Lucy Boyd

A Cell of Her Own: Female Identity, Community, and ProtoFeminist Thought in the Autobiog raphies of Early Modern Women Religious

Lucy Boyd

Living and working in a time of profound social and political change, Catholic nuns in the 16th and 17th centuries found themselves at the intersection of several pressing questions. With the advent of the Protestant Reformation––a movement that advocated for the closure of convents––their traditional way of life was under threat. Furthermore, the ongoing querelle des femmes debate, sparked by Christine de Pisan centuries earlier, foregrounded questions surrounding the proper role of women in society.1 As one of the only female-centred environments at this time, convents provided a unique vantage point from which its inhabitants could interrogate these challenges and consider the political and personal roles of women. Many of these “women religious” took advantage of the nunnery’s unusual environment to write texts that provide valuable insights into the complexities of their lived realities. Carole Slade notes that, in this era, “women […] were most often represented by men.”2 Yet in convents, many nuns defied this standard and wrote of their personal lived experiences, both as cloistered and embodied women, in acts of remarkable self-representation. This essay will examine the autobiographical output of three nuns––St. Teresa of Avila, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and Arcangela Tarabotti––and the ways in which their cloistered environment influenced their perceptions of female identity and their place in the world.

Babel Volume XXI 9 While critics disagree on the extent to which St. Teresa may be upheld as a proto-feminist icon, her historical and ecclesiastical impact cannot be denied. Born in Àvila, Spain, in 1515 to a family of conversos, Teresa was an unlikely champion of Catholicism.3 As her own writing confesses, she was initially reluctant to enter the convent: “I could not have been pursuing these vanities for more than three months when [my father and brother] took me to a convent in the city where I lived, in which girls like myself were educated, though there were none there so depraved as I.”4 Her “depravity,” as she terms it, stems from a taste for “frivolities”5 including finery and gossip, and especially from her friendship with a woman of whom her parents disapproved. Staying at a local Augustinian convent for a year and a half as a laywoman, she first “suffered greatly, but more from the suspicion that [her] frivolities were known than from [her] being in a convent.”6 While she continued to struggle with her affinity for worldly things, she notes with fondness her first taste of the communal monastic experience: “All the sisters were very pleased with me […] I was made much of, and though I was then bitterly averse to taking the habit […] I was delighted to see nuns who were so good.”7 While she left the convent a happier woman––and with a close friendship with one of the cloistered women––she was still “most anxious not to be a nun.”8 In November 1536, however, Teresa bowed to overwhelming family pressure and took holy vows at the Carmelite Convent of the Incarnation just outside Àvila.9 This move displeased her father, as the convent’s vast property holdings and relatively relaxed rules made it popular in the town (Monastery of La Encarnación). Despite the convent’s worldlier bent, Teresa became fixated on the humiliation of the flesh: “When I took the habit, the Lord immediately showed me how He favours those who do violence to themselves in order to serve Him.”10 It was also around this time that she began to experience fainting fits and a host of other ailments that scholars to-

10 Babel Volume XXI day speculate was temporal lobe epilepsy.11 Desperately seeking a cure, Teresa began to turn towards books and prayer.12 Yet even as Teresa turned increasingly inwards, she still struggled with the

“vanities of the world.”13 She laments in her Life that a “convent of unenclosed nuns” (as was the case for the sisters of the Convent of the Incarnation) was “a place of great peril, and more like a road to Hell.”14 Still, she praises her “virtuous” sisters and worries for their spiritual well-being.15 It is this love and concern for the women with whom she lived that ultimately motivates Teresa’s literary projects: indeed, the inscription indicates that she wrote the Life of St. Teresa “at the command of her confessor.”16 The Dominican friar, Garcia de

Toledo, requested an account of her life, convincing her that an account of her personal sin, experiences with prayer and ecstatic rapture, and views on monastic life, would be a great asset to the women in her care.17 The Life of St. Teresa, completed in 1565, was her first and most richly autobiographical work: she would go on to compose several subsequent texts on mental prayer.18 While much of the first half of the Life recounts the age-old struggle between spirit and flesh, the earthly and the divine, Teresa also argues that accessing the divine requires both prayer and, importantly, spiritual friendship: I would counsel those who practice prayer to seek, at least in the beginning, friendship and association with other persons having the same interest […] I don’t know why it is not permitted that a person beginning truly to love and to serve God talk with some others about his joys and trials, which all who practice prayer undergo.19

Friendship is a key aspect of convent life, and nuns are ostensibly gathered to seek a common purpose. Yet, as Teresa herself makes amply clear, convents were not always separate from worldly concerns. Carole Slade observes that Teresa’s autobiography is comprised of three key sections: her struggles with sin, her mystical experiences and observations on mental prayer, and her reform

Babel Volume XXI 11 activities within the convent and the Catholic faith.20 In this final section, driven by a motivation to protect her sisters, she addresses her hopes and concerns for monastic life. On the Convent of the Incarnation, she writes that while there are “many servants of God,” the Order did not “observe the Rule in its original strictness” and it “seemed to [her that nuns] enjoyed excessive comfort.”21 Instead, she desired to follow the stricter practices of the Barefoot (Discalced) Orders and received a vision from God that encouraged her to found a new convent.22 This was initially met with great opposition, both from church hierarchs and the nuns themselves.23 After some years of struggle, a new Discalced convent––the Convent of St. Joseph––was founded in 1562 with the blessing of the Bishop of Àvila.24 The convent aimed to provide an environment in which nuns could “withdraw more completely from activities and fulfill [their] profession and vocation more perfectly under conditions of greater enclosure.”25 Yet Teresa recounts a “struggle with the devil” that soon followed her great success: “[He asked me] would the sisters be happy, living under so strict a rule, whether they might not go short of food, indeed, whether the whole venture was not ridiculous––for who had made it my business, seeing as I was in a convent already?”26 While Teresa’s account of her struggle has an obvious spiritual purpose, it also foregrounds rhetorical humility at a time when female agency and authority were greatly questioned in ecclesiastical matters and beyond. Teresa recounts how she drew on prayer––and, once again, love for God and her sisters––to steel herself.27 Still, opposition to her reforms remained great, and male political and ecclesiastical opponents refused to sanction the new convent and threatened a lawsuit.28 Against these challenges, however, Teresa’s convent would prevail.29 In the final eight chapters of the Life, Teresa finally achieves “the balance between outer and inner events” that so plagued her at the beginning of the work.30 The autobiography ends in her fiftieth year: she would go on to found another six-

12 Babel Volume XXI teen convents and write several other works, including, most famously, the Interior Castle, a guide to mental prayer and spiritual perfection.31 St. Teresa––an intellectual heavyweight of the Catholic

Reformation, and the first woman to be named Doctor of the

Church––was, without doubt, one of the most influential women of the 16th century.32 Yet, the interpretation of her works has vexed feminist scholars for decades. As her Life reveals, she was a champion of the convent, which motivated her written and reform work, and she challenged male authority in her pursuit of an enclosed space for female spirituality. At the same time, however, the Life (as with Teresa’s other works) is steeped in references to

“female frailty” and weakness. Some scholars have argued that this “rhetoric of humility” was a necessary device for her survival in a patriarchal context, while others contend it is an accurate articulation of her beliefs.33 Others question whether feminism can meaningfully exist within a Catholic context; as Margaret Dorgan writes, “Teresa’s primary focus on inner spiritual freedom makes her a questionable candidate for posthumous glory as a social liberator.”34 Yet Dorgan notes that the richness of her spiritual project is like “a still-flowing fountain where anyone can come to drink,”35 an image Teresa herself harnesses in the Life. Indeed, some of the limitations of Teresa’s project may be underscored through an analysis of the work of another literary woman religious: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Born Juana Inés de

Asbaje y Ramirez de Santillana, the illegitimate daughter of a

Spanish captain and a Criolla woman, Juana lived in Colonial

Mexico at the apex of Catholic intensification, almost a century after Teresa’s reforms in Spain.26 Juana was a profoundly gifted child prodigy who could read and write at the age of three; by adolescence, she was fluent in Latin, Ancient Greek, Spanish, and the Aztec language Nahuatl.37 Most impressively, she was an autodidact––a necessity for scholarly women at the time, as women were barred from receiving a formal education.38 Educational av-

Babel Volume XXI 13 enues for women were few during the 17th century: Juana was advised to enter a convent, where she was told she would have the time and space to study, free of the obligations of family and marriage.39 In August 1667, she chose to join the Discalced Carmelite monastery of San José in Mexico City––a Mexican settlement of Teresa’s reformed order.40 In Juana’s own words: “I entered the convent although I knew certain characteristics (I speak of secondary qualities, not formal ones) incompatible with my character, but considering the total antipathy I had towards matrimony, the convent was the least disproportionate and most honourable decision I could make.”41 However, she was miserable in the strict environment and left after three months.42 In the same year, she entered a new order: the more relaxed Hieronymite Convent of Santa Paula.43 While she is now revered as the “Tenth Muse” in Mexico, her time in the convent was fraught––it was far from the scholarly utopia she longed for, as her writing amply demonstrates.

As Elizabeth Teresa Howe notes, unlike Teresa, Sor Juana never composed a “straightforward” autobiography, focusing on profane topics––such as love––rather than the mysticism that characterized her predecessor’s work.44 Instead, Howe observes that “the story of [Juana’s] life is a thread running through a tapestry of literary forms that encompass the many genres in which she wrote.”45 This essay will consider one of Sor Juana’s most direct accounts of life within the walls of Santa Paula––and her foremost proto-feminist piece––the Response to Sor Filotea. The Response was composed at a particularly difficult moment in Sor Juana’s life. A well-known author whose work had been celebrated by the previous Viceroy and Vicereine, Sor Juana lost her patrons when they returned to Spain in 1686.46 The void of aristocratic support left her vulnerable, and a public scandal arose in November 1690 when the Bishop of Puebla published without her knowledge her critique of a sermon by a Portuguese

14 Babel Volume XXI

Jesuit preacher.47 Writing under the pseudonym “Sor Filotea,” the

Bishop attached a letter addressed to Sor Juana that advised her to focus on religious matters instead of secular study.48 Forced to defend both herself and her studies, the Response is at once a sad account of the limitations placed upon her within the convent and a powerful defence of women’s right to education. Despite Sor Juana’s initial vision, the convent ultimately provided many challenges to her intellectual goals. She hints at the “obligatory occupations” that “limit[ed] the freedom of [her] studies” and the “noise of [the] community that […] interfered with the tranquil silence of [her] books.”49 Even when she managed to find time to study alone, learning was a gruelling task to undertake alone: “I learned how difficult it is to study those soulless characters without the living voice and explanations of a teacher; yet I gladly endured all this work for the sake of my love of letters.”50 There is a cruel irony in Sor Juana’s dilemma: the convent provides her with neither the solitude for study nor the community in which learning thrives. The more serious challenge that she faced, however, was not a physical obstacle to study, but rather the confrontation her work represented in a theological context. In order to preserve her right to secular letters, Sor Juana was forced to adopt a rhetoric of humility and defend her work on religious terms. She writes that to know the “Queen of Sciences”––theology––the student must first know “her handmaidens.”51 “How,” Sor Juana writes, without great erudition [can one] approach so many matters of profane history mentioned in Holy Scripture, so many Gentile customs, so many rites, so many ways of speaking? How, without many rules and much reading of the Holy Fathers, can one grasp the obscure expression of the prophets?52

As Amanda Powell observes, Juana undercuts her own authority by citing an incapacity to study scripture––even as she demonstrates a mastery of the subject.53 After defending each secular

Babel Volume XXI 15 field on a scriptural basis, Sor Juana moves on to a larger project: the defence of education not merely for herself, but all women. In doing so, Sor Juana cites famous learned women––both from the Bible and classical history––and argues that “danger is averted”54 when women are taught. “For what disadvantage can there be,” she asks, “in having an older woman learned in letters, whose conversation and customs are holy, directing the education of young girls?”55 She alludes to the threat that male teachers pose to younger female pupils in her defence of both female education and the right to teach.56 According to Amanda Powell, Sor Juana makes an important distinction at the heart of her argument: “the prohibitions against women’s learning or writing are man-made, based on precedent and social custom, rather than on actual law, whether divine, human, or natural.”57 Over the course of the Response, Sor Juana repeatedly argues that it is this custom, rather than an innate lack of female intellect, that holds women back:

If I turn to my ability, so often criticized, to make verses––which is so natural in me that I even have to force myself not to write this letter in verse––seeing it condemned and incriminated so often by many, I have searched very diligently for what may be the harm in it and have not found it.58 Most strikingly, Sor Juana demonstrates that even if she is barred from her books, she can never be truly separated from learning; she moves to study “all the things God created.”59 She recounts learning through cooking and through her observations of, for example, two young girls playing with a spinning top and the arches in the ceiling.60 Elizabeth Teresa Howe writes that Sor Juana gives herself three distinct narrative voices in her examination of women’s learning: “the humble nun, the rhetorician and logician, and, finally, the divinely inspired writer.”61 Collectively, these separate voices––while partly motivated by necessity––speak to the complexity of women’s situation in the 17th century

16 Babel Volume XXI and allow Sor Juana to address the querelle through a

“polyphony” of dissenting voices.62 While Sor Juana’s story is a tragic account of a scholarly woman limited by circumstance––both within the convent and in light of the broader repressive social conditions of her time––other women faced graver challenges still. The convent was commonly used as a dumping ground for women deemed

“undesirable”––whether they lacked dowries or had physical or mental disabilities.63 Such was the case for Arcangela Tarrabotti––a young Venetian woman living at the beginning of the 17th century. Born with a leg deformity (that scholars speculate was clubfoot), Arcangela was initially sent in 1617 at the age of eleven to the Benedictine convent of Sant’Anna as a boarder.64 The double standard in the treatment of her disability is striking: her father was born with a similar ailment, yet was able to marry and have a successful career.65 Arcangela would take her first set of vows in 1620 at the same convent, from which she would not be permitted to leave or resign.66 She was a poor fit for monastic life, refusing to wear her habit or cut off her hair, as was the custom for the Benedictines.67 Yet at the same time, the strictly enclosed and regulated convent offered Arcangela the space to begin her literary career and provided her with source material for much of her work. While she wrote several works in her lifetime, the most famous––and autobiographical––is Paternal Tyranny, which was published two years after her death in 1654.68 On the one hand, the work is a moving and disturbing portrait of life for a young disabled woman in Early Modern Europe; on the other, Arcangela is quick to move beyond her individual circumstances to level a broader critique at patriarchy and the social, ecclesiastical, and political structures that served to impede women. As such, the work is a stunning demonstration of how the personal is made political––and a testament to the proto-feminist impact of autobiography.

Babel Volume XXI 17 Paternal Tyranny is composed of three sections. In the first, Arcangela examines theology, particularly the notorious story of Adam and Eve. She frames Adam as a coward who refuses to take accountability for his actions––and who is, she argues, a greater sinner as a result.69 In the second section, she turns to the Venetian social and political structures that oppress women. She is particularly attentive to women’s inability to take part in higher education and public office and examines the role of the convent.70 In the third and final section, Arcangela revisits the Bible and offers a feminist reading of the New Testament, arguing that gender equality is a fundamental Christian doctrine.71 Arcangela’s portrait of her life in Sant’Anna is sobering. She often compares the convent to a “tomb”––a reference to the Benedictine rule of “stability,” under which veiled women were barred from leaving the convent––and frequently harnesses the language of incarceration to drive her point home.72 Most strikingly, she calls the convent a “living hell” for “those without [true] vocation” and the “enforced slaves of Christ.”73 She even draws a parallel between Sant’Anna and Dante’s Inferno: “Over the gate of Hell, Dante says, are inscribed the words Abandon every hope, who enter here. The same could be inscribed over the portals of convents.”74 While this depiction of Arcangela’s cloistered life is unquestionably grim, her work draws important distinctions between willing and unwilling nuns. She extols the merits of a “freely chosen religious life” and “reveres” pious women such as St. Teresa and St. Euphrosina.75 When she paints the convent in a negative light, she draws upon the experiences of forcibly enclosed women––who, she asserts, make up to a third of her convent.76 These women, she writes, are not true nuns but rather “laywomen,” a title she also gives to herself.77 For Arcangela, religious vocation is noble but the convent is at the same time a corrupted place co-opted to serve patriarchal ends. This “paternal tyranny” defiles not only the Church but also perverts the very

18 Babel Volume XXI structure of the Christian faith––a faith that, she argues, was initially founded on equality between the sexes.78 The experiences of Teresa, Sor Juana, and Arcangela of convent life were diverse and varied. For Teresa, the convent was a freeing entity––one that offered her the space to lead a rigorous devotional life and care for her sisters. This spirit is reflected in her autobiographical and religious writings, which were produced in this same spirit of devotion: both to God and the cloistered community. While her legacy as a feminist is hotly contested, her writing championed a revolutionary approach to female learning and piety. In contrast, Sor Juana took the veil primarily to escape the distractions of the earthly world in pursuit of knowledge and learning. Ultimately, however, these distractions would follow her into the convent, where she would struggle against both patriarchal and ecclesiastical structures. Her Response to Sor Filotea reveals the ways in which she suffered as a result while articulating her proto-feminist views. Finally, Arcangela Tarabotti’s Paternal Tyranny is at once a powerful invective against women’s repression, and more specifically the ways in which men co-opt religious structures to further their own ends. Inspired by Arcangela’s own unhappy experiences as a young disabled woman forced into a convent against her will, it condemns the treatment of “undesirable” women like herself. Taken together, these autobiographical accounts of the Church are important sites of early feminist thought. For all its failings and limitations, the early modern convent provided a uniquely female-dominated environment that allowed these women—through bracing acts of authorial selfrepresentation—to interrogate wider issues of gender and power.

Notes 1 Amanda Powell, “Revisiting the ‘Querelle’ in Maria de San José Salazar and Juana Inés de la Cruz: Inciting Disturbances of the Patriarchy,” Letras Femeninas 35, no. 1 (2009): 211-212. 2 Carole Slade, St. Teresa of Àvila: Author of a Heroic Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 1. 3 J.M. Cohen, introduction to The Life of Teresa of Àvila by Herself, by Saint Tere-

sa of Àvila (London: Penguin Classics, 1957), 1. 4 Saint Teresa of Àvila, The Life of Teresa of Àvila by Herself, trans. J.M. Cohen (London: Penguin Classics, 1957), 28. 5 Àvila 27. 6 Àvila 29. 7 Àvila 29. 8 Àvila 30. 9 Àvila 33. 10 Àvila 33. 11 Àvila 35. 12 Àvila 35-36. 13 Àvila 51. 14 Àvila 51. 15 Àvila 54-55. 16 Àvila 21. 17 Elizabeth Teresa Howe, Autobiographical Writing by Early Modern Hispanic Women (Abingdon-on-Thames: Routledge, 2015), 65. 18 Slade 2-3. 19 Àvila 66. 20 Slade 2-3. 21 Àvila 236. 22 Àvila 236-37. 23 Àvila 239-41. 24 Àvila 266. 25 Àvila 266. 26 Àvila 267. 27 Àvila 268-70. 28 Àvila 270. 29 Àvila 275-76. 30 Cohen 13. 31 Cohen 13. 32 Cohen 2. 33 Margaret Dorgan, “St. Teresa of Àvila: Woman and Waverer,” CrossCurrents 32, no. 2, (1982): 1-2. 34 Dorgan 1-2. 35 Dorgan 1. 36 Howe 195-96. 37 Howe 195. 38 Howe 196. 39 Howe 195-96. 40 Howe 197. 41 Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Selected Works, ed. and trans. Edith Grossman (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2014). 163. 42 Howe 197-98. 43 Howe 196. 44 Howe 195. 45 Howe 195.

20 Babel Volume XXI 46 Howe 203. 47 Howe 206-07. 48 Fernandez, Bishop Don Manuel de Fernandez, “A Letter From Sor Filotea, to the Eminent Sor Juana Inéz de la Cruz,” in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Selected

Works, ed. and trans. Edith Grossman (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2014), 143-49. 49 Cruz 163-64. 50 Cruz 164. 51 Cruz 165. 52 Cruz 166. 53 Powell 217. 54 Cruz 193. 55 Cruz 194. 56 Cruz 195-96. 57 Powell 221. 58 Cruz 201. 59 Cruz 182. 60 Cruz 184-85. 61 Howe 221. 62 Powell 218. 63 Letizia Panizza, introduction to Paternal Tyranny, by Arcangela Tarabotti (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004) 1. 64 Sabrina Ebbersmyer, “There Remains Nothing to Lose for the One Who

Has Lost Liberty: Liberty and Free Will in Arcangela Tarabotti’s Radical Criticism of the Patriarchy,” Intellectual History Review 32, no. 1 (2021). 65 Panizza 2-3. 66 Ebbersmyer. 67 Panizza 3-4. 68 Ebbersmyer. 69 Arcangela Tarabotti, Paternal Tyranny, trans. Letizia Panizza (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 51-54. 70 Tarabotti 85-122. 71 Tarabotti 123-53. 72 Panizza 4. 73 Tarabotti 65. 74 Tarabotti 65. 75 Tarabotti 64. 76 Tarabotti 72. 77 Tarabotti 65. 78 Tarabotti 119-21.

Bibliography Àvila, Saint Teresa of. The Life of Teresa of Àvila by Herself. Translated and with an introduction by J.M. Cohen. London: Penguin Classics, 1957. Cohen, J.M. Introduction to The Life of Teresa of Àvila by Herself. By Saint Teresa of Àvila. London: Penguin Classics, 1957. Cruz, Sor Juana Inés de la. Selected Works. Edited and translated by Edith

Babel Volume XXI 21 Grossman. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2014. Dorgan, Margaret. “St. Teresa of Àvila: Woman and Waverer.” CrossCurrents 32, no. 2 (1982): 155-166. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/ stable/24458494. Accessed 13 Feb. 2021. Ebbersmyer, Sabrina. “There Remains Nothing to Lose for the One Who Has Lost Liberty: Liberty and Free Will in Arcangela Tarabotti’s Radical Criticism of the Patriarchy.” Intellectual History Review 32, no. 1 (2021). Taylor & Francis Online. doi-10.1080/17496977.2020.1855948. Accessed 18 Feb. 2021. Fernandez, Bishop Don Manuel de. “A Letter From Sor Filotea, to the Eminent Sor Juana Inéz de la Cruz.” In Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Selected Works. Edited and Translated by Edith Grossman. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2014. Howe, Elizabeth Teresa. Autobiographical Writing by Early Modern Hispanic Women. Abingdon-on-Thames: Routledge, 2015. E-Book. “Monastery of La Encarnacion.” City of Àvila, 2021. Accessed 23 Feb. 2021. <https://www.avilaturismo.com/en/what-to-see/item/411monastery-of-la-encarnación> Panizza, Letizia. Introduction to Paternal Tyranny. By Arcangela Tarabotti. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Powell, Amanda. “Revisiting the ‘Querelle’ in Maria de San José Salazar and Juana Inés de la Cruz: Inciting Disturbances of the Patriarchy.” Letras Femeninas 35, no. 1 (2009): 211-232. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/ stable/23023069. Accessed 15 Feb. 2021. Slade, Carole. St. Teresa of Àvila: Author of a Heroic Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. E-Book. Tarabotti, Arcangela. Paternal Tyranny. Translated and with an introduction by Letizia Panizza. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.