Wisdom and Her Lovers in Medieval and Early Modern Hispanic Literature (The New Middle Ages)

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Wisdom and Her Lovers in Medieval and Early Modern Hispanic Literature by Emily C. Francomano

WISDOM AND HER LOVERS IN MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN HISPANIC LITERATURE Emily C. Francomano

WISDOM AND HER LOVERS IN MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN HISPANIC LITERATURE

Copyright © Emily C. Francomano, 2008. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–7196–8 ISBN-10: 1–4039–7196–X Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: June 2008 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

For P&P

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CONTENTS

List of Figures Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations Introduction 1

xi xiii xv 1

Bodies of Knowledge: Wisdom, Personification, and Memory

11

Lady Wisdom My Brother: Reading Sapientia in Medieval Castile

27

Figures of Matter and Form: Feminine Personification and Epistemology in the Visión deleytable

45

4

The Wise Virgin’s Confounding Body of Knowledge

75

5

Sor Juana and St. Catherine: From Blood Martyrdom to a Holocaust of the Intellect

105

2 3

Conclusion Commonplaces and Common Women: Wisdom, the Strange Woman, and Bawdy Bodies of Knowledge

129

Notes

143

Works Cited

173

Index

189

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LIST OF FIGURES

3.1 3.2 3.3 4.1 5.1

La Gramática. Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Espagnol 39, f. 3r. El Entendimiento, La Razón, and La Verdad. Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Espagnol 39, f. 21r. La Sabieza and her attendants modified by a reader. Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Espagnol 39, f. 15v. Cadels, Bocados de Oro, Biblioteca Nacional de España, MS 8405, f. 63v. Frontispiece, Fama y obras póstumas de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Madrid, 1700.

67 68 70 101 124

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

F

ortune placed many living personifications of Wisdom along the path to conceiving of and publishing this book: teachers and mentors, Patricia E. Grieve, Joan Ferrante, Alban Forcione, Ron Surtz, Ángel Gómez Moreno, and Mary Carruthers; colleagues at Georgetown University, Sarah McNamer, Penn Szittya, Jo Ann Moran Cruz, Verónica Salles-Reese, Joanne Rappaport, Barbara Mujica, Alfonso Morales, Fr. Leon Hooper, and Carole Sargent; erudite and patient family members, Nina Rulon-Miller, Harry Rulon-Miller, and Frank Francomano. Personifications of Love, Patience, and Reason abounded on the long path as well, in particular, Eugenio Ibarz, Lola López Espinosa, Monica Martinez, and Rachel Barr. Nor would this book have seen the light of day without the help of Sacramento Roselló, Clara Pascual-Argente, Michael Khoury, and the indefatigable Maureen Russo. Thanks also to Bonnie Wheeler, editor of the New Middle Ages Series, for her support to the project. Generous grants from the Fulbright Program, the Program for Cultural Cooperation Between Spain’s Ministry of Culture and the United States’ Universities, Georgetown University and Columbia University permitted research in Spain and France. Part of chapter 2 was published as “The Lady Vanishes” in Hispanic Review 72:2 (Spring 2004): 307–325. Parts of chapter 4 appeared as “¿Que dizes de las mugeres?” in La corónica 30.1 (Fall 2001): 87–110 and as “Lady You Are Quite a Chatterbox” in St Katherine of Alexandria: Texts and Contexts in Medieval Europe, edited by Jacqueline Jenkins and Katherine Lewis. Turnhout: Brepols, 2003, 131–52. All are reproduced by kind permission of Hispanic Review, La corónica, and Brepols press.

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LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

BETA BHS HR HSMS JHP JSOT MLN NLH NSRV PMLA RFE RLA RP RQ

Bibliografía Española de Textos Antiguos Bulletin of Hispanic Studies Hispanic Review Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies Journal of Hispanic Philology Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Modern Language Notes New Literary History New Standard Revised Version Publications of the Modern Language Association Revista de filología española Romance Languages Annual Romance Philology Renaissance Quarterly

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INTRODUCTION

W

hen Juan Rodríguez del Padrón placed his visionary Siervo libre de amor (Free(d) servant of love) (c. 1440) on Minerva’s path—“la angosta senda, la qual es la vida contemplatiua de no amar” (the narrow path that is the contemplative life of not loving)—he knew that he could count on his audience’s recognition of the multiple literary, mythical, and even liturgical intertexts that he brought into play.1 Not only is the laborious ascent made under the aegis of the classical goddess of wisdom, it also leads the love-servant to Syndéresis, the apex or “spark” of the human intellect personified.2 Late-medieval audiences would have recognized both Minerva and Syndéresis as members of a familiar cadre of metonymically related and specifically feminine tropes representative of man’s higher intellectual faculties and the knowledge those faculties may attain and retain. Deeply rooted images in the premodern literary imaginary, the feminine personifications Wisdom, Synderesis, Reason, Philosophy, and Truth are deployed in myriad medieval works concerning man’s desire for enlightenment. However, in the medieval and Early Modern context, metaphorical imagery casting the female body as the vehicle for the transmission of knowledge is at once delightful and difficult: rhetorical tradition demands that Wisdom and her like must be personified as women, but cultural imperatives insist that women are anathema to wisdom, reason, and the spirit. Wisdom and Her Lovers explores how medieval and Early Modern writers reconstructed, and also how readers read, these contradictory commonplaces, focusing on the most pervasive and canonical of the feminine personifications that mediate between men and the world of the spirit, Wisdom. In my title, thus, Wisdom refers both to the corpuses of knowledge that allegorical texts and rhetorical embodiments of wisdom seek to transmit, as well as to the narrative presences of personifying bodies. The biblical Books of Solomon (Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Ecclesiasticus [Sirach], and the Wisdom of Solomon) exerted a heavy inf luence on medieval and Early Modern discourses of wisdom. The Book of Proverbs

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and the Wisdom of Solomon in particular provided medieval and Early Modern readers and writers with an authoritative and eroticized Wisdom (Hokmah, Sophia, Sapientia), the female figure for whom Solomon professes his love: “Wisdom is radiant and unfading, and she is easily discerned by those who love her, and is found by those who seek her. / She hastens to make herself known to those who desire her. . . .I loved her and sought her from my youth, and I desired to take her for my bride, and I became enamored of her beauty” (Wisdom 6:12–13 and 8:2).3 Biblical scholars have offered various hypotheses about the origins of the feminine personification Wisdom: Asherah, the Canaanite goddess of wisdom and fertility, the goddess Athena/Minerva, and the Platonic Nous.4 Similar feminine mediating wisdom figures also appear in many ancient and early medieval meditations on the pursuit of knowledge beyond the material world. Augustine, for example, embraces and adapts Solomon’s eroticized imagery in his Soliloquies, where he personifies Wisdom as a lover who can be shared among male philosophers joined in their pursuit of enlightenment. Boethius’s early sixth-century Consolation of Philosophy, which was widely read and imitated throughout the Middle Ages, introduces readers to the maternal and heuristic Philosophia, whose “milk of learning” nourishes the despairing imprisoned poet and philosopher. In the Consolation, Philosophy leads the visionary poet-narrator on an intellective, spiritual journey to wisdom and happiness.5 Medieval and Early Modern authors continually espoused, recast, and parodied these allegories. Spanish literature in particular provides an ideal prism for an inquiry into the contradictory nature of feminine personifications. Indeed, in the Hispanic context, feminine personification of intellective faculties and truths consistently come up against equally authoritative commonplaces that construct the female body as the site and vehicle of moral and intellectual corruption. Moreover, these personifications are frequently put to use in works where issues of gender and sexuality are of prime importance as well as in deeply misogynist texts and contexts where Woman, as the personification of worldly dangers, is an object of study. Consequently, Wisdom and the multiple feminine personifications that resemble her create a tension between the homosocial hermeneutics of wisdom literature and the imagined heterosocial and heterosexual relationships that men in search of Wisdom forge with her. The tension created by the dynamics of personification allegory provides a lens for reading narratives that are not overtly allegorical, but where feminine characters similarly represent bodies of knowledge and their transmission. The canonical master-texts and their romance imitators featuring feminine embodiments of wisdom reveal a deep-seated anxiety about

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potential confusion between feminine imagery and real, extratextual women. According to the paternal narrating voices of Proverbs and the Wisdom of Solomon, Wisdom is the woman to whom men should direct their love and desire in order to be protected from dangerous carnal ties with women of f lesh and blood. And indeed, as if to underline the problematic resemblance between Wisdom’s feminine form and the danger women pose to men, the Books of Solomon place Wisdom in close textual proximity to the “Strange Woman,” a heretical temptress who cunningly imitates and perverts Wisdom’s message and who leads callow youths to death through moral and physical vices. Augustine also echoes Solomon’s fears by stressing that his beloved Wisdom will not only strengthen the homosocial and spiritual bonds among philosophers: her imagined, intellective embraces will also replace the physical “execrable embraces” of human, f leshy female partners. In Augustine’s allegory, Wisdom is both a “body of knowledge”—a feminized corpus to be passed between men—and also a reminder of the dangers of consorting with real female bodies, which are obstacles in the path to wisdom and the enlightenment of the intellect. Wisdom will not distract men in pursuit of knowledge from their worthy quest, nor will she “sap the citadel of manly strength, whether of mind or body,” as would the attachment to a wife’s “female blandishments and familiarities.” Rather, philosophers may be “the more thoroughly conjoined” through their common union with Wisdom, the shared “object of our love.”6 The Consolation of Philosophy similarly conscripts the feminine personification of Philosophy in order to negotiate the divide between sensual and intellective experience. Philosophy banishes the muses of Boethius’s selfindulgent and earthbound lyrics, whom she calls “little stage whores,” and “sirens,” yet even she, the mediator of divine knowledge, is a siren who sings delightful songs that seduce and leave the prisoner “spellbound.” 7 The master-texts thus not only bequeathed an alluring image to their successors; a concomitant rhetoric of anxiety was part of their legacy. The feminine mediating figure—though she may look like a woman, nurture like a mother, sing like a siren, please like a bride, and share her body like a common woman—is by no means to be confused with real, extratextual women. Given this ambivalent inheritance, it is not surprising to find a pervasive anxiety surrounding feminine images of wisdom in medieval and Early Modern Spanish literature. Siervo libre de Amor, quoted above, faithfully transmits this anxiety about entanglements with women: Rodríguez del Padrón’s path of Minerva leads away from the emotional and physical perils of heterosexual and courtly love, and the freed loveservant’s encounter with Syndéresis signals his release from the bonds of lovesickness.8

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Moreover, and significantly for my readings of medieval and Early Modern Spanish imagery, Augustine’s vision of Wisdom as a lover shared among men also points to the importance of Wisdom personified in the essential theme of homosocial translatio studii. Didactic texts featuring female figures that represent the transmission and acquisition of knowledge are overwhelmingly homosocial, and often homophilic as well. That is to say, in addition to imagining male audiences, they demonstrate marked preferences for same-sex social, intellectual, and affective relationships. Indeed, Augustine’s Solomonic image resonates throughout the medieval and Early Modern wisdom tradition, where images of Wisdom and her like—eroticized bodies representing bodies of knowledge—are passed along, reconstructed in the hands of multiple authors, and received by successive audiences in homosocial hermeneutic circles. While outside the canonical wisdom tradition, feminine images of wisdom are sometimes presented in works that imagine mixed or female audiences, they are generally offered as figures for imitation and admiration rather than as intimate nurturers and surrogates for human spouses.9 My approach to the reception, reinvention, and redeployment of Wisdom and other feminine embodiments of wisdom and knowledge, both spiritual and human, in medieval and Early Modern Spanish literature is grounded in a combination of close reading, intellectual history, and reception theory. I look for the imagined and ideal audiences posited by medieval embodiments of wisdom and the traces of their historical acts of reception in the readerly and writerly processes of adaptation, translation, compilation, illustration, and parody. This multifaceted approach serves to deconstruct feminine images of wisdom in a manner consistent with their historical contexts. My aim is, to use an ancient conceit taken up by Terry Eagleton as a metaphor for deconstructive reading, “to reverse the tapestry” of a given text or discourse “in order to expose in all its unglamorously disheveled tangle the threads constituting the well-heeled image it presents to the world”10 There are perhaps no better-heeled images in medieval rhetoric than the figures of personification allegory. Thus, my approach goes beyond traditional “image of women” criticism, which historically has analyzed the false and misogynist representations of women in literary texts, often with the hope of recovering women’s historical realities. In contrast, I examine the use of feminine tropes in the pursuit of wisdom in order to recapture, insofar as is possible, medieval and Early Modern responses to feminine embodiments of wisdom in vernacular literature and, thus, to elucidate the provocative and often problematic nature of feminine imagery and corporeal metaphors in discourses of authority.

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Throughout medieval and Early Modern literature, the relationship between woman and wisdom is always charged: woman is wisdom’s body and its cipher, wisdom’s prize, and its perverter. The wisdom figures imagined by Castilian writers reveal their secrets in intimate embraces with the sages who seek them, instruct male subjects in philosophical dialogues, confront supposedly wise men in piquant debates, harangue men who cannot read their bodies of knowledge correctly, and even misleadingly promise wisdom but mediate carnal knowledge. The thirteenth- through seventeenth-century works analyzed in Wisdom and Her Lovers all negotiate the potential slippage between Wisdom and woman. In their literary and philosophical conjunctions of wisdom and the feminine, they encode, anticipate, and provoke readerly responses. * *

*

Chapter 1 introduces and examines the receptive dynamics at work in the personification of Wisdom in the biblical books attributed to the fabled King Solomon. My discussion of Solomon’s inf luential biblical allegory introduces the engagement of personification, as the literary representation and rhetorical equivalent of form participating in matter, in complex metaphysical issues. And, given the association of the female with the material and the corporeal in Western philosophical and theological discourse, feminine personification is particularly well-placed to demonstrate the imprinting of form upon matter. This reading sets the stage for my discussion of vernacular Spanish works. When wisdom is personified as a woman in medieval and Early Modern texts, the female body—the foremost representative for and representation of matter in philosophical texts and also of spiritual, physical, and moral corruption in medieval Castilian moral treatises—is made to represent abstract concepts that lie beyond the grasp of everyday language. As traditional Christological exegesis of biblical wisdom literature demonstrates, for centuries readers consistently resisted the union of the female form with divine abstractions. However, at the same time, the premodern arts of memory implicitly value this supposed incongruence between the material and the spiritual, the sensual and the intellective. The opposition between woman and wisdom makes the personification all the more memorable. Moreover, wisdom, identified as the body of desired knowledge in allegories depicting “the getting of wisdom,” is made visible by taking the form of another desired body, and the emotional import of Wisdom’s narrative feminine behavior encourages audiences to “cleave with affection” to the image and thus easily memorize her teachings. In the wisdom tradition, heterosexual desire is often sublimated in

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this way, turned to an intellectual object that is portrayed as a desirable female body.11 The importance of imagined corporeality in memory also, I would argue, intimates an erotic charge in personification allegory in general, and specifically in texts that combine feminine personification allegory and the teaching of normative heterosexuality, as is the case in many of the works addressed in this volume. Nevertheless, the combination of concretization and abstraction, of incongruence and likeness, posited by this canonical metaphor is a source of continual anxiety, as the master-texts reveal in their repeated encouragement to readers not to confuse their feminine personifications with women. Chapters 2 and 3 are concerned with medieval Castilian adaptations of canonical wisdom allegories and visionary narratives; the other chapters concern feminine embodiments of wisdom in vernacular texts that rely upon canonical wisdom allegories and the dynamics of feminine personification as essential “pretexts” or “keys to interpretability.”12 They also challenge audiences to read, and to read through, feminine embodiments of knowledge and the bodies of knowing female characters. In each of these salient instances of the reception and reshaping of wisdom and mnemonic imagery, the personification of wisdom functions in multiple ways: it is a trope that clarifies arguments, persuades audiences, and makes didactic content memorable, yet it is also a figure that obscures meaning, disrupts the transmission of wisdom, and reminds audiences of the vulnerability of sages and seekers of knowledge. Chapter 2 examines the discomfiture of thirteenth-century translators charged with rendering the biblical image of Wisdom received from Hebrew and Latin sources into the vernacular. Castilian translators and editors working in the sphere of Alfonso X’s scriptoria and also those who prepared biblias romanceadas contrived new, culturally congruent imagery. In fact, they created new, queer allegories where “Sir” Wisdom teaches, nourishes, loves, and marries the sage. The thirteenth-century readers who created the vernacular Libros de Solomón were thus reading against the grain of authoritative texts, practicing an early form of deconstruction and demystifying and dismantling biblical imagery. The romanceadores’ aims were homosocial and homophilic rather than homoerotic and correspond to the generic demands of vernacular wisdom, or sapiential literature. Further, while the masculine interpretation of the biblical figure of Wisdom was clearly anticipated by Christological exegesis, the textual transgendering of Wisdom must have surprised audiences who were culturally attuned to the original biblical allegory. Few works so clearly illustrate the perceived incongruity of feminine personifications of abstract and universal concepts as Alfonso de la Torre’s fifteenth-century Visión deleytable, the subject of chapter 3. Though rarely

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read by students and scholars of Spanish literature today, the Visión was widely read in the century following its composition. Indeed, like the Consolation of Philosophy, upon which it draws heavily, it was a staple of noblemen’s libraries. Feminine personifications, such as the Liberal Arts, Nature, Truth, and Wisdom, structure the Visión, while simultaneously troubling the smooth transmission of knowledge from sapiential text to reader. Alfonso’s personifications teach Platonic and Aristotelian lessons about matter and the seductions of the f lesh, all the while representing and resembling the very wily bodies they preach against. In addition to the Visión’s own underlining of the epistemological tensions arising from the use of corporeal metaphors, two premodern responses to the treatise demonstrate how allegory is easy prey to parody, that fifteenth- and sixteenth-century readers were not only conscious of the easy slippage from metaphorical feminine embodiment to female bodies but happily exploited it as well. Chapter 4 turns to fifteenth-century retellings of the stories of two wise virgins, characters that are not generally considered personifications, but whose feminine outlines are presented as ideal containers for bodies of knowledge and storehouses of memory. St. Catherine of Alexandria was one of medieval Europe’s most popular saints, and the legend revolving around her debate with fifty wise men was a standard example used in medieval profeminine arguments. Moreover, like the Virgin Mary, St. Catherine was offered to hagiographic audiences as the vehicle for the Word. In contrast, the story of the slave girl Teodor, which follows the same plotline as the saint’s legend, presents the wise virgin as a storehouse of medicosexual knowledge in an exemplary tale that teaches about both sexual intercourse and men’s vulnerability to women. In any genre, however, the wise virgin embodies the anxiety provoked by a woman who masters the master-text, and her story engages the problem of reading the bodies of personification correctly. The wise virgins confound as they transmit knowledge: their stories turn the presumed inconceivability of joining woman and wisdom into plot devices. Nevertheless, several narrative strategies work to assuage the anxiety the wise virgin may rouse, foremost among them are the narratorial and diegetic expressions of amazement at a wise virgin’s very existence. In the Early Modern and Transatlantic context of chapter 5, I turn to the intersection of literature and history, where the textual production revolving around Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz—the Mexican poet, playwright, composer, and author of religious treatises, hailed as the “Minerva of Mexico”—abounds in allusions to ancient and medieval allegories of wisdom. My aim in this chapter is to take a second look at how Sor Juana, her champions, and her critics made use of the large-scale tropes common

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to the texts and contexts in which women represent wisdom and translatio studii. In her own literary and philosophical self-fashioning, Sor Juana made good use of the figure of the wise virgin to defend women’s intellectual capabilities and to prove that a woman might serve the Catholic Church without extinguishing her intellect and thirst for knowledge. However, while St. Catherine of Alexandria provided an authoritative exemplar for Sor Juana’s written defenses of her intellectual endeavors, the powerful images of quiescence and martyrdom in the legend also provided her superiors with a model for subservience and silence. Further, echoing the expressions of wonder uttered by Teodor’s and St. Catherine’s fictional interlocutors, Diego de Callejo, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s first biographer, reported that her wisdom was “beyond the bounds of human understanding,” and admiring readers turned to the feminine imagery in the Books of Solomon in order to eulogize Sor Juana, thus projecting their own poetic and intellectual mastery upon her. Despite their ubiquity, feminine embodiments of wisdom are provocative rhetorical devices with a history of troubled reception in Spanish literature. No doubt this is due in part to their ironic resemblance to the even more familiar negative feminine embodiments of carnal knowledge: the wisdom attributed to female characters in medieval and Early Modern literature is frequently a dangerous and sexualized knowledge, allied with dark magic. In chapter 6, I turn away from feminine wisdom figures whose wisdom is construed positively to conclude with a rereading of Fernando de Rojas’s Celestina. Parodies of allegories of wisdom depend on the receptive shift from embodiments to bodies. This shift from the intellect to the f lesh is at work in the creation of Celestina, a(n) (in)famous embodiment of women’s nefarious wisdom. Revisiting the Books of Solomon and the theories of personification allegory explored in the other chapters, I read Celestina in the context of the wisdom tradition. Indeed, Rojas situates Celestina in a discursive world that greatly resembles the world of Solomon’s Proverbs, where the bawd functions doubly as a parodic inversion of Wisdom and as the reincarnation of her evil biblical impersonator, the Strange Woman. Moreover, the common woman Celestina ironically echoes Augustine’s image of Wisdom as a common woman shared among sages. Like Wisdom, the celestinesque figure was a commonplace that was also passed along and recreated over the centuries and that drew texts and audiences together in a discursive fellowship. In my analysis, I both draw upon and part ways with well-known and recent studies that consider Wisdom and other figures of feminine personification allegory in medieval literature “goddesses.” Howard Patch’s 1927 The Goddess Fortuna in Medieval Literature and George Economou’s

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oft-cited and recently reedited The Goddess Natura in Medieval Literature, which review the appearances of Fortune and Nature personified in Late Antique and medieval literature, are prime examples. In the same vein, in her recent God and the Goddesses, Barbara Newman categorizes the figures of personification allegory as either rhetorical or theological tropes, considering the theological-allegorical personifications, such as Sapientia, Philosophia, Nature, and Reason, a “third pantheon” in medieval Catholicism, goddesses that “open, and thrive within, a comparatively safe space for the imaginative exploration of Christian faith.”13 With their use of the term “goddess,” these studies analyze Nature, Wisdom, and Philosophy as hypostases, feminine faces of divinity that survived in medieval patriarchal Christian culture and belief. In contrast, Wisdom and Her Lovers focuses on the reception and literary responses of Spanish-speaking readers and writers to feminine embodiments in canonical and vernacular texts, where the “goddesses” of wisdom are frequently secularized, demoted, and distorted, transformed into mediators of anxiety as well as of knowledge.

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CHAPTER 1 BODIES OF KNOWLEDGE: WISDOM, PERSONIFICATION, AND MEMORY

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he power and provocativeness of feminine embodiments of wisdom derive from the process of personification. This chapter will examine the poetics and receptive dynamics of personification itself and the specific personification of Wisdom as a woman. An attendant goal here is to challenge the traditional notions that personifications are clumsy rhetorical figures and that gender in personification is merely coincidental. When we probe under the surface simplicity of personification allegory, the aesthetic and moral hold it had on medieval and Early Modern readers becomes evident. The pursuit of wisdom is one of the great themes of literature, yet “wisdom” itself is a notoriously ambiguous, polyvalent, intangible, and culturally specific concept. Wisdom’s very uncircumscribability makes it a natural candidate for personification, which offers a rhetorical and conceptual strategy for imagining the concrete shape and tangibility of abstract ideas and universals. Proverbs 1–9 and chapter 8 of the deuterocanonical Wisdom of Solomon, both attributed to the authorship of the fabled king, provide some of the best-known feminine personifications of wisdom in the Western literary tradition and present fundamental master-texts and intertexts for patristic, medieval, and Early Modern personifications of wisdom. “Lady Wisdom,” as the trope is called by most modern biblical scholars and commentators working in English, appears in the Hebrew Bible as Hokmah, in the Septuagint as Sophia, and in the Vulgate and Vetus Latina Bibles as Sapientia. She plays an important role in the imperative interpellation of the male subject in the Books of Solomon, where this specifically feminine personification is presented as the object of a twofold narratorial and readerly desire. A prophet, teacher, nurturer, disciplinarian, lover, and wife to the sage and the audience he

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addresses, Wisdom is at once the intellectual and spiritual goal of a cerebral journey and the preferred feminine object upon which normative, heterosexual male desire is directed. The Gendered Dynamics of Personification Allegory According to the Rhetorica Ad Herennium, the paramount medieval and Early Modern authority on rhetoric, compiled in the first century B.C.E. and attributed to Cicero throughout the Middle Ages, “Personification consists in representing an absent person as present, or in making a mute thing or one lacking form articulate, and attributing to it a definite form and a language or a certain behaviour appropriate to its character.”1 Personification thus makes intangibles appear to be present and, as James Paxson has observed, is “a device for transcending spatiality” and time.2 Personification is routinely referred to simply as “allegory” in the context of medieval literary history. It is a device supposedly so selfexplanatory that classic studies of allegory deride it as a perfunctory, “wooden,” and “ juvenile” conceit that merely prettily dresses up authorial didactic content. 3 As Carolynn Van Dyke puts it, in her review of critical responses to personification in Prudentius’s Psychomachia, personification allegory is a technique that “everybody understands because it is so transparent—and dislikes for the same reason.”4 Such is the basic assessment of personification allegory in Chandler Rathfon Post’s Mediaeval Spanish Allegory (1915)—to my knowledge, the only book-length study of personification in medieval Castilian literature. To his description of personifications of the virtues and vices as “tediously common,” Post adds that unframed personification narratives were superseded by allegories within visionary frameworks because “even the mediaeval man, fond though he was of the weird and the bizarre,” became distressed by personification allegory’s “extravagant” f lights of fancy.5 Personification does indeed give the appearance of simplicity and transparency to literary texts, making meaning “manifest” by “naming the actor with the concept.”6 However, in medieval and Early Modern texts, figures of personification are often the definitive markers of allegorical discourse, which signal the existence of meanings hidden within textual surfaces and alert readers to the didactic and interpretive possibilities of a given work. Figures of personification may appear in passing or may be the protagonists of extended narrative. As protagonists, they give the audiences of allegorical narratives plots inhabited with socially recognizable figures they can follow and also make the

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veiled truths of allegory easier to recall. Intriguingly, as we shall see, the “weirdness” and “extravagance” of personification allegory have a great deal to do with medieval appreciation for its aesthetic as well as mnemonic value. Personification allegory clearly held an intense appeal and fascination for premodern writers and their audiences. It has piqued the interest of contemporary literary theorists as well. Recent scholarship suggests that personification is a master trope, which, while seeking to recover “the pure visibility of the truth,” points to the impossibility of representation and the void that lies between words and things, representation and reality.7 As Paul de Man asserts, the transparency of personification is deceptive because the “emphatic clarity of representation does not stand in the service of something that can be represented.”8 Allegories of Wisdom, Philosophy, and other feminine embodiments rely on a specific kind of personification: anthropomorphization, where a human, speaking form acts as a vehicle for an abstract and invisible tenor. The two elements combine to produce a hybrid figure that is at once abstract and concrete. This sort of personification depends upon one of the most basic ontological and orientational “metaphors we live by”: the conceptualization of body as a container.9 The imagined body of Wisdom is “full of ” wisdom, and Philosophy “full of ” philosophy; the two personifications carry the sum of their abstract contents within their human outlines. Anthropomorphization also depends upon the conceptualization of the body as a surface for inscription: not only do the imagined bodies of personification allegory act as the vehicles for content, their names and surface appearance also represent their tenors. As a result, the corporeal images of personification resemble Möbius strips, with the inside and the outside equally visible and inscribed. The feminine personification of Wisdom and the general predominance of feminine over masculine personifications are by and large assumed to be merely a function of grammatical imperative: wisdom, philosophy, the liberal arts, the soul, and other abstractions are personified as female figures because they are words that are grammatically gendered female. In Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and the romance languages, the feminine personification of Wisdom consequently appears “natural” and even necessary due to the grammatical gender of many abstract nouns clustered around the semantic field of the transmission of knowledge. As Morton Bloomfield argues, “One might say that languages with grammatical gender, unlike English, have automatically built-in personification of some sort.”10 Or, as Marina Warner concludes in her survey of feminine personification in the Western tradition, “it can be said that one of the consequences of [linguistic]

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gender has been the seemingly animate and female nature of numerous abstract nouns.”11 Other critics find that the gendered nature of personification allegory goes beyond grammar. S. Georgia Nugent, writing on Prudentius’s Psychomachia, observes that grammar is often used to “explain away” gender in personification allegory, providing a “comfortably philological rationale” that leads critics to ignore the fact “that gender is strongly embedded in the overall conception of the work.”12 Joan Ferrante remarks with respect to Medieval Latin allegories that female characters “personify cosmological forces that govern man’s life; in lyric and romance, they represent his ideals, his aspirations, the values of his society. But the embodiment of these forces and values in female figures is significant.”13 Hanna Pitkin’s study of the Fortune in the works of Machiavelli underlines the writer’s use of the gendered dynamics of personification: Fortune, a female “of mythical proportions,” must be conquered by masculine virility and virtue.14 This strong embedding of gender, as I will argue in the following chapters, is certainly the case in medieval Castilian narratives that feature feminine personifications. Barbara Kurtz argues that medieval writers and readers were very much aware of the play between grammatical congruence and narrative incongruence in personification allegory, observing that Medieval theory. . .seems to locate the genesis of personification in a certain relationship between a noun and a verb, specifically, a relationship apparently incongruous but in reality conveniens, that is, permissible on grammatical and logical grounds.15

Clearly, the kind of human form used in allegorical narratives carries important implications for both the composition and reception of medieval allegories. Female and male embodiments are distinct, both poetically and hermeneutically, because each human form connotes a number of culturally gendered concepts. As Morton W. Bloomfield points out, personification, by making a proper noun out of a common noun, stylistically stresses the unity of the subject. “Truth consists of a class of many truths, but the class ‘Lady Truth’ contains only one member, the being who is the subject (or object) of the sentences in the literary work.” The predicate, or personifier, brings second-order referents to the meaning of the abstract subject to which it lends its form. In other words, Lady Truth is truth, but also a lady.16 Speaking feminine personifications function according to traditional gender performance and carry the mark of gender on their persons in the narratives they populate. By virtue of such expectations of performance and appearance, Wisdom can

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become the male sages’ lover in the Books of Solomon and Augustine’s Soliloquies, and Boethius’s wet-nurse in The Consolation of Philosophy. The feminine forms incessantly used in personification allegory to represent knowledge, teaching, and the transmission of wisdom bring all of the positive and negative connotations of the body and its carnal relations into play. Male personifications in medieval literature are relatively rare, Love and Genius standing as prominent examples. In fact, feminine personification was so conventional in medieval poetry that at times the few abstract nouns that are grammatically masculine were personified as women.17 Although grammar heavily inf luences the choice of human form used in personification allegory, medieval romance vernaculars contain synonyms with different grammatical genders, and writers could thus convey many abstract concepts in both masculine and feminine vehicles. For example, Castilian offered writers several possibilities for personifying wisdom: the masculine noun saber, and the feminine nouns sapiencia and sabiduría. And, as Barbara Newman observes in her discussion of the images of wisdom in medieval devotional literature, “Wisdom or Sapientia is unique” among medieval allegorical figures: [It] is the only personification that remained equally compelling, and indeed ubiquitous throughout the Middle Ages, in both a masculine and a feminine guise. In fact, its long history witnesses a tension between the procedures of personification allegory, in which the persona’s traits must be consistent with its grammatical gender, and the special demands of Christian theology, in which Wisdom—a feminine persona in the Old Testament—was very early identified with the masculine Christ (cf. I Cor. 1:24).18

Wisdom’s medieval masculinity is thus in large part due to the patristic biblical exegesis that urges the audiences of the Books of Solomon to understand Wisdom, despite her femininity, as a type for Christ—an interpretation that I would argue suggests the extreme disconcertion caused by the metaphor inherited from the ancient text in the patriarchal context of medieval Christianity. However, in spite of the uniqueness of Sapientia, male personifications of wisdom are rarely used by secular medieval authors, making them all the more intriguing when they appear. In its depiction of the participation of universals in particular bodies, personification engages thorny metaphysical questions that complicate its function as a didactic and literary tool. In terms of the Western philosophical tradition, the participation of universals or substances in

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particulars and matter is an inherently sexual process. Plato, and later Aristotle, illustrated the participation of universal forms in particular matter as the process of a masculine spirit taking form in an alien feminine substance. In this process, Gordon Teskey discerns, “the problem of how form participates in matter is transferred to the alien context of gender, where it can appear to be solved under the image of sexual congress.”19 In the Platonic and Aristotelian vision of the participation of substances and matter, “matter is made pregnant with form by assuming a ‘subject’ (sub-iectum ‘cast down’) position with respect to the male.” Both philosophers describe “matter as assuming the proper position for the wife in intercourse.” An analogous process is at work in personification allegory, where “the female will appear to embody, with her whole body, the meaning imprinted on her.”20 Feminine personification is thus the literary representation of feminine matter impregnated by form. The figurative use of the female body and its role in heterosexual relations, pregnancy, and birth in philosophical and wisdom texts creates a metaphorical dependency upon the feminine. As Teskey suggests, personification clearly illustrates how allegory “forces” union upon two disparate entities, which are placed in a hierarchical relationship: allegory “elicits continual interpretation as its primary aesthetic effect, giving us the feeling that we are moving at once inward and upward toward the transcendental ‘other,’ ” the purportedly higher abstract meaning.21 The vehicle of personification—the human (most frequently female) body—is located at the literal level in the tangible and contingent world of matter, thus connoting a lower order of existence. This forced union between matter and a transcendent other highlights the incongruence between physical bodies and abstract concepts that lie beyond the grasp of everyday language.22 An effect of this metaphorical and metaphysical incongruence is that personifications always simultaneously reaffirm and break down the dualistic separation of mind and body, turning readers both toward and away from contemplations of embodiment. This allegorical contrast makes the figures of personification not only highly memorable but also provocative. Medieval and Early Modern rhetorical manuals and ars memoriae celebrate personification for its vividness, persuasive force, and mnemonic power. When they extol personification as a privileged mnemonic device, arts of memory also implicitly value the incongruities of personification—feminine personification in particular. Indeed, pedagogically and erotically active feminine allegorical figures are key elements in premodern ars memoriae, where theorists encourage their readers to use imagines agentes, memorable active images: in other words, personifications that will appeal to the affective and sensible part of the

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soul, consequently adhering firmly in memory. As Mary Carruthers observes, not only was the image of the human body an essential support for memory-work, but also the likenesses that serve as memory aids were linked to emotional reactions: “memory-images of whatever sort require emotional coloring” so that they may be recalled without difficulty.23 The memory section of the Rhetorica Ad Herennium, the main source for both the medieval and classical traditions of artificial memory, stresses the importance of strong emotional reactions to memory figures: Now Nature herself teaches us what we should do. When we see in everyday life things that are petty, ordinary, and banal, we generally fail to remember them, because the mind is not being stirred by anything novel or marvellous. But if we see or hear something exceptionally base, dishonourable, extraordinary, great, unbelievable, or laughable, that we are likely to remember for a long time. . . .Thus Nature shows that she is not aroused by the common, ordinary event, but is moved by a new or striking occurrence. Let Art, then, imitate Nature, find what she desires, and follow as she directs.24

The author next suggests that we bind such striking occurrences to imagines agentes in order to aid memory: We ought, then, to set up images of a kind that can adhere longest in the memory. And we shall do so if we establish likenesses as striking as possible; if we set up images that are not many or vague, but doing something; if we assign to them exceptional beauty or singular ugliness; if we dress some of them with crowns or purple cloaks, for example, so that the likeness may be more distinct to us; or if we somehow disfigure them. . .[or assign] them certain comic effects. . .that, too, will ensure our remembering them more easily. 25

This “weirdly populated memory,” as Frances Yates has aptly characterized it, is clearly present in Scholastic ref lections on memory, which situate the mnemonic use of personification within their integration of the Aristotelian philosophy of mind.26 For example, Thomas Aquinas describes how human memory depends in large part upon the phantasms or “sense objects” that are created by the imagination: “For this reason we cannot remember well those things which we regard as rarified and spiritual; those objects that are corporeal and perceived by the senses are better objects of memory. It is necessary, if we will to facilitate remembering abstract ideas, to bind them to particular images.”27 In his Summa Theologica II: II, quaestio XLIX, Aquinas further elaborates

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upon this idea: There are four things whereby a man perfects his memory. First, when a man wishes to remember a thing, he should take some suitable yet somewhat unwonted illustration of it, since the unwonted strikes us more, and so makes a greater and stronger impression on the mind. . . .Now the reason for the necessity of finding these illustrations or images is that simple and spiritual intentions easily slip away from the mind, unless they be tied as it were to some corporeal image, because human knowledge has a greater hold on sensible objects. For this reason memory is assigned to the sensitive part of the soul. Secondly, whatever a man wishes to retain in his memory he must carefully consider and set in order, so that he may pass easily from one memory to another. . . .Thirdly, we must be anxious and earnest about the things we wish to remember, because the more a thing is impressed on the mind, the less it is liable to slip out of it. Wherefore Tully says (Ad Heren. de arte rhet. iii.) that anxiety preserves the figures of images entire. Fourthly, we should often ref lect on the things we wish to remember.28

The acknowledgment that the soul will “cleave with affection,” as Yates translates Aquinas’s third point,29 to a corporeal similitude of an “unwonted” nature rather than to an abstract idea suggests that the inherent “violence” of the allegorical “forced unions” described by Teskey makes feminine personifications especially memorable. The memorative force of corporeal similitudes was visual as well as verbal and, as Yates and later V. A. Kolve argue, such “corporeal similitudes” from the art of memory become familiar images in the medieval plastic and literary arts. The boundaries between internal visual images created to aid memory and external imagery necessarily overlapped: “the ‘things’ which [medieval people] were to remember through inner images were of the same kind as the ‘things’ which Christian didactic art taught through images.”30 As Kolve remarks, “Not only were medieval readers and listeners asked to respond to literature in this way—to ‘see’ what they had heard described—but the act of literary composition itself was often represented [in manuscript illumination] as an act of visual imagining.”31 The figures of literary personification allegory are easily remembered corporeal similitudes, readily identified as containing and conveying more meaning than their appearance and physicality. However, in addition to giving shape and order to experience and to universals, personifications bring excess meaning to the abstractions to which they lend their form. Bodies, even when portrayed as literary tropes, partake of complex systems of cultural symbolism. If, at first sight or reading,

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the bodies of personification allegory appear to be bodies that exist in an imaginary realm apart from the Aristotelian, Galenic, and humoral systems of corporeal signification known to premodern writers, the narratives into which they are inserted often, if not always, depend upon those very systems. And the body is wily; even in the hands of authors who intend personification to provide a mere recognizable outline, it tends to add its own surplus connotations and to invite confusion between corporeal similitudes and carnal bodies. Some premodern theorists clearly were aware of how the figures of personification tended to turn their audiences’ thoughts from the contemplation of universals and toward distracting appetites and earthly concerns. Peter of Ravenna recognizes this sort of slippage in his fifteenth-century art of memory, where he advocates using images of enticing women as memory-places, remarking, “illae enim multum memoriam meam excitant” [these indeed greatly stimulate my memory], while cautioning both those who hate women and those who cannot control their sexual appetites not to use his method.32 The Biblical Personification of Wisdom Proverbs and the other wisdom texts attributed to Solomon are poetic, yet eminently practical books. Biblical wisdom takes the whole of human life into its purview, instructing its inscribed audience on matters of leadership, counsel, finance, friendship, war, love, and piety. Thus, it seeks to bring all aspects of life under control by providing its audiences with rules, definitions, and codes of prudent behavior, all encapsulated in exempla, aphorisms, and parables. The main narrating voices of the Books of Solomon are fathers addressing sons. Though ostensibly universal texts open to all readers, they hail an imagined and ideal male reader—one destined for an important societal position—who must choose a suitable wife and enter into beneficial relationships with the other male leaders of his society. In their deep preoccupation with the education of elite young men, which in large part depends upon the successful negotiation of gender relations, the wisdom books are prime purveyors of “anxious masculinity,” where male prerogatives and social superiority are simultaneously asserted and revealed as vulnerable and in need of vigilant protection.33 Indeed, a great deal of the fatherly advice in the Books of Solomon concerns women, and this concern extends throughout the sapiential tradition. Wisdom literature’s concentration on sexuality and gender relations is an attention-getting device that corresponds to the kinds of choices and activities that its

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intended and ideal audiences would have encountered in their extratextual existence. The authorial voices of the narrators in Proverbs counsel young male subjects to expect and resist the dangers presented by their entrance into the gendered world of adult, patriarchal sexuality and society. As Athalya Brenner observes, biblical wisdom literature on the whole, with the exception of Job, is marked by a “preoccupation with women, femininity and gender relations,” which is particularly evident in the rhetorical devices, such as “metaphors, hyperbole, similes and repeated idioms,” and in “narratorial focalization.”34 In her convincing study of Proverbs, Carol Newsom remarks that “A casual reader asked to describe Proverbs 1–9 might reply that it was the words of a father talking to his son, mostly about women. . .though woman is not the sole topic of the chapters, talk about women and women’s speech occupies an astonishing amount of the text.”35 Proverbs, as Newsom continues, is a discourse about male social and sexual maturation: [Proverbs describes] a critical moment not only in psychoanalytic terms but also a critical moment for the social and symbolic order. It is the moment at which the patriarchal family will be successfully replicated or threatened. The system of approved and disapproved sexual relations forms a language through which men define their relationships with one another. . . .Metaphorically, in the social fabric of patriarchy woman is the essential thread that joins the pieces. But equally she indicates the seams where the fabric is subject to tears.36

Ecclesiastes and the Wisdom of Solomon echo Proverbs’ teachings on gender relations, while Sirach takes its basic material on women and expands upon it at great length. In the book of Proverbs, Wisdom personified first appears in verses 1 to 9, where she calls out in the streets to young and foolish men, offering her knowledge, love, and protection to those who choose to follow her. Her speeches are framed by those of a father speaking to his son about the benefits of embracing Wisdom, which include wealth and a long life. The fatherly narrator praises Wisdom for her priceless worth for she “is more precious than jewels” (Prov. 3:15). In Proverbs 7:1–5, he employs a nuptial metaphor that recalls the sister-bride of the Song of Songs to explain how to love Wisdom: My child, keep my words and store up my commandments with you; keep my commandments and live, keep my teachings as the apple of your eye;

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bind them to your fingers, write them on the tablet of your heart. Say to Wisdom, “You are my sister,” and call insight your intimate friend, that they may keep you from the loose woman, from the adulteress with her smooth words.

This metaphor is amplified and intensified throughout chapter 8 of the Wisdom of Solomon, where the narratorial Solomon describes his love and desire for Wisdom, whom he seeks to take as a bride: “I loved her and sought her from my youth, and I desired to take her for my bride, and I became enamored of her beauty.” In Solomon’s nuptial metaphors, the sage’s intellectual knowledge is cast as a kind of “carnal knowing,” suggesting that there is a “sexual dimension of knowledge.”37 In the bridal imagery, the imagined body of Wisdom represents a mastered body of knowledge: the sage-husband gains and maintains his wisdom through his sexual and marital mastery. He is not only the master of his wife and house, but also of the precepts the wisdom books teach.38 The nuptial wisdom imagery of Proverbs and Wisdom forms an important part of biblical wisdom literature’s considerable focus on gender relations. Due to the importance the authors and editors of wisdom literature place on prescribed marriage and proscribed gender relations in their vision of an ideal life, the regulation of sexual behavior is one of its overarching themes.39 Illicit sexual experiences, the Solomonic narrators of wisdom literature warn, will lead men to lose honor, power, wealth, and, eventually, their lives. Choosing an appropriate sexual partner and a good wife, on the other hand, assures social status and economic stability. Consequently, it is not surprising that biblical wisdom literature blends profeminine and promarriage statements with strident gynophobic axioms, axioms that would become commonplaces in medieval works championing and defaming women. Such contradictory—while ultimately corollary—teachings are found in close textual and contextual proximity. Throughout Proverbs, the much feared, smooth-talking, adulterous Strange Woman, “decked out like a prostitute,” persuades young men with “seductive speech” to follow her to her house. She leads her feckless victims to their deaths, into the “depths of Sheol.”40 In Proverbs 9, Wisdom builds a house with seven pillars and invites those who would follow her to a feast and compares her own invitation to that of the Strange Woman. In fact, the words and actions of these two opposed feminine figures are quite similar, suggesting the difficulty of telling them apart. The challenge for the inscribed audience is to learn to distinguish Wisdom’s straight path to knowledge, social acceptance,

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and blessedness from the Strange Woman’s twisted path to perfidy and death. Unlike the dangerous and strange seductress, Wisdom is an ideal counselor and consort; indeed, she is also the model for the ideal wife, envisioned in the final chapter of Proverbs. Proverbs 31:10–31 praises the Woman of Worth, the wife who, in contrast to the Strange Woman, positively imitates Wisdom. She too sets up housekeeping, working from before dawn to after dark to order her productive household. Like Wisdom, the Woman of Worth prepares her house in order to nourish Solomon’s imagined reader, who is encouraged to marry just such a woman. She is a credit to her husband, and her work provides him with many of the same things that Wisdom proffers and that the paternal voice ensures the lovers of Wisdom will receive. Thanks to the Woman of Worth’s industriousness, her husband can preside at the city gates with the elders, reinforcing homosocial relationships. Commenting on the rhetorical power of personification allegory in biblical wisdom literature, Claudia Camp envisions an affective and aesthetic response to Wisdom personified that is the receptive extension of the Books of Solomon’s nuptial metaphors: [Lady Wisdom] engages the reader, implicating him or her in the issue at hand and compelling a personal response. One responds not to the abstract concept of wisdom but to the woman who takes a stand, cries out, offers love and builds a house. The metaphorical predicate thus lends an affective aspect to the personification that complements its integrative function.41

Camp’s depiction is reminiscent of the relationship between Philosophy and the author-figure in the Consolation of Philosophy, where Boethius, as the inscribed audience and receiver of Philosophy’s teaching and motherly comforting, responds much in the way that the inscribed audience of Proverbs is encouraged to do, although without Solomon’s unequivocal eroticism. The combination of Wisdom’s “alluring female qualities” and her connection to abstract divine wisdom, which is unknowable without the mediation of personification, makes the imagery of Proverbs particularly powerful.42 However, the text also creates another strong affective bond, that between the parental narrator and his inscribed audience. The relationship between the wise fatherly narrator and his imagined younger, male audience establishes a series of homosocial hermeneutic circles that circumscribe Wisdom’s discourses. The Books of Solomon pair their teachings about Woman as an object of intellectual and ethical mastery

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with their central metaphor of Wisdom, the woman: she is both an abstract body of knowledge embodied by a feminine figure and a bride, presented from father to son as an advantageous match in an arranged marriage. Medieval and Early Modern Reception Iberian vernacular wisdom literature replicates the biblical wisdom books’ quest for overall mastery of life, with its concomitant attentiveness to issues of sexuality and gender relations. Although modern scholarship tends to focus on the importance of Arabic inf luences and source materials over biblical texts, the Books of Solomon are essential intertexts for the greater corpus of medieval Iberian wisdom literature.43 The three traditions share a densely woven intertextual fabric, and biblical wisdom texts provide an authorizing bridge between the Eastern Mediterranean tradition and medieval Christianized sapiential works. Moreover, the thirteenth century saw an increased interest in the ethical and political advice offered by the Books of Solomon; whereas eleventh- and twelfth-century exegetes tended to focus on the mystical interpretations of the Song of Songs, thirteenth-century scholars mined Proverbs, Wisdom, and Ecclesiastes for practical counsel about human affairs.44 As is the case in the Books of Solomon, the narrators of vernacular wisdom literature are frequently paternal or magisterial figures who address an imagined audience of adolescent male readers who are destined for the upper echelons of society. Importantly, as María Jesus Lacarra observes, wisdom literature seeks to present readers and listeners with the keys to safe passage through this life and into the next, and wisdom itself is presented as received and unchallengeable knowledge, without need for expansion and as universally applicable.45 This conception of the static nature of wisdom allows for its wholesale transference from sage to disciple, a transaction often dramatized in wisdom narratives and the manuscript images that accompany them. However, would-be sages are cautioned not to presume too much of their own sagacity, for some knowledge will always remain beyond their grasp. Nor will learning free them of their human susceptibility to worldly incursions. The Books of Solomon were at once religious and historical texts for premodern audiences. In them, readers found an idealized autobiography of a life devoted to the search for and devotion to W/wisdom, a model for all noblemen and leaders of nations. Moreover, King Solomon was also one of the preeminent authorities on Woman and women. His

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Proverbs teach what kinds of women are to be avoided—“strange,” foreign, nonorthodox, querulous, and promiscuous—and what kind is to be pursued and married—Wisdom and her imitator, the industrious Woman of Worth. Solomon’s celebrated mastery of the subject of Woman notwithstanding, medieval and Early Modern readers also knew him as a classic counterexample: a man who, despite all his wisdom and experience, had been no match for the wiles of women. His biography in Kings attests to his practical experience of the dangers posed by “strange women”; his “ardent love” for them led him to idolatry, incurred the wrath of God, and instigated war (3 Kings 11). Wise yet weak, Solomon is emblematic of the mastery and anxious vulnerability that go hand in hand throughout the sapiential tradition’s meditations on Woman, women, and wisdom. In Proverbs, Wisdom and the Strange Woman personify this combination of control and confusion. Wisdom embodies “the positive qualities of the woman possessed by a man (Wisdom as wife),” while the Strange Woman embodies “the negative qualities of the woman incapable of being mastered by any man,” or by patriarchal monotheism.46 The shared “anxious masculinity” of biblical and vernacular wisdom literature led to direct borrowings from the Books of Solomon. Indeed, medieval and Early Modern wisdom literature is peppered with quotes and paraphrases from the Books of Solomon’s observations about women. Nevertheless, like its biblical model, vernacular wisdom literature offers readers images of exemplary, though extremely rare, wives and concedes the necessity of marriage, procreation, and the occasional sexual activity necessary for physical and mental health. However, the rare appearances of good women in wisdom literature do little to counter the rhetorical force of its universalizing misogynist dictates, where Woman, la muger, is the subject of myriad axioms. Proverbs 31:10, Solomon’s encomium to the Woman of Worth who toils so that her husband may sit at the city gates with other respected men was the subject of gendered exegesis throughout the Middle Ages and Early Modern period. Misogynist sapiential texts, seeking to steer their readers away from the perils of the f lesh, often paraphrase the first half of Proverbs 31:10—“a good woman, who can find?”—in order to stress the rarity of good women, and in order to conclude that not even Solomon could find one. Jehan Le Fèvre, for example, selectively quotes Proverb 31:10 in The Lamentations of Matheolus (c. 1371–1372): “Solomon, in his works, makes an amazing comment, which supports my case, for he exclaims, ‘Who could find a virtuous woman?’ The implication here is, of course, that this would be impossible.”47 Conduct texts for women, on the other hand, such as Fray Martín de Cordoba’s Jardín de nobles doncellas

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(c. 1468–1469) and the anonymous fifteenth-century Castigos que un sabio daua a sus hijas, cite the full proverb, exhorting their audiences to imitate Solomon’s mujer fuerte, and the entirety of Fray Luis de León’s La perfecta casada (1583) is structured around Proverbs’ encomium of the good wife. The implication in conduct literature for women is not just that it is possible to imitate the Woman of Worth, but that it is a wife’s duty to do so.

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CHAPTER 2 LADY WISDOM MY BROTHER: READING SAPIENTIA IN MEDIEVAL CASTILE

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he feminine personification of Wisdom in the Books of Solomon has long fascinated scholars, in large part due to the apparent incongruence of a powerful female figure in texts that are pillars of patriarchal wisdom.1 It appears to have given thirteenth-century Castilian readers and translators pause as well. Despite the authority and conventionality of the biblical personification of Wisdom, Solomon’s “Lady” Wisdom was not translated with ease into Castilian versions of biblical wisdom literature, where she undergoes significant transformations. Surprisingly, given the poetic and liturgical inf luence of the feminine personification of Wisdom, “Lady” Wisdom often vanishes from sight, and instead, the male figure of Saber, or “Sir” Wisdom, embodies the human and divine wisdom that Solomon, now filtered through Castilian vernacular authorial voices, imparts. These instances of masculine lexical preference are particularly intriguing, because the biblical wisdom books are so deeply preoccupied with gender relations, and, within the context of this anxiety, the sage’s erotic relationship with Wisdom is of central importance. The choices made by the translators demonstrate that translating and glossing are often intertwined processes and that, in many cases, the medieval Castilian romancers were resisting readers of the feminine personification of Wisdom. The Books of Solomon circulated in the vernacular in medieval Iberia in the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century biblias romanceadas, which contain full and partial translations of the Hebrew Bible and Christian Evangelical texts, and in the third part of Alfonso X’s General estoria, which contains complete translations of the Song of Songs, Proverbs, Wisdom, and Ecclesiastes.2 Their place in the Castilian monarch’s ambitious historiographic project, which also functioned as a mirror of princes,

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demonstrates the multivalence of Solomon’s biography and his legendary wisdom in medieval literary culture. Translatio Studii: from Solomon to Alfonso X A miniature on the verso side of the first folio of one of the codices containing the Estoria de Espanna, Alfonso X’s thirteenth-century chronicle, depicts a scene of idealized translatio studii. Alfonso, the regal authorfigure of the history, appears enthroned in the center of the miniature, presiding over his court. Other crowned male figures are seated slightly below him, and below them are male courtiers. All of the men depicted are engaged in discussion, gesturing with their hands.3 Alfonso is turned toward his son Sancho IV and presents a book to him. The miniature aptly illustrates how wisdom passes from man to man in the sapiential tradition and, further, echoes the bond between father and son imagined in Proverbs. Moreover, the transmission of wisdom is under strict control in the miniature: Alfonso, as author-figure, presides over the prince and other nobles who make up the history’s imagined audience.4 A complete textual body of wisdom passes ceremoniously from father to son in agnatic inheritance in this scene of homosocial translatio, where the transfer of wisdom is intimately bound up with translatio imperii. This miniature accompanies the prologue of the Estoria de Espanna, which presents the wise king as both the master and the body of wisdom itself: O Espanna, si tomas los dones que te da la sabiduria del rey, resplandeçeras, otrosi en fama et fermosura creçeras. El rey, que es fermosura de Espanna et thesoro de la filosofia, ensennanças da a los yspanos; tomen las buenas los buenos, et den las vanas a los vanos.5 Oh Spain, if you take the gifts that the King’s wisdom gives you, you will be resplendent and you will grow in fame and beauty as well. The King, who is the beauty of Spain and a great store of philosophy, gives [his] teachings to the Spaniards; let the good take the good teachings and give what is worthless to the worthless.

King Solomon plays a central role in the vast Alfonsine project of translatio, which extends through the histories, legal compilations, translations, and literary compositions commissioned by the thirteenth-century Castilian monarch, who hoped to be remembered not only as a rey sabio but also as the Holy Roman Emperor.6 Alfonso, as author-figure, frequently stakes out his own symbolic and sapiential allegiance with the

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biblical monarch and embeds Solomon’s authority within the confines of his own. For example, after God and Alfonso himself, Solomon is the first named authority in the Siete Partidas, where he is depicted as a model legislator, empire builder, husband, and, of course, sage. Alfonso also presents himself as a Solomonic author-figure and as a royal mediator of wisdom and justice in the Estoria de Espanna, the General estoria, and the Siete Partidas, three works that contributed to emerging ideas and ideals of an imagined cohesive Castilian nation. In Alfonso’s editorial hands, Solomon, a key figure in the Hebrew Bible’s narrative of Israelite postexilic ethnic destiny, becomes an authority in works that narrate a thirteenth-century vision of neo-Visigothic Castilian destiny in Reconquest Iberia. The inclusion of the Books of Solomon in Alfonso’s voluminous, though ultimately uncompleted, General estoria clearly demonstrates the sapiential dimensions of Alfonsine historiography, contributing to its dual functions as both mirror of princes and chronicle. While the majority of sources used in the General estoria are paraphrased, amplified, or abbreviated, in the third part of the universal history the Solomonic wisdom texts are directly translated and interpolated as complete units. By interpolating the vernacular Cantar de los Cantares, Proverbios, Sabiduría, and Eclesiastés, Alfonso mediates Solomon’s wisdom for his Castilian audience, translating and transplanting Solomon’s words and thus governing their passage from sage to page to audience.7 The Castilian Libros de Salomón: The Lady Vanishes The Castilian vernacular allowed translators to take liberties with Wisdom. The translations to be considered here are found in the four extant manuscripts of the third part of the Alfonsine General estoria and in MS Escorial I.I.6 [E6], a thirteenth-century biblia romanceada containing Castilian translations of both the Hebrew Bible and Christian Evangelical texts.8 The provenance of E6 is unknown, but some scholars have associated it with the Alfonsine cultural enterprise, and the similarity between the General estoria and E6’s translations of the Books of Solomon may indicate a relationship between the two.9 The textual and iconographic characteristics of the biblias romanceadas offer a great deal of information about how the Bible was read and interpreted by medieval translators and patrons who wished to make canonical scriptures available in romance.10 In the majority of the biblias romanceadas, Castilian translators use several related terms as equivalents for the figure of Sapientia and Hokmah that they found in their sources: sapiençia,

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sabiduría, çiençia and saber. Taking as a point of departure the translations of Proverbs 1:20, where Wisdom preaches in the streets, we can see some of the medieval romancers’ choices. The biblia romanceada in MS Escorial I.I.5, a fifteenth-century manuscript copied from one of the earliest extant Castilian vernacular Bibles translated from Hebrew, uses both sabiduría and las sçiençias for personified Wisdom, turning her, with the latter, into a group of personified figures. For example, the “sciences” preach in the streets: “Las sçiençias enlas calles cantan enlas plaças dan su boz” [The sciences sing in the streets and raise their voices in the squares].11 The fourteenth-century MS Escorial I.I.4 similarly names both la sabiduría and las sabidurías. MS Escorial I.I.3, an early fifteenth-century manuscript containing the complete translated text of the Hebrew Bible and two apocryphal books of the Maccabees as well, alternates between çiençia and las çiençias. MS 10288 of the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid, a fifteenthcentury biblia romanceada translated from Latin and Hebrew and including glosses by Jerome, also shifts its personification of Wisdom between the singular and plural feminine sabiduría and sabidurías. In these biblias romanceadas, the plural is favored for translating Proverbs 1:20 and 9:1, where a female chorus preaches in the streets and builds a seven-pillared house. Use of the plural may ref lect highly literal translations of the metaphor; as in the original Hebrew, Hokmah appears in an intensifying plural form.12 In addition, it is possible that the translators envisioned this chorus as a group related to the seven liberal arts, also personified as women in medieval allegory and associated with the seven pillars of Wisdom’s house in Proverbs 9. In E6 and the General Estoria, the translators’ interpretations of the gender rather than the number of Wisdom result in readings that differ significantly from canonical Christian feminine imagery. The Alfonsine General estoria’s Proverbios begins its reimagining of Wisdom in chapter 1, where Wisdom calls to young and foolish men, ordering them to heed her teaching. While the Hebrew, Septuagint, and Vulgate Bibles personify wisdom (hokmah, sophia, sapientia) as a woman preaching in the streets, the General estoria transgenders Wisdom: “El saber fuera prediga, en las plaças da la su boz” [Wisdom preaches outdoors, he calls out in the squares] (GE3, 189).13 This startling interpretive move not only performs a grammatical shift: it significantly alters a well-known metaphor, one that Alfonso’s audiences would have heard in liturgy and perhaps even seen in iconography. Wisdom’s gender then f luctuates in the General estoria’s Proverbios 2:1–6: Mio fijo, si tú recibieres las mis palabras, e condesares en ti los mis mandados de guisa que oya la tu oreja el saber [sapientiam], baxa el tu coraçon a conocer

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sabiduría [prudentiam]; ca si llamares la sapiencia [sapientiam] e omillares el tu coraçón a la sabiduría [prudentiae], e la demandares assí como riqueza e la buscares como tesoros, estonces entendrás el temor del Señor e fallarás el saber [scientiam] de Dios; ca el Señor da la sapiencia [sapientiam], e d’él viene la sabiduría [prudentia] e el saber [scientia]. (GE3, 190–91)14 My son, if you receive my words, and store up my teachings within you so that your ear may hear wisdom, lower your heart to know wisdom, because if you call to wisdom and humble your heart to wisdom, and you seek it/her like wealth and search for it/her like treasure, then you will understand the fear of the Lord and you will find the knowledge of God, because God gives wisdom and from him comes knowledge and understanding.

In Proverbios 2:9–11, the son is urged to call upon “el saber” and to let it/ him into his heart and soul, changing the heterosexual erotically charged relationship between Wisdom and the seeker of wisdom portrayed in the original text (GE3, 191). Nevertheless, the authors of the General estoria faithfully translated the central erotic and nuptial metaphors. The inscribed male audience is encouraged to love Wisdom, la sapiençia, in Proverbios 4, and she is the same figure that is seen later as a preferred beloved than the muger estraña in the famous verses translated from the Vulgate Proverbs chapter 7 in Alfonso’s Proverbios 6.4–15: Di a la sapiencia [sapientiae]: —Mi ermana eres tú, e llama tu amiga a la sabiduría [prudentiam], porque te guarde de la mugier estraña e de la agena que adulcea sus palabras. Ca de la finiestra de mi casa caté yo por los caneziellos, e vi los pequeños; e mesuré el mancebo puesto fuera de su coraçon, que passava por las plaças cerca’l requexo, e cerca la carrera de su casa andava en oscuro contra viésperas, e anocheciendo ya; e vi una mugier do salié, e se encontró allí con él en las tiniebras e en la escuredat; e estava guisada a manera de mugier del sieglo para engañar las almas, palrera e que se andava de vagar, e non querié estar en paz nin podié ser en su casa; e iva por su pie a las vezes de fuera, a las vezes en las plaças, a las vezes cerca los requexos, assechando a aquel mancebo; e priso·l e besó·l, e començó·l a falagar con cara de garçonía. (GE3, 204–205) Say to wisdom, “You are my sister,” and call insight your intimate friend, that she may protect you from the strange woman, and from the foreign woman who sweetens her words. For from the window of my house I looked through the lattice, and I saw the little ones, and I observed a young man out of his right mind, who passed through the squares close to her corner, taking the road to her house in the twilight, with night coming on, and I saw a woman come out and meet him in the shadows and the

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darkness, and she was dressed like a prostitute in order to trick souls; a talker and wayward, she did not want to be still, nor could she remain in her house, and she walked sometimes out in the open, sometimes in the squares, sometimes at the corners, lying in wait for that young man, and she grabbed him and kissed him and, with an impudent face, began to f latter him.

In the Alfonsine Chapter 7, which corresponds to the Vulgate 8, Wisdom calls out to all men, offering her teachings that are more precious than any other treasure: Llama la sapiencia [sapientia] toda vía, e da la sabiduría [prudentia] su boz en los somos e en las altas vertudes sobre la carrera, en medio de los senderos estando, cerca las puertas de la civdat, en los quiciales mismos fabla e dize. . . .Mejor es saber [sapientia] que todas las riquezas las más preciadas que pueden seer, e aun toda cosa que de dessear es non se podrié egualar a ella. (GE3, 207–208) Wisdom yet calls out, and understanding raises her voice in the heights and in the high places by the road, in the crossroads, close to the city gates, in the very portals she speaks. . . .Wisdom is better than all the most prized riches, and everything that is desirable cannot equal her.

In the midst of this allegorical scene, the gender of Wisdom the protagonist changes from female to male and back to female. The use of the masculine saber above, strangely referred to by the feminine pronoun ella, may have led to the gender switch in the continuation of Proverbios 8: “Yo saber [sapientia] moro en el consejo sesudo, e só en los sabios cuidares” [I, Wisdom, live in learned counsel and wise thoughts]. And, in the following allegorical scenes, Wisdom remains a male figure. In the Alfonsine Proverbios 9.1, where Wisdom builds a house, preparing it for guests, we read: El saber [sapientia] fizo casa para sí, tajó siete pilares en ella sobre que la asentó; sacrificó sus sacrificios, guisó vino e puso su mesa. Embió sus sergentes [ancillas suas] que llamassen al alcáçar e a las menas de la cibdat. (GE3, 210–11). Wisdom has built his house, he has hewn seven pillars upon which he has built it; he made his sacrifices, mixed wine, and set his table. He sent out his servants to call in the alcazar and the high places in the city.

The allegorical imagery of female Wisdom the house builder and hostess attended by her maidservants is reenvisioned as male Wisdom, house builder and host attended by his sergentes, a male or mixed group of servants.

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Strangely, Wisdom appears as both male and female in the General estoria. The examples above demonstrate its basic method of rendering the Latin terms sapientia, prudentia, and scientia into the vernacular. “Saber” is used to translate both scientia and sapientia, and, occasionally, prudentia. However, at times “sapiencia” is also used to translate sapientia. For example, the General estoria’s translation of the book of Wisdom is called “el Libro de Sapiencia,” while El Saber and La Sapiençia continue to share the stage. “Sabiduría” is used exclusively to translate prudentia. Consequently, the three potentially personifiable figures who are feminine in the Latin text are all intermittently rendered saber, which is at times an anthropomorphized character in Alfonso’s Proverbios, and at others an object or abstract concept. However, due to the stressed personification of wisdom in key lessons, the metaphorical and narrative forces of personification reverberate when saber or sapiençia appear in the Proverbios’ nonallegorical passages. The alternating terms applied by the translators and editors suggest that they did not consider the figure of Wisdom in the Books of Solomon as necessarily feminine even though the original Latin term, sapientia, is grammatically gendered feminine. Nevertheless, they do not seem to have intended to render Wisdom a sexless abstraction. Rather, they appear to have based their choices on the gendered quality of Wisdom’s diverse activities. Wisdom the beloved and wife is feminine. Wisdom the preacher from Proverbs 1:20–33 is male in the General estoria, as is Wisdom the house builder and host from Proverbs 9:1–18. In the context of medieval prohibitions of female preaching and the homosocial dynamics of medieval translatio studii, the latter three activities no doubt seemed more appropriate for a male figure than a female to the translators and adapters in the Alfonsine scriptoria. In contrast, in the biblia romanceada E6, the feminine personification of Wisdom is unconditionally rejected, and Solomon’s Hokmah or Sapientia is always translated with the masculine noun saber.15 Thus, as in the General estoria, the preaching figure from Proverbs 1:20 is rendered male. However, in E6, even the erotic and nuptial metaphors are rendered by masculine personification. Consequently, in E6’s Proverbios and Sapiencia, the preference for saber requires additional gender changes: Mio fijo. . .Guarda los mios mandamientos e viviras e la mi ley assi como la niniella del to oio ata la en tos dedos e escrivi la en las tablas de to coraçon. di al saber mi ermano eres e llama a sciencia tu amiga. (Proverbios VII, 3rb, emphasis added)16 My son. . .Keep my commandments and you will live, and [keep] my law like the apple of your eye, tie it to your fingers and write it on the tablets of your heart. Say to wisdom, you are my brother. And call knowledge your

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friend, that she may keep you from the strange woman who makes her words sweet.

The preference for the non-Latinate and masculine noun motivates the change from sister to brother. Consequently, the original erotic connotations of the biblical bridal title “sister” are shifted to the somewhat ambiguous Castilian term “amiga” and away from the figure of Wisdom. When this nuptial metaphor intensifies and is presented in greater detail in Wisdom 8, so does the nature of the intimacy between the sage and Wisdom. Whereas the General estoria translates the feminine personification, the E6’s Solomon, however, describes a homosocial marital relationship with Wisdom: Este ame e demandit desde mi ninnez, e quis le auer en logar de esposa, e so amador de su forma. . .entrando en mi casa folgare enella, ca no a amargura la morança della, ni enoio, mas alegria e gozo, cuedando e pensando en mio coraçon que saber no es mortal en pensamiento, e que en su amiztat a deleytamiento bono. (Sapiencia VIII, 21va, emphasis added) I loved and sought him out from my youth and wanted to have him in place of a wife, and I am a lover of his form. . .entering in my house, I will find rest in it, for there is no bitterness living in it, nor anger, but rather happiness and joy, believing and thinking in my heart that Wisdom is not mortal in thought and that in his friendship there is good delight.

Here, in order to maintain the masculinity of Wisdom and the basic structure of the text without creating a metaphor presenting an overtly homosexual relationship between Solomon and Wisdom, the translator has specified that he wanted Wisdom “in the place of ” or “in lieu of ” a wife, and, as in E6’s version of Proverbios, the preference for male Wisdom requires additional changes. Moreover, the Latin phrase that reads “with her” is translated “enella,” so that the feminine pronoun comes to refer to casa in the Castilian text rather than to Wisdom as in the Vulgate.17 Translation, Exegesis, and Gloss The dismantling of the familiar personification allegory from biblical narrative in the thirteenth-century Libros de Salomón indicates a particular interpretive stance toward biblical wisdom literature and reveals a troubled facet of medieval readers’ and writers’ reception of feminine images of wisdom. The translators of both E6 and the General estoria translated the biblical Books of Solomon in contravention of Jerome’s

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famous mandate that, while most translations should be made “sense for sense,” translations of the Bible must preserve both the words and their original order because “even the order of the words is a mystery.”18 While some medieval Castilian translators did indeed produce word-for-word translations of passages in the books of Proverbs and Wisdom, those who prepared the Alfonsine versions and E6 created new images of wisdom that they perhaps felt would be more pleasing—or even more orthodox— for their intended audiences. The liberties taken with Wisdom in the General estoria, while surprising, do not seem as shocking as they do in E6, which was created as a vernacular Bible rather than as a work of secular wisdom literature or historiography.19 From the outset of the third part of the General estoria, Alfonso claims his authority to adapt his Solomonic source material as he sees fit. The prologue to the third part explains that it will relate the “fourth age” of the world, from the reign of King David to the period of the Babylonian captivity, and subsequently refers to the inclusion and order of the Books of Solomon in the chronicle (GE3 15).20 While the prologue does not explain the wholesale interpolation of the biblical wisdom books in the General estoria, given the overall importance of the transmission and acquisition of wisdom in Alfonsine historiography and Alfonso’s own particular affinity for Solomon, it does not seem surprising.21 It is possible, however, that the inclusion of the Books of Solomon ref lects the clear editorial decisions made after Alfonso’s death in order to appeal to the tastes of the history’s intended audiences.22 Whatever the inspiration, their inclusion ref lects both the thirteenth-century exegetical currents that highlighted the political and practical applications of the biblical wisdom texts and the clear editorial desire to interweave historiography and sapiential literature. In the Vulgate Bible the ordering of the Books of Solomon ref lects a spiritual and sapiential ascendance. According to patristic interpretations, Proverbs, a text for “beginners,” is followed by Ecclesiastes, which exhorts audiences to despise the things of this world. The next book, the Song of Songs, appeals to initiates ready to understand its mystical and allegorical meditations on the love of God.23 In contrast to the patristic reading of the Books of Solomon as an intellectual and spiritual journey to wisdom, Alfonso’s translations pattern the reading on the physical and psychological chronology of biography. The General estoria rearranges the books in a supposedly chronological order: Song of Songs, Proverbs, Wisdom, and Ecclesiastes. In this scheme, the Song of Songs ref lects Solomon’s youth and marriage, Proverbs and Wisdom, his reign as a wise monarch, and Ecclesiastes, the skepticism of old age. The Alfonsine narrator explains that he has reordered the Libros de Salomón “according to

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what we think is appropriate” and to “good ordering” (14). The prologue thus insinuates that the Alfonsine readers and translators were, in a sense, better readers of the Books of Solomon than the patristic tradition as a whole; the General estoria claims it provides an improved, historically accurate rendering of Solomon’s life, words, and deeds. Translation is commentary. Such commentary, as Rita Copeland observes, “does not simply ‘serve’ its ‘master’ texts: it also rewrites and supplants them.” In this way, she continues, “vernacular writing can authorize itself by taking over the function of academic discourse.”24 And indeed, throughout the General estoria, Alfonso authorizes his universal history through the appropriation of canonical, exegetical, and classical discourse. While translation, in Lloyd Kasten’s words, was one way for Alfonso to “stick to authority,” the translations, paraphrases, and adaptations of the multiple canonical authorities used as sources in Alfonsine historiography also transformed inherited authorities in order to support the Castilian king’s own authority and aspirations.25 In such textual transformations, Charles Fraker notes, the Alfonsine translators added many a “new small element” that could “carry the text to regions undreamed of by the first author.”26 Whoever the “first author” of the biblical metaphor might have been, the Castilian translators carried his or her “Lady” Wisdom off into a new allegorical realm. Margherita Morreale considers the Alfonsine Libros de Salomón and E6 in two articles that contribute to her many philological investigations of the biblias romanceadas. As she explains, it would seem only natural for the translators to have chosen sapiençia, the Castilian term closest to the Latin sapientia, but, as Morreale observes, the biblias do not bear out this expectation. As Castilian developed in the Middle Ages, the Latinate term sapiençia gradually fell out of use, first in favor of saber, a term dating from the very beginnings of the vernacular, and, finally, in favor of sabiduría, a later addition that became firmly implanted in romance vocabulary in the thirteenth century and that eventually became the dominant term. Morreale concludes that, while it would be logical to find that thirteenthcentury usage reserved sabiduría to refer to divine wisdom and saber to refer to human wisdom, no such clear semantic division is present in the biblias romanceadas.27 Comparing the two Castilian versions of the Books of Solomon that use saber, Morreale finds the General estoria’s translations more “awkward due to their servility” to the master-text, revealed by the intermittent use of sapiençia as an equivalent for sapientia.28 She sees the translators’ decision not to use the feminine noun sapiençia in E6 as their rejection of overly erudite language. Although she concedes that readers familiar with the Latin, Greek, and Hebrew versions would undoubtedly

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have noted that the exclusive preference for saber in E6 causes various “disturbances” in the text, Morreale argues that the use of saber is proof of E6’s respect for the receptor language of Castilian romance and that the translators’ usage of “en logar de esposa” to translate “quaesivi sponsam mihi eam adsumere” [I sought to take her as my bride] is evidence of their dexterity.29 E6’s linguistic consistency does indeed make it a less servile translation of the original, but its insistence upon using the masculine saber sets up a rigid grammatical imperative that shapes all of the wisdom metaphors. Even though, as Morreale argues, the translators’ usage norms strongly advocated saber, at some points in the text the preferred term simply did not work without introducing significant textual alterations. Notwithstanding the supposed rejection of a lofty, Latinate term, it seems clear that the translators of E6 also rejected the gender of the Latin noun sapientia and the nature of the intimate relationship between “Lady” Wisdom and the sage. Their interpretation—which caused the translators to describe the ideal relationship as one where Wisdom lives with Solomon “in lieu of a wife” and, in Proverbios, to exhort, “Say to Wisdom, ‘You are my brother,’ ”—also radically alters the canonical extended personification allegory. The translators were clearly aware of the gendered personification allegory at work in these passages. “Sir” Wisdom, Saber, cannot be called “my sister” and cannot be taken and enjoyed as a wife because “he” is most definitely masculine. Augustine’s encomium of Wisdom as a female lover whose embrace could fortify homosocial relations between sages undoubtedly draws upon Solomon’s declaration that he loved Wisdom and wished to live with her instead of with a wife. However, the metaphor of homosocial intimacy in wisdom in E6 has a different sort of Augustinian ring. Augustine wrote in The Literal Meaning of Genesis that another man would have been a more logical partner for Adam in paradise: “How much more agreeably could two male friends, rather than a man and a woman, enjoy companionship and conversation in a life shared together.”30 For the translators of E6, keeping Wisdom “between men” in the sense that Augustine imagined in his Soliloquies does not seem to have been enough. For the translatio to be wholly homosocial, Wisdom must be a man, not just a woman shared between sages. The transgendered translations also seem to ref lect what GonzálezCasanovas has called the thirteenth century’s “dogmatic vision of the Christian Church and society based on domination by celibate males and control of ‘natural’ heterosexual desire in the sacrament of marriage,” where images of intimate relationships between men and Christ come to the fore in theological writings, as do similar intimate

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homophilic relations between knights in chivalric discourse. For example, Bernard of Clairvaux’s sermons on the Song of Songs and the Llibre d’Amic e d’Amat, by Alfonso’s contemporary Ramón Llull, are emblematic of the homophilic and often homoerotic readings of the relationship between Christ and the soul of the devout Christian man. As GonzálezCasanovas suggests, due to the conf luence of Platonic and Augustinian ideals, which were also inf luenced by Sufism in the case of Llull, “Such a paradigm. . .of falling in love with divine truth and beauty in a personal relationship of transcendent intimacy would have been widely diffused along the religious and intellectual frontiers of Reconquest Iberia and the Mediterranean.”31 Christological exegesis on biblical wisdom literature suggests a further rationale for the intermittent gender switches in the General estoria and in the creation of “Sir” Wisdom the wife in E6. In Christian exegesis on Proverbs and on the Wisdom of Solomon, Wisdom is read as a type for Christ; thus, both are interpreted as the divine Word and as the mediating figure between God’s inscrutable wisdom and humanity.32 The Glossa ordinaria explains clearly: “Sapientia, id est Christus.” This interpretation is repeated in an anonymous Spanish gloss found in the fifteenth-century Biblia de Osuna: “la sabiduria la qual es fijo de dios” [Wisdom, which is the son of God] (BN MS 10232, 100rc). In this interpretation, feminine embodiment thus becomes the corteza [husk] that must be cast off in order to grasp the meollo [pith] of wisdom, the Word, Christ. This standard Christological reading of Wisdom explains the difference between grammatical and typological gender when it establishes the relationship between Wisdom and Christ. Wisdom, as a metaphor that joins not only wisdom to the feminine, but also the feminine sapiential noun to the male Christ, creates, in Charles Kannengiesser’s words, “a transvestite Lady Wisdom/Christ,” a “hybrid figure,” “as foreign to the Old Testament as she/he might be in the New.”33 In severing the rhetorical union between wisdom and the female body, patristic and Christological exegetical moves demonstrate that what allegory unites, allegoresis can sunder. Allegoresis allows for the suspension of the strict association of gendered terms with gendered figures, suggesting that ancient and medieval readers were very much aware of the divide between vehicle and tenor, the uneasy fit between the material shape—or letter—in the personification of Wisdom and the abstract concept—or spirit—that the metaphor seeks to make visible. A late twelfth-century sermon by Martín de León addresses the issue of Wisdom’s gender, meditating upon the tensions that arise between the rules of allegorical personification and Christian theology. Martín poses

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a rhetorical question based on the grammatical gender of the nouns in question: “Si Christus Dei Sapientia est, quare vocatur Filius et non filia?” [If Christ is God’s Wisdom, then why is he called son and not daughter?]. His following response indicates that, to his mind at least, the allegory works the way its divine author intended it to, and not according to the rules of grammar: “Ad quod nos respondemus, quod duabus ex causis Filius vocatur et non filia. Prima videlicet, quia honorabilius est nomen Filii, quam filiae. Secunda, quia non in persona filiae, sed in persona Filii dignatus est nasci de Virgine” [To which we respond, that there are two reasons why he is called son and not daughter. First, clearly, because the name of son confers more honor than that of daughter. Second, because it was not as a daughter, but as a son that he was worthy of being born of a virgin].34 The Libros de Salomón suggest that similar questions arose in the thirteenth-century Castilian scriptoria. Thirteenth-century translators working from the Vulgate would undoubtedly have been familiar with the Christological interpretation, and it is possible that the medieval Castilian translators sought to make a Christological reading more evident by making Wisdom male.35 Just as the translations facilitate the readers’ interpretive work by providing canonical texts in the vernacular, they also relieve readers of the task of making the interpretive leap from a feminine personification to the male figure of Christ. The audience thus needs neither Latin nor a welldeveloped understanding of allegory in order to receive Wisdom in its “correct,” masculine form. The General estoria and E6 gloss Wisdom by embedding a gender switch in their texts, while their homosocial imagery circulated without the marginal and interlineal glosses that fill the folia of medieval biblical manuscripts in Latin.36 The intermittent disappearance of “Lady” Wisdom in the General estoria thus eases the interpretive task of the reader somewhat, although some transgendering allegorical interpretation is still required to maintain the masculinity of Christian Wisdom. In E6, on the other hand, all gender reassignment is completed by the time the vernacular audience interacts with the text. Indeed, it seems that E6’s romanceadores wanted to prevent any possibility of a literal association between wisdom and woman. Nevertheless, changing the gender of Wisdom in the Books of Solomon works a profound change on the canonical texts. A significant effect of these translations is the attenuation of the extended narrative allegory of “Lady” Wisdom in the Books of Solomon. In the General estoria, what had been a single allegorical mode, extending across the divide of the separate books, becomes a set of unattached and varied personifications of Wisdom. By retaining the feminine personification at some points, the

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General estoria’s translators and editors did not have to alter key passages where Wisdom appears and establishes her vital nuptial relationship to the would-be sage. In Proverbs 7 and Wisdom 8, for example, gender relations are central to the personification because Wisdom is portrayed as the preferred object of narratorial and readerly romantic desire. And, as an object of male desire, in a normatively heterosexual text concerned with the institution of marriage, the concept of wisdom is metonymically linked to the female body. Moreover, the nuptial metaphor is particularly apt for framing the overarching goal of wisdom literature itself: the mastery of wisdom in this world, which assures success both in this life and the next. The translators who produced E6, as observed above, chose another tack. Proverbs is structured around Wisdom and her human foils, the Strange Woman and the Woman of Worth, and privileges the relationships that each of these figures has with the primary narrator and the young man he advises. Not only is the erotic relationship between Wisdom and man an important facet of biblical wisdom literature, but also the significance of this relationship is both compounded and troubled by the close textual proximity of the dangerous Strange Woman, who is found in the same places as Wisdom—in the streets, squares, and gates—and who uses similar rhetorical appeals to young and foolish men in order to seduce and defile rather than to protect and enlighten. In the biblias romanceadas, the Strange Woman (issa zara in the Hebrew Bible and aliena in the Vulgate) is consistently translated as the muger agena, a foreign woman or the woman/wife of another man. The Woman of Worth (eset hayil and mulier fortis) generated more variations: muger fuerte [strong woman/wife], muger de pro [worthy woman/wife], and muger virtuosa [virtuous woman/wife]. While the translators’ choices for rendering the Woman of Worth into Castilian certainly reveal varied ideas of what a good wife should be, the gender of the Strange Woman and the Woman of Worth is never problematic, no doubt because their activities at the literal level of the narrative are perfectly in keeping with thirteenth-century expectations for both prescribed and proscribed feminine behavior. In both the Glossa ordinaria and the Spanish gloss, the Strange Woman is read as the sign for all heretics, who also take recourse to verbal deception: Asy como la mala muger busca dulçura de palabra & la fermosura del cuerpo para engañar alos mesquinos asy los hereges buscan engaños & arterias para engañar alos sinples & los lieuen & trestornen consigo al Infierno ca el que es lançado una begada delante del acatamiento de dios quiere traher los otros consygo ala muerte. (Biblia de Osuna 100rc)

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Just as the bad woman seeks sweet words and bodily beauty to trick the unfortunate, so do heretics seek tricks and wiles to trick simpleminded men and lead them and turn them with them to Hell, because he who is thrown once before the judgment of God wants to drag all others with him to death.

In E6, any possible similarity or confusion between the dangerous commerce of the Strange Woman and the life-giving intimacy of Wisdom is erased, while a homophilic intimacy in wisdom—with an undoubtedly unintentional homosexual resonance—is established. An additional effect of E6 is that Solomon’s relationship with male Wisdom is wholly unlike his legendary affair with many mugeres agenas, detailed in Kings. Wisdom’s invitations and preaching are thus transgendered away from the dangerous world of heterosexual relationships that may provoke the wrath of God, and into the close-knit circle of king, advisor, and Christ as male beloved that leads to success in this life and guaranteed paradise in the next. Moreover, the passages about the Strange Woman may have been particularly charged in the context of thirteenth-century Iberia. Proverbs warned its original Israelite audience about the dangers of consorting with non-Israelite, heterodox, “strange” women. The Alfonsine translations of Proverbs and the other sapiential books respond to a similar anxiety about biological and spiritual miscegenation in medieval Iberia, where Christians, Muslims, and Jews often shared the same language and some of the same urban spaces. Indeed, in the context of the General estoria and E6, the warnings against consorting with the muger agena, who, in the Christian exegesis of Proverbs, is read as a figure for heretics and heresies, can be read as a counterpart to the strict laws set out in the Siete Partidas forbidding Christian women to have sexual relations with Muslim and Jewish men.37 The associations between Wisdom and the Woman of Worth, whose practical wisdom and skills make her a domesticated and earthly version of Wisdom, are also weakened in the General estoria and erased in E6. Rather than praising two formidable female figures linked by textual proximity, gender, productivity, and savoir-faire, these versions of the Proverbios isolate the Woman of Worth, thus stressing her rarity. The proverbial good wife receives exegetical interpretation that renders her a figure for the Church: “La muger es la sancta eglesia el preçio de la qual es lexos por quanto mucho espaçio de tiempo fue entre salamon & la encarnación” [The wife is the holy Church, the worth of which is as great as the space in time between Solomon and the Incarnation] (Biblia de Osuna 105rc).

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The reproduction of the wisdom books reasserts the primacy of biblical authority in the General estoria, but their translation into the Castilian vernacular and their editorial reordering also creates a commentary, revealing the Alfonsine attitude that the Bible was an adaptable and perhaps even replaceable text. In the General estoria and the biblia romanceada known as E6, which was perhaps produced as support material for the universal history, the Castilian translators created new, noncanonical personification allegories in their Libros de Salomón. In both versions of the Books of Solomon, it seems that the translators and editors found that vernacular prose was not conducive to mystical meditations on the sage’s love and pursuit of “Lady” Wisdom. The new romance allegories featuring “Sir” Wisdom that these translations create ref lect a concern for the kinds of corporeal images that are associated with Solomon’s wisdom and his imagined relationship with Wisdom. The thirteenth-century Libros de Salomón indicate that the feminine figure of Wisdom was disconcerting to the readers, translators, and editors who wished to provide biblical texts to vernacular audiences. While it is possible that, unlike modern readers and critics who are highly sensitized to gender issues, they did not see how strongly gender is embedded in the overall conception of wisdom literature; I would argue that they did in fact notice and attend to gender in their translations. Precisely for this reason, they partially and/or completely transgendered Wisdom. In effect, the translators deconstructed Wisdom personified; they read against the grain of the canonical feminine imagery they had inherited from the Bible and with the grain of patristic commentary. The feminine gender of Wisdom had to be interpreted away, as in the Glossa ordinaria and the commentary of Martín de León, in order to provide a masculinized image of Wisdom comprehensible even to literal-minded readers. These revisions of the personification suggest that, although these thirteenth-century Castilian readers did engage with the image of “Lady” Wisdom, they did not do so in the positive, enamored manner imagined by feminist theologians such as Claudia Camp. They were, rather, resisting readers. Rather than a demonstration of the translators’ respect for the Castilian vernacular, the changes in Wisdom’s gender appear to demonstrate the translators’ respect for the receptor culture. The metaphorical identification of women and wives with Wisdom is simply incongruous in the context of homosocial, vernacular wisdom literature, as well as in the Alfonsine concept of translatio, where the king himself—as the image of Wisdom incarnate—mediates between his audience and knowledge. In the absence of grammatical necessity, the romanceadores purposefully recreated the personification of Wisdom in order to make grammatical and

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social gender consonant. Preaching and translatio studii remain thoroughly homosocial activities, and Wisdom’s form resembles that of wise kings rather than the feminine shape of their consorts. In these thirteenthcentury contexts of the General estoria and E6, “Lady” Wisdom, like all women, is potentially agena, a contaminating presence that threatens to unhinge the homosocial order of sages.

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CHAPTER 3 FIGURES OF MATTER AND FORM: FEMININE PERSONIFICATION AND EPISTEMOLOGY IN THE VISIÓN DELEYTABLE

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n Juan de Mena’s Laberinto de Fortuna, Providence promises to show the dreamer-poet “algo de aquello que puede / ser apalpado de humano intelecto,” [something of that which can be touched by the human intellect].1 Her promise is the very promise of allegory, which offers seemingly tangible figures to the mind’s eye, figures that, as the dreamerpoet finds when he tries to embrace his divine guide at the close of the Laberinto, cannot actually be touched by human hands because they exist on a wholly intellectual, metaphorical, and spiritual plane. However, the narrator’s desire to embrace Providencia suggests the potential for confusion between the embodiments of personification allegory and the female bodies they resemble. The dreamer-poet wakes from the labyrinth with his arms wrapped around his own shoulders, his lovely guide having vanished from sight. Her disappearance signals his exit from the visionary’s intellective experience and reentry into the sublunary sensorial world. Other than this revealing conceit at the end of Mena’s visionary journey, the Laberinto does not delve into its own allegorical constructs. In contrast, the tension between the bodies of knowledge that feminine personifications transmit and the physical bodies represented in personification comes to the fore in Alfonso de la Torre’s Visión deleytable. The Visión was avidly read in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, circulated widely in manuscript and print in Spain and abroad, and was almost as inf luential as its contemporary the Laberinto de Fortuna.2 Critical studies of the Visión have tended to treat the literal level of the text as a decorative and derivative ornament that contributes little more than an entertaining surface and mnemonic organizational device to the work as a whole.3

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My intention here is to scrutinize the often undervalued literal level of the Visión in order to analyze Alfonso de la Torre’s use of personification allegory as a didactic vehicle. Indeed, my reading of the Visión values the literal level as a “complex phenomenon” in itself that is as important as the figurative level; it is, as Morton Bloomfield cogently observes, “the skin” that gives a work its shape, continuity, and “acts as the corrective force to misinterpretation.”4 Not only do allegorical narratives encourage readers to gloss, to read “vertically” in order to arrive at a presumably higher meaning, they also carry readers through a “horizontal” reading of the plots that form their “skin.” Reading, as Quilligan rightly asserts, proceeds linearly and allegory itself “often institutionalizes this fact by the journey or quest form of the plot, journeys which are, furthermore, extremely episodic in nature.”5 The Visión’s paradoxical admixture of somatophobia and metaphorical embodiment, as well as its many meditations on the limitations of the material body, motivated early readers to produce various responses to its literal narrative, ranging from Scholastic gloss and imitation to marginalia and parody. I will conclude my scrutiny of the Visión’s “skin” by exploring late-medieval responses to the Visión in manuscript illustration and in a parody of the treatise that appeared in the second edition of Hernán Castillo’s Cancionero general and in the Cancionero de obras de burlas y provocantes a la risa. These readerly responses indicate that while feminine personifications are certainly good to think with, they can be difficult to see and think through. At first sight—or reading—the bodies of personification that abound in the Visión may seem to be transparent vehicles for the work’s philosophical content, outlines with human aspect, incidental to the subject matter that they teach. However, like other personifications, they are never fully divested of the material meanings of their gendered bodies. Although little is known about the historical Alfonso de la Torre, or El Bachiller de la Torre, who is thought to have been a student of theology at Salamanca with close ties to the court of Navarre, his treatise was widely read throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In many ways, this extensive philosophical and theological cento—with its allegorical journey to wisdom, lengthy discussions of each part of the trivium and quadrivium, review of Aristotelian epistemology and metaphysics, and mystical catechistic conclusion—demonstrates the distance between late-medieval and modern literary tastes. Inventories of medieval libraries suggest that the Visión was often read by nobles of an intellectual bent as well as by educated nonnobles: in addition to its original dedication to Juan de Beaumonte (personal tutor to Carlos de Viana, prince of Navarre), the Visión appears in the inventories of both Gómez Manrique

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and Fernando de Rojas, and Lope de Vega turned to the Visión as a source for his personifications in the Arcadia, suggesting that the treatise figured prominently in late-medieval literary culture and beyond. The Visión—ironically—offers itself as a “brief compendium” of the sciences that will explain not only the purpose and the “delectation in every discipline,” but also the “final purpose of man,” which Alfonso de la Torre identifies as la bienaventurança, a state of happiness and blessedness that can be attained only through rigorous study and purification (VD, 3).6 The Visión’s hero, el Entendimiento—Understanding or Intellect—travels from the dark confusion of the sublunary world to a paradisiacal realm of clarity, learning the arts of the trivium and quadrivium, each personified as a stately maiden, as the journey progresses. When he reaches the summit, el Entendimiento receives further instruction in metaphysics, ethics, and theology, delivered by the feminine personifications of Reason, Nature, Wisdom, and, finally, Truth. El Entendimiento’s education, first in the care of la Gramática and the other Liberal Arts and then under the tutelage of Reason and her sisters, dramatizes the human soul’s ideal intellectual progression to wisdom and truth, the ultimate goals of philosophers and theologians. The Visión models its narrative structure on Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy and Alan of Lille’s Anticlaudianus and derives its content from Maimonidean and Scholastic Aristotelianism. This interweaving of narrative and theological sources highlights the engagement of personification with philosophical and ontological questions of embodiment, memory, and cognition.7 El Entendimiento personifies the Aristotelian “active intellect” or “agent intellect,” considered humanity’s most perfect element, that which sets it apart from nonrational beings. In Aristotelian epistemology, the agent intellect mediates between the soul and the body, translating sense perception into images comprehensible to the soul. The soul depends upon the body to channel its perceptions of the outside world, and the body depends upon the soul to make sense of the perceptions it receives. The intellect’s mediating role is literalized throughout Alfonso de la Torre’s heuristic vision, and his multiple personifications dramatize the Aristotelian concept that all intellectual knowledge originates with the senses and the creation of phantasms perceptible to the soul. Alfonso de la Torre thus creates a theater of memory that not only organizes philosophical content but also mirrors the process of knowledge acquisition. The learning hero el Entendimiento also models the interpretive process and the response of the Visión’s ideal reader, who is eager to follow the text’s lessons and reads apace with el Entendimiento’s epistemological and theological adventures.

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In its Aristotelianism, the Visión accepts the importance of sense perceptions for knowledge, thus troubling the Platonic mind-body split, but it also teaches the radical division between mind and body, explicitly aligning matter, carnality, and femininity. Alfonso de la Torre’s feminine personifications teach both Platonic somatophobia and Aristotelian “carnal knowing” while they interact as feminine figures of authority with the Visión’s hero. The work’s organizing metaphors of vision and embodiment constantly point to the mutual imbrication of physical and intellectual sight and the epistemological necessity of the carnal body that perceives. However, the Visión’s constant literalization of knowledge acquisition and intellective pleasure also simultaneously works to clarify and collapse the distinction between matter and spirit. To further complicate matters, Alfonso de la Torre’s allegorical maidens also discuss the nature of allegory itself and often deliver their lessons in the form of metaphors built upon the female body, sexual intercourse, and the processes of generation, pregnancy, and nurturing. The Visión’s metaphorical-epistemological dependence on feminine personifications clashes with its profound distaste for the body, pointing to the inherent “violence” of allegory, which forces the union of distinct concepts and entities, thus always placing the two “others” it joins in hierarchical relationships.8 In its abundant use of feminine embodiments that explain the workings of matter and form using carnal and corporeal metaphors, the Visión provides a distinctive demonstration of the medieval didactic use of Woman as a philosophical trope. Moreover, Alfonso de la Torre’s personifications point el Entendimiento and the reader toward the transcendental world of forms while continually reminding them of the contingent world of matter. This contrast not only highlights the incongruity of grammatical gender and gendered philosophy, it also creates an unintentional irony in the treatise, which some of the Visión’s early readers clearly enjoyed and exploited. Vision, Intellection, and Interpretation The host of allegorical maidens who instruct el Entendimiento address metaphysical and epistemological questions about human existence and intelligence in the fallen world. A central element of their teaching, which paves the way for el Entendimiento’s final lessons in theology, concerns the fundamental and interrelated philosophical distinctions between form and matter, soul and body, and intellective and sensory perceptions. These distinctions are essential in order for el Entendimiento to learn the “final purpose of man,” which will be revealed as the particular delectation of the purified soul when it apprehends God.

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The Visión begins with a conventional metaliterary maneuver that underlines the central distinction in visionary and mystical discourses between physical sensory experience and the representation of such experiences in the mind’s eye. Alfonso de la Torre describes how he falls into the state of dorveille, the visionary’s state of psychic reduction, which, as Paxson notes, is so often found “in the proximity of personification fabulation.”9 In this state, the dreamer’s senses are deadened and yet he sees clearly (VD, 105). The dreamer-narrator sees el Entendimiento, a fiery form the shape and size of a small boy, who sets off into the realm of the Liberal Arts, where Grammar and her sisters teach lessons that set up a dynamic between the content and shape of the teachings el Entendimiento will receive throughout the rest of the Visión. His tutelage under the Liberal Arts is essential to the intellectual and spiritual progress of the visionary hero, but it also introduces readers to the fundamental irony of reading a somatophobic text, charged with anxiety about female bodies, through figures of feminine embodiment. El Entendimiento first ascends to la Gramática: Una asaz honesta donzella, en la mano derecha de la qual estava un týtulo escrito de letras latynas las quales dezían en esta manera: “Vox literata e articulata debito modo pronunciata”; e en la siniestra mano tenía una palmatoria con açotes. E era una cosa maravillosa e muy admirable que, seyendo virgen, le proçedían de los pechos dos fuentes de muy dulçíf lua leche, la qual leche era en refecçión e nudrimiento de aquellos que aún no avían conseguido natividad e produçión de los dientes. (VD, 107–108). A very honest maiden in whose right hand was a standard in Latin that said the following: “an utterance which may be written down and pronounced in the correct manner”; and in her right hand she held a scourge. And it was a marvelous and wondrous thing that, she being a virgin, two streams of the sweetest milk f lowed from her breasts, milk that was refection and nourishment for those who as yet had no teeth.

Grammar breastfeeds the f ledgling el Entendimiento, giving him her “más provechosos que delectables nudrimyentos” [more beneficial than delectable nourishment]. Grammar’s lactation is a literary and pictorial convention. However, it also suggests that the vehicles of personification allegory deserve a second look. The virginal maternity of the first fully discursive feminine personification in the Visión also immediately troubles the union between particulars and universals that allegory endeavors to effect. Even though la Gramática and her student are both personifications whose abstract referents are clear, a feminine personification that breastfeeds serves as a

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reminder of the materiality and maternity associated with specifically female biology. La Gramática is thus not just a vehicle lending her shape to an abstract body of knowledge; she has something inside that recollects the ontological status of the particular kind of matter that has been conscripted via allegory to represent a universal idea. The relationship Alfonso de la Torre allegorically paints between Grammar and her student is highly physical and charged with sensorial information. There is a sense of physical immediacy conveyed by this embodiment, which appears to function simultaneously as a sublunary woman and a suprasensible goddess. Her productive body and the intellect’s enjoyment of its milk recalls, and perhaps even suggests, the stirring of the author figure’s sensorial faculties, deadened and then abandoned in the first scene of the vision. On his tour through the commonplace personifications of the Liberal Arts, el Entendimiento sees, hears, touches, and even tastes their teachings; the plot continually literalizes the intellect’s translation of sensory perceptions into knowledge of abstractions. In Alfonso de la Torre’s model for the Liberal Arts, Alan of Lille’s Anticlaudianus, Grammar holds a file for cleaning teeth in one hand to represent how she corrects errors and a scourge for disciplining recalcitrant students in the other. Alan was clearly alert to the intersections of gender, sex, and grammar in personification allegory. With the species of gendersensitivity typical in the Anticlaudianus, Alan clarifies the combination of Grammar’s maternal breast milk and masculine whip: “Thus by blows she makes the milk more bitter, by the milk she makes the blows more mild. In one and the same action she is father and mother. By the blows she makes up for a father, by the milk she fills the rôle of mother.”10 Mary Carruthers reminds us that Grammar’s violent, physically punishing side reflects both the mnemonic “cultivation of anxiety-provoking images” and “the actual pervasive brutality of ancient and medieval elementary pedagogy” that was “necessary to impress memories upon the brain.”11 While Alfonso de la Torre does not treat his protagonist to a beating, but only to breastfeeding, Grammar instills anxiety concerning the susceptibility of men to concupiscence and sensual delectation. After el Entendimiento cuts his teeth and learns the rudiments of speech and reason, Grammar teaches him about his origins and about the Fall of man. In the process, she gives him a lesson about scriptural exegesis and allegory. God created Man as an excellent and rational creature, so that he might understand and love truth, but, she says, engañado por la muger o Sensualidat, ayuntadas la mançana, o Delectaçión, e la subjeçión e fallaçia del antyguo culebro, o Concupiçiençia, a las cosas contrarias e agenas de su natura fue deçendido de aquel huerto

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sagrado de paraýso, o Claridad e Perfeçión de entendimiento, e echado. (VD, 108–109) tricked by woman—or Sensuality—combined with the apple—or Delectation—and the subjection and lies of the ancient snake—or Concupiscence—and thus subjected to things contrary and alien to his nature, man was cast out of the sacred garden of paradise—or Clarity and Perfection of the understanding.

According to la Gramática, scripture is to be read allegorically, both figuratively and tropologically. Woman, apple, and snake represent sensuality, delectation, and concupiscence, the threefold impediment to human understanding. El Entendimiento must rise above these impediments in order to realize his intellectual potential. Grammar thus begins the Visión’s discourse on metaphysics and epistemology—two closely related, if not intertwined, subjects for medieval philosophers—by explaining how God created man to be an intellectual creature. Understanding and reason, she reminds el Entendimiento, are what definitively distinguish men from beasts. La Gramática concludes her interpretation of the Fall by instructing el Entendimiento about the different kinds of delectation, sensual and intellective. Since the Fall, she laments, man has all but lost sight of intellective delectation: E tanto ha seýdo la contynuaçión e usança del triste omne en las momentáneas e caducas delectaçiones sensybles, que se ha olvidado el fin para quien final mente fue fecho, e la perfecçión e honra en la qual fue criado, e quasy toda la gente es en este número, syno alguno a los quales Nuestro Señor quiere demostrar este camino. (VD, 109) And unfortunate man has so continued to depend upon f leeting and impermanent sensual delights that he has forgotten the purpose for which he was ultimately created, and the perfection and honor with which he was created, and almost all people are like this, except for the few to whom Our Lord wants to show this road.

Grammar’s review of epistemological and allegorical basics provides the philosophical foundation for the rest of the work. It also firmly puts the image of the female body in its place: it is the allegorical representative of sensuality that drives man to sensual delectation and concupiscence. Grammar’s interpretation of the Fall also clearly evokes the allegorical practice that provides a cornerstone of Maimonides’ project in the Guide of the Perplexed, another of Alfonso de la Torre’s models. Maimonides describes signified and signifier in allegory as “apples of gold in nets of silver” and structures his Guide around the interpretation of selected

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passages from the Hebrew Bible. Indeed, the Guide is all about allegory and allegoresis, about reading through the “silvery” surface of the words in scripture and prophecy in order to get to their “gold,” their higher meanings.12 This lesson on the allegorical interpretation of the Fall, in addition to its metaphysical and ethical content, serves as a preliminary caution to readers not to get caught up in the sensorial delightful surface of the Visión’s allegories, but to focus on the intellectively delectable higher meanings. Grammar’s reading of the Fall encourages el Entendimiento (and the reader) to think about the similarities and differences between the imagined bodies that serve as places in memory and the real, supposedly historical female bodies, such as Eve’s, that corrupt the intellect. Like Grammar, who nurtures as a mother and disciplines as a father, la Arismética, Arithmetic, is a doubly gendered feminine personification. Alfonso de la Torre highlights what was for him a conceptual difficulty in making mathematics female, even in allegorical discourse: Una sagaçísyma e muy profunda donzella de çiençia, de la qual, maguer los mienbros cubriese con hábito femenil, paresçía debaxo de aquél esconderse coraçón de muy penetrante e muy yngenioso varón. En la mano diestra tenía un garfio de fierro, e en la syniestra una tabla enblanqueçida; en somo de las vestiduras tenía unas letras griegas en las quales dezía “Par et inpar.” (VD, 129) A supremely wise and very profound maiden of science, who, although her members might be covered with feminine clothes, seemed to hide below them the heart of a penetrating and very ingenious man. In her right hand she held an iron hook and in the left a whitened tablet; on her clothes she had Greek letters reading “Even and Odd.”

This physical description of the personification recalls how, for Alan of Lille, Arithmetic is “A man by intelligence, a woman by sex, she surpasses a maiden in strength by a superabundance of power and by her skill. In one way a woman, in one way a man, in mental capacity she is not a ‘she’ but a ‘he.’ ”13 Alfonso de la Torre and his predecessors’ characterizations of their feminine personifications as partly masculine reveal an authorial strategy for negotiating the incongruity of associating such “manly” disciplines with the female form. However, just as the woman in the Garden of Eden signifies “la sensualidat,” la Gramática and the other personifications that el Entendimiento meets signify more than their names. Their physical outlines are vehicles for bodies of knowledge that will lead to enlightenment, but as feminine personifications, they are always also representations of the female body, visually and ontologically

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related to Woman, matter, sensuality, and desire, which caused the Fall of man; they are the “nets of silver” forming the major obstacles between man and his ultimate perfection. Figuras asaz palpables: Matter and Form After el Entendimiento’s intellectual initiation in the trivium and quadirivium, Alfonso de la Torre can begin to tackle the central questions of the treatise and lead his personified hero and reader to the mysteries of the Trinity. Now el Entendimiento can just glimpse la Verdad as she reigns over paradise attended by la Sabieza [Wisdom], la Naturaleza [Nature], and la Razón [Reason]. Under their instruction, the clash between the Visión’s feminine personifications and their philosophical and spiritual lessons becomes increasingly pronounced. Not only do they elaborate upon Grammar’s warnings about matter and sensuality, Wisdom, Nature, Reason, and Truth make use of extended metaphors and exempla that explicitly reaffirm the traditionally aligned philosophical categories opposing matter and form, body and soul, carnality and reason, and masculine and feminine. Their teachings remind us that in the world of the allegory, el Entendimiento sees with the interior eyes of the intelligence rather than with physical eyes. At the same time, el Entendimiento’s interactions with the personifications continue to emphasize the importance of sensory perceptions, implying the dependence of the mind upon the body. La Sabieza laments that ignorant men rely too heavily on their five senses and thus cannot imagine the existence of what they cannot see: “Como ellos non veen cosa la qual non tenga cuerpo piensan que non ay Dios, nin ángeles, nin puedan estar syn cuerpo.” [They cannot see anything [with their intellect] unless it has a body [and so they think] that neither God nor angels exist] (VD, 139). La Sabieza’s observation that fools need to see physically in order to believe, while perfectly consistent with the lessons of the Visión, is also a revealing statement for a personification to make. Indeed, with these words she implicitly comments upon her own status as a heuristic device: la Sabieza’s juxtaposition of physical and intellectual vision underlines the way that allegory in general and the Visión in particular imitate the former—phyiscal sight—in order to encourage the latter—intellective vision and understanding. La Razón continues in this line of reasoning when she outlines a negative epistemology in order to explain why it is so hard for humans to comprehend metaphysical truths. Above all, man’s “uso de las delectaçiones corporales, voluptuosas sensybles, ca éstas enbeven e anegan los sentidos, non solamente corporales mas aún espirituales e yntelectuales”

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[use of corporeal delectations, voluptuous and sensual, because these sap and drown the senses, not only the corporeal ones, but also the spiritual and intellectual senses] and “la yndispusyçión de la materia, la qual faze a las vezes los omnes no ser capaces de las çiençias” [the indisposition of matter, which sometimes makes men incapable of study] stand in the way of intellectual and spiritual progress (VD, 143–44). Despite these human limitations, la Razón and her sisters decide that el Entendimiento is worthy to continue his journey to wisdom, and they welcome him into the “huerto de la delectaçión” [the garden of delectation/ delight], which is none other than the Garden of Eden. In paradise, el Entendimiento will learn more about matter and form and about man’s place in the cosmos and, finally, move beyond reason to truth, literally passing from la Razón to la Verdad. Sensorial delight reigns in the huerto, where the first things the hero sees are the visages and physiques of la Verdad and la Razón. La Verdad is the first and more powerful of the two sisters and her dress is sumptuous beyond the capacities of human description, escaping even the eloquence el Entendimiento learned in the house of la Retórica during his ascent through the Liberal Arts. Furthermore, la Verdad’s figure precisely fits the limits of understanding and her words are self-evidently true to any reasonable hearer. The sight of la Verdad is in fact el Entendimiento’s first glimpse of la bienaventuranza, the ultimate delectation: Venía la Verdad vestida de una muy preçiosa vestidura e de mayor sumpto que los mortales estimar sabrían, tanta era la çertidunbre e credulidad que sus sentençias tenían que era ynposyble de negarlas ome razonable, tanto era el amorío e benivolençia que demostrava su gesto que asaz era bien aventurança mirar a ella en la cara. La estatura della en cantydad era limytada e propoçionada, segúnt la ygualdad e longura del entendimiento, las palabras suyas eran tan çiertas e tanta firmeza dexavan en el coraçón, que non quedava ninguna dubda nin temor de la contrariedad. En su mano diestra tenía un espejo de un muy claro diamante guarnido con multitud de perlas e piedras muy preçiosas, e en la syniestra tenía un muy conçertado e justo peso todo de oro fino syn mistura de otro metal. (VD, 147) Truth approached dressed in a very precious gown, a gown more sumptuous than mortals could imagine; such were the certainty and convincing nature of her sentences that it was impossible for a reasonable man to deny them; such were the love and benevolence that she demonstrated in her gestures that looking at her face was just like blessedness. Her height was limited and proportionate according to the eveness and extent of understanding, her words were so certain and left such surety in the heart that no doubt, fear, or contraries were left. In her right hand she carried a mirror made of a very lucid diamond, decorated with a multitude of pearls

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and precious stones, and in her left she carried a finely balanced scale of pure gold without any other metal mixed in it.

La Razón fittingly resembles her sister, but her robes are more ostentatious, and her eyes seem to be made of mirrors. Additionally, like Boethius’s Philosophy, la Razón’s stature is variable: “era una cosa muy maravillosa de la Razón, que a las vezes paresçía estar tan alta su cabeça como el çielo, a las vezes como las nuves, e otras vezes se ygualava con la cantidad de forma umana” [A very marvellous thing about Reason was that at times she seemed so tall that her head reached the sky, at times as high as the clouds, and at times she seemed the same size as a human form] (VD, 147).14 In his description of el Entendimiento’s experience of the two lofty sisters, Alfonso de la Torre plays upon the blinding power of the corporeal sensations that La Razón earlier vilified as an impediment to acquiring knowledge. Indeed, el Entendimiento takes such pleasure in looking at the two sisters, that he is struck “medio estúpido o pasmado” [half stupid or dumbfounded] (VD, 147). For relief, he turns to look at the huerto de delectaçión and finds other stupefying objects that dazzle all his senses: “era la calor tan tenplada que agradava e demulçía todos los sentidos” [the heat was so temperate that it pleased and softened all the senses]; the trees “eran tan frutíferos e tan odoríferos. . .que avía refecçión a amas las fuerças, yntelectiva e sensytyva” [were so fruitful and fragrant. . .that they nourished both faculties, the intellective and the sensible] (VD, 148–49). It is here, in the garden, where the intellect is most stimulated and most impressionable. The scene recalls la Gramática’s reading of the Fall, where the perfection of the intellect was forever impaired by sensuality. However, while the tree of knowledge stands in the center of the huerto, there is no mançana, mujer, or culebro in Alfonso de la Torre’s vision of the garden redeemed by Truth. El Entendimiento is invigorated by the delectations offered to his intellective senses and can continue on his journey. El Entendimiento at last enters the house of la Sabieza, who reviews the doubts about God’s existence and omnipotence and about divine providence that still plague the inexpert intellect. She presents twentysix Aristotelian principles, the “verdaderos ynfalibles” [infallible truths] from which other truths may be derived.15 Following Wisdom’s lessons, Alfonso de la Torre returns to his discourse on ways of seeing. El Entendimiento now sees with his intelligence: “De todo lo que avéys dicho me ha plazido muy mucho, tanto que nunca pensé tan clara mente ver aquesta materia de la providençia” [All you have told me has pleased me greatly, so much that I never thought I saw the subject of providence so clearly] (VD, 189, emphasis added). El Entendimiento still harbors some

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confusions about God’s relation to the world and human beings; he is yet to comprehend the workings of form and matter, a key element to explaining why God would allow evil to exist in his created world. Although he began to learn about matter and form during his education with the Artes Liberales, it is only in the garden that the subject is fully explored. La Sabieza uses a domestic analogy to illustrate the relationship between matter, good, and evil: Asý como quien consiente tener una muger fea sy pare un fijo cada año o es obidiente a su marido en quanto puede, mas algunas vezes sale de los términos de la obidiençia, como muger, e ensáñase una vez en el mes o en el año, en tanto que riñe con el marido, ha pelea con los siervos e las syervas de casa, e açota a sus fijos e otras tales desordenanças. Enpero, después que lo ha fecho se arrepiente e llora e demanda perdón al marido, e falaga los fijos e los servidores, e dales donativos e obedesçe a su marido todo el año syno aquel día que se ensaña; e en aquesto tiene otras virtudes, que es muy piadosa, muy devota e es muy casta, e es guardadora. E por el mucho provecho que della se sigue en respecto del poco daño, el marido se tiene por muy contento. . . .Esta muger es la materia en la qual por virtud de la ynteligençia e de la naturaleza se engendran todas las cosas que son. (VD, 191) Just as he who consents to have an ugly wife if she gives birth to a son evey year or is obedient to her husband insofar as she is capable, but one who nevertheless sometimes strays from the limits of obedience—like a woman—and gets angry once a month or once a year, in such a way that she scolds her husband, fights with the servants of the house, and hits her children, and does other disorderly things. Nevertheless, afterward, she regrets what she has done and cries and asks her husband’s forgiveness, f latters the servants and gives them gifts, obeys her husband all year except for that day that she gets angry, and has other virtues as well, she’s very pious, devout, and very chaste, and watchful. And for the great benefit that comes from her relative to the small harm, the husband considers himself quite content. . . .This woman is matter in which, by virtue of intelligence and nature, all things that exist are engendered.

La Sabieza’s analogy clearly echoes the Platonic and Aristotelian alignment of matter with the feminine and of spirit with the masculine. Matter, represented here by the wife in a productive but somewhat trying marriage, is not all bad and also produces “mucho provecho” in the form of the children born each year in the parable. She—la materia—provides the material for God’s intelligence and nature to shape the world. The wife’s occasional rages represent the presence and source of evil in the world and its root in matter.

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El Entendimiento then asks how matter can be made by God, since it seems to recycle itself from one thing to another. Once again, in la Sabieza’s explanation, the female body, its relationship to matter, and its role in creation provide the narrative for an example that will make God’s relationship to matter comprehensible. It is a rather amusing story, quoted almost verbatim from Maimonides’ Guide, about the counterintuitive processes of human generation: Un omne yva con su muger preñada por la mar en una barca e aportaron a una ysla onde avía frutas e ganado ovejuno e buenas aguas, e vieron que era buena tierra para morar e fincáronse alli. Conteçió que la muger murió de parto, el padre crió el fijo con leche de ovejas, e crióse bien e cresçió e era muy engeñoso. Desque ovo veynte años él preguntó a su padre que ellos cómo se avían fecho e cómo eran criados o nasçidos. El padre le respondió: “Fijo, nós somos fijos de otro tal animal como nosotros, al qual dizen muger, e ella conçibió en tal e en tal manera, e andamos allí dentro del su vientre nueve meses enbueltos en una otra piel”. E dixo el mozo: “¿Qué comemos quando estamos allí o quién nos lo da?”. Dixo el padre: “Manténemonos de la sustançia de la madre a la qual estamos enxertos por el onbligo, como está el ramo en el árbol”. E dixo el niño: “Cómo fazemos la neçesydad?”. Dixo el padre: “Non atraemos de aquella sustançia más de quanto gastamos en el nudrimiento e non finca superf luydad”. E dixo el fijo: “¿Por dó alentamos?”. E dixo el padre: “Non lo avemos menester”. Dixo el fijo: “Maravíllome, padre, de vós, que no avéys vergüença de creer tales locuras como éstas, que vemos que sy un omne no comiese por la boca morirse ýa de fambre e sy no resollásemos luego nos moriríamos en media ora e menos, e vós dezís que estamos nueve meses syn alentar, e aquesto es escarnio. Yten, dezís que un omne puede estar nueve meses syn fazer su neçesydad, e vemos que en diez días rebentaría un omne, e aquesto es trufa”. Enpero el padre verdad dezía. (VD, 196–97) A man was traveling by sea in a boat with his pregnant wife and they landed on an island where there were fruits, f locks of sheep, and good water, and they saw that it was a good place to settle and they stayed there. It happened that the wife died giving birth, the father raised his son with sheep’s milk, and he was brought up well and grew to be very smart. When he was twenty years old he asked his father how they had been formed and brought up or born. And the father responded: “Son, we are children of another animal like us, called woman, and she conceives in such and such a way, and we grow inside her womb for nine months wrapped in another skin.” And the young man said: “What do we eat when we are there and who gives it to us?” The father said: “We live on the mother’s sustenance, which we take through our navel, like the limb on a tree.” And the boy said: “How do we relieve ourselves?” The father said: “We do not take more of that sustenance than we need for nourishment and there is no

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superf luity.” And the son said: “How do we breathe?” And the father said: “We do not need to.” The son said: “I am amazed, father, that you are not ashamed to believe such crazy things, for we see that if a man does not eat with his mouth he soon dies of hunger and if we did not breathe for even half an hour or less we would die, and you say that we spend nine months without breathing, and that is scurrilous. What is more, you say that a man can go for nine months without relieving himself, and we see that in ten days he would burst, and all you have said is nonsense.” But the father was telling the truth.

This humorous exemplum teaches that seeing is not necessarily believing when it comes to metaphysics: matter, formed and informed by divine intelligence, works in strange ways that cannot be derived from mere ocular observation. God, la Sabieza continues, created matter in this way because he understands that the relationship between matter and form should work in this way; evil exists because matter is not form and matter would not be matter if it were not susceptible to change and error. Following Wisdom’s exempla about matter and form, Alfonso de la Torre’s la Naturaleza—a familiar allegorical figure who shapes matter in the sublunary world—appears surrounded by the ancient sages whose knowledge can be assimilated into the Visión’s theology. La Naturaleza has a curious deformity that is reminiscent of the masculine traits of some of the Artes Liberales: E la dueña era antygua e tenía la cara muy sagaz. E tenía en la una mano una vara e en la otra una masa de tierra. E tenía de la çinta en suso una vestidura de púrpura blanca e algunas gotas coloradas en ella, e la falda de la vestidura era toda de velludo de velo, e muy negro. E tenía esta dueña una diformidad, que avía las piernas vellosas de los ynojos ayuso, asý como oso. Enpero ella era muy prudente e muy sabia. (VD, 211) And the lady was very old and had a very wise face. And she had in one hand a staff and in another a clump of earth. And from the waist up she wore a vestment of purple and white cloth with some colored spots in it, and the skirt of her gown was all velvet and deepest black. And this lady had a deformity: she had legs that were as hairy as a bear’s from the knees down. But she was very prudent and wise.

Unlike Alan of Lille’s Nature, who complains of men’s contempt for her laws of procreation and wears a torn gown signifying the errant ways of men, la Naturaleza complains to el Entendimiento only that she is the most hateful of all the sisters because she has been misunderstood to be evidence of the eternity of the world, rather than of God’s creativity and thus of his omnipotence.

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La Naturaleza’s central role in the Visión is to teach the metaphor of man as microcosm. Like Wisdom before her, Nature allies matter with the feminine. As Plato and Aristotle elbow each other in the background, pleased with their superiority over the other ancient philosophers, la Naturaleza echoes the Aristotelian concept that matter desires form “as the female desires the male and the ugly the beautiful”: La verdad es que son tres prinçipios: la materia, la forma, la privaçión. E la materia nunca es su ofiçio syno partyrse de una forma e desnudarse e vestirse de otra. E la privación dale aquel apetito, la qual es una suziedad e ynpuridad, la qual se llega a la materia en tal manera que sy della se partiese non se engendraría ninguna cosa. (VD, 212)16 The truth is that there are three principles: matter, form, and desire. And matter’s office is never other than that of leaving one form, undressing herself, and then dressing herself up in another. And privation gives her desire, which is a dirty and impure thing, which comes to matter in such a way that if it were to leave her nothing would ever be engendered.

Until this point in the Visión, female bodies have served as the vehicles of translatio, the shape of intellectual and physical experience, and, as the central images of the narrative, examples that make invisible truths palpable to human intelligence. They have, in the way of all personifications and matter, become impregnated by form. However, in her central lesson about human intelligence, which is not engendered by matter, la Naturaleza introduces a new kind of corporeal metaphor into the Visión, “una figura asaz palpable” [a truly palpable image]. This “palpable figure” will complete el Entendimiento’s education about human nature and rational man’s place in the universe: Este mundo es uno e es proporçionado por una orden muy engeñosa e vínculo muy yndysoluble. E es uno asý como un omne es uno, videlicet, Pedro o Juan, e asý como en el omne ay diversidad de miembros e virtudes que mueven e son movidas, e otras que mandan, e otras que obedeçen, asý mismo es en el mundo. E asý como en el omne ay carne, nervios, huesos e umores diversos, asý la espera del çielo se conpone de muchas esperas e de quatro elementos, e lo que se conpone de aquéllos. (VD, 215)17 This world is one and is proportioned by an ingenious order and by an indissoluble link. It is one just as man is one, videlicet, Pedro or Juan, and just as in man there is a diversity of members and qualities that move and are moved, and others that command and others that obey, so is the world. And just as in man there is f lesh, nerves, bones, and varied humors, so the sphere of heaven is composed of many spheres and of four elements and of what is made of them.

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Only men with entendimiento, whose intellect and understanding function in the body analogously to God in the universe, can truly be said to function according to the figura asaz palpable; others merely resemble apes. With the image of man as microcosm, Nature introduces the body as a different kind of teaching device into the Visión. The feminine personifications that have led el Entendimiento function as the vehicles through which universals are translated into knowable particular substances and have also stressed the equivalence of the female body and matter. Nature’s “palpable figure,” in contrast, is expressly masculine. The body of “Pedro or Juan” and its functions serve as an analogy for cosmic order. Ironically, unlike the bodies of personification allegory that interact with el Entendimiento in the visionary narrative and the reproductive female bodies of Wisdom’s exempla, Nature’s “truly palpable figure” is not diegetically palpable at all in the Visión. El Entendimiento synesthetically sums up the delectation that he has enjoyed thus far on his journey when the boy comments, “Grant gozo he avido en ver vuestro fablar tan dulçe” [I have had great enjoyment in seeing your sweet talk] (VD, 232, emphasis added). El Entendimiento’s remark serves as a further reminder that this is a visionary narration and that the personifications are the objects of vision even as they speak. El Entendimiento has learned from beings with bodies that he has been able to “see,” and even though el Entendimiento represents the active intellect, he is still presented as a human child with a body that will interfere with his spiritual development. To persevere on the path to enlightenment, el Entendimiento must continually strive to harness his sensuality. To this end, the transmission of knowledge changes radically in the final chapters of the Visión where el Entendimiento receives its culminating lessons. Truth’s Mirror The Visión’s analysis of the epistemological potential of the senses comes to a head in the final chapters, where a new, noncorporeal heuristic instrument is introduced by la Verdad. Truth’s lessons—the pillars of the Catholic faith—are delivered through her brilliant and blinding mirror, rather than through exempla or allegorical dialogues between the intellect and embodiments of knowledge. The switch from speaking personifications to ref lecting mirror occurs as el Entendimiento’s journey is about to come to its end. La Verdad says that even though el Entendimiento has reasoned the truth of God’s unity and existence in the house of la Sabieza, he must also believe in the Trinity. El Entendimiento tellingly responds “Non lo veo” [I do not see it] (VD 327). The Visión’s hero still cannot

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see with full clarity. In this scene, Alfonso de la Torre seems to be at his most Scholastic, following the Thomistic idea that there are two kinds of knowledge about God. The first kind—which el Entendimiento learns “led on by the light of natural reason” directly from la Sabieza and her sisters—involves truths that can be known by reasoning about the world. The second involves the mysteries of religious doctrine that, as Aquinas states, “exceed all the ability of human reason” and depend upon faith and revelation.18 Given the Visión’s teachings on the division between the soul and the body, it is fitting that the vehicle for its culminating lesson should be distinct from the earlier ones that transmited knowledge. El Entendimiento’s journey to wisdom has progressed from the knowledge of sensible things, gained from seeing, touching, hearing, and even tasting, to a knowledge of less obvious concepts known through reason, and finally, to the theological truths that the Visión locates far beyond sensibilia and reason. In this text, despite the appearance of Wisdom and her cohort of personifications, bienaventuranza and Christian wisdom cannot be conveyed in concrete feminine form, for not even allegory is capable of giving them definite or tangible limits. When el Entendimiento says that he still cannot see the Trinity, la Verdad, recalling the “unbelievable” story of pregancy and gestation, explains that “Asý como el entendimiento es sobre el sentido, asý la profeçía es sobre el entendimiento. E muchas cosas ay en el mundo sensybles las quales sy fuesen contadas en otra manera las avrían por una grant mentyra” [ Just as understanding is above the senses, prophecy is above understanding. And there are many things in the sensible world that, if they were explained in another fashion, would be considered great lies] (VD, 327). Remarkably, la Verdad’s explanation momentarily dismantles Alfonso de la Torre’s allegorical edifice. El Entendimiento is reverted to entendimiento, and the personification returns to the ontological status of an abstraction. Human intelligence, or understanding, which has been the hero and champion of the Visión’s narrative surface until this point, has exhausted its capacities. El Entendimiento cannot visually or rationally grasp the Trinity, the conception and birth of Christ, or the Resurrection; when la Verdad concludes each verbal explanation, the intellectual hero repeats with growing frustration “Non lo veo.” In these matters Truth can neither appeal to his senses nor to his reason, so she must stop speaking and reveal the truth to el Entendimiento and la Razón with her mirror. Truth’s mirror blinds la Razón and el Entendimiento with its spiritual light: “Fueron asý como çiegos. . .con la çeguedad que tenían con la grand lunbre que estava en el espejo, no vieron nada. . .por su çeguedad grande e por la exçelençia grande de la gloria de los bien aventurados, no vieron

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nada” [They were as if blind. . .with their blindness and the great light that was in the mirror, they saw nothing. . .because of their great blindness and the great and excellent glory of the blessed, they saw nothing] (VD, 329). Their intellegence is likewise affected: “E ellos tanto estavan terrestidos de las mutaçiones del espejo que fueron convertidos a creer lo que les dezía la Verdad, enpero que non entendían cómo estas cosas pudieron ser, mas conosçieron su defecto muy grande” [And they were so amazed at the mutations of the mirror that they were converted to believing what Truth told them; they could not understand how these things could be, but they knew their own great defect] (VD, 330). Here, the familiar spiritual and philosophical concepts of sight and blindness—the difference between the physical sensory perceptions of the eye and the sight of the mind and soul—are demonstrated by the mirror into which the characters “cannot see anything” but finally believe “everything,” even though they cannot fully understand it. El Entendimiento no longer looks and listens; knowledge no longer issues forth from the mouths of feminine personifications. Rather, a knowledge that cannot be circumscribed by words or bodies is aphasically and blindingly delivered, representing a move beyond the contigencies of human discourse. Truth’s mirror marks the boundary between the imperfect and matter-laden world and the realm of universal truths. Even the personifications, the vehicles for the vast majority of the Visión’s content, are left below in the narrative world of matter.19 At last, el Entendimiento is ready to learn the answer to his original question, to clarify that most troubling doubt about the meaning of human existence. He is ready to learn “del fyn postrimero del omne” [the final purpose of man]. La Razón warns him, however, that the body and its “torpes deseos”[vulgar desires] will still be an impediment, even to the man who has mastered metaphysics and ethics. Accordingly, the next and penultimate chapter narrating the vision returns to the theme of delectation—and the meaning of Alfonso de la Torre’s ambiguous title, Visión deleytable—in order to prove that the purpose of human existence is “la visyón de Dios glorioso e poderoso” [the vision of glorious and powerful God] (VD, 334). Availing herself of yet another example involving the female body and sexual intercourse, la Razón compares the vision of God, which is inaccessible to men of limited intellect or an intellect blinded by sensuality, to the sexual pleasure, which humoral complexion makes unattainable for melancholics: “como el que es muy malencónico e natural mente frío, sy le dizen que ay delectaçión en el usar con la muger, no se sigue que non le digan verdad, no obstante que él nunca aya sentydo la tal

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delectaçión” [If they tell a man who is melancholic and naturally cold that there is delectation to be had in going with women, he will not think they are lying even though he can never feel such delectation]. However, she cautions that it is shameful to compare the ultimate delectation with “qualquiera delectaçión ymaginada por los omnes” [any delectation imagined by men] (VD, 334 and 337). In addition to injecting a little humor into the discussion, la Razón’s highly sensorial analogy serves as yet another reminder of the distance between Reason, who remains in the sublunary world of bodies, and Truth. La Razón’s concluding remarks, which coincide with the conclusion of the visionary narrative, ref lect upon the need for such a treatise as Visión deleytable and upon its methodology as well. The Visión, she explains, shares the intentions of the ancient prophets, that is, to teach about the mysteries of faith and blessedness. However, the prophets veil the truth: “fasta oy nunca ninguno tan clara mente lo dixo, ca los profetas lo dixeron por metáforas e los sabios lo declararon por conparaciones, e aquesto era porque lo pudiesen entender” [until now, no one has ever said it in such a clear way, because the prophets said it through metaphors and declared it through comparisons, and this was so that [men] could understand it]. La Razón and her sisters, like the ancient prophets, also have had to take recourse to analogies, metaphors, and exempla in order to make their teachings understood: E fueme neçesario de poner e dizir que avía gozos corporales e penas porqu’el pueblo no entiende otro gozo nin otra pena syno la sensyble e brutal, e aquesta gloria o pena de que avemos dicho son tanto mayores que las otras quanto Dios glorioso exçede e sobreexçede más perfecto que todas las otras cosas. (VD, 345–46) It was necessary for me to speak in terms of corporeal pleasures and pains because people do not understand any other kind of pleasure or pain than the sensible and bestial kind. And that glory or pain that we have spoken about is as much greater than the other kind as perfect God in his glory exceeds and superexceeds all other things.

Throughout the Visión, the personifications’ ref lections on their own ontological and pedagogical status remind us not only that in the world of the allegory el Entendimiento sees with “los ojos interiores” [the interior eyes] of the intelligence rather than with physical eyes, but also that Alfonso de la Torre’s personifications, like the metaphors of the ancients, and like the analogy of the melancholic who cannot appreciate the joys of sexual intercourse, are necessary “palpable” examples. They are

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metaphors of presence, acting out physical relations that, in turn, represent the process of knowledge acquisition through sensibilia and then revelation, which is wholly immaterial. El Entendimiento’s journey to wisdom clearly marks the hierarchy of the senses, reason, and faith. When the fictional character el Entendimiento sees with his eyes, hears the lessons of the Liberal Arts, and tastes the milk of la Gramática, his sensations, even though they resemble sensory perceptions, represent intellectual perception. However, in the narrative world where no corporeal humans exist, el Entendimiento’s senses are also stimulated by the diegetically tangible feminine personifications. While el Entendimiento’s allegorical intellectual journey literalizes the processesing of sensory experience into intellectual fodder, it also continually reminds the Visión’s readers of the difference between the acquisition of knowledge and those sensual perceptions and delectations that cannot contribute to understanding. Alfonso de la Torre concludes the Visión with a farewell address to his reader that restates the goals of the work and ref lects upon how he intended to use personification allegory. The Visión strives to show “el fyn del omne” and to teach the content and delight of each science in an allegorical narrative populated by imagines agentes that literally “are” what they mean: “las ymaginaçiones de las quales figuras e devisas o señales sygnifican muchas vezes aquello que tratan” [the images of such figures and emblems or signs frequently signify that which they teach] (VD, 349). However, the Visión’s feminine personifications convey bodily messages that are not limited to the bodies of knowledge that name them. Alfonso de la Torre’s treatise teems with effective mnemonic devices, arresting feminine corporeal similitudes such as Grammar, Wisdom, and Reason, who not only function as pedagogical tools but also comment upon their own utility and their own incongruity, recalling the advice in the Arts of Memory that attractive and incongruous active images are all the more memorable. The personifications and the metaphors, comparisons, and figures that they in turn use make the Visión’s content more palatable and palpable to readers. However, the constant doubling of meanings in their literalization of knowledge transfer and acquisition continually points to the forced relationships between allegorical vehicles and tenors, in this case, between matter-laden corporeal bodies—particularly female bodies—with their capacity to arouse mind-clouding appetites as well as logical and theological concepts that can be understood only when such appetites have been surmounted. Throughout the Visión, Alfonso de la Torre’s imagines agentes combine somatophobia with sexualized exempla that require readers to negotiate the text’s pairing of deepseated anxiety about corporeality and sexuality with attractive and active figures of feminine embodiment.

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Responses to the Visión: Marginalia and Parody Allegorical texts tend to elicit commentaries, which, as Ralph Flores remarks, can take on lives of their own, “displacing or opening up, in complicated ways,” the texts they gloss.20 One of the fifteenth-century manuscripts of the Visión contains marginal glosses that refer the reader to multiple ancient and medieval authorities, above all Aristotle, the Bible, Augustine, Aquinas, and the work of Giles of Rome. The glossator was most concerned to elucidate the Aristotelian metaphysical material presented in the first thirty-four chapters of the Visión, and he appears to have wanted to guide readers in a Scholastic interpretation of the text by further explicating the content of the teachings of Alfonso de la Torre’s personifications. For example, when La Gramática gives her lesson on the Fall and different kinds of delectations, the glossator chimes in: Dos maneras havemos de delectaciones, unas sensibles, las quales tomamos con los sesos, hotras spirituales o inteligibles, las quales tomamos con l’ánima intellectiva. Las sensibles son los deleytes e desseos carnales que se dizen voluptades o apetito, a diferencia del deseo del entendimiento, que se dize voluntad o apetito intellectivo. Las delectaciones intelligibles son las del entendimiento, que’es entender, saber, especular e hotras. E lo que dize Egidio, que lo pueblo comuna mente no conoce sino las delectaciones sensibles, es porque natura humana por el peccado del primer hombre fue scurida e apartada de la puritad del entender. (VD vol. 2, 30)21 We have two kinds of delectations, one is sensible, which we take in with the brain, and the other is spiritual or intelligible, which we take in with the intellective soul. The sensible delectations are carnal delights and desires, which are called voluptuous pleasures or appetites, in contrast to the desire of the intellect, which is called intellective wish or appetite. The intelligible delectations are those of the intellect, which are understanding, knowing, speculating, and others. And, as Giles says, people generally know only the sensible delectations because human nature, due to the sin of the first man, was darkened and distanced from the purity of intellect.

The glossator would seem to represent Alfonso de la Torre’s ideal reader, one who is ready to receive the Visión’s lessons and to connect them back to the scholarly and religious authorities that are woven into the heuristic allegorical vision. Like many modern critics, the glossator found little that was of interest at the literal level of the Visión. Two other contemporary responses to the widely read Visión suggest that the maximum clarity of understanding that Alfonso de la Torre sought to convey with his imagines agentes was not entirely successful, and that his didactically and mnemonically powerful feminine personifications

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do more than establish loci in the readers’ memories that aid in the recall of abstract ideas. While the teachings of the allegorical ladies no doubt come across, some readers appear to have seen the figures as opaque, contingent, and particular, insisting on their existence as women in the very world of sensuality and matter they disparage. In contrast to the scholarly approach to the Visión in the gloss, marginal illumination in a fifteenthcentury mansucript of the Visión and a parodic poem first printed in the early sixteenth century provide two kinds of less authoritative responses, from less than “ideal” historical readers. Medieval manuscripts frequently concretize verbal allegories by illustrating them, and miniatures of the Liberal Arts have long accompanied medieval texts about them. The pairing of rhetorical personification with pictorial illustration suggests that the imagination or mind’s eye is somehow insufficient to the mnemonic and educational tasks at hand. In such illustrations, the allegorical “corporeal similitudes” that are imagined in the mind’s eye become the objects of physical sight, transferred back into the realm of concrete figures. This reconcretization assures that a particular kind of active image will be stored up in memory. In one of the fifteenth-century manuscripts of the Visión, copied in Barcelona circa 1477, Alfonso de la Torre’s personified figures are rendered literally visible, carrying the intellectual exercise of personification from the mind’s eye to the manuscript page.22 The marginal program of this particular manuscript of the Visión is concise, ordered, and directly associated with the texts at the center of the page, each drawing clearly illustrating the chapter it accompanies. The margins are populated by illustrations of the author setting out to dream up his vision—el Entendimiento, the young learner, who closely resembles the author, and the female figures of personification allegory. Each allegorical figure is shown richly clothed in Neapolitan style and holding the tools of her discipline. Grammar holds her standard and scourge and is shown with her nipples bared as if offering her lactational-intellectual lessons to the reader (figure 3.1). Logic is similarly depicted as portrayed in the text, with disheveled hair, bearing her standard of “True and False,” holding a bouquet of f lowers in one hand and a scorpion in the other. “Sophisticated, simulated,” and “shallow,” Rhetoric appears with her painted face, wearing her device Ornato et persuasio, and la Arismética appears in a short, tunic-like dress that reveals the “masculine” legs Alfonso de la Torre’s text describes. La Sabieza appears, attended by the Cardinal Virtues, in the lower corner of the first folio containing the description of el Entendimiento’s stay in her mansion, and two illustrations in the lower margins of the second part of the Visión depict el Entendimiento in the

Figure 3.1 39, f. 3r.

La Gramática. Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Espagnol

Source: By permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Figure 3.2 El Entendimiento, la Razón, and la Verdad. Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Espagnol 39, f. 21r. Source: By permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

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company of la Razón and la Verdad (figure 3.2). In the first, illustrating the chapter where Reason and Truth lead el Entendimiento into the garden of delight, the three personifications travel across the margin, arm in arm, la Verdad’s mirror leading the way. In the second, which is the last illustration in the manuscript, the three figures gesticulate as if in lively conversation with the Virtues. In addition to the miniatures themselves, the manuscript also contains evidence of a particular response to the Visión’s combination of miniatures and metaphors. An unknown early reader contributed details to the miniatures that suggest his understanding of the Visión’s didactic message about sensuality and matter and of the ontological status of personifications. Possibly inspired by the low-cut bodice la Gramática wears, exposing her full breasts, the reader has drawn breasts burgeoning forth from the bodices of the other illustrated figures in several of the miniatures (figure 3.3). The hand that penned the additional breasts may have merely wanted to assert that all of the Arts, Virtues, and Wisdom and her sisters nourished the learning soul in the same maternal fashion. However, we can also interpret these iconographical supplements as one reader’s playful and prurient response to feminine personification allegory and its visual representation. The reader’s addition of breasts and nipples to the miniatures appears to epitomize what Michael Camille characterizes as marginalia’s potential to “usurp” the authority of the texts at the center of the page.23 Indeed, the anonymous reader’s redecoration of the feminine images he found in the margins suggests that his attention strayed from the earnest and anxious philosophizing of the text about sensuality and intellect to the eye-catching miniatures that look like women rather than abstractions. The reader seems to have had his mind on matter and to have willfully literalized the organizing metaphors of the Visión. The allegorical ladies’ new profiles in the margins intimate that the reader saw the personifications as more than the vehicles of abstract content: he saw them as female bodies, and as such, as the representations of the same “Woman, or sensuality” la Gramática warned of in her exegesis of Genesis. This particular reader’s interaction with the text—one moment of reception that may have impacted upon other successive readers— resonates with and perhaps anticipates a parodic poem titled “Una obra de un cavallero llamado ‘Visión deletable’ ” [A poem by a nobleman called “Delectable Vision”] that demonstrates the same kind of slippage between literary metaphors to palpable bodies. This Visión deletable appeared in print for the first time in Hernán Castillo’s second edition of the Cancionero general (1514) and was later included in the Cancionero de obras de burlas provocantes a la risa (1519). The latter reprints and expands upon the ninth section of the Cancionero general, which had been dedicated

Figure 3.3 La Sabieza and her attendants modified by a reader. Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Espagnol 39, f. 15v. Source: By permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

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to parodic and saucy verses, adding, among other texts, the Carajicomedia, a scabrous parody of Juan de Mena’s Laberinto de Fortuna. The anonymous Carajicomedia systematically parodies the Laberinto, taking up its formal aspects, and also taking aim at its central preoccupations. Where Mena crafted rhetorical figures representing providential truths, the parodic poet saw bodies engaging—not always successfully—in sexual activities. Mena’s Providencia gently escorted the dreamer-poet by the hand, promising to show him truths “that can be touched by the human intellect.” Her double in the Carajicomedia, the Old Whore, grabs the impotent visionary’s f laccid penis and promises to restore his sexual potency, to show him something that can be manually touched: “siendo apalpado, ser blanco, de prieto” [being touched can turn from black to white]. The parody transforms the Laberinto’s iteration of Spain’s providential history into a guided tour of Iberia’s most famous brothels. Mena’s “glorious lineage of kings,” his catalogue of warriors and chaste and constant women are, one by one, replaced by images of infamous prostitutes and witches, a “lustful lineage of sluts.”24 In the Carajicomedia’s concluding mock epic battle between the carajos [pricks] and the coños [cunts], the male members are savagely beaten into a state of complete submission. The parody transforms Mena’s prophecy of the male warrior taming Fortuna [Fortune], in order to complete the reconquest of Iberian territory in the hands of the Moors, into a story about taming male sexuality. Allegory, with its abundant personifications, is easy prey to such willful literalizations, and the poetic parody of Alfonso de la Torre’s Visión deleytable hinges upon the same interpretive move from embodiments to bodies. The poem “Una obra de un cavallero llamado ‘Visión deletable’ ” abounds in the sort of erotic puns that heavily populate cancionero lyric and the Carajicomedia. The poetic voice describes how, sleepless with lovesickness, he goes to the chapel, seeking respite. As he meditates there upon the cause of his “passion,” he, like the Visión’s author-figure, enters into a state of dorveille and has a vision populated with women: Vi venir, como en visión, mucha gente en procesión, que me puso espanto en vella; mas cuando cerca de mí se allegaron con plazeres, todo temor despedí, porque luego conocí que todas eran mujeres. (Cancionero, 167) I saw many people in a procession, as if in a vision, which it scared me to see. But when they delightfully approached me, I dismissed all fear because I immediately saw that they were all women.

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The poetic narrator quickly learns that these women praise the kind of delectaçión that Alfonso de la Torre’s allegorical ladies maligned. The women in the Cancionero’s vision adore “Matihuelo.” He is clearly the male member personified: a matihuelo is literally a toy, a “tumbler or rolypoly,” that wobbles when struck but never falls down. Matihuelo also means siempretieso, or ever-erect. Matihuelo gives pleasure to his followers: Que con honra muy real llevaban a Matihuelo en un carro triunfal, él tan gordo largo y tal, que arrastrava por el suelo: y luego tras él venían muchas dueñas y doncellas que altas bozes dezían: “Las que de ti se desvían, plazer se desvía de ellas.” (Cancionero, 167) With regal honor they carried “Matihuelo” in a triumphal chariot. He was so fat and long that he dragged on the ground, and many ladies and maidens followed behind him saying in loud voices, “Delight strays from those who stray from you.”

The poem’s lascivious ladies who adore the priapic Matihuelo seem to have taken the diegetic place of Alfonso de la Torre’s Artes Liberales and other feminine personifications. However, they are clearly carnivalesque reversals of the virginal and maternal instructresses in the Visión. The ladies in the parody seek to “adobar” [dress or soften] Matihuelo’s “ejercicios” [exertions], they burn with passion and lick their lips in their desire to eat him, until they spy the dreamer-poet, at which point they join hands and sing Matihuelo’s praises. There follows a villancico “Onremos a Matihuelo” [Let us honor Matihuelo] that mentions nine women’s names, describing in puns how each venerates Matihuelo, and a palinode in which the poet begs pardon for having published such “cosas viciosas” [sinful things] (Cancionero 168–69). The parodic appropriation of the title indicates not only the Visión’s popularity at the end of the fifteenth century, but also its audiences’ awareness of the artificiality and polyvalence of its allegorical structure. If the glossator read according to authoritative allegorical practice— aptly described by Hans Robert Jauss as “the tendency to take away the extravagant character of figural discourse. . .in order to transform it into direct doctrine”—thus leading the Visión’s readers back to scholarly Latin authorities, the graffiti artist and parodist both recover some of the

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extravagant and polysemous character of the Visión’s vernacular allegorical adventure, developing their own vernacular and ludic responses.25 In both the poem and the marginal graffiti, Alfonso de la Torre’s personification allegory has lent itself to literalization by its readers. Personifications, the vehicles for abstract concepts and bodies of knowledge, are constant reminders of the sublunary bodies that people the contingent, human world—bodies that are prone to the sensual delectations that stand in the way of reason, learning, and the bienaventurança that the allegorical Visión seeks to teach. The Visión deleytable narrates the intellect’s quest for truth. Alfonso de la Torre’s ubiquitous use of personifications, as tropes of embodiment, and the lessons they teach about matter create a subtext that ponders the relations between sense perceptions, knowledge and representation, and between epistemology and rhetoric. However, in its disquisitions on matter and embodiment, the Visión implicitly comments upon its own rhetorical construction. By virtue of its conjugation of feminine personification allegory and lessons on matter and form, the Visión simultaneously epitomizes the utilization of personification allegory in classical and medieval didactic texts while also underlining the epistemological tensions intrinsic to the use of corporeal similitudes. Time and again, works about wisdom caution their audiences not to confuse feminine images of wisdom with real, nonallegorical women. But, time and again, the same texts and readerly responses to them demonstrate the susceptibility of allegorical narrative to make just such ontological confusions. The Visión may intend to be intellectively delightful, but its appeal to the senses invites other kinds of delectation. Reception of Alfonso de la Torre’s mnemonic devices inspired more than philosophical meditation because they also inspired readers to contemplate the female body—and in the case of the cancionero poem, the male member—not just as the conventional sign for matter but also for matter’s attendant sexual desire. Both Alfonso de la Torre’s pedagogical use of personification and the responses of his fifteenth-century readers are emblematic, elucidating medieval concepts of personification as a useful, persuasive, but ultimately problematic device, especially in didactic works that seek to teach the dangers of the f lesh and the evil inherent in matter. Didactic authors may intend to use feminine personifications as tropes of clarity, but at narrative and pictorial levels, feminine personifications repeatedly assert their material presence as female bodies, thus troubling the smooth transfer of abstract bodies of knowledge through concrete female outlines.

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CHAPTER 4 THE WISE VIRGIN’S CONFOUNDING BODY OF KNOWLEDGE

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beautiful young virgin stands before a panel of illustrious male sages who have grudgingly come together to debate her and put her knowledge to the test. Against all expectations, she confounds their firm belief that wisdom and femininity cannot coexist. Those who debate her are astonished by her beauty, wit, and intelligence and are even humiliated by this unlikely contender in a contest of eloquence and wisdom. This brief but oft-repeated scene forms the folkloric nucleus of both the legend of St. Catherine of Alexandria, one of the most popular saints of the Middle Ages, and Doncella Teodor, a story known to late-medieval Castilian audiences as the final chapter of Bocados de oro [Mouthfuls of Gold], a sapiential compendium adapted from the Arabic Mukhta¯r al-h. ikam wa-mah. a¯sin al-kalim [The Choicest Maxims and Best Sayings].1 The canonical feminine personification of Wisdom is clearly a palimpsestic presence in these popular stories. Indeed, the familiar liturgical and allegorical figure informs and is transformed in the legend of St. Catherine and the story of Teodor—narratives where speaking feminine personae become heuristic devices, and the heroines’ imagined bodies are the vessels and vehicles for bodies of knowledge. Moreover, as the attractive transmitter of wisdom, the wise virgin may delight and even titillate her interlocutors, her beauty serving to maintain audiences’ attention and firmly fix the didactic content of her debate in their memories. The tales of these wise virgins appear in three highly interpellative vernacular genres: hagiography, the literary “debate” on women, and wisdom literature. In contrast to their narratorial similarity, the two tales of wise virgins were transmitted with different audiences in mind. Donzella Teodor—at least in its fifteenth-century incarnations—appears in the familiar male homosocial dynamics of sapiential discourse. The

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hagiographic legend imagines mixed audiences, and it is known for its “special appeal to women.”2 However, in his Libro de las claras e virtuosas mugeres, Álvaro de Luna deploys the legend as a counterargument to those men who “siniestras cosas contra [las mujeres] non se auerguençan nin dubdan de dezir” [are not ashamed and do not hesitate to say evil things against women] (21) and consequently are in need of courtly profeminine instruction.3 These contexts suggest that wise virgins could be particularly provocative invocations of the rhetorical tradition that employs feminine embodiment as a vehicle for translatio studii. In her concise survey of the archetype of the wise woman in medieval Spanish literature, María Jesús Lacarra observes that wise female characters, at first glance at least, seem to contradict the overwhelmingly negative view of women and their supposedly limited moral and intellectual potential in medieval literature. This view is neatly summed up in the medieval Castilian versions of the Historia del filósofo Segundo by the legendarily misogynist philosopher’s response to the question, “What is woman?”: “Confondimiento del onbre, bestia que nunca se farta, cuydado que non ha fin, guerra que nunca queda, peligro del onbre que non ha en sy mesura” [Man’s confusion, a beast that is never satisfied, endless worry, relentless war, a danger to man that has no self-control], a proverbial formula that was frequently applied in medieval vituperations of women.4 Nevertheless, as Lacarra notes, the wisdom of wise female characters in medieval Castilian literature is always measured in patriarchal terms.5 María Eugenia Lacarra concurs, observing that the sapiential tradition calls wise only those women who “do not contradict masculine wisdom, but rather, reinforce it in all its aspects including in those that go against the image of women themselves.”6 This is not surprising because such female characters are generally envisioned by male authors for male ideal and intended audiences. Nevertheless, the voices of feminine embodiments of wisdom speak also “bodytalk” in the sense suggested by E. Jane Burns: they speak as characters imagined by male authors “to represent misogynous fantasies of female corporeality,” but, much like the Old French figures Burns discusses, feminine embodiments of wisdom in Castilian literature “can also be heard to rewrite the tales in which they appear.” 7 Ironically, the term confondamiento, used in Segundo’s aphoristic definition of “Woman,” also appears in the Castilian stories of the wise virgin martyr Catherine of Alexandria, suggesting that the archetypal figure shares an important characteristic with man’s bestial confounder and confuser. And, in the early printed editions of her story, Teodor responds to the question of “what is woman?” by complicating the proverbial response: “Arca de mucho bien y de mucho mal, imagen del hombre, bestia que nunca se harta” [Repository of much

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good and much evil, man’s image, beast that is never satisfied] (Historia de la Doncella Teodor, 76).8 Recent scholarship has challenged traditional assessments of literary manifestations of the “woman question” as ref lections of individual authors’ sincere historical stances toward women or, alternately, as merely insincere repetitions of commonplaces. The debate, as Julian Weiss cogently argues, is never just about women, but “inextricably intertwined with a range of other ideologies that structure social castes and classes, notions of race, morality or medicine, or such practices as courtliness and the literary,” where gender also necessarily comes into play.9 Moreover, Robert Archer has lucidly assessed how, in many cases, the authors of late-medieval literary defenses of and invectives against women took on questions with serious philosophical import. Their continual and contrary attempts to define Woman resulted in a “strong sense of indeterminacy.”10 My concern in this chapter is to examine the wise martyr’s legend and the gnomic tale of Teodor as two modes of using feminine wisdom imagery in relation to the sempiternal and multifarious “woman question.” Not only do the two stories address the question of whether women can be rational, intelligent, and virtuous, they also offer visions of how men and women should interact. Their answers to the question—often penned by male authors writing for other men— are presented as inconfutable yet confounding truths. Medieval stories about wise women are often engaged—either implicitly or explicitly—in the perennial debate about women’s intellectual and moral potential. In fifteenth-century Iberia this literary and often courtly debate reached a particularly intense pitch and was intricately interwoven with the political issues of the day. Virginity, Wisdom, and Personification In the medieval imaginary, virginal bodies were conceived of as ideal containers for bodies of knowledge, and virginity itself was closely linked to wisdom in the Christian tradition. This association between virginity and the safeguarding and transmission of wisdom reverberates in both secular and devotional vernacular tales of debating wise virgins. As Barbara Newman observes, the “deep imaginative appeal” of the feminine personification of Wisdom continued to assert itself in the cult of the Virgin Mary. Moreover, the alignment of Mary with Sapientia served to counterbalance somewhat the tendency to interpret away the female body in canonical personifications of Wisdom.11 One of the many liturgical titles of the Virgin Mary is Sedes Sapientiae, “the seat of wisdom,” and many medieval devotional images present

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Christ—logos and divine wisdom—seated on her lap. Mother and seat of Wisdom, the Virgin Mary is, in a sense, Christianity’s ultimate feminine personification; as the bearer of and vehicle for the Word, she provides the material to house an intangible divine presence and delivers its tangible body into the contingent human world. Moreover, Mary’s role as the feminine vehicle for Christian wisdom is related to her legendary role as the custodian of Christian memory. As we have seen, all personifications depend on the fundamental conceptualization of the body as a container. This basic metaphor structures human thought and communication and is, I would argue, directly related to medieval ideas of virginal bodies and the literary portrayal of them, particularly the body and womb of the Virgin Mary, the hortus conclusus [closed garden]. In the Golden Legend, for example, Jacobus de Voragine envisions Mary as a storehouse of memory. Her virginity assures that her body, “an ark,” remains inviolate even as it disseminates the logos: As the Gloss on [chapter 2 of Luke] says: “She kept in her memory everything she knew about the Lord and what the Lord did and said, so that when the time came to preach or write about the incarnation, she could adequately make known all that had been said and done, to those who sought information.”. . .It is believed, therefore, that the evangelists questioned Mary about many things, and that she gave them sure answers. This would be particularly true in St. Luke’s case. It is believed that he turned to her as to the ark of the testimony and from her received sure knowledge.12

Mary’s function as the seat of wisdom and keeper of memory ref lects patristic and medieval theology’s “potent emphasis on the virgin body as the ‘abnormal’ mediator between the human and the divine,” whose “intimacy with God [was] as close as that of any angel.”13 The sealed and inviolate body of the Virgin is the natural container for the Logos, the complete and inalterable body of Wisdom. The hagiographic legend of St. Catherine served devotional and catechistic ends; the wise virgin martyr transmits the pillars of Christian belief, with which she, as a sponsa Christi, has been infused by her divine husband. In the saint’s legend, the Logos once again takes up residence with human and female f lesh when Catherine speaks the words that Christ has given her. However, as the forking generic paths of the wise virgin’s story suggest, the virginal container may serve as a vessel for any form of wisdom. The secular and sapiential Teodor announces that she has learned the sum of all knowledge and the skills of entertainment, but her story, at least in its extant medieval Castilian versions, culminates

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with her declamation of sexual techniques with which men may enjoy women without jeopardizing their health. In both contexts, the wise virgin’s story demonstrates the tendency of feminine personifications of wisdom to gravitate toward issues of corporeality. St. Catherine, like the biblical Wisdom and the Virgin Mary, guides her listeners to look beyond the material world to divine truths; Teodor teaches about the correct use of the body in the material world. St. Catherine of Alexandria: Confounding Men in the Defense of Women After Wisdom and the Virgin Mary, Catherine of Alexandria was perhaps the best-known feminine embodiment of Christian wisdom in medieval devotional literature and liturgy. Reverence for Catherine extended throughout medieval society, from royalty to peasants, religious to lay, young and old, men and women. She was the patron of students, philosophers, orators, and wheelwrights, and she was also thought to extend special patronage to young women who sought husbands.14 The legend of this highly popular virgin martyr is filled with verbal and physical confrontations that produce both numerous conversions to Christianity and a high body count. It recounts how the learned princess and Christian convert Catherine rules Alexandria after her father’s death, refusing to marry any earthly suitor. When the Romans enter Alexandria and demand that all citizens sacrifice to the pagan gods, Catherine confronts the Roman emperor Maxentius, denouncing his worship of false idols and preaching the central tenets of Christianity. Awestruck by her beauty and her eloquence, Maxentuis offers to make Catherine his concubine if she venerates and sacrifices to the Roman gods. Upon her refusal, he incarcerates her and summons the fifty wisest men in the Empire to Alexandria, to debate with her and to prove the Romans’ intellectual and spiritual supremacy. Christ appears in a vision to Catherine, promising to give her his words for the debate. The debate is staged before a large audience; when the sages see Catherine, they voice their displeasure at having been called from their homes to debate a young woman. However, Catherine’s eloquent arguments cause the philosophers to admit defeat, upon which they all convert. Maxentius promptly has them all executed and then tortures Catherine and locks her in a dark cell. Maxentius’s wife, hearing of the sages’ conversion, goes to visit Catherine with her faithful vassal Porphyrius, and they too are converted, along with an entourage of 200 men. Maxentius has them all killed as well, and, realizing that he cannot f latter, bribe, torture, or starve Catherine into submission, he orders the construction

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of a death-machine of interlocking wheels with many razor-sharp blades and has Catherine tied between the wheels. Before the machine can be put into motion, an angel descends and destroys it, killing many of the spectators in the process. Finally, Maxentius has Catherine’s head cut off. She dies, milk f lowing from her neck instead of blood. Her Christian followers then carry away and bury her body in secret at Mt. Sinai. As the story of Catherine of Alexandria clearly issues an implicit challenge to the traditionally prescriptive and proscriptive gender roles in the medieval Church—Catherine studies, rules, and preaches vociferously— the legend became a commonplace in the wider literary and cultural debate on women.15 This interpretation and deployment of the legend is clearly at work in Álvaro de Luna’s formal defense of women, the Libro de las virtuosas e claras mugeres (LVCM, 1446), where Catherine is the culminating example in an extensive catalogue of good women from the Bible, ancient history, and Christian hagiography. The legend also stakes an implicit claim for the moral and intellectual abilities of women in the late fourteenth- or early fifteenth-century anthology of saints’ lives and pious romances found in the Escorial Monastery Library, named by later readers Flos sanctorum and El libro de los huéspedes. In this anthology featuring heroic women, St. Catherine serves as a model of feminine chastity, piety, and eloquence; her debate with the wise men echoes throughout the romances, where misogynist commonplaces about women are also challenged.16 St. Catherine is something of a troubling figure in the context of defenses of women, because they are profeminine rather than protofeminist, that is to say, they defend the value and valor of women in their traditional roles. Late-medieval male-authored literary defenses may assert the spiritual and moral superiority of women and attack the manners and masculinity of misogynists, but they do not much seek to change gender roles in society or to advocate any sort of radical reordering of gender relations, as to refute the hyperbolic discourse against women in misogynist works. In fact, profeminine works often take the very commonplaces of feminine nature and behavior reviled by misogynist discourse and turn them into positive traits, a rhetorical strategy that Alcuin Blamires has termed “redoctrination” in his analysis of defenses of women in medieval English and French literature.17 Although it is tempting to read St. Catherine and other profeminine heroines as ref lections of authentic female voices that “whisper at the margins” of male-authored texts, confronting not only paganism, but patriarchy as well,18 the narrative and receptive spaces and freedoms opened up in the stories close in on their heroines at the end. The speaking heroines of medieval romance are, as Roberta Krueger suggests,

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rather, “the fictional traces of voices in a dialogue whose words are lost.”19 While the hagiographic wise virgin’s legend may challenge many misogynist commonplaces about women, its narrative structure works to strictly control the female heroine, who, though she speaks well, is ultimately and spectacularly silenced in her death. Moreover, although she challenges pagan patriarchal authority and preaches in her defiance of Roman religion, she remains well within the confines of patriarchal Christian ideology. Simultaneously heterodox and orthodox, she is an ambivalent exemplar for her many audiences, one that, as Maud Burnet McInerney rightly observes, is “continually oscillating between appearances as an icon of silence and death and as one of active speech and liberation, always potentially both.”20 Álvaro de Luna—who was himself at the center of ongoing controversies involving gender and power during the reign of Juan II—addresses his treatise both to “el pueblo común e rudo” [common and boorish people] who have not had the benefit of en education that allows men to reason logically about the nature of Woman and to those pseudo-learned men who have erroneously written vituperations of women, inspired by their misinterpretations of the the ancients (LVCM, 23 and 26). His catalogue is prefaced by a prohemio by Juan de Mena, suggesting that his work at some point had a courtly readership, one accustomed to engaging in the fifteenth-century literary debate on women.21 Since, as Suero de Ribera’s poetic contribution to the debate asserts, “¡Pestilencia por las lenguas / que fablan mal de las donas. . . .Los fidalgos han de ser / defensa de las mujeres” [A pox upon the tongues that speak ill of ladies. . . .Noblemen must defend women], Luna may have seen the composition of the Libro as an opportunity to boast of his own courtliness, his expertise in the subject of Woman, and perhaps even to affirm his appreciation for women in the face of his enemies’ accusations of homosexuality.22 In the first of five preambles to the work, Luna explains that he intends to prove “by subtle reasoning” that the “vices or faults” so often attributed to women are not caused by nature, but rather by custom, and that men are just as easily inclined toward such failings as women. Luna continues his introduction by challenging the misogynist appropriation of biblical wisdom literature, admonishing those writers who twist Solomon’s words in order to assert the nonexistence of good women. Luna maintains, moreover, that Solomon’s warnings about bad women should not be understood as general definitions of Woman: Aquellos que han querido escriuir diciendo mal contra las mugeres, paresçe que se ayan movido por autoridades del rey e sabio salamon e de otros; pero bien entendidas las dichas autoridades, aquellas sola mente fablan e se

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entienden de las desordenadas mugeres aienas de virtudes, mas non de las virtuosas. . .e despues que el dicho rey salamon ha tractado en el dicho su libro largamente los viçios de la desordenada e non virtuosa muger, faze e acaba el postrimero capitulo de dicho libro de prouerbios en las loanças de la virtuosa muger, diziendo entre las otras cosas, que el su preçio e valor es muy grande e vale mucho, e siguese adelante, que los fiios de aquesta la predicaron por muy bien auenturada e por su marido es ella muy loada. (LVCM, 26–27) It seems that those who have wanted to write defaming women have been inspired by the teachings of the wise king Solomon and others; but if these authorities are understood correctly, [one sees that] they only speak of and mean to refer to disorderly women who are devoid of virtue, not to virtuous women. . .And after the said king Solomon discusses the vices of the disorderly and nonvirtuous woman at length in his book [Proverbs], he concludes the last chapter in the said book of Proverbs by eulogizing the virtuous woman, saying, among other things, that her price and value is very great and she is worth much, and he goes on to say that her sons proclaimed her blessedness and that she is lauded by her husband.

In the third section of the Libro de las virtuosas e claras mugeres, Luna presents Catherine as a learned scholar who, in the fashion of a male university student, has progressed through the liberal arts before receiving instruction in theology. He asserts that the virgin martyr can most worthily draw his catalogue of good women to a close due to her extraordinary talent and beauty: Fue esclarecida por disçiplinas de todas las artes, e por maravillosa fermosura de cuerpo, e por señalada santidad. E pasando yo la vida destas todas, con la rrazon e voluntad, pareçiome que esta debía ser ante puesta a las otras. E por ende, esta moça excelente. . .porná fin a las santas mujeres. (LVCM, 242) She was distinguished in all the disciplines of all the arts, and because of the marvelous beauty of her body, and for her remarkable sanctity. Thus, reviewing the lives of all these women, with reason and will, it seemed to me that this one ought to be put before the others. Consequently, this excellent damsel. . .will conclude the section on holy women.

Luna’s extended proof that women are as likely to be as virtuous as men is a catalogue of 115 individual exemplary women. In bringing not only the section on Christian saints but his entire inventory of good women to a close with Catherine, Luna drives home his argument of the moral equality of the sexes set forth in his prologue. There he declares that women, like men, have freewill, which they are able to exercise according to

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an Aristotelian model, joining “prudence, or good sense, to good and polished reasoning and speaking” (LVCM, 22). In the frame of Luna’s fifteenth-century catalogue, Santa Catalina, who uses her rhetorical prowess in the defense of Christianity, is above all a prime example of a virtuous woman who joins learning and prudence to polished reasoning and persuasive speech. Luna highlights the enormous power of Catherine’s radiant virginal beauty, a “beauty so great that it appeared a marvel in everyone’s eyes.” This virginal fermosura blinds the emperor Maxentius with sexual desire but also opens the eyes of the philosophers, Porphyrio, and the Queen, making them receptive to Catherine’s equally enthralling eloquence. Luna’s retelling of the popular legend as well as the many others in which Maxentius not only creates spectacular scenes of debate and torture for Catherine but also voices his sexual desire for her point to the opposed diegetic responses that Catherine’s beauty, preaching, and suffering provoke. She is desirable to the villain, who looks at her with what Sarah Salih has called the “pagan gaze”: the pagan persecutor cannot see through the feminine form and the sweet sounding rhetoric. In contrast, those who can look at her with what I will call, by analogy, the “Christian gaze” are converted, Catherine’s physical beauty and convincing words also incite in others a desire for God equal to her own. This opposition of the sexualized “pagan gaze” and the reverent gaze of the convert suggests possible responses—ideal and improper—imagined by hagiographers to the highly physical imagery they present to their audiences. As Salih argues, the focus on Catherine’s body in the legend is “a staging of the difficulty of reading the body correctly.”23 In many versions of her legend, Catherine’s speech is lauded for its transparent truth, particularly in comparison with the sophistry of the pagan wise men. Karl D. Uitti observes that the legend of St. Catherine is a supreme example of holy women’s rhetorical simplicitas, which “expresses in the most unmediated fashion possible the truth of experience, hence of witness.”24 Nevertheless, although Catherine—as the embodied vehicle and mouthpiece of the logos—speaks with simplicitas, her body and beauty supply the rhetorical coloring and ornamentation that is absent from her speech. Although her refusal of Maxentius’s offer—“I offer my body to Christ, just as he gladly offered his for me; he is my God, and my pastor, and my husband”—conclusively sets her chaste body and the wisdom it contains apart from earthly desire, the narrative’s sustained focus on the beautiful, tortured, starved, and finally decapitated body of the virgin martyr works to hold the audience’s attention (LVCM, 243–45). The hagiographic legend’s staging of opposed methods for decoding the virgin martyr’s body signals an interpretive tension that is present in

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all stories of wise virgins, and, indeed, I would argue, whenever works that employ feminine embodiments of wisdom also take on issues of spirituality and corporeality. Filtered through the proscribed “pagan gaze,” the virgin martyr’s beauty may excite lust, but, through the admiring prescribed Christian gaze, it may inspire emulation and devotion. Characters such as Maxentius model the difficulty of reading allegorically and the importance of not getting caught up in the surface vehicle of meaning, moving instead from the potentially distracting container to its enlightening contents. However, in the manner of all feminine embodiments of wisdom, the saint’s material body has, at the very least, an effect on other characters in the narrative, and, perhaps, the narratorial descriptions of that body also inspired her hagiographic audiences to form attractive imagines agentes in their minds, toward which they may have turned their inward scopophilic gazes. Indeed, the stories of virgin martyrs would lose much of their narrative tension and emotional power if the broken, bleeding, and distinctly female bodies they dwell upon did not supplement the heroines’ impassioned speeches.25 St. Catherine’s story is a powerful tale of positive seduction achieved through the traditionally “feminine” ability to beguile men verbally and physically. In addition to staging the difficulty of reading the relationship between vehicle and tenor in a feminine embodiment of wisdom, that is to say, reading beyond the carnal appearance of a female body, the legend of St. Catherine also stages the supposed cognitive dissonance that the very appearance of a wise virgin generates. In late-medieval texts, Catherine may be portrayed as a sophisticated scholar who combines the learning of the ancients with Christian rhetoric and wisdom, and thus as a champion for women’s moral and intellectual abilities. Alternately, she may be depicted as a “niña tierna sin çiençia” [tender little girl without learning] to whom the truths of Christianity have been revealed through divine grace, and who does not venture into the libraries or debates of learned men, making her stunning knowledge and eloquence all the more surprising.26 In either case, St. Catherine is always presented by hagiographers as a surprising figure, one whose very existence is beyond belief. “An Eloquent Woman Is Never Chaste”27 Regardless of genre and context, in medieval and Early Modern literature, the wise virgin elicits amazement and confusion on the part of her interlocutors, for whom not only wisdom and woman are mutually

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exclusive terms, but also virgin and knowing. Although medieval readerly and cultural horizons of expectations clearly anticipate the figure of the wise virgin, her story also features the concomitant figure of dubitatio, narratorial and diegetic expressions of astonishment at her very existence. Just as the opposed modes of diegetic response to the virginal body model the correct and incorrect readings of the virginal body of knowledge, the interlocutors’ expressions of wonder and confusion model responses to the virgin martyr’s wisdom. In Álvaro de Luna’s version of Catherine’s legend, the Roman emperor, upon hearing the virgin explain the incarnation of the Word “so sharply and wisely,” wonders “at her smooth talk, at her great learning, and at her virginal beauty.” He goes on to remark in dismay, “Esta aqui vna virgen, que rresplandece, por diuinal çiençia, e singular sabidoria, e muy grand valentia de juyzio, la qual confonde a todos los varones claros de çiençia, e afirma que nuestros dioses non son dioses mas demoños.” (LVCM, 244) “There is a virgin here who shines with divine science, and singular wisdom, and great valor of judgment, who confounds all the famed men of science and affirms that our gods are not gods but demons.”

Similarly, in De santa Catalina, the version of the legend included in the Escorial codex mentioned above, the emperor is “frightened” when he first hears the maiden speak because he “could never find a smarter man” than she. Although the philosophers called to Alexandria are at first angered and chide the emperor for exalting the “weak disputations of a maid” (De santa Catalina, 251), their disparagement soon turns to wonder and speechlessness: “fueron los filosofos espantados e quantos otros y estavan e non sopieron cosa que rresponder ante mudecieron todos por la virtud de Dios e fueron torvados e confondidos” [The philosophers and all others present were frightened and they did not know what to respond, rather they were all silenced by the power of God and they were troubled and confused] (De santa Catalina, 265).28 As McInerney observes in her study of eloquent virgin martyrs, medieval legends of well-spoken virgins suggest that “the spectacle of a woman speaking is in and of itself miraculous.”29 Moreover, the loosening of a woman’s tongue was also traditionally associated with marriage and the woman’s entrance into sexual commerce.30 Nevertheless, in the wise virgin’s story, virginity counters the proverbial wisdom that learned and eloquent women are necessarily also sexually knowing. According to proverbial misogynist logic, then, not only is an eloquent woman a contradiction in terms, an eloquent virgin is even more surprising. Virginity,

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despite its metaphorical associations with Christian wisdom, is also associated with verbal reticence. Despite hagiographic and folkloric celebrations of wise and eloquent virgins, their vocal spectacles are “uncomfortably” reminiscent of “the other great exemplar of medieval female excessive speech, the riotous, offensive, and emasculating scold.”31 Feminine verbosity is indeed one of the favorite themes of writers contributing to the misogynist side of the debate, who equate women’s loose tongues with their loose morals. As Alfonso Martínez de Toledo, Arcipreste de Talavera, so delights in telling the audience of his Corbacho, women are naturally talkative, bad listeners, and like to hear the sound of their own voices: La muger ser mucho parlera, regla general es dello: que non es muger que non quisiese siempre fablar e ser escuchada. E non es de su costumbre dar logar a que otra fable delante della; e, si el día un año durase, nunca se fartaría de fablar e non se enojaría día nin noche. E por ende verás muchas mugeres que, de tener mucha continuaçión de fablar, quando non han con quién fablar, están fablando consigo mesmas entre sí. Por ende verás una muger que es usada de fablar las bocas de diez ombres atapar e vençerlas fablando e maldiziendo: quando la razón non le vale, bía a porfiar. (Corbacho, 194) It is a general rule that women are chatterboxes, for there is not a woman alive who does not want to be always talking and listened to. It is not her custom to give another the opportunity to speak in her presence, and if the day lasted a year she would never tire of talking day or night. Thus you will see that many women are so in the habit of talking that they talk to themselves when there is no one else to talk to. You will also see that, with her talking and evil-speaking, a woman can stop the mouths of ten men. (Simpson, 153)

And, indeed, Martínez de Toledo lampoons women’s speech in his sermons by putting seemingly endless streams of nonsensical prattle into their mouths. Affronted by women, he writes of himself, and of all men, as attacked by women, helpless in the onslaught of both seductive and annoying verbiage that issues from women’s mouths and penetrates into the defenseless ears of men.32 Virginity does not wholly eclipse conventional associations between femininity and carnality, but it assures the audiences of both hagiographic and secular tales that, although the wise virgin may confound male sages, she will not confound men in the manner of Solomon’s Strange Woman or Segundo’s beast. Unlike Martínez de Toledo’s verbose and lewd harpies, Catherine confounds the philosophers and her attackers because she does not babble continually and meaninglessly, despite their

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initial expectations. When the legend of St. Catherine of Alexandria is drawn into the larger debate on women’s moral and intellectual qualities, the process of “redoctrination”—that is, the positive presentation of traditionally feminine and negative characteristics—transforms feminine verbosity and the supposedly inherent ability of women to confound and confuse men into positive tools for teaching and proselytizing. Catherine of Alexandria is indeed a scolding confounder of men: she must confound in order to disprove the pagan beliefs of her interlocutors and in order to convert them. Nevertheless, and here is where hopeful positivist feminist critics turn a blind eye to the legend’s import in the medieval Christian imaginary, Catherine’s verbosity is meaningful because her words are not ultimately her own. As the legend makes clear, Christ speaks through her. She, like all personifications, is something of a ventriloquist’s dummy. Luna concludes his retelling of the popular legend by stating that Catherine should be honored as a philosopher greater than Aristotle and even Plato. He avers that the virgin martyr’s preeminence among the philosophers recalls her debate with the fifty “valiant men of science” called to Alexandria only to be defeated by her: their names are lost forever, while hers lives on (LVCM, 244). As we shall see, in the story of Doncella Teodor, a wise virgin similarly triumphs over philosophers, proving the inadequacy of their wisdom and insinuating the insufficiency of their knowledge about Woman in their defense against women. Donzella Teodor If thirteenth-century Castilian readers of the Books of Solomon responded to the incongruity of a feminine embodiment of Wisdom by transgendering Wisdom in their vernacular translations in order to create a figure that was both exegetically and culturally coherent, some Castilian compilers of vernacular wisdom literature also found the feminine personification a useful and piquant heuristic figure. Late-medieval compilers of the widely diffused Bocados de oro included the tale of the wise virgin Teodor as the conclusion to the anthology of sages’ teachings. In Bocados, as in the Books of Solomon and the wisdom tradition as a whole, the implied and often inscribed audience is a young man who is destined for the higher echelons of society, and, given the profound concern with sexuality, femininity, and gender relations in Bocados and in medieval Iberian sapiential literature in general, the appearance of Donzella Teodor as the final bocado, or morsel, in the compendium is intriguing. Bocados’ fifteenth-century audiences would most likely have recognized the story’s similarity to its hagiographic analogue and might have even recalled the use of the familiar tale of the wise virgin in defenses of

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women. Nevertheless, Donzella Teodor supports Bocados’ vision of mastery by offering readers a delightful feminine embodiment of the sum of all wisdom who is a mouthpiece for essential knowledge about the sexual mastery of women. However, the tale of Teodor, in its resemblance to the ludic tales of humiliated sages, “Virgil in the Basket” and the Lai d’Aristote, also conveys an implicit warning about the dangers women pose to men, especially those women whose wit and wisdom rival that of the ancient sages. The story of the wise virgin Teodor is a popular and long-lived tale that has traveled from Arabic and medieval Spanish oral and manuscript sources to the Golden Age stage; multiple printed editions circulated in Spain and Colonial Latin America. Throughout its long journey across languages, continents, and centuries, the story’s tellers, scribes, and editors added and eliminated material.33 In each context, the horizon of expectations and systems of intertextual referentiality changed along with the different intended audiences.34 In the discussion that follows, I read Donzella Teodor as an integral part of Bocados de oro, a reading that is suggested by codicological evidence.35 Indeed, Bocados appears to be the main vehicle for the textual transmission of Donzella Teodor in the fifteenth century: of the five extant medieval manuscript versions of the story, four appear as the concluding chapter of the sapiential compendium. The story of Segundo the misogynist philosopher appears as the conclusion to other manuscript versions of Bocados and as the final chapter in some early printed editions.36 Throughout Bocados, philosophers and historical figures such as Sócrates, Platón, Diógenes, Aristóteles, and Alexandre are introduced with short narratives about their lives and deeds, followed by chapters recording their castigos, or teachings. Bocados functions as a stand-in for the sages, keeping their voices alive in such a way that reading or hearing a work in the medieval sapiential corpus reenacts the pedagogical dynamics of the classrooms of antiquity. Teachings about the nature of Woman fill a significant portion of Bocados. The castigos of the sages attempt to reduce Woman and women to neatly generalized categories that provide the tools for the intellectual mastery of the subject as well as for the mastery of sexual appetites, implicitly understood as mastery of Woman. In addition to reproducing commonplaces of medieval antifeminist discourse, the model of mastery over Woman expounded in Bocados parallels both the Arabic adab tradition and Western medieval academic debates, where Woman also appears as a subject to be studied, known, and mastered.37 The very nature of medieval sapiential literature’s closed system of incontestable facts serves to canonize the wisdom of the ancients and automatically confers the weight of their authority

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upon their misogynist teachings.38 One of the supposedly indisputable truths transmitted from sage to disciple in Bocados and throughout the Iberian sapiential corpus is that Woman is a dangerous creature: unstable, immoral, purely sexual, and consequently always sexually available. Above all, in Bocados, women are one of the preferred topics of sages for displays of rhetorical virtuosity. Even though the sages in Bocados admit the existence of a few good women, they warn that even good women are easily drawn to evil and are best avoided. Individual female characters, with few exceptions, are portrayed as wily tricksters who possess dangerous knowledge and who are always on the lookout for ways to cheat, humiliate, and otherwise take advantage of men, who, once they have entered into contact with women, are incapable of protecting themselves. Aristóteles’ student, Alexandre, for example, is presented as a model avoider of women, even to the point of forgoing his rights as a conqueror: “E quando fueron presas las fijas de Dario, contaron-le de las sus fermosuras, e non las quiso ver, quanto más de fazer otra cosa. E dixo: Fea cosa es que nos vençamos los omes, lidiando con nusco, e que nos vençan sus mugeres, seyendo ellas nuestras presas” [When Darius’s daughters were [Alexandre’s] prisoners and he was told of their beauty, he did not want to see them, not to mention doing anything else [with them]. And he said: “It would be an ugly thing for us to conquer the men, who fought with us, and then to be conquered by the women, who are our prisoners”] (Bocados, 135).39 Diógenes, another model misogynist, admits nevertheless that women are a necessary evil in man’s life: “la muger es mal que non puede ome escusar” [woman is an evil that man cannot avoid] (Bocados, 43), and Sócrates, the ultimate expert on women in Bocados, completes this thought by advising the tempered “use” of female f lesh for the disciple who simply cannot control his heterosexual desire: Si non puedes escusar las mugeres, usa-las como el que usa las carnes mortezinas, que non las come si non con nescesidat, e come d’ellas quanto se govierna, e después dexa-las. E si come d’ellas más de lo que ha menester, matan-lo. (Bocados, 53) If you cannot avoid women, use them like the man who eats carrion, which he wouldn’t eat except in case of necessity and then eats only what is needed and leaves off. And if he eats more than is called for, it kills him.

The longest section on la muger found in Bocados—and, in fact, one of the longest thematic units in the entire compendium—is a series of jocular aphorisms attributed to Sócrates, which, alongside the more sober bocados

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in the compendium, provide comic relief. The first string of Sócrates’ wisecracks serves to validate the affirmation that “non ha mayor estorvador que nescedat, nin peor mal que la muger” [there is no obstacle worse than stupidity and no evil worse than woman]. For example, “E vió a una muger enferma que se non podíe mover en su lecho, e dixo: El mal queda con el mal” [And he saw a sick woman who couldn’t move in her bed, and he said, “Evil stays with evil”]. Sócrates is reportedly most perturbed by the sight of a young woman learning to write, “E vido una moça que deprendíe escrevir, e dixo: Non acrescientes el mal con el mal” [And he saw a damsel who was learning to write and he said, “Do not build upon evil with evil”] (Bocados, 63). In addition to equating woman with evil in his witticisms, Sócrates draws further equivalences between women and fire, women and the stairway to Hell, the company of women and death, the company of women and impotence, and women and “el árbol de la adelfa” [oleander], which is beautiful to look at but is poisonous. Sócrates also advises his disciples to avoid women because they are nearly insurmountable obstacles to gaining and maintaining wisdom and moral goodness: “El que quiere aver poder de demandar la sapiencia, non dé poder a las mugeres sobr’el” [He who wants to seek wisdom should not give women power over himself ] (Bocados, 64). Clearly, within the context of homosocial-sapiential literature, a wise woman would be an astonishing creature. Proverbial quips and wordplay about women’s nature and intelligence and the ridicule of men who are the butts of women’s practical jokes and adulterous schemes are commonplace in many sapiential works. Bocados uses such humor as an attention-getting device in order to captivate and maintain the attention of its inscribed audiences. The laughter provoked in the inscribed audience works as yet another institutionalizing tool in the compendium of wisdom. Sócrates’ jokes about women in Bocados are tendentious and hostile; their content is sometimes sexual, highly aggressive in tone, and they are told primarily for defensive, or prophylactic, purposes. More than in any other section of his teachings, it is in dissertating on Woman that the sage relies upon humor to convey his mastery and to convince his inscribed disciples. In wisdom literature’s intensely misogynist and also highly heteronormative mode, humor is a way of reinforcing misogyny while sublimating the intense gynophobia—and perhaps even the desire—of the sages. It no doubt contributed to and continues to contribute to the popularity of misogynist discourses. An element of tension is introduced into Sócrates’ teachings on women and Woman when his students question the universal nature of the misogynist sage’s pronouncements: “E dixieron-le: Pues alguno

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de nos ha buena madre o buena hermana, ¿es bien de [las] obedescer? E dixo: Abonde-vos lo que vos dixe: todas son semejantes en el mal.” [And they said to him, “What if one of us has a good mother or a good sister, should we not obey her?” And he said, “Content yourselves with what I said, all women are equally evil”]. His students audaciously put forward one of the common defenses of women in medieval debates, that the men who claim superiority over women were born of and nourished by them: E dixieron-le: ¿Cómo denuestas las mugeres? que si non fuese por ellas, non seríes tú nin los otros sabios, que son tales como tú. E dixo: La muger es tal como la palma que ha espinas, e si entran en el cuerpo del ome llagan-lo; pero llieva buenos dátiles. (Bocados, 63–64) And they said to him, “How can you scorn women? If it weren’t for them, you would not exist, nor would the other sages who are like you.” And he said, “Woman is like the palm that has thorns, if the thorns enter a man’s body they wound him, but the tree bears good dates.”

Thus, a nascent debate on the nature of Woman is conclusively silenced in Bocados. The danger of doubting the sages’ teachings about women is confirmed in the versions of Bocados that conclude with the Historia de Segundo. After having been educated in Athens, where he has learned that there is no such thing as a chaste woman, Segundo, the philosopher-hero, decides to visit his family. However, he also decides to put the sages’ teachings to the test, using his own mother as the unwitting subject of his investigations. Disguised, he bribes the maid to allow him to enter his mother’s bed, where he sleeps nestled between her breasts, though she expects something more. In the morning, he reveals his true identity with disastrous results. His mother, upon discovering that she has been willing to commit incest with her son, falls in a swoon and dies. Consequently, Segundo takes a vow of silence. He returns to Athens, where he becomes famous for both his sagacity and his silence. The Emperor Hadrian, intrigued by Segundo’s vow, devises his own test, threatening to decapitate the silent sage if he refuses to speak. Steadfast, Segundo refuses to speak even under pain of death. Pleased, Hadrian asks Segundo a series of questions and riddles that the philosopher answers by writing on a tablet. One of the questions Hadrian poses is, “Qué es la muger?” [What is Woman?], to which Segundo famously replies, “Confondimiento del onbre. . . .”40 In contrast to Segundo, Donzella Teodor, at first sight at least, does not seem to fit neatly into the organic structure of the compendium. As a

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wise, well-spoken, and faithful female, whose story directly contradicts what the preceding chapters have to say about women’s intellectual and moral capacities, Teodor certainly is an exceptional female figure in Bocados. Moreover, like the legend of St. Catherine, Donzella Teodor can be read as an implicit defense of female intellectual ability.41 However, in addition to her intertextual resonances with the wise virgins of hagiography, Teodor is also a literary model of historical Andalusian and Persian expensive slave girls who were educated to delight and entertain men both intellectually and sexually. Teodor thus presents a potent blend of associations to the compendium’s inscribed audience. Within the context of Bocados, the appearance of Teodor as a specifically feminine and sexually titillating embodiment of wisdom suggests a further “use” for the female body in the sapiential tradition. While Segundo reaffirms the sages’ teachings through his disastrous maternal experiment, Donzella Teodor provides a conclusion to Bocados de Oro that not only reaffirms the unchanging nature of wisdom but also delivers its message in the delightful but difficult form of a beautiful, virginal body. In the story of Donzella Teodor, a rich and pious merchant purchases a beautiful slave girl for a great sum of money and teaches her the extent of human knowledge. However, he then falls upon hard times and confides his troubles to his student and slave, Teodor, who then devises a plan for her own resale to the king Abomelique Almançor for the immense sum of 10,000 gold coins. Throughout the preceding chapters of Bocados, the sages have preached the superiority of wisdom to material goods. The final bocado, Donzella Teodor, however, directly links the two. Teodor’s exorbitant price recalls Solomon’s praise for Wisdom and the good wife as “more precious than jewels”: the pecuniary praise for Solomon’s female figures is literalized in the story of Teodor, as are the metaphors describing the legendary sage’s marriage to Wisdom. Teodor instructs her troubled master to buy her fine clothes and cosmetics—afeytamientos—with which she paints her face.42 Readers— both fifteenth- and twenty-first century—familiar with misogynist discourse may, at this point, be reminded of misogynist commonplaces concerning women’s vanity and trickery and the associated use of cosmetics. Teodor thus redirects the traditional feminine wile of falsifying her appearance in order to support her master. Moreover, her use of cosmetics resonates with the praise for learning as an intellectual ornament throughout Bocados. In metaphor after metaphor, wisdom itself becomes an afeyte, and the inscribed reader is encouraged to adorn himself with knowledge. For example, “El enseñamiento es afeitamiento de seso; pues afeita tu seso quanto pudieres” [Learning is the ornament of intelligence; thus adorn your intelligence as much as you can] (Bocados, 12).

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Lowering her veil before the king, Teodor reveals her painted face and recites the extent of her learning. She is like the open book that her story concludes, a compendium that contains and can transmit all the knowledge necessary for a good life: “Señor, yo aprendí la ley y el libro; e aprendí los quatro libros e las siete planetas e las estrellas e las leyes e los mandamientos e el traslado e los prometimientos e las cosas que crió en los cielos; e aprendí las fablas de las aues e de las animalias, e la físyca e filosofía e la lógica e las cosas prouadas e el juego del axedrez; e aprendí tañer laúd e cañon e las treynta e tres trobas; e aprendí las buenas costumbres de leyes; e aprendí baylar e cantar e sotar; e aprendí texer paños de peso; e aprendí labrar paños de seda; e aprendí labrar de oro e de plata e de todas las otras artes e cosas nobles.” (DT, 3–5) “Sir, I have learned law and the book, and about the four winds and the seven planets and the stars and the laws and the orders and the movement and the promises of God and what he created in the heavens. And I learned the speech of birds and animals, and physics, logic, philosophy, and things that have been proven. I also learned chess and how to play the lute and the zither and the thirty three ways of composing; and I learned good legal tradition and how to dance and sing. I also learned how to make cloth of silk and to weave quality cloth and to work with gold and silver. And I learned all the arts and noble things.” (Parker, 39–40)

Moreover, like the humor that tempers Bocados’ didacticism, Teodor’s performance of sapiential mastery will not only be enlightening but also entertaining. Abomelique Almançor responds to Teodor’s recital of her areas of expertise with the typical astonishment found in medieval stories about wise virgins and decides to test her knowledge: she will be examined by the three wisest men in the kingdom to ascertain if she is worth her asking price. Teodor’s first opponent in debate is a físico [physician], whose first lines of questioning concern the humors of the human body and medicinal remedies. After approving of her answers to these factual tests, he asks, “¿Quál cosa es la que encaneçe al omne ante de su tienpo?” [What makes a man’s hair grow white before his time?], and Teodor answers, “La debda descubierta, e la poridad, e yazer con muger vieja, que es pecado mortal” [Debt and the secret which is revealed, and sleeping with an old woman, which is a mortal sin]. Although Teodor has herself already mentioned sexual intercourse, one of the físico’s next questions presents a difficulty in what hitherto has been a seamless performance of mastered categories of wisdom. He asks, “¿Qué dezides del yazer con las mugeres?” [What have you to say about lying with women?] (DT, 7–8; Parker, 40).

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Teodor’s reluctance to answer speaks to the contested compatibility of sagacity and virginal purity: E la donzella, con gran vergüença que ouo, abaxó sus ojos con su rrostro contra tierra; e levantóse el físico en pie e dixo al rrey: “Sabed, señor, que es vençida la donzella, pues que non rresponde a esta demanda.” E dixo la donzella: “Señor, non lo mande Dios, ca yo oue vergüença de vos, porque so yo niña pequeña e so virgen.” E el rrey ouo muy gran amor della, e mandóle que rrespondiese. (DT, 8) And the maiden, with great shame, lowered her eyes and looked at the ground. And the físico arose and said to the king: “Know Sir, that this maiden is defeated because she responds not to this question.” And the maiden said: “Sir, may God forbid. I am ashamed to answer that for I am young and a virgin.” And the king felt a great love for her, and ordered her to answer. (Parker, 40, slightly modified to highlight the importance of the concept of vergüenza and the king’s “gran amor.”)

At the king’s order, Teodor goes on to answer a series of questions on sexual relations between men and women. She declaims: “todo yazer con muger es dolencia” [all lying with women is an ailment], and proceeds to describe the least harmful ways that men can have sexual relations with women (DT, 8; Parker, 40), recalling Sócrates’ advice on the tempered use of female f lesh. Teodor then continues her prolix demonstration of her mastery over Woman by correctly responding to the question about “the ages of women”: “Que la muger de veynte años es commo nobleza; e la muger de treynta años es commo carne con limón; e la muger de quarenta años es de seso; e la muger de cinquenta es para el cuchillo; e la muger de sesenta años es para el otro mundo; e la muger de setenta años es vieja tierra; e la muger de nouenta años—non me preguntedes del ynfierno.” (DT, 9) “The woman of twenty years is like nobility; the woman of thirty is like meat with lemon juice; the woman of forty years is wise; the woman of fifty is ready for the knife; the woman of sixty is ready for the other world; the woman of seventy is old earth; and the woman of [ninety,] don’t ask me of things from Hell.” (Parker, 40–41)

Next, after a brief series of questions on astrology and theology by the other sages, the físico further examines Teodor’s knowledge of the human body, specifically the humors and the eighteen signs of feminine beauty. Teodor’s response is another rhetorical feat, turning the female body into a riddle, lingering over it, taking it apart, and, finally, piecing

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it back together: “Aquella muger es fermosa que es señora de diez e ocho señales. . . .La que es luenga en tres [partes], e pequeña en tres, e ancha en tres, blanca en tres, e bermeja en tres, e prieta en tres. . . .Luenga en tres: que sea luenga de estado, e que aya el cuello largo, e los dedos luengos; e blanca en tres: el cuerpo blanco, e los dientes blancos, e lo blanco de los ojos blanco; e prieta en tres: cabellos prietos, e lo prieto de los ojos prieto, e las cejas prietas; e bermeja en tres: mexillas bermejas, e beços bermejos, e ensías bermejas; e pequeña en tres: boca pequeña, e nariz pequeña, e los pies pequeños; e ancha en tres: ancha de caderas, e ancha de espaldas, e ancha la fruente; e que sea muy placentera a su marido e muy ayudadora, e que sea pequeña de hedad.” (DT, 12–13) “The woman is beautiful who has eighteen signs. . . .She should be long in three [signs], small in three, wide in three, white in three, dark in three and reddish in three. . . .Long in three means that she should be tall, have a long neck and long fingers. White in three means white body, teeth, and the white of the eyes. Dark in three means dark hair, eyebrows, and eyes. Reddish in three means lips, cheeks, and gums; and small in three means small mouth, nose, and feet. And wide in three means wide hips, shoulders, and forehead. And she should be very agreeable to her husband and very helpful and she should be young.” (Parker, 42)

With this description of the perfect sexual and marital partner, the físico admits his defeat, announcing that Teodor is even more learned than he. The third sage, “Abrahen el Trobador,” a Jewish master of grammar and rhetoric, poses a series of riddles to Teodor and offers a wager: “Sy vos me rrespondierdes çiertamente a todo lo que yo vos preguntaré, que yo que vos dé todos los mis paños; sy vos non me rrespondierdes çiertamente, que vos que me dedes los vuestros paños” [If you respond to all of my questions correctly, I will give you all my clothes; if you do not answer well, you give me your clothes] (DT, 13; Parker, 42). The king once again orders Teodor to risk her maidenly modesty for the sake of his pleasure and play this game of intellectual strip poker; Teodor, once again, out-masters the sage and Abraham is shamed, left standing in his underwear after paying her 10,000 gold coins. In her analysis of the topic of Woman as a commonplace in the medieval university debating tradition, Helen Solterer remarks that when women are written into literary versions of such academic debates and placed in the position of disciple and/or disputant, more often than not they become “privileged mouthpieces of clerical wisdom. . .party to clerical claims on the knowledge of women.” Male authors “enlist women

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complicitously” as debaters, depicting them “enunciating the clerical right to possess women’s own secrets,” and such secret knowledge, Solterer argues, reinforces clerical control over women themselves.43 Solterer, however, sees some medieval female disputants, both historical and fictional, as speaking what Burns denominates “body talk,” that is to say, as providing new and positive models of female response to misogynist authoritative texts. As is the case with the legend of St. Catherine, it is at first glance tempting to interpret Teodor, whose story positions a female figure within a philosophical debate, as a female voice that disputes and challenges male authority. And, certainly, in other contexts, Teodor’s story may have been received as a profeminine exemplum. Nevertheless, the content of Teodor’s debate corroborates the canonical misogynist corpus of knowledge in the previous chapters of Bocados. Her responses to the sages’ questions are wholly congruent with the very same male authority against which she is pitted, and Teodor merely repeats what she has learned from her master. Unlike Segundo, she never questions authority. Indeed, in Bocados, this placement of misogynist discourse onto the female tongue becomes a rhetorical strategy for guaranteeing its truth-value. Moreover, when Bocados enlists Teodor as “a privileged mouthpiece” for its teachings on the mastery of sexuality and sexual dealings with women, the “mal que non puede ome escusar,” the attractive female body comes to represent the entire corpus of knowledge about women. In this story, two separate authorities have ordered Teodor to speak— the king and the physician—compelling her to perform verbal intercourse about sexual intercourse. In her answers about women and sexuality, Teodor echoes the sages’ prior teachings on the tempered use of female f lesh and reproduces their models of mastery by reducing women into manageable units and categories. In her answer to the riddle about the eighteen signs, Teodor takes this reduction to a literal extreme. The wise virgin thus triumphs in the erotically charged exam, beating the wise men at their own game of mastery. Teodor’s initial hesitation to answer questions about sexual relations between men and women, as Marta Haro observes, heightens the erotic and narrative tension leading to her triumph in the debate and further emphasizes her initially disadvantaged status in a male-centered intellectual contest. The effect of this tension is arousal: “didactic intention and erotic stimulation are joined in an extremely attractive manner” in Donzella Teodor.44 Abemolique, who is so pleased with Teodor that he gives her another 10,000 coins and offers to take her into his own household, models such stimulation in the story. Teodor’s virginity would seem to assure that she cannot be interpreted as a woman who

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has engaged in the sexual activities that she describes. Rather, she has learned the particulars of amatory techniques by rote, having learned them from her master. He has, as it were, stored up his knowledge within her. After enjoying her sapiential display, the king no doubt anticipates that when Teodor becomes his sexual partner, they will be able to apply her knowledge together. She asks, rather, to be married to her master and the two live in comfort ever after. Although the maiden wins the right to decide about her own immediate future, when she voices her desire to wed her master, the audience is assured that her display of sexual knowledge will not be followed by any disorderly carnal activity.45 Marriage to her master safely contains Teodor within the approved social limits and also protects the merchant’s interests, for not only does he recoup his financial losses thanks to Teodor’s performance, he also gets to keep his intellectually, monetarily, and presumably sexually valuable slave. Like the biblical sage who marries Wisdom, mastering her in marriage, the merchant marries a concrete body of wisdom that represents his own mastery. Teodor is thus deployed in Bocados’ didactic scheme as a lovely embodiment of wisdom that, like Solomon and Augustine’s beloved Wisdom, can be enjoyed by men in their pursuit of a life of the mind where “execrable embraces” with real extratextual women’s bodies may be avoided, or at least controlled through mastery of technique. Caveat sapiens Although Donzella Teodor contributes to the development of such mastery at the close of Bocados, like the Historia de Segundo, it also contains a cautionary message. Within the context of the compendium, the inclusion of the story of Teodor not only insinuates to the compendium’s readers that Sócrates’ assertions about women are perhaps not as univocal as he would have his disciples believe, but also implies a feminine incursion into the homosocial hermeneutic that Bocados and wisdom literature in general celebrate. In its presentation of a female character who not only learns from and wisely advises her master but has also mastered what are supposed to be male disciplines, Donzella Teodor disrupts male-to-male translatio. Further, in Donzella Teodor, the sages, who are the intellectual and spiritual heroes throughout all the previous chapters in the compendium, are not infallible authorities, but, rather, vulnerable pedants; Abrahen el Trobador is even a figure of fun. The humiliated sage is a topic in medieval literature that is often associated with the need for strict sexual discipline. In Bocados, Alexandre avoids

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women because he judges contact with them inherently dangerous, since they are the natural predators of men and will automatically conquer the conquering hero. Alexandre’s supposedly wise policy toward the opposite sex implicitly recalls the embarrassing example provided by his master Aristóteles. Although in Bocados the chapter on Aristóteles includes no sexual scandals, throughout the Middle Ages the great philosopher was also commonly known as the protagonist of the Lai d’Aristote. In the lai, despite the fact that Aristotle harangues his student Alexander about staying away from women, the sage is so carried away by his own lust that he allows his mistress to dress him in a saddle and bridle and ride him into court. Martínez de Toledo gives his version of Aristotle’s downfall in the chapter of his Corbacho dedicated to the downfall of sages, where he also bitterly asserts that, once they have turned their thoughts to sexual activity with women, even the wisest and most learned men lose their learning, self-restraint, and freedom. Nevertheless, Martínez de Toledo has more to celebrate when he recounts a similar anecdote about Virgil, the famed necromancer and poet, who climbs into a basket lowered from the chamber of a woman he desires with the expectation of being pulled up to spend the night with her. The crafty woman leaves him hanging in midascent until the next day, for all of Rome to see. Although Martínez de Toledo admits that women may take pleasure from these tales and revel in the tricks of their foremothers, his intended audience should heed the stories’ warnings and recall Virgil’s revenge: Pues el suso dicho Virgilio sin penetençia non la dexó, que mucho bien pagó a su coamante que apagar fizo en una ora, por arte mágica, todo el fuego de Roma, e vinieron a ençender en ella todos fuego; que el fuego que el uno ençendía non aprovechava al otro, en tanto que todos vinieron a ençender en ella fuego en su vergonzoso lugar, e cada qual para sí, por vengança de la desonra que fecho avía a ombre tan sabio. (Corbacho, 101) Virgil did not let the woman off unpunished, but repaid her handsomely, for by his magic art he extinguished in a single hour all the fire in the whole city of Rome, so that every man came to her to get fire from her privy parts, but the fire that one got did not profit the next and each had to do so for himself—this in revenge for the dishonor she had brought upon so wise a man. (Simpson, 52)

Virgil’s revenge in the form of the collective raping of his crafty mistress thus puts Woman in her place: mastered by rather than mastering the sage. It also clearly illustrates how, in the wisdom tradition, sages turn their own vulnerability to women into occasions for exposing and roundly condemning the wiles and inexhaustible lust of women. In the end, the lesson about the vulnerable sage is a lesson about Woman. As

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in the anecdotes about the saddled Aristotle and Virgil in the basket, in Donzella Teodor a woman outwits sages in a sexually charged situation. Although Teodor is neither the archetypal trickster who leads the sages on only to shame them, nor a provocative riddler, but, rather, the embodiment of knowledge of women, she confounds one sage after another. Her story is a reminder that, for all their mastery, sages may still be humbled even by the most unlikely—female—adversary, who not only may infiltrate the homosocial circle wisdom literature seeks to create and close off but also receive and respond to the sages’ teachings in ways that cannot be brought under their strict control. Donzella Teodor, with its sexual subject matter, appears as an alluring alternate finale to a profoundly misogynist work, where anxiety about women is assuaged only partially by tendentious humor and mastery. In Teodor’s story, the misogynist authority that she reiterates makes women familiar and knowable, thus weaving the wise slave girl into a context where she cannot be overly threatening. Like Augustine’s imagined lover, Teodor serves to keep wisdom between men, but her story also conveys a cautionary message of “anxious masculinity.” It ref lects the same anxiety that led to provoking Sócrates to lambaste women and causes Segundo to vow silence after sexually testing his mother, and that is vented in the stories of humiliated sages. The sages’ humor at once admits the vulnerability of men who must struggle to avoid evil—that is to say women—and seeks to mask such vulnerability through aggression. As Sócrates insists in his comic discourse, although women must be avoided, they must also be studied closely. The versions of Bocados that end with Donzella Teodor conclude with the suggestion that some female figures will escape the maxims of proverbial wisdom that seek to master Woman. Moreover, Teodor herself is a reminder of the dangerous women who entice and confound sages. Teodor’s “body talk” in Bocados simultaneously troubles the homosocial hermenuetic circle and asserts the necessity of continuing male-to-male warnings about women. An Excursus into the Margins The margins of many of the manuscripts containing Bocados are filled with evidence of readers’ responses: hands pointing, crosses, underlining, notes, and glosses all suggest that the work was often used for reference and moral edification, perhaps for compositions of other works and sermons. Marginalia are not only indices of individual and discrete historical responses. Since they permanently alter the appearance of the mise en page, marginal images also affect successive readings. Much in the way that the inclusion of Donzella Teodor adds an element of anxiety in Bocados,

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marginalia that accompany Sócrates’ quips about women in MS 8405, a fifteenth-century manuscript of the compendium in the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid, suggest that the sage’s apparently impregnable homosocial hermeneutic is in reality vulnerable to feminine incursions.46 In addition to the more common f lourishes and annotations, MS 8405 contains human faces and rabbits populating its margins. Such small representational figures belong to a type of secondary manuscript decoration called a cadel, meaning “a little gift, or something ‘extra.’ ”47 In MS 8405, a f lourisher or some other reader of the text has drawn two truncated figures stemming from the woman-hater’s words on folio 63vb (figure 4.1). They appear in the upper right corner of the second column on the page, emerging from the words “el mas” in Sócrates’ explanation of man’s relation to goodness: “El bueno en el mas alto estado [es] quando puna de aver las bondades por sí” [The good man is in the highest estate when he strives to have goodness for its own sake] (63vb). One is most definitely gendered female and the other, although more ambiguous, seems to be wearing a headdress indicating feminine attire. Both have reddened cheeks, which may represent rouge. The right-hand cadel has one arm raised, perhaps gesticulating. Unlike these two faces on folio 63v, the other marginal faces scattered throughout MS 8405 bear no marks of gender. The figure on the left appears to make direct eye contact with the extratextual reader, while the other casts her gaze toward the first column of the page, which contains Sócrates’ final, corrosive remarks on women, which include: “E dixieron-le por que fuyes delas mugeres. E dixo por que veo que fuyen ellas del bien e van al mal. . . .E al que las mugeres tienen en poder, es muerto maguer sea bivo” [And they asked him, “Why do you f lee from women?” And he said, “Because I see that they f lee from goodness and go toward evil. . . .And he who is in women’s power is dead although he lives”] (Bocados, 64). Freud’s classic theory on tendentious and smutty jokes would seem to lend itself perfectly to the triangular relationships between sage, imagined reader(s), and the marginal figures at work in this folio. For Freud, hostile and “dirty” jokes are a substitute for sexual activity in which desire is sublimated into salacious speech acts, but they are only effective if there are three characters involved: the teller, the interlocutor, and the butt of the joke. The success of the joke lies not in the narrator’s delivery, but in the anticipation or implication of pleasure, and in the bond created between the teller and the receiver; although the butt, a desired woman, is left out of the verbal intercourse, she is marginalized and shamed.48 In Bocados, Sócrates tells the jokes, his diegetic disciples as well as the inscribed male readers are its receivers, and Woman is the butt. The cadels accompanying Sócrates’ dialogue may have been drawn

Figure 4.1 f. 63v.

Cadels, Bocados de Oro, Biblioteca Nacional de España, MS 8405,

Source: By permission of the Biblioteca Nacional de España.

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in response to the jokes, as the visual targets of the philosopher’s derision and as representations of the women upon whom the sage gazes and then insults. Alternately, the figures sprouting from the philosopher’s words also suggest the behavior of women, as defined by the sages, who escape in a typically cunning “feminine” manner from the monologic authority of Sócrates’ discourse. A further possibility is that the gaze of these marginal women—whose heads f low in f lourishes from the sage’s words, making them literally “excurses” and literally “marginalized”—penetrates the carefully and anxiously homosocial interpretive circle created by the self-mystifying sapiential text. The third party that gazes into the philosopher’s discourse and should complete the tendentious joke’s triangular structure may also be evaluating the center from the margins. Thus, the cadels also suggest that Sócrates’ joke is not performing precisely according to a homosocial and triangular model. Michael Camille has applied another aspect of Freudian joke and dream theory to marginalia, remarking upon their “peculiar brevity,” “condensation,” “multiple use of the same material,” as well as their “double meaning and allusion.” As Camille suggests, marginalia may provide modern readers with glimpses of the medieval unconscious at work in manuscript production, ref lecting dreamlike resurgences of what is repressed in the center: “The margins, as we have often seen, represent things excluded from official discourse.”49 Naomi Schor’s elaboration of the reading strategy she terms “clitoral hermeneutics” provides another useful tool for exploring this feminine presence in the margins of Sócrates’ discourse and in sapiential literature as a whole. Blending a psychoanalytic perspective with a feminist consciousness, Schor elaborates “a hermeneutics focused on the detail, which is to say on those details of the female anatomy generally ignored by male critics and which significantly inf luence our readings of the texts in which they appear”; for Schor, “the clitoris is coextensive with the detail.”50 Clitoral hermeneutics highlights a text’s “odd eccentric textual details,” eroticized parts of the female body that catch the paranoid reader’s attention, thus presenting a “hitch” in narratives.51 Indeed, the cadels supplementing the misogynistic jokes attributed to Sócrates seem to be troubling gifts. The faces that sprout from the sage’s words and peer into them from their enclosures in f lourishes raise questions concerning readerly and narrative gazes. In Bocados, the cadel, the little something extra in the margins, creates a “hitch” in Sócrates’ narrative. The female presences in the margins of Sócrates’ textual world in MS 8405 serve as a reminder to the intended audience of their presence in the real world, where, as the ever-vigilant sages warn, no man is safe. Sapiential literature abounds in such “hitches.”

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Doubt and Confusion The embodiment of wisdom at the end of Bocados recalls Sócrates’ preference for the direct, soul-to-soul transmission of wisdom over its transmission via the written word: “E tanto quiso onrrar la sapiencia, de guisa que destorvó a los filosofos que vinieron después d’él, que el teníe por bien de non meter la sapiencia en pargaminos. E dezíe, por que la sapiencia es cosa linpia e santa, non nos conviene de la poner si non en las almas vivas, e non en los pellejos muertos” [So greatly did he wish to honor wisdom, that he admonished the philosophers who came after him that he held it to be good not to store wisdom in parchments. And he said, “Wisdom is an unsoiled and sacred thing and it does not behoove us to put it in any thing but in live souls, and not in dead skins”] (Bocados 45). This Platonic preference for speech over writing explains the dual horror the philosopher expresses upon seeing a woman learning to write. For Sócrates, the philosopher’s body becomes a codex of the living word of wisdom. Teodor concretizes the image of wisdom written onto, and then contained within, the living soul, rather than in dead skins. Yet she herself is transmitted “en pellejos muertos,” recalling the curious and memorable mix of textuality and corporeality in personification allegory. Teodor, as the concretization of wisdom and its worth, is a figure for the book itself—a book that Sócrates would not have approved of—and a source of instruction and delight, a prized and attractive object that can be opened and examined. Both the tale of the learned slave girl and the legend of the wise virgin martyr suggest the difficulty of correctly reading the bodies in feminine embodiment. Curiously, as embodiments of knowledge about women, Catherine and Teodor are particularly transparent personifications, that is to say, the knowledge of women that they convey is congruent with the concrete feminine outlines of their characters. However, both Catherine and Teodor are portrayed in medieval narratives as the simultaneous purveyors of confusion and enlightenment. This tension and its expression in consternation and amazement arise, I would argue, because in addition to the supposedly incongruous fusion of wisdom and woman, and the diverse stores of wisdom their narrative genres seek to transmit, the wise virgins also embody the anxiety provoked by a woman who masters the master-text. Stories of wise virgins are filled with rhetorical dubitatio, generated by the surprised recognition that narrative reality contrasts with readerly and narratorial expectations aroused by the appearance of “tender little girls” who debate. This rhetorical strategy points to aporias in the seemingly airtight logic of sapiential definitions of Woman and gender

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relations. However, dubitatio also serves to smooth over the very hitches it presents. The dissonance between the proverbial knowledge about women, such as that expressed in the ancient sages’ misogynist diatribes, and the intellectual performance of the wise virgin can be somewhat reconciled and assuaged by defining a wise virgin, be she saint or slave girl, as an astonishing anomaly. In the context of hagiography, the astounding nature of Catherine’s wisdom and eloquence serves to encourage the audience’s worshipful admiration; other characters’ doubt and surprise confirm the truly astonishing quality of her sanctity. Dubitatio takes on an additional valence when the saint’s legend appears as a profeminine proof in the context of the late-medieval literary debate on women. For Luna, for example, Catherine is still an amazing creature, but he also mediates the dissonance between her story and the commonplaces about women’s intellectual inferiority by confounding those who ape the misogynist authorities. In Bocados, on the other hand, the dissonance not only troubles the supposedly seamless weave of the sages’ authority but also serves as a reminder that men, no matter how wise, must continually be on their guard against women and their ability to confound.

CHAPTER 5 SOR JUANA AND ST. CATHERINE: FROM BLOOD MARTYRDOM TO A HOLOCAUST OF THE INTELLECT

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n their stories, Catherine of Alexandria and Doncella Teodor elicit the amazement and confusion of their challengers because, as virgins and as women, they defy the sages’ inherited and hitherto unquestioned misogynist definitions of wisdom and woman. In the late seventeenth century, a “wise virgin” from colonial New Spain also created quite a stir in both literary and religious circles: renowned for her erudition and literary skill, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz became a legend in her own time and acquired near-beatific status soon after her death.1 It seems that learned women were indeed scarce in the New World. In both Protestant and Catholic countries in the seventeenth century, women’s education declined. Stephanie Merrim characterizes this shift as “a misogynist backlash against whatever enlightened attitudes toward women had arisen from humanist, Erasmian, or Reformation ideologies. . .The scores of women humanists with a broader training of earlier years had shrunk in the seventeenth century to the exceptional Tenth Muses—sometimes to one icon, if any, per country.”2 Sor Juana became just such an icon. As such, she inspired a great deal to be written to and about her. In this f lood of textual production, the feminine imagery that is so familiar from the wisdom tradition reappears. Rather than attempt to contribute to the academic sorjuanistas’ valuable investigations into the historical Juana de Asbaje’s life and society, my aim in this chapter is to reevaluate how Sor Juana, her champions, and her critics made use of the large-scale tropes common to the texts and contexts in which women represent wisdom and translatio studii. The Baroque literary imagination delights in classical allusions and associations, jumping quickly from one trope or commonplace to another.

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Sor Juana’s encomiasts bestowed many iconic titles upon her, including “Minerva,” “Phoenix of the New World,” “Monster of Nature,” “Mujer Fuerte,” and “Tenth Muse,” a title also conferred upon the Virgin Mary and St. Catherine of Alexandria. Sor Juana’s ecclesiastical superiors also took recourse to canonical imagery of wise virgins in their efforts to convince her to sacrifice her literary talent and scientific curiosity to monastic obedience and the seventeenth-century ideal of santa ignorancia [holy ignorance], the strict limitation of knowledge to just that sufficient for worship and meditation.3 Her Peninsular readers’ f lamboyant praise and highly rhetorical admiration were the converse of the hyperbolic and strident remonstrance she received from confessors and archbishops on the other side of the Atlantic. Nevertheless, both responses to Sor Juana work to create her as a type; detractors and admirers alike depended upon canonical imagery to ground their reception of both Sor Juana herself and her prolific literary output. The letters, laudatory poems, and biography of Sor Juana composed in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries impose rhetorical control upon a figure that not only confounded traditional ideas about the incompatibility of wisdom and the feminine but also fit the familiar allegorical pairing of wisdom and woman.4 A woman self-educated in the same textual traditions as both her admirers and her critics, Sor Juana likewise appropriated wisdom imagery in her hagiographic compositions and in her autobiographical works. The legend of Catherine of Alexandria provided Sor Juana with an authoritative model for her literary self-fashioning and for her defense of women’s intellectual potential. However, the legend proved equally important in the imposition of a martyr model upon Sor Juana’s life by her male ecclesiastical superiors and admirers, which was in many ways antithetical to her championing of feminine intellectual potential and her own dedication to study. In addition to the hagiographic model, the biblical corpus of Solomonic literature provided Sor Juana’s commentators with the somewhat incongruous epithet of mujer fuerte, applied to her in the introductory materials in the Inundación Castálida [The Flood from the Muses’ Springs], the first volume of her work published in Spain in 1689, the Segundo Volumen [Second Volume] published in 1692, and in the Fama y obras póstumas [Fame and Posthumous Works] published in 1700. When Sor Juana’s devotees called her a “strong/masculine woman,” they referred to Solomon’s legendary and supposedly fruitless quest to the far reaches of the earth in search of a good woman, thus inserting the historical Mexican writer into the proverbial and sapiential tradition of mastery, a tradition that, as we have seen, also provided a paradigm for envisioning how feminine wisdom figures draw men together.

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Sor Juana and La rosa de Alejandría Baroque hagiography celebrating the lives of both new and traditional female saints was in constant interplay with its classical and medieval models. Although the Council of Trent reaffirmed the traditional cult of the saints, Counter-Reformation hagiography and spiritual practices produced and promoted changing ideals of sanctity, as represented by Teresa de Ávila and the steadily increasing number of New World martyrs and ascetics. Pedro de la Vega’s life of St. Catherine of Alexandria, La rosa de Alejandría, first published in Mexico in 1672, presents a familiar yet altered image of the virgin martyr by portraying an intelligent but ultimately silent and submissive saint. Vega sought to offer the most compendious and historically accurate rendition of the life, passion, and miracles of a saint known for her intelligence, while also providing a role model for pious women in an era in which the ideal of feminine piety involved the post-tridentine standard of “holy ignorance.” It seems reasonable to assume that Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz read La rosa de Alejandría. Of the two aprobaciones that accompany this vita, one is by none other than Antonio Núñez de Miranda, Sor Juana’s confessor. When the first edition of La rosa de Alejandría appeared, Sor Juana had recently entered the convent of San Jerónimo with Núñez’s support. Although Vega’s text does not anticipate a female reader—rather, the ideal audience is clerical, including those who direct and preach to women—it is not unlikely that Núñez considered Vega’s version of the life, passion, and miracles of the wise virgin martyr exemplary reading for his learned spiritual daughter. La rosa de Alejandría, like many Baroque saints’ lives, is a virtuosic feat of amplification.5 Its 300-odd pages are divided into twelve rosicleres, or chapters: eleven are devoted to Catherine’s mystical marriage to Christ and exemplary attributes, the twelfth addresses her patronage and miracles.6 Vega devoted considerable rhetorical dexterity to his reconstruction of a saint who had appeared time and again in medieval and Early Modern profeminine works. Throughout La rosa de Alejandría, Vega’s hagiographic and didactic strategy is the opposite of the redoctrination employed by medieval profeminine texts, which sought to turn traditionally feminine—and, consequently, negative—character traits into positive features. Indeed, Vega finds a rationale for “holy ignorance” and obedience to authority in the very activities that medieval profeminine authors had used in their arguments—St. Catherine’s erudition and preaching. Considering Vega’s reconstructive strategy in the vita, it is not surprising that the rosicler devoted to Catherine’s wisdom is the shortest chapter in the book and the only occasion in which Vega chooses abbreviatio over

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amplificatio as a stylistic device. In fact, the central event of her legend, the debate with the pagan philosophers, is almost entirely omitted. Vega tersely records it in the following way: “Citò aqui la erudita Virgen mucha copia de lugares de los mas cèlebres Autores, tan punctual en las citas, que la admiraba yà el concurso vna animada Bibliotheca” [Here, the erudite Virgin quoted abundantly the sententiae of the most celebrated Authors, she was so exact in her quotes that the debaters admired her as an animated library] (RA, 125).7 Vega is careful to highlight Catherine’s exact repetition of Church authorities; she is a walking library, a repository of sacred teachings. While Vega glosses over Catherine’s famous speech, he provides readers with a list of theological works that contain the same teachings as those she is supposed to have delivered in the Roman arena, so that the reader may plan a course of study and emulate her considerable erudition. Prominent among them are Augustine’s City of God and Juan Luis Vives’s commentaries on Augustine. Thus, Vega firmly grounds, in addition to the otherworldly source of Catherine’s eloquence, the saint’s speech in patristic authority. Moreover, Vega makes it abundantly clear that Catherine’s study of secular literature is not to be emulated: her wide reading and exceptional prudence proves that women’s reading matter should be limited to “graves sentencias” [serious teachings] (RA, 14–15). He argues that if Catherine read the Greek philosophers and patristic theologians, then seventeenth-century women should not read anything but Catholic devotional literature, and, if Catherine preached and spoke eloquently, then women should imitate her by keeping silent. Consequently, in La rosa de Alejandría, Catherine’s legendary intelligence and profuse studies become, by virtue of antiphrasis, a defense of “santa ignorancia.” Vega also took advantage of every opportunity to intercalate sermonic passages on correct feminine behavior as well as long digressions on the general depravity of women, to show that Catherine is to be understood as a “glorious exception.” In order to resolve the conundrum faced by an author who presents a female figure as the embodiment of wisdom but also must firmly assert the incongruity of wisdom and woman, Vega echoes conventional praise for holy women who must rise above their sex to achieve sanctity. He explains why “woman” is the most extraordinary of all of Catherine’s attributes: Muger te formò el Cielo, porque fueras à èl, y al mundo mucho asombro. No te llamarè, no, Diosa para encarecer tu grandeza, que no han menester tus prendas essas mentidas lisonjas. Apellidarète muger, porque en aqueste apellido està tu elogio mas realzado. Esse tu obrar tan heroyco desmiente la realidad de tu sexo. (RA, 142–43)

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Heaven made you a woman, so that you might belong to it and be an amazement to the world. No, I will not call you a goddess in order to extol your greatness; your gifts have no need of such false f lattery. I will call you woman because your highest praise rests in that name. Your heroic works belie the reality of your sex.

Vega portrays the incompatibility of wisdom and femininity as particularly evident in his day by distancing Catherine’s learnedness both chronologically and culturally from seventeenth-century women: Era en Egypto Alexandria, lo que Athenas en la Grecia, madre de todas las ciencias, y emporio ilustre de ambas Filosofias la Natural, y Moral: y acostumbrabase en aquellos dorados siglos juntar las mugeres con las labores del lienzo los caratères del papel, cursando Escuelas, aun para graduarse de Doctoras: y quanto en la sangre mas nobles, tanto en las ciencias mas insignes. (RA, 13) Alexandria was to Egypt what Athens was to Greece: mother of all the sciences, and illustrious emporium of both philosophies, Natural and Moral; in those golden centuries, women were accustomed to join their needlework with written characters on paper, studying in the schools and even graduating as doctors: the nobler their blood, the more they excelled in learning.

The vita then trenchantly bemoans the manner of educating “las donzellas de aora” [maidens of our time] and suggests that the ancient, albeit pagan, system would benefit seventeenth-century society, if only young women could pursue their studies with the modesty of the virgin martyr Catherine, who never read anything that might lead her to vain thoughts or let “the poison of sweet words” seduce her: “no. . .atendìa à lo dulce engañoso del estilo en los Poetas, que estudiaba, y Oradores que aprendìa; sino à lo util de la sentencia, y lo honesto de la enseñanza” [She paid no attention to the sweet tricks of style in the poets and orators that she studied; rather, she heeded what was useful in their meanings and what was honest in their teachings]. He continues, “Estudiaba para vivir como prudente. . . .Leía para portarse como Sabia” [She studied in order to live prudently. . . .She read in order to behave like a wise woman]. Nor did the saint boast of her intellectual abilities as—according to Vega—many presumptuous literate women do: “No hazìa alarde de entendida con desdoros de Bachillera” [She did not show off her intelligence like a woman who presumes too much of her education and never stops talking] (RA 14). Thus, in addition to her prudent reading habits, one of Catherine’s most important traits in the seventeenth-century scheme is her modesty, humility, and reticence. Vega makes Catherine a representative of rhetorical brevity

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and simplicitas, typified by the unadorned and unlearned speech of the female biblical characters who witnessed the life and passion of Christ.8 Rosicler V, entitled “Su Pureza” [Her Purity], presents an extended metaphor in which Catherine is the catedrática [chair] of theology at the University of Mount Sinai from whence she teaches the wise philosophers lessons in Divinity. However, while Catherine plays an important role in the education of men, Vega explains, her professorship bequeathed a nonintellectual lesson to her seventeenth-century female devotees. For them, the professorial robes Catalina won in martyrdom are not symbols of knowledge, but rather, symbols of modesty: O que provechosas lecciones dà Catalina aqui à las Virgines! Todas son leyes, que deben aprender quantas se quieren salvar: la modestia en los adornos, la honestidad en los juegos, la compostura en los ojos, la cautela en los peligros, la constancia en los trabajos, la fortaleza en los martyrios, la que fuere digna de ellos. (RA, 242–43) Oh, what beneficial lessons Catherine here gives to Virgins! They are all precepts that those who wish to be saved should learn: modesty in adornments, honesty in games, moderation and self-control of the eyes, caution in dangers, constancy in trials, fortitude in martyrdom, she who would be worthy of them.

Vega’s strategy of redoctrination concludes in the final rosicler, which recounts a series of Catherine’s miracles. Most of those who benefit from Catherine’s intercession in these miracle stories are men, for example, university students whose devotion to the virgin martyr allows them to study without the obstacles of marriage and other entanglements with women. Much in the way that Augustine praised his own and other sages’ love for Wisdom, the miracle tales teach that Catherine is the only female figure whom men who would be learned should love. The final miracle included by Vega in La rosa de Alejandría translates Catherine’s patronage from a European University setting, where male students and professors are the recipients of her benevolence, to a hospital for the poor in colonial Mexico where the virgin martyr assists the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene in ministering to a dying Mexican woman. As the old woman lies wasting away in a humble cot, refusing to eat, despite the efforts of doctors and nurses, she sees what she thinks are three wealthy and pious Spanish women making a charitable visit to the hospital. These three beautiful and richly attired women hand-feed delicious foods to the patients. The sick woman’s curiosity is piqued, and when the three “hermosissimas señoras” [supremely beautiful ladies] reach her bed, she “no solo sentía ganas de comer, sino una dulcíssima ternura, que le

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bañaba toda el alma” [not only felt the desire to eat, but also the sweetest tenderness that bathed her entire soul] (RA, 344–45). Throughout the scene, Catherine remains the silent attendant of the Virgin. Rather than study and preach, this New World Catherine devotes herself to service and charity. Vega concludes the miracle by urging the criollas of Mexico to do away with their lazy and fastidious ways and emulate Catherine’s assistance to the Virgin Mary by attending to the sick and poor. Thus, the miracle collection of the final rosicler clearly divides imitation of the saint along gendered lines. Men may look to Catherine’s traditionally most salient feature, her learnedness, and imitate her devotion to study and her disdain for worldly pleasures—including the company of women—while women may imitate only her modesty and verbal reticence, employing themselves in charitable works. “Haec stupor est mundi”: Sor Juana Debates the Sages The learned but reticent virgin martyr portrayed by Pedro de la Vega casts a long shadow over the remonstrations and panegyrics written about Sor Juana. First published in 1700 as the Aprobación to a volume entitled Fama, y obras póstumas del fénix de México, dezima musa, poetisa americana, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Diego de Calleja’s Vida de Sor Juana is a celebration of the colonial icon, infused with hagiographic topoi and hyperbole. In addition to the first biography of Sor Juana, the Fama contains sonnets, romances, décimas, and acrostics that elegize her intelligence and wit and poetically wonder that a woman, let alone a woman born far from the civilized world, at the very ends of the earth, could distinguish herself in the “Republic of letters.”9 Expressing some trepidation at the prospect of retelling what might seem a fantastic occurrence, Calleja’s Vida reports that at the tender age of sixteen, Juana Inés debated the forty wisest men in New Spain: exegetes, theologians, mathematicians, historians, poets, and humanists, all gathered in the viceregal court. Calleja asserts that he would not have included the anecdote were it not for the eyewitness testimony of the viceroy himself, the Marqués de Mancera: Atestigua el señor Marquès que no cabe en humano juizio creer lo que viò. . .“à la manera, que un Galeon Real se defenderìa de pocas Chalupas. . .assi se desembaraçaba Juana Inès de las preguntas, argumentos, y réplicas, que tantos, cada uno en su classe la propusieron. ¿Què estudio, què entendimiento, què discurso, y què memoria serìa menester para esto?”

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The Marquis attests that what he saw was beyond the bounds of human understanding. . .“just as a royal galleon would fend off a few canoes. . .so did Juana Inés strike down the questions, arguments and responses that each sage asked in his own discipline. What learning, what understanding, what discourse and what memory could possibly do this?” (Vida, 21–22; emphasis original)

This account is a favorite among both Sor Juana’s Early Modern and more recent readers, who often seem to share the Marqués’s wonder at the young girl’s miraculous display of erudition. Although many scholars have called Calleja’s Vida de Sor Juana hagiography rather than biography, critics, in fact, tend to echo Calleja, celebrating the debate as a remarkable feat.10 Arguably, however, the Vida owes its debate scene as much to folkloric and hagiographic models as to historical events. The resemblance of the debate recounted in the Vida to the stories of wise virgins discussed in the previous chapter is self-evident, as is Calleja’s report of Sor Juana’s victory. It is, of course, impossible to ascertain the inf luence of the legend of Catherine of Alexandria and the tale of Doncella Teodor in Calleja’s biography. If the debate in the colonial viceregal court did indeed take place, it may also have been an event staged as a conscious imitation of the hagiographic and sapiential models. Sor Juana’s other panegyrists echo the Marquis and Calleja in their amazement, calling her, among other sobriquets, “prodigio estraño” [strange prodigy] (Fama 49), “Monstruo de la Sabiduría” [Monster of Wisdom] (Segundo Volumen 33), and “stupor mundi” [amazement of the world] (Segundo Volumen 32). In the Fama, Felipe Santoyo’s poem lamenting Sor Juana’s death proclaims: “No fue muger aunque el sexo como à tal la reconoce” [She was not a woman, even though her sex shows her as such] (197). In the Segundo Volumen, Gaspar Franco de Ulloa uses familiar language to describe Sor Juana’s relation to the world of wisdom: the wise nun “confunde toda la Sabiduría de los Varones mas excelentes” [confounds all the wisdom of the most excellent men] (37). In addition to Calleja’s hagiobiography, the Fama, y obras póstumas also contains Sor Juana’s Carta Atenagórica or Crisis de un sermón (1690), written to contest the widely admired Portuguese Jesuit Antonio de Vierya’s Sermón del Mandato (1650), the Carta de Sor Filotea (1690), written by Manuel Fernández de Santacruz, the Bishop of Puebla, under a feminine pseudonym in response to Sor Juana’s Carta Atenagórica, and Sor Juana’s Respuesta a Sor Filotea (1691). These three texts constitute Sor Juana’s historical textual debate with “wise men” of the New World. Moreover, this textual debate also displays Sor Juana’s own autobiographical selffashioning as well as her interlocutors’ attempts to define her according to

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known types—and thus confine her within them—in response to what was, for them, her confounding and unthinkable nature. Vierya’s Sermón del Mandato had contested patristic interpretations of Christ’s commandment from the Gospel according to John: “love one another, as I have loved you,” and Sor Juana’s Carta Atenagórica was a defense of the Church fathers. Nevertheless, “Sor Filotea” used Sor Juana’s challenge to the famous orator as an occasion to attack her scholarly endeavors. The Bishop’s letter begins with theological issues, but is profoundly concerned with the nature and correct use of women’s intelligence as well as its public expression.11 The model wise virgin, St. Catherine is an allusive presence throughout this epistolary debate. The Carta de Sor Filotea makes no explicit reference to St. Catherine of Alexandria, but it is dated on her feast day, November 25. The Bishop was undoubtedly familiar with the liturgical calendar and the implications of the date; it is quite reasonable to assume that he had the archetypal wise virgin in mind when, in the guise of a compassionate spiritual sister, he signed his invective to a real wise virgin who had become a thorn in his side. The Carta de Sor Filotea opens by remarking that wise men should “gloriarse de verse impugnados de una mujer que es honra de su sexo” [congratulate themselves for being challenged by a woman who is the honor of her sex]. “Sor Filotea” then makes some rather backhanded compliments about Sor Juana’s poetry and reprimands her for not having employed her talents to better ends in the past, urging her to imitate Teresa de Ávila by writing verses on divine subjects. From this rather gentle admonishment the missive progresses to the pith of the Bishop’s virulent attack, calling her studies and writing her “ruina” [ruin], berating her for attending to the “rateras noticias de la tierra” [base subjects of this world], and going so far as to accuse Sor Juana of never having taken the time to read the Gospels (SF, 2–5).12 It may seem strange that the Bishop of Puebla leveled his attack on Sor Juana’s humanistic studies in what is supposedly a response to a profoundly theological work. However, his message is clear: Sor Juana, in order to serve the Church, should refrain from humanistic and scientific studies and keep her opinions on famous orators to herself. If she is to be like St. Catherine, she is to be like Pedro de la Vega’s reconstructed saint, and not like Álvaro de Luna’s triumphant virgin, whose name will outlast those of all the ancient sages. Sor Juana responded to the letter with what has become the most famous of her autobiographical works: the erudite and highly intertextual Respuesta a Sor Filotea. As Frederick Luciani cogently argues, in the Respuesta the author crafts an image of herself that follows a recognizable master-plot and also underscores “the very acts of reading, research, exegesis, and writing that constitute the self-fashioning process.”13 The

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Respuesta’s eloquent defense of Sor Juana’s devotion to study and literary activities is also an elaboration of her earlier autobiographical Autodefensa (c. 1681), addressed to her confessor Antonio Núñez de Miranda. In both, the defense is grounded in the authority of the same doctors of the church she sought to defend in her Carta Atenagórica. In the Autodefensa, she poses the questions: “¿Las letras estorban, sino que antes ayudan la salvación? ¿No se salvó San Agustín, San Ambrosio y todos los demás Santos Doctores? Y Vuestra Reverencia, cargado de tantas letras, ¿no piensa salvarse?” [Does learning hamper rather than help salvation? Were not St. Augustine, St. Ambrose, and all the other doctors of the church saved? And Your Reverence, filled with so much learning, do you not think of being saved?] Anticipating her confessor’s objection that the Santos Doctores are men, and, therefore, that she must not look to them as models, she continues, “¿No estudió Santa Catarina, Santa Gertrudis, mi Madre Santa Paula, sin estorbarle a su alta contemplación, ni a la fatiga de sus fundaciones, el saber hasta griego? ¿El aprender hebreo?. . .¿Sólo a mí me estorban los libros para salvarme?” [Did not St. Catherine and St. Gertrude study? And my mother St. Paula, did she not study, even to the point of learning Greek without interfering with her heavenly contemplation or robbing energy from her foundation [of convents]? Learning Hebrew?. . . .Am I the only one for whom books are an obstacle to salvation?].14 In the Bishop’s acerbic Carta de Sor Filotea, martyrdom is exalted over learning. While, in theory, “Sor Filotea” defends the right of women in general to study “divine letters,” the Bishop stresses the fact that women should not take their intellectual and literary development too far: “letras que engendran elación, no las quiere Dios en la mujer, pero no las reprueba el Apóstol cuando no sacan a la mujer del estado de obediente” [God does not want women to have learning that engenders pride, but the Apostle does not condemn learned women when their learning does not remove them from their state of obedience]. From this generalization the Bishop moves to Sor Juana’s particular case: “Notorio es a todos que el estudio y el saber han contenido a V. Md. en el estado de súbdita y que la han servido de perfeccionar primores de obediente” [It is well known to all that study and knowledge have kept Your Worship in a state of submission and that they have served you in the perfection of your skills of obedience]. The Bishop then urges her to be as obedient to the Church as she has been to her studies by sacrificing her intellect. Sor Juana must turn intelligence and eloquence into obedience and martyrdom: “pues si las demás religiosas, por la obediencia, sacrifican la voluntad, V. Md. cautiva el entendimiento, que es el más arduo y agradable holocausto que puede ofrecerse en las aras de la Religión” [for if other nuns, in

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obedience, sacrifice their wills, Your Worship should tame your intellect, which is the most arduous and agreeable holocaust that can be offered to the altar of Religion] (SF, 3–4). Through “Sor Filotea” the Bishop asserts clearly that the correct role for an extraordinary religious woman is that of martyr rather than theologian. In the Respuesta, Sor Juana, like Calleja, embroiders her life with saintly threads, but the threads are worked to different ends.15 She portrays herself as a childhood prodigy with an ascetic bent, uninterested in the normal games of young girls, and, later, as a young woman determined never to marry. Sor Juana takes special care in spelling out the relationship between her drive for learning and the soul’s drive for knowledge of divinity; she, like centuries of Christian scholars before her, must first understand the seven liberal arts before she can dare to study theology, the “Queen of the Sciences.” Sor Juana also responded to the Bishop by describing her desire to become a doctor of theology and its interdiction by her superiors as a peculiar sort of martyrdom. In the Respuesta, her desire for learning is cast in language reminiscent of the mystic’s desire for an intimate union with divinity; it is an overpowering force in her life from childhood on, a desire that is not chosen but, rather, divinely inspired.16 She wrote of herself as one “possessed” by an intense drive: El escribir nunca ha sido dictamen propio, sino fuerza ajena; que les pudiera decir con verdad: Vos me coegistis. Lo que sí es verdad que no negaré (lo uno porque es notorio a todos, y lo otro porque, aunque sea contra mí, me ha hecho Dios la merced de darme grandísimo amor a la verdad) es que desde que me rayó la primera luz de la razón, fue tan vehemente y poderosa la inclinación a las letras, que ni ajenas reprensiones—que he tenido muchas—, ni propias ref lejas—que he hecho no pocas—, han bastado a que deje de seguir este natural impulso que Dios puso en mí. (Respuesta, 46)17 My writing has never proceeded from any dictate of my own, but from a force beyond me; I can in truth say, “You have compelled me.” One thing, however, is true, so that I shall not deny it (first because it is already well known to all, and second because God has shown me His favor in giving me the greatest possible love of truth, even when it might count against me). For ever since the light of reason first dawned in me, my inclination to letters was marked by such passion and vehemence that neither the reprimands of others (for I have received many) nor ref lections of my own (there have been more than a few) have sufficed to make me abandon my pursuit of this native impulse that God Himself bestowed on me. (Arenal and Powell, 47)

Nevertheless, in the pursuit of “la santa ignorancia,” her confessors and elders urged her to give up the vice of studying: “¿Qué me habrá

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costado resistir esto? ¡Rara especie de martirio donde yo era el mártir y me era el verdugo!” [How was I to bear up against this? A strange martyrdom indeed, where I must be both martyr and my own executioner!] (Respuesta, 62; Arenal and Powell, 63). Stephanie Merrim remarks that Sor Juana frames her life story “as a martyrdom akin to that of Christ and the saints;” she “packs the passage on her pursuit of knowledge with the vocabulary of martyrdom appropriate to a model nun following the camino de perfección,” thus inviting the reader to make a direct comparison between her suffering and Christ’s.18 Such hagiographic framing was not unusual for the period, for saints’ lives offered some of the few positive and authoritative role models found in the “graves sentencias” that seventeenth-century nuns and other women were urged to read by moralists and confessors. However, as Luciani suggests, Sor Juana’s skillful strategies of hagiographic and Christic self-fashioning in the Respuesta may have been read as “rhetorical overreaching” by unsympathetic readers. “While the imitatio Christi is a suitably humble behavioral paradigm for a woman, the self-comparison with Christ is inevitably vainglorious.”19 However, Sor Juana used the hagiographic tropes as the basis for a logical argument in support of her rejection of “santa ignorancia.” An additional figure entered into the debate several months after the exchange of epistles between the two “sisters” Sor Juana and Sor Filotea. In January 1691, the orator Javier Palavicino delivered a sermon to the nuns in Sor Juana’s convent entitled La fineza mayor, as a response to Vieyra, Sor Juana, and the Bishop. Palavicino not only criticizes Vieyra’s attempt to gainsay the church fathers but also praises Sor Juana, remarking that she follows in the hallowed footsteps of such wise saints as Paula and Blesilla. Moreover, Palavicino is the first of Sor Juana’s admirers on record to draw a direct analogy between the seventeenth-century nun and Catherine of Alexandria: “Sólo le falta el nombre de Catalina para ser objeto digno de toda admiración antigua por su nobleza, religión y por su doctrina” [All she lacks to be an object worthy of all ancient admiration for her nobility, religion, and learning is the name Catherine].20 Sor Juana’s Villancicos in Honor of St. Catherine Sor Juana did not accept Sor Filotea’s call to martyrdom immediately. Soon after the epistolary exchange with the Bishop of Puebla, she composed twelve villancicos [carols] in honor of St. Catherine’s feast day.21 The subject matter of the villancicos performed in the Cathedral of Oaxaca on November 25, 1691—precisely one year after the publication of the Carta Atenagórica and the Carta de Sor Filotea—is clearly charged due to

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the resonance of the saint’s life with the central points of the epistolary debate. Throughout the cycle of songs, Sor Juana tells a familiar story, exalting Catherine’s prudence, beauty, and superior wisdom and, above all, focusing on the wise virgin’s martyrdom. The overriding scheme of the eleven villancicos is typological: Catherine is the fulfillment of prophecy, the perfected mirror of figures from the Hebrew Bible and ancient mythology, and the eighth and most marvelous wonder of the world. Sor Juana also places St. Catherine in a catalogue of pious exemplary women, comparing the saint’s beauty and virtues to that of the heroines of the Hebrew Bible: Abigail, Esther, Rachel, Susannah, Deborah, Jael, Judith, Rebecca, Ruth, Bathsheba, Tamar, and Sarah. Despite the conventional nature of Sor Juana’s typology, she used the occasion of the saint’s feast day to argue that study and feminine piety are by no means mutually exclusive, while simultaneously exhibiting her own poetic genius in the villancicos.22 Seventeenth-century villancicos were vehicles for ingenio due to the very fact that poets were required to limit themselves to well-known stories that were part of the common store of hagiographic and liturgical knowledge.23 Not only is the songs’ content an outright challenge to “holy ignorance,” Sor Juana’s poetic and rhetorical f lamboyance in the villancicos is an implicit rejection of silence and simplicitas and demonstrative proof of feminine intellectual potential. Villancico six has received the most critical attention because of its engagement with the perennial debate of female intellectual potential in general and Sor Juana’s debate with “Sor Filotea” in particular. Echoing the profeminine arguments of her medieval predecessors, Sor Juana asserted in one verse of the villancico that Catherine proves that intelligence is not determined by sex: De una Mujer se convencen todos los Sabios de Egipto, para prueba de que el sexo no es esencia en lo entendido. ¡Víctor, víctor! [. . .] Estudia, arguye y enseña, y es de la Iglesia servicio, que no la quiere ignorante El que racional la hizo ¡Víctor, víctor! [. . .] Vencidos, con ella todos la vida dan al cuchillo: ¡oh cuánto bien se perdiera

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si Docta no hubiera sido! ¡Víctor, víctor!24 The learned men of Egypt, by / a woman have been vanquished, / to demonstrate that sex is not the essence of intelligence. / Victor, victor! /. . ./ She studies, and disputes, and teaches, / and thus serves her Faith; / for He who gave her reason / does not want her ignorant. / Victor, victor! /. . . Vanquished, with her all the sages / gave their lives up to the sword; / had she not been a learned woman, / we should have lost great good! / Victor, victor! (Arenal and Powel, The Answer / La respuesta, 161–63, slightly modified, to ref lect the appellation Víctor in English.)

Sor Juana’s interest in the Alexandrine wise virgin and what we know of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s biography make analogies between the Mexican nun and St. Catherine inevitable and irresistible. The structural similarity between Catherine’s passion, which revolves around her dual rejection of male religious and sexual authority—she defends her virginity despite taunts, bribery, and torture, and successfully debates religious questions with the fifty wisest men in the Roman Empire—and Sor Juana’s legendary debate with the forty colonial “sabios,” recorded by her first biographer Diego de Calleja, have inspired some of her contemporaries and some modern scholars as well to consider her a latter-day St. Catherine, a martyr and genius born under the shadows of the Aztec, rather than the Egyptian, pyramids.25 Drawing upon Sor Juana’s references to Catherine of Alexandria in the Autodefensa and the Respuesta, most modern studies of Sor Juana’s work assume that the villancicos are autobiographical and that they contain a subversive feminist agenda.26 And indeed, by writing the villancicos in honor of Catherine of Alexandria and those in honor of other saints, Sor Juana could remind her critics that she, like St. Teresa, could cut her pen in the interests of the Church as “Sor Filotea” urges her to do in his Carta. Describing the villancicos as “defiant” and “belligerent,” Elías Trabulse asserts that Vega’s La rosa de Alejandría was the source for Sor Juana’s villancicos and concludes that she wrote the villancicos as a veiled but direct response to both Vega’s misogynistic interpretation of the wise virgin martyr’s legend, as well as to the Carta de Sor Filotea.27 St. Catherine was, of course, a very popular saint, and Sor Juana, like her society as a whole, was probably familiar with the legend long before the publication of La rosa de Alejandría. In any case, Sor Juana would have encountered in Vega’s vita just as much “gold to take out of Egypt” as she would have found material to refute.28 However, I believe that it is important to bear in mind that, in the manner of so many other “tricks of the weak,” the direct defense of

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women’s intellectual potential in the villancicos is partially veiled and perhaps recognized only by audiences looking for it and attuned to profeminine arguments.29 The most memorable and clear portions of the villancicos were the repeated musical line and poetic content of the estribillo that extols Catherine’s “divine science” and its superiority to pagan wisdom, rather than emphasizing her gender. Indeed, the “prueba de que el sexo no es esencia en lo entendido” is deemphasized, embedded in one section of a long villancico and thus subordinated to the most memorable and clear portions of the villancico—the repeated musical line and poetic content in the estribillo.30 The very last villancico, the eleventh of the cycle, celebrates Catherine’s wisdom as a miracle and a marvel and Sor Juana here echoes the familiar rhetoric of wonder at a wise woman. However, her placement of the exclamations of disbelief and surprise in the mouths of two rustics hints that she may have done so tongue-in-cheek: Érase una Niña, Como digo a usté, cuyos años eran, ocho sobre diez. Esperen, aguarden, que yo lo dire. Ésta (qué sé yo, cómo pudo ser), dizque supo mucho, aunque era mujer. Y aun una Santita dizque era también, sin que le estorbase para ello el saber.31 There was a little girl, as I tell you sir, who was eight and ten years old. Wait, listen, I’ll tell you. This girl (what do I know, how it could have been), they say she knew a lot, even though she was a woman. . . .And they say she was even a little saint, without her learning getting in the way of her sainthood.

In the villancicos, Sor Juana thus deftly wove her defense of her own scholarly projects and the intellectual potential of women in general into celebrations of the Alexandrian martyr that, on the surface, contain nothing that could be deemed inappropriate to the traditional saint’s legend or for Baroque veneration. The villancicos contain no calls to imitate St. Catherine, only to admire her; in the villancicos, the wise virgin that Sor Juana claimed to imitate in her autobiographical prose is not held up as a

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model of female erudition for her contemporaries, nor is she transformed into a model of the traditional feminine contemporary and monastic virtues of poverty, subjection, obedience, silence, and modesty as in La rosa de Alejandría. However, the villancicos assert that God did not want Catherine to be “ignorante,” and Sor Juana’s celebration of Catherine’s martyrdom does not paint it as a holocaust of intelligence. Hers is a picture of martyrdom in which intelligence and eloquence are not subsumed but exalted. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz provides us with a historical example of a female respondent to the legendary wise virgin. Considering the role that saints’ lives often played in the lives of their readers, it is quite possible that Sor Juana saw in St. Catherine of Alexandria—a wise woman who authenticates written authority and who, by extensive study of human and divine letters, serves the Catholic Church—an authoritative exemplar and a strong proof of the propriety and utility of her own humanistic endeavors as a woman in a religious order. By using the authoritative image of the archetypal wise woman who both authenticates Christian tradition and harmoniously brings together human and divine wisdom, in the face of attack, Sor Juana certainly could arm herself “like a galleon.” However, the virgin martyr also provides a model that did not serve Sor Juana’s defense of her studies and holy erudition. Her superiors and critics urged that she follow St. Catherine’s path to its end, recalling Vega’s paradigm of wisdom and debate turned to silence and servility. In the Bishop’s letter, Calleja’s biography, and the celebratory poetry in the Fama, we see the imposition of the journey from sabia to santa and the pattern of eloquent debate followed by martyrdom of study and intelligence upon Sor Juana’s story. Sor Juana as Martyr The powerful image of martyrdom gave both Sor Juana’s critics and her admirers a great deal of material for constructing and reconstructing her life according to known models that served to make the “strange” phenomenon of a wise woman in Mexico intellectually conceivable, and, to some extent at least, ecclesiastically acceptable. Sor Juana was eventually commanded to perform the “holocausto” of her intelligence that Bishop Fernández de Santa Cruz had urged upon her in his Carta de Sor Filotea. In April 1693, in response to both her fame as a poet and her infamy as a critic of Vieyra and “Sor Filotea,” an episcopal investigation of Sor Juana’s activities began. And, in February 1694, the vicar-general Antonio de Aunsibay y Anaya ordered her to admit to and abjure her errors against the Church, confess her sins, turn her library and other possessions over to the archbishop, and cease publishing her work.32 As

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a result, Sor Juana signed a confession in her own blood and vowed to put an end to her years of study and literary work, and to sell her vast library and her collection of scientific instruments and donate the profits to charity. As Fernández de Santa Cruz’s biographer states, the letter from “Sor Filotea” had had the desired effect: “porque retirándose y aplicando de allí en adelante su minerva a cosas espirituales, como se lo persuadía la Carta de Su Ilma., vivió dando ejemplo a sus religiosas y murió con muestras claras de su salvación” [because, retiring herself and applying her “minerva” from then on to spiritual things, as the letter from His Eminence persuaded her to do, she lived as an example for the other nuns and died with clear demonstrations of her salvation].33 Calleja’s description of young Juana Inés’s intellectual martyrdom begins with her decision to enter the convent. According to Calleja, Juana Inés consulted with her confessor, Antonio Núñez de Miranda, about the possibility of a religious life. Núñez de Miranda, Calleja reports, did not find it difficult to believe that Juana Inés combined “dentro de un alma tantos talentos de sabiduria, hermanados con grandes virtudes Religiosas: y que si se oponian à estas” [within a single soul such talents for wisdom matched with great religious virtues: and that the former were opposed to the latter]. Moreover, the illustrious and holy man later convinced her that “era mucha ganancia esconder los talentos” [hiding her talents would be a great gain] and, so, “despuesta la repugnancia resolviò Juana Inès con denuedo piadoso, dexar en su Mundo su inclinacion à la sabiduria humana; y en cada Libro que abandonaba, degollarle à Dios un Isaac” [putting aside her reluctance with pious courage, Juana Inés resolved to leave her inclination toward human wisdom in its world, and with every book that she abandoned, she slit the throat of an Isaac for God] (Vida, 18). Calleja thus molds his subject into a latter-day wise virgin martyr, much in the way that Vega turns Catherine of Alexandria into an emblem of humility and maidenly silence. The sonnets, romances, décimas, and acrostics that follow Calleja’s biography in the Fama, as well as the copious aprobaciones, censuras, and celebratory poems that introduce the two other volumes of Sor Juana’s work, the Inundación Castálida and the Segundo Volumen, laud Sor Juana’s intelligence and wit.34 In addition to their conventional expressions of the pasmo [astonishment] caused by Sor Juana’s intellect, many writers also paint her as a martyr worthy of veneration. For example, an anonymous devotee, “apassionado de sus obras” [impassioned by her works], celebrates Sor Juana’s sale of her library in a romance: El amor con que vendiste Quantos libros el consuelo

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En sabias ociosidades Tuvo fieles compañeros; Accion singular, que admira Entre tus grandes portentos, Pues solo veniste al Mundo, Para ser sacro embeleso. Quitarse el pan de la boca, Lo hizo tal vez un excesso; Pero quien llegò à quitarse El pan del entendimiento? Buscò tu ardiente Martyrio Aun el Pielago inmenso De la Claridad, mas rumbos, Que tantos Pilotos diestros. Quitarse el pasto del alma, Es sacrificio violento, Y en las Aras del cariño Estas victimas no ardieron. ... Con tus Libros enseñaste Humanas Artes; sin ellos, A los Discretos avisas La Theulugia del Cielo. (Fama, 139–42) The love, with which you sold all the books that had offered consolation in wise recreation, had faithful companions; among all your great portents, this singular action amazes. You came to the World to be a holy wonder. Perhaps it was excessive to take bread from one’s mouth; but whoever took bread from the intelligence? Your ardent Martyrdom found, even in the immense sea of Saints, more routes than any number of skilled Navigators. Witholding the soul’s sustenance is a violent sacrifice, and these victims [books] did not burn at the Altar of love. . . .With your Books you taught Human Arts; without them you counsel the Wise in the Theology of Heaven.

Another anonymous aficionado of her works imagines Sor Juana’s parting with her books as an “hoguera mental” [mental bonfire] and closes his poem with a pun elevating the ashes of her sacrifice above her pen: “Que pues Fenix Sagrado te eternizas, / Serán mejores plumas tus cenizas” [You are immortalized as a sacred Phoenix / your ashes will be better pens] (Fama, no pagination). Whereas Catherine of Alexandria undergoes “blood martyrdom” and Catherine of Siena “white martyrdom,” Calleja and the anonymous enthusiasts applaud Sor Juana’s “brain martyrdom.” Interestingly, as Trabulse’s investigations have revealed, historical evidence belies the image of intellectual renunciation and the final

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embracing of true holy ignorance that inspired the poetic encomia and Calleja’s hagiographic excursus. An inventory of Sor Juana’s possessions at the time of her death notes that her cell contained 180 books. Other historical documents suggest that Sor Juana also continued her work as the convent accountant and continued actively investing her own monies after her “conversion” in 1694. Trabulse concludes that Sor Juana never really abandoned her studies and literary pursuits, even after handing over her library and scientific instruments to the archbishop, but, rather, rebuilt her library and continued to write until her death (in a manner oddly reminiscent of the final miracle attributed to St. Catherine by Vega; Sor Juana died during an epidemic when she was caring for the sick). The “holocaust” of intellect demanded by Sor Juana’s superiors and praised by her admirers appears to have been a fiction fashioned by admirers, ecclesiastical orders, and by the nun herself.35 Mulierem fortem quis inveniet? The legendary wisdom of Solomon provided Sor Juana’s admirers with a further paradigm for interpreting the Mexican nun’s intellectual and literary endeavors. In his dedication to Queen María Ana of Spain, Juan Ignacio de Castorena y Ursúa, editor of the Fama, alludes to the oftquoted rhetorical question, “mulierem fortem quis inveniet procul et de ultimis finibus pretium eius” [Who shall find a valiant woman? far and from the uttermost coasts is the price of her] (Prov. 31:10), when he announces that, with the publication of the Fama, he has brought the Spanish monarchs a new treasure from the very limits of the known world. The allegorical and emblematic portrait of Sor Juana that illustrates the frontispiece of the Fama makes a similar claim for Sor Juana’s rarity, value, and provenance (figure 5.1). The portrait centers on the figure of a nun seated within a neoclassical archway, framed by a wreath of laurels, holding a book and quill, “the poetess and second Minerva,” as Castorena y Ursúa explains. Above the nun’s head, as if carved into the lintel of the arch, we read the familiar beginning of the Solomonic ode to the Woman of Worth, the capable wife, who is both the result and reward the wise man obtains for following the path of Wisdom in Proverbs 31:10. Castorena explicates the meaning of the proverbial question: “Aquella pregunta. . .(habla, con el sentido que se puede entender de Mugeres Fuertes en Virtud, Religion, y Sabiduría). Y responde esta, que allá, allá, en los límites vltimos del Vniverso se halló también su preciosidad” [That question (which speaks in terms of Women who are Strong in Virtue, Religion, and Wisdom). And the response in the sentence is: there, there

Figure 5.1 Frontispiece, Fama y obras póstumas de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Madrid, 1700. Source: By permission of the Biblioteca Nacional de España.

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in the farthest reaches of the Universe such preciousness was also found] (Fama, dedication, no pagination). The proverbial epithet mulier fortis is similarly used in the paratexts of the Segundo Volumen of Sor Juana’s works, first published in 1692. In an aprobación for the volume, Ambrosio de la Cuesta glosses the term: Prendas son estas [la castidad y la sabiduría] que para digno de su estimacion desseaba el Sabio hallar en una Muger, fuerte, no sólo por la virtud de la Castidad, sino tambien varonil por lo profundo de la Sabiduría. . . .Mas oy en la Madre Juana se halla, lo que antes tenia lugar solo en las dudas de que lo huviesse: Vna Sabia, y constante Virgen consagrada en la Religion à Dios, un Varonil Ingenio, que descubriendo el Tesoro de las más principales Sciencias, desde los últimos fines de la tierra muestra los quilates de su mayor estimacion.36 Chastity and wisdom are the graces that the Sage wanted to find in a strong woman, she is strong not only because of her virtue of Chastity, but she is also manly for the profoundness of her Wisdom. . . .But today one finds in Mother Juana what earlier existed only in the doubts of its very existence: a Wise Woman and constant Virgin, consecrated in Religion to God, a Manly Intellect that, upon discovering the Treasure of the most important Sciences, showed the greatest estimation of her worth from the farthest reaches of the earth.

Fr. Pedro del Santíssimo Sacramento, another commentator in the Segundo Volumen, also draws upon the proverbial mujer fuerte, comparing Sor Juana’s literary strength to that of the supposedly less surprising warrior woman: Que ceñirse una mujer Espada y vencer Batallas campales, Historias Sagradas, y profanas lo refieren, no lo podía extrañar Salomón: Que sin armas Militares entre los exercicios de su profession Religiosa, con el corte de la Espada de su Pluma, vença en campañas Literarias los Entendimientos más valientes, y los Ingenios mas varoniles, esto es lo que Salomon, con verlo mirado todo, desseo tanto ver.37 Solomon would not have wondered at a woman who girded a Sword and conquered on the Battlefield, Histories Sacred and profane tell of it: [Sor Juana], without Military arms in the exercise of her Religious profession, with the cutting Sword of her Pen, triumphs in Literary campaigns against the most valiant Minds and the most manly Intellects, this is what Solomon, having seen it all, desired so greatly to see.

The image of Sor Juana as literary warrior-woman is consistent throughout the encomia. Ironically, in her original context, the mujer

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fuerte of Proverbs has very few qualities that could be celebrated as varonil. When Sor Juana’s admirers—in poetry, prose, and visual image—apply the epithet of mujer fuerte to Sor Juana, they read her as a metaphorically and literally “strong woman,” associating the biblical term with the adulation of varonil, so often bestowed upon women whose intellects overcame the supposed natural debility of the female sex.38 Rather, she works from before dawn until after nightfall in order to support her husband, so that he may meet at the city gates with other prominent and wise men. Nevertheless, just as the mujer fuerte’s domestic labors allow her husband to sit with the other elders of the city, the unearthing of Sor Juana in the “uttermost coasts” provides her admirers the occasion to come together as sabios and literati in order to share and publish the fruits of their own intellects. Sor Juana, rendered both exemplary and strange by virtue of her intelligence and chastity, becomes the topic for male rhetorical virtuosity. In their admiration for Sor Juana, these male panegyrists reenact the centuries-old communion of philosophers—lovers of w/Wisdom—bonded by mutual love for an icon.39 Margo Glantz identifies two basic rhetorical moves at work in the poems aprobaciones and censuras written in praise of and as implicit defenses of Sor Juana’s work: comparison and hyperbole. Armed with these two rhetorical strategies, Sor Juana’s panegyrists “descompone[n] la figura de la jerónima para explicar su esencia” [dismantle the figure of the nun in order to explain her essence] and place her within known taxonomies of illustrious women.40 For Glantz, the result of such descriptive attempts to insert Sor Juana into known categories and series was the discovery that Sor Juana was “fuera de serie” [incomparable]. I would counter, however, that Sor Juana’s detractors’ and aficionados’ typological tendencies show that Sor Juana was, for them at least, eminently comparable. In order to resolve the cultural cognitive dissonance of Sor Juana’s demonstration that wisdom and woman could coexist in the same material and earthly female body, her audiences read her and also wrote about her through the allegorical lenses of canonical wisdom imagery. These receptive and rhetorical strategies contained Sor Juana within recognizable outlines, making her not only an amazing anomaly, but also a familiar and nonthreatening literary type. The receptive and rhetorical strategies of Sor Juana’s audiences are akin to personification: the person whom they apparently described as a historical individual becomes a mere outline with human aspect into and onto which abstract ideas, ideals, and moral values are cast. Sor Juana explains such allegorical processes in her Neptuno alegórico (1680), in which she outlines the genealogy of Minerva, goddess of wisdom. The ancients,

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she observes, revered their gods in the form of different hieroglyphs and varied figures, No porque juzgasen que la Deidad, siendo infinita, pudiera estrecharse a la figura y término de cuantidad limitada; sino porque como eran cosas que carecían de toda forma visible, y por consiguiente, imposibles de mostrarse a los ojos de los hombres. . .fue necesario buscarles jeroglíficos, que por similitud, ya que no por perfecta imagen, las representasen. Y esto hicieron no sólo con las deidades, pero con todas las cosas invisibles.41 They did not do this because they thought that the Diety, being infinite, could confine itself to a bounded and limited figure, but rather because the gods were things lacking visible form and, consequently, impossible to see with human eyes. It was necessary to find hieroglyphs for them, which, by similitude, if not by perfect image, represented them. And they did this not only with deities, but with all invisible things.

Sor Juana’s readers, for whom she was literally invisible—first obscured by geography and later by her death—strove to envision her using rhetorical “hieroglyphs” or tropes from their common stock.42 Sor Juana’s last and unfinished romance suggests that she was well aware of the ways in which her readers fashioned her with their pens into what they wanted her to be. It is at once a conceptual formulation of the humility topos and a perspicacious commentary on the distance between the historical Sor Juana and the wise virgin her admirers envisioned: No soy yo la que pensáis, sino es que allá me habéis dado otro sér en vuestras plumas y otro aliento en vuestros labios, y diversa de mí misma entre vuestras plumas ando, no como soy, sino como quisisteis imaginarlo.43 I am not who you think I am, rather, you have given me another identity with your pens and another voice upon your lips, and estranged from myself I walk among your pens, not as I am, but as you wanted to imagine me.

By fashioning Mexico’s “tenth muse” into a wise martyr, her amazed male public interlocutors and biographers gave her story a familiar, comprehensible, and thus nonthreatening shape and put her intelligence and debating skills in what they deemed their proper place. The same process is at work when Sor Juana’s admirers read her as that rare, yet commonplace

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creature—Solomon’s proverbial “strong woman.” Encomia, like saints’ lives, construct their subjects, shaping and reshaping the saint or other praised object in accordance with the needs and interests of the addressees. Sor Juana’s readers and interlocutors thus, in effect, converted her from the “the amazement of the world” into a proverbial figure whose sacrifice and consequent silence conformed to the ideals of both the Church and those of her readers. Literature, legend, and history intersect in the textual production revolving around Sor Juana. It is, however, difficult to determine whether Sor Juana’s enthusiasts felt they had captured her essence in their descriptions. No doubt they were aware of the conventions they drew upon for their encomia of a person whom most knew only through hearsay and filtered through her writing. The known categories and commonplaces served, at the very least, to order their experience of Sor Juana’s work and existence in a world where, according to both the norms of patriarchal order and the literary convention, an intelligent and literarily talented woman had to be a marvel. The imposition of known models combined with a rhetoric of singularity and indescribability allowed audiences to master Sor Juana, who, unlike the fictional characters that the literary representations of the nun resemble, was a historical person, whose very existence caused a certain amount of category confusion that was not limited to the confines of fictional narratives and legends. This double recognition renders Sor Juana known and unknown, mundane and marvelous.

CONCLUSION COMMONPLACES AND COMMON WOMEN: WISDOM, THE STRANGE WOMAN, AND BAWDY BODIES OF KNOWLEDGE

A

study of the feminine personification of Wisdom in medieval and Early Modern Castilian literature would not be complete without a brief discussion of the celestinesque anti-Wisdom figure, a large-scale trope that is particular to and peculiarly at home in Hispanic literature.1 Parodies of wisdom allegories depend on the receptive shift from embodiments to the imagined activities of carnal bodies, as previously discussed in chapter 3. This shift from the intellect to the f lesh is at work in the creation of Celestina, Spanish literature’s most notorious embodiment of women’s nefarious wisdom. The go-between appears in numerous works dating from the fourteenth-century Libro de buen amor to Lope de Vega’s seventeenth-century Dorotea and the Hispano-Mexican Segunda Celestina, with its continuation attributed to Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Most famously, the bawd’s imagined grotesque body and carnal knowledge occupy the center of Fernando de Rojas’s Celestina, a multilayered text that is deeply concerned both with wisdom and the negotiation of authority. First published in 1499, Celestina was a wildly popular book by sixteenth-century standards; it has also occasioned intense critical debates in Spanish Studies concerning its authorship, intentionality, and meaning.2 Like the canonical master-texts of the wisdom tradition, Celestina presents its audiences with an archetypal, enthralling female character who is central to the mediation of intimacy and knowledge. And, as in Proverbs, in Celestina mastery over sexuality is a sine qua non of wisdom. Echoing the biblical tradition’s “remarkably consistent formulation” that links “female power, wisdom, and sexuality,”3 Celestina conjures the specter of a woman whose wisdom and movements are not

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under the control of a master, god, father, or husband, a sabia who moves freely, traversing the boundaries dividing public, private, gendered, cultic, and ethnic spaces. Readers familiar with Celestina will immediately recognize multiple parallels between the urban Castilian go-between and Solomon’s Strange Woman. In Proverbs, the Strange Woman is a smooth-talking harlot, who is “crooked” in her ways and in her speech and whose house is on the road to death. She is a temptress whose lips drip honey and whose slick tongue delivers words that are smoother than oil (Prov. 5:3–6). As Claudia Camp suggests, the relationship between Wisdom and her evilly promiscuous foil, the Strange Woman, offers a lens for reading other narratives where “issues of strangeness—whether of gender, ethnicity, sexuality, or cultic activity—predominate.” This lens, I would argue, elucidates not only Celestina’s engagement with just such “issues of strangeness,” but also the nature of Celestina’s seductive authority and her perversion of auctoritas in an imagined world where, as in the world envisioned by Proverbs, anxieties about wisdom are never far from sexual and social anxieties.4 Chapter 7 of Proverbs, which contains the famous exhortation to the reader to call Wisdom his sister (or brother, depending upon the translation; as we have seen, this passage could present interpretive difficulties to medieval readers), also contains the cautionary narrative of the seduction of a young man by the Strange Woman. The seduction takes place in an urban setting, where the comings and goings of loose women and foolish young men can be observed from the windows of those who have the prudence to stay at home and keep their doors shut tight against noxious intruders. The paternal narrator of Proverbs describes how he watches from his window as the Strange Woman leaves her house at twilight “decked out like a prostitute,” wantonly travels through the city, and lies in wait, ready to ensnare her prey. He watches as she physically and verbally waylays a young man, seizing him and kissing him, telling him of the sacrifices that she has offered in his honor and how she desires to see him. The narrator then mimics the Strange Woman’s invitation to a rich meal and her promise of a night of gluttony and ecstasy in her perfumed bed. With these polished words the Strange Woman reduces her victim to a docile beast. As the Alfonsine translators render the passage: “Priso·l con muchas razones como con red, e troxo·l a alongamiento con blanduras de sus labros. / Luego fue empós ella como va el buey aducho al sacrificio, e como el cordero loçano e no sabidor que es traído a prisión” [She caught him with her many words as in a net and took him a long way with the softness of her lips. He went right after her like the ox goes to be sacrificed, like the little, foolish lamb is taken to prison] (GE3, 206).5

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The Solomonic narrator concludes his cautionary tale by remarking that the scene he witnessed is by no means unusual; many have fallen into the Strange Woman’s trap. The warning of this seduction story in Proverbs is clear: young men who do not cling to Wisdom will find themselves unprotected and vulnerable to the onslaughts of “strange” and “alien” women who “wantonly ambush the innocent.” However, Proverbs also underlines the Strange Woman’s misleading resemblance to Wisdom. Both call out to callow young men and invite them to partake of their tables, love, and protection, but the Strange Woman is knowing rather than wise; her hospitality and embraces are folly, bringing death and destruction, rather than wisdom, life, and wealth. As Proverbs warns, those who would “go into her”—a frequent biblical metaphor for men engaging in sexual relations with women—are wounded unto death (Prov. 2:12–19). Wisdom’s embraces, however, as envisioned in the highly inf luential Books of Solomon, Augustinian Soliloquies, and the Consolation of Philosophy are metaphors that evoke the erotic dimensions of knowledge acquisition. Despite the late-medieval appreciation for Aristotelian theories describing the importance of the physical senses in human perception and cognition, the metaphorical fusion of intellectual and physical intimacy contributed to readers’ ambivalent and resisting responses to the feminine embodiments of wisdom analyzed in this volume. And, as the parodies of allegories of intimacy with Wisdom discussed in the conclusion to chapter 3 suggest, the line between feminine images of embodied wisdom and carnal knowledge is indeed easily blurred. Throughout the wisdom tradition, the anxiety caused by the potential confusion is sublimated via humor and misogyny, which both point to the received and perceived incompatibility of feminine corporeality and wisdom. In addition to sharing seductive rhetorical techniques, Celestina and the Strange Woman inhabit similar discursive worlds. Like Proverbs, and the wisdom tradition as a whole, Celestina is prescriptive. In the Toledo 1500 edition of Celestina, Rojas offers the work as a prophylactic that will shield its intended audiences from the perils of a world filled with dangerous women. He dedicates Celestina to one of the multitude of gallants who find themselves the cruelly treated prisoners of love, so anguished and besotted that “vencidos en su desordenado apetito, a sus amigas llaman y dizen ser su dios” [overcome by their excessive appetite, [they] call their ladies God] (Celestina, 82; Singleton, 13).6 The work, he promises, will provide the weapons necessary for their self-defense in the form of its “avisos y consejos contra lisongeros y malos sirvientes y falsas mugeres hechizeras” [wise counsels. . .[and] protection against f latterers, bad servants and against false women witches] who can take advantage of

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love-struck youths (Celestina, 70; Singleton, 4, slightly modified to ref lect Rojas’s use of the word mugeres). Although the sincerity of Fernando de Rojas’s insistence on the didactic value of Celestina is uncertain, his paratexts clearly and firmly align the work with the sapiential tradition.7 In the revised and expanded Valencia 1514 edition, Rojas reviews his initial readers’ varied reactions to his work. Words, says Rojas, are preñadas, “pregnant,” swollen to the point of bursting with meaning that can be deciphered by discerning readers (Celestina, 77).8 The polysemous nature of all words prefaces Rojas’s exegesis of the Petrarchan axiom that all things are born from struggle and discord, supported by numerous examples from the animal kingdom, including the violent generation of vipers where the female bites the head off the male and their offspring erupts from the womb and kills the female (Celestina, 77–79). Rojas’s move from pregnant words to the viper’s destructive pregnancy alerts us to a power-struggle between metaphorical language and physical bodies in Celestina. With its constant imposition of the body with its scars, f luids, sexuality, and mortality into a world where characters strive to negotiate their desires through the language of the sapiential tradition, the rules of courtly love, the medical discourse surrounding lovesickness, and the social mores of aristocratic and urban society, Celestina is an Early Modern study in abjection. As we have seen, both midrash and patristic exegesis of the Strange Woman associate her sweet words and predatory sexual behavior with missionary activity. Her bed is the temple of a heretic. This conf lation of physical and spiritual corruption is marked from the very beginning of Celestina, when the lovesick Calisto pronounces a credo that takes the poetic apotheosis of the beloved to an extreme: “Melibeo só, y a Melibea adoro, y en Melibea creo, y a Melibea amo. . .Por dios la creo, por dios la confesso, y no creo que hay otro soberano en el cielo aunque entre nosotros mora” [I am a Melibean. I worship Melibea. I believe in Melibea, and I devoutly love Melibea. . . .I hold her to be God, I so confess her to be, and I believe there is no other sovereign in heaven—even though she dwells on earth] (Celestina, 93–95; Singleton 20–22). Calisto’s amorous heresy is at once comical and threatening, and, throughout the work, his hyperbolic amatory rhetoric becomes increasingly inf lamed and ludicrous. For not only does Calisto’s credo “contradict the Christian religion,” it also contradicts the reigning scholarly authorities on the subject of Woman, as his manservant Sempronio warns in the first auto: “Lee los ystoriales, estudia los filósofos, mira los poetas. Llenos están los libros de sus viles y males enxenplos, y de las caýdas que levaron los que en

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algo, como tú, las reputaron. Oye a Salomón do dize que las mujeres y el vino hazen a los hombres renegar. Conséjate con Séneca y verás en qué las tiene. Escucha al Aristóteles, mira a Bernardo. Gentiles, judíos, cristianos y moros, todos en esta concordia están.” (Celestina, 96–97) “Read the historians, study the philosophers, heed the observations of the poets. Books are full of the vile and evil activities of women, and we may read many an account of the destruction of men like you who have attributed any value to them. Heed the words of Solomon, who tells us that wine and women make men lose their religion. Take counsel with Séneca, and you will see what he thinks of them. Listen to Aristotle; recall what Bernard has to say. Pagans and Jews, Christians and Moors—all unite in a single opinion.” (Singleton, 23)

Sempronio’s speech suggests that the misogynist sapiential tradition was one discourse in which true convivencia existed in medieval Iberia. In the action of the primer auto of Celestina, Sempronio’s diatribe falls on deaf ears, but the initial readers of the primer auto, among whom were both Rojas himself and his own expected audience, would have been well acquainted with Sempronio’s litany. Indeed, any moderately well-read person at the end of the fifteenth century could probably have recited a similar sermon, and the intended audience would no doubt have enjoyed the jokes and felt pleasure in their recognition of its commonplaces. They would also have been familiar with Calisto’s counterargument, expanding upon Sempronio’s catalogue of fallen sages and echoing both the Arcipreste de Hita and the Arcipreste de Talavera, asking why he should presume to be any more steadfast in the face of women’s attractions than Adam, Solomon, David, Aristotle, or Virgil. In contrast to the Libro de buen amor, however, where the Archpriest-narrator delights in his vulnerability to Love and cites Aristotle as the authority proving the naturalist assertion that it is necessary for men to love women, the authority for this affirmation in Celestina is Celestina herself, whose self-serving exploitation of male vulnerability leads to death and disaster. Sempronio and Calisto’s dialogue on the vulnerability of wise men leads to the introduction of Celestina, who will be the reigning authority on women, love, and male vulnerability until her violent death in the twelfth auto of the tragicomedia. Calisto’s desire to meet his god in person requires the intercession of a being who can channel his desire, a medianera. Like a devotee’s reverence for the Virgin Mary, which can draw him closer to God, Calisto’s devotion to Celestina will bring him into intimacy with his deity, Melibea. And, just as wily women bring down the sages in the cautionary tales of the wisdom tradition, discussed in chapter 4, Celestina will manipulate Calisto’s desire for her own purposes, drawing him and Rojas’s other protagonists into a web of sex and death.

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The primer auto clearly presents Celestina as an ironic mediator of wisdom when she persuades Pármeno to join her and Sempronio in their plan to take full advantage of Calisto’s lovesickness, in a dialogue that apes both the book of Proverbs and Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy.9 In the exchange, Celestina offers him fellowship with Sempronio, sex with her protégée Areúsa, and money. Pármeno resists, seeming to understand that he would be making a bargain with the devil. The old sabia champions prudence and phronesis, practical wisdom gained from experience, stressing her greater experience and greater wisdom: “mi hijo, dexa los ímpetus de la juventud y tórnate con la dotrina de tus mayores a la razon. . .Bien dizen que la prudencia no puede ser sino en los viejos; y tú mucho moço eres” [my son, put aside now the wildness of your youth and return to the exercise of reason, and abide by the teaching of your elders. . .How well it is said that only elderly people use common sense! And you are very, very young indeed] (Celestina, 121–23; Singleton, 44–46). In her exhortations, Celestina also calls Pármeno simple, loco, aznillo [simple, crazy, little ass], in an ironic echo of the biblical Wisdom’s calls to young foolish men to listen to her call: “How long, O simple ones, / will you love being simple?” (Prov. 1:22). Pármeno’s response closely echoes Christian exegesis on the Strange Woman: “No querría, madre, me conbidasses a consejo con amonestación de deleyte, como hizieron los que, caresciendo de razonable fundamento, opinando hizieron sectas embueltas en dulce veneno para captar y tomar las voluntades de los f lacos y con polvos de sabroso affecto cegaron los ojos de la razón.” (Celestina, 126) “I do not intend, Mother, to let you convince me that these things are good just because they provide pleasure. You are acting like those people who have no solid grounds for their beliefs and wrap up all sorts of heresies in sweet poison, in order, by causing their weak victims to become fond of it, to capture them, and blind their eyes to reason.” (Singleton, 49)

Despite this initial show of resistance, Pármeno eventually falls prey to Celestina’s sweet words. Celestina responds that reason comes from the prudence and discretion of advanced age and that he is too callow to know what reason is: “La discreción, que no tienes, lo determina, y de la discreción, mayor es la prudencia. Y la prudencia no puede ser sin esperimento, y la esperiencia no puede ser más que en los viejos. Y los ancianos somos llamados padres, y los buenos padres bien aconsejan a sus hijos, y especial yo a ti, cuya vida y honra más que la mía desseo.” (Celestina, 126–27)

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“Only discretion (which you do not have) can define what reason is. The better part of discretion is prudence. Prudence cannot exist without experience back of it—and experience is an attribute only of old people like me. We old ones are always referred to as parents—and good parents certainly counsel their children wisely. I think I may say that I in particular go out of my way to advise you properly, for I value your life and honor more than my very own.” (Singleton, 49)

There is an inherent irony in placing this Aristotelian pearl of wisdom in the mouth of an old prostitute who is all too ready to sacrifice Parmeno for a profit. The first auto further highlights the irony of Celestina’s role as a wisdom-figure when she cites that most famous “father” of wisdom, Solomon, remonstrating Pármeno for his stubborn refusal to yield to her teaching by quoting Proverbs 29: “Pues dezirte he lo que dize el sabio. Al varón que con dura cerviz al que le castiga menosprecia, arrebatado y quebrantamiento le verná, y sanidad ninguna le conseguirá” [Let me tell you what the wise man says: “The man who disdains good counsel given in need will totally collapse and never succeed”] (Celestina, 127; Singleton, 50). What Celestina does not reveal is that the following passage in Proverbs 29 warns, “A child who loves wisdom makes a parent glad, but to keep company with prostitutes is to squander one’s substance” (Prov. 29:3), a dictum echoed by Rojas’s promise in the paratextual carta to instruct readers about avoiding “false women witches.” The silenced second half of the sage’s proverb invalidates Celestina’s authority; the anonymous author of the first auto may have intended readers to get the joke, or he may have been “picking” texts apart as do the readers Rojas imagines in the prologue of his revised Celestina, those who “pican los donayres y refranes comunes, loándolos con toda atención, dexando pasar por alto lo que haze más al caso y utilidad suya” [pick at the pleasantries and proverbs known to all—praising them to high heaven—but neglecting what would really be most pertinent and useful] (Celestina, 80; Singleton, 11, slightly modified to preserve Rojas’s metaphor). Indeed, just as Wisdom’s discourse is vitiated on the honeyed tongue of the Strange Woman, Celestina subverts the sapiential tradition. On her tongue, the sages’ prophylactic axioms become perverse and ineffective.10 Celestina also appropriates the story of Virgil in the basket, which, as we have seen, was a favorite of misogynist authorities. In order to sway the reluctant Pármeno, she transforms the tale of sapiential vulnerability into a eulogy for his dead mother, Claudina. Like Virgil, who suffered great humiliation when he dangled in the basket for all of Rome to see, Claudina too suffered when she was hanged on the scaffold as a witch.

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However, Celestina argues, “por esso no dexó de ser honrrado ni perdió el nombre de Virgilio” [“not for all that did he cease to be a man of honor, nor did he ever lose the name of Vergil”] (Celestina, 199; Singleton, 117). Celestina asserts that Claudina, likewise, never lost her good name. Not surprisingly, Celestina, unlike the Arcipreste de Hita and the Arcipreste de Talavera before her, is not interested in recounting Virgil’s vengeance. Her recollection of Virgil’s exemplary lust is just part of her larger scheme of seduction, which will lead Pármeno to Areúsa’s bed and then eventually to his death. Celestina’s rhetorical dexterity also creates the illusion of an intimate discursive fellowship among Sempronio, Pármeno, Elicia, and Areúsa in the ninth auto’s ironic symposium. In this scene, Celestina plays the roles of both the misshapen but seductive Socrates and his “Lady Wisdom,” Diotima, as the old bawd regales her listeners with tales of her illustrious past and as they drink and break bread together.11 The illusions of fellowship and mutual affection created by Celestina’s verbal fascinatio break down in the face of greed, when Celestina reveals the emptiness of her promise to share the spoils of Calisto’s lovesickness with Sempronio and Pármeno. In the first auto she declares, “los bienes, si no son communicados no son bienes. Ganemos todos, partamos todos, holguemos todos” [goods, if not shared, are of no use. Let’s all earn a bit, let’s all share what we earn, let’s all be happy together], but she retracts these sweet words in a moment of self-referential exegesis: “Pues ya sabes, Sempronio, que estos offrecimientos, estas palabras de buen amor, no obligan” [But I thought you knew [Sempronio,] that such little friendly adornments and accoutrements [words] of good will do not oblige] (Celestina, 115 and 270; Singleton, 38 and 187). After Celestina reveals the polyvalent but ultimately barren nature of her speech, her two “hijos” literally rip her apart, recalling the viper in Rojas’s prologue, whose pregnancy leads to her destruction. As Roberto González Echevarría observes, Celestina, at the time of her death, is “reduced to her material cipher, which is an old, sterile, and consumed body.”12 Along with the timeless theme of sexuality and danger, the similarities between Celestina and Proverbs seem to result from the analogous social contexts that contributed to their genesis. The biblical book of Proverbs was compiled during a period of social and ethnic definition and delimitation of the postexilic Israelite community, “a time of struggle over Jewish identity formation, including the use of a powerful rhetoric of Othering in the interest of defining and controlling ‘Us.’ ”13 Celestina came into being at the height of the Catholic Monarchs’ cultural program of religious, political, and ethnic homogenization, seeking “to forge an empire through the extirpation or suppression of all signs of difference from

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their realms,”14 marked by the establishment of the Spanish Inquisition in the service of “the eradication of heresy and the enforcement of uniformity of belief,”15 the expulsion of the Jews from Castile and Aragon, the conquest of Granada, and the forced conversion of many Muslims. At the same time that Spain’s rulers sought to purge their dominions of ethnic, sexual, and religious Others, all over Europe women were being made strangers to the traditional practice of medicine, which was rapidly becoming a profession marked by its exclusivity. Celestina’s portrayal of the old prostitute, midwife, and witch forms part of a larger discourse discouraging and denigrating womens’ healing practices.16 Reading the celestinesque figure as a trope is somewhat heretical in the field of Celestina studies, which traditionally laud Fernando de Rojas’s realism and creation of complex literary characters. While, to a certain extent, all literary characters are personifications, the celestinesque figure, much like the feminine allegorical figure Wisdom, is also a commonplace that was readily adapted by many authors in generically related but widely varying medieval and Early Modern texts. Celestina and the literary avatars that she spawned are clearly recognizable and emblematic figures, portrayed with a conventional set of physical traits and associated with particular bodies of knowledge and activities. Indeed, Celestina’s body is also a central object in Celestina’s text and in the illustrations that appeared in early printed editions. Unlike other protagonists who are described in different ways by different characters—such as Melibea, whom Calisto sees as an unparalleled beauty, while others describe her as nothing special and even ugly—Celestina is universally described as a grotesque figure: old, ugly, and scar-faced.17 The grotesque body of the literary bawd not only personifies material and moral corruption but, like the imagines agentes of the ars memoriae discussed in chapter 1, also serves as a vivid place in memory. Soon after the publication and widespread circulation of Celestina, the archetypal old bawd became mnemonically tied by her name to erotico-medical knowledge, illicit pleasures and their dangers, occult practices, and her abundant sententiae as well. She also embodies the perversion of the very rhetorical and didactic commonplace of the feminine personification of wisdom. Indeed, the dream of “carnal knowing,” of intimacy with a feminine embodiment of wisdom, breaks down in Celestina, where intimacy with a female archetype brings no wisdom, but, rather, folly and death. James Burke, observing Celestina’s intertextuality with medieval theories of vision and cognition, argues that Celestina herself functions as a personification of vitiated intellective vision. Though she claims to see “con intellectuales ojos” [with the eyes of the intellect] when she

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announces in the primer auto that though she may be old, she still has all her faculties; she represents the perversion of vision, turning everything the senses relay to the intellect into sensuality.18 This distinction between intellection and the physical senses clearly recalls the conundrum posed in Visión deleytable—a text found in Rojas’s personal library—and indeed in allegory in general. Just as in Alfonso de la Torre’s cento, where “[la] muger es la materia,” Celestina is Rojas’s sign for corrupt and corrupting matter. An intertextual reading of Celestina and the Maimonidean, Aristotelian, and Catholic cento Visión deleytable suggests that Rojas’s protagonists are barred from intellective understanding by matter and sensuality. Maimonides read the Strange Woman as a sign not only for false belief, but also for man’s most compelling epistemological obstacle and the source of all corruption, matter. He offers his reading of the passage in Proverbs 7: 6–21, where the Strange Woman attempts to seduce a callow youth, as a standard for biblical exegesis in general. The surface meaning of the passage, according to Maimonides, “is a warning against the pursuit of bodily pleasures and desires,” represented by Wisdom’s foil and her tempting offer of physical delight. However, Maimonides continues, it is also an allegorical explanation of the corruption of matter: Accordingly he [Solomon] likens matter, which is the cause of all these bodily pleasures, to a harlot who is also a married woman. In fact his entire book [of Proverbs] is based on this allegory. . . .For all the hindrances keeping man from his ultimate perfection, every deficiency affecting him and every disobedience, come to him from his matter alone, as we shall explain in this Treatise.19

Celestina has the power to corrupt one of the most sacred corporeal ideals—the intact, virginal hymen—reducing it to mere sensual matter, to which she, rather than God’s servant Nature, gives form. Celestina is famed for the “making and unmaking” of 5,000 virgins and proudly claims to manage the loss and restoration of virginity throughout the city, maintaining a register of all female births in order to keep an account of all those who have “escaped her net” (Celestina, 112). Celestina is a text that obsessively dwells upon the hymen and the troubling destabilization of virginity. In Celestina’s covetous hands the hymen—and the virginity that it guarantees— becomes not only the object of trade and bargain but also an inconstant and ultimately relative good: virginity is no longer nulla reparabilis arte [that which once lost can never be regained by any art].20 Perpetual virginity is possible, and not just for the Virgin Mary: in Celestina, the hortus conclusus may be opened, closed again, and can regain its formerly intact appearance. Celestina’s hymeneal knowledge and her

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skill at patching hymens both sever virginity’s traditional connection to wisdom and replace the wisdom of the intact virgin with art, appearances, and astuteness. Thus the name “Celestina” goes beyond merely naming a character. It contains a wealth of information about the kind of character authors present and audiences expect, as well as about the kind of knowledge held within the character and the kind of language that will issue forth from the celestinesque mouth. Indeed, Celestina and her ilk are what Elizabeth Fowler has termed “social persons,” characters that are “inherently allegorical” because they personify “a position in the network of social structures” and convey a known set of arguments about such societal structures.21 Moreover, an important effect of Celestina’s existence as an archetypal figure is that, like all archetypes, she belongs to a shared, “weirdly populated” literary and mnemonic imaginary. Rojas’s continuation of the anonymous primer auto and the many continuations, “second Celestinas,” and “daughters of the Celestina,” published in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, show Celestina passing from author to author, moving in ever-expanding circles of readership. From the anonymous author and Rojas to Lope de Vega, writers knew that the image of the wise old woman was guaranteed to connote and to function in a particular way. Like a commonplace personification, the celestinesque figure could be resurrected by any number of pens in order to invoke the same welter of associations about speech, sin, heresy, and deviant feminine sexuality. Individual writers might add their own particular f lair, humor, and skill to the characterization, but all Celestinas, and especially those that arose in the wake of Rojas, would remain types. In the canonical wisdom allegories, Alfonso de la Torre’s Visión deleytable, and the stories of Catherine of Alexandria and Teodor, feminine incarnations of wisdom mediate between the male subject (often a visionary) and a body of abstract knowledge that is beyond the grasp of quotidian experience and can only be appreciated by the ojos interiores. The celestinesque go-between mediates between the male subject (a lover who may erroneously think he is a visionary) and carnal knowledge, matter, and sensuality. Wisdom’s mediation comes in feminine form, but the go-between’s comes in the form of a specific and concrete female body, which is, above all, the body of a puta vieja [old whore]. This ironic redeployment of feminine embodiment underlines the metaphorical resemblance of sexual mediation and the transmission of wisdom. The similarity between the two translationes guided the anonymous parodist of Juan de Mena’s Laberinto de Fortuna when he turned Providence’s transmission of wisdom into the Old Whore’s sexual transmission of f luids in

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the Carajicomedia, as well as the poet who composed “Una obra de un cavallero llamado ‘Visión deletable.’ ” Such a parodic metaphorical transformation is, in fact, quite logical, because, according to medieval theories of sexuality and consanguinity, a prostitute’s body, by definition, has a mediating function. Sexual intercourse was thought to create a bond of consanguinity between partners that extended to their families: a prostitute could, theoretically, create kinship relations among her clients. Although Celestina does not physically form a blood bond between Pármeno and Sempronio, her procuring and discursive work unites the two servants in a bond that is sealed by her words and with the sexual intercourse that she arranges for her two “hijos.” The Perversion of Prostitution In the context of fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Castile, when Ferdinand and Isabel’s program of cultural control extended to the regulation of extramarital sexual activities, prostitutes were particularly important figures for societal control because they provided a service considered necessary to the overall well-being of society. An oft-quoted gloss on Augustine’s remarks about prostitution in his On Providence declares, “the public woman is in society what bilge is [in a ship at] sea and the sewer pit in a palace. Remove this sewer and the entire palace will be contaminated.”22 In Celestina, Sempronio’s initial suggestion that Calisto turn to the old go-between for a cure for his sickness ref lects the traditional connections between prostitution and hygiene in the form of the purging of harmful bodily f luids and maintaining mental health. However, as a clandestine procurer whose trafficking in women is unregulated rather than “honest,” Celestina is an agent of contamination. Rather than working to cure Calisto’s lovesickness, she infects Pármeno with the same malady and spreads the disease to Melibea. Indeed, in Celestina, Rojas presents his audience with the seemingly oxymoronic perversion of prostitution and its civil-sanitary function. In the context of medieval Iberia’s often uneasy convivencia followed by the Catholic Monarchs’ systematic repression of cultic and perceived ethnic “strangers,” the “common” woman’s body also symbolizes a limit, a “moveable and corporeal” boundary between insiders and outsiders, Christians and Jews, Old Christians and conversos.23 However, although prostitutes were “public” or “common” women, shared by men, if their sexuality was not controlled, their bodies could become the sites of miscegenation through coming into contact with outsiders.24 Ironically, Wisdom and the myriad feminine embodiments made in her image are also, at least metaphorically, “common women.” King

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Solomon urges all young men to follow his example by embracing Wisdom, and Augustine elaborates upon this theme in his Soliloquies when he extols Wisdom as the perfect lover, one that could be shared among wise men and who could thus strengthen their bonds of discursive fellowship. The mediating function of the bodies of allegorical personifications is thus structurally and disturbingly similar to that of the medieval prostitute: while through Wisdom’s imagined and mnemonic body men bond as sages, the prostitute’s body forges bonds of consanguinity, and, in Celestina, bonds of lust, greed, and violence. However, the limits of limpieza de sangre, the boundaries between insiders and outsiders, may also be breached. As is so often the case in medieval and Early Modern depictions of wise women, Celestina and her impious powers are the stuff of fantasy. Her reversals of the prevailing and patriarchal order can be read as positive, revolutionary moves, as some critics argue, or as negative threats to that order, as Rojas’s paratexts assert. Celestina, like the Strange Woman, is both alluring and frightening, an outsider and an Other who is “threatening and destructive” unless she can be “controlled by men who wish to fulfill and also master their own desires.”25 She is a fearsome specter created to cause anxious laughter, who is then spectacularly destroyed to assuage readerly anxiety. Rojas imposes control over his “strange woman” by making her a grotesque and often darkly comic object, and by violently killing her off in the course of his tragicomedia. Like Wisdom, who draws men into intimate homosocial-sapiential relationships but disturbs as she seduces across the centuries; the commonplace and common woman Celestina, with her potent mixture of prostitution, heresy, desire, death, and humor, would continue to be revived and passed from reader to reader and writer to writer for centuries. Conclusion The feminine personification of Wisdom is a commonplace so ubiquitous that it tends to be overlooked. It did, however, provoke intense reactions from medieval and Early Modern Hispanic readers and writers. They imbibed and imitated a long rhetorical tradition that demanded they imagine Wisdom as a woman. Yet they also wrote from within a culture resolute in its construction of Woman as the abomination of wisdom. Wisdom and Her Lovers has explored how medieval and Early Modern writers reconstructed, and also how readers read, the contradictory commonplaces of “Lady” Wisdom and related feminine personifications of man’s intellective faculties. My intention throughout this book has been to unravel the threads of an apparently seamless rhetorical tradition,

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to probe under its surface simplicity in order to reveal the erotic and anxiety-ridden receptive dynamics that are set in motion when authors schooled in the Iberian Christian tradition place Wisdom and her like in the imaginary schoolrooms of allegorical dialogues and in the visionary landscapes of journeys to enlightenment. The receptive dynamics at play in authoritative allegories clearly inf luenced romances and hagiographic works in which female characters are vehicles for the transmission of knowledge. From Alfonso X’s General estoria to the encomia dedicated to Sor Juan Inés de la Cruz and Fernando de Rojas’s Celestina, feminine personifications and their bodies of knowledge inspired reactions ranging from consternation to arousal, often blending the two. As I have argued, readers and writers have encountered in “Lady” Wisdom not only a familiar and serviceable figure for the mnemonic organization of the lessons taught in heuristic allegories, but also a trope ripe for parodying and subverting. As a result of centuries of rhetorical recreations, allegorical interpretations, imitations, and parodic appropriations of the feminine personification of Wisdom, the canonical commonplaces inherited from ancient philosophy and biblical tradition became compositional common women, to be shared among men in the ongoing endeavor to transmit—and jealously guard—the wisdom that assures male prerogatives and social superiority.

NOTES

Introduction 1. Juan Rodríguez del Padrón, Siervo libre de amor, ed. Antonio Prieto (Madrid: Castalia, 1986), 76. 2. Synderesis is a term first coined by Jerome in his fifth-century commentary on Ezekiel, in which he likens the four faces of the prophet’s vision to four parts of the human soul, thus expanding the Platonic division of the soul into three elements. Jerome identifies the fourth part as synteresin, “that spark of conscience which was not even extinguished in the breast of Cain after he was turned out of Paradise, and by which we discern that we sin, when we are overcome by pleasures of frenzy, and meanwhile are misled by an imitation of reason” (cited and translated in Timothy R. Potts, Conscience in Medieval Philosophy [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980], 70–80). Although it has been posited that Jerome’s synteresin is actually the result of a scribal error in the transcription of syneidesis (conscience) (Robert A. Greene, “Synderesis, the Spark of Conscience, in the English Renaissance,” Journal of the History of Ideas 52.2 [1991]: 197), from the twelfth century on, theologians debated the nature of synderesis and its relationship to human conscience and intellect. The discussions of synderesis found in the works of Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure, which are I believe the most pertinent to Rodríguez del Padrón and his contemporaries’ understanding of the concept, follow Jerome’s characterization of synderesis as the faculty of the human soul that is a remnant of prelapsarian perfection, allowing the immediate, unmediated, and infallible apprehension of good and evil. Thomas Aquinas identifies synderesis as the “highest activity of human moral sense.” For Bonaventure, synderesis is an appetitive faculty, one that makes humans naturally desire what is good, even when it conf licts with what is useful and physically desirable. In his Journey of the Mind to God Bonaventure defines Synderesis as the “apex mentis seu scintilla” [the crown of the intellect or its spark] and in the Breviloquium, he further defines it as the grace of recte volendum, the function of which is “remurmurare contra malum et stimulare ad bonum” [to remurmur against evil and to spur to the good], cited in William R. Inge, Christian Mysticism: Considered in Eight Lectures Delivered before the University of Oxford (London: Methuen, 1948), 359–60, Reprint,

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3.

4.

5.

6. 7. 8.

NOTES

8th edition). Hispanomedievalists have interpreted Rodríguez del Padrón’s Syndéresis in varying ways, ranging from identifying her as a personification of Wisdom, the “Worm of Conscience,” and Penitence, to a figure for the dedicatee of Siervo, Gonzalo de Medina (Robert Folger, Images in Mind: Lovesickness, Spanish Sentimental Fiction and Don Quijote [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002], 127–28). Given that Rodríguez del Padrón was a Franciscan, it is not unlikely that he found inspiration in Bonaventure for both his allegorical journey up the path of Minerva (wisdom) and his personification of Synderesis, found at the apex of the path (“Siervo Libre de Amor” de Juan Rodríguez del Padrón: Estudio y edición, ed. Enric Dolz [Valencia: Servi de Publicaciones, Universitat de Valencia, 2004], 282–88). Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Wisdom of Solomon were attributed to the authorship of Solomon in the Middle Ages and Early Modernity. The Wisdom of Solomon is a canonical text for the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches, but it is not found in the Hebrew Bible and is considered apocryphal in both the Jewish and Protestant traditions. See Claudia Camp, Wisdom and the Feminine in the Book of Proverbs (Decatur, GA: Almond Press, 1985) and “Woman Wisdom as Root Metaphor: A Theological Consideration,” in The Listening Heart. Essays in Wisdom and the Psalms in Honor of E. Murphy, O. Carm, ed. Kenneth G. Hoglund, Elisabeth F. Huwiler, Jonathan T. Glass, and Roger W. Lee (Sheffield, UK: JSOT, 1987), 45–76; James L. Crenshaw, Old Testament Wisdom: An Introduction (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1998); Bernhard Lang, Wisdom and the Book of Proverbs: A Hebrew Goddess Redefined (New York: Pilgrim Press, 1986), 142–60; Paul A. Olson, The Journey to Wisdom: Self-education in Patristic and Medieval Literature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995); and Gerhard Von Rad, Wisdom in Israel, trans. James D. Martin (London: S. C. M. Press, 1972). Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. Joel C. Relihan (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2001). The Consolation had a status tantamount to required reading for late-medieval literates. In medieval Iberia, the Consolation and glosses by various authors were circulated in both Latin and in vernacular languages. See Ronald G. Keightley, “Boethius in Spain: A Checklist of Early Translations,” in The Medieval Boethius: Studies in the Vernacular Translations of De Consolatione Philosophiae, ed. A. J. Minnis (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 1987), 169–87. Augustine, Soliloquies and Immortality of the Soul, ed. and trans. Gerard Watson (Warminster, UK: Aris & Phillips, 1990), I: 17–25, 47–63. Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, 3 and 49. On the much debated meaning and intentionality of Siervo libre de amor, see Marina Scordilis Brownlee, “The Generic Status of the Siervo libre de amor: Rodríguez del Padrón’s Reworking of Dante.” Poetry Today 5.3 (1984): 629–43; Folger, Images in Mind; Patricia E. Grieve, Desire and Death in the Spanish Sentimental Romance (Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 1987), 24–25; E. Michael Gerli, “The Old French Source of Siervo libre

NOTES

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

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de amor: Guillaume de Deguileville’s Le Rommant des trois pèlerinages,” in Studies on the Spanish Sentimental Romance (1440–1550): Redefining a Genre, ed. Joseph J. Gwara and E. Michael Gerli (London: Tamesis, 1997), 3–20; and Louise Haywood “ ‘La escura selva’: Allegory in Early Sentimental Romance,” HR 68.4 (Autumn 2000): 415–28. The works of Hildegard von Bingen and Christine de Pizan, two medieval authors whose work lies beyond the scope of this study, provide fascinating examples of feminine embodiments of wisdom in works meant for female and mixed audiences. See Barbara Newman, Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard’s Theology of the Feminine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); Maureen Quilligan, The Allegory of Female Authority: Christine de Pizan’s Cité des dames (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); and Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (New York: Athaneum, 1985), chapter 9. Terry Eagleton, Against the Grain: Essays 1975–1985 (London: Verso, New Left Books, 1986), 80. Cervantes, among other Spanish authors, uses the image of turning a tapestry over to describe the results of translation. In chapter 62 of book two of Don Quijote, the ingenioso hidalgo remarks: “me parece que el traducir de una lengua en otra, como no sea de las reinas de las lenguas, griega y latina, es como quien mira los tapices f lamencos por el revés, que aunque se veen las figuras, son llenas de hilos que las escurecen y no se veen con la lisura y tez de la haz” (1143). As Ralph Flores suggests, Augustine’s feminine embodiments cover up a “threatening void of unfulfilled desire.” Ralph Flores, A Study of Allegory in its Historical Context and Relationship to Contemporary Theory (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1996), 82. The term is Quilligan’s: “the pretext is the text that the narrative comments on by reenacting. . . .The pretext is not merely a repository of ideas, it is the original treasure house of truth,” a text that has the “privileged status in guiding not only the interpretation but the possibilities of the allegory.” Maureen Quilligan, The Language of Allegory: Defining the Genre (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), 98. Barbara Newman, God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 49.

1

Bodies of Knowledge: Wisdom, Personification, and Memory

1. Ad C. Herennium De Ratione Dicendi (Rhetorica Ad Herennium) IV.lii, trans. Harry Caplan (London: William Heinemann, 1954), 399. 2. James J. Paxson, The Poetics of Personification Literature, Culture, Theory (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 14. 3. See, for example, the assessments of personification allegory in C. S. Lewis’s Allegory of Love (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), 44–48; Angus Fletcher’s Allegory, the Theory of a Symbolic Mode

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4. 5. 6. 7.

8.

9.

10. 11. 12.

13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1964), 26–35; and Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957, 1973 reprint), 90–91. Carolyn Van Dyke, The Fiction of Truth: Structures of Meaning in Narrative and Dramatic Allegory (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 30. Chandler Rathfon Post, Mediaeval Spanish Allegory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1915), 3 and 7. Maureen Quilligan, The Language of Allegory. Defining the Genre (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), 31. Stephen J. Greenblatt, “Preface” in Allegory and Representation, Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1979–80, ed. Stephen J. Greenblatt (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), vii. Paul De Man, “Pascal’s Allegory of Persuasion,” in Allegory and Representation, Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1979–80, ed. Stephen J. Greenblatt (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 1. Orientational metaphors conceptualize ideas and experiences by giving them a spatial orientation vis-à-vis the speaking or viewing subject. Ontological metaphors, on the other hand, “impose artificial boundaries” on physical objects, ideas, emotions, and experiences so that they are perceived as entities and substances. When we identify these experiences as substances, “we can refer to them, categorize them, group them, and quantify them—and, by this means, reason about them.” Both metaphorical modes stem from the very structure of the human body and our experiences of its relationship to other entities and the environment that surrounds us. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980, 2003 reprint), 25. Morton W. Bloomfield, “A Grammatical Approach to Personification Allegory,” Modern Philology 60.3 (1963): 162. Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (New York: Atheneum, 1985), 70. S. Georgia Nugent, “Virtus or Virago? The Female Personifications of Prudentius’s Psychomachia,” in Virtue and Vice: The Personifications in the Index of Christian Art, ed. Colum Hourihane (Princeton: Index of Christian Art and Princeton University Press, 2000), 13. Joan Ferrante, Woman as Image in Medieval Literature from the Twelfth Century to Dante (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), 1. Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, Fortune Is a Woman: Gender and Politics in the Thought of Niccolò Machiavelli (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 25–26 and 122. Barbara E. Kurtz “Medieval Grammatical Theory and the Genesis of Personification Allegory,” Ball State Forum 30 (Summer 1989): 24. Bloomfield, “A Grammatical Approach,” 165–67. Warner, Monuments and Maidens, 85. Barbara Newman, Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard’s Theology of the Feminine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 42–43.

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19. Gordon Teskey, Allegory and Violence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 15–16. 20. Teskey, Allegory and Violence, 15–16 and 19. 21. Teskey, Allegory and Violence, 4. 22. In this light, it is interesting to note that the first full reference to the device of prosopopeia in a rhetorical treatise hints at the status of gender in its use. In his third-century treatise, the rhetor Demetrius conceives of personification as the lending of the specifically female physical form to lifeless things: “Another figure of thought—the so-called prosopopeia—may be employed to produce energy of style, as in the words: ‘Imagine that your ancestors, or Hellas, or your native land, assuming a woman’s form, should address such and such reproaches to you.’ ” In Paxson, Poetics, 12. 23. Mary Carruthers, “Reading with Attitude, Remembering the Book,” in The Book and the Body, ed. Dolores Warwick Frese and Katherine O’Brien O’Keefe (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1997), 10. 24. Rhetorica Ad Herennium, III: xxii, 219–21. Capitalizations of Art and Nature mine to ref lect the anonymous author’s own personifications. 25. Rhetorica Ad Herennium, III: xxii, 219–21. 26. Frances Yates, Art of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 75. The Latin text reads: “Tertio, oportet ut homo sollicitudinem apponat et affectum adhibeat ad ea quae vult rememorari, quia quanto aliquid magis fuerit impressum animo, tanto minus elabitur.” Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica (Paris: Lethielleux, 1939), 257. 27. Thomas Aquinas, On Memory and Recollection, in The Medieval Craft of Memory: An Anthology of Texts and Pictures, ed. Mary Carruthers and Jan M. Ziolkowski (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 165. 28. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica. Complete English Edition, Part 2 (Second Part), trans. Fathers of the Dominican Province (New York: Berziger Brothers, 1912–25), 34–35. 29. Yates, Art of Memory, 75. 30. Yates, Art of Memory, 81. 31. V. A. Kolve, Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative: The First Five Canterbury Tales (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984), 32. 32. Quoted in Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 109. 33. Masculinity, Mark Breitenberg suggests, is “inherently anxious,” and the cultural productions that construct masculinity within patriarchal contexts inevitably express anxiety because they construct male subjects as superior, yet also in need of the “constant defense” of their privileged position: “masculine subjectivity constructed and sustained by a patriarchal culture—infused with patriarchal assumptions about power, privilege, sexual desire, the body—inevitably engenders varying degrees of anxiety in its male members.” Mark Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 1–3. This concept of “anxious masculinity” neatly characterizes the tone of biblical and medieval wisdom literature. Following

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35.

36. 37.

38.

39. 40.

41. 42.

NOTES

Barbara F. Weissberger’s discussion of gendered anxiety in the literary productions associated with the reign of Isabel I of Castile, I apply the concept of “anxious masculinity” more broadly, as “any discursive strategy that expresses, articulates, and/or contains a perceived loss of masculine power and privilege.” Barbara Weissberger, Isabel Rules: Constructing Queenship, Wielding Power (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), xv. Athalya Brenner, “Some Observations on the Figurations of Woman in Wisdom Literature,” in A Feminist Companion to Wisdom Literature (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995), 51. Carol A. Newsom, “Woman and the Discourse of Patriarchal Wisdom: A Study of Proverbs 1–9,” in Gender and Difference in Ancient Israel, ed. Peggy L. Day (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989), 142. Newsom, “Woman and the Discourse of Patriarchal Wisdom,” 153–55. Here, I follow Margaret Miles’s definition of “carnal knowing” as embodied knowledge, “an activity in which the intimate interdependence and irreducible cooperation of thinking, feeling, sensing, and understanding is revealed.” Margaret Miles, Carnal Knowing: Female Nakedness and Religious Meaning in the Christian West (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), 9. Gail Corrington Streete discusses the “sexual dimension of knowledge” in The Strange Woman: Power and Sex in the Bible (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1998), 106. The concepts of marriage and mastery go hand in hand in the metaphor. As Judith Wegner points out, a wife is described in biblical law as “beculat bacal,” “which, though usually translated as ‘married woman,’ literally means a woman laid by a husband and also (as the word for husband, bacal, is identical with that for master, or owner, of a domestic animal or for the possessor of an object or quality) bears the inescapable connotation of the property of an owner.” Judith Wegner, Chattel or Person? The Status of Women in the Mishnah (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 13. See introduction to A Feminist Companion, ed. Brenner and Newsom, “Woman and the Discourse of Patriarchal Wisdom.” Athalya Brenner comments upon the enigmatic nature of the Hebrew epithet issa zara, which is generally translated as “strange woman,” but also connotes “foreign woman” and “other woman.” Brenner, Introduction to A Feminist Companion, 16. Claudia Camp, Wisdom and the Feminine in the Book of Proverbs (Decatur, GA: Almond Press, 1985), 219. Camp, Wisdom and the Feminine, 222. The goals and scope of both Claudia Camp’s and Athalya Brenner’s projects extend beyond literary analysis and into the realms of historical sociology and theology. Both hope to recover female roles and voices from the texts of the Hebrew Bible for contemporary feminist theology. Indeed, much recent scholarship on biblical wisdom literature seeks to find the original meanings of the axioms and metaphors it presents and, through a deeper understanding of these

NOTES

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44.

45. 46. 47.

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meanings, reconstruct models of reception, but, while doing so, often intends to contribute to current liturgical and exegetical practice. María Jesús Lacarra, Cuentística medieval en España: los orígenes (Zaragoza: Departamento de Literatura Española, 1979), 162, and Hugo O. Bizzarri, “Textos Sentenciosos De Inf lujo Bíblico (MS B. N. Madrid 6608),” Atalaya 3 (1992): 92–100. As Beryl Smalley observes, biblical wisdom literature had become the object of increased exegetical interest throughout the eleventh and twelfth centuries. While twelfth-century exegetes “had been more interested in the ‘divine wisdom’ which they found in the Canticle than in the discussion of human affairs and of natural science contained in other books of the group,” thirteenth-century masters, such as Thomas Aquinas, John of Salisbury, and John of Varzy, draw attention to the application of the political advice in the wisdom books to human life. Beryl Smalley, Medieval Exegesis of Wisdom Literature, ed. Roland E. Murphy, Scholars Press Reprints and Translations Series (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1986), 6–7. Lacarra, Cuentística, 34 and 100. Streete, Strange Woman, 105. Jehan Le Fèvre, “The Lamentations of Matheolus,” translated from the Latin by Karen Pratt, in Woman Defamed and Woman Defended: An Anthology of Medieval Texts, ed. Alcuin Blamires, K. Pratt, and C. W. Marx (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 194.

2

Lady Wisdom My Brother: Reading Sapientia in Medieval Castile

1. Claudia Camp, for example asks: “How are we to understand the function of a highly exalted female figure in a canon that is patriarchal in source and monotheistic in perspective?” (Claudia Camp, Wisdom and the Feminine in the Book of Proverbs [Decatur, GA: Almond Press, 1985], 11). Roland Murphy, one of the preeminent twentieth-century commentators on biblical wisdom literature, writes, as if completely taken aback by the suggestion that Wisdom represents sapiential order: “Who has ever sued for, or been pursued by, order, even in the surrogate form of a woman? The very symbol of Lady Wisdom suggests that order is not the correct correlation. Rather, she is to be somehow identified with the Lord, as indicated by her very origins and her authority. Roland Murphy, “Wisdom and Creation,” Journal of Biblical Literature 104 (Mar. 1985): 9. While Murphy’s remarks are intended in support of his thesis that Lady Wisdom symbolizes a divine voice of wisdom, his response indicates the incongruity of linking “woman” and “wisdom” within a patriarchal framework. 2. Medieval Spanish translations of the Hebrew Bible were generally made either directly from Hebrew or from the Vulgate, although the Vetus Latina Bible was also still in use throughout the Iberian Middle Ages.

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4.

5. 6.

7.

8.

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The versions of the Vulgate that circulated in Iberia in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries were derived from the model known as the Paris Bible, which Sánchez-Prieto and Horcajada conclude was the model for the sapiential translations in the General estoria. Alfonso X., General estoria, tercera parte. Libros de Salomón: Cantar de los cantares, Proverbios, Sabiduría y Eclesiastés (Hereafter GE3), ed. Pedro Sánchez-Prieto Borja and Bautista Horcajada Diezma (Madrid: Gredos, 1994), 20 and 20n. References to Alfonso X. (1252–1284) as the “author” of the many historical, scientific, and poetic works associated with his cultural enterprise are, in the words of Roberto González-Casanovas, “a critical short hand for the whole complex phenomenon (rhetorical, semiotic, technological, ideological, and hermeneutic) of book production and reception at his court.” Roberto González-Casanovas, “Book Culture in Alfonso X.’s Prologues: The Texts and Contexts of Wisdom,” Hispanófila 111 (1994): 2. The miniature is found in MS Escorial Y.I.2 and is reproduced in color in Alfonso X., Primera crónica general de España que mandó componer Alfonso el Sabio y se continuaba bajo Sancho IV en 1289, 2 vols., ed. Ramón Menéndez Pidal (Madrid: Editorial Gredos, 1955), unnumbered plate on an unnumbered page. The concern for the transmission, reception, and retention of saber also links the histories with the other sapiential works that were compiled as part of Alfonso’s cultural enterprise, such as Bocados de oro, and Calila e Dimna. Primera crónica general, 2. All translations mine, unless otherwise noted. See Anthony Cárdenas, “Alfonso’s Scriptorium and Chancery: The Role of the Prologue in Bonding the Translatio Studii to the Translatio potestatis,” in Emperor of Culture: Alfonso X the Learned of Castile and His ThirteenthCentury Renaissance, ed. Robert Burns (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1980), 90–108; Roberto González-Casanovas, “The Bible As Authority in Alfonso X.’s General Estoria: A Rhetorist’s Reading of the Prologue,” in Estudios Alfonsinos y otros escritos en homenaje a John Esten Keller y a Aníbal A. Biglieri, ed. Nicolás Toscano Liria (New York: National Endowment for the Humanities, 1990), 87–97; Francisco Márquez Villanueva, El concepto cultural alfonsí, Colección Sefarad (Madrid: Mapfre, 1994); and Francisco Rico, Alfonso el Sabio y la “General estoria”: Tres lecciones (Barcelona: Ariel, 1972). I have used the NSRV for general titles and quotations from the biblical and deutero-canonical works; the Alfonsine Castilian chapter titles appear italicized: Cantar de los cantares, Proverbios, Sabiduría and Eclesiastés. Although these full translations of biblical materials are found within the broader context of the General estoria, they are also considered contributions to the corpus of thirteenth-century biblias romanceadas. The third part of the General estoria is found in four known manuscript witnesses: R, MS CXXV/2–3 of the Biblioteca Pública e Arquivo Distritale de Évora, a thirteenth- or fourteenth-century copy; MS Y.I.8 of the Real Monasterio de San Lorenzo de El Escorial, dating from the

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fifteenth century; BN, MS 7563 of the Biblioteca Nacional de España, another fifteenth century copy; and A6, Real Academia Española MS 6, a late fifteenth or early sixteenth-century copy. In my analysis, I rely upon Sánchez-Prieto and Horcajada’s edition and review of variants in the manuscript witnesses, as well as my personal inspection of E6, Y.I.8 and MS BN 7563. Due to the fact that the manuscripts of the third part of the General estoria were first edited in 1994 by Pedro SánchezPrieto and Bautista Horcajada, many of the seminal studies on Alfonsine historiography do not include a consideration of the third part of the universal history in their analyses. Sánchez-Prieto and Horcajada’s edition is bilingual, providing the Vulgate text with interlineal glosses that the Alfonsine translators included in their vernacular versions of the Books of Solomon. 9. Julián Zarco Cuevas identified MS I.I.6 as “pre-alfonsina.” Catálogo de los manuscritos castellanos de la Real biblioteca de el Escorial, 3 vols. (Madrid: Real Biblioteca de El Escorial, 1924–29), 27. Sánchez-Prieto and Horcajada, however, assert that the Alfonsine translations of the Books of Solomon are not dependent upon earlier biblias romanceadas. Rather, they argue, the royal team of translators and adaptors worked directly from the original Hebrew and from the Vulgate. On the other hand, the editors of Philobiblon attribute E6 to the Alfonsine scriptorium. Philobiblon, BETA manid 1161 (URL: http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Philobiblon/BETA/1161. html) Jan. 31, 2007. Fernando Gómez Redondo, noting that the first Castilian translations of the Bible date from the thirteenth century, suggests that they were prepared specifically as support materials for the General estoria. Historia de la prosa medieval castellana I (Madrid: Cátedra, 1998), 125–31. 10. On the intended audiences of Iberian romance Bibles, see introduction to Biblia Romanceada I.I.8: The 13th-Century Spanish Bible Contained in Escorial MS I.I.8, ed. Mark G. Littlefield (Madison: HSMS, 1983) and introduction to Biblia Ladinada Escorial I.J.3: A Critical Edition with Notes and Commentary, 2 vols., ed. Moshe Lazar (Madison: HSMS, 1995). Margherita Morreale provides a concise history of vernacular Bibles in Castilian in “Vernacular Scriptures in Spain,” in The Cambridge History of the Bible, ed. G. W. H. Lampe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 465–91. The translation methods of the Afonsine scriptoria are detailed in Clara Foz, El traductor, la Iglesia y el rey: La traducción en España en los siglos XII y XIII, trans. Enrique Folch (Barcelona: Gedisa, 2000) and Hans Josef Niederehe, Alfonso X el Sabio y la lingüística de su tiempo (Madrid: Sociedad General Española de Librería, 1987). Medieval decrees forbidding the possession of vernacular Bibles, such as Juan I of Aragón’s at the Council of Tarragona in 1233, do not seem to have had much effect and, until the expulsion of the Jews in 1492, biblical translation f lourished in medieval Spain. See introduction to Biblia Ladinada, ix–xi, ed. Moshe Lazar. 11. Biblia romanceada, MS Escorial I-I-5, f. 180rb.

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12. A. Cohen, commenting on Proverbs 8:20, explains that, in addition to the pronounced feminine personification of Wisdom in the passage, in Hebrew, “The plural form of the word expresses the abstract idea; according to others, [it expresses] intensity, profound wisdom or fullness, the perfection of wisdom.” Proverbs: Hebrew Text & English Translation with an Introduction and Commentary, ed. A. Cohen (Hindhead, UK: Soncino Press, 1945), 5. Although the fifteenth-century rabbinic translations in the Alba and Ferrara Bibles are beyond the scope of this study, it is worth noting here that, while they do not employ the masculine personification of Saber, they too reveal a preference for the plural sçiençias and sabidurías in the passages where Wisdom preaches and builds her house. 13. All quotations from the General estoria’s translations of the Books of Solomon are from Sánchez-Prieto and Horcajada’s edition, GE3. 14. In the quotations above, I have put some key Latin terms in brackets following the Alfonsine translations of those terms. 15. The manuscript begins with Proverbs, includes two books of Maccabees, Christian evangelical texts, and the Apocalypse. According to José Llamas, the translation drew upon both Hebrew and Latin Bibles. Estudio introductorio in Biblia medieval romanceada judio-cristiana; versión del Antiguo Testamento en el siglo XIV, sobre los textos hebreo y latino, ed. José Llamas (Madrid: Instituto Francisco Suárez, 1950–55), xxxiv–xxxvi. Sánchez-Prieto and Horcajada, on the other hand, argue that it is one of the first in a series of romance Bibles translated wholly from the Vulgate. Introduction to GE3, 16. 16. (Proverbios VII 3rb emphasis added). In my transcriptions from MS Escorial I-I-6 and BN 10231 I complete scribal abbreviations with italics. 17. The Vulgate text for Wisdom 8.2–17 reads: Hanc amavi et exquisivi eam a iuventute mea / et quaesivi sponsam mihi eam adsumere et amator factus sum formae illius. . . ./ intrans in domum meam conquiescam cum illa / Non enim habet amaritudinem conversatio illius nec taedium convictus illius sed laetitium et gaudium / Haec cogitans apud me et commemorans in corde meo quia inmortalis est in cogitatione sapientia / Et in amicitia illius delectatio bona. GE3, 315–18. 18. Letter LVII to Pammachius, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, Volume 6 ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, trans. W. H. Freemantle (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1995; Reprint of the Christian Literature Publishing Company, 1893 edition), 113. 19. In his study of Alfonsine linguistics, Niederehe argues that Jerome’s method was of little interest to Alfonso, who desired not to transmit a Bible, but a history of the world in the vernacular. Alfonso X el Sabio y la lingüística de su tiempo, 200. As Dorothy Donald suggests, when the Alfonsine translators strayed from word for word accuracy, it was in the service of making their sources intelligible “in terms of the Spanish vocabulary of the thirteenth century,” a process that María Rosa Lida de Malkiel denominates as “actualization” of the ancient sources. Dorothy Donald, “Suetonius in the Primera crónica general through the Speculum

NOTES

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31.

32.

153

Historiale,” HR 11 (1943): 102. Lida de Malkiel, “La General estoria: Notas literarias y filológicas (I),” RP 12 (1958): 111–42 and “La General estoria: Notas literarias y filológicas (II),” RP 13 (1959): 1–30. Sánchez-Prieto and Horcajada note that these introductory remarks appear in the following manuscripts: Escorial Y.I.8, fol. 1ra and Biblioteca Nacional 7563, fol. 1ra. As Sánchez-Prieto and Horcajada suggest, Alfonso’s affinity for Solomon could have inf luenced the compilation of the third part of the universal history. Introduction to GE3, 13. Samuel Berger, La Bible romane au Moyen Age (Bibles provençales, vaudoises, catalanes, italiennes, castillanes et portugaises) (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1977), 237. Beryl Smalley, Medieval Exegesis of Wisdom Literature, ed. Roland E. Murphy, Scholars Press Reprints and Translations Series (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1986), 40. Although Copeland states that medieval biblical translations lie beyond the scope of her study on medieval translation theory, some of her remarks do indeed apply to Alfonso’s use of the Bible as a translatable and adaptable text. Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 3 and 8. Lloyd Kasten, “Alfonso el Sabio and the Thirteenth-Century Spanish Language,” in Emperor of Culture: Alfonso X the Learned of Castile and His Thirteenth-Century Renaissance, ed. Robert Burns (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 35. Charles Fraker, The Scope of History: Studies in the Historiography of Alfonso el Sabio (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 3. Margherita Morreale, “Acerca de ‘sapiencia, sabencia, sabid(u)ría’ y ‘saber’ en la IVa parte de la ‘General estoria,’ ” Cahiers de Linguistique Hispanique Médiévale 6 (1981): 111–22 and “Consideraciones acerca de saber, sapiencia, sabencia, sabiduría en la elaboración automática y en el estudio histórico del castellano medieval,” RFE 60 (1978–80): 1–22. Morreale, “Consideraciones,” 16. Morreale, “Consideraciones,” 13–15. Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis, vol. 2, trans. John Hammond Taylor (New York: Newman Press, 1982), 75. Roberto González-Casanovas, “Male Bonding as Cultural Construction in Alfonso X, Ramon Llull, and Juan Manuel: Homosocial Friendship in Medieval Iberia,” in Queer Iberia: Sexualities, Cultures, and Crossings From the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, ed. Josiah Blackmore and Gregory S. Hutcheson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 165 and 175. This Christological reading of the figure of Wisdom in the Books of Solomon begins in the language of the Synoptic Gospels of Matthew and John, and was further explicated by Origen in his writings on the Arian controversy.

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33. Charles Kannengiesser, “Lady Wisdom’s Final Call: The Patristic Recovery of Proverbs 8,” in Nova Doctrina Vetusque: Essays on Early Christianity in Honor of Fredric W. Schlatter, S. J., ed. Douglas Kries, Fredric W. Schlatter, and Catherine Brown Tkacz (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), 65. 34. Martín de León, Sermo Quartus In Natale Domini II, in Patrologia Latina Database Vol. 208. col.137D ( Jacques-Paul Migne) (Bell & Howell Information and Learning Company 1996–2000 [cited 2005]). 35. Medieval translators familiar with Midrash on wisdom literature perhaps recalled the many interpretations that read the scenes of Wisdom personified as allegories for the Torah and the male scholars’ relationship to it. The Midrash on Proverbs, ed. and trans. Burton L. Visotzky (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 49. 36. In the first two parts of the General estoria Alfonso interpolates and calls attention to commentaries from multiple religious and secular authorities. Sánchez-Prieto and Horcajada identify traces of an interlineal gloss in GE3 that appear to come from the Glossa ordinaria and the exegeses of Bede, Bonaventure, and Rabanus Maurus. Alfonso X., Introduction to GE3, 57–84. 37. On Alfonso’s policies regarding Jews, see Dwayne Carpenter, Alfonso X and the Jews: An Edition and Commentary on Siete Partidas 7.24 “De los judios,” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 5; 85–88.

3 Figures of Matter and Form: Feminine Personification and Epistemology in the Visión deleytable 1. Juan de Mena, Laberinto de Fortuna y otros poemas, ed. Carla de Nigris (Barcelona: Crítica, 1994), st. 26. 2. The Visión was composed in 1440s and first printed in 1480. There are fifteen known manuscripts, four incunabula editions, and seven printed editions from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Introduction to Alfonso de la Torre, Visión deleytable, ed. Jorge García López (Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca, 1991), 13–34. 3. For example, the two most recent studies dedicated to the Visión are concerned with Alfonso’s source material and religious affiliation: Luis GirónNegrón, Alfonso de la Torre’s Visión deleytable: Philosophical Rationalism and the Religious Imagination in 15th Century Spain (Leiden: Brill, 2001) and Concepción Salinas Espinosa, Poesía y prosa didáctica en el siglo XV: La obra del bachiller Alfonso de la Torre (Zaragoza: Prensas Universitarias de Zaragoza, 1997). Marta Haro Cortés’s discussion of the narrative elements in the Visión is an exception to this general critical rule. “La ficción como elemento didáctico en la Visión deleytable de Alfonso de la Torre,” in Actas del III Congreso de la Asociación Hispánica de Literatura Medieval, I–II, ed. M. I. Toro Pascua (Salamanca, Spain: Biblioteca Española del Siglo XV, Departamento de Literatura Española e Hispanoamericana, 1994), 445–51.

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4. Morton W. Bloomfield, “Allegory as Interpretation,” NLH 3.2 (1972): 311 and 317. 5. Maureen Quilligan, The Language of Allegory. Defining the Genre (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), 28. 6. Alfonso de la Torre, Visión deleytable, 2 vols., edición crítica y estudio, Jorge García López (Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca, 1991). 7. Due to his extensive use of Moses Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed, and a reference to the cabbala, some critics have suggested that Alfonso was a crypto-Jew, while other readers argue that he was a sincere Christian seeking, like his Scholastic models, to reconcile Aristotelian philosophy with his faith. On Alfonso de la Torre’s many sources and a review of scholarly opinions on his religious belief, see introduction to Visión deleytable, ed. Jorge García López; Luis Girón-Negrón, Alfonso de la Torre’s Visión deleytable, 11–23; and Concepción Salinas Espinosa, Poesía y prosa didáctica en el siglo XV. J. P. Wickersham Crawford first pointed out Alfonso de la Torre’s indebtedness to Alan of Lille and, following Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo’s observations, argued for the centrality of Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed in “The Seven Liberal Arts in the Visión Delectable of Alfonso de la Torre,” Romanic Review 4 (1913): 58–75; and “The Visión Delectable of Alfonso de la Torre and Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed,” PMLA 28 (1913): 188–212. 8. Gordon Teskey, Allegory and Violence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 15–16. 9. James J. Paxson, The Poetics of Personification Literature, Culture, Theory (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 94. 10. Alan of Lille, Anticlaudianus or the Good and Perfect Man, ed. and trans. James L. Sheridan (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1973), 85. 11. Mary Carruthers, “Reading with Attitude, Remembering the Book,” in The Book and the Body, ed. Dolores Warwick Frese and Katherine O’Brien O’Keefe (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1997), 3. 12. Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, Moses Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, trans. S. Pines, ed. Leo Strauss (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 11–13. 13. Alan of lille, Anticlaudianus, 103n, 106–107. James Sheridan remarks that “Alan must have been irked by the fact that all of the Virtues and the seven Liberal Arts were feminine. He tries here and there to inject a masculine element.” 14. Boethius’s medieval commentators, including Nicholas Trivet, whose glosses circulated widely in Spain in the fifteenth century, explain that Philosophy’s three heights represent the three levels of learning that comprise the journey to wisdom: earthly studies, mathematics or astronomy and heavenly studies, and, ultimately, metaphysics and theology. 15. The principles are repoduced fairly faithfully from the Guide II.I. Girón Negrón, Alfonso de la Torre, 105. Simina Farcasiu traces the allegiances of these chapters in the Visión to Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologicae.

156

16. 17.

18. 19.

20. 21.

22.

23. 24.

NOTES

Simina Farcasiu, “Social Purpose and Scholastic Method: The Visión Delectable of Alfonso de la Torre,” in Circa 1492: Proceedings of the Jerusalem Colloquium—Litterae Judaeorum in Terra Hispanica ( Jerusalem: Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1992), 79–97. Aristotle, The Physics, 2 vols., trans. Philip H. Wicksteed and Francis M. Cornford (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), I 9. The same metaphor is found in the Guide I, 72. See Francisco Rico, El pequeño mundo del hombre: Varia fortuna de una idea en la cultura española (Madrid: Alianza, 1986). Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, 4 vols., trans. A. C. Pegis (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975), I, 63. Luis Girón-Negrón sees the conclusion to the Visión as a “begrudging acquiescence to the irrational demands of a blind faith” that is incongruent with the treatise’s championing of reason (Alfonso de la Torre’s Visión deleytable, 33). Alfonso may indeed have appended this ending to his Maimonidean and Aristotelian cento in order to escape censure, or the Visión may have been a sincere attempt to synthesize Maimonidean and Aristotelian thought with orthodox Catholicism. Although the final lesson on Catholic doctrine was cut from some later versions of the Visión that would circulate among Jewish communities, the entire allegorical structure of Alfonso de la Torre’s Visión in fact privileges the final chapter’s celebration of blind faith, which even confounds La Razón. Moreover, the unseating of La Razón in the Visión clearly evokes the conclusion of the journey to heaven made in Alan of Lille’s Anticlaudianus, where Reason finds that the horses that draw her chariot of intellectual ascension no longer obey her and the reins must be handed over to Faith for the final part of the expedition. Ralph Flores, A Study of Allegory in Its Historical Context and Relationship to Contemporary Theory (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1996), 16. Jorge García López includes an edition of this and the later glosses in his two-volume edition of Alfonso de la Torre’s Visión deleytable. The fifteenth-century scholarly gloss is found in MS 3367 of the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid, Spain. The manuscript is MS Espagnol 39 in Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris France. While there is no firm evidence concerning the provenance of this manuscript, it may have became part of the Bibliothèque Nationale’s holdings as part of Louis XII’s collection, much of which was inherited from the monarchs of Aragon, and which his predecessor Charles VII had brought from Naples. Michael Camille, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 42. As Weissberger observes, the Carajicomedia turns Laberinto’s “high-f lown meditation on the unfortunate condition of the kingdom into worry over the sorry state of one man’s penis.” BarbaraWeissberger, Isabel Rules: Constructing Queenship, Wielding Power (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 5. Many of the long line of infamous whores

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are named Isabel, adding another level to the parody; Mena’s allegory sought to rouse Juan II to his duty as a Christian warrior sovereign, but the Carajicomedia is taking potshots at the female monarch Isabel I. Isabel Rules, 7–16. 25. Hans Robert Jauss, “The Alterity and Modernity of Medieval Literature,” NLH 10 (Winter 1979): 219.

4 The Wise Virgin’s Confounding Body of Knowledge 1. The eleventh-century Arabic Mukhta¯r al-h. ikam wa-mah. a¯sin al-kalim was translated into Spanish before 1257, and subsequently translated into Latin as the Liber philosophorum moralium antiquorum. 2. Jacqueline Jenkins and Katherine J. Lewis, eds., “introduction” in St Katherine of Alexandria: Texts and Contexts in Western Medieval Europe, Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), 2–3. The stories of the virgin martyr and her romance imitators were undoubtedly pleasing tales for mixed audiences. As Jocelyn Wogan-Browne has observed, the strong heroines and narrative “spaces and freedoms for women as subjects and not only objects” suggest their particular appeal for female audiences. “The Virgin’s Tale,” in Feminist Readings in Middle English Literature: The Wife of Bath and All Her Sect, ed. Ruth Evans and Lesley Johnson (London: Routledge, 1994), 170. 3. Álvaro de Luna, Libro de las claras e virtuosas mugeres por el Condestable de Castilla Don Álvaro de Luna, Maestre de la Orden de Santiago del Espada, ed. Manuel Castillo (Madrid: Rafael Menor, 1908). Hereafter LVCM. 4. Vida De Segundo. Versión castellana de la Vita Secundi de Vicente de Beauvais, ed. Hugo O. Bizzarri, Exeter Hispanic Texts, 56 (Exeter: University of Exeter, 2000), 14. Segundo is an oft-quoted authority on the base nature of women in wisdom literature. See Maria Jesús Lacarra, “Algunos datos para la historia de la misoginia en la Edad Media,” in Studia in honorem prof. M. de Riquer, vol. 1 (Barcelona: Quaderns Crema, 1986), 349. 5. Maria Jesús Lacarra, “El arquetipo de la mujer sabia en la literatura medieval,” in La mujer en la literatura hispánica de la Edad Media y el Siglo de Oro, ed. Rina Walthaus (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993), 11–21. 6. María Eugenia Lacarra, “Representaciones de mujeres en la literatura española de la Edad Media (escrita en castellano),” in Breve historia feminista de la literatura española (en lengua castellana). La mujer en la literatura española: modos de representación desde la Edad Media hasta el siglo XVII, ed. Iris M. Zavala (Barcelona: Anthropos, 1993), 68. 7. E. Jane Burns, Bodytalk: When Women Speak in Old French Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 7. 8. In Narrativa popular de la Edad Media: La donzella Teodor, Flores y Blancafor, Paris y Viana, ed. Nieves Baranda and Víctor Infantes (Madrid: Akal, 1995), 59–83. For the title Donzella Teodor, I follow Hugo O. Bizzarri, reserving Donzella Teodor for the manuscript versions, and Historia de la

158

NOTES

9.

10. 11. 12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

donzella Teodor or Historia de la doncella Teodor for the early printed editions that began to circulate in print in the late fifteenth century. Hugo O.Bizzari, “La labor crítica de Hermann Knust en la edición de textos medievales castellanos: ante la crítica actual,” Incipit 8 (1988): 96. Julian Weiss, “ ‘Qué demandamos de las mugeres?’: Forming the Debate about Women in Late Medieval and Early Modern Spain,” in Gender in Debate from the Early Middle Ages to the Renaissance, ed. Thelma S. Fenster and Clare A. Lees (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 242. The ascent of Isabel I to the throne of Castile after the reigns of two other Trastámaras, Enrique IV and Juan II, who were accused of maurophilia, heretical beliefs, effeminacy, and homophobia, is often the subtext for discussions of gender in the late fifteenth century. On the debate on women and the reign of Isabel the Catholic, see Barbara Weissberger, “ ‘Deceitful Sects’: The Debate about Women in the Age of Isabel the Catholic,” in Gender in Debate from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, ed. Thelma S. Fenster and Claire A. Lees (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 207–36, and Isabel Rules: Constructing Queenship, Wielding Power (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). Robert Archer, The Problem of Woman in Late-Medieval Hispanic Literature (Woodbridge, UK: Tamesis, 2005), 4 and 204. Barbara Newman, Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard’s Theology of the Feminine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 42. Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, 2 vols., trans. William Granger Ryan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 2: 253–54. Presumably, the Gloss to which Jacobus refers is the Glossa Ordinaria. Peter Brown, “The Notion of Virginity in the Early Church,” in Christian Spirituality: Origins to the Twelfth Century, ed. Bernard McGinn and John Meyendorff (New York: Crossroad, 1985), 433. On St. Catherine’s intercession on behalf of young women seeking husbands, see Katherine J. Lewis, “Pilgrimage and the Cult of St Katherine of Alexandria in Late Medieval England,” in Pilgrimage Explored, ed. J. Stopford (York: York Medieval Press, 1999), 145–60. See Alcuin Blamires, The Case for Women in Medieval Culture (Oxford: Clarendon New York: Oxford University Press, 1997) and Billy Bussell Thompson, “ ‘Plumbei cordis, oris ferrei’: La recepción de la teología de Jacobus a Voragine y su Legenda Aurea en la Península,” in Saints and Their Authors: Studies in Medieval Hispanic Hagiography in Honor of John K. Walsh, ed. Jane E. Connolly, Alan Deyermond, and Brian Dutton (Madison: HSMS, 1990), 97–106. For other versions in medieval Castilian, see Billy Bussell Thompson and John K. Walsh, “Old Spanish Manuscripts of Prose Lives of the Saints and Their Affiliations. I: Compilation A (The Grand Flos Sanctorum),” La corónica 15 (1986–87): 17–28. The anthology is MS h.I.13 of the Biblioteca Real de El Escorial, Spain (Philobiblon BETA manid 1303, URL: http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/ Philobiblon/BETA/1303.html), Jan. 31, 2007. The complete manuscript has been transcribed and edited in a microfilm edition by Thomas D.

NOTES

17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24.

159

Spaccarelli, who has given it the title El libro de los huéspedes, or The Guests’/Hosts’ Book. Text and Concordance of El Libro de los huéspedes. Escorial MS h.I.13 (Madison: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 1996). On the rationale for anthologizing the legend with pious romances, see Thomas D. Spaccarelli, A Medieval Pilgrim’s Companion: Reassessing “El libro de los huéspedes” (Escorial MS h.I.13) (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 59–65; Emily C. Francomano “ ‘Lady, You Are Quite a Chatterbox’: The Legend of St Katherine of Alexandria, Wives’ Words, and Women’s Wisdom in MS Escorial h-I-13,” in St. Katherine of Alexandria: Texts and Contexts in Medieval Europe, ed. Jacqueline Jenkins and Katherine Lewis (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), 131–152; and “Manuscript Matrix and Meaning in Castilian and Catalan Anthologies of Saints’ Lives and Pious Romances,” BHS, 81.2 (2004): 139–53. I follow Blamires’s lead in Case for Women in Medieval Culture and discard the term “profeminist” in favor of “profeminine” to describe medieval defenses of women that praise women according to the traditional definitions of gendered roles in society. The term “profeminine” avoids the anachronistic connotations of the word “feminist” when applied to medieval texts about women. Alcuin Blamires’s discussion of “redoctrination” appears in “Refiguring the ‘Scandalous Excess’ of Women: The Wife of Bath and Liberality,” in Gender in Debate from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, ed. Thelma S. Fenster and Claire A. Lees (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 57–78. Gail Ashton, The Generation of Identity in Late Medieval Hagiography: Speaking the Saint (London: Routledge, 2000), 123. Roberta Krueger, Women Readers and the Ideology of Gender in Old French Verse Romance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), xiv. Maud Burnett McInerney, Eloquent Virgins: From Thecla to Joan of Arc (New York: Palgrave, 2003), 9. On the political and sexual controversies surrounding Álvaro de Luna, see Gregory S. Hutcheson, “Desperately Seeking Sodom: Queerness in the Chronicles of Álvaro de Luna,” in Queer Iberia, ed. Gregory Hutcheson and Josiah Blackmore (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 222–49; Nicholas Round, The Greatest Man Uncrowned: A Study of the Fall of Don Alvaro de Luna (London: Tamesis, 1986); and Julian Weiss, “Álvaro de Luna, Juan de Mena and the Power of Courtly Love,” MLN 106.2 (Mar. 1991): 241–56. Poesía cancioneril castellana, ed. E. Michael Gerli (Madrid: Akal, 1994), 281–82. Sarah Salih, Versions of Virginity in Late Medieval England (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2001), 82–84. Karl D. Uitti, “Women Saints, the Vernacular, and History in Early Medieval France,” in Images of Sainthood in Medieval Europe, ed. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Timea Szell (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 258n.

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25. Many scholars have endeavored to understand the nature of nakedness in the passions of virgin martyrs and its potentially pornographic and/or voyeuristic implications for audience reception. See, for example, Miles, Carnal Knowing, 53–77. For a survey of critical stances, see Salih, Versions of Virginity, 9–40; and McInerney, Eloquent Virgins, 1–13. 26. Such is the case in the anonymous poem, roughly contemporary to Luna’s catalogue of exemplary women, called “La ninna que alexandrina es llamada,” which highlights the incongruity between Catherine’s youth and feminine weakness and her strength in the face of discursive and physical adversity. The poem is found on folio 1r of MS K.II.26 of the Biblioteca Real de El Escorial, Spain (Philobiblon, BETA manid 1245, URL: http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Philobiblon/BETA/1245.htm), Jan. 31, 2007, a fifteenth-century manuscript of the fragmentary Crónica breve de España. 27. “This saying of many wise men I hold to be true: that an eloquent woman is never chaste; and the behavior of many learned women also confirms its truth.” This axiom comes from an anonymous fifteenthcentury Italian humanist’s accusation of incest and promiscuous sexuality against the learned Isotta Nogarola. Margaret L. King, “The Religious Retreat of Isotta Nogarola (1418–1466): Sexism and Its Consequences in the Fifteenth Century,” Signs 3.4 (1978): 809. 28. De santa Catalina, in Geschichte der Legenden der h. Katherina von Alexandrien und der h. Maria Aegyptiaca nebst unedirten Texten, ed. Hermann Knust (Halle: 1890). 29. McInerney, Eloquent Virgins, 191. 30. See Minette Gaudet, “The Denial of Feminine Subjectivity in Chrétien’s Enide,” RLA 5 (1993): 40–46 and Jean-Paul Debax, “Et voila pourquoi votre femme est muette,” Caliban 17 (1980): 23–37. 31. McInerney, Eloquent Virgins, 192. 32. Ironically, Alfonso Martínez de Toledo’s style has been celebrated as an early example of Spanish realism for these representations of feminine speech. In a recent article on Martínez de Toledo’s mimicry of women, Catherine Brown persuasively characterizes the Archpriest’s Maldezir de mugeres as a drag performance. “Queer Representation in the Arcipreste de Talavera, or, the ‘Maldezir de mugeres’ is a Drag,” in Queer Iberia: Sexualities, Cultures and Crossings from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, ed. Josiah Blackmore and Gregory Hutcheson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 73–103. 33. See introduction to Narrativa Popular de la Edad Media; Margaret Parker, The Story of a Story across Cultures: The Case of the Donzella Teodor (London: Tamesis, 1996); and Historia de la donzella Teodor: Edition and Study, ed. Isidro Rivera and Donna M. Rogers (Binghamton, NY: Global Publications/Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2000). Previously, the only available modern editions of Donzella Teodor were Walter Mettmann’s La historia de la donzella Teodor: ein spanisches Volksbuch arabischen Ursprungs Untersuchung und kritische Ausgabe der ältesten bekannten

NOTES

34.

35.

36.

37.

38.

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Fassungen (Weisbaden: Verlag der Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, 1962) and in Hermann Knust’s edition of Bocados de oro in Mittheilungen aus dem Eskurial (Tübingen: 1879). For changes in intended audience and reception of the Historia de la donzella Teodor, see Claude Bremond and Bernard Dabord, “Tawaddud et Teodor: les enjeux ludiques de savoir,” in L’enciclopedismo medievale, ed. Michelangelo Picone (Ravenna: Longo, 1994), 253–74; Isidro Rivera, “Negotiation of Scientific Discourse in the First Printed Edition of the Historia de la Donzella Teodor (Toledo: Pedro Hagenbach, ca. 1500),” HR 66:4 (1998): 415–32; and Rivera and Rogers, Historia de la Doncella Teodor, xxiii–xxx. Codicological evidence suggests that, at the time these manuscripts were compiled, Donzella Teodor and Segundo were considered integral chapters and appropriate endings for Bocados. No distinction is made in the codicological programs of the manuscripts in which they appear between what critics have deemed the last chapter of Bocados and Donzella Teodor or Segundo: there is no indication that the tales were included as an afterthought, or as a way of filling empty space in the last quires, and there is no change in hand or text block. There are three basic medieval Castilian versions of Bocados: a translation that closely corresponds to the original Arabic text; a translation and adaptation that begins with a sapiential narrative about a certain King Bonium’s search for wisdom that concludes with Segundo, the tale of the silent misogynist philosopher; and lastly, a translation and adaptation that concludes with Donzella Teodor. Donzella Teodor appears as the conclusion to Bocados de oro in Escorial MS h.III.6, Biblioteca Nacional MSS 17853 and 17822 and in Salamanca Universitaria MS1866. The fifth manuscript version of Donzella Teodor is a fragment included in MS 6545 of the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid, which also contains the Libro del conocimiento de todos los rregnos y señoríos, the Historia de los reyes godos, and the Anales de los reyes de Castilla. On the study of Woman in the medieval university tradition, see Helen Solterer, The Master and Minerva: Disputing Women in French Medieval Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). For an overview of the presentation of women in the adab tradition, see Fedwa MaltiDouglas, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Word: Gender and Discourse in AraboIslamic Writing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 29–53; and, for the story of Teodor in relation to the adab, see María del Pino Valero Cuadra, La Donzella Teodor: Un cuento hispanoárabe, Colección ensayo e investigación (Alicante: Instituto de Cultura “Juan Gil-Albert,” Excma. Diputación Provincial de Alicante, 1996). The proverbial wisdom handed down about women in Bocados conforms to R. Howard Bloch’s useful definition of medieval literary misogyny as “a speech act in which woman is the subject of the sentence and the predicate a more general term; or, alternatively, as the use of the substantive woman or women with a capital W.” Medieval Misogyny and the

162

39. 40. 41.

42.

43. 44.

45.

46.

NOTES

Invention of Western Romantic Love (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 5. Bocados: Bocados de Oro: Kritische Ausgabe des altspanischen Textes, ed. Mechthild Crombach (Bonn: Romanisches Seminar der Universität, 1971). Segundo, 14. With the important exceptions of María Jesús Lacarra’s brief survey of wise virgins and María Eugenia Lacarra’s observations about Teodor’s medical and sexual discourse, scholars from Menéndez Pelayo on have not questioned the intrinsically profeminist nature of Donzella Teodor and Historia de la donzella Teodor (María Jesus Lacarra “El Arquetipo,” and María Eugenia Lacarra, “Parámetros de la representación de la sexualidad femenina en la literatura castellana medieval,” in La mujer en la literatura hispánica de la Edad Media y el Siglo de Oro, ed. Rina Walthaus (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993), 23–43. The two book-length studies by Parker and Valero Cuadra, indeed, take the profemininity of the tale as their starting points. Parker begins, “The story is about a young woman, both beautiful and intelligent, active yet submissive, who has charmed literate and illiterate audiences for several centuries. Men may admire her beauty and wit; women may respond to her exercise of power through wits and words; and people of both genders may view her triumph as that of the common folk over the privileged.” The Story of a Story across Cultures, 1. In her prologue to Valero Cuadra’s study, María Jesús Rubiera Mata terms it a “relato didáctico y feminista.” La Donzella Teodor, 11. Similarly, Harriet Goldberg calls Donzella Teodor a “dazzling display of womanly intellectual superiority.” “Review of Parker, The Story of a Story across Cultures,” RP 58 (1998): 219. DT: Historia de la donzella Teodor: Edition and Study, ed. Rivera and Rogers. English translations. Parker, The Story of a Story across Cultures, 38–43. Solterer, Master and Minerva, 33. Marta Haro Cortés, “Erotismo y arte amatoria en el discurso médico de la Historia de la doncella Teodor,” Revista de Literatura Medieval 5 (1993): 114 and 116–17. In this Teodor is like one of her literary forerunners, Shahrazad. As Fedwa Malti-Douglas argues, the closure of the Arabian Nights, by having the storytelling wise maiden express her desire to marry the king, demonstrates that Shahrazad’s own desires are proper. Before the marriage, Shahrazad and her sister give an erotically charged performance, dressing up in various costumes, through which, “Sharyar and Shahzaman [the king and his brother] regain their scopic relationship to desire, now in a context of sexual mastery. As the women become objects of desire, the male has regained his active role and the female her passive one. In the place of her intellect, it is now Shahrazad’s physicality that comes to the fore.” Malti-Douglas, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Word, 26–27. MS BN 8405 contains a mélange of Bocados de oro and other sapiential works.

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47. Kathleen Scott, Later Gothic Manuscripts, 1390–1490: A Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles. 2 vols (London: Harvey Miller, 1996), 370. 48. See Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1960), 90–116. 49. Michael Camille, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 36 and 126. 50. Naomi Schor, Breaking the Chain: Women, Theory, and French Realist Fiction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 159–60. 51. Naomi Schor, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (New York: Methuen, 1987), 7 and Breaking the Chain, 161.

5

Sor Juana and St. Catherine: From Blood Martyrdom to a Holocaust of the Intellect

1. Juana Ramírez de Asbaje’s modern biographers have relied, in great part, on her own writing. The daughter of a Mexican-born woman, Isabel Ramírez, and a Basque man, Pedro Manuel de Asbaje, Juana was born in either 1648 or 1651 near Mexico City and entered the Convent of San Jerónimo in 1669. See introduction to Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, The Answer/La respuesta: Including a Selection of Poems, ed. Electa Arenal and Amanda Powel (New York: Feminist Press, 1994), 1–18, and Octavio Paz, Sor Juana, or the Traps of Faith, trans. Margaret Sayers Peden (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). 2. Stephanie Merrim, Early Modern Women’s Writing and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1999), 198–99. 3. For a discussion of the concept of “santa ignorancia” in Spanish CounterReformation sacred writing, see Aurora Egido, “Los prólogos teresianos y la ‘santa ignorancia,’ ” in Congreso Internacional Teresiano, vol. 2, ed. Teófanes Egido Martínez, Víctor García de la Concha, and Olegario González de Cardenal (Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca, 1983), 581–607. On the idea of holy ignorance in Sor Juana and Teresa de Ávila’s work and its relation to the humility topos, see Merrim, Early Modern Women’s Writing, 160–67. 4. Such rhetorical strategies clearly served as a counterweight to what Stephanie Merrim identifies as “male anxiety regarding female authorship” in the prefatory panegyrics written for seventeenth-century “Tenth Muses” like Sor Juana, where “gender issues dominate. . .as their male authors tackle the uncomfortable task of justifying the excellence of a woman’s verse and the temerity of placing it in the public domain.” Merrim, Early Modern Women’s Writing, 177. 5. Since seventeenth-century saints’ lives indeed tend to be very long, José Sánchez Lora has suggested a new generic term for Baroque hagiography: novela de santo. Mujeres, conventos y formas de la religiosidad barroca (Madrid: Fundación Universitaria Española, 1988), 404.

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6. Rosicler means “red silver” but is also a gongoresque term used in Baroque poetry to refer to a reddish light. Vega’s use of the term also clearly plays upon Catherine’s epithet, Rose of Alexandria. 7. Pedro de la Vega, RA: La rosa de Alexandría entre flores de humanas, y divinas letras Sta. Catalina Virgen Regia Doctora Ilustre, Martyr Inclita, virtudes de su vida, triunfos de su muerte. (Sevilla: Francisco de Leefdael, 1727). 8. Karl D. Uitti, “Women Saints, the Vernacular and History in Early Medieval France,” in Images of Sainthood in Medieval Europe, ed. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Timea Szell (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 258 and 258n. 9. A monk living in Madrid and the author of other hagiographic works, Calleja knew of Sor Juana through her work and also referred to his personal correspondence with her in the Vida. Calleja also wrote the second aprobación to Sor Juana’s first published collection of poetry, Inundación Castálida, which appeared in Madrid in 1689. Antonio Alatorre suggests that their correspondence began in 1675 and lasted through at least 1693 and assumes that the exchange constitutes the primary source of Calleja’s Vida (Introduction to Facsimile edition of Fama y obras póstumas del Fénix de México, Décima Musa, Poetisa Americana, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, xliii–li). To my knowledge, the letters are today unknown, and the Vida is the only record of the transatlantic correspondence between Calleja and Sor Juana. Diego de Callaja, Vida de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, ed. Emilio Abreu Gómez (Toluca: Instituto Mexiquense de Cultura, 1996). 10. For example, even Margo Glantz, whose work has done much to deconstruct the hagiographic discourse in Sor Juana’s autobiographical writing, the panegyrics written in her honor, and in Calleja’s biography, devotes an entire chapter of her Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Saberes y Placeres to the legendary debate (Toluca, Mexico: Gobierno del Estado de México, Instituto Mexiquense de Cultura), 1996. 11. A great deal of scholarship has been devoted to this epistolary debate. Consequently, I refer only to the essential details. For thorough analyses of the Carta Atenagórica and Respuesta a Sor Filotea, see Arenal and Powell, The Answer/La respuesta, and Frederick Luciani, Literary Self-fashioning in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, The Bucknell Series in Latin American Literature and Theory (Lewisburg PA: Bucknell University Press, 2004). 12. SF: Carta de Sor Filotea, in Fama y obras póstumas del Fénix de México, Décima Musa, Poetisa Americana, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (Madrid: Manuel Ruiz de Murga, 1700; Facsímile: ed. Antonio Alatorre and Gabriela Lis-Eguía, Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma de México, 1995). 13. Luciani, Literary Self-fashioning, 24. 14. Juana Inés de la Cruz, Carta de Juana Inés de la Cruz a su confesor: Autodefensa Espiritual de sor Juana, ed. Aureliano Tapia Méndez (Monterrey, México: Al Voleo, 1993), 3.

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15. I have borrowed this felicitous phrase from Patricia Grieve’s article on hagiographic discourse in the novellas of María de Zayas, “Embroidering with Saintly Threads,” RQ 44 (1991): 86–106. See also Emilie Bergmann, “Ficciones de Sor Juana: Poética y biografía,” in Y diversa de mí misma entre vuestras plumas ando: Homenaje Internacional a Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, ed. Sara Poot Herrera and Elena Urrutia (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 1993), 171–83; Egido, “Los prólogos teresianos y la ‘santa ignorancia;’ ” and Merrim, Early Modern Women’s Writing, 138–90, on the hagiographic editorial shaping that Sor Juana applies to her own life. 16. On Sor Juana’s appropriation of mystical discourse, see Stephanie Merrim, “Narciso desdoblado: Narcissistic Stratagems in El Divino Narciso and the Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz,” BHS 64 (1987): 116. 17. Respuesta: The Answer/La respuesta, Including a Selection of Poems, ed. and trans. Electa Arenal and Amanda Powell (New York: Feminist Press, 1994). 18. Merrim, Early Modern Women’s Writing, 169. Sor Juana’s framing of her life was not unusual for the period. Sonia Heropel, analyzing “the enormous inf luence of saints’ lives” upon Baroque religious women, observes that, the writings of nuns frequently adopt “numerous [hagiographic] strategies for relating episodes of their own lives.” “El lector femenino en el siglo de oro español,” in La mujer en la literatura hispánica de la edad media y el siglo de oro, ed. Rina Walthaus (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993), 92. 19. Luciani, Literary Self-fashioning, 111 and 124. 20. Quoted in Glantz, Sor Juana: la comparación y la hipérbole (Mexico City: Sello Bermejo, 2000), 232. The sermon was published soon after its original delivery. Palavicino was subsequently punished for his outspoken praise for Sor Juana. After a lengthy investigation by the Inquisition, in which his “indecent” praise of Sor Juana was used as evidence against him, Palavicino was expelled from the Company of Jesus and threatened with being defrocked in 1703. Glantz, Sor Juana: la comparación y la hipérbole, 235. 21. Villancicos were vernacular liturgical compositions that often included local dialects, folk characters, and comic situations, infusing carnivalesque elements into religious services that sharply contrast with Latin liturgy. Natalie Underberg, “Sor Juana’s Villancicos: Context, Gender, and Genre,” Western Folklore 60 (2001): 301–305. Sor Juana composed at least 22 sets of villancicos for feast days between 1677 and 1692. Many, including the villancicos in honor of St. Catherine, were published after their debut performances, prefaced with typical hyperbolic praise for Sor Juana’s intellectual prowess. 22. Indeed, the poetic and rhetorical f lamboyance of the Catalina villancicos has often been overshadowed by contemporary criticism’s desire to shape Sor Juana into a seventeenth-century crusader for the feminist cause.

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23. Martha Lilia Tenorio “El villancico novohispano,” in Sor Juana y su mundo: Una mirada actual, ed. Sara Poot Herrera and José Rogelio Alvarez Noguera (Mexico City: Universidad del Claustro de Sor Juana, 1995), 476. 24. Juana Inés de la Cruz. Obras completas, ed, Alfonso Méndez Plancarte, vol. 2 (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1951–1956), 171–72. 25. Indeed, twentieth-century biographies suggest that the tendency to mold Sor Juana in familiar shapes is not limited to Early Modern biographers. See Bergmann, “Ficciones de Sor Juana: Poética y biografía,” 171–83; and Darío Puccini, Una mujer en soledad. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, una excepción en la cultura y la literatura barroca, trans. Esther Benítez (Madrid: Anaya, 1996). 26. For example, Octavio Paz argues that “Sor Juana saw herself in Catherine of Alexandria;” he reads the series of villancicos as a defense of Sor Juana’s own and, by extension, all women’s, right to study. Paz suggests that the villancicos were performed in Oaxaca rather than in Mexico City or Puebla, because “neither the Archbishop of Mexico nor the Bishop of Puebla would have listened to such aggressive and strident praise of a ‘learned maiden.’ ” Paz, Sor Juana or, The Traps of Faith, 434. Electa Arenal and Amanda Powell assert that the villancicos in honor of Catherine of Alexandria “could be described as lyric companion-pieces or indeed as a sequel to” Sor Juana’s Respuesta a Sor Filotea. They also consider the villancicos “probably one of the most feminist texts ever to be performed in the context of Catholic Liturgy.” The Answer/La respuesta, 425–37 and 150. Underberg likewise asserts that Sor Juana’s villancicos dedicated to Catherine of Alexandria and to the Virgin Mary are forms of filtered autobiography that “present her pro-woman vision subversively.” “Sor Juana’s Villancicos,” 304. 27. “La rosa de Alejandría: ¿una querella secreta de Sor Juana?” in Y diversa de mí misma entre vuestras plumas ando: homenaje internacional a Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, ed. Sara Poot Herrera and and Elena Urrutia (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 1993), 209–14. 28. Susan Shibanoff borrows the concept of “taking the gold out of Egypt” in Exodus to describe the resisting, but also appropriating, interpretation of the female reader who would survive a treacherous antifeminist text. “Taking the Gold Out of Egypt: The Art of Reading as a Woman,” in Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts, and Contexts, ed. Elizabeth Flynn and Patrocinio Schweieckart (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 81–106. 29. See Josefina Ludmer, “Tretas del débil,” in La sartén por el mango, encuentro de autoras latinoamericanas, ed. Patricia Elena González and Eliana Ortega (Río Piedras, PR: Huracán, 1984), 47–54. 30. For the rhetorical force of the estribillo in villancicos, see Carlos Vega, “The Refram in the Cantigas de Santa María,” in Alfonso X of Castile, the Learned King (1221–1284), ed. F. Márquez Villanueva and Carlos Alberto Vega (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1990), 132–58.

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31. Obras completas, vol. 2, 179–80. 32. Elías Trabulse, Los años finales de Sor Juana: una interpretación (1688–1695) (Mexico City: Centro de Estudios de Historia de México. Condumex, 1995), 30–35. 33. Quoted in Francisco de la Maza, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz ante la historia: biografías antiguas: La Fama de 1700: Noticias de 1667 a 1892 (Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma de México, 1980), 84. 34. All three volumes went through an unusually large number of editions for the period. Inundación Castálida sold out in a few months after its first publication in Madrid in 1689, and was subsequently published seven more times under the title Varios poemas castellanos (Alatorre, intro to Fama y obras póstumas, xxviii). The Segundo Volumen went through six editions and the Fama five (Alatorre, into to Fama y obras póstumas, xxviii). 35. See Trabulse, Años finales 35–38; La muerte de Sor Juana (Mexico City: Centro de Estudios de Historia de México. Condumex, 1999), 63–69; and “El silencio final de Sor Juana,” Anejo de la revista Tinta (1998): 143–56. 36. Segundo volumen de las obras de Soror Juana Inés de la Cruz, monja profesa en el monasterio del señor San Jerónimo en la Cuidad de México, dedicado por la autora a D. Juan de Orúe y Orbieto (Sevilla: Tomás López de Harot, 1692); Facsímile: intro. Margo Glantz and ed. Gabriela Lis-Eguía (Mexico City: UNAM, 1995), 21–22. 37. Segundo Volumen, 27. 38. Varonil is a term of high praise used throughout the Middle Ages and Early Modern period. It was often applied to female rulers, such as Isabel the Catholic. Melveena McKendrick, in her Woman and Society in the Spanish Drama of the Golden Age: A Study of the Mujer Varonil (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1974), ix–x, having first rejected “masculine woman” and “manly woman” as too suggestive of sexual deviance to translate this term of high praise, defines mujer varonil in the following way: the woman who departs in any significant way from the feminine norm of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She can take the form of the mujer esquiva who shuns love and marriage, the learned woman, the career woman, the female bandit, the female leader and warrior, the usurper of man’s social role, the woman who wears masculine dress or the woman who indulges in masculine pursuits. . . . The woman who is “masculine” not only in her dress but also in her acts, her speech or even her whole attitude of mind. 39. Although there is an implicit allusion to the biblical figure of Wisdom in the application of the proverbial epithet mujer fuerte, Sor Juana’s admirers do not go so far as to call her Sapiencia or Sabiduría. Sabiduría may have seemed too strong an epithet, perhaps due to the orthodox reading of Wisdom in Proverbs as a figure for Christ. While Sor Juana’s devotees did not hesitate to call her Minerva, their elevation of the poet to quasibeatific status in their own poetry did not overstep the bounds of religious decorum. For Sor Juana’s own use of biblical wisdom literature in

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40. 41. 42.

43.

her devotional writing, see Grady C. Wray, “Seventeenth-Century Wise Women of Spain and the Americas: Madre Ágreda and Sor Juana.” Studia Mystica 22 (2001): 123–52. Glantz, Sor Juana: la comparación y la hipérbole, 178. Obras completas, vol. 4, 355–56. In the Neputuno alegórico, Sor Juana portrays the new viceroy as Neptune, who in this scheme, rather than Jupiter, fathers Minerva. She concludes that the naming of Athens after the goddess of wisdom, rather than after Neptune, was no defeat: “pues no era otra cosa Minerva, que su propio entendimiento” [because Minerva was nothing other than his own understanding]. Obras completas, vol. 4, 391. Obras completas, vol. 1, 159.

Conclusion Commonplaces and Common Women: Wisdom, the Strange Woman, and Bawdy Bodies of Knowledge 1. The smooth-talking go-between and embodiment of carnal knowledge emerges from rich and varied literary, historical, and social horizons that ref lect the blend of Latin, Mediterranean, Arabic, and Humanistic currents in medieval Iberian literary culture. For discussions of the many sources, inf luences, and intertexts contributing to the characterization of Celestina, see Jean Dangler, Mediating Fictions: Literature, Women Healers, and the Go-Between in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2001); Michelle Hamilton, “Transformation and Desire: The Go-Between in Medieval Iberian Literature,” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2001; Francisco Márquez Villanueva, Orígenes y sociología del tema celestinesco (Barcelona: Anthropos, 1993); Leyla Rouhi, Mediation and Love: A Study of The Medieval Go-Between in Key Romance and Near-Eastern Texts (Leiden: Brill, 1999); and Michael J. Ruggerio, The Evolution of the Go-Between in Spanish Literature through the Sixteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966). 2. Although the number of printed editions ebbed around 1630, there were at least 109 Castilian editions made in the sixteenth century, as well as translations into all the major European vernacular languages, Latin, and Hebrew. 3. Gail Corrington Streete, The Strange Woman: Power and Sex in the Bible (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997), 159–60. 4. Claudia Camp, Wise, Strange and Holy: The Strange Woman and the Making of the Bible (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), 13. 5. The Alfonsine version of this passage is quoted at length in chapter 2. 6. All citations from Celestina are from Fernando de Rojas, La Celestina, ed. Dorothy S. Severin (Madrid: Cátedra, 2000). English versions of quotes from Celestina are from Celestina: A Play in Twenty-One Acts Attributed to Fernando de Rojas Translated from the Spanish by Mack Hendricks Singleton

NOTES

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12. 13. 14.

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(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1958), with some slight modifications as noted. Critics and criticism on Celestina’s didacticism traditionally fall into two basic camps: those who accept the work’s stated didactic intentions and those who consider the work’s claims of utility as masking a profound pessimism and agnosticism that derives from Rojas’s identity as a converso insincere in his Christianity. This polarity is exemplified by the inf luential studies of Marcel Bataillon, La Célestine selon Fernando de Rojas (Paris: M. Didier, 1961); and Stephen Gilman, The Spain of Fernando de Rojas: The Intellectual and Social Landscape of La Celestina (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972). I take a middle ground, interpreting the references to the work’s utility seriously and the disastrous dénouement as evidence of the work’s intention as a reprobation of love; however, I do not see this stance as necessarily opposed to pessimism or as implying anything about the historical Rojas’s religious affinities. The varied responses of Early Modern historical readers that have come down to us ref lect such differences of opinion. See Joseph T. Snow, “Hacia una historia de la recepción de Celestina: 1499–1822,” Celestinesca 21 (1997): 115–73; “Historia de la recepción de Celestina: 1499–1800. II,” Celestinesca 25 (2001): 53–121; “Historia de la recepción de ‘Celestina’: 1499–1800. III (1601–1800),” Celestinesca 26 (2002): 53–121. In addition to her ironic resemblance to the Ladies Philosophy and Wisdom, Celestina’s position as mediatrix and the reverential rhetoric with which the other protagonists greet her suggest that she is also an antitype for the Virgin Mary. For Manuel da Costa Fontes, this ironic antithesis is evidence of Rojas’s converso atheism. “Celestina as Antithesis of the Virgin Mary,” JHP 15 (1990): 28. See also Dangler, Mediating Fictions, 84–127, and Elena Gascón Vera, “Celestina: Dama Filosofía,” Celestinesca 7.2 (1983): 3–10. Indeed, as Louise Fothergill-Payne asserts, one objective of the anonymous first author of Celestina was to poke fun at would-be intellectuals who liked to boast of their erudition, but whose superficial knowledge was evident. Seneca and Celestina (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 45. See Roberto González Echevarría, Celestina’s Brood: Continuities of the Baroque in Spanish and Latin American Literatures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 29–30; and Kevin S. Larsen, “Bed and Board: Significant Parallels between Plato’s Symposium and Rojas’ La Celestina,” Neohelicon 21 (1994): 256. González Echevarría, Celestina’s Brood, 27. Camp, Wise, Strange and Holy, 15. E. Michael Gerli, “Dismembering the Body Politic: Vile Bodies and Sexual Underworlds in Celestina,” in Queer Iberia: Sexualities, Cultures, and Crossings from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, ed. Josiah Blackmore and Gregory S. Hutcheson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 370.

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15. Charles Henry Lea, A History of the Inquisition of Spain, vol. 2 (New York: Macmillan Company, 1906–1907), 1. 16. See Mary S. Gossy, “Hymen and Text in Celestina,” in The Untold Story: Women and Theory in Golden Age Texts (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989); Dangler, Mediating Fictions; and Michael Solomon, The Literature of Misogyny in Spain: The Arcipreste de Talavera and the Spill, Cambridge Studies in Latin American and Iberian Literature, 10 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 165–73. Early Modern discourse on witchcraft reveals one strategy for excluding women from medical practice: any healing activity done by a woman, and especially midwifery, could create the suspicion of sorcery, devil-worship, and witchcraft. The authors of the Malleus maleficarum, printed shortly before the appearance of Celestina, and soon to become the Church’s official inquisitional text on witches, were unequivocal in equating midwifery with heresy and witchcraft: “the greatest injuries to the Faith as regards the heresy of witches are done by midwives; and this is made clearer than daylight by the confessions of some [witch-midwives] who were afterwards burned.” Heinrich Institoris and J. Sprenger, Malleus maleficarum. ed. and trans. Montague Summers (New York: B. Blom, 1970),140. 17. Of course, due to the nature of Celestina’s dialogued form, where the characters speak uninterrupted by authorial or narratorial comments, we cannot know if the description given by Sempronio in the primer auto was originally intended to be taken seriously. Clive Griffen points out, in his study of the woodcuts that illustrate early editions of Celestina, that Celestina is the only protagonist whose individualized physical characteristics are portrayed in the woodcuts, where she appears with a noticeably scarred face, and carrying a skein of thread. The woodcuts thus linked a consistent image with the verbal descriptions of the old whore who scuttles through Celestina in her long skirts. “Celestina’s Illustrations,” BHS 78 (2001): 59–75; 73. 18. James Burke, Vision, the Gaze and the Function of the Senses in Celestina (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 62–69. 19. Moses Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, trans. S. Pines, ed. Leo Strauss (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 13. 20. See Gossy for an analysis of the motto Nulla reparabilis arte. As she observes, “Hymen mending. . .confounds meaning. Stitching the hymen confuses the interpretive, naming function of phallic penetration; it makes ownership of meaning uncertain.” Celestina capitalizes on and subverts the symbolism of virginity and the physical hymens upon which patriarchal concepts of honor depend. Gossy, “Hymen and Text,” 43–45. 21. Elizabeth Fowler, Literary Character: The Human Figure in Early English Writing (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 14 and 29. 22. Quoted in Jacques Rossiaud, Medieval Prostitution, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 81. See also María Eugenia Lacarra, “La evolución de la prostitución en la Castilla del siglo XV y la mancebía de Salamanca en tiempos de Fernando de Rojas,” in Fernando de Rojas and

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Celestina: Approaching the Fifth Centenary, ed. Ivy Corfis and Joseph T. Snow (Madison: HSMS, 1993), 33–78. 23. See David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 146. 24. As David Nirenberg points out, clandestine prostitutes, those not working in the late-medieval institutionalized brothels, which “were subject to a great deal of official supervision,” were the most likely to be named in cases of miscegenation. Communities of Violence, 145. 25. Streete, Strange Woman, 74.

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INDEX

Alan of Lille; Anticlaudianus, 47, 50, 52, 58; The Plaint of Nature, 58–59, n155 Alexander, 88–89, 97–98 Alfonso X, king of Castile and Leon, 6–7, 27–43, 142, n150, n152, n153, n154; Estoria de Espanna, 28–29; General estoria, 27–43, 142, n150, n151, n152, n153, n154; Libros de Salomón, see Bible; Siete Partidas, 6–7, 29, 32, 41, n154. See also Bible, biblias romanceadas allegory, 3, 5, 7, 12–13, 16, 38–39, 45–46, 48–49, 50, 51–53, 61, 71. See also personification allegory; metaphor anxiety, 2–3, 6–7, 9, 18, 27, 41, 49, 50, 64, 69, 99, 102–3, 130–31, 141–42, n163; “anxious masculinity,” 19, 24, 99, n147, n148 Aquinas, Thomas, 17–18, 61, 65, n143, n147, n149, n155; Summa Theologica, 17–18. See also arts of memory Archer, Robert, 77, n158 Arenal, Electa, 115, 116, 118, n164, n166 Aristotle, 7, 16–19, 46–48, 55, 56, 59, 65, 83, 87, 88, 98–99, 131, 133, 138, n155, n156; Lai d’Aristote, 88, 98 Arithmetic; la Arismética, see personification allegory

Artes Liberales, see personification allegory arts of memory, 5–6, 16–19, 47, 52, 64, 78, 137 Asherah, Canaanite goddess, 2 Athena, 1–2 Athens, 109 Augustine, 2–4, 8, 15, 37–38, 65, 97, 99, 108, 110, 114, 140, 141, n145; The Literal Meaning of Genesis, 37; Soliloquies, 2, 15, 37, 131 Baranda, Nieves, n157 Bataillon, Marcel, n169 Beaumonte, Juan de, 46 Bergmann, Emilie, n165, n166 Bernard of Clairvaux, 38 Bible, 1–3, 5, 6, 8, 11, 15, 19, 29–30, 35, 40, 42, 52, 65, 80, 117, n144, n148, n149, n153; biblias romanceadas, 6, 27, 29–34, 36, 39, 40–43, 87, 130–31, n144, n150, n151; Biblia de Osuna, 38, 40–41; biblical personification of wisdom, 1–3, 5, 6, 11, 15, 19–25, 27–43, 75, 123, 134, 139, 142; Books of Solomon 1–3, 6, 8, 11, 12, 15, 19–25, 27–43, 82, 87, 106, 123–26, 130–31, 133, 134, 138–39, 142; Ecclesiastes, 2, 20, 23, 35; Ecclesiasticus (Sirach), 2; Libros de Salomón, 6, 29–34, 35–6, 38–39, 42; Proverbs, 2, 11, 19–25, 27–30, 33, 34–6, 38, 39–40, 41, 81–82, 126, 129–31;

190

IN DEX

Bible—continued Song of Songs, 35, 38; Wisdom of Solomon, 2–3, 11, 19–22, 27, 29, 38 Biblia de Osuna, see Bible biblias romanceadas, see Bible biblical personification of Wisdom, see Bible; personification allegory bienaventurança, 47, 54, 61 Bizzarri, Hugo O., n149, n157, n158 Blamires, Alcuin, 80, n158, n159 Bloch, R. Howard, n161 Bloomfield, Morton, 13–14, 46, n146, n155 Bocados de oro, 75, 87–93, 96–104, n150, n161, n162 body, 1, 3, 4, 7, 12–19, 21, 45, 47–48, 50–51, 53, 60, 62, 69, 73, 77–79, 83–85, 92–94, 96, 102–3, 129, 132, 137, 139–41, n146, n147; bodily humors, 19, 59, 62, 93, 94; bodies of personification, see personification allegory. See also matter; metaphor, corporeal metophors Boethius; Consolidation of Philosophy, 2–3, 7, 15, 22, 47, 55, 134, n144, n155 Bonaventure, n143 Books of Solomon, see Bible Brenner, Athalya, 20, n148 Breitenberg, Mark, 147n Brown, Catherine, n160 Brown, Peter, n158 Brownlee, Marina Scordilis, n144, n154 Burke, James, 137–38 Burns, Jane E., 76, 96 Calleja, Diego de; Vida de Sor Juana, 8, 111–12, 115, 118, 120–23, n164 Camille, Michael, 69, 102 Camp, Claudia, 22, 42, 130, n148, n149

Carajicomedia, 71, 140, n156, n157 Carlos de Viana, 46 Carruthers, Mary, 17, 50, n147 Castigos y doctrinas que un sabio dava a sus hijas, 25 Castillo, Hernán; Cancionero general; Cancionero de obras de burlas y provocantes a la risa, 46, 69 Castorena y Ursúa, Juan Ignacio de, 123 Catherine of Alexandria, 7–8, 75–76, 78–80, 82–84, 86–87, 92, 96, 103–14, 116–23, 139, n158, n160, n164, n165, n166 Catholic Church, 8, 37, 41, 80, 108, 113–14, 118, 120, 128, n144, n170 Celestina, see Rojas, Fernando de Cervantes, Miguel de, n145 Christine de Pizan, n145 Copeland, Rita, 36, n153 corporeal similitudes, see metaphor Cuesta, Ambrosio de la, 125 de Man, Paul, 13 death, 3, 21–22, 41, 80–81, 90, 130–31, 133, 137, 141 delectation, 47–48, 50–51, 54–55, 60, 62–65, 73. See also sense perception Diogenes, 88–89 Doncella Teodor, 7–8, 75–78, 87–88, 91–99, 103, 105, 112, 139, n157, n158, n160, n161, n162 dubitatio, see rhetoric Eagleton, Terry, 4, n145 Ecclesiastes, see Bible Ecclesiasticus (Sirach), see Bible Economou, George, 8–9 Eden, Garden of, 51, 52, 54 Egypt, 109, 118, n166 Entendimiento, see personification allegory exegesis, 50. See also personification allegory, interpretation of

IN DEX

Fall of Man, 48, 50–53, 65. See also Synderesis. Farcasiu, Simina, n155, n156 feminine embodiments, see personification allegory feminisim, 42, 87, 102, 118, n159. See also profeminism Ferdinand II, king of Aragon, V, king of Castile, 136, 140 Fernández de Santacruz, Manuel, 112–16, 120, n166; Carta de Sor Filotea, 112–18, 120–21 Ferrante, Joan, 14 Filotea, Sor, see Fernández de Santacruz Fletcher, Angus, n145 Flores, Ralph, 65, n145, n156 form, 16, 53–58. See also matter Fortune, see personification allegory Fowler, Elizabeth, n170 Fraker, Charles, 36 Franco de Ulloa, Gaspar, 112 Freud, 100–2 Frye, Northrop, n145 Garcia López, Jorge, n154, n155, n156 gaze, 83–84, 100–2 gender, 2, 6, 13–16, 19, 20, 21, 23, 27, 30, 32, 33, 37–43, 48, 50, 52, 7, 80, 81, 87, 100, 103, 111, 119, 130, n147, n148, n158, n162, n163. See also personification allegory Gerli, E. Michael, n144, n145, n159, n169 Giles of Rome, 65 Gilman, Stephen, n169 Girón Negrón, Luis, n154, n155, n156 Glantz, Margo, 126, n164 Glossa Ordinaria, 38, 40, n154 Gómez Redondo, Fernando, n151 González-Casanovas, Roberto, 37–38, n150 González Echevarría, Roberto, 136

191

Gossy, Mary S., n170 Grammar; la Gramática, see personification allegory Greenblatt, Stephen J., n146 Grieve, Patricia, E., n144, n165 hagiography, 7, 75–78, 80–87, 92, 104, 106–7, 111–12, 116–20, 123, 128, 142, n158, n159, n163, n164, n165 Haro Cortés, Marta, 96, n154 Hildegard von Bingen, n145 Historia del filósofo Segundo, 76, 86, 88, 91–92, 96–97, 99, n157, n161 Hokmah, see Bible; biblical personification of wisdom; personification allegory Horcajada Diezma, Bautista, n150, n151, n152, n153, n154 humor, 58, 63, 90, 93, 99–100, 102, 131, 131, 135, 139, 141 imagines agentes, see personification allegory Infantes, Víctor, n157 Inquisition, 137, n165 intelligence, 48, 52, 55, 56, 58, 63, 92, 120; human, 59, 61; women’s, 109, 113, 114, women’s legendary, surprising or unbelievable, 75, 107, 108, 111, 118, 121, 126–27 intellect, 1–2, 3, 5, 8, 45, 48, 50, 53, 55, 62, 65, 66, 69, 71, 73, 125, 126, 129, 137–38, 141; active intellect, 47, 60. See also personification allegory Isabel I, queen of Castile, 136, 140, n148, n157, n158 Jacobus de Voragine; The Golden Legend, 78, n158 Jauss, Hans Robert, 72 Jenkins, Jacqueline, n157, n159 Jerome, 30, 34, n143, n152

192

IN DEX

Jesus Christ, 37, 38, 78, 79, 87, 107, 116; Christ as Wisdom, 5–6, 15, 38–39, 41, n153 jokes, see humor Kannengiesser, Charles, 38 Kasten, Lloyd, 36 knowledge acquisition, 4, 35, 47–50, 64, 131. See also sense perception; intellect Knust, Hermann, n158, n160 Kolve V.A., 18 Krueger, Roberta, 80 Kurtz, Barbara, 14 Lacarra, María Eugenia, 76, n157, n162, n170 Lacarra, María Jesús, 23, 76, n149, n157, n162 Lazar, Moshe, n151 Le Fèvre, Jehan; The Lamentations of Matheolus, 24 Lewis, C.S., n144 Lewis, Katherine J., n157, n158 Libro de buen amor, 129, 133 Libros de Salomón, see Alfonso X; Bible Littlefield, Mark G., n151 Llull, Ramón; Llibre d’Amic e d’Amat, 38 Logic, see personification allegory Lope de Vega; Arcadia, 47 love, 1–6, 15, 19, 20, 24, 38, 54, 94, 113, 122, 131, 133, n167, n169; courtly love, 3, 132; love of truth, 50, 115; lover of wisdom, 2, 20–22, 31–34, 37, 41–42, 97, 99, 110, 126, 135, 129; lovesickness, 3, 71, 132, 134, 136, 140. See also Wisdom as lover Luciani, Frederick, 113, 116 Luis de León; La perfecta casada, 25 Luna, Álvaro de; Libro de las virtuosas e claras mugeres, 76, 81–83, 85, 87, 104, 113, n159, n160

Maimonidies, Moses, 47; Guide of the Perplexed, 47, 51, 57, 138, n155, n156 Malti-Douglas, Fedwa, n161, n162 marginalia, 66–70, 99–102 marriage, 6, 20–24, 31–35, 37–38, 40, 79, 85, 92–93, 97, 107, 115, 110, 138, n148, n162, n167 Martín de Córdoba, 24–25 Martín de León, 38–39, 42 Martínez de Toledo; Arcipreste de Talavera; Corbacho, 86, 98, 160n martyr, martyrdom, 8, 76–79, 80–85, 97, 103, 106–7, 109, 110–11, 114–16, 120–22, 127, n157, n160; intellectual martyrdom, 120–22 Matihuelo, see personification allegory matter, 5, 7, 16, 48, 50, 53–60, 62, 66, 69, 73, 138–39. See also body McInerney, Maud Burneo, 81, 85 memory, 5–7, 16–19, 47, 66, 78, 112, 137. See also arts of memory Mena, Juan de; Laberinto de fortuna, 45, 70–71, 81, 139–40 Menéndaez Pelayo, Marcelino, n155, n162 Merrim, Stephanie, 105, 116, n163, n165 metaphor, 1, 4, 6–7, 13, 15, 16, 38, 48, 53, 63–64, 69, 92, 110, 126, 131, 132, 135, 139; corporeal metaphors, 4, 6, 7, 13, 18–19, 42, 48, 59, 64, 66, 73; man as microcosm, 59, n156; nuptial metaphors, 20–23, 31–34, 37–38, 40, 92, n148; ontological metaphors, 78, n146; orientational metaphors, n146 Mettmann, Walter, n160 Mexico, 7, 106–7, 110–11, 120, 127, n163 midrash, 132, n154 Minerva, 1–2, 3, 7, 106, 121, 123, 126, n144, n167, n168

IN DEX

Miles, Margaret, n148 Minerva, see personification allegory misogyny, 88, 90, 131, n161. See also woman, debate on Morreale, Margherita, 36, 37, n151, n153 mujer fuerte, see Woman of Worth mujer varonil, 125–26, n167 Murphy, Roland, n149 Nature; la Naturaleza, see personification allegory New World, 105, 106, 107, 111, 112, 123 Newman, Barbara, 9, 15, 77, n145, n146 Newsom, Carol, 20 Niederehe, Hans Josef, n151, n152 Nirenberg, David, n171 Núñez de Miranda, Antonio, 107, 114 Nugent, S. Georgia, 14, n146 Palavicino, Javier; La fineza mayor, 116 Parker, Margaret, 93, 94, 95, n160, n162 parody, 2, 4, 7, 8, 46, 65–72, 129, 131, 139–40, 142, n157 Patch, Howard, 8 Paxson, James, 12, 49, n147 Paz, Octavio, n163, n166 Pedro del Santíssimo Sacramento, 125 personification allegory, 1–5, 11–19, 22, 30, 34, 37, 45–48, 49–50, 51–53, 60, 64, 66, 72–73, 75, 77–79, 103, 137–38, n144, n145; Arithmetic, la Arismética, 52, 66; Artes Liberales, 56, 58, 72; bodies of personification, 18, 45–46, 49–50; Intellect; Active Intellect; el Entendimiento, 46–54, 55–56, 56–57, 58–62, 63–64, 66–69, 68; feminine embodiments, 1–7, 11, 13–14, 15, 27, 45–46, 47–48, 49–50, 52–53, 62, 64–66, 73, 75, 76–79, 83–84, 87, 103, 129, 131,

193

142; Fortune, 14, 71; Grammar; la Gramática, 47, 49–53, 55, 63–65, 66–69, 67; imagines agentes, 16–17, 64, 65–66, 84; interpretation of, 2, 8–9, 12–15, 22–23, 27, 34–31, 38, 69, 72; Logic, 66–69; male personification, 14–15, 19–20, 71–72; Matihuelo, 72; Nature; la Naturaleza, 47, 53, 58–59; Philosophy, 1–2, 13, 22–23, 54–55; Platonic Nous, 2; Providence, la Providencia, 45, 71; Reason, la Razón, 1, 47, 52–55, 61–62, 64, 66, 69; Rhetoric, la Retórica, 66, 69; “social persons,” 139; Syndéresis, 1, 3–4, n143–44; Truth, la Verdad, 1, 47, 52–55, 58–63, 66, 68, 69; Wisdom, 1–4, 5, 6, 8–9, 13, 15, 21–24, 27, 29–31, 32, 33–43, 64, 69, 70, 77–9, 92, 97, 123–25, 129–31, n152; Wisdom as lover, 2–4, 6, 8, 11, 15, 20–22, 31–34, 37, 41, 97, 99, 110, 141; Wisdom, la Sabieza, 53, 55–56, 58, 60–61, 66; Wisdom, sapiençia, sabiduría, çiençia, prudencia, 29–34, 35–37; Wisdom, saber (male personification), 32, 36–37, 38, 40–43 Peter of Ravenna, 19 Philosophy, see personification allegory Pitkin, Hanna, 14 Plato; Platonism; Neo-Platonism, 2, 4, 7, 16, 38, 48, 56, 59, 87, 88, 103, n143; Symposium, n169 Platonic Nous, see personification allegory Post, Chandler Rafthon; Mediaeval Spanish Allegory, 12 Powell, Amanda, 115, 116, 118, n164, n166 Prieto, Antonio, n143 profeminism, 7, 21, 76, 80–1, 96, 104, 107, 119, n159, n162

194

IN DEX

prostitution, 21, 71, 130, 135, 140–41, n171. See also Celestina; Strange Woman Proverbs, see Bible Providence; la Providencia, see personification allegory Puccini, Darío, n166 pyramids, Aztec and Egyptian, 118 Quilligan, Maureen, 46, n145 Reason; la Razón, see personification allegory rhetoric, 1, 4, , 12, 20, 73, 76, 80–84, 95, 103, 106, 110, 116–17, 119, 123, 126, 126, 131, 132, 136, 137, 141–42, n147, n150, n163, n165, n166, n169 Rhetoric; la Retórica, see personification allegory Rhetorica Ad Herennium, 12, 17–18, n147 Rivera, Isidro, n160, n161, n162 Rodríguez del Padrón, Juan; Siervo libre de amor, 1, 3, n143, n144 Rogers, Donna M., n160, n161, n162 Rojas, Fernando de; Celestina, 8, 47, 129–42, n168, n169, n170 saints’ lives, see hagiography Salih, Sarah, 83 Salinas Espinosa, Concepción, n154 Sánchez-Prieto Borja, Pedro, n150, n151, n152, n153, n154 santa ignorancia, 196, 108, 115, 116, n163, n165 Santoyo, Felipe; Fama, 112 Schor, Naomi, 102 sense perception, 17, 47–49, 53–54, 55, 60, 61, 64–65, 73, 131, 138, n148 sexuality, 2, 3, 5–7, 8, 12, 16, 19–21, 23, 24, 31, 34, 37, 40–41, 50–52, 62–64, 71, 73, 79, 81, 83, 85, 87–100, 129, 130–40, n147, n148, n160, n162. See also body

Shibanoff, Susan, n166 simplicitas, see rhetoric Singleton, Mack Hendricks, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136 Socrates, 88–90, 94, 97, 99–100, 102–3, 136 Solterer, Helen, 95, 96, n161, n162 Song of Songs, see Bible Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, 7–8, 105–28, 129, 142, n163, n164; Carta Atenagórica, 112–14, 116, 120, n164; Fama y obras póstumas, 106, 111, 112, 123, 124, n164, n167; Inundación Castálida, 106, 121, n164, n167; Respuesta a Sor Filotea, 112–16, 118, n164; Segundo volumen, 106, 112, 125, n167; villancicos in honor of St. Catherine, 116–20, n165, n166 Smalley, Beryl, n149, n153 Snow, Joseph T., n169, n171 Spain, 28, 45, 71, 88, 106, 137, n144, n151, n155; Aragon, 137, n156; Castile, 137, 140 New Spain, 88, 105, 111 Strange Woman; muger estraña, muger agena, 3, 8, 21–22, 24, 31, 34, 40–43, 86, 129–41, n148. See also Celestina; matter; prostitution Streete, Gail Corrington, n148, n149, n168, n171 Suero de Ribera, 81 synderesis, 1, 3–4, n143–44. See also personification allegory Teresa de Ávila, 107, 113, 118, n163 Teskey, Gordon, 16, 18 Torre, Alfonso de la; Visión deleytable, 6, 10, 45–73, 129, 138–39; “Un cavallero llamado ‘Visión deleytable’”, 71–72 Trabulse, Elías, 118, 122, 123, n167 Translatio; translatio imperii; translatio studii, 4, 8, 28–29, 33, 37, 42–43, 76, 97, 105

IN DEX

translation, 4, 28, n145, n151, n153, n161, n168; biblical translation, 27, 29, 30, 33, 42, 87, 130, n149, n150, n151, n152, n153 trivium, quadrivium, 46–47, 53 Uitti, Karl D., 83 Valero Cuadra, María del Pino, n161, n162 Van Dyke, Carolynn, 12, 146n Vega, Pedro de la; La rosa de Alejandría, 107–11, 113, 118–20, 123 Vierya, Antonio de, 112–13, 116, 120 Virgil; “Virgil in the Basket”, 88, 98–99, 133, 135, 136 Virgin Mary, 77–79, 106, 133, 138 virginity, 77–78, 85–86, 96, 97, 118, 138–39; wise virgins, 7–8, 75–78, 81–97, 103–4, 105–7, 112–13, 117–21, 127, n162 vision, see sense perception Vives, Juan Luis, 108 Warner, Marina, 13, n145, n146 Wegner, Judith, n148 Weiss, Julian, 77 Weissberger, Barbara, n148, n156, n158 wisdom, 1, 4–5, 11–13, 21–24, 27, 28–29, 38–39, 40, 42, 54, 73, 74–78, 79, 83, 84–87, 88, 90, 92–93, 95, 97, 103–4, 105–6,

195

108–9, 112, 117, 119, 120–21, 123, 125–26, 134, 135, 137, 139, 141; biblical personification of wisdom, see Bible; feminine, 8, 129–30; feminine embodiment of, see personification allegory; and homosocial intimacy, 3–4, 6, 22, 28, 34, 37, 41–43, 75, 90, 97, 99, 106, 142; journey to, 2, 12, 35, 46, 54, 61, 64, 142, n155; literature, 2, 5, 19, 20–24, 27, 34, 35, 38, 40, 42, 75, 81, 87, 90, 97, 99, n147, n148, n149, n154, n157, n167; personified, see personification allegory; and virginity, 77–79, 85–86, 139 Wisdom of Solomon, see Bible witch; witchcraft, 71, 131, 135, 137, n170 woman, 2, 5–6, 7, 11, 20, 22, 23–24, 39, 50–51, 53, 56, 69, 76–77, 81–82, 84, 87, 88–92, 94, 95, 98–99, 100, 103, 105–6, 108, 112, 126, 132, 141–42, n161; debate on, 75, 77, 80–81, 87–88, 91, 104, 117, n158. See also matter; body; personification allegory Woman of Worth; muger fuerte; muger de pro; muger virtuosa, 22, 24, 25, 40–43, 106, 123, 125, n167 Yates, Frances, 17, 18 Zarco Cuevas, Julián, n151