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Mystical Traditions Are Political

2018; Duke University Press; Volume: 56; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00138282-4337580

2573-3575

Núria Silleras-Fernández,

Early Modern Women Writers

Mystical traditions are not apolitical. In this context, I understand medieval politics in a broad sense, encompassing policies of the church (secular and regular) and the monarchy (government and court) that did not always align. I will refer to mysticism as a personal religious experience in which the subject seeks to encounter God and to unite with the divinity whether or not that end is achieved. There are many possible ways of addressing the connection between politics and mysticism using examples from my main geographic area of expertise, the Iberian Peninsula, which—borrowing from Sharon Kinoshita—is where I put the foot of my compass while studying the Mediterranean. In this brief piece, I will argue not only that medieval and early modern mystical traditions are political but that those politics were gendered. Medieval virtue was as performative and as constructed as gender, and it was based on a “stylized repetition” of virtuous acts; therefore, for women to be recognized as having attained distinction in devotion and mysticism, they needed to comply with, resist, or fight against the particular roles assigned to them (sometimes all at once).1 Similarly, because men were considered generically more virtuous, women were supposed to become manlier to be more virtuous.2 It is no coincidence that the etymological root of virtue, the Latin virtus, is vir, or man; therefore virtue signified “manliness,” or “courage.”For the sake of brevity, I will look at one example, that of Teresa Enríquez (1450–1529), known as the Madwoman of the Host (La Loca del Sacramento)—the nickname given to her by Pope Julius II. Her other popular nicknames were the Drunkard of Celestial Wine (La Embriagada del Vino Celestial) and God’s Fool (La Boba de Dios).3 I will examine how she acted and was perceived during her lifetime and how her figure was modified in a series of texts penned by male authors shortly after her death and into the twentieth century. All the authors tailored her biography to suit their own objectives and presented her experiences and those of her grandmother—both of whom were connected to the Trastámaras, the royal dynasty ruling the Crowns of Aragon and Castile—in a more mystical light. I will contend that those texts portrayed Teresa as a model for upper-class women (particularly widows) to emulate but that these portrayals obscure and diminish the agency she had in life. These writers’ aim was to convince women that the theological virtue of charity went beyond loving God above everything else. They transformed charity into a virtue that in this precise context meant the use of one’s own resources to support the church (and, typically, the specific branch of the church represented by the writer in question). This would bring women closer to God and to salvation while increasing their pious reputation and, paradoxically, their status in society and their capacity to exercise agency. If performing piety was a form of empowerment, then, to quote John Harvey, “it is true, too, that piety was power in the late Middle Ages, and humility had authority.”4 Teresa Enríquez certainly had it all: piety, power, humility, authority, and, since the 1970s, beatification.Teresa Enríquez was the daughter of María de Alvarado y Villagrán and Alfonso Enríquez de Quiñones, Almirante of Castile. Teresa’s connection to the royal house was through her father, who was Queen Juana Enríquez’s half-brother. Juana Enríquez (r. 1458–68) was the wife of King Joan II of Aragon (r. 1458–79) and the mother of Ferran (Fernando) the Catholic, king of Aragon in his own right and king-consort of Castile thanks to his marriage to Isabel I. Several historians have pointed out that she must have been illegitimate.5 After her mother’s death, she was raised by her “holy” grandmother, in the shadow of the Franciscan convent of Valdescopezo (Medina de Rioseco, Valladolid).6 Apparently, this inspired her to become a nun, but despite this, around 1470 her father married her to a nobleman, Gutierre de Cárdenas, the Contador Mayor of the Catholic Kings—whose employment placed them both in the royal court, where she served as a lady-in-waiting to Queen Isabel. The two women became very close, and Teresa assisted the queen in her various projects. For instance, she collaborated at the Hospital of the Queen (Hospital de la Reina) established in Córdoba to aid those injured in the military campaign against Granada.7 However, what matters more to the present discussion is what she did after the death of her husband in 1503, and of Isabel in 1504. Now free of male supervision, and in control of the substantial wealth and property she was supposed to eventually pass to Diego de Cárdenas, her son and heir, she would become—if we are to follow didactic treatises dedicated to teaching women how to behave—a model for widows.8 Books such as Carro de las donas (The Chariot of Ladies, 1542)—an adaptation of the late fourteenth-century Llibre de les dones (The Book of Women) by the Franciscan Francesc Eiximenis—includes Teresa Enríquez as an example. Both the Catalan, Francesc Eiximenis, who spent most of his career in Valencia, and the Valencian, Lluís Vives, in The Instruction of a Christian Woman, praised widowhood as a virtuous state in which one can focus on serving God. They both discouraged widows from remarriage. For instance, Eiximenis presented widowhood as a period of female autonomy, because for women marriage equaled subjugation, given that men always “endeavor to tyrannize women” (volen tiranegar a les dones).9 Medieval and early modern thinkers, both secular and religious, typically divided a woman’s life into three stages: virginity, marriage, and widowhood. That is, a woman’s life was determined by her relationship with men and was based on her familial and reproductive roles.Mysticism claims universality. In theory, any believer can unite with God, but in practical terms, the way a community perceives this individual relationship with the divine, or the way it is recorded in textual form, was mediated by gender, social stature, the particular context, and the writer’s agenda. Teresa was determined to serve God, so she transformed her palace in Torrijos (a town near Toledo) into a site of devotion and asceticism, where she could pray, do good works, and help the poor who streamed into her palace from far and wide thanks to her reputation and willingness to help. She contributed to the expenses of converting the Muslim subjects of her lands to Christianity, sending missionaries and creating schools for the children; she redeemed captives and created and maintained a collegiate church in Torrijos dedicated to the Holy Host. Teresa built herself a house with a corridor that communicated with the church so she could have privileged access at all times, making the collegiate church an extension of her home. In that church she also founded a confraternity under the name of the Holy Host—the regulations of which were tailored to suit her own religious needs. She also established a monastery in Torrijos dedicated to the Conceptionists, or the Order of the Immaculate Conception (of Mary), founded in 1484 by a Portuguese woman associated with the Castilian court, (Saint) Beatriz de Silva, who had also been supported by Queen Isabel.10 Teresa’s sponsorship of this order, essentially an Iberian version of Franciscanism that focused on Mary’s purity and miraculous conception, brought her into conflict with her deceased husband’s final wishes. Gutierre’s will stipulated the creation of a monastery of Poor Clares in Almería, but Teresa had other plans and funded the Conceptionists instead.11 This point is not raised by her early modern biographers, who praise her obedience. As part of the campaign to promote the new order, she also donated ten thousand maravedís for the printing of five hundred breviaries of the Holy Conception.12 However, Teresa’s intense religiosity did not push her to profess as a nun, most likely because she wanted to achieve her religious goals with the freedom granted to her as a wealthy noble widow. As a lay widow, she remained free to choose her own destiny.Teresa was a member of a network of women who were very engaged with religion and had strong connections with the royal court. They cooperated with the reform of the church on their own terms—a reform supported by Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros, the confessor and confidant of Queen Isabel. Cisneros, for his part, also contributed to the diffusion of female spirituality and provided models of devotion for women by sponsoring the translation, printing, and publication of the vitae of holy women like Juana de Orvieto, (Saint) Margarita de Castello, and (Saint) Catherine de Siena.13 Just as those texts depicted these three holy women in an idealized fashion to promote female spirituality and present them as role models for women, so too did Teresa’s life story shortly after her death. This literature was necessary in part because women of the time needed contemporary examples of feminine piety so they could identify with them and channel them as models. Gonzalo Fernández de Toledo in his Quincuagenas mentioned that he personally knew Teresa, a widow who “se retrajo en su villa de Torrijos con diez o doce cuentos de rentas y muchos vasallos y rentas, que ella supo muy bien gastar y emplear en servicio de Dios” (retreated into her home at Torrijos with ten or twelve rental stipends and many vassals and tenants, which she knew very well how to dispose of and put to use in the service of God). The Carro de las donas, published in 1542 and written by an anonymous Castilian observant Franciscan in the entourage of the Queen Catalina of Portugal (to whom the work is dedicated), presents one of the fullest depictions of Teresa’s life as an exemplary model of Christian piety and charity, but it does so in such a way that she is deprived of most of her agency, independence, and peculiarities, and she is reduced largely to a two-dimensional character who simply gives money to the church, the Franciscan order, and the poor.14 Teresa is also presented in this manner by Juan Pérez de Moya (ca. 1513–96) in his Varia historia de sanctas e illustres mugeres en todo género de virtudes (1583), in which he cites as his sources the Carro de las donas and Mugeres illustres by the Dominican friar Domingo de Valtanás (1488–1565).15These texts contrast with other sources, including several near-contemporary chronicles that are more critical of Teresa. They take the perspective of her son, who was losing all of his father’s patrimony because of his mother’s “excessive” behavior and because the Madwoman of the Host was too pious to think about her own family line. This view is supported by other works such as Alonso Téllez de Meneses’s Libro de linajes de España, sus principios y continuación (written at the beginning of the sixteenth century).16 Téllez recounts, “Murió finalmente gozando de todo el estado del marido sin que su hijo le gozase todos estos veinte años, el cual era adelantado de Granada, y él, con la esperanza de su herencia, no la osó enojar” (She died finally having exhausted the estate of her husband, without her son having been able to benefit from it in all of those twenty years; he who was adelantado of Granada, and he, who hoping to eventually inherit, did not dare to anger her). Similarly, in his Crónica burlesca, Carlos V’s buffoon, Franciquillo de Zúñiga, makes fun of the fact that Teresa was squandering her son’s inheritance. Likewise, Andrea Navagero, the ambassador of Venice to the court of Carlos V, also pointed out that Teresa was very generous with her donations to the church, although this came at the expense of her own son, whose patrimony was dwindling to fulfill her pious agenda.17At the twilight of the seventeenth century, on January 7, 1699, a Franciscan friar found the uncorrupted body of a woman identified as Teresa Enríquez.18 This was considered a miracle that confirmed all the views expressed by the “pro-Teresa” party, who, despite this sign, never went as far as to ask for her beatification. The body was removed from where it had been found and placed on display in a location where the people of Torrijos could venerate it. In 1809, during the Napoleonic invasion of Spain, the body was transferred to the convent of the Conception in Torrijos. In 1920 Costantino Bayle and the Cardinal Guisasola, along with other religious authorities, visited the body. Bayle, who wrote a biographical study of Teresa in 1922, recounted his experience as follows: En la parte izquierda del coro bajo, a unos dos metros y medio del suelo, hay abierto un medio arco, en el descansa el ataúd. Con una escalera de mano subimos; el cadáver está amortajado con el hábito franciscano, con blancas tocas en la cabeza, completamente conservado. . . . Es notable el parecido del rostro a la estatua de doña Teresa que hay en la capilla de la Virgen de la Antigua en la catedral de Toledo, levantada por ella y su marido.[On the left side of the lower choir, at some two and a half meters from the ground, is a half arch in which rests the coffin. We ascended by means of a stepladder. The body was shrouded in a Franciscan habit, with white details on the head, and completely conserved. . . . It is noteworthy that the face appears like that of the statue of lady Teresa which can be found in the Chapel of the Virgin of Antigua in the Cathedral of Toledo, constructed by her and her husband.]19In 1979, to commemorate the 450th anniversary of Teresa’s death, several important figures of the Spanish church and the civic society requested that a process of beatification be undertaken. Churchmen pointed out that Teresa had remained a model of virtue, but this time not only for widows. The context had changed. They focused instead on Teresa’s love for the Eucharist, as an example to follow for modern Spaniards who were neglecting their churchgoing now that Spain was finally transitioning toward secular democracy and political and social liberty.20 Among the many exhortations of support provided by those who wrote in favor of the beatification, three members of the social elite stand out because they demonstrate a historical continuity in the praising of the values that Teresa Enríquez represented: Cayetana Fitz-James Stuart, duchess of Alba (1926–2015), King Juan Carlos I (r. 1975–2014), and Queen Sofía of Spain.21 Sofía and Juan Carlos I wrote, “Con nuestro ferviente deseo de que la locura de doña Teresa Enríquez nos contagie a todos en el amor al Santísimo Sacramento” (With our fervent desire that the madness of Lady Teresa Enríquez might infect everyone with love of the Most Holy Sacrament).22In conclusion, Teresa shows that even though women were accused of being excessive in the misogynist culture of the medieval and early modern eras, there was such a thing as “good excess,” particularly if it focused on the church and the poor in a noncontroversial way, and if it was directed at pious activities of which the clergy approved. Thus Juan Pérez de Moya ended his portrayal of Teresa by saying: “Fueron tantas sus buenas obras que en un libro no acabarían de escribirse. Y con tener tanta renta, le hallaron que el día de su tránsito no tenía sino una pobre cama y 50 reales, lo qual y la tapicería mandó dar a la yglesia y cofradía del Sacramento” (There were so many and such good works, that you cannot record them all in a book. And having had such great wealth, she was found to have on the day of her passing nothing more than a humble bed and 50 reales, which she had left together with her bedclothes to the church and the confraternity of the Sacrament).23 Teresa, a historical character, became a literary one, celebrated in a series of texts that tailored her persona to the agenda of the writer in question, including his order, his views about gender, and his ideas about the role of women in society. And because women could not participate in the wider church as high clergy or theologians, mysticism—by its nature “irrational” and therefore more “feminine”—was one of their few outlets for religious protagonism and could provide a cover of legitimacy for activities that were also at bottom “political,” whether as social initiatives or as strategies to shape the direction of the church.