CH A P T E R

T H R E E

Letters from the Convent: St. Teresa of vilas Epistolary Mode

Joa n F. Ca m m a r ata

The medieval view of women as frivolous, inconstant, irrational, and given to their passions is still perceived as the norm in Early Modern Spain where Saint Teresa of vila (15151582) writes under the constraints of circumscribed sex roles and gender expectations.1 Her situation is most tenuous because she communicates from a position of triple marginalization: she is a woman, a cloistered religious, and a new Christian. In the hostile social environment of the Inquisition and the Counter-Reformation, Teresas individual, and epistolary, identity is formed by the multiple aspects of societal and sexual tensions. While in her prose narratives Teresa portrays herself as the submissive female to subvert patriarchal strategies, there is a new language and a different voice in her letters, which ref lect her struggles, ambitions, and accomplishments in the public sphere. Her letters, written during the last fifteen years of her life and numbering almost five hundred, provide a record of how a woman is successful in attaining her goals and how she creates a worthwhile identity in spite of the intellectual, social, and psychological forces of a restrictive society. Letters are a valuable resource for critical inquiry because they reveal the complex dimensions of personhood and the experiences that shape social and political theories. Early Modern women must consciously create an appropriate written language because their words and the adequacy of their language will often endure male scrutiny. Teresas

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letters provide a valuable clue to a language that invents the self within the tradition of womens culture, the mostly oral tradition, which is not the authoritative written discourse of males. She mediates through the dominant structures that define her passivity by acknowledging and conceding that her credibility will be questioned. Teresas letters provide a criterion for a typology of feminine epistolography in their reconstruction of a womans life during a point in history of feminine disadvantage. Neither the restrictions placed on women outside the convent nor the limitations of a cloistered life hindered Teresa in her capacity as religious reformer and foundress for the Carmelite Order. Confronted with a laxity of regulations in her convent, Teresa pursued the reforming of the religious order as well as the individual to oppose the Protestant Reformation and reestablish Catholicism. She overcame the resistance of the Calced Carmelites to the restoration of the Orders original austerity and, in 1562, founded St. Josephs of vila, the first of many Discalced Carmelite convents. She drew up a new Constitution, with bylaws, that Pius IV authorized in a brief dated February 7, 1562. Restrictions on female judicial pursuits abound in Early Modern legal tracts: Woman is excluded from a wide variety of legal functions, including acting as witness, making contracts and administering property . . . they may not be judices, nor magistrates, nor advocates; nor may they intervene on anothers behalf in law, nor act as agents (Maclean 77). However, in her reform of the Carmelite Order, Teresa assumed duties generally forbidden to women in her times, as she was the first and final manager in title deeds and purchases, debts, legacies, and support of her foundations. Given her excellence in reform and leadership, Father Rubeo, the apostolic visitor and general of the Carmelites, bestowed on her the authority to found other convents and priories in Castile, including male monasteries. Teresas reformist enterprise triumphed two years before her death with the brief from Rome that granted the independent Discalced province on June 22, 1580 (Hatzfeld 18). First published in 1658 but not in their entirety,2 Teresas letters deal mainly with problems in her reform, the foundations, economics, family, and the politics of the Order. She wrote to members of the Court, the ecclesiastical hierarchy, her confessors, family, sisters, and even the king, Philip II. In her letters to Philip II, Teresa asks for his help in certain matters (not mentioned in her letter but related personally by Juan de Padilla to the king) with the promise that the more the Order progresses, the greater his gain in prayers for himself and his family (Letters I: 118; June 11, 1573).3 She astutely beseeches him, for love of

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God and Mary, to command that the Discalced have a separate province because Our Lady calls on him to protect her Order (Letters I: 188; July 19, 1575). He is the king, after all, and so Teresa does ask pardon for being bold, but she justifies herself by declaring that the Lord hears the poor. In letters to male clerics, aristocracy, and benefactors, one may perceive the semblance of a subordinate woman, but Teresa shows the same confidence and authority that she does in letters to her sisters and family. To achieve her goals, Teresa quickly learned to negotiate her communicative approach through the strategy of religious humility and obedience (Mrquez Villanueva, Vocacin 355). She learned that one must deal with people according to their temperament (Letters I: 142; June 1574). The gender-inscribed communicative formula and style of Teresas letters reconstruct a feminine history that underscores individual triumph over gender deficiency. Claudio Guilln observes that letters reveal personal subjectivity: The author of a real letter may be mirroring and shaping through the written word a particular version of himself . . . (85). Letters give Teresa a mediation of space (Altman 24) in which there is not only physical distance but also the intellectual distance from which to assess herself. It is through the structure of the epistolary genre, in writings directed in confidence to specific individual readers, that Teresa shapes a version of herself to fully reveal her human personality and the actuality of a woman of her era. She sheds the detached, retiring persona of her vita contemplativa to surmount historical gender constraints and her limitations as a Discalced Carmelite to be successful in her vita activa in the roles of reformer, foundress, religious superior, spiritual teacher, businesswoman, and advocate. In her Way of Perfection, a guide to the attainment of spiritual perfection through the practice of prayer, Teresa counsels her sisters on the three essentials of a life of prayer: fraternal love, humility, and detachment. Teresa insists that a vow of radical poverty, a vestige of medieval monastic reform, be written into the Discalced bylaws. Teresian detachment from the material world presupposes the breaking with family ties to bring freedom from the social and financial interests that interfere with spiritual pursuits (Way of Perfection, Complete Works 2: 39; chapter 9). A denial of family is, implicitly, a denial of identity, that is to say, lineage. In her writings, Teresa reiterates her good faith by constant professions of loyalty to the doctrines of the Church, and she attributes any errors to her ignorance or her gender. This circumspection, or humility topos, is not only an acknowledgment of her inferior status as a woman, but, most likely, also a recollection of another aspect

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of cultural otherness, her converso heritage.4 Teresas paternal grandfather, Juan Snchez de Toledo, was a converted Jew, who was brought before the Inquisition in 1485 and given a penance for heresy and crimes against the faith (Mrquez Villanueva, Espiritualidad 146). Teresa undertook her reform and her writings in a sociocultural context in which there was suspicion of new Christians, and all activities were subject to censure by the Inquisition. It is not clear whether her fear of reprisal is predicated on the Inquisition or arises from her feeling of unworthiness, as a woman, to write edifying material, but she begs those who read her Life to send it back to her with all possible precaution (Letters I: 50; June 23, 1568), and even requests that it be recopied so that her handwriting not be recognized (Caminero 553). Her Life is not published until 1588, six years after her death, after it has passed the most careful scrutiny of theologians and the Inquisition.5 Teresas great concern is that the Inquisition not oppose her foundations. Unlike other religious orders of the time (Lynch 27), she did not prepare statutes against the admission of new Christians to the Order.6 She ignored the prejudice of limpieza de sangre, purity of bloodline, by opening her convents to all and by accepting the financial help of the converts. Indeed, new Christians provided the support for Teresas foundations and, in return for their philanthropy, the contributors enjoyed the prestige of having their name associated for posterity with the patronage of a monastery or the right to family burials in the chapel (Mrquez Villanueva, Espiritualidad 157 ff ). Perhaps it is Teresas converso heritage, an aspect of cultural otherness, that provoked her egalitarianism, as well as her disapproval of those who boasted of the honor of their illustrious lineage. On this issue, she recommends self-restraint to her nuns. She says, Let the sister who is of highest birth speak of her father least: we must all be equals (Way of Perfection, Complete Works 2: 112; chapter 27). Teresa preferred that the sisters of her convents assume a new identity without reference to parental lineage, and she herself gave up her less-than-illustrious family name, Ahumada, to be called Teresa of Jesus. As a woman, Teresa wrote in the vernacular, under the constraints of acceptable discussion, of agreement of silence. Formulaic structures of humility, courtesy, and inadequacy encode her experiences for linguistic expression.7 The very fact that an astute, politically wise woman repeats the orthodox line about womans insufficiencies and mans wisdom and learning, reminding her readers consistently and constantly that she is only a woman, supposedly silent, and that men are the legitimate interpreters of Scripture, suggests how she prevented her dialogue

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from supporting patriarchal attitudes. Christian humanists were determined to keep womens knowledge under control:8 Even though Erasmus, More, and Vives actively supported the education of women, they did so within private and domestic concerns. For the most part, the educated Renaissance woman was silenced and marginalized, deprived of all but a few limited outlets for her intellectual abilities (Glenn 128). Teresa was denied the tools of technical theology by not being taught Latin. This personal limitation later caused Teresa great distress when, in 1559, the local Index of the Spanish Inquisition banned vernacular translations of the Bible (Elliott 237) and deprived Teresa of her favorite mystical works. Subsequently, as foundress and spiritual leader of the Discalced Carmelites, Teresa stressed that applicants to her convents must know how to read Latin well (Letters I: 102; March 7, 1572). A gender-based alienation from language is expressed in the stereotypical association of woman with the aguja (sewing needle), a silent act, and of man with the pluma (pen). A womans language, acceptable only as oral, not written, discourse, is not the authoritative discourse of males. Adrienne Rich has appropriately noted, No male writer has written primarily or even largely for women, or with the sense of womens criticism as a consideration when he chooses his materials, his theme, his language. But to a lesser or greater extent, every woman writer has written for men even when . . . she was supposed to be addressing women (37). Teresas words will not only be read, but they will also be scrutinized, reviewed, judged, and, perhaps, burned by men of letters.9 In her didactic prose works, she is supposedly writing in obedience to her confessors, at their request, and for the edification of her sisters. Teresa is expected to direct herself specifically to her own sex and to write within the tradition of womens culture, the subcultural tradition.10 Hers is a fellowship of discourse (Foucault 226) that circulates within a closed community according to strict regulations. The feminist psychologist Carol Gilligan maintains that woman defines self in terms of connectedness in a matrix of relationships with others (8). For Teresa, the art of communication has a shared set of assumptions in the presence of an interpretive community. Her language is self-referential, personal, and conversational, as well as circular and digressive. Teresas letters, like her prose works, are undeniably feminine, clearly in the sense that they are culturally constructed, but also in the sense of Hlne Cixouss definition of criture fminine as more f luid and less fixed than masculine discourse. Cixous sees writing as a power identified with patriarchal principles that women can use to effect

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change: Writing is precisely the very possibility of change, the space that can serve as a springboard for subversive thought, the precursory movement of a transformation of social and cultural structures (249). Virginia Woolf labeled letters a womans art that historically offers women a convention to manipulate when they are barred from others that men control: The art of letter-writing is often the art of essaywriting in disguise. But such as it was, it was an art a woman could practice without unsexing herself (60). In the epistolary technique of writing to the moment, letters partake of a dialogism that makes the voice interior and exterior simultaneously and provides an intimate and honest expression of the self in a simple, personal writing style that is more accomplishment than art. A letter can denote a conversation or a dialogue between friends who are at a distance. Conversation is the model for Teresas epistolary form as she strives to create a reciprocal commitment to dialogue with the interlocutor. In a lively conversational tone, Teresa uses the epistolary genre, the form of writing acceptable for her gender, to broach a range of topics and situations in letters that are discursive, narrative, and varied. This complicates the matter of classifying her letters, which participate in several themes and move between different subjects. A large number of Teresas letters typify the epistolary category of mixed letter as defined by Erasmus. In her letters, Teresa informs and instructs, counsels and gives advice; she offers caring and consolation, petitions and admonitions. She provides thoughtful solutions to health and family dilemmas, spirituality to make life bearable, consolation for sickness and death,11 solutions for domestic concerns,12 and directions for the reform. She can be demanding or cajoling, consoling or mocking, rebuking or loving, confident or unsure in her particularly womans text that is neither wholly private nor wholly public. The discourse about the details of everyday life and friends, stereotypically feminine, is a flood of thoughts without an attempt to control their logic or structure. To a greater or lesser extent feminine epistolarity is written under erasure. Women have been defined and delimited by a society which permitted only an internal or psychological space in which to express themselves (Smith 24). Teresa suffers internal and external censorship, postal inefficiency and political surveillance. She herself demands the destruction of her letters. Even though a letter has one intended recipient, there is always the danger that it will find a wider circulation. A letter is a potential disclosure if it is intercepted by the wrong person, even though it may not be conspiratorial. In the transfer from the private to the public sphere, a larger audience may judge the content of

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a letter suspect. Teresa instructed her recipients to read her letters, make note of her instructions, and then burn the letters. Concern that her correspondence would fall into the wrong hands prompted Teresa to unseal a letter to Father Gracin in order to cross out passages that she feared might be damaging if ascribed to her; she also requested that Father Gracin destroy the letter after he read it (Letters II: 562; May 8, 1578). Fortunately, Father Gracin did not always pay much attention to the Saint in this matter, but Ana de Jess, in obedience, destroyed all but one. Most unfortunately, St. John of the Cross destroyed Teresas letters to prevent information falling into the hands of the Calced Carmelites who persecuted him. After her death, he burned packets of her letters either due to the pain of his grief or as proof of his desasimiento, detachment from worldly things as preached by his mentor. There is general agreement among the critics that Teresa rigidly adheres to the epistolary code of her age.13 In letters that fit into the established categories of persuasion, petition, counsel, consolation, and, most importantly for Teresa, mixed letters that leap from one subject to another, her epistolary style mirrors Early Modern precepts. Her context encompasses the external factors and the social conditions that authorize these speech acts. Teresa is aware that the art of writing letters is the art of using conventions. She employs formulaic structures that are requisite to social etiquette and develops themes through commonplaces, similes, and examples. She carefully and deliberately adapts the letters to the station and personality of the one addressed. Her letters are contextual acts that consider the recipient, the subject matter, the purpose of the missive, and the acceptable conventions of the discourse that satisfy the expectations of the reader and writer. Teresas letters are shaped by her addressee not only in what she communicates but how she communicates. Her consciousness of a specifically delineated reader affects her tone and style.14 Teresa intentionally, and sometimes obsequiously, repeats the recipients title many times throughout her letter in a strategy to get what she is after. She is adept in the art of strategy, as articulated by Michel de Certeau: I call a strategy the calculation (or manipulation) of power relationships that become possible as soon as a subject with will and power . . . can be isolated. It postulates a place that can be delimited as its own and serve as the base from which relations with an exteriority composed of targets or threats . . . can be managed. As in management, every strategic rationalization seeks first of all to distinguish its own place, that is, the place of its own power and

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will, from an environment . . . it is an effort to delimit ones own place in a world bewitched by the invisible powers of the Other. (3536) Teresas letters reveal a psychological perspicacity through which she approaches her readers on their own terms and establishes her position of power to gain authority and exercise her will. Teresa achieved the difficult task of acquiring female literary authority through the appearance of conformity but what is, in essence, the subversion of patriarchal norms of discourse. According to epistolary codes, response letters should follow the same order of topics as the remitters letter (Vives, De conscribendis 864). In general, Teresa shapes her new letters from the phrases and paraphrases of letters to which she responds. Her writing is a means of speaking, almost as if she were having a present-day telephone conversation, with, of course, the responses of the recipient delayed. There is an exchange with an external reader who is not the self but with whom the writer, Teresa, has a special relationship: Reader consciousness implicitly informs the act of writing itself (Altman 186). Her monologue is really a dialogue in which she predicts the response or the effect of her letter on the recipient. Teresa counseled her sisters from afar, as the older to the younger, in a nurturing attitude, giving permission for those who were ill to partake of good food and the comforts forbidden by the reform. She told Ana de la Encarnacin, Prioress at Salamanca, not to give up eating meat because some pampering is preferable to the alternative of illness (Letters I: 131; January 1574); however, Teresa herself did not always follow her own advice. In other instances, Teresa exacted obedience and humility in her Order. She admonished, reprimanded, and censured indiscretions that could put the reform in jeopardy. She was annoyed at two Castilian friars who were imprisoned when found in a house of ill repute; they should have considered the reputation of the Order (Letters I: 181; June 18, 1575). Teresa advised that friars should be hermits and not travel about looking after evil women. Teresa acknowledges that she wrote so hurriedly and under such time constraints that she never proofread her letters. Is it that she is so pressed for time, as she often comments (Letters I: 412; January 17, 1577)? Or is it that Rereading ones own letter entails a switch in perspectivefrom writer to readerand a consequent distancing that may lead to selfdiscovery (Altman 92)? Because of her constant references to the burden from which she is never liberated, her letter writing becomes her daily

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martyrdom (Rodrguez and Egido 428), and she is astonished that she could stand it. She generally wrote late at night, until after midnight, and was left with only a few hours rest before morning prayers. She even wrote while traveling for the foundations. It was not uncommon for Teresa to ask the recipient of her letter to pass it along to a few people so that she would not have to write other letters; for example, the same letter was to be read by three prioresses. Until 1577, almost everything was written in her own hand. When her strength failed her, the doctor recommended that she not continue writing after midnight and that she not write in her own hand. In one of her letters, she openly praised Ana de Bartolom as her secretary (Letters II: 899; December 4, 1581). But even when someone else wrote for her, she would write the last sentence herself. Much as we might complain that we do not have time for leisure reading, Teresa was so overburdened with obligatory letters that she had no time to write letters for pleasure. The negative feminine characteristics of capriciousness, duplicity, and incoherence function as ontological signifiers in Teresas description of womans nature. She diagnoses these imperfections as inherent deficiencies of her gender and, in effect, reiterates the opinions current in the sixteenth century about womans more limited powers of reason. Teresa seems to confirm this through her affinity for the personal oneto-one format of the letter, a composition that requires little formal education and no scholarly training. Jacques Derrida has defined the place of woman as a non-place; to write from it or in it is to situate oneself in the realm of the undefinable (111113). Writing from this non-place, Teresa openly acknowledges her difference, underscores it, and establishes her own subjectivity to subvert previously held identity assumptions, but without the threat of challenging the dominant culture. She accepts and celebrates her difference in a discourse that crosses both cultural and textual lines as she creates in her letters an intimate and honest expression of the self. She undermines the patriarchal discourse through a paradoxical strategy of acceptance, reiteration, and overemphasis of feminine inferiority as she cloaks herself with her womanliness to acquire the freedom denied her gender. Teresa, who was later named a Doctor of the Church, becomes adept at docta ignorancia, a cleverness that does not recognize itself as such (Certeau 56). Instead of contributing to womans worthlessness, Teresa subtly, but systematically, invalidates the effects of male discourse through her technique of strenuously validating it. For contemporary readers, Teresas letters afford messages of all kinds that we must decode. The code is generally determined by her

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contextual relationship to her recipient. We read her letters from the perspective of the reader, the author, and ourselves. The discursive practice of epistolography involves power relationships wherein power and knowledge are joined together, and Teresa uses the rules to her benefit. The letter is, in a sense, a manner of autobiography in that it ref lects personal history. Teresas letters lay bare the most intimate portrait of the many facets of her personality and the inf luence she exerts in her private-turned-public sphere. Her letter writing is a tool in the struggle to create an identity and a vision of the world through a genre that allows her to be critical and creative. Through the letters of both public and private individuals, we can begin to piece together the intellectual history of a period and the social history of a people. Notes
1. The human attributes conventionally associated with gender are ref lected in the normative perception of male discourse as rational, controlled, terse, strong, and balanced, while in contrast, womens discourse is vapid, silly, hyperemotional, trivial, and excessive (Ruthven 108). Analogous to the speech of a madman as described by Michel Foucault (217), the discourse of women is received as null and void, without truth or significance, and inadmissible as evidence. 2. Fray Luis de Len does not include Teresas epistolary production in his edition of her complete works. Father Gracin is the first to see the merit of publishing Teresas letters for their courtesy and discretion, but an edition does not appear until 1658. The majority of the letters have disappeared, being lost or burned at her request as a cautionary measure, so it will never be known exactly how many she wrote. There are close to five hundred that are extant (476 are known; 246 are original autographs), but this is considered only a third of the original number she wrote. Silverio de Santa Teresa believes that Teresa wrote almost five thousand (xli). Efrn de la Madre de Dios and O. Steggink believe that even fifteen thousand letters would be a conservative guess (863). 3. All citations of Teresas works are from the editions of E. Allison Peers: The Complete Works of Saint Teresa of Jesus and The Letters of Saint Teresa of Jesus. 4. Teresas Jewish heritage is the subject of various studies: see Sers, Alonso Corts, and Egido Martnez. 5. Teresa lived under the scrutiny and threat of the Inquisition; see Llamas Martnez, Mrquez, and Kamen. Her Life was twice delated to the Inquisition, which caused her great mortification until the inquisitorial tribunal at Seville finally exonerated her. At the height of the struggle between the Calced and Discalced Carmelites, Teresa took the precaution of using code names to give her letters the security of anonymity, e.g., she called herself Laurencia, Father Gracin was Eliseo, and even God was named Joseph. For a more extensive list, see Hatzfeld (109110). 6. In 1597, the Carmelite Constitution admitted the proviso of refusing those who traced their convert heritage back four generations, which would have excluded Teresa, whose grandfather was a convert (Egido Martnez 169). 7. The best exposition of Teresas rhetorical strategies is given in Alison Webers important study. 8. In his The Education of a Christian Woman (15241528), the humanist Juan Luis Vives reinforces the common opinion about the weak nature of woman and her inclination to sin. Vives

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9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

favors education for women so that they may be virtuous married women but he condemns the public exhibition of this instruction. Baldassare Castiglione, the Italian enlightened social commentator, offers similar arguments in favor of and against female inferiority in The Book of the Courtier (Il cortegiano 1528). While he contends that men and women have the same capacity for virtue, he ultimately reiterates common social conventions about the legal and matrimonial subordination of women (201282). Father Diego Yanguas ordered Teresa to burn her Conceptions of the Love of God (15711573), her commentary on the portions of Solomons Song of Songs that were read in the Carmelite Divine Office. The patriarchal rules that controlled discourse by denying access to certain individuals excluded women from commentary on the Scriptures. See my study of Teresas spiritual interpretation of the profane love of the Song. As Foucault describes, not all areas of discourse are equally open and penetrable; some are forbidden territory (differentiated and differentiating) . . . (224225). Teresas writings, in a style of direct expression based on experience, authorize a tradition of convent writing by later Hispanic nuns. In their significant study, Arenal and Schlau present an in-depth analysis of the writings of colonial nuns in the seventeenth century. Letters of consolation are popular in the Early Modern period and could be offered not only for deaths but also for loss or injury. Both Erasmus (169) and Guevara (I, 61, 411; II, 27, 316) provide examples of letters of consolation. These letters are permitted to be lengthier so that consolation could be expressed more leisurely. In her letters of consolation for deaths of children, wives, husbands, brothers, and sisters, Teresa encourages the bereft to have confidence in God and to let Christian resignation to Gods will heal their sorrow. Often Teresa recommends that others bear their trials with resignation and joy because this is the road to Our Lord. According to Teresa, life is made up of crosses, but blessings will come from suffering because the things of this life are of little duration; see my article on Teresas letters of consolation. To her favorite brother Lorenzo, Teresa offers both spiritual and temporal advice. She tells him how to run his household, where the servants should be lodged, and how his kitchen should be arranged. Her nephews education is also a concern because she fears they might fall in with the wrong crowd, which she calls the stuck up set in vila (Letters I: 261; July 24, 1576). She is happy that Lorenzo has returned to Spain to educate his children and she advises her brother that the boys should attend the College of the Company of Jesus. Pilar Concejo confirms that La estructura de las cartas revela que conoca y le eran familiares las reglas de cdigo epistolar de su poca. El esquema es sencillo: encabezamiento, invocacin y saludo, contenido o cuerpo de la carta, conclusin, despedida, fecha y firma (279). Teresa sigue rgidamente, sin concesin de ninguna clase, los imperativos del cdigo espistolar de su poca (Rodrguez and Egido 436). We cannot document with certainty with which manuals of epistolography Teresa actually came in contact or those that she knew from second-hand sources. We do know that she read Antonio de Guevaras work (Morel-Fatio 63; Concha 106). She recommends to her fellow Carmelites his spiritual writing, Oratorio de religiosos y exercicio de virtuosos (Valladolid 1542), a practical manual for religious life that is addressed to persons of both sexes. Could she also have had access to his manual of epistolography? Teresa may have learned of Juan Luis Vives treatise from her interaction with her confessors and with those who were educated. It is likely also that at some point she would come across the manual of Gaspar de Tejeda. In 1562, she left the convent for Toledo to console the widow of the Marshal of Castille. She did not know how she should address the widow but she was informed that the title was Seora. Even though she had someone write it out for her, she still did not master it. She confessed her failure to her hosts and ended up addressing them as Vuestra merced, a less elite title. This mortifying experience is likely to have inf luenced Teresa to learn the proper forms of address. We may conjecture that it is perhaps at this time that she becomes acquainted with the works of Guevara, Tejeda, or maybe even Torquemada.

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14. As Torquemada advises, you must tailor your letters to your reader: a los moos, como a moos, y a los viejos como a viejos; a los philosofos y sabios en cosas de ciencia . . . (186).

Works Cited
Alonso Corts, Narciso. Pleitos de los Cepeda. Boletn de la Real Academia Espaola 25 (1946): 85110. Altman, Janet Gurkin. Epistolarity. Approaches to a Form. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1982. Arenal, Electa and Stacey Schlau. Untold Sisters: Hispanic Nuns in Their Own Works. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989. Caminero, Juventino. Actitud intelectual de Santa Teresa en su ambiente social. Santa Teresa y la literatura mstica hispnica: Actas del I Congreso internacional sobre Santa Teresa y la mstica hispnica. Ed. Manuel Criado de Val. Madrid: EDI-6, 1984. 535570. Cammarata, Joan. Sacred and Profane Love: St. Teresa of vila. Selected Proceedings of The Pennsylvania Foreign Language Conference. Ed. Gregorio C. Martn. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University, 1992. 7478. . Epistola consolatoria y contemptus mundi: el epistolario de consuelo de Santa Teresa de vila. Actas del XIII Congreso de la Asociacin Internacional de Hispanistas. Ed. Florencio Sevilla y Carlos Alvar. Madrid: Editorial Castalia, 2000. 301308. Castiglione, Baldassare. The Book of the Courtier. Trans. Charles S. Singleton. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1959. Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Cixous, Hlne. The Laugh of the Medusa. Trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. New French Feminisms. Eds. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron. New York: Schocken Books, 1981. 245264. Concejo, Pilar. Frmulas sociales y estrategias retricas en el epistolario de Teresa de Jess. Santa Teresa y la literatura mstica hispnica. Ed. Manuel Criado de Val. Madrid: EDI-6, 1984. 275289. Concha, Victor Garca de la. El arte literario de Santa Teresa. Barcelona: Ariel, 1978. Criado de Val, Manuel, ed. Santa Teresa y la literatura mstica hispnica: Actas del I Congreso internacional sobre Santa Teresa y la mstica hispnica. Madrid: EDI-6, 1984. Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970. Egido Martnez, Tefanes. The Historical Setting of St. Teresas Life. Carmelite Studies I (1980): 122182. Elliott, J.H. Imperial Spain 1469 1716. New York: St. Martins, 1964. Erasmus, Desiderius. De conscribendis epistolis. Trans. Charles Fantazzi. Collected Works of Erasmus. Vol. 25. Ed. J.K. Sowards. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985. 1254. Foucault, Michel. The Discourse on Language. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon, 1972. 215237. Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982. Glenn, Cheryl. Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity through the Renaissance. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997. Guevara, Antonio de. Libro primero de las Epstolas familiares. I, II. Ed. Jos Mara Cosso. Madrid: Aldus (Real Academia Espaola: Biblioteca Selecta de Clsicos Espaoles, 10, 12) 1950, 1952.

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The Catholic Church and Unruly Women Writers

Critical Essays
Edited by

Jeana DelRosso, Leigh Eicke, and Ana Kothe

2007