Being an Island: From Presence to Meaning in the Treatises of Teresa de Cartagena

Abstract

Abstract Teresa de Cartagena (ca. 1425 – after 1478) was a disabled nun who faced a tripartite predicament as an author: deafness, gender, and her lineage within a Jewish convert family in medieval Spain. Regrettably, scholarship has tended to encapsulate her in a three-walled box (literature, affectivity, mysticism) in which medieval women’s spiritual writings in the vernacular are siloed. Against the prevailing interpretative model of her writing, which is based on enclosure and spatiality, I advocate for a paradigm shift toward a dialectic of absence/presence that underscores the pervasive nature of Teresa’s intellectual concerns and aligns more faithfully with the actual experience of deaf people. Within this perspective, this article seeks to retrieve the depths of Teresa’s intellectual aspirations, recognizing her not merely as a literary figure but also as a theologian and a Bible scholar. I also argue that Teresa is a mystic, and an intellectual one, whose mysticism has more affinity with the revelation of the rational and the enlightenment of the understanding than with the darkening of the mind before the inexpressible. Taking her intellectual vocation with the utmost seriousness, the present account aspires to reposition Teresa not simply as a marginalized writer but as a theologian of the marginalized: the first Spanish woman exegete and theologian, and the first proponent of a theology of disability.