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Teresa de Cartagena (c.1425–?) was a Sephardi Jew author and nun who fell deaf between 1453 and 1459. That influenced her two known works ''Arboleda de los enfermos'' (Grove of the Infirm) and ''Admiraçión operum Dey'' (Wonder at the Works of God). The latter work represents what many critics consider as the first feminist tract written by a Spanish woman. Few documents exist regarding Teresa’s life. In Francisco Cantera Burgos's history of the Santa María family, the author confirms Teresa's identity as a ''conversa'' (a Christian of Spanish Jewish heritage) and as a member of the Santa María-Cartagena family, the most powerful converso family in late-medieval Spain. Her grandfather, Rabbi Shlomo ha-Levi, converted to Christianity around 1390 and was baptized as Pablo de Santa María, becoming bishop of Burgos in 1412. Cantera Burgos discovered that Teresa was the daughter of Pedro de Cartagena after finding her named in the will of a later bishop of Burgos, Alonso de Cartagena, Pedro's brother and Teresa's uncle. Before becoming deaf, Teresa entered the Franciscan Monasterio de Santa Clara in Burgos around 1440. Later, in 1449, she transferred to the Cistercian Monasterio de Las Huelgas in Burgos, where she became deaf. The transfer likely occurred, as Dayle Seidenspinner-Núñez and Yonsoo Kim point out, because of family political strategy and hostility of the Franciscans, who outed ''converso''. Cartagena wrote her first work ''Arboleda de los enfermos'' in reaction to the solitude of her deafness. Approximately one to two years later, she penned a defense of her first essay, called ''Admiraçión operum Dey'', after mostly male critics claimed that a woman could not have possibly been the author of such an eloquent and well-reasoned work. Both of her writings have come down to modern readers through a single manuscript completed by the copyist Pero López del Trigo in 1481. Important as Spain's first feminist writer, Teresa also contributed to an overall European canon of medieval feminist authors including Hildegard von Bingen and Christine de Pizan. Both ''Arboleda'' and ''Admiraçión'' are semi-autobiographical works that provide an authentic written voice of the Medieval female, a true rarity among works of the Middle Ages. ==''Arboleda de los enfermos''== Teresa's first essay examines the effect of her deafness on her life and its spiritual development. After being devastated by the initial onset of the illness, Teresa meditates in the silent prison of her deafness and ultimately concludes that God has afflicted her in order to separate her from the distractions of everyday noise. After much reflection in the prison of echoing sounds within the cloisters of her ears, Teresa reasons that her soul would have been purer if she had never been exposed to speech at all, which makes one turn to the outside material world and forget the inner spiritual world. The copyist, Pero López, indicates that her work was addressed to Juana de Mendoza, wife of Gómez Manrique, a poet and prominent political figure of the time, but within ''Arboleda'', she addresses a "''virtuosa señora''" (virtuous lady), who may be Juana de Mendoza, suggesting a female audience at large. In contrast, the genre Teresa employs, the ''libro de consolaciones'' (book of consolations), was primarily authored by men and addressed a male audience. In order to humble herself strategically before male readers, the author reiterates the weakness of her intellect or "''la baxeza e grosería de mi mugeril yngenio''" (lowliness and grossness of my womanly intellect ). 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Teresa de Cartagena」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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