TERESA DE CARTAGENA, WRITER AND CONVERSATIONALIST: The first female defense of Hispanic literature

Teresa de Cartagena is one of the most significant historical figures of the Spanish Middle Ages. Converso intellectual of 15th-century Spain, this woman, a mystic, deaf, and writer, is yet another voice marginalized at the end of the medieval period, both due to her conventual enclosure and her isolation caused by deafness, as well as her female condition in the misogynistic century she lived in. Her two treatises, Arboleda de los enfermos and Admiraçión operum Dei, splendidly analyzed by Ilse Díaz in this book, reflect the cultured converso Burgos family environment in which Teresa was educated alongside her grandfather Pablo de Santa María, a highly regarded scholarly rabbi well-versed in Talmudic and philosophical knowledge, and her uncle, Alonso de Cartagena, bishop of Burgos, who had translated Seneca and whose influence is felt in the author's treatises, as he was a key figure who confronted the body, mortal and imprisoned by being subjected to needs, with the spirit, which could be fully liberated through the practice of virtues and mental discipline. These elements are essential for the writing of this woman who dedicates herself to the body, female physiology, and illness, with whose reflections she contributes to the philosophical, theological, and medical thought of the 15th century, just as her intellectual converso relatives had influenced, with their respective works, Hispanic literature and the spirituality of the late Middle Ages.

Ilse Díaz analyzes the Stoic sources in the treatises with remarkable skill, specifically in the contextualization of neo-Stoicism among the converso humanists of the 15th century, where she frames the author in her formative and educational context, in order to lay the groundwork for a more extensive interpretation of Seneca's influences in her texts and constructs the intellectual biography of the religious, converso, and mystic.
The methodological proposal of the book follows Michel Foucault's ideas on "technologies of the self" and the two forms of subjectivation: "care of the self" and parrhesia. Illness and "the care of the self" are addressed from the philosophical perspective of "the disdain of the body" to the suffering body, which, however, can lead to the healing of the soul.
The first of Teresa de Cartagena's works, Arboleda de los enfermos, presents itself as a philosophical text on the subjective experience of pain and isolation, but, at the same time, as a medical treatise for the soul. The second work, Admiraçión operum Dei, is set within the famous 15th-century debate known as the "querelle des femmes," initiated by Christine de Pizan about the vilification or praise of the female sex, in which misogynists and philogynists wield arguments against or present catalogs of famous and virtuous women in favor. The final part of the book is a necessary comparison of the work of Teresa de Cartagena, Admiraçión operum Dei, and Sor Juana's "Respuesta a Sor Filotea" as both defend the woman's right to education (teaching and learning), knowledge, and intellectual work.
Teresa de Cartagena, the first advocate for women in Hispanic literature, laid the foundations, since the 15th century, for the reclamation of women in the intellectual sphere, and her voice will be heard by future women, to whose call the author of this splendid book, which you are about to begin reading under the expert hand of Ilse Díaz Márquez, also responded. Her sensitivity and erudition will guide you through ancient and little-explored terrains that you will undoubtedly enjoy with her fluid and pleasant prose.