is that of bearing
witness. As stated in Chapter one, according to critics such as Caruth and Robson this is
one of the functions of literature in the retelling of trauma. Caruth regards trauma
narratives as relating both the story of death and the story of life, and as indicated
already, this duality is clearly evident in the Memorias.

Writing of a twentieth-century French author born during the bombing of Paris in
World War 11, Catherine Robson notes, “Her writing does not start at the beginning of her
life in the war, but seems rather to begin with her rebirth and thus to offer a different life

story and family history, that covers up the horror of her birth and her parents' deaths.

 

28 “that l was doing very well” (76) “for my sins, my husband and I were undone (76) “I was of grand
lineage and my sons would be great” (78) “and because of my sins, that night he came down with the
plague and the next day l buried him ...“ (80) "Come out good people and you will see the most

unfortunate, forsaken and condemned woman in the world, (80)

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She is not bearing witness to forgotten civilian deaths, but to her own survival. and to the
power of the life drive ...” (123).

Leonor certainly does not “cover up” the deaths of her family, but she does devote
considerable space to her “witnessing of the life-drive”. In the Memorias the question of
witness is a fairly straight forward one, due in large part to the invocation at the opening
of the text. As indicate in the earlier discussion of authorship, bearing witness to her
family’s tragedy is one of her stated purposes in writing the Memorias. However, the stay
in the Atarazanas occupies a comparatively short segment of Leonor’s narrative, with the
primary focus of the text being dedicated to her “rebirth” i.e. her struggles and her
successes after she has been released.

I suggest therefore, that the function of bearing witness is multi-layered. First, she
tells us directly of her desire to create a written record “que quede por memoria” (16).
Her goal of creating a written record was probably far more successful than she could
ever have imagined. As Amy Katz Kaminsky and Elaine Dorough Johnson point out,
until the late 19705 and the definitive critical edition of Reinaldo Ayerbe-Chaux, the
Memorias were regarded as a historical document rather than a literary text. As Carmen
Marimon-Llorca further explains: “las Memorias fueron punto de atencion para los
historiadores interesados en la polémica etapa que constituyo e1 cambio de dinastia en la
Castilla de transicion al siglo XV. La parcialidad de las Cronicas oficiales hacen que
cualquier documento haya sido aprovechado para rellenar las lagunas o verificar los datos
que en ellos se exhiben. Las Memorias, obra de una testigo presencial del cerco de

Carmona, fueron por esta razon analizadas en lo que tienen de fuente de informacion para

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la resolucion de ciertos aspectos puntuales de la historia peninsular” (94).29 She further
tells us, that in addition to the Memorias" value as documentation of a political transition,
they also offer an account of the conditions for upper-class women of the period. Thus,
Leonor’s immediate legacy was regarded as a historical rather than a literary

contribution.

Second, It is her intent that her audience know that her struggles did not end in the
Atarazanas, but continued as she worked to reconstruct her life, an objective plainly
stated in her opening lines, ”y por que quien lo oyere sepan la relacion de todos mis echos
é milagros que la Virgen Santa Maria, me mostro, y es mi intencion que quede por
memoria, (16).30 Her use of the phrase “mis echos” (my deeds) is telling. The focus here
is Leonor herself, not the former King Pedro, not Enrique, and her family mostly insofar
as they relate to her. However, to vindicate herself, she must also vindicate her family.
Her father’s loyalty and honor bring honor to her and confirm her nobility. And likewise,
her “echos” restore her honor to her forebears, and hopefully pave the way for her own
children’s advancement. Therefore, within this larger objective fall two others: to offer
testament to her noble lineage. and to record her family’s story. In undertaking the latter,
she bears witness both to her family’s nobility and ensures that the fate of the loyalists to

Pedro not be forgotten.

 

29 The Memorias were of interest to historians concerned with the polemical period and the change in
Castilian Dynasty in the fifteenth-century. The incompleteness of official chronicles have made it necessary
to for scholars to avail themselves of any surviving documents in order to fill in the gaps and confirm the
dates which the chronicles contain. The Memorias, work of an eyewitness to the siege of Carmona, were
for this reason analyzed for the information they contain regarding certain debates in Peninsular history
(my translation)

3” all that is written here is true for I saw it and it happened to me, and I write it to the honor and glory
of my Lord Jesus Christ, and of the Holy Virgin Mary his mother who bore him so that all creatures who
suffered might be certain that I believe in her mercy, that if they commend themselves from the heart to the
Holy Virgin Mary she will console and succor them as she consoled me. And so that whoever might hear it
know the tale of my deeds and miracles that the Holy Virgin Mary showed me, it is my intention that it be
left as a record. I ordered it written as you see before you” (73).

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Continuing in the vein of Leonor’s focus on herself as protagonist, as Louise
Mirrer demonstrates, Leonor’s use of female-specific language—“santos y santas”--
suggests a strong awareness of herself as female, and as a female writer. Thus, I think we
can conclude that in addition to writing in a general way about rebuilding her life, she
wished to bear testament to her experience as a woman. Carmen Marimon-Llorca’s
observations on the historicity of Leonor’s text, and it’s value in documenting women’s
condition during the fifteenth-century again bear out Leonor’s effectiveness here, as do
Louise Mirrer’s observations on Leonor’s language.

I have already highlighted the matrifocal world depicted by Leonor, and the
secondary role which male family members seem to occupy. Even in the years prior to
her imprisonment, when the males in her life are unquestionably functioning as leaders,
Leonor’s mother and the Infantas occupy a significant role. Leonor attributes her early
marriage to her mother’s death, “mi Madre fallecio mui temprano, y asi me caso mi Padre
de siete afios” (17).

As she describes in the Memorias, the Infantas, her godmothers seem to take the
place of Leonor’s mother, at least in providing a female presence for the young Leonor,
“las Sefioras Ynfantas, fij as del Senor Rey Don Pedro, y Parientas tan cercanas de mi
Marido, y mias por mi Madre” (17),31 and “naci en Calatayud en Casa del Sefior Rey,
que fueron las Sefioras Ynfantas sus fijas mis Madrinas, y trujeronme con Ellas al
Alcazar de Segovia con mi Senora Madre que ay murio” (20).32 As previously discussed,

Leonor takes great care to situate her text within the world of male discourse, as is

 

3 ' “Seeing this misfortune he took the road for Carmona where the lady princesses, daughters of Lord King
Don Pedro were, and very close relatives of my husband and mine by my mother” (73).

32 “And I was born in Calatayud in the house of the Lord King. His daughters, the lady princesses, were my
godmothers, and they brought me with them to the castle in Segovia with my lady mother who died there”
(73).

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obvious in the notarial formulae invoked at the text’s beginning. Nonetheless, throughout
her text Leonor manages to create a strong female presence.

Finally, it is also her intent to bear religious witness, that is, to bear witness to the
ways in which the Virgin Mary aided—and sometimes did not aid—her in her quest to
re-assume her former state. This objective is made clear in the text’s opening, but I think
is not so well executed. She writes: “escribolo a honrra, y alabanza de mi Sefior Jesu
C hristo, e' de’la Virgen Santa Maria su Madre que lo pario, por que todas las Criaturas que
estubieren en tribulacion sean ciertos, que yo espero ensu misericordia, que si se
encomiendan de Corazon a la Virgen Santa Maria, que Ella las consolara, y acorrera,
como consolo a mi ...” (16).33 The extent of Mary’s consolation is extremely debatable,
and Leonor’s honesty here unfortunately undermines this earlier invocation. Mary’s
master-work here would be responding to Leonor’s prayers—three-hundred Hail Marys
on her knees for thirty days and the adoption and baptism of the Jewish orphan—-
allowing her to open the entryway to her aunt’s home, and later granting her the private

house.

However, other than this Magnum Opus, Leonor’s prayers yielded less favorable
results. When Leonor again turns to the Virgin in supplication at the outbreak of the
plague, though she does spare the life of the Jewish orphan, Mary does not spare the life
of those who attended him in his illness, including Leonor’s own eldest son. Thus the text
here seems to send a double-message. The acquisition of the private house was no small

boon, and it would prove to be an important one, as it gave Leonor a place to return to

 

3" “I write it to the honor and glory of my Lord Jesus Christ, and of the Holy Virgin Mary his mother who
bore him so that all creatures who suffered might be certain that I believe in her mercy, that if they
commend themselves from the heart to the Holy Virgin Mary she will console and succor them as she
consoled me”(73).

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after she had been expelled from the family in Aguilar. But Leonor also does not
withhold those instances in which the Virgin did not console her or come to her aid. One

possible reading here would be that Leonor finds consolation despite her misfortune.

Leonor doesn’t suggest this at any point other than her opening statement, which
as we have already discussed is highly formulaic. But given the text’s fragmentary
nature, such a reading would not be outside the realm of plausibility. I would argue
however, that such a reading does not fit comfortably with Leonor strong-willed, often
quarrelsome nature. A second reading would be that much as with the reconstruction of
her life and her identity, the construction of her faith is a work-in-progress. This reading
requires less extrapolation on the part of the reader, and fits more comfortably with the
other information we possess about Leonor’s life. It also corresponds to Caruth and
Robson’s statements about trauma narrative and bearing witness, speaking both to a life-
drive which propels one forward, and simultaneously harkening back to the damage
remaining from the traumatic experience.

A final question to which I turn is that of departure in the Memorias. Is there
departure? If so, in what does it consist? As with many aspects of this text, departure is
yet another polemical issue. A surface reading could indicate that yes, Leonor does
experience departure from her traumatic experience. She is released from prison. Though
her estate is not restored, she does receive shelter and assistance from maternal relatives,
and even eventually secures the much-coveted home of her own. She is blessed with
children for whom she seems to care, and establishes close, albeit turbulent relationships
with her maternal aunts. All of these circumstances speak to reintegration, healing and

departure. But each also brings it’s own wounds, which seem to prevent the closure and

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healing of the original wound of trauma. Though Leonor made a would-be advantageous
marriage, her husband proves inefficacious, returning to Leonor and her family for
protection, rather than serving as protector himself. While Leonor’s aunts take her in.
there is constant—or at least frequent—tension between Leonor and her cousins. Leonor
does attain the private house, but only after great struggle, hard work, and one murder.
Looking beyond her text, Leonor attains glowing success at court, only to be brought to
an end in an equally colossal failure, when Queen Catherine dismisses her from court and
forbids her to ever return.

It is Leonor’s children who make the strongest argument for a final, healing
departure. It is not known how many children Leonor bore, though she does talk in the
Memorias of “Hij uelos.” We do know that she bore at least two, the son who died in the
plague, and a daughter, Leonor de Henestrosa, who would be her sole inheritor
(Marimon-Llorca, 96). This fact would seem to indicate that if there were other children,
they died at an age too young to inherit. However, Leonor’s daughter represents what is
perhaps Leonor’s most enduring bid for bringing the political rifts responsible for her
own difficult life to a close. She arranges the marriage of her daughter to the Conde de
Niebla, nephew of Enrique 11. With this act, Leonor both unites the two opposing royal
factions through marriage, and establishes her own family as part of the Trastamara
bloodline, thus ensuring her own family’s place in the current monarchy.

As Carmen Marimon-Llorca writes:
La misma Leonor parece que no escapo a la tentacion de asegurar su posicion en
la corte y borrar su pasado casando a su hija Leonor con un nieto de Enrique II.

Gracias a este matrimonio, Leonor emparentaba con la familia reinante y daba por

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finalizada una etapa de su Vida. No deja de ser paradojico que esta maniobra

coincida con la que previamente habra realizado Juan I, hijo de Enrique II, 31

casar a su hijo Enrique III, nieto de Enrique 11 con Catalina de Lancaster, nieta de

Pedro I con lo que unia ambas ramas y hacia cesar las hostilidades referentes a la

casa reinante, los Trastamara. (97-98)

Marimon-Llorca draws the parallel between Leonor’s marriage of her daughter,
and the royal marriage of Enrique and Catalina. One cannot overlook however that
Leonor’s choice of son-in-law is also an echo of her father’s actions some forty years
earlier. His aim in selecting Rui Guitie'rrez as Leonor’s husband had been to secure an
alliance for his daughter with the loyalist faction. Leonor, similarly trying to ensure her
own daughter’s security, makes the reverse choice, deciding to align young Leonor with
the Trastamara faction, thus aligning her daughter with the ruling family, bringing
together the two bloodlines, closing the rift that began with Pedro and Enrique.

Leonor’s own life was like that of the proverbial phoenix, rising from the ashes,
only to return to them again and again. Her indomitable nature allowed her to continue
repeatedly to try and depart from both her emotional and her material pain. In many
cases, it may have been the very strength that kept pushing her forward that also
prevented her from truly reaching resolution. Without her strength of character—and her
maternal connections—it would have been difficult, if not impossible for Leonor to re-
establish herself. However, this same strength of character also seems to have contributed
to ongoing conflict with her cousins, and finally, and perhaps most importantly, with
Queen Catherine of Lancaster. Leonor’s text, is a text that is at times defensive, at times

almost melodramatic, and at times amazingly honest. The text of her memoir and what

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we know of those parts of her life she did not choose to include in the Memorias, is thus a
complex amalgam of glowing success, painful failures, but above all a continuous
determination to survive.

As I indicated at the beginning of this chapter, Leonor’s text is most concerned
with affairs of the secular world, and it is therefore amid those concerns that her text is
situated. Let us now proceed to Teresa de Cartagena’s two texts, where we will consider

an example of the textual representation of trauma within the context of religious writing.

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Chapter 3

Writing as Reconciliation: Teresa de Cartagena

With the works of Teresa de C artagena we move into the middle years of Spain’s
fifteenth century, and also into the world of religious and spiritual writing. In contrast
with Leonor Lopez de Cordoba’s fragmented, disorganized narrative, the two essays of
Teresa de Cartagena are well-organized texts. Particularly in the Admiracion Operum
Dey we find a tightly-constructed logical argument that draws on an extensive knowledge
of scripture and religious writing of the period. Unlike Leonor whose purpose in writing
her memoirs continues to be the subject of scholarly speculation, each of Teresa’s essays
has a clearly identifiable focus. Teresa authored two treatises. In the first, La Arboleda de
las enfermos, she deals with themes related to her deafness and to her subsequent entry
into the convent, in a reflective essay which is generally considered to fall within the
tradition of self-consolation. Her second work, Admiracion Operum Dey, she tells us is
prompted by the entreaties of one dofia Juana de Mendoza. This text offers Teresa’s
response to those who criticized her writing based on the notion that a woman would not
have been capable of writing the Arboleda.

In this chapter I will consider the relationship between Teresa’s writing and her
experience of disability and thus trauma. I use trauma here in a broad context. Today it
would rarely be argued that the onset of disability would typically be trauma-inducing.
Both contemporary attitudes toward disability as well as medical treatments and
technological advances have made the modern experience of disability very different
from what it would have been even a century ago, much less during the fifteenth century.

10]

Even so, the DSMIV, cited in chapter 1, includes the following experiences as criteria for
diagnosing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: an experience that is a threat to one’s
physical integrity and being diagnosed with a life-threatening illness (484). As I stated in
Chapter 1, while Teresa’s physical existence was clearly not threatened, the day-to-day
substance of it certainly was. Like Leonor Lopez de Cordoba, who had to transition from
being a daughter of the court to being an impoverished political outsider, Teresa too had
to adjust her schemata of self, her concept of herself and how that self fit into the world
around her. The option to marry would no longer be a part of her future. Her social
interactions would be altered, and she would find herself entering into the religious life,
an option which her writing leads us to believe had not been her own choice. Such major
changes would inevitably result in the need to revise and rebuild Teresa’s understanding
of herself and her relation to the world around her. While Leonor had to find new family
in her maternal relatives who had been former political enemies, Teresa is placed in a
new family, that of her convent, or as she describes it, that of the infirm. The emotional
impact of this multifaceted transition is poignantly conveyed in Teresa’s first essay, as
will be explained later on. So, while there is no denying the vast differences between
incarceration, starvation, and torture, versus the loss of one’s hearing, I argue that each
has a similar psychological impact on the individual, and that the similarities in their
experiences make Teresa a viable candidate for inclusion in a study involving trauma and
female authorship.

Before beginning a consideration of the essays themselves and their relation to
Teresa’s trauma or personal suffering, let us first review briefly the limited biographical

information in our possession.

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3.1. Teresa’s Life and her Social Context

Though a great deal is known about her family, considerably less is known about
Teresa herself. In fact, her affiliation with the Cartagena family has been established only
through the work of multiple generations of scholars, and was not conclusively proven
until the work of Francisco Cantera-Burgos in the 19505, when he was able to link Teresa
with the Cartagena family through her uncle Alonso’s will. Thanks to his excellent work,
we today are able to piece together a general autobiographical sketch of one of the
earliest Spanish female religious writers. The biographical information I offer here is a
result of his work, as well as that of Alan Deyermond, Carmen Marimon-Llorca, and
Dayle Seidenspinner-Nunez.

Though Teresa belonged to 3 hi ghly-renowned converso family whose male
members held high rank in religious, courtly, and literary spheres, her status as a nun and
an unmarried woman rendered her all but invisible to posterity. Her life was not recorded
as her male relatives’ lives were, both by virtue of being deemed less significant, and by
virtue of the fact that as a female she would not have held military, political or
ecclesiastical office, roles which would have been recorded in other types of
documentation. Even Teresa’s married sisters left more evidence of their existence, as
their marriages into important families were documented. From a literary or historical
perspective, Leonor Lopez de Cordoba’s text provided critical documentation of key
historic events such as the siege at Carmona, a circumstance which made her document
of interest to historians. Though this historical context would of course not make

Leonor’s writing well-known, it would preserve at least a limited place for her in the

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literary annals. On the other hand, as Ronald Surtz points out in his book Writing Women
in Late Medieval Spain, most literary production by women in Spain at the time was
written by nuns, writing at the behest of their confessor. At first glance, Teresa’s writing
would seem to fall into this same category, and thus be deemed as perhaps not worthy of
preservation.

The first of the Cartagena family to convert to Christianity was Teresa’s
grandfather, Salomon Halevy, (ca. 1355-1435). While serving as chief rabbi of Burgos,
he held a number of diplomatic roles. In 1390 he converted to Christianity, adopting the
new name Pablo Garcia de Santa Maria. While some scholars have speculated that his
conversion was motivated by opportunism and ambition following the violence of the
pogroms of 1369 and 1391, Pablo and his brother Alvar, who converted with him,
nonetheless made the most of their conversion and quickly rose within the ranks of the
Christian church. Twelve years later Pablo was named Bishop of C artagena, from which
appointment the name Cartagena would be added, and as we know it is this name that
would then come to be associated with his descendants. Pablo de Santa Maria authored a
number of theological treatises, as well as a national history entitled, Seven Ages of the
World (Siete Edades del Mundo), the latter of which would serve as an instructional tool
for Juan II. In addition he held various political offices, including Chancellor to Enrique
III, tutor to Juan II, and eventually became Bishop of Burgos. He also became friends
with Pedro de Luna, who would later hold the Avignon papacy under the name of
Benedict XIII. Following his renunciation of the papacy, Pedro de Luna would author his

Libro de Consolaciones de la Vida Humana, which Teresa would most certainly have had

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access to, and is likely to have been an influence in her writing of the Arboleda
(Seidenspinner Nunez, 5).

Two of Pablo’s sons, Gonzalo and Alonso, followed in their fathers’ footsteps,
pursuing diplomatic and ecclesiastical careers. Both served as Bishop of Plasencia, and
Alonso succeeded his father as Bishop of Burgos as well. Also like his father, Alonso
was a prolific writer. He translated works of Boccaccio, Cicero and Seneca, and also has
some twenty-seven historical, legal, and philosophical treatises to his own credit.

Teresa’s father, Pedro de Cartagena, third son of Pablo de Santa Maria chose the
path of a courtier. He served as bodyguard to Juan II, and also as royal counselor to
Enrique IV as well as to the Catholic Kings. He was married twice, first to Maria de
Sarabia, and later to Mencia de Rojas. Maria de Sarabia bore him five children, of which
Teresa is believed to have been the fourth. His second wife, Mencia de Rojas, would add
a daughter and a son to this numerous family, and don Pedro would also acknowledge
three illegitimate children, bringing the total number of children to ten.

In addition to or as a result of his own accomplishments at court, Pedro’s home
was also a frequent gathering place for Spain’s nobility. Teresa’s grandfather’s friendship
with Pedro de Luna has already been mentioned. It is also well-known that the princess
Blanca of Navarra stayed in the C artagena home on her way to be wed with Enrique IV
in 1440. Cantera Burgos also writes that the Condestable Alvaro de Luna was staying in
the Cartagena family home at the time of his arrest in 1453 (152). It is within this highly
cultured, intellectual environment that Teresa would spend her early years. Though as a
woman Teresa would of course not directly participate in the activities of her male

relatives, as a daughter of such a family, she would nonetheless have been an active

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participant in Spain’s upper class, and would most likely have received an education well
beyond that of many of her female contemporaries. She would undoubtedly have had
access to her family’s extensive library, and been exposed to literary, religious and
philosophical traditions.

Scholars have differed in their estimations of the year of Teresa’s birth. Louis
Hutton simply makes the general observation that she lived during the early half of the
fifteen century, a notion which one must call into question given what we know about the
dates of composition of the Arboleda and the Admiracio’n Operum Dey. Cantera Burgos
proposes the broadest period of time, suggesting that Teresa would have been born
sometime between 1420-1435 (538), a time-frame which has been widely accepted by
many scholars. Alan Deyermond proposes a slightly narrower time-frame in his article
“Spain’s First Women Writers” where he suggests the dates 1420-1425 (38). The earliest
estimate of Teresa’s birth is given by Dayle Seidenspinner-Nunez, who offers her view
that Teresa would have been born between 1415 and 1420 (10). If we accept the
A rboleda as having been written some time around 1450, given Teresa’s statement that
she had been deaf for 20 years, "oy son veinte afios que este freno ya dicho comencé a
costrefiir la haz de mis vanidades (Castro-Ponce, 121)", as well as her assertion that she
enjoyed a full and active life for some time before the onset of her deafness, it seems
likely that her birth would have occurred earlier rather than later in this twenty-year time
span.

Past this point we have few details of the author’s early life, save those things
which she herself chooses to include in the Arboleda, the content of the Admiraeion

Operum Dey being more of a theological treatise and thus containing less personal

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material. However, Teresa’s intent in the Arboleda was not to create a memoir, thus only
those facts of her life which are germane to her purpose find their way into her essay. We
are nonetheless able to glean a general picture of what her pre-convent life must have
been like. We know for instance that she would have spent her childhood living in the
family home located on Calle Cantarranas la Menor in Burgos, and that she in all
likelihood resided there until her entry into the convent. Teresa indicates in the Arboleda
that before becoming deaf she thrived on an active social life and enjoyed worldly
pleasures, which she later feels deprived of on account of her deafness, “aunque poblar de
veadnos no se puede, porque pocos o ningunos hallares que de su grado en ella quieran
morar, ca es estérile de plazeres tenporales e muy seca de glorias vanas, e la fuente de los
honores humanos tiene muy lexos en verdat” (97),34 and “me enojan algunas personas
quando me ruegan y dizen: "Id a fulanos qu'os quieren ver e aunque vos no lo oigades
oiran ellos a vos" (105).35 We further know that she pursued some form of study in
Salamanca, “pocos ar‘ios que yo estudie’ en el estudio de Salamanca” (213), though
exactly what this study consisted of is unclear. Dayle Seidenspinner-Nunez suggests that
she may have gone to a convent in Salamanca and received some education there, “In all
likelihood, she would have been tutored at home and then sent to Salamanca to study in a
convent, for in the late Middle Ages religious houses trained not only their own novitiates

but also the sons or daughters of the nobility and the wealthy bourgeoise” (10).36

 

3’ All Spanish citations of Teresa’s text will be taken from Clara Castro-Ponce. Teresa de Cartagena,
Arboleda de los enfermos. Admiraeion operum Dev. Edicion Singular. Brown University, Ph.D.
dissertation, 2001. All English translations will be taken from Dayle Seidenspinner-Nunez, The Cloisters of
my Ears: The Writings of Teresa de Cartagena. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1998.

35 So with reason I am angered when people beg me and say, "Go to so-and-so; for they want to see you
and even though you cannot hear them. they will hear you” (27).

36 Much study has been done on the education of women in the Middle Ages. For additional information
see: Kelly, Joan. Women, History and Theory: The Essays of Joan Kelly. Chicago: The U of Chicago P.

107

 

However, while Teresa would most certainly have had access to such educational
opportunities, Teresa’s education would have a different focus than that received by her
brothers. Rocio Quispe-Agnoli addresses these issues in her article “Teaching, Learning,
Reading and Writing: Educational Tools for Women in Fifteenth-Century Spain” where

she writes:

according to Cicero, educado referred to "spiritual formation," and in antiquity,
the main goal of edueado was to prepare the individual for the public life.
Therefore, education leads to knowledge, and knowledge to power. This,
however, was not the expected path for women to follow in the societies of the
Middle Ages. In spite of this disadvantageous situation, European medieval and
early modern women did have access to the books. Most of these books were
related to spiritual counsel, such as meditation, prayers, psalm-singing and
biblical excerpts. The spiritual scope of female education would lead women to
their relationship with God and correct the consequences of the first sinful
woman, Eve (32).

Teresa would therefore not have received an education that would prepare her for public

life, but would presumably have received an education oriented toward spiritual growth

and development. Such an education would of course prepare Teresa extremely well for

the works she was to write later on.

Though as we have seen Teresa grew up in a large family, her family members
occupy only a few lines in her writing. However, her one brief mention of her relations

with her parents is enough to let the reader know that discord may have existed, or at

 

1984; Kelso, Ruth. Doctrine for the Lady of the Renaissance. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1956: and Labalme,
Patricia. Beyond Their Sex: Learned Women of the European Past. New York: New York UP, 1980.

108

least that those relationships would seem to have been strained. Her only mention of her
parents occurs when she is discussing the difficulties of her illness, which she indicates
was present for some time before finally causing her hearing loss. In her only mention of
her family she writes: “la salut nos desanpara, los amigos nos olvidan, los parientes se
enojan, e aun la propia madre se enoja con la hija enferma, y el padre aboresce al hijo que
con continuas dolerias le ocupare la posada” (142). Though only a brief sentence, these
statements would support the theory offered by scholars such as Ronald Surtz that
Teresa’s family may have been impatient with her ill health, and that she was sent to the
convent so that her family would no longer have to care for her. In this context the lack of
maternal imagery is noteworthy.

When talking about God, her focus is on the saints, or Jesus, but at no point does
she pray to, or honor, the Virgin. The one mention of Mary occurs in the Arboleda, when
she is reciting a litany of plaintive statements produced by her illness. The Admiraeion,
whose focus was defending the idea that God could endow a woman with the ability to
reason and write, and would therefore seem to offer a perfect context for inclusion of
Mary, holds no mention of her. It would of course be stretching the matter to draw any
sweeping conclusions from such limited information, but certainly this absence of a
mother figure, along with Teresa’s albeit brief description of her parents’ frustrations
raises speculation about Teresa’s relationship with her mother.

Regarding her monastic life, we of course also know that following her deafness
Teresa entered the convent, seemingly involuntarily, or at least that convent life would
not have been of her choosing. Whether deliberately or accidentally, the name of Teresa’s

convent is never mentioned in either essay. However, it is generally believed that

109

Teresa’s convent was of the Franciscan order, possibly located in Burgos or Salamanca.
Carmen Marimon-Llorca further suggests that Teresa may also have entered into the
same convent that Leonor Lopez de Cordoba describes having entered in the Memorias:

El convento de Teresa debio ser uno de aquellos para hijas de familias ricas, quiza

como el que fundaron las bisabuelas de Leonor Lopez de Cordoba: «estaba en la

Orden de Guadalaxara, que la hicieron mis bisabuelas, e dotaron precio para

quarenta Ricas Hembras de su linaje que viniesen en aquella Orden» en los que se

podia desarrollar una cierta vida social. La misma Teresa nos habla de las visitas
que recibian «...como acesce quando alguna persona de grand estado e dinidad
nos quiere venir a ver...» (Arboleda... , 97-98) y parece no haber perdido por
completo el contacto con el mundo durante su vida conventual a juzgar por la
relacion que mantuvo con Dofia Juana de Mendoza; porque —segt'rn ella misma

nos cuenta— debia salir con cierta frecuencia del convento (l l 1).

As the citation from the Memorias suggests, this was a convent founded for “forty
wealthy women” where it would have been intended that members could to a large extent
continue to enjoy social involvement, and have a fair amount of freedom both to make
and receive visits from friends and relatives. Whether or not Teresa entered into the same
convent as Leonor, the above-mentioned comments regarding Teresa’s maintenance of
social relationships as well as her communication with Juana de Mendoza support the
notion that the convent she entered was similar in nature. Thus, her “exile” would be at
least in part self-imposed, a notion which I will explore in more depth later in this

chapter.

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3.2. Deafness, Literacy, and Orality

Though briefly discussed at the beginning of this chapter, it will be useful at this
juncture to present some considerations regarding the issue of Teresa’s deafness. One can
readily imagine that the ramifications of deafiress would be much more far-reaching than
in contemporary society. There was not in the fifteenth-century the disability awareness
that exists today, nor did exist the notion that an individual with a disability would even
attempt to live the same life as his or her nondisabled peers. Teresa’s deafness would
therefore have broad implications for her adult life, certainly in her personal life, but also
in her experience as reader and as author.

As indicated earlier, Teresa’s personal life would become significantly more
limited as a result of her deafness. Teresa’s status as a woman would of course have
meant that she would not enjoy the political, ecclesiastical, and literary options of her
high-power male relatives. However, her position as the daughter of a family that was at
the heart of nearly every aspect of Spain’s political and religious life afforded her many
opportunities. As has already been observed, it offered her access to both formal
education and to her family’s extensive libraries. It would have made her attractive in
social circles, and would have positioned her to make a good marriage, as did two of her
sisters, Juana and Maria de Sarabia. Though her social status would not be diminished
and would allow her to enter into a convent for noble or bourgeoise women, she would
no longer be considered marriageable.

While we have no indication that Teresa truly desired marriage, we are told in the
Arboleda that she did not desire the convent, that she was forced to enter by God in the

form of her deafness:

lll

Grand tienpo ha, virtuosa sefiora, que la niebla de tristeza tenporal e
humana cubrio los te'rminos de mi bevir e con un espeso torvellino de angustiosas
pasiones me llevo a una insula donde tantos afios ha que en ella bivo, si vida
llarnar se puede; jamas pude yo ver persona que enderezase mis pies por la carrera
de paz nin me mostrase camino por donde pudiese llegar a poblado de plazeres.
Asi que en este exillio e tenebroso destierro, mas sepultada que morada me
sintiendo plogo a la misericordia del muy Altisimo alunbrarme con la Iucema de
su piadosa gracia, porque pudiese poner mi nonbre en la nomina de aquiellos de
quien es escrito: "los que moravan en tiniebras y en sonbra de muerte, luz les es
demostrada” (97).37
Although throughout this essay Teresa frames this change in fortune as God’s

attempt to instruct her—an issue which will be critical to our discussion of trauma—in
these opening lines it is clear that Teresa did not wish to enter a convent. Furthermore, it
would seem that time has not changed her view. Even at the time of her writing, which
she tells us is twenty years after the onset of her deafness and presumably also close in
time to her entry into the convent, she is still bitterly unhappy—though perhaps more
resigned--with this change in her situation. This supposition is further bome-out by
Carmen Marimon-Llorca’s observation that Teresa never mentions other convent sisters

or discusses the tranquility of convent life:

 

’7 Long ago, virtuous lady, the cloud of temporal and human sadness covered the borders of my life and
with a thick whirlwind of anguished sufferings carried me off to an island called "Oprobrium hominum et
abiecio plebis" where l have lived for so many years — if life this can be called without ever seeing anyone
to direct my steps onto the road of peace or show me a path whereby I could arrive to any community of
pleasures. Thus in this exile and shadowy banishment, feeling myself more in a sepulcher than a dwelling it
pleased the mercy of the Most High to illuminate me with the light of His compassionate grace so that I
might place my name in the register of those about whom it is written: "The people that walked in darkness,
have seen a great light: to them that dwelt hi the region of the shadow of death. light is risen" [Isaiah 9:2].
(25)

l 12

(...) “sobre todo, porque no hay una sola alusion en los dos tratados ni a sus
hermanas, ni al sosiego de la vida conventual, lo que nos hace pensar que el
convento no era mas que el marco donde Teresa soportaba su propio aislamiento
del mundo, vivia su profunda vida interior y de comunicacion con Dios y se
relacionaba ocasionalmente con sus contemporaneos” (112).38

The convent for Teresa therefore seems rather to be nothing more than a holding
space where she bore her deafness and isolation. And though as I have indicated it is
likely that the convent would have provided her opportunities for continued social
interaction with the outside world, as we shall see in our consideration of the Arboleda
Teresa writes that social interaction simply makes her feel more isolated since she cannot
hear the conversation around her.

While the personal redefinition of Teresa’s world would have been difficult in and
of itself, I concur with Seidenspinner-Nufiez’s view that Teresa’s deafness would also
have had an impact on her literary experience, given the highly oral/aural dimension of
literature at the time. Well into the Middle Ages the practice of reading was generally
I understood to mean reading aloud, often in a group. This practice served multiple
functions. First and perhaps most importantly it was used to facilitate instruction,
particularly within convents and monasteries. In these settings group reading would be
used so that monks and nuns who were unable to read would learn scripture and become
familiar with religious writing. Teresa herself refers to this practice in the Arboleda,

when she writes of her own recollections of being able to listen to sermons before her

 

’8 Above all, because there is not a single reference in either work, either to her fellow nuns, or to the
tranquility of convent life, we are led to believe that the convent was nothing more than the space where
Teresa endured her isolation from the world and lived her profound interior life of reflection and
communication with God, and maintained occasional contact with her contemporaries (my translation).

113

hearing loss: “me acuerdo de un tienpo, el qual era antes que mis orejas cerrasen las
puertas alas bozes humanas, aver oido en los sermons” (201).39

In addition to being used in instructional ways, reading out loud was also used as
a form of group entertainment. One can speculate that this would almost certainly have
occurred in a household such as the Cartagenas, where learning and intellectual
accomplishment were so highly valued. Thus, Teresa’s deafness would have turned
reading from the collective, social experience that it had formerly been, to a silent,
solitary activity. Although to the modern reader who is accustomed to reading as a silent
practice this may appear to be insignificant, books are the one pleasurable activity left to
Teresa following the onset of deafness. We know that her love of books predates her
deafness, and so on some level it seems likely or at least possible that the loss of the
ability to participate in comunal reading. would only serve to magnify Teresa’s other

losses.

In her brief discussion of deafness, Seidenspinner Nufiez presents a phenomenon
described by Oliver Sacks wherein individuals who experience post-lingual deafness hear
phantom noises in situations where they have experienced noise accompanying a visual
cue. She further suggests that Teresa’s ability to maintain interior dialogue—or I would
add, dialogue with God—is in fact a recreation of the phenomenon described by Sacks. I
would take this a step further, and suggest that it may actually be reflective of a need
within Teresa to place the act of reading within a familime social context, a mechanism
for lessening the intense solitude of which she writes. In this way she continues to

experience reading as a collective or social activity, her companions now. rather than

 

’9 I remember a time, before my ears closed their doors to human voices, when I had heard the Master of
Sentences referred to in sermons (76).

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being her family members, or fellow auditors, are now her texts and God. The essays are
replete with references to God “reading her” or “reading to her”: “El solo me ensefio, e E1
solo me leyo” (259).4O

Lastly, deafness will also influence Teresa in her role as author. First and most
obviously, because it will provide much of the content for her first essay. Second, the
intense isolation that her deafiress forces upon her lends to her writing a unique
perspective, both in terms of the restrictions it places on what would seem to be an
extroverted personality and the change it brings in her relationship with the written word,
in going from a social, aural activity to one that is silent and solitary. Seidenspinner
Nufiez makes the astute observation that “In effect, as a writer, Teresa is thrice
marginalized -by her gender, by her deafness, and by her status as a conversa (3).
However, as with Leonor Lopez de Cordoba, the circumstances that marginalized Teresa
may also have been the very thing that made it possible for her to assume the role of
author. By the time Leonor began to write her Memorias, she essentially had little to lose
by incurring any stigma that may have come from female authorship. She had lost her
father, siblings, and many relatives to the torture of the Atarazanas, and with that loss
came the loss of status and wealth she had enjoyed as one of its members. She had been
forced to abandon the home of her maternal relatives, and she had been banished from
Queen Catherine’s court. Any scorn she might have incurred for attempting to write
down the events of her life would seem to be able to have little if any impact on her at
that point. Similarly, Teresa’s deafness leaves her with no option to resume the active life
she had led before as a member of one of Spain’s leading families. And unlike many of

her sisters, the social interaction of the secular world is not replaced by the communal life

 

4° ”He alone taught me, he alone read to me/read me” (my translation)

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offered by convent living. As we have seen, she seems not to identify with the other
sisters in her convent, rather her identification is with the convent of the infirm,
“convento de los enfermos” (128), a sisterhood with whom she can not enjoy physical
community. Therefore, particularly given her literary background, the transition from
verbal interlocutor to author, once she feels that she can no longer partake of verbal
exchange, seems inevitable. While her detractors may have annoyed or frustrated her,
there was nothing they could do to worsen Teresa’s plight. Both Teresa and Leonor are
careful to place their writings within accepted paradigms, glorification of God, combating
idleness, instructing others to commend themselves to the Virgin, but both also seem to
have an awareness of a certain freedom that allows them to cast aside societal disapproval

of a woman writing.

3.3 The Texts: Consolation and Reconstitution

As previously stated, Teresa authored two essays. The first was entitled Arboleda
de los Enferrnos, and was written approximately in 1450. Though set within a religious
context, it offers a glimpse into Teresa’s personal experience of coming to terms with
both her deafness and her entry into the convent. The second essay, the Admiraeion
Operum Dei --Teresa tells us--is written at the urging of Juana de Mendoza, with whom it
is believed Teresa maintained a close friendship. Much less personal in nature, in this
second essay Teresa draws on Scripture to frame a defense against the incredulity of male
critics who doubted that the Arboleda could have been written by a woman. Though
written for different purposes, and differing significantly in their content, these two

essays together form a single whole that reflects the processes for coping with trauma

116

described by Catherine Robson, Cathy Caruth, and from a more clinical perspective,
Allan Young. We know that several years elapsed between the writing of the plaintive
Arboleda and the completion of Teresa’s process in the Admiraeion Operum Dei, and
given the change in tone, it is likely that during the interim years Teresa continued to
grapple with the task of accepting her circumstances. This interrupted process is
congruent with the process of oscillation described by Cathy Caruth, and also with that of
reframing/recycling described by Allan Young. To place this in the context of the literary
expression of trauma, I posit that though Teresa tries in the Arboleda to convince her
reader that the silencing of her lips and ears and her removal from worldly chatter and
activity is a blessing from a loving God who cares for her spiritual development, she has
not yet managed to convince herself. Her language betrays a woman who still bitterly
misses her former life, but is struggling arduously to bring her psyche into the line with
the words she is putting to paper. As we have seen, Young describes this process as

follows:

[they can] reframe their traumatic memories, making the memory content
consistent with their preexisting cognitive schemas. They can attempt to revise the
cognitive schemas, making them consonant with their memories. Or they can try
to empty the memories of their salience and emotional power, by assimilating
them (responses one and two) or erecting defenses against them via denial, efforts
at avoiding the stimuli that trigger recollections, generalized emotional numbing,
and so on. The psychological process through which dissonant memories are
assimilated is believed to consist of phases and cycles... Normally, cycling and

processing continue until the memory is metabolized, at which point it becomes

117

part of the individual's inactive memory. That is, it is retrievable but no longer
intrusive (8-9).
As we shall see in more detail in Chapter 4 when we discuss Madre Juana de la
Cruz, religion provided each of these women a cognitive schema that would greatly
enhance their ability to deal with the traumatic events in their lives. This I believe is
Teresa’s task in the Arboleda, to revise her understanding of her misfortune, and turn it
from illness, isolation and pain, into a special grace bestowed upon her by God. Despite
her best effort, however, I do not believe that she is successful within the Arboleda.
Rather, it is in the Admiracio’n Operum Dey that she actually achieves what she sets out
to do in her earlier essay. In this way, the Arboleda serves as a literary example of the
earlier stages described in Young’s cyclical model of assimilation, the reworking of the
traumatic event to bring it in line with Teresa’s cognitive schema. Seidenspinner Nufiez
has made a similar observation within a literary context, when she says of the
Admiracio'n:
Teresa reasserts her authorship and ultimately reclaims her text by completing the
autobiographical project suspended halfway through Grove of the Infirrn and by
tracing her journey toward spiritual understanding ("to know God") and self-
knowledge ("to know myself‘), a journey that ends in Teresa's final biblical
analogue, a daring imitatio Christi. In cataloguing the lessons she learned,
sandwiched between the exaltation and knowledge of God and the abnegation and
shaping of her will is Teresa's recognition of the self-knowledge she achieved in

the writing of her autobiographical project ("to know myself'), the site of the

118

quiet resolve and gentle irony of her defense as she establishes her text -and the

self she constructs in her texts--as one of the admirable works of God (137).

Thus, while I will consider each essay separately, the underlying structure in my
view is that at least as they relate to trauma, they are two parts of the same text, one
whole that constitutes one textual representation of Teresa’s restoration or reconstitution
of the self.

Moreover, because discussing both essays in their entirety would require its own
study, I will limit my discussion to those issues most pertinent to considerations of
literary expression of trauma in Teresa’s texts.41 I will begin by considering three aspects
of the Arboleda, Teresa’s statement of purpose in writing the essay, her discussion of the
bit and bridle imagery, and her exegesis of the supper of the Lamb in which she describes
the diet of the infirm. Though I will briefly treat other aspects of this essay, these three
themes are most germane to the discussion here.

Though autobiographical in nature, the Arboleda is not a memoir, and is therefore
not concerned with narrating the specifics of Teresa’s life, focusing instead on emotional
and spiritual content. Moreover, in much the same way that Leonor Lopez de Cordoba
chose to open her text by implementing testamentary formula typical of court documents,
Teresa also chooses to place her text within the context of style and genre popular in the

fifteenth century. invoking forms accepted by male authors such as the religious and

 

4' There are already many excellent analyses of Teresa’s two essays. For a more general overview of her
work, see the following: Cartagena, Teresa de. Ed. Clara Castro-Ponce. Teresa de Cartagena, Arboleda de
los enfermos. Admiracion ogerum Dey. Edicion Singular. Brown University, Ph.D. dissertation, 2001.
Seidenspinner-Nunez, Dayle. The Cloisters of my Ears: The Writings of Teresa de Cartagena. Cambridge:
D.S. Brewer, 1998. Deyermond. A. “El convento de Dolencias: the Works of Teresa de Cartagena»
Journal of Hispanic Philolgy, l (1976): 19-29, and “Spain's First Women Writers”, in Beth Miller, ed.,
Women in Hispanic Literature: Icons and Fallen Idols. Berkeley: U of California P, 1983. 27-52. Marimon
Llorca, Carmen. Mujeg sociedad medieval: Prosistas castellawedievales. Alicante: Caja de Ahorros
Provincial, I990.

119

consolatory treatise. As has already been stated, Teresa’s grandfather Pablo de Santa
Maria was a friend of Pedro de Luna, and most scholars agree that Teresa would have
had access to his Libro de C onsolaciones de la Vida Humana (Books of C onsolations of
Human life) written in 1604. Alan Deyermond, in his article, “El Convento de Dolencias”
notes Teresa’s reliance on imagery common to period texts, images of family
relationships, landscape, and most notably, the frequent use of the grove or garden image
or locus amoenus in other period texts such as Verge] de consolacion, Orto do Esposo,
Jardin de nobles donzellas, Verge] de principes (21). Deyermond also draws the reader’s
attention to Teresa’s citing of the Bible, as well as many of the church fathers, St.
Augustine, St. Bernard, St. Jerome, among others. Unfortunately, a thorough exploration
of textual influences and imagery would require more space than we have here, and is not
central to the issues under consideration in this study. It is however germane in that
Teresa’s use of these topoi is I think a deliberate choice on her part. In much the same
way that Leonor seeks validation through courtly formulae, Teresa seeks validation by
establishing herself as well-read in both sacred and secular literature. In doing so, she is
able to write an essay that is personal as well as intellectual and artistic. The opening of
the Arboleda demonstrates this expertly.

The problem, or traumatic event, is named immediately in the Arboleda’s
opening: “Este tractado se llama Arboleda de los enfermos, el qual conpuso Teresa de
C artagena, seyendo apasionada de graves dolerias especialmente aviendo e1 sentido del
oir perdido del todo (97).42 However, unlike in Leonor Lopez de Cordoba’s Memorias,

where Caruth’s notion of a “double-telling” was pivotal. in the Arboleda Teresa’s

 

‘2 “This treatise is called Grove of the lr_rfirm,l which Teresa de Cartagena composed, being afflicted with
grave ailments and, in particular, having lost completely her sense of hearing (24).

120

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concern is not the traumatic event of losing her deafness, but rather the life that is left to
her having experienced that event. The reader learns almost immediately that the
Arboleda was written some time after both the onset of deafness and Teresa’s entry into
the convent, “Grand tienpo ha, virtuosa sefiora, que la niebla de tristeza tenporal e
humana cubrio los términos de mi bevir e con un espeso torvellino de angustiosas
pasiones me llevo a una insula donde tantos afios ha que en ella bivo” (97).43 Though
she makes frequent mention of her “pasiones” (passions) and “graves dolores” (grave
pains) she does not at any point either discuss the nature of her illness or attempt to
narrate those events. While she does write of her parents’ frustration with what would
seem to have been a constant or long-terrn illness continuing to be a source of anguish for
her, what she presents to the reader are her feelings about that experience, rather than
providing any narration of her family life or description of quarrels with her parents.
As I have suggested earlier, in the Arboleda the reader finds a duality of language,
a dialectic tension between where Teresa would like to be and where she is. Her
statement of her purpose in writing belies this tension:
E aunque non desenbuelta la lengua y peor dispuesto e1 sentido solamente rne
aprovechare' dellos por no dar lugar a estos dos dafios, los quales son soledat e
ociosidat. E pues la soledat no puedo apartar de mi quiero huir la ociosidat porque
non pueda" travar casamiento con la soledat ca seria un peligroso matrimonio. E
si puede asi arredrar de mi diestro lado la soledat la ociosidat del lado siniestro,
non dubdedes que en ello afanar por descanso lo avria mi mano. [...] E donde el

oir fallesce, gque’ tiene que ver el fablar? Quedara la presenta muerta & sola del

 

4" Long ago, virtuous lady, the cloud of temporal and human sadness covered the borders of my life and
with a thick whirlwind of anguished sufferings carried me off to an island where l have lived for so
many years (24)

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todo. Asi, que por estas razones e por el espirencia que las faze dignas de fee, se
puede creer de mi quando estoy sola; pues asi es que esta mi esquiva e durable
soledat apartar de mi no puedo, quiero hazer guerra a la ociosidat, ocupandome en
esta pequefia obra, la qual bien se puede dezar que no es buena nin comunal mas
mala del todo. Pero pues el fin porque se haze es bueno bien se puede seguir otro
mayor bien. E por la mi voluntat éste sea que Aquel soberano Sefior que mas las
voluntades que las obras acata quiere hazer apazible e acebto delante de los ojos
de su grand clemencia lo que enojoso e digno de reprehension alas gentes

paresce. (100-101)44

However, keeping in mind Teresa’s opening lines, it can be readily seen that while she
offers as a primary purpose to combat idleness and solitude she simultaneously expresses
a deep loneliness that cannot be driven away even by the company of her books. Carmen
Marimon-Llorca makes a similar observation:
“Hace veinte afios que es sorda, durante ese tiempo, Solo 103 libros 1a han
acompafiado, y solo ellos han sido su fuente de conocimiento, pero su compafiia no

ha sido suficiente para aliviarla de la amargura de no poderse comunicar con los

 

4’ And although my tongue is not eloquent and my sense is ill prepared, [1 am writing this treatise] to avoid
succumbing to these two dangers, solitude and idleness; and since I cannot rid myself of solitude, I want to
drive idleness away so that it cannot join with solitude, for this would be a dangerous marriage. And if my
hand could thus drive off solitude fi'om my right side and idleness from my left, do not doubt that it would
ever tire from this travail; And where hearing fails, what good is speech? One is left dead and
completely isolated. Thus, for these reasons, and because my experience lends them credence, you can well
believe how very lonely I am; and since I cannot rid myself of this unsparing and lasting loneliness, I want
to combat my idleness by busying myself with this little treatise, which one might well say is neither good
nor even ordinary, but rather completely bad. However, since it is written for a good purpose, a greater
good consequently may ensue. And because of my good intention, may our sovereign Lord, whojudges
intentions rather than works, find my writing, which seems vexing and reprehensible to some people,
pleasing and acceptable to His merciful eyes.

(25).

122

demas. La Arboleda parece un intento de llenar e1 hueco de sus horas —vacias ante
la imposibilidad de escuchar—- y de esas frustraciones” (117).

Given Teresa’s insistence on the pleasure she used to take in “worldly chatter” one can
readily deduce that while she may not wish to engage in verbal exchange, she would
nonetheless still be driven toward some form of self-expression. The transition from the
mouth to the pen, particularly for a well-read woman from a family where learning and
literary achievement were highly valued, would thus be a short one. In other words,
Teresa has in effect; decided to do what Catherine Robson has called writing her way in
and through the wounds of idleness and loneliness that twenty years of reading and
reflection have not been able to take away. Without calling into question Teresa’s stated
purpose, I argue therefore that the Arboleda has a dual purpose, first it’s stated one to
help Teresa pass away the long hours and keep her mind and her hand occupied, and
second, to write her way out of her sadness and into conformity with the will of God.

Teresa again reinforces this tension between her natural inclinations and her
imposed isolation in her use of the bit and bridle image from Psalm 31. This passage is
first cited in her prologue, "With bit and bridle bind fast their jaws, who come not near
unto thee" (Psalm 31 :9), and is later further developed. As she tells us,

Para mejor ver commo e quanto haze a mi proposito esta autoridat es de

considerar que este acatamiento de cabestro e freno es diputado para los animales

brutos que carecen de razon, porque con estos artificiales acatamientos son traidos

casi por fuerca adonde les cunple e al servicio de su duefio. Conviene asi que por

el cabestro son guiados e por el freno costrefiidos. E ansi como en la boca e

cerviz de los ya dichos animales es puesto cabestro e freno por las dichas razones,

bien ansi paresce por otras dos semejantes causas ser dado a todo animal
razonable cabestro y freno. El cabestro es la razon y el freno es la tenpranea y
discricion, ca la razon nos guia e deve guiar a todo lo que es bueno y conplidero,
no solo a nuestro bien tenporal, mas a lo espiritual e pertenesciente a1 servicio de
nuestro Senor; e la tenplanca y discrcion nos costrifie a refrenar los apetitos

desordenados de nuestra humana flaqueza (115).45

Thus, the bit and bridle are used for the restraint and guidance of animals incapable of
reason. Likewise, God uses these same tools to guide his flock. The bit represents human
reason, and the bridle temperance and discretion. Initially the expectation, Teresa tells us,
is the voluntary use of these tools in order to live a life that conforms with the will of
God, but Teresa also indicates that when one fails to use discretion and reason of one’s
own volition, God has yet a second bit and bridle, that of dolencias (afflictions) to guide

those individuals who must be forced to follow his ways:

Segund desto, bien es y mas de bien serle afiadido otro freno asi commo animal
bruto. [...] Digo e afirrno que por mi grand bien y manfiesto provecho el Sefior
soberano con cabestro y freno de dolencia e pasiones costrifio las mexillas de mis

vanidades. [...] La dolencia buena y durable es cabestro para abaxar la cerviz de

 

’5 To better appreciate how this biblical authority suits my purpose, we must consider that a bit and a bridle
are designed for dumb animals who lack reason so that with these bindings they may be brought almost by
force to a place that suits them and pleases their master: thus they are guided by their bit and constrained by
their bridle. And just as, for the reasons stated above, this bit and bridle are placed in the mouth and on the
neck of irrational animals, so for similar reasons another bit and bridle are provided for rational animals.
The bit is our reason and the bridle our temperance and discretion. For reason guides us toward all that is
good and fitting for our temporal good and our spiritual well-being in the service of our Lord. and
temperance and discretion constrain us to curb the disordered appetites of our human weakness.

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sobervia es freno para costrefiir y evitar los deseos dafiosos y enpecibles al anima

(117).46

This notion that God intervenes to force his direction on those who do not employ
reason and discretion in good, spiritual living, raises some interesting questions. Though
Teresa at no point suggests that she carries a dark secret as does her English predecessor
Margery Kempe (ca. 1373), this last passage suggests that she does regard some aspect of
her former conduct as being errant enough to warrant being forcibly restrained by God.
The most obvious and simple explanation of this would simply be that Teresa at some
point did engage in behavior that she feels earned her the punishment of God. However,
if in fact we accept that she is grasping to revise cognitive schemas which she had held
for her entire life, now some forty years. one also must consider the possibility that
Teresa is reframing her understanding of her former life, so as to justify punishment from
God as a means of explaining her deafness. As Judith Lewis Herman points out in
Trauma and Recovery, at some point during the recovery process all victims of trauma
must confront the question of why this incident befell them. Herman explains:

the survivor confronts another, equally incomprehensible question: Why me? The

arbitrary, random quality of her fate defies the basic human faith in a just or even

predictable world order. In order to develop a full understanding of the trauma

story, the survivor must examine the moral questions of guilt and responsibility

 

4° From this it follows that the man who does not know nor wants to know how to use his bit and bridle is
an irrational animal since he does not exercise reason, for the proper use of reason is to admonish and
constrain us to desire good and avoid evil. Therefore, it seems that whoever abandons good and follows
evil has forsaken reason, or reason has forsaken him. Accordingly. it is more than right that. like a dumb
animal, he be provided with another bridle. I say and affirm that with bit and bridle my sovereign Lord
constrained the jaws of my vanities to benefit my spiritual well-being. A good and lasting ailment is a
bridle to humble the proud neck and a bit to constrain desires dangerous and injurious to the soul (34).

125

and reconstruct a system of belief that makes sense of her undeserved suffering

(178).

The fact that Teresa is reconstructing her belief systems is evident throughout this
essay. What form that reconstruction has taken is less discernible; is Teresa simply
owning up to flaws in her own conduct and accepting the designated punishment? Or is
she in fact revising her views of her former life and taking on guilt in order to explain her
suffering? Unfortunately neither her text, nor the current body of information about her
life allows us to arrive at a definitive answer to this question. However, as with Madre
Juana, the religious mantle offers Teresa a kind of special protection that is more difficult
to come by in a modern worldview. Whatever the source of her feelings of guilt, her
religious framework enables her to turn what could be viewed as God’s punishment into
what will ultimately be His special grace, as we will see in the Admiracio'n Operum Dey.

A second principal theme in the Arboleda is the motif of the supper of the Lamb,
which Teresa combines with a parable from the Gospel of Luke. Through the use of this
parable Teresa initiates a lengthy allegorical discourse which employs the metaphor of
food and diet for spiritual fulfillment and well-being. In the parable from Luke, a man
prepares a supper, and when none of his guests attend, he bids his servant to go and
gather new guests from the hungry and suffering of the street. In a moment of self-
awareness and self-acceptance, Teresa equates this with the supper of the Lamb, and is
able to see both sides of her struggle, seeing in herself both the guest who refused to
attend and the one who would eventually be brought in by special invitation. Teresa
initially places herself within the first group of invited guests who do not wish to attend,

asking the question, who given a choice would not choose health over sickness. She then

126

supports her argument with the story of Tobias, who argues that he will find no other

pleasures in life if his eyes are unable to see the sky. She writes:

En esta manera se entiende, 0 me paresse que se deve entender: qualquier
enferrno, por bueno e virtuoso que sea, padesce la dolencia contra su voluntat e
aunque sea justo y santo, deseara ser libre de pasiones corporales, y si aquéllas 1e
hizieren conpafiia non le plazera dello. Onde avemos enxenplo en Tobias quondo
nuestro Sefior premitio que cegase e commo el angel Rafael le saludase diziendo:
"G020 a ti sienpre sea", respondio el santo onbre: "gQual gozo sera a mi pues la
luz del cielo no veo...?" Donde paresce que no le plazia con aquella pasion. (3E
quién es que non desee ser sano mas que enfermo? No, ninguno en los humanos
yo creo se podria hallar tan perfetto que negase aquello a que naturalmente es
inclinado (128).47
This is one of only a few brief moments in the Arboleda when Teresa seems comfortable
with her natural predilection for the world’s entertainments. But this moment is fleeting,
as Teresa quickly shifts her perspective and resumes her exhortation that all should
abandon their own will and conform to the will of God: “Pero entra de grado a la cena ya

dicha si conosce serle dada por su bien, y con devota paciencia y accion de gracias

 

‘7 It seems to me this should be understood in this way: any invalid, no matter how good or virtuous, suffers
illness against his will; even though he may be just and saintly, he will desire to be free of physical
suffering and he takes no pleasure in its company. Of this we have an example in Tobias, when our Lord
permitted him to be blinded and when the angel Raphael greeted him, saying, "Joy be to thee always," the
saintly man replied, "What manner of joy shall be to me who sit in darkness, and see not the light of
heaven?" [Tobias 5:11-12]. From this it appears that his suffering did not please him. And who does not
desire to be healthy rather than sick? No human, I believe, is so perfect that he will deny what he naturally
prefers, which is to desire health above all things (40).

127

conforrna a su querer con la voluntat de Dios; plaziéndole, no naturalmente, ca esto no
podia ser, mas espiritualmente, con todo aquello que al Senor plaze” (129).48

Teresa continues to write of the importance of accepting the will of God and his
wisdom and mercy in removing her from the world and forcing her to be silent and listen
to his word. However, here she is much less strident than she was in her self-criticism in
her discussion of the bit and bridle. Here, rather than making the argument that her
punishment was merited and necessary she continues to be keenly aware of her own
unhappiness. This segment of her text almost has the feel of the reflections of a child who
has just been punished, perhaps recognizing that a behavioral adjustment is in order, but
nonetheless unhappy at being the recipient of her parents’ corrective measures. Teresa’s
appreciation of God’s corrective measures appears at this point to be largely intellectual,
as she still recalls the pleasures of her former life.

The explication of Luke’s parable is followed by a lengthy discussion of the
benefits of “la cena divinal” (God’s supper), which in turn leads to an extolling of the
virtues of a healthy spiritual diet. Still, she places herself among those who would make
different choices had she been able. In her discussion of the diet of the infirm, when she
writes of the desire for human pleasure she uses the nosotros form: “Trabajamos por traer
a nuestras manos los gozos humanos y ellos no quieren venir porque todo el bien deste
mundo es manjar de los sanos” (l4l),49 clearly placing herself among those still desirous
of worldly pleasures. She then proceeds to cajole her fellow sufferers—and herself--to

partake of and enjoy the diet befitting the infirm, a diet which is bitter but beneficial:

 

‘8 he enters gladly if he recognizes that it is given for his own good, and with devout patience and gratitude
he conforms his desire to God's will, taking pleasure spiritually -not naturally, for that cannot be-in
everything pleasing to the Lord (40).

’9 We strive to bring within our reach human joys and they refuse to come. All the blessings of this world
are food reserved for the healthy (46)

128

pues dexemos lo ajeno y usennos de nuestra dieta, y de tales viandas gustemos
que nos hagan buen estomago sofridor de todo trabajo. De seis viandas me
paresce que devemos y podemos usar seguramente todos los que dolerias
padescemos. Las quales son e’stas: tributada tristeza, paciensia durable, contricion
amarga, confesion verdadera y freqt'rentada, oracion devota, perseveracion en
obras virtuosas. E destas seis viandas e de otras sus familiares podemos comer sin
temor; y aunque parescan a1 gusto algun tanto amargas, necesario es que asi sea.
Ca en la dieta a pocos enfermos sabe bien, pero es provechosa y es fortificativa.
Por ende queramos lo amargo, pues lo dulce no nos quiere (141-142).50
One can hardly avoid here the image of a child being admonished to eat his vegetables,
and Teresa, it would seem, would definitely prefer dessert. Her struggle in adhering to
this diet is exposed, as she works to convince both herself and others of the benefits of a
diet that has been forced on her. Teresa freely acknowledges that the dishes served on this
diet are bitter and unpleasant, but good for one’s health. She further recognizes that the

more desirable dishes (“lo dulce”) are no longer within her grasp: “no nos quiere” (141).

This struggle is at it’s core a type of conversion experience. Though Teresa’s
family had converted to Christianity two generations ago, as has been previously stated,
speculation exists that the motivation may have been more one of survival than an actual
spiritual change-of—heart. Teresa’s conversion is truly one of a spiritual nature, a struggle

to accept God’s will over her own. This representation of conversion as internal struggle

 

so let us leave what we cannot have and get accustomed to our own diet, and let us partake of those foods
that suit our stomach and help us suffer our travail. It seems to me that we who endure suffering should
partake of these six dishes: grievous sadness, enduring patience, bitter contrition, frequent and heartfelt
confession, devout prayer, perseverance in virtuous works. And we can ingest without fear these six foods
and related provisions; and although they may seem quite bitter to our taste, this is necessarily so, for few
infirm enjoy their diet, even though it is beneficial and fortifying. Therefore, let us love the bitter since the
sweet does not love us. so that what is bitter to our palate (that is. to our human senses) may be converted
into sweetness for our soul (46).

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is in keeping with Carolyn Bynum’s description of the differences between male and
female conversion experiences. In her book, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on
Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion, Bynum describes the male
conversion experience to be characterized by three phases: crisis, breech, and
reintegration or triumph. Further, she suggests that the final reintegration often involves
voluntary acceptance of some sort of reversal, weakness, poverty, or traits associated
with the feminine. She regards this pattern to be a manifestation of the fact that male
saints entered their conversion from a position of power, and offers in support of this
view, the observation by liberation theologians that the powerful often express imitation
of Christ by voluntarily taking on poverty, nudity, or weakness. The disempowered on
the other hand, who already suffer these discomforts involuntarily, express their imitatio
Christi through ongoing struggle (41). Bynum suggests that this same dynamic of
struggle is also prevalent in conversion experiences of women, who also enter conversion
from a marginalized position. The irony here is striking, and must have been especially
difficult for this involuntary nun who was raised in privilege and comfort. Despite her
affluent upbringing, in which she would have had her pick of anything the world had to
offer—at least of those things it could offer to a woman—she now finds herself among
the infirm or disabled and thus the disempowered. She must accept the poverty of silence,
of a diminished social life, and of imposed entry into the convent. Though she
recognizes, at least intellectually the benefits of spiritual diet/conversion, it is nonetheless

a more austere path which she previously would have eschewed.

Clearly these elements are present in Teresa’s circumstance, and like those

mentioned by Bynum, acceptance is Teresa’s primary task. However, there also exists a

130

 

nearly complete lack of agency on the part of the subject. The decision to accept the bitter

Ill

diet of illness is for all intents and purposes perceived by Teresa as not initiating from the
subject, but by the world which rejects her and thus imposes isolation from the outside,
and by God who forces the subject to submit to His will, again removing all control from

the subject:

Los plazeres que en él (mundo) son del todo nos haborescen: la salut nos
desanpara, los amigos nos olvidan, los parientes se enojan, e aun la propia madre
se enoja con la hija enferma, y el padre aboresce al hijo que con continuas
dolerias le ocupare la posada. [...] Por ende dexemos a quien nos dexa y Aquel
solo queramos que nos quiere y Aquel solo amemos que nos da las dolerias a este

respeto, porque aborescamos al mundo y amemos a El que nos ama (l42-143).51

Obviously none would make the deliberate choice to endure a long-term illness.
However Teresa herself writes of having received and declined invitations to continue
former social relationships. This is seen when the author states: “Id a F ulanos qu’os
quieren ver” (105), and later in the Arboleda when she writes of her relationship with
dofia Juana de Mendoza. The reader must therefore consider to what extent Teresa has
actually been rejected, and to what extent she is choosing to read rejection in those
around her in order to ease her own difficulties in accepting the limitations imposed by
her illness. In the above passage her sense of a lack of agency is evident, and perhaps it is

her own perception that is most important. But by internalizing a schema of forced

 

5' Worldly pleasures despise us, health forsakes us, friends forget us, relatives get angry, and even one's
own mother gets annoyed with her sickly daughter, and one's father despises the son who with chronic
afflictions dwells in his home. ...Therefore, let us forsake what forsakes us, and let us want only the One
who wants us and love only the One who gives us our afflictions, so that we may despise the world and
love only Him who loves us (46-47).

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Obeissance, she also empowers herself to choose not to participate in social interactions
t liat heighten her feelings of isolation.

Following the analysis of the Suppr of the Lamb, Teresa continues by discussing
the parable of the Talents, which leads into a discussion of the seven cardinal sins, which
i n turn lead to the seven Cardinal virtues. The autobiographical project is essentially
abandoned here, and the essay becomes more of a standard spiritual treatise. We will
therefore conclude our discussion of the Arboleda at this point, and consider how self-
revelation is resumed in the Admiracion Operum Dey.
As I have already discussed, Teresa’s purpose in writing the Admiracion had little
t 0 do with personal exploration or self-expression. She tells us at the essay’s opening that
She is writing at the request of her patroness, the noblewoman Juana de Mendoza. The
l atter has apparently urged her to respond to male critics of the Arboleda, who argue
against the notion of a woman writing a spiritual treatise: “Muchas vezes me es hecho
entender, virtuosa sefiora, que algunos de los prudentes varones e asi mesmo henbras
discretas se maravillan o han maravillado de un tratado, que la gracia divina
administrando mi flaco mugeril entendimiento, mi mano escrivio” (225).52 What follows
is a rather spirited defense of Teresa’s ability to write the Arboleda, in which she draws
on various images and conventions in order to silence her critics.
Though the Admiracio'n is an interesting and forward-thinking text, considered by

some scholars to be one of Spain’s earliest feminist writings,53 what is of primary

 

’3 “Many times, virtuous lady, I have been informed that some prudent men and also discreet women have
marveled at a treatise that, with divine grace directing my weak womanly understanding, was written by
my hand” (87).

5" For a discussion of feminism in the A dmiracio'n see Ronald Surtz, “The New Judith” in Writing Women
in Late Medieval Spain (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Press, 1995). It should be noted however, that while
Surtz’s argument is compeling, Teresa’s feminism is in fact of a rather sollopsistic nature. Though she does

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concern for this study is that of departure. Whereas the Arboleda is a text of loss and of
mourning, the Admiracio'n is Teresa’s written departure from sadness. In terms of what
1: his may have meant for Teresa’s actual day-to-day convent life, there is no way of
knowing. Just as the information surrounding her early life is scant, so too, there is no
information about her life at the time of or after the Admiracion. These two essays are her
only extant works. As was typically the case, there are no records leaving information
about the remainder of her days in the convent, and we do not even know the date of her
death. So, risky though it may be, anything that can be surmised about Teresa’s final
coming—to-terms with her deafness must be inferred from her texts.

What is of most interest to our purposes here is the image of herself that Teresa
conveys in her writing. Gone are the self-chastisement, the willfiilness and the struggle
that permeate the A rboleda. Though she maintains a level of self-deprecation that would
be expected of a woman throughout, she also expresses amazement and scorn at her
detractors, an act that indicates a more solidly formed schemata of self. In explanation of
her taking up the pen in this second essay she writes::

creo ciertamente que se ayan maravillado los prudentes varones del tractado que

yo hize, y no porque en e’l se contenga cosa muy buena ni digna de admiracion,

mas porque mi propio ser e justo merescimiento con la adversa fortuna e

 

advance her right to authorship, she does not argue that same right for her sisters. Instead, she argues that
she has been endowed with a special grace from God, to engage in what would otherwise be a task It
should be noted however, that while Surtz’s argument is compeling, Teresa’s feminism is in fact of a rather
sollopsistic nature. Though she does advance her right to authorship, she does not argue that same right for
her sisters. Instead, she argues that she has been endowed with a special grace from God to engage in what
would otherwise be a task It should be noted however, that while Surtz’s argument is compeling, Teresa’s
feminism is in fact of a rather sollopsistic nature. Though she does advance her right to authorship, she
does not argue that same right for her sisters. Instead, she argues that she has been endowed with a special
grace from God, to engage in what would otherwise be a task reserved for males. Many scholars do not
accepts Surtz’s position, arguing that one cannot apply a twentieth-century ideology to an Early-Modem
authorr.

133

acrecentadas pasiones dan bozes contra mi e llaman a todos que se maravillen
diziendo: "(3Como en persona que tantos males asientan puede aver algund bien?"
[...] E de aqui se ha seguido que la obra mugeril e de poca sustancia que dina es
de reprehension entre los onbres comunes, con mucha razén seria fecha dina de
admiracion en el acatamiento de los singulares e grandes orantes, ca no sin causa
se maravilla el prudente quando ven que el nescio sabe hablar. E diga quien
quisiere que esta ya dicha admiracion es loor, que a mi denuesto me paresce e por
la mi voluntad, antes se me ofrescan inj uriosos denuestos me paresce que no
vanos loores, ca ni me puede dafiar la injuria ni aprovechar el vano loor. Asi que
yo no quiero usurpar 1a gloria ajena ni deseo huir del propio denuesto. (227).54
With inescapable irony, Teresa remains self deprecatory,while levying harsh
criticism against “105 prudentes varones.” As Seidenspinner Nufiez points out, the
placement of the adjective “prudente” is significant. By placing the adjective before the
noun, she alters the meaning. Rather than distinguishing a particular group from among
men, she uses prudentes to denote an inherent male characteristic. She then marvels that
these men who are so prudent would even take the time to be bothered with such a little
work as the Arboledas, “E commo sea una obra pequefia, de poca sustancia, estoy

maravillada. E no se crea que los prudentes varones se inclinasen a quererse maravillar de

 

5" But if their wonder is certain, my offense is clear, since apparently their awe does not result from the
merits of my text but from the defects of its author; prudent men have marveled at the treatise I wrote,
not because there was any thing very good or worthy of wonder in it, but because of me and my justly
deserved adversities and increased suffering; they cry out against me and call upon everyone to marvel,
saying, "How can there be any good in a person afflicted with so many misfortunes?" And from this it
follows that if a womanly text of little substance is worthy of reprehension among common men, with
greater reason it would inspire consternation in exceptional and great men, for not without cause does the
prudent man marvel when he sees that a fool can speak. And although it is said that their wonder is
flattering, to me it seems offensive and clear that they offer me scathing insults and not empty praise; yet

although insults cannot hurt me or vain praise benefit me, I do not want to usurp another‘s glory nor ignore
my own offense.

134

tan poca cosa” (225).55 Her disdain is evident. Why, she asks, would such prudent and
learned men even be bothered with her little trifle of an essay? The Teresa we met in the
Arboleda would seem to have been much more likely to blame herself. In fact, in the
Arboleda’s opening, she suggests that some may find fault with her decision to write, but
justifies her actions by virtue of her need to avoid idleness, which she would have known
would be favorably accepted as an attempt to avoid one of the seven cardinal sins about
which she would later write.

Though Teresa’s advocation of women’s writing—and the limitations thereof-—are
not the focus of this study, some words about her argument are necessary here as they are
also at the crux of her resolution of her grief over her hearing loss and subsequent
isolation. Though Teresa does advocate for the notion that a woman can write, she does
not suggest that all women can write. Rather, she argues that though writing may not be a
typical activity for a woman, certain women—herself among them—when endowed by
God with wisdom can write. In support of this position she puts forth two primary
arguments. First, invoking the metaphor of the pith and the bark (meollo ycorteza) she
argues that men and women are interdependent and complementary, that the stronger
exterior bark is necessary to protect the softer pith, but that without the softer inner
material the bark would not receive the necessary nurturanceito sustain itself. In this way,
while different, both sexes are equally of value if either is to survive. Second, and of most
interest to this study, is that on certain occasions God calls upon a woman to perform

extraordinary acts.

 

’5 And since it is a brief work of little substance, I am amazed, for it is~hard to believe that prudent men
would marvel so at such an insignificant thing.

135

To illustrate this argument Teresa invokes the biblical story of Judith as her
spiritual mother and role model. She draws two parallels here, first between herself and
Judith, and second between two traditionally male objects, the pen and the sword. As
Ronald Surtz points out in Writing Women in Late Medieval Spain, there are a number of
parallels between Judith and Teresa. First, Judith is a Jew, Teresa is the daughter of a
converso family. Second, as a widow, Judith lives in chastity; as a nun, Teresa does as
well. Lastly, both women have acted as a man, Judith in wielding the sword, and Teresa
in wielding the pen (32). Teresa first describes how, though merely a woman, God
imbued Judith with the strength to take up the sword and overcome the great commander
Holifernes. If then, despite her weakness and lack of skill and training God could provide
Judith with the courage to wield a sword, which after all is much greater than the pen,
how much more readily could he give to a woman the grace and understanding to put pen.
to paper:

écomo los negara la gracia suya para que con ella o mediante ella sepan e puedan

fazer alguna otra cosa que sea mas facil o ligera de fazer al sexo fimineo? Que

manifiesto es que mas a mano viene a la henbra ser eloquente que no ser fuerte, e

mas onesto le es ser entendida que no osada, e mas ligera cosa le sera usar de la

péfiola que del espada. Asi que deven notar los prudentes varones que Aquél que
dio industria e gracia a Judit para fazer un tan maravilloso e famoso arto, bien
puede dar industria o entendimiento e gracia otra qualquier henbra para fazer lo

que otras mugeres, o por ventura algunos del estado varonil no sabrian (239).56

 

5" Well, if God did not deny the female condition the grace and skill to do very difficult things beyond the
power of their natural state, how will He deny us His grace to know and be able to do something more
readily accessible to the female sex? For clearly it is more within the reach of a woman to be eloquent than
strong, and more modest for her to be skilled than daring, and easier for her to use the pen than the sword.

136

Again one notes the striking change in tone from the Arboleda. No longer are we
reading about the angry woman forced to accept God’s discipline, though she would
rather be enjoying the noise and chatter of the secular world. In our discussion of the
Arboleda, we discussed that essay as an example of Carolyn Bynum’s view that the
female conversion experience was frequently represented as struggle. Teresa did not need
the male conversion model of voluntary sacrifice, as her sacrifice had been taken from
her already and against her will, and so she struggled between acceptance and rejection of
that over which she had no control. It would seem here that for Teresa the struggle of
conversion is a thing of the past. In Judith she finds not only a powerful female role
model, but one who accomplished that which no man had been able to accomplish. In her
acknowledgement of God’s right to choose her as his instrument, Teresa writes as one
who feels deserving of being the recipient of God’s grace, and as such, entitled to wield
her pen Teresa’s argument here is essentially the same one she employs in the Arboleda,
that God chooses to bestow that which it wishes on whomever he wishes according to His
estimation of what will bring the most spiritual fruit. In writing of her suffering, Teresa
argued that God chose to force her from the pleasures of the world because if He hadn’t,
she would never have turned her attention from worldly pleasures. Writing, then, is her
reward. It first served to help her come to an acceptance of her losses, and now God’s
understanding continues to pour through her pen for the enlightenment of those who
would question her and in questioning her, question Him. God may have taken away her

voice, but in return for her struggle, he has given her the pen.

 

Thus prudent men should note that He who gave the skill and grace to Judith to accomplish such a
marvelous and famous act can well give ingenuity or understanding and grace to any woman to do what
other women and perchance some of the male condition might not know how to do (93).

137

She is careful however to clarify that this is not due to any special merit of hers.
In yet another magnificent double-entendre, she removes herself from any risk of
appearing boastful, while simultaneously irrsulting her critics when she writes that God
does not bestow His virtues according to human merit, because if that were the case, all
His virtues would simply return to heaven:
respondo que verdad es: Judit era muger santa e muy solicita en guardar la ley de
Dios e grande amiga de oraciones e de ayuno e de todo exercicio santo; pero
sabemos que Dios no faze beneficios ni gracias a los onbres por respetto de los
méritos de cada uno, mas solamente a respetto de si mesmo e de su inestimable
bondad; que en verdad, si por sola santidad e justicia e méritos buenos de las
criaturas humanas dispensase el celestial Padre e repartiese los sus beneficios,

pie’nseme que todos los bienes que avemos en la tierra se sobirian al cielo (239-

240157

Teresa has thus been transformed from the stubborn, irrational animal who had to
be forced with the bit and bridle of affliction to conform to God’s will, to a female vessel
endowed with the special grace to wield the male pen to share His wisdom.

Finally, let us consider one last segment of the Admiracio'n, Teresa’s treatment of
the parable of the blind man on the road to Jericho found in the Gospel of Luke. Again,
we find a strong personal identification between Teresa and her biblical model, the

obvious connection being that the two share a physical disability. Teresa equates his lack

 

’7 I respond that this is true: although Judith was a holy woman and very solicitous in keeping God's law
and very given to prayers and fasts and all spiritual exercises, we know that God does not confer blessings
or grace according to our individual merit but only according to His own inestimable goodness; for, indeed,
were our heavenly Father to dispense and distribute His blessings according to the sanctity and justice and

merits of human beings, I believe that all the blessings we have here on earth would return to heaven (93-
94.

138

of sight with her deafness, his wandering with her physical and social isolation. As Surtz
tells us, the identification here is so strong that Teresa begins her recounting of this tale in
the third-person, but ends up interjecting herself into the narrative in the first-person:
ciego qu'estava en el camino quando nuestro Redentor pasava cerca de Gerico. E
asi como aquel ciego, non viendo luz alguna, sintio que Aquél por quien, es hecha
la luz pasava acerca d'e’l, e que le podia librar de la tiniebla en que eslava» bien asi
mi entendimiento, estando ciego e lleno de tinieblas de pecados, sintio las pisadas
del Salvador, las quales son las buenas ispiraciones que El enbia en nuestras
animas antes que venga, porque desque sea venido le amoscamos e sepamos pedir
lo que: de razon pedir devemos.
E como mi ciego entendimiento sintio por las sefiales ya dichas que'l Salvador
venia, luego comenco a dar secretas bozes diziendo: "Ave merced de mi, Fijo de
David" [...] ca como yo estava en el camino cerca de Jerico, que se entiende
puesto todo mi cuidado en la calle deste mundo (260).58
Teresa continues with her narrative, telling how Christ, whom she equates with
divine grace, guided the blind man to him, and restored his sight, thus bringing Teresa’s
understanding into line with his will. This is the one point in the Admiraeio'n where
Teresa allows the reader to see that her struggle is still not completely put to rest when

she writes, “E sea verdad que mis naturales e humanos deseos me conbidavan e

 

’8 And certainly I believe that my understanding at that moment was like the blind man on the road near
Jericho when our Redeemer passed by.28 Andjust as that blind man, without seeing any light at all, felt that
He who made light was passing near by him and that He could free him from his darkness,29 so my
understanding, blind and full of the darkness of my sins, felt the footsteps of my Savior, which are the good
inspirations He sends to our souls before His coming so that once He has arrived we recognize Him and
know to ask what we should rightfully request. And when, because of these signs, my blind understanding
felt my Savior coming, it immediately began to shout with secret voices, saying, "Jesus, son of David, have
mercy on me" since I was on the road near Jericho -by which it is understood that all my thoughts were

placed on the road of this world and my desires were closer to human attachments than to spiritual ones
(I04).

139

inclinavan a pedir cosas algund tanto contrarias a la salud espiritual, pero desque ya
conosci que aquel Sefior que asi me interrogava era mi Salvador e que si yo le pidiese
alguna cosa contraria a mi salvacion, que no me la daria” (262).59 In this very genuine
moment, Teresa admits that she has not lost her desire for all those things that held sway
over her in the Arboleda, hearing, social interaction and worldly pleasures, but rather
that she has learned to dominate those desires accepting and even embracing the spiritual
path to which she has been called. As she tells us in the Arboleda that anyone given the
choice would choose to be healthy, it would seem disengenuous were she to suddenly
find herself free of her desire to be healthy and have her hearing once again. So now,
while she may not find the menu to be of her choosing, she opts to embrace the supper of
the Lamb which she only forcibly attended in the Arboleda.

Much like Catherine Robson’s image of the scar that leads both back to the
wound and forward toward healing, this fusion of light and sound imagery lends a spiral
element to Teresa’s two essays, bringing them together, as I suggested at the beginning,
as one text. At the opening of the Arboleda, Teresa writes of her shadowy banishment
and her silent isolation, invoking the passage from the book of Isaiah that promises God’s
light to those who dwell in darkness, “a los que moravan en tinieblas Luz les es dada”.
Throughout the Arboleda Teresa struggles between accepting her fate or her conversion,
and longing to return to the life that she once knew. At last, in the Admiraeién she seems
to have found in her new life her own meaning and value in being chosen by God to bring

his words to other sufferers.

 

’9 “And while my natural human desires invited and inclined me to request things contrary to my spiritual
health, I realized that the Lord that asked me that question was my Savior and that if I were to ask for
something contrary to my salvation, He would not give it to me” (104).

140

S 0, here, nearing the close of the Admiraeién Operum Dei, God has finally
responded to the cries of the blind man, providing guidance and restoring sight. The
silence has been filled by Teresa’s own voice crying out for the healing hand of Christ,
and God’ 5 restoration of light to the blind man/Teresa. At the Arboleda’s opening, Teresa
seeks di Vine light, but she cannot receive it because she has not finished mourning the
loss of 3.11 that held meaning for her in her former life. In the Admiraeién, she is ready to
receive God’s light, and it is thus given to her, “luego se ronpio el velo de las tinieblas

que teni a ciegos los ojos de mi entendimiento e vio e siguio al Salvador manificando a

Dios” (264).60

To conclude, unlike Leonor Lopez de Cérdoba, who experiences several false

departures only to return to her starting point, Teresa has accomplished true departure.
That W11 ich was lost has not been and cannot be restored, but she has found meaning in
that 1038 which has made it endurable, and perhaps she is even able to find some pleasure
in her SI)iritual walk. She offers an excellent example of Young’s description of
aSSimilation of trauma, the memory of her loss has become integrated into who she is, it
is retrievable as in the moment in the Admiraeién when she must decide what to ask for,
but it i S no longer intrusive. Thus as Seidenspinner Nufiez points out, Teresa finally

attains self-knowledge and spiritual understanding, and is thus able to reassert her

authoI‘ship, reclaim her text, and embrace the life that remains.

—\

60 .
S “the veil of darkness that blinded the eyes of my understanding was rent, and it saw and followed its
. avxor, extolling God” (105).

141

Chapter 4
The Unspeakable: Vision As Traumatic Memory in the Sermons of
Madre Juana de la Cruz
As we turn our consideration to the sermons of Madre Juana de la Cruz, we move
from the fifteenth into the early sixteenth century. We also move even further outside the
genre 0 f autobiographical writing, and into the landscape of mystical religious writing,
though as I hope to demonstrate, Juana’s texts are not devoid of personal content.
Madre Juana is the author of the Libra del Conorte, a series of religious sermons
organized around the liturgical year of 1508. Being of peasant stock Juana never received
formal education, and her sermons were therefore dictated, often while in a trance state,
to a fel 1 0w nun. These sermons have a dual-purpose: to illuminate scriptural episodes,
and t0 13 Iovide a divine message for the salvation of the faithful. Such texts would
obvious ly not be intended as vehicles of personal disclosure, but I will attempt to argue
that Madre J uana’s sermons in fact present thematic content that suggests the possibility
that She may have been exposed to some sort of sexual experiences during her childhood.
If read from the perspective that these texts contain material from her subconscious, they
d pro‘Dably reveal more than she realized. In the two sermons that will be examined in
this Qlilapter, I suggest we will find both language and imagery that are sexualized beyond
the nO'rm even for medieval iconography. We will see two instances in which a male is
purSLling sexual contact with a female against her will. We will see the employment of
breaSt imagery not in a context of nourishment or motherhood, but as the instrument of

sens11a] pleasure. The implications of the sexual experiences are evident in her text in

142

two way S: first, in J uana’s use of sexually explicit imagery which she invokes to describe
her relationship with God, and second in the high level of textual androgyneity which she
applies both to herself and to the protagonists of her visions. Before proceeding to her

texts however, I will review the biographical information available to us.

4.1. From Orphan to Abbess

Juana was born in 1481 to farming parents Catalina Gutierrez and Juan Vasquez,
in the town of Azafia near Toledo. We do know that she had a brother, as he figures in the
episode of the benefice of Cubas which will be discussed later, but do not know if there

were any other siblings. According to J uana’s Vida her mother died when Juana was
seven years old. It is not known how long Juana remained in her father’s home following
her mother’s death, but at some point she did go to live in the home of a somewhat
wealthi er aunt and uncle. The reason for Juana’s move is unknown. It could have been as
simple as a desire on the part of the father for Juana to have a female figure involved in
her “Pb ringing, or, it may have been to remove Juana from problems within the father’s
home -

It appears that, having found a suitable marriage prospect for their niece, J uana’s
relatives, intention was to enter her into marriage. However, Juana had no interest in
mart-i age plans. The Vida tells us that at the age of fifteen, Juana dressed in male attire
and fled in secret from her relatives’ home, seeking entry into the convent of Franciscan
Terti aries of Santa Maria de la Cruz in Cubas. As Carolyn Walker Bynum points out in
Fr “8 'nentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval
Rel i8 ion, the phenomenon of women cross-dressing was not as uncommon as one might

think :

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Cross-dressing by laywomen, even by women who gave it some religious
s i gnificance, was fairly common. Joan of Arc was unusual in donning male
(3 lothes to lead an army, but a number of cases are recorded of women who put
on male clothing to travel — especially on pilgrimage — or to run away from
home. Their cross-dressing was a mechanism to aid in role change or a real
disguise to gain the physical protection offered by superior status. In short,
cross-dressing and role reversal were more common among women than men
and less disturbing to them. Such inversions (both women masquerading as
men and men cross-dressing or reversing gender) were far more disturbing
possibilities, and thus more heightened and powerful symbols, to men. It does
not seem surprising, therefore, that religious men spoke of their renunciation
of the world as adopting another gender, as the cross-dressing they seldom in
fact did. On the other hand, women, who more commonly put on male dress in
the world in order to accomplish certain goals (occasionally even, religious
goals), did not in the safety of the cloister or anchor-hold use "acquiring

maleness" as a symbol or metaphor with spiritual content. (170-171)

This conceptualization of cross-dressing provides the reader with much to
consi Cler. Would Juana have been aware of other women who had engaged in cross-
dresSi hg? If so, what was the context for the behavior? As Bynum suggests, it could
Simply have been an artifice employed to facilitate safe travel and allow Juana to escape
from a life she did not desire. On the other hand, we know that in her role as abbess,

Juana would assume a level of leadership not generally permitted to females. Was her

do“fling of men’s attire simply an announcement of an early decision to adopt a

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masculine persona? While cross-dressing may not have been uncommon for women, for
Juana it may nonetheless have been an early sign of a very fluid gender identity construct.
When Juana’s relatives eventually located her and arrived at the convent, they
were persuaded to allow her to remain there. Her dowry for entry into the convent was
arranged, and thus began her distinguished ecclesiastical career.

Juana quickly rose within the convent hierarchy, and in 1509 became Abbess.
Though the Vida reports that Juana had begun having mystical visions while still in the
Cradle, we are told that she again began having these experiences in the year 1505, and
that they continued throughout thirteen years of her convent life. In addition to her

mYStical visions Juana’s religious practice was characterized by a harsh asceticism
pervasi Ve among female mystics of the period including Catherine of Siena, Angela da
Folignc) and others. Juana’s renown eventually became so wide-spread that many famous
people, among them Cardinal Cisneros, came to hear the sermons she delivered while in
mYStiCa] trance.

However, the attentions brought on by J uana’s fame as visionary were not all
desirable. In 1512, a fellow Franciscan, who had become convinced that he was to be the
father of a second Messiah, wrote to her and ask that she graciously agree to be the
mother of his divine child. Naturally wanting nothing to do with either the man or the
e"deetyor, she reports him to church fathers, and he is duly arrested. This episode is
impo I‘tant in that it demonstrates the duality of Madre Juana’s persona. It stands out as
one example among many counter examples, of Juana’s more conservative side. While

Juana frequently blurs gender roles, and seems to have no qualms assuming leadership

r0138 atypical for a female, she nonetheless wanted no part in such blatant heresy. So,

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here she is the obedient daughter, not only declining this dubious honor, but turning the

would-be father into the Church authorities to prevent him from engaging in any further
misconduct. As we shall see in our discussion of Juana’s sermons, she is hardly unwilling
to assume a position of divinely inspired authority, but prefers to do so via more subtle
manipulations of ecclesiastical convention.

It was during this same time that Juana had also become involved in the incident
0fthe benefice of Cubas. Apparently the financial situation of the convent had become
Precarious. In an attempt to secure the financial stability of the convent, Cardinal

C isnero 5, Archbishop of Toledo, sent two orders, one in March and the other in
December of 1410, allowing the parish church at Cubas to be annexed to the convent.
This was an extraordinary move, in that it granted power to a female abbess that was
typical 1 3 reserved for male ecclesiastics. Governance of the parish at Cubas meant not
only tliezt the convent would enjoy the benefit of all income from the church, but also that
the abb ess, Madre Juana, would be allowed to select the parish chaplain, which Juana did
in the person of her brother. As one might expect, such an unusual arrangement was
unlikely to go unchallenged. After Cisneros’s death in 1517, other ecclesiastics argued
that it was improper for a woman to exercise jurisdiction over a perish, and attempted to
take away the benefice. In response, after consulting with supporters, Juana attempted to
secure a papal bull in order to retain the benefice for the convent. She was successful in
this, but was denounced by a fellow nun, the convent’s vicaress, to the order’s superiors
for hEwing spent too much money in obtaining the papal bull as well as for acting without

the permission of the order’s superiors. As a result of the vicaress’s denunciation, Juana

was removed from her post as abbess in approximately 1527. However, her removal

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would prove to be only temporary. When the vicaress became ill, she admitted to having

falsely accused Juana. Juana was subsequently reinstated, and would remain in the post

of abbe: SS until her death in 1534.

4.2. So me Textual Considerations

For many reasons Madre Juana’s writing presents the greatest difficulty in terms
0f a conceptualization within the framework of trauma. First, there is less biographical
inforrrl ation available about her than about either Teresa de Cartagena or Leonor Lopez

de Cordoba. Though she is the only one of the three to have had actual biographies of her
life wri tten, the biographies in question were hagiographic in nature, and thus concerned
with her status as a mystic, not with the factual dimensions of her childhood and family
backgro und. Both Leonor’s and Teresa’s lives were in some way connected to the
national life of Spain, Leonor because of her family’s political involvement, and Teresa
because of the literary, courtly, and ecclesiastical activities of her male relatives. Being of
a lower social and economic class, Juana would naturally have held no interest to
SChOl'c‘Lrs were it not for her career as a mystic. Because she was not affiliated either with
the coun or with Spain’s upper class but was born to a farming family, she thus could
easily have lived out her entire life below the radar of any mechanisms for documentation
that e>~:isted, as did most women of her social status. So though much of Juana’s adult life

would be documented by virtue of her ecclesiastical activities, little is known with

certai nty about her childhood.

A second problem we encounter in discussing themes of trauma in these texts lies

m the nature of the trauma in question. Child abuse, whether of a sexual or nonsexual

147

nature, is carefully concealed, both by the perpetrator and the victim. The reasons for this
concealment are many. First, the victim must grapple with a sense of shame. Second, the
perpetrator may force the child into secrecy, by coercion or threats of further violence.
Third, when the perpetrator of the abuse is a primary caregiver, the child also struggles
with his or her conflicted understanding of why this person who is supposed to be
benevo 1 ent and loving, is engaging in this behavior in the first place, a circumstance
Which frequently results in the child assuming responsibility for the abuse in order to
Preserv e a positive image of the abuser. As Catherine Robson writes, citing Judith
Herman:
Child sexual abuse is often referred to as an untold secret: a secret trauma (Russell
1 986), even, in Florence Rush’s words, the best kept secret (Rush 1980).

Psychiatrists have noted that in cases where children are abused by a parent or

primary caretaker, they are forced to collude in the abuser's secrecy not only out

of fear but also, crucially, in order to retain belief in their parents: "All of the
abused child's psychological adaptations serve the fundamental purpose of

preserving her primary attachment to her parents" (Herman [1992] 1994, 102).

Child sexual abuse is, then, ofien concealed by the perpetrator and the victim

alike, as well as by society, in order to protect the family unit. (84)

These words are based on Herman’s studies which of course are concerned with
twent ieth-century abuse survivors. One can only imagine how much stronger this taboo
might have been during a time period in which, as Ruth Kelso points out, “The quality
most highly valued in a woman is chastity. Enough could not be said of it as the

fout‘lclation of womanly worth, let a woman have chastity, she has all. Let her lack

148

chastity and she has nothing” (1978, 24). Though lack of chastity would not have
prevented Juana’s entry into the convent, it would have rendered her unmarriageable,
which given her relatives intentions that she marry, would have been more than adequate
cause to conceal any improprieties that may have occurred. Moreover, Juana herself
appears to have an awareness of the need for concealment of certain types of physical
contact as we shall see in our consideration of the Vision of the Nativity.

Thus, it is highly improbable, even if Juana’s relatives were aware of any such
circumstance, that they would have disclosed the information. Juana as victim, certainly
would not have done so. We are therefore lefi with the task of trying to decipher her text,

and fi nd in it clues to her past. To do this, we must not only pay attention to Juana’s
WOFdS, but also to her silences. As I intend to demonstrate, Juana’s texts reflect well-
docum ented psychological mechanisms for reconstructing one’s identity within the
contex t of trauma. While this cannot of course be considered concrete proof, it will I
hope provide additional perspective on both the text and the person of this sixteenth-
century mystic.

To date, very little scholarly research has been conducted on Madre Juana. Of
those women generally associated with Early-Modem writing in the Peninsula, she is
among the least known and the least studied. She is not mentioned by critics such as Alan
Deyermond, or others who have studied the earliest writings of women in the Iberian
PerliInsula. According to traditional wisdom, one of Juana’s fellow nuns, Maria
Eva~11gelista, who also served as scribe for Juana’s sermons, was the author of the original
biography of Madre J uana’s life, though it is unknown when the task was undertaken.

Ho\Never, as Ronald Surtz tells us in The Guitar of God, “The biography is as sparing in

149

historical facts as it is generous in recording the supernatural happenings of J uana's
intense spiritual life” (3). According to Surtz, the biography focuses primarily on Juana’s
asceticism, and on narrating her mysticism and her miraculous powers, providing little to
no factual information about her life. The seventeenth century saw a renewed interest in
Juana’s beatification and canonization, and this would result in various literary works,
among them the unofficial biography written by Antonio Daza, Historia, vida y milagros,
e’xtasis y revelaciones de la bienaventurada Virgen santa Juana de la Cruz (1610-1613),
and Tirso de Molina’s theatrical work La Santa Juana (1613-1614). However, these
biographies, Daza’s being no exception, were written for the purpose of promoting
J uana’s canonization. Their intent was not therefore to provide an accurate accounting of
the nun’s life, but rather to promote her candidacy for sainthood, and would therefore not
have shown any aspects of J uana’s life or personality that might have hindered their
cause. Moreover, Daza’s biography was not only subject to his own authorial objectives,
but also underwent the scrutiny of the Inquisition, and was altered to bring it into
conformity with ecclesiastical doctrine. So, while Daza’s biography does provide us with
some information about Juana’s life, it can hardly be read as a factual account.61

The work which will be of primary concern to this study is Juana’s only extant
text, El Libro del Conorte. Ronald Surtz (1995) tells us that while Juana purports to have
had visions throughout her childhood; the visions Juana experienced during her tenure in
the convent began in 1505, and continued for thirteen years. During these visions Juana

would go into a trance state, which generally lasted approximately six hours. We are not

 

6' Unfortunately, I was unable to obtain a copy of Daza’s text for this study, and the Libro del Conorte is
only available in manuscript form. Therefore, all biographical information, as well as all textual citations
will be taken from the work of Ronald Surtz, The Guitar of God: Gender, Power, and Authority in the
Visionary World of Mother Juana de la Cruz (1481-1534). Translations of the vision of the Nativity will be
taken from Surtz, Writing Women in Late Medieval Spain.

150

told what caused the beginning or ending of the visions. The visions that comprise the
collection are organized according to the liturgical year of 1508-1509.

The Libro del Conorte also underwent a series of revisions. As stated above, the
sermons were originally recorded by fellow nuns while Juana was in a trance state. For
years following Madre Juana’s death, the manuscript would be at the mercy of the editing
hand of various supporters and detractors. As Surtz relates, the first set of notations was
added by one Ortiz, whom Surtz speculates may have been the Franciscan Francisco
Ortiz (1496-1547). His notations were largely favorable, and supported the orthodoxy of
madre J uana’s mystical experiences. However, the next round of revisions would not be
so kind. Some time later, an lnquisitorial censor whom Surtz suggests was a close relative
to Madre Juana, radically modified the content of both Madre Juana’s visions and the
marginal glosses supplied by Ortiz, to the extent that much of the Trinity Sermon was
simply erased, destroyed with pieces of cotton that had been soaked in ink. Lastly, in
1567-1568, a Father Francisco de Torres edited the Escorial manuscript, adding his own
notations and glosses with the intent of defending the religious validity of Madre Juana’s
text, and her status as a female visionary. One can well imagine that after so many
revisions, each with such disparate purposes, that the existing manuscripts may have little
in common with the material that was originally recorded by Juana’s friend and scribe
Sister Maria Evangelista. For purposes of this analysis, though I will incorporate
information from the Vida I will rely primarily on the language and content of Juana’s
text, as presented by Surtz, to reconstruct her experience of loss, and discuss her text as a

potential response to trauma.

151

Finally, before moving into a discussion of the sermons themselves, it is useful to
consider the reading of Juana’s text. As I believe has been amply demonstrated, the
traditional reading has been to treat the sermons as the written record of the mystic
visions received by a sixteenth-century Franciscan nun. I propose an alternative reading,
that of trance as flashback.

As we have seen described in the DSM-[ V, the flashback is a pervasive symptom
of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Though this phenomenon would of course not have
been documented in the sixteenth century, it would be logical to surmise that sixteenth-
century trauma survivors would in all likelihood have experienced this same symptom.
During a flashback, the individual can lose all sense of his/her current situation, believing
that he/she is in fact still living the traumatic event. Thus someone experiencing a
flashback can believe themselves to be younger, in another location, and with other
people. These experiences can last anywhere from a few minutes to several days.

As Judith Lewis Herman points out, fixation on the trauma and the resultant
experiencing of flashbacks has been observed by scholars of trauma dating back to Janet,
Kardiner and Freud. She further points out that the onset of flashbacks is not necessarily
predictable,

The traumatic moment becomes encoded in an abnormal form of memory, which

breaks spontaneously into consciousness, both as flashbacks during waking states

and as traumatic nightmares during sleep. Small, seemingly insignificant
reminders can also evoke these memories, which often return with all the

vividness and emotional force of the original event. Thus, even normally safe

152

 

environments may come to feel dangerous, for the survivor can never be assured E—

that she will not encounter some reminder of the trauma (3 7).

How then would such symptoms have been regarded at the time of Madre J uana’s
writing? On the negative end of the spectrum one can imagine alternatives such as
demonic possession, on the more positive end, trance or vision. As was discussed in
Chapter 1, medical treatment of the period was the purview of the ecclesiastical world,
and therefore already existed within a spiritual/magical context. We know from Surtz and
from the Vida that Juana began experiencing these visions as a very young child. It is
conceivable then, that the mystical vision may have provided her with the only socially
acceptable mechanism she could find for endowing the traumatic experience and its
subsequent trance/flashback with meaning. Such a conceptualization of her situation
would have a dual effect. It would provide Juana with a positive interpretation of
otherwise negative events, i.e. she is chosen by God to bear His message to the World,
and to do so she must also willingly take on suffering. It also however, provides a lasting
connection with the traumatic event, a reason as it were, to continue to re-experience the
trauma in the form of visions. As Herman tells us, this is in keeping with many trauma
survivors’ experiences:

Unless the relational aspect of the trauma is also addressed, even the limited goal

of relieving intrusive symptoms may remain out of reach. The patient may be

reluctant to give up symptoms such as nightmares or flashbacks, because they
have acquired important meaning. The symptoms may be a symbolic means of

keeping faith with a lost person, a substitute for mourning, or an expression of

153

 

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unresolved guilt. In the absence of a socially meaningful form of testimony, many

traumatized people choose to keep their symptoms. (183-184)

Juana would certainly fall among those with incentive for “keeping her symptoms”, for it
is precisely these “symptoms” that have gained her such wide renown as a visionary and
thus have elevated her ecclesiastical status. She not only maintains a link with a troubled
past, but is able to put that past to work for her own advantage. This is not of course to
say that this choice is the result of a consciously thought-out decision. As much of the
literature on trauma demonstrates, the trauma survivor’s awareness of his or her
assimilation'process can vary widely, depending on the individuals coping skills prior to
the event, as well as on the nature and duration of the event itself.

As we shall see in Juana’s visions, we find an unlikely amalgam of blurred gender
imagery, erotic content, and bids for power, which I propose form a gestalt that strongly
suggests thematic content that reflects familiarity with the experience of illicit childhood
sexual activity. I will consider two of her visions that I believe best exemplify these
characteristics: The Creation Sermon and the Vision of the Nativity. In the first, Juana
provides her own revision of the creation story of Genesis. In the second, Juana offers a
description of Mary’s birth and childhood, and also describes a pageant performed in
honor of these events. In both sermons a traditional story is eroticized, and classic images
of Eve and Mary are inverted. I will discuss Juana’s treatment of these episodes, and how

her own traumatic memories may have influenced her revisions.

4.3. The Creation Sermon
Our point of departure for the discussion of Madre J uana’s sermons will be her
Creation Sermon. In many respects this sermon is not typical of the other sermons in the

154

 

Libro del Conorte. First, The Creation Sermon focuses on explication of an Old
Testament story rather than on an episode of the lives of Christ, Mary, or the saints as do
the others. Similarly, this sermon lacks the references to the Gospels that is also typical of
the other sermons. Finally, it is here that Juana constructs the strongest defense of her
spiritual authority. This is not to say that issues of J uana’s authority are not addressed in
other sermons: it is in fact a theme throughout her text. However, here her defense of her
authorship becomes most direct. It is also, along with the Vision of the Nativity, one of
two sermons containing the most concrete references to the theme of childhood sexual
encounter. For all of these reasons, it is therefore an ideal place to begin our discussion.

The Creation Sermon consists of three parts. It begins, as its title suggests, with a
narration of the Creation’s story. The second part of the sermon is devoted to a
description of an allegorical pageant also dealing with the creation theme, and then
concludes with J uana’s defense of the divine inspiration of her work.

At the creation narrative’s beginning, it appears to be yet another recounting of
the well-known story of creation found in the book of Genesis. Briefly Juana recounts
how God created the heaven and the stars and the angels. Eventually man is created, and
woman is created from man to fill the places formerly occupied by fallen angels. As in
the Genesis account, God is initially pleased to find Adam and Eve living in a state of
purity and innocence, and so takes them to Paradise. However, here Juana’s version
begins to diverge in significant ways from the traditional account as found in the book of
Genesis.

While the Genesis account attributes the Fall to Adam and Eve’s loss of

innocence, it was generally held that it was this loss of innocence that led to sexual

155

 

 

activity and the Fall, and therefore that sexual activity didn’t occur until after the Fall. In
J uana’s version the sexual dalliances between Adam and Eve precede the Fall. Juana tells
us that while still in paradise, Adam and Eve begin to play: “E que estando ellos en esta
inocencia, enpecaron entramos a jugar, (1990, 15).62 As Surtz points out, it is unlikely
that Juana refers here to innocent games (20). The word “jugar” held sexual connotations
in the romances of chivalry, so it would be unlikely that Juana employs that term in a
nonsexual context. This playfulness then leads to a perpetual game of cat-and-mouse,
with Adam constantly pursuing Eve as she tries to flee from him. The dynamic suddenly
changes, “e luego enpeco a reinar en ellos la malicia y el desamor” (1990, 15).

Adam, as Juana relates, becomes obsessed with possessing Eve. He chases Eve
relentlessly, sometimes taking her by flattery, and other times by force. Eve wants none
of this, and responds to Adam’s advances by beating him (ferirle). Adam complains
repeatedly to God, who first tells him to hit her back, then to simply leave her alone,
which Adam refuses to do. Finally, God tells Adam to go away, promising that he will
solve the problem for Adam: “"Pues, no te quieres apartar d'ella, déxame e no me digas
esas cosas. Anda, ve, échate a dormir, que yo te faré de manera que te tema e aya miedo
de llegar a ti e que tu seas senor sobre ella e no ella sobre ti” (l6).63

To accomplish this God adorns Adam with a beard, but the effect was not the one
for which Adam had hoped. Upon seeing the beard, Eve is terrified and wants nothing to
do with Adam. At this point Juana inverts the Genesis narrative, casting aside one of the

basic assumptions upon which the Eve/Mary dichotomy rests, that it was Eve who

 

(’2 “And when they were in this innocent state, the two of them began to play” (1 5)

63 "Since you refuse to stay away from her, leave me, and don't tell me these things. Get going, leave, go to
sleep, for I will transform you in such a way that she will fear you and be afraid to come near you and you
will be master over her and not vice versa” (1990, 16).

156

offered Adam the forbidden fruit and thus led him into sin. Adam continues to chase after

66”

her, offering flowers, and of course, the apple, E cogia de las mancanas e flores e de las
otras frutas que tenian los arboles e iva comiendo, conbidandola e diziendo: "No fuigas de
mi, hermana, que ningun mal te fare'. Toma estas flores e frutas que traigo para ti”
(144).64 Eve will not be persuaded by Adam’s proffered gifts. Thus not only is she not
the first to offer the apple, but she also does not take it when Adam offers it to her.

The implications of this shift are enormous, calling into question one of the pillars
upon which the Early Modern understanding of gender rests. Gone is Eve the temptress,
who through her engagement with the serpent is single—handedly responsible for bringing
sin into the world and separating Man from God and Paradise. She is replaced by what
would today be called a victim of stalking. Of course, this is not to superimpose a
twentieth-century understanding, as it is well-known that relentless pursuit by a man of a
female love object is one of the tenets of the courtly love paradigm. Nonetheless, Surtz
suggests a similar dynamic, “Eve either refused to submit sexually to Adam or did so
with great reluctance. Moreover, when the Creation sermon says that Adam made Eve
come to him, sometimes through cajolery and other times by force, there is room for
speculation that he may have tried to rape her” (20). Juana has thus turned Eve from
being the mother of man’s downfall, to a frightened woman fleeing unwanted amorous
advances. Moreover, Adam is aligned here with the serpent that is responsible for

offering Eve the apple, an apple which Eve wants no part of. In this light then, it is not

Eve who is responsible for the fall, but Adam.

 

6" And he gathered apples, flowers and other fruits that were growing on the trees and ran after her calling
to her and saying, “Don’t run from me my sister, I will do you no harm. Take these flowers and fruits that l
have brought for you” (translation mine)

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Moreover, as the Vida relates, the apple as symbol holds special significance for
Juana. As Surtz explains, according to the Vida, God had originally intended for Juana to
be born a male. For reasons not disclosed, the Virgin Mary requested that God transform
her instead into a female. God Acquiesced, but refused to take away a very prominent
Adam’s apple, which Juana in fact bore throughout her life: “Y la bienabenturada Juana
de la Cruz estava entonces en el vientre de su madre enpezada a facer varon. Tornola
muger como pudo y puede hacer como todopoderoso. Y no quiso su divina magestad
deshazerle una nuez que tenia en la garganta por que fuese testigo del milagro” (Surtz,
1990, 6).65

It is easy to imagine the great impact that the awareness of such a circumstance
could produce. As Surtz points out, it would undoubtedly have the effect of making
gender assignment seem rather arbitrary. It also seems to have given Juana a sense of
fluidity or freedom to move between prescribed gender roles. We see this in her own
career as abbess when she pursues the papal bull, and in her sermon as both Adam and
Eve move in and out of roles prescribed for his or her gender, Eve’s association with
Christ through suffering, and Adam’s offering of the apple.

As with her own ecclesiastical career, Juana takes care to maintain the duality
between subversive and dutiful daughter. On the one hand, her narrative relieves
Eve/woman of the stigma of having been responsible for the fall, and places that
responsibility on Adam’s shoulders. But much like her behavior with the Franciscan who

sought to parent the next Messiah with her, Juana also takes good care not to openly stray

 

6’ “And blessed Juana de la Cruz was at that moment in the belly of her mother in the process of becoming
a male. He [God] turned her into a woman as He could and can do since He is all-powerful. And His Divine
Majesty refused to take away an Adam's apple that she had in her throat so that it might bear witness to the
miracle” (Surtz, 1990, 6-7).

158

 

too far outside of established doctrine. As Surtz demonstrates, Juana uses the creation of
the beard to reestablish the submissiveness of women, and in doing so, returns her
narrative to the conventions of divine or natural order. Adam eventually tires of Eve’s
fear of him. He returns to God and asks him to remove the beard, saying that he would
rather endure Eve’s cruelty than live apart from her. But God refuses to acquiesce to
Adam’s request: “Calla, Adan, que bien estas assi, que mi voluntad es que todos los
varones tengan lo mesmo e sean sefiores sobre las mugeres” (1990, 116).66 Implicit here
are both a statement of male dominance, and an acknowledgement of the notion that part
of this domination will involve the traditional social convention that allows men to
pursue sexual contact with women, whether or not the woman is desirous of his
attentions. In a rather ironic moment, reminiscent of Juana’s turning in of the priest who
asked if she would conceive a child with him, the duality of Juana’s ecclesiastical
persona appears yet again. After recounting this radically subversive narrative that inverts
many of the gender concepts found in the Genesis account, Juana suddenly reverts to
established gender order when she puts in God’s mouth the pronouncement that men are
to dominate and women to be dominated.

Upon closer scrutiny however, Juana’s endorsement of the status quo is rather
tepid. Adam’s reward for gaining dominance is not Eve’s love as he desires, but rather
her fear. For all intents and purposes little has actually changed. Eve still runs from
Adam, but now it is out of fear rather than the disdain she showed after their creation.
Moreover, Adam is a ridiculous and comical figure throughout the episode. He does not

wear his dominance comfortably, in fact he lacks even the vaguest semblance of dignity.

 

66 "Be silent, Adam, for you are just fine like that, for it is my will that all men should have a beard and be
lord over women” (Surtz, 1990, 16).

159

 

Consumed from the beginning with his love/lust for Eve, he follows her, whining and
desperate, begging and pleading for her attentions, taking them when he can. Unable to
master her on his own, he must rely on divine intervention to attain the level of
dominance he finally possesses.

The form taken by God’s intervention is also telling. In Chapter 1 of this study I
briefly discussed the view upheld by the medical establishment of the period that based
on their humoral balance men were innately imbued with traits such as robustness, moral
strength, courage, liberality, and so on. God does not intervene by helping Adam to
acquire those qualities, but rather by providing him with a symbol of authority, the beard.
Thus, Adam’s dominance rests not in his personal character traits, but rather in the
superficial sign of the beard, and specifically in the meaning that Eve attributes to it. It is
therefore a dominance that rests outside of Adam, and as such, cannot be controlled by
him. Like the beard, J uana’s approbation of the traditional gender order appears more
symbolic than genuine. The words she places in God’s mouth appear to convey
obeisance, but a closer reading suggests an element of superficiality in the assignation of
that order. God gives Adam the symbol though never the substance of dominance, so too
does Juana include the obligatory acknowledgement that God intended men to dominate
women. But every other aspect of her text suggests a very different view, one in which it
is woman who is exhonerated, woman who is more closely connected to Christ, and
woman who is forced to live with man’s inefficacy.

The relation between Juana and her portrayal of Eve is also telling. In accordance
with prescribed gender norms, Eve occupies a largely passive role throughout the text. As

stated previously, it is not Eve, at least initially, who offers Adam the apple, but Eve who

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refuses Adam’s offers of fruit and flowers. Whether from disdain or fear, Eve’s main E:
activity is to constantly evade Adam’s advances. The episode with the serpent is absent
here, and in fact, Eve never speaks at all during the narrative. Surtz suggests a reading
that reverses the relation between activity and passiveness, and ultimately shifts the
responsibility for the fall from Eve to Adam:
Mother Juana implicitly relates the question of responsibility for the Fall to the
question of activity as opposed to passivity. In Genesis Adam is relatively
passive. It is God who finds a suitable mate for him, and Adam has no active role
in the creation of Eve, which occurs while he is sleeping. Eve, on the other hand,
has a relatively active role. It is she who plays out the temptation scene with the
serpent, and it is she who offers the forbidden fruit to Adam. Thus, in Genesis
action is associated with guilt, while passivity is associated with absolution from
responsibility. In the beard legend there is a reversal of roles, for it is Eve who is
relatively passive. Thus, if passivity is to be equated with innocence, then Eve is
exonerated, while the more active Adam is implicated as primarily responsible for
the Fall. (1990, 21-22)
To restate, if passivity is associated with innocence and activity with guilt, Juana is also
making a broader commentary on the dichotomy between the active public male spheres
of activity and the private, passive feminine sphere While traditionally the female is
considered to be too easily led astray to assume a role outside the home, the male is
considered to be of stronger character and thus capable both of managing the women in

his life, and of interacting with the larger world. In the same way that Juana’s association

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of passivity with innocence exhonerates Eve, so too does it suggest that the men who i’
continue to dominate women are the bearers of guilt for the fall.
Surtz further points out that while God has ordained that Eve be submissive,
Juana never shows Eve actually demonstrating her submissiveness. Though her initial
aloofness and disdain for Adam have been replaced with fear, she never grants Adam that
which he covets, the reciprocation of his love, and she does not draw near to him of her
own volition. So, though theoretically cast in the submissive role, it is a role that she
acquiesces to in a symbolic way. Much as Adam does not internalize the authority God
has bestowed upon him, neither does Eve internalize submission. Further, by placing Eve
in the submissive/passive role, Juana also draws a clear parallel between her humility and
that of Christ on the cross:
E la muger es figurada e significa a la persona del F ijo, porque asi como la muger
es mas humillde e obediente e piadosa e mansa que el honbre, assi la persona del
F ijo fue tan humillde e obediente al Padre que fasta la muerte de la cruz le
obedecio. E tan grande fue su piedad e mansedumbre que nunca respondio
palabra a cuantas injurias le dixeron, mas antes estando en la cruz, rogava al Padre
por los que le crucificaron. E que asi como las mugeres, si son discretas, son
naturalmente mansas e piadosas e perdonan las injurias antes que los honbres, asi
Nuestro Sefior J esuchristo perdona muy presto las injurias que le son fechas y es

contino perdonador e abogado de todo el humanal linage (144).67

 

’7 “And woman is like the person of the Son, because just as the woman is more humble, obedient, docile,
and pious than man, so the person of the Son is humble and obedient to the Father, even unto death on the
cross he obeyed him. So great was His humility and meekness that he never uttered so much as a word
against those who injured him, but instead, while suffering on the cross pleaded to the Father on behalf of
those who crucified him. Just so are women, if they are discrete, they are naturally meek and merciful, and
forgive injry more readily than men, so Christ is quick to forgive injuries against him, and is a constant
pardons and advocate of all the human race” (my translation).

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Thus, if Eve is the first of all women, by linking her to the crucified Christ, Juana diverts
the traditional association of women from the Virgin Mary, and associates her instead, in
the person of Eve with the crucified Christ in his humility and his ability to constantly be
an advocate for humankind, even in the face of ill-treatment and injury.

Finally, before turning our consideration to the sermon of the Nativity, let us
return to the issue of the apple. As I have shown, contrary to the Genesis account, Juana
shows Adam using the apple to entreat Eve, not to fear him. In yet another textual
ambiguity, she does revise this account toward the end of her narrative when she writes:
“no se enojava El con ellos mas antes le plazia que se amasen entramos. E dixo su divina
magestad que quando Adan comio la mancana que le dio Eva, que lo fizo por el desamor
que Eva 1e tenia e por que no se apartase d'él e se fuesse fiando como otras vezes solia
fazer. De manera que la discordia e poca paz e desamor que entre entramos avia fue
causa e raiz e principio del pecado tan grande en que cayeron (145).68 Again, she aligns
her story with the Genesis account, but does so almost as an aside. Moreover, she quickly
follows this correction of her narrative with an interpretive correction: that it was not in
fact the offering of the apple that was the cause of the Fall, but rather the discord that
arose between Adam and Eve. She thus accomplishes two objectives, she both gives
adherence to the traditional genesis narrative, while still relieving Eve of responsibility
for the Fall, and in so doing, suggesting an alternative schema for the understanding and

prescription of gender roles.

 

’8 “And He (God) was not angry with them, but rather it pleased him that they loved each other. And God
said that when Adam ate the apple Eve gave him, that he did it because of Eve’s coldness toward him, and
so that she would not run from him as she had done before. Thus, the discord, lack of peace, and lack of
love was the cause of the great sin into which they fell” (my translation).

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In conclusion, the vision of Eve presented in Madre Juana’s version of the
Genesis story is a provocative one. Rather than being the biblical temptress who serves as
the basis for much of the negative conceptualization of the feminine, she is here the
victim. For having made the simple choice to reject Adam’s advances, she is forced to
endure Adam’s relentless pursuit; she is what today would be considered harassed, and
perhaps even raped. When she becomes frightened of Adam, God defends Adam’s
authority, saying instead that that is the proper order of things. Many of the saints lives
are replete with similar sorts of tales, so it is certainly possible that Juana could have
taken this image from hagiographic accounts or iconographic representations. Even so.
the reader nonetheless questions J uana’s use of this imagery, and the extent to which Eve
is a representation of Juana herself, particularly within the context of trance as F lash-back
discussed above. If Juana’s trances are in fact a reliving of sexual encounters she
experienced as a child, she would naturally process and reprocess the content of those
experiences during her trances. While it is true that stories of the saints’ lives contained
accounts of both sexual and nonsexual violence, the Genesis account of the story of
Adam and Eve does not.

Though Juana’s manipulation of the story is masterful on many levels, the
principle variation she inserts is the predatory relationship between Adam and Eve.
Moreover, as we shall see, this is not the only sermon containing an account of a male
seeking sexual engagement with a woman against her will. Interestingly however, Juana
does not make the expected reversal and align Eve with Mary, but rather aligns her in her
suffering, humility, and mercy with Christ. Precisely through this shift, she is able to take

from Eve the responsibility for the fall and for leading man into a state of sin. She is also

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able to elevate Eve to the highest possible state, that of the crucified Christ, who takes Lt"
man’s suffering upon himself. An episode from the Vida, which Surtz calls The Mother

Hen, shows how this role of taking on the suffering of souls as a vehicle of their

 

salvation, is a role that Juana sees not only for Eve, but also for herself. In this episode,
Juana becomes convinced that the souls of those in purgatory are housed in stones. After
seeing in a vision the punishments suffered by those in purgatory, she asks God’s
permission to take their suffering onto herself. She accomplishes this by asking her
fellow nuns to bring stones to her. She can discern which stones contain souls and which
do not, and she takes those stones containing human souls and places them on her joints
and limbs, so that the pain will leave the entrapped souls and be absorbed by her own
bones. Thus, it seems likely that at least subconsciously if not consciously, Eve is here a
reflection of J uana’s own self-concept. As Eve becomes redemptress, so with Juana when
she takes on the pain of souls suffering in purgatory. It follows logically that if Eve is a
parallel image of Juana in her desire to save souls, so too might she be in her role as

victim of Adam’s constant sexual advances.

4.4. The Vision of the Nativity

Another of Madre J uana’s sermons, written for the Nativity of the Virgin, treats
similar themes. Like most of the sermons, it consists of two parts. The first part consists
of a representation of the birth and childhood of the Virgin Mary. This is followed by a
description of a pageant performed in Heaven in honor of Mary’s birth. Each section has
accompanying glosses wherein Christ, speaking through Juana, provides instruction for

the interpretation of the sermon.

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As the narrative of Mary’s birth opens, Juana tells us that the angels are so
amazed at Mary’s purity that her soul is removed from her body and taken up to heaven,
so that they and the Father can play with it. St. Anne and Mary’s relatives thought the
child had died, and began to mourn her. Finally, after three days, Mary’s soul was at last
returned to her body and began to suckle at her mother’s breasts, Episodes such as these
would become common-place, as it seems the angels never tired of bringing the baby
Mary, now body and soul, up into Heaven. Interestingly, Mary’s visits to Heaven also
involved the removal of her earthly clothes, as God and the angels desired that Mary
always be naked. Her naked body would be given to the Father who would play with it.
Mary’s nudity in her visits to heaven eventually seems to have transferred to Mary’s
behavior while on the earthly plane. Though originally it was the angels who undressed
her, she eventually acquired the habit of undressing herself. As Ronald Surtz writes,
despite St. Anne’s efforts to try and keep her baby daughter dressed, Mary was constantly
removing her clothes and going naked. The angels encouraged this behavior, telling her:
“Descr’rbrete, nifia, e no estés cubierta, que no tienes en todo tu cuerpo cosa que ayas
menester cubrir, mas toda eres linpia e pura e fermosa e perfeta e acabada de ver e de
mirar” (1995, 106).69

St. Anne continues to express her disapproval but Mary’s propensity for disrobing
continues. At one point, Mary actually removes her clothes in the temple. St. Anne,
horrified, covers her daughter with her own cloak, and takes her home and spanks her.
But even this does not stop Mary from undressing in public. It is when Mary reaches

puberty that things change. Though there are discrepancies in estimates of Mary’s age at

 

’9 “Show yourself, child, and don't be all covered up, for nowhere on your body do you have anything you
need to cover; rather, you are all spotless and pure and lovely and perfect and consummate to see and to
contemplate” (Surtz, 1995, 106).

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the time of her presentation at Temple, according to the Vida, she was a young woman at

If

the time. Whatever her age, it is at this time that the angel Gabriel tells Mary that it is no
longer God’s will that she go about naked. When Mary explains that she had only done
so because the angels had told her to, Gabriel states that it was good. for her to be naked
while a child. But that now that she is a woman she should no longer go without clothing.
At this point, the narrative of Mary’s birth and childhood comes to a close and the
scene shifts to the heavenly pageant performed in honor of the Nativity. In this pageant,
God summons several groups of young girls, and also summons the twelve tribes of
Israel. As Surtz points out, what follows is sort of a heavenly beauty pageant. All of the
girls, including Mary are suddenly transformed into children. Each of the groups of girls
is asked to sing and dance, and representatives of each tribe are sent to decide who is the
most beautiful of all the girls. Mary is kept apart from these groups, and is brought out
only at the end. Of course the outcome is that none of the girls can compare with the
beauty and perfection of Mary. Once the pageant is over the other girls continue to sing
and dance, until the Father asks them to give him their crowns. He comments on the
sweet scent and beauty of the crowns. Then he tells the Son that he wants Mary to dance.
The Son and Holy Spirit agree and bid her not only to dance, but to dance naked. In a
rather striking contrast with Mary’s earlier habit of disrobing, she expresses hesitation at
the order to undress, saying,
Senor Padre mio e Dios mio todopoderoso, a mi me plaze de salir no solamente
desnuda a bailar delante todos los celestiales mas aun estoy aparejada a obedescer .
si me mandare vuestra magestad ir agora al mundo e andar entre todas las gentes

asi desnuda como nasci. Aunque segun mi encerramiento e onestidad e vergiienca

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se me faria algo de pena, pero, Sefior Dios mio, heme aqui a mi, vuestra sierva.

Cunplase e sea fecha en mi vuestra santa voluntad (107).7O
However, like an obedient daughter she submits to God’s will and begins to dance.
Though she is still a child, as she dances her breasts begin to grow. The Father marvels at
the beauty of Mary’s breasts. He extends his little finger drawing her up to him. Once in
his arms, she is fully clothed. At this point Juana inserts a gloss, explaining that Mary’s
nakedness is a symbol of her purity and sinlessness, and that her breasts signifies that
from the time she was born she had “breasts of good desires and great love for her God
and Creator” (108).

When Juana resumes the narrative, Mary is still in the Father’s arms. Again he
bids her dance, and asks that she offer him a special gift. As Mary dances, he eyes her,
praising in detail the physical beauty of her body. Again God asks her to offer him some
special gift, but she says she has nothing to offer him. God persists, so she picks up a
palm frond, laden with golden leaves and flowers and apples. In each flower is a
consecrated host. God asks Mary why she offers him only consecrated hosts, while the
other girls all offered jewels and crowns. Mary responds that there is no more perfect gift
than God’s son. She says that she offers God the hosts in memory of Christ’s crucifixion,
so that he will not forget about the souls who suffer. God comments that though still a
child, Mary shows great concern for sinners. However, He is apparently more concerned

with other things. He tells Mary to forget about the sinners for now, and to come to him

 

7° My Lord Father and my almighty God, it pleases me to dance naked not only before all the inhabitants of
heaven, but I am even disposed to obey if your majesty ordered me to go now to the earth and to walk
among all people as naked as l was born. Although in accordance with my reclusion and honor and
modesty it would somewhat pain me, nonetheless, my Lord God, behold me, your servant. So be it and may
your holy will be accomplished and done to me (Surtz, 1995. 107).

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so that he can fondle her breasts. Mary demurs, saying that it is sinners she wants, for she
is always concerned about them. She asks God to receive her gift of the hosts as a
sacrifice offered for the entire church, and then she will give him her breasts.

But God will not be dissuaded; he insists that he wants her breasts right away.
Again, Mary expresses hesitation, this time telling him that it is not good for him to
fondle her in public. Instead, she suggests that they retire to a secret garden, and their in
private she will let him do as he pleases. God then takes the hosts in his hand, and they
become one host. He then holds them up to himself and the hosts become one with him,
symbolizing that the Trinity is one, and that there is one Divine essence. Then, the trinity
and all in Heaven take Mary in their arms and place her on the throne. Finally, Juana
inserts another gloss. Here God explains Mary’s giving consent to let God play with her
breasts only in private. According to God through Juana, Mary’s insistence on only
giving the Father her breasts in private is intended to serve as a metaphor for how one
should show one’s love for God. While Mary often performed good works in public, her
love for God was a private matter, and thus should be expressed in private, in the secret
garden of her heart and soul.

The pageant closes with Mary being told to go and enjoy herself with all her
relatives in Heaven so that she may know how much the Creator loves her. God then
clothes Mary with his mantle, which is heavy and laden with jewels. Mary still being a
little girl and the mantle therefore quite large, the seraphim offer to carry her, but Mary
refuses, saying she is unworthy. Again, there is another gloss explaining that this is to
show Mary’s humility. In the final scene of the pageant, some thieves arrive on the scene

and attempt to steal the mantle. Others defend Mary against her would-be assailants, and

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again God speaks to explain that the thieves represent heretics, who try to take from her

 

her virginity and her purity. Then circling around to the serrnon’s opening, God recalls
the scene in which the angels took away Mary’s clothes because she was innocent and
had nothing to hide, and how they continued to do so even when Mary’s mother tried to
clothe her.

One of the first things one notices about this sermon is the prominent role
occupied by either the presence or absence of clothing. God seems never to tire of
playing with Mary while she is naked, whether as a baby, or as a little girl with
burgeoning breasts. Moreover, even in trance state Juana seems incredibly cognizant of
the taboo surrounding her subject matter. The distinction between the male and female
voices in Mary’s life is striking. While Mary is a child, it is the mother figure St. Anne
who reprimands her and tries to keep her clothed, while God the father is constantly
inducing her to go naked. The one limitation to this condition seems to be once a little
girl reaches puberty, nakedness is no longer permitted, even by God. The parallel
suggested between J uana’s narrative and her own life is evident, for it is at puberty when
Juana herself eschews marriage by running away from home to take the veil. While this
could of course be nothing more than a coincidence, given that the content of flash-backs
and other trance states is known to come from traumatic memories and other matter from
the subconscious, that seems unlikely. Moreover, in the second part of the sermon, Mary
seems to have embraced the notion that it is inappropriate for her to be naked. During the
first part of the sermon, the child Mary seems happy to be naked, and attempts to disrobe
in both public and private situations. However, once in Heaven at the pageant, she is

reluctant to comply with God’s request, saying that it would give her “a1 go de pena.”

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Though the pageant is not intended to be a continuation of the narrative of Mary’s birth
and childhood, it seems apparent that this Mary is a rather more modest and subdued
creature than the child in the first part of the sermon.

Secondly, God’s intent fascination with Mary’s breasts is significant in many
respects. First, God here seems much more reminiscent of a father engaging in
inappropriate physical contact with his child, or perhaps of the serpent in the Genesis
creation story than of the Divine creator. When Mary is a baby, he wishes to play with
her naked. When the little girl Mary’s breast grow as she dances, he becomes insistent
upon touching and fondling them. And his desire does not take Mary by surprise. She
shows no alarm, but instead simply says that if God will go with her to a private garden,
she will let him do as he pleases. Again, returning to the notion that trances represent the
subconscious or traumatic memory, this would seem also to be a familiar scene for Juana.
We know that J uana’s mother died when she was approximately seven years of age.
Juana resided with her father for some time after that, but was eventually removed from
her father’s home. We do not know the reason for this removal, and it certainly could
have simply been an attempt to place Juana in a home where there was a female care-
taker. However, it does raise a series of questions. Why was she removed from her
father’s home? Why did she then flee her uncle’s home to enter the convent despite
family opposition? Obviously, this action could simply have been the result of religious
devotion, but as Surtz suggests, there could have been other factors motivating the young
Juana:

Perhaps such speculations (of childhood trauma) can be linked to the timing of

J uana's acting on her desire to become a nun. At the age of fifteen, in the face of

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attempts by her relatives to marry her off, Juana escaped from her uncle's house,

dressed in male attire, and sought refuge in the convent. Her relatives would not

have attempted to arrange her marriage had Juana not already undergone puberty.

Did her own sexual awakening precipitate her decision to become a nun? While

Juana had long desired to take the veil, puberty itself may have signaled that it

was time to go. (126)

Surtz observation is astute. It is in fact puberty that often causes difficulty for survivors of
childhood sexual abuse, because it is at this time that their own sexuality awakens. Such
children have usually received a discordant array of messages regarding their sexuality,
on the one hand they are often over sexualized, and condition to comply with another’s
wishes on demand. Simultaneously, they are often told that what they are doing is
shameful or secretive, and is thus to be concealed. So, when they begin to experience the
changes of puberty they often experience difficulties appropriately handling their own
sexuality.

In J uana’s case this could have induced her to avoid marriage, and/or to remove
herself to a safe environment, the convent, where she need not confront these internal
conflicts. Moreover, one does not preclude the other. Juana’s religious devotion may
simply have come together with her desire for a sexually safe environment, making the
convent the ideal choice. Of course one can only speculate about Juana’s motives here,
but Mary seems rather adept at managing the secrecy of sexual encounter, and given
J uana’s trance state, it would be natural that such adeptness may be a reflection of

J uana’s own experience with such situations.

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Some comments regarding medieval iconography and scripture are necessary
here. As the reader is no doubt aware, iconography of the period is not lacking in its
inclusion of the female breasts in its imagery. The use of the breast as symbol of
motherhood and nurturance was widespread. Moreover, as Ronald Surtz points out, the
image of the double-intercession involved the display of the breast and was a prevalent
one during the period. The double-intercession refers to the notion that Mary prays to her
son to aid those who seek her help, and in turn Christ, moved by his mother’s requests,
intercedes with the Father on behalf of Mary and the petitioner. This image was typically
represented by the showing of Mary’s breast, and Christ’s wounds. Within this context
the employment of the breast image would not seem so strange. However, as Surtz points
out, when the breast was displayed in representation of the nursing mother, typically only
one breast would be displayed.

The displaying of two breasts, on the other hand, conveys something rather
different. Exposure of two breasts carried the connotation of the prostitute, or at the very
least, of a woman or girl exposing more of her body than was deemed proper. As Surtz
explains, “Indeed, severe moralists railed against fashions that left the female breasts
exposed. For example, in one of his sermons, Saint Vincent F errer (d. 1419) states that
women have breasts so that they can function as a cellar ("wine cellar" or “pantry”) for
their suckling infants, and he goes on to condemn girls who expose their "lungs" to the
birds of the air as if they were prostitutes”(116). As we have seen, J uana’s imagery
involves the latter, the exposing of two breasts. Moreover, she combines this imagery
with that of the little girl—presumably invoking a state of innocence—and the sensuous

dancing that would be associated with a prostitute. Thus, while the inclusion of breasts is

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not in and of itself atypical, the manner in which Juana displays them is. Rather than
simply showing the single breast, she shows both, and in so doing, alters the image she
presents from that of the nurturing mother to that of the sexually provocative female.
The points at which glosses are interpolated in the sermon is also noteworthy. As
I have stated above, the glosses represent God speaking directly through Juana and
provide specific instruction on the interpretation of the content of her visions. By placing
the interpretation in God’s mouth, Juana side-steps any questions of her own authority,
for to question the interpretation would be to question God’s own word as delivered
through her. Herbert Bell in his book Holy Anorexia, sees this as being a pattern among
certain female mystics:
Just as critical as the course of this war against bodily urges, wherein the quest for
autonomy is purely internal, is the contest for freedom from the patriarchy that
attempts to impose itself between the holy anorexic and her God. The authority
figure may in fact be female, as for a time it was during Catherine of Siena's battle
against her mother or when Veronica Giuliani fought her abbess, but always in the
official church it is a male priest who dispenses the saving body of Christ. The
holy anorexic rebels against passive, vicarious, dependent Christianity; her piety
centers intensely and personally upon Jesus and his crucifixion, and she actively
seeks an intimate, physical union with God. Once she convinces herself that her
spiritual bridegroom communicates directly with her and she thereby achieves
true autonomy, the commands of earthly men become trivial. Her total
dependence upon God's will, ultimately hailed as heroically virtuous by the very

patriarchy she is rebelling against, legitimizes her defiance and places her in a

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position of enormous strength. For in her actions on earth the "will of God" to

which she yields is a force she alone interprets and arbitrates (116).

Though the first part of the sermon contains no glosses, it does contain the
passage spoken by the angels encouraging Mary to show her naked body; “descubrete”.
The glosses in the second part nearly all occur in relation to the donning or taking off of
clothing, in response to God’s desire for Mary’s breasts, or in praise of Mary’s physical
beauty. The first gloss occurs when the twelve messengers are examining the troops of
young girls, and tells us that the episode of the messengers is to tell all that Mary is “the
most lovely and perfect of all the virgins” (Surtz 1995, 107). The second gloss occurs
following the growth of Mary’s breasts while she is dancing naked before the Trinity and
the angels, and explains the symbolism of Mary’s nudity and her perfect breasts. Yet
another gloss is inserted at the point when Mary is in the arms of the Father and is
suddenly dressed in rich garments. This gloss informs us that Mary’s newly-donned
clothing is to demonstrate that just as she is without sin, so she is also elegantly adorned
with special graces.

The following gloss explains Mary’s gift of the palm frond, which as we have
seen, does not seem to be the gift that God had hoped for. As we have seen, God insists
after Mary’s presentation of the frond that he instead wants her breasts and he wants them
right away. The subsequent gloss seeks to explain Mary’s offering of her breasts to him
only in a private place. As we have seen above, the gloss suggests that this is a reflection
of Mary’s discretion in insisting that her love and devotion for God be a private rather
than a public matter. Finally, the three remaining glosses are all concerned with the image

of Mary’s mantle. The first explains that Mary was the mantle of Heaven when she bore

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Christ inside her. The second explains that Mary will not accept help from the seraphim

 

in bearing God’s mantle because of her great humility. And the last explains the
significance of the thieves who had come to steal God’s mantle from her.

Nonetheless, it hardly seems likely that the placement of the glosses is mere
coincidence. We know from J uana’s dealings in the Benefice of Cubas and the incident
of the priest who wished to conceive a new Messiah with her that Juana is both astute and
politically sophisticated. She would have been well-aware that the image that she was
projecting of Mary ran counter to established imagery, even within the sometimes
graphic representations permitted in medieval iconography. While her subconscious mind
may have brought forth these images of a naked little girl secretly giving her breasts to
God, Juana the astute Abbess would certainly have realized that this image would be
considered highly subversive, and would have recognized the need for interpretation. By
having the Gloss come from God the Father or Christ, she side-steps all the intermediate
levels of auctoritas described by Minnis, and goes straight to the highest level, that of
divine auctor. Thus, anyone who wishes to criticize either her or the content of her
sermons is also criticizing God’s own word as given to her.

We can say then, that Juana’s imagery invokes a highly sexualized little girl, who
accepts the sexual advances made to her, but also recognizes the need for them to be
carried out in private. Further, it can be seen from Juana’s placement of the glosses and
their content, that on some level, Juana the politician and Abbess recognizes that she
must find a way to avoid the public scrutiny of these images.

The inversion of traditional representations of Mary is similar to that which we

saw in the Creations Sermon, where Eve is transformed from temptress into the hapless

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victim of Adam’s undying love. In the same way, Mary is transformed from the pure and
virtuous handmaid of the Lord. First she is a little girl disobedient to her parents and
disregarding of social norms that dictate that her body should be covered, and later, when
dancing naked before the Father, she comes dangerously close to the projecting image of
a prostitute. Either one of these inversions would be interesting enough on its own, but
together I believe they essentially reinvent the medieval paradigm that governs social
views of women. As scholars such as Marina Warner (1976) point out, it was Eve, the
first woman, who through her lasciviousness, frailty and deceit cost man the opportunity
to live in Paradise in harmony with the Creator. Mary, the second Eve was to rectify

Eve’s error. And as Marina Warner points out, Mary’s virginity was key:

The inauguration of the new era of Christ found in virginity a most satisfying
image: a new, incorrupt, untainted world had been created by the Incarnation and
the Redemption; just as God molded Adam from new clay, so he had fashioned
his son anew. Because Jesus did not descend to earth but was born of a woman, it
was crucial that her clay too should be pristine and unspotted. This symbolism of
a new world also influenced the ideas of early Christian theologians far more than
the equivocal stories of J esus' birth in the Gospels. The fundamental idea that the
Incarnation of the godhead had overturned the Old Covenant of sin and death
found one of its loveliest images in the concept of the Virgin who gives birth to
the redeemer. She is the second Eve, mother of all the living in a new, spiritual

sense (59).

Just as Juana blurs the gender roles occupied by Adam and Eve, so too, does she blur the

images of the two first women, Eve and Mary. In J uana’s sermons, Eve is the woman

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w- -

who shrinks from Adam’s advances, while Mary dances naked before God and agrees to
go to a garden where God can fondle her breasts. Thus both women are prey to the sexual
desires of the male; one flees from them, while the other consents, but only in private.

Nonetheless, neither woman’s status is diminished or tainted due to these encounters.

At the conclusion of the Genesis narrative in the Creation Sermon Juana elevates
Eve through her share in Christ’s suffering, placing her as advocate for sinners. At the
close of the Vision of the Nativity, Mary is quite fully clothed, wearing God’s ornate
mantle which is nearly too heavy for her to carry. In fact, Juana is careful to tie both
women to the salvation of sinners, Eve through her suffering, and Mary through her
constant preoccupation for their salvation. One wonders whether this could be an attempt
at coming to terms with experiences in Juana’s own life. As we have seen, the role of Eve
as bearing the suffering of others to gain their salvation is one which Juana also sees for
herself when she places the rocks containing the souls from purgatory on her limbs. If
after all, the Virgin consents to a private encounter with the Father, would it not follow

that Juana would likewise have to suffer such an indignity for the redemption of sinners?

Lastly, as with Leonor and Teresa, let us consider the issue of departure, or
assimilation of the traumatic memory. As with much of Juana’s life and work, it is
difficult to make a definitive statement as to whether Juana actually completed the
healing process described by Alan Young. However, it is possible to make some general
observations.

As we know from the Vida, Juana had had visions/trances since her earliest
childhood. Though again we lack specific details, it would seem that these visions ceased,

and then for some reason began again in the year 1505 and continued for thirteen years.

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This period corresponds to the four years prior to Juana’s being made Abbess, and about
ten years after that event. It would of course be helpful to have some understanding of
why her childhood visions ceased, and why they began again, only lasting for thirteen
years. However, the fact that she did experience these trances suggests that at that time
the traumatic memories were still intrusive, and thus that she had not been able fiilly to
assimilate them. A subject for further study would be what caused them to stop in 1518.
A more thorough understanding of why her flashbacks did not continue would help a
great deal in addressing the question of departure.

However, while it may appear on the surface that traumatic memory plagued
Juana throughout much of her adult life, as I indicate earlier in this chapter, the visionary
path afforded Juana outlets for contextualizing these memories that would not have
existed at many other points in history, including our own century. Juana would of course
lacked the contemporary psychological framework to have understood her trance
experiences as flashbacks. The explanation of these events that would have been
available to her would have been to understand them as supematural communications
from God, which would also enhance her ecclesiastical career. Though in the more
pragmatic aspects of her rule as abbess she extended her power well-beyond that
generally permitted to women, in the mystical realm, she had the good fortune of living
in a climate where female visionaries were endorsed and even promoted. Scholars such as
Rocio Quispe-Agnoli points out in her article “Teaching, Learning, Reading, Writing:
Educational Tools from Women for Women in Fifteenth-century Spain”, the period of

Cardinal Cisneros leadership was a time of great support for female mystics. She tells us

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that during this time, such experiences by women were not only encouraged, but also
promoted by being made available in writing:
During Cisnero's spiritual governance in Spain (1436-1517), revelations, and
especially female revelations, were encouraged. Among the spiritual works
published at Cisneros's expense were both the Latin text (1505) and a Castilian
translation (1510) of the book of Angela de F oligno.21 The prologue to the
Castilian version probably reflects Cisnero's own ideas about female spirituality.
According to this prologue, there are two types of knowledge, that acquired
through formal studies by the educated (males), and the infused science closely
associated with women (45-46).
In the years following Cisneros’s death this trend would undergo an almost total reversal.
But for Juana it meant that her trances need not subject her either to medical or
inquisitorial scrutiny. Instead, they occurred within a political climate which allowed her
to flourish, elevating her to a position of power and status. As I suggested earlier, this
may have had some negative effects. On the one hand, her trances allowed her to achieve
a level of renown and success she would not otherwise have achieved. On the other hand,
her very success may also have kept her linked to her trauma longer than may otherwise
have been the case. Juana would therefore be simultaneously moving away from the
trauma, while still being unable to integrate it sufficiently to bring the intrusive memories
to an end. In Chapter One we considered Catherine Robson’s model of the scar of trauma
pointing in two directions, toward healing and yet still back to the moment of injury.
Juana seems to exemplify this model perhaps more than any of the other writers

considered in this study. Though we do not know what happened after 1518, the fact that

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her trances disappeared suggests that finally there was movement away from the
traumatic memory and toward healing.

As the reader is no doubt aware, there is much room for further study here.
Though J uana’s visions were in fact the impetus for this study, they also leave us with the
greatest number of unanswered questions. Why did Juana leave her father’s home? Why
did her trances resume in 1505, and why did they cease in 1518? What was the original
language that Juana used during her trances, and what the language employed in Sister
Maria Evangelista’s original transcription? Though it is improbable that information
regarding any sexual abuse ever existed, more information regarding Juana’s childhood
and family history could fill out the picture of her pre-convent life. Unfortunately, at the
time of this writing, it was not possible to work with complete versions of either the Vida
or the Libro del C onorte. It is my hope that at some point, full access to these texts may
provide answers to some of the gaps that remain in this study. In the meantime, Juana has
left us, perhaps unwittingly, if not with concrete biographical information, at least with a
small glimpse into some of the issues that seemed to form part of her psychological

makeup.

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Conclusions

In the preceding chapters I have considered three women authors’ attempts at
committing to paper themes related to having --at some point in their lives» experienced
a traumatic event or series of events. Though with differing outcomes, for each, the act of
writing provided a cathartic release, and played a role in her process of assimilating the
trauma. I have entitled this study Writing as Reconstitutive Act, because my first goal was
to explore the presence of themes related to trauma within the works, and second to
consider the ways in which reconstitution of the subject was at the core of each author’s
purpose in writing, though this was not always explicitly stated.

I began in chapter 1 to lay the groundwork for these explorations by presenting a
brief history and overview of trauma. These considerations began with a discussion of
how the question of trauma and the subsequent psychological syndrome, Post-Traumatic
Stress Disorder, might have been regarded within the Early-Modem medical framework.
Authors such as MacLean and Garza, among others, have demonstrated that mental or
emotional imbalances were viewed within a humoral context, as were conditions related
to physical health. Therefore, behaviors related to exposure to trauma such as depression,
numbing, flash-backs would have been treated by attempting to bring the patient’s
humors back into balance. As the beginnings of modern medicine took root, this
conceptualization eventually evolved from this quasi-spiritual understanding to
something more akin to contemporary definitions. Through the early work of pioneers
such as John Ericson, and then later in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the work

of Sigmund Freud, Pierre Janet, and Abram Kardiner scholars began to speak specifically

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of certain incidents as causing psychological trauma and resulting in a distinctive body of
symptoms. Scholars and practitioners continued to work in the arena with patients,
particularly war veterans, and later also with victims of sexual assault. In the 19705 the
Diagnosis of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder was added to the American Psychiatric
Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, creating an official diagnostic category
for this disorder. Allan Young and Judith Lewis Herman have contributed significantly to
the considerations undertaken here with their discussions of what constitutes Post-
Traumatic Stress Disorder and its treatment.

Finally literary scholars such as Cathy Caruth and Catherine Robson laid the
groundwork for a study such as this by applying psychological theory to discussions of
trauma within the literary text. Their work focused on the notion of trauma as wound, and
the act of writing as the survivor’s attempt to “write in and through the wounds”(27-28).
Implicit in this model are both the telling of the story of the actual traumatic event, and
the story of its recovery, what Caruth has called a “double telling (7). This double telling
served as a framework for the consideration of these three authors, as I examined the
ways in which the texts treat and avoid the narration of the original trauma, and then how
the act of writing may have served these women in their cathartic or reconstitutive
process.

In the work of Leonor Lopez de Cordoba we encountered a woman who had
survived lengthy incarceration during her adolescent years, and spent the remainder of
her days attempting to regain the social and economic status that she had lost. In her
Memorias, she recounts her early life in the court of Pedro 1, her imprisonment following

Pedro’s murder and the taking of the throne by Enrique de Trastamara. The bulk of her

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narrative is dedicated to her post-imprisonment life, as she works through prayer and
cajoling to acquire her lost fortune, her own home, and a secure place for herself and her
children. She recounts the acquisition of the private house, the adoption of the Jewish
orphan which she undertakes as a way to gain additional favor with God, and later her
and her relatives’ flight from the plague, which ultimately results in the death of her
eldest son and her own expulsion from her aunt’s family. As I stated in Chapter 1, she
interestingly omits from her narrative the time she spent at court as the chief consultant to
Queen Catherine of Lancaster, despite the fact that this was the pinnacle in her struggle to
ascend Spain’s social ladder. However, as we know from historical sources, this too
would come to an unhappy end when one of Leonor’s competitor’s for the queen’s
attention manages to turn Queen Catherine against Leonor and take her place as the
queen’s favorite.

Leonor’s is a story of ongoing struggle. Though she seems a woman of infinite
tenacity, she never recaptures the security, status and power that her family enjoyed
under Pedro’s rule. Though little is known of Leonor’s life after her days at Catherine’s
court, all indications are that her life ended in relative obscurity and perhaps poverty. It is
during this time that most scholars believe that her memoir was written, and this sense of
struggle and disillusionment permeates her text. Although written at the end of her life,
Leonor still writes almost worshipfully of her father’s heroism and betrayal. Likewise,
her narration of her early memories of the Atarazanas prison, the ill-treatment that she
and her family received there, and the resulting death of many of her relatives--
particularly her brother Lope—-are clearly still poignant for her. Unlike the other authors

considered here, Leonor seems to have fossilized in the position of role of victim. This is

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of course hardly surprising, given that life is not much kinder to her in the years after her
imprisonment. Though she does garner the support of her aunts, their support is
frequently compromised by Leonor’s cousins’ dislike of her. These tumultuous family
relationships finally break apart when the Jewish orphan Leonor adopted brings the
plague to the family home, and at the end of her narrative, we find her a broken woman,
cast out by her relatives and grieving the death of her eldest son. Thus, despite her efforts,
there is no evidence that Leonor has yet moved past the earliest stages of assimilation of
trauma described by Alan Young, of recycling and reprocessing traumatic memory until
one finds a way to reconcile it with one’s internal schema. One can hope that the writing
of her memoir may have provided some level of catharsis, though since we know nothing
of her life at the time of their writing, this cannot be said conclusively. Leonor does in
fact reconstitute herself, over and over again. This is after all, her task upon leaving the
prison and it is a task to which she will devote much of her life, first through the
acquisition of her houses, and later as a member of Catherine’s court. In fact her power to
continually reinvent and recreate herself is one of her most amazing personal qualities.
That said, her various reconstitutions are never successful in the long-term. As Amy Katz
Kaminsky and Elaine Dorough Johnson point out (1984), she seems to have inherited her
father’s political acumen, but in the end, like her father, she was unable to save herself
from a bad end. Thus, while themes of trauma occupy a central role in her text, there is
little evidence of successful reconstitution or even of assimilation of the traumatic event.
In Teresa de Cartagena’s writing we find a similar struggle, but with a much more
successful conclusion. Teresa’s two theological treatises are not autobiographical in

nature, but do treat themes of late-onset deafness and the subsequent adjustments this

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necessitated in Teresa’s life. While Leonor openly states that in part she wrote the
Memorias as a testament to the events she witnessed, Teresa’s purpose is rather one of
helping her cope with the long hours and isolation of the cloistered life, which she admits
she would not have chosen. As with the rest of her essays’ content she frames this in a
biblical context, that of combating idleness, one of the seven deadly sins. We must
therefore piece together those autobiographical elements which Teresa provides as a by-
product of her theological reflections.

In her first essay the Arboleda de los Enfermos we find Teresa struggling to
accept her deafness and its consequences—her removal from her family’s highly public
and social life, and her need to accept having to enter into the convent. In this essay she
treats the theme of being forced to listen to the word of God, which she would otherwise
have been too immersed in worldly pleasures to do. She provides no description of her
illness, nor does she talk specifically about her process of becoming deaf. The few
references we find to her family relationships occur when she refers to their frustration at
her illness. Though her intent is to recount in a positive way that this is a blessing from
God, she is still struggling to overcome her bitterness at this unwanted intrusion. She
does not speak of spiritual or domestic contentment as a member of a convent
community, rather she talks of her isolation, and the bitterness of the supper that God set
before her. By invoking images such as the bit and bridle metaphor, she talks of God’s
forcible restraint of her ears and tongue so that she would listen to his words. The tone
throughout the essay is one of trying to recognize that what has happened to her is

actually in her benefit, but at the essay’s close she still seems unreconciled to her new

life.

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In the Admiraeio'n Operum Dei however, her tone changes. This essay was written
several years after the Arboleda purportedly at the behest of one Juana de Mendoza.
Again in this essay Teresa does not directly address personal themes. Here she writes in
response to critics—presumably male—who have argued that a woman could not have
written a work like the Arboleda. Hence the focus of her second work is the defense of
what she describes as God’s choice to use her as his vessel. One could speculate that
perhaps it was the very necessity of having to defend her work that finally enabled her to
complete the Reconstitutive act she began in her first essay. Whatever the cause, it is here
where Teresa completes her psychological task of reintegration. Three pivotal segments
in this essay are Teresa’s implementation of the pith and bark metaphor, her exegesis of
the story of Judith, and later that of the blind man on the road to Jericho.

Her use of the pith and bark metaphor occurs near the beginning of the essay, and
in many ways sets the stage for the rest of her defense. In many respects, I believe that it
is here also that Teresa comes closest to adopting a truly feminist position. Her argument
begins by acknowledging women’s comparative softness. She continues by comparing
this softness to the relation between the pith and the bark of a tree, the outer bark being
strong and hard, while the inner pith is soft and malleable. Both, she tells us, are
necessary in order for a tree to remain alive and healthy. Just so do the qualities of men
and women complement each other. Both are necessary for the well-being of the other,
and God uses both to His ends and purposes. Though this is not a direct embracing of
Teresa’s illness, it is a graceful acknowledgement of the fact that all aspects of life are
part of a greater whole, and all are necessary. Gone are references to the spuming of

illness or forced acceptance that God is acting in her best interest. In their place there

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appears a calm, if not perhaps indignant author who both acknowledges and accepts her 5;.
frailties.

In her treatment of both biblical episodes, this seeming acceptance continues. Her
language reveals a woman who has at last made peace with a life that was neither of her
choosing nor her liking. In the former example, the story of Judith, she talks of God’s
ability to aid the widow Judith in wielding the sword in order to kill the commander
Holifemes. Just as Judith may have been an unlikely opponent for Holifemes, so too was
Teresa an unlikely candidate to become an author. However, Teresa argues that God can
use any instrument of his choosing to whatever purpose he wills, and he therefore could
endow both Judith and Teresa with the necessary qualities and skills to perform the task
he has assigned for them. Again, Teresa argues her point not from the perspective of one
disenfranchised, but rather as one who has found the silver lining after the clouds. God
forced her to be silent that she would listen to Him, and then imbued her with the words
to write his message.

She gives a similar treatment to the episode of the blind man on the road to
Jericho. The parallels here are fairly obvious, a man also with a physical disability is
wandering along the road crying out to meet Jesus. So too did Teresa cry out in her first
essay, reaching for peace with and acceptance of her situation. One unique feature of this
episode is Teresa’s actual insertion of herself into the narrative. As I explain in Chapter 3,
though she begins her treatment of the parable in a traditional fashion, she gradually
seems to become so identified with her subject that the distinction between her and the

blind man becomes blurred. The two characters then fuse into one, making it difficult for

the reader to know for certain when she is talking about herself and when the blind man.

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This is in vivid contrast to the Teresa of the Arboleda who rather than actively seeking is
restrained by the bit and bridle so that she may be forced to listen to God’s word. Of
course the parable concludes with the blind man/Teresa being made well. Obviously this
conclusion does not refer to the restoration of Teresa’s hearing, but rather to the healing
of her spirit. Thus the task that she embarked on in the Arboleda actually comes to
fruition in her second work.

Though as I have stated the details of Teresa’s illness are sparse, the reader can
nonetheless find a clear recounting of Allan Young’s model of recycling and reprocessing
trauma until it is finally incorporated in a healthy way into the individual’s internal and
external schemata. The depressed, angry woman who penned the first lines of the
Arboleda has finally found the spiritual center and purpose which she tired
unsuccessfully to reach in her early writing.

In the writings of Madre Juana de la Cruz, trauma is represented in a very
different way. While Teresa’s texts were also theological, her psychological process was
visible throughout. In Juana’s text the reader must trace the presence of specific themes
to unearth content related to the possible textual representation of trauma and
reconstitution. As I explain in Chapter 4, though our biographical information about
J uana’s childhood is scant, there is enough evidence to cause speculation about the
possibility that she may have experienced sexual abuse. We know from her Vida that her
mother died when she was seven. Following her mother’s death we know she remained
for a time in her father’s home, but that eventually, for an unknown reason, she went to

live with an aunt and uncle. Finally, we know that at the age of 15, roughly the age of

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puberty, she fled her relatives’ home in order to escape their marriage plans for her and
enter the convent.

Juana is reported to have had visions throughout her childhood. It is these same
visions that begin again during her years in the convent and for the basis for the sermons
that comprise her one extant text, the Libro del Conorte. I propose a possible reading of
these sermons from the perspective that the mystical visions or trances were in fact flash.-
backs, a common symptom of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder wherein the victim loses
all contact with their immediate environment and relives the traumatic events. Read in
this way, J uana’s texts certainly provide ample evidence that gender and sexuality
occupied a prominent space in the nun’s subconscious. The earliest manifestation of this
comes not from the sermons but from the Vida, where we learn that Juana believes that
God had originally intended for her to be male, but at the behest of the Virgin Mary
changed her into a female. The result of the last-minute gender switch was that Juana
would be left with a prominent adam’s apple as reminder of what God had intended her
gender to be.

This fluidity in J uana’s gender identity seems to have been reflected in her career
as abbess. During that time, she would assume the male role of having jurisdiction over a
local parish in order to obtain the financial revenue from the parish to support her
convent. When this benefice was later called into question, she would take the
extraordinary step of securing a papal bull to insure her continued leadership and
financial stability. We also have evidence from the Vida that Juana strongly identifies
with the Male Christ figure as being responsible for the saving of souls. this was seen in

the description of her placing hot stones on her joints so that she could bear the pain of

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souls from purgatory, so that she could bear their pain and shorten their penance, thus
speeding them on their journey to Heaven. She makes the highly unusual maneuver of
placing God’s own words in her mouth, thus bolstering her sermons from merely being
the ramblings of a mystic, to containing Divine authority. If God speaks through her, she
becomes elevated to the highest level of literary authority and to a large extent places
herself beyond male criticism. As scholars such as Ronald Surtz have demonstrated this
subject in and of itself provides much material for exploration, which unfortunately is
beyond the scope of this study. What is significant to our purposes here, however, is
Juana’s identification with the male godhead, both in her own ascetic practices, and the
authority she infuses into her sermons.

The content of her texts is similarly androgynous. In the first of the two sermons
treated in this study, the Creation Sermon, Juana reverses the traditional roles occupied
by Adam and Eve in the Genesis creation account. In Juana’s rendition, it is not Eve who
brings about man’s fall, but Adam. As Juana tells us, Adam engages in relentless sexual
pursuit of Eve, despite her continuous rejection of his advances. The beard, Juana writes
was God’s way of instilling fear into Eve so that Adam could have domination over her.
However, when Adam is displeased by Eve’s fear, he offers her fruits and flowers, and of
course, the infamous apple, to try and cajole her into coming near him. If we interpret this
material as being the content of the subconscious as presented in flashbacks, these blatant
references to sexual pursuit of an unwilling or frightened female offer the reader much to
consider. Moreover, in reversing their respective roles in the fall, Juana is able to identify

Eve with the suffering Christ. Eve then violates the traditional creation narrative in two

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ways, first by being the victim of Adam’s ill-treatment rather than the sinister female
temptress, and second, by identifying through her suffering with the male Christ figure.

When considered in conjunction with the other sermon treated here, that of the
Nativity, this cross-identification creates a sort of gender triangle between Eve, Mary,
and Christ. As we have seen, the sermon of the Nativity treats themes related to Mary’s
birth and childhood. However, once again, Juana’s narrative hardly complies with
tradition. In the section dealing with Mary’s birth and childhood, Juana relates how Mary
is encouraged by God and the angels to remove her clothes and go about naked. She is
frequently taken to heaven, and is always naked while there. This continues until the
onset of puberty, at which time the angel Gabriel appears to Mary and tells her that now
that she is a woman, it is no longer appropriate for her to be without clothes.

However, God’s desire to see Mary naked does not abate. In the second segment
of this sermon, Mary is a participant in a heavenly beauty pageant. Here God insists that
she remove her clothing because he wants to see her dance naked before him. Thus,
Juana also inverts Mary’s own image, taking her out of the role of stainless sinless
mother, and casting her in a role very similar to that occupied by Eve the temptress in the
traditional Genesis narrative. Juana of course does not imply here that Mary was
responsible for the fall, but she does bring together the paradigm of the two first women
into one amalgam of victim of male sexual desire and suffering Christ figure. We know
that Juana does herself Identify with the later role, it therefore seems plausible that she
also identifies with having been the victim of male sexual desire.

As Mary dances, although she is still a little girl, her breasts begin to grow. God

then bids her to come to him so that he can fondle her breasts. While in the first segment

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Mary seemed quite content to be naked, here she proceeds with more caution, suggesting
that they retire to a secret garden and there she will let him do as he pleases. Again, if we
regard Juana’s trance content as coming from her subconscious, the link to Juana’s
having experienced such and encounter herself seems quite strong.

The implications of these thematic issues for consideration of trauma in J uana’s
texts are complex. On the one hand, the fact that she is continuing to have
trances/flashbacks, is indicative of one still experiencing Post-traumatic Stress Disorder.
On the other, she is artfully able, whether consciously or not, to turn these incidents to
her advantage, and use them to build a solid ecclesiastical career, and to develop a
national reputation as a visionary, that will eventually result in several attempts at
canonization. We are also led to believe that Juana’s visions stop in the year 1518. Of
course, the theological explanation for the visions’ ceasing would simply be that God at
that point chose not to continue to endow her with his visions. A psychological
explanation on the other hand would suggest that for whatever reason, at that time Juana
was able to assimilate the trauma, and therefore no longer needed the recourse of
flashbacks.

As I state in Chapter 4, this analysis in many ways leaves us with more questions
than it answers. Though I do think further study might yield a further understanding of
these issues, the great likelihood is that we will never have conclusive answers for many
of these questions. But we do have texts whose thematic content may shed some light on
the early life of a sixteenth-century nun, and events that may have led to her career as a

mystic and visionary.

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In the texts of these three authors then, we have encountered representations of
trauma varying in content, style, and purpose. Leonor openly writes of her difficult life
with the purpose of leaving a testimonial legacy. Teresa writes of her illness only insofar
as its discussion is necessary to support the thematic content of her texts. In all
likelihood, the inclusion of themes related to trauma in Madre Juana’s texts was entirely
outside of her conscious awareness. We can hypothesize that for both Teresa and Juana
writing may have played a role in their catharsis, and certainly did so in their post-
traumatic reconstitution of the self. Teresa’s writing seems to have given her an outlet to
express her feelings of grief and loss, so that she could eventually become reconciled
with her new situation. J uana’s visions, and the writing of them, brought to Juana a
renown and status that she would not have been otherwise likely to enjoy simply as the
abbess of a convent.

While this study has proved a good beginning for the exploration of these issues,
it has also led to a number of areas that merit further exploration. The first and most
obvious of these pertains to Madre Juana. As I state in Chapter 4, I believe that thorough
study of the manuscript is in order. Some areas of exploration would include, an
examination of the Libro del Conorte as text, a closer examination of the actual language
employed by Juana, and study of those sermons not yet analyzed by other scholars.

In addition, it would be useful to consider if and how considerations of trauma
might apply to other women writers of the Iberian Peninsula, the late fifteenth-century
love poet Florencia Pinar being one of the first to come to mind. We have even less
biographical information about Florencia than we have about Madre Juana. However,

many critics, Alan Deyermond (1983) and Joseph Snow (1984) among others, have

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written of the tone of complaint in the three poems currently attributed to her. As with H?
Madre Juana, proof of the existence of trauma may be difficult if not impossible,
particularly without additional biographical data. But like Juana, an exploration of
thematic content could be a beginning for such an exploration.

Teresa de Cartagena is of course not the only woman to be sent to a convent
against her will. As many scholars point out, convents were often used as depositories for
female family members who for whatever reason were deemed unmarriageable. It is
likely then that many women struggled with the isolation and boredom of convent life.
One fact frequently pointed out by scholars such as Ronald Surtz (1995) is the number of
women in convents who wrote during this same period. Though often these women wrote
at the behest of their confessors, a study that examined their writings might also yield
more information about the daily lives and struggles of other nuns who simply never
acquired even that small bit of recognition that Teresa did.

A consideration of these issues across geographical regions could also be of

 

interest. One point of departure could be an exploration of the Memorias in the context of
other personal narratives of the period, such as the Avision of Christine de Pisan, written
approximately seven years before the Memorias in 1405. As I have mentioned

previously, Christine de Pisan is another example of a woman who wrote as the result of
a life-altering event. These two works have much in common: proximity in time,
autobiographical structure, and both deal with themes of suffering and personal loss. A
comparative study of these two works would certainly be a fruitful and fascinating area of
investigation, and could be expanded to include other personal narratives of the period as

well.

195

Stemming from our considerations of women’s literary expressions of trauma, a
study of gender difference and literary expression of trauma or suffering would also be of
interest. Within the early modern historical context, did the same events produce a
traumatic reaction in both men and women? Were men who experienced trauma more
likely to write than those who did not? Carolyn bynum addresses some of these issues
within the context of religious practice and conversion experience in her book
Fragmentation and Redemption. She observes a number of differences in how men and
women identify God with gender, and the models they employ to their experiences of
conversion:

Medieval men and women looked at and used gender-related notions very

differently. Male writers saw the genders as dichotomous. They stressed

male as power, judgment, discipline and reason, female as weakness,
mercy, lust and unreason. They applied female images to themselves to
express world denial, and the world they renounced was predominantly the
world of wealth and power. Women writers used imagery more fluidly.

Personal and social characteristics were more often shared by the two

genders in women's writings. The female was a less marked category; it was

more often simply a symbol of an almost genderless self. When women did

give the female content taken from the traditional idea of asymmetrical

genders, they saw it as physical and bodily (175).

Herbert Bell makes similar observations regarding asceticism and it’s relation to concepts
of God and the Devil among female mystics in his book Holy Anorexia when he writes:

“In a recent work, Saints and Society, Donald Weinstein and I set forth a major

196

 

 

distinction between male and female saints, especially with regard to their ascetic
practices, based on their differing perceptions of the locus of sin. For women evil was
internal and the Devil a domestic parasitic force, whereas for men sin was an impure
response to an external stimulus, one that left the body inviolate (l 7). Though both these
scholars are speaking within the context of the religious life, an exploration of possible
implications for the lay-person could shed light on differences between male and female
processing of traumatic events during the late Medieval and Early-Modem periods.
There is also a significant body of literature in psychology and women’s studies
suggesting that women’s psychosocial development differs from that of men. Some
scholars, such as Carol Gilligan (1982), have theorized that women’s development is
marked by a tendency toward connection with others and a need to nurture and be
nurtured by her peers. Male development on the other hand, is viewed as being
characterized by the drive toward differentiation and individual success, i.e. distinction
from the group. Gilligan has further suggested that these developmental differences are
reflected in the ways men and women respond to conflict and moral dilemma, with
women favoring more flexible solutions that take into account a sense of the “greater
good”, while men frequently favor resolution that upholds social order over individual
need. Gilligan is of the opinion that these distinctions span both time and culture. If we
employ Gilligan’s model alongside those presented by Bell and Bynum, what
ramifications might there be for a gender analysis of trauma and literature in early-
modem Spain? What differences exist in the ways that male and female authors discuss-

or refrain from discussing—trauma in the written text?

197

These are just a few of the questions that come to mind as avenues for possible
further study in the area of trauma and literary production. Though this is but a
beginning, it is my hope that an exploration of the issues presented here will open new
alternatives for the study of the writing of Early Modern women, and also lead to new
avenues of study within the area of early Modern narrative across gender and

geographical borders.

198

 

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