¹ Encarnación Juárez points to the unique vantage of Grove as a medieval perspective, written not only by a female author but also from the perspective of a writer with a physical impairment. She comments ‘Teresa de Cartagena's voice is of double interest: not only is the author one of the few women writers in medieval Spain but also Arboleda is the only known text, written in the first person during the premodern period, that explores issues of disability, corporeal pain, and social rejection of the different.’ See Juárez, Encarnación, ‘The Autobiography of the Aching Body in Teresa de Cartagena's “Arboleda de Los Enfermos”’, in Brueggemann, Brenda Jo and Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie (eds), Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities (New York: Modern Language Association, 2002), p. 132Google Scholar.

² Deanda, Elena, ‘Speak in Silence: The Power of Weakness in the Works of Teresa of Cartagena’, EHumanista 29 (2015), p. 461Google Scholar.

³ Teresa is duly lauded for her challenge to patriarchal authority, for her outreach to disabled individuals and for her contributions as a female author. However, as scholars such as Deanda, Hutton, and Carmen García show, Teresa is not immune from responsibility related to participation in the systems she confronts, especially with respect to the intended audience for her work, the large majority of whom would have consisted of wealthy, male and able-bodied persons. See Hutton, Lewis Joseph, ‘Introduction’, in Arboleda de Los Enfermos y Admiraçión Operum Dey (Madrid: Real Academia Española Anejo XVI, 1967), pp. 8, 23Google Scholar; Deanda, ‘Speak in Silence’, pp. 467–73; García, Carmen, ‘Los Tratados de Teresa de Cartagena Dentro La Evolución de La Epístola’, in Beresford, Andrew M. (ed.), Quien Hubiese Tal Ventura: Medieval Hispanic Studies in Honour of Alan Deyermond (London: Queen Mary and Westfield College, 1997), pp. 149–57Google Scholar.

⁴ As Kim argues, ‘in spite of the fact that she came from a privileged social class, she suffered under various forms of discriminations and adversities for being a deaf person’. Kim, Yonsoo, Between Desire and Passion: Teresa de Cartagena (Boston: Brill, 2012), pp. 121–2Google Scholar.

⁵ Female authors show great diversity in their writings and in their approaches to a feminised Christianity. See Mary Elizabeth Baldridge, ‘Christian Woman, womanChrist: The Feminization of Christianity in Constanza de Castilla, Catherine of Siena, and Teresa de Cartagena’ (PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2004). Furthermore, Teresa's grandfather, Šelomó ha-Leví, converted from Judaism to Christianity in order to safeguard his family and secure greater political and monetary opportunities. For more on Teresa and her familial identity as conversos, and its impact on Teresa's intellectual context, see Kim, Between Desire and Passion, pp. 12–14; María Milagros Rivera Garretas, ‘Los Dos Infinitos En Teresa de Cartagena, Humanista y Mística Del Siglo XV’, Miscelánea Comillas 69/134 (n.d.), pp. 250–1; Hussar, James, ‘The Jewish Roots of Teresa de Cartagena's “Arboleda de Los Enfermos”’, La Corónica: A Journal of Medieval Hispanic Languages, Literatures, and Cultures 35/1 (2006), pp. 151–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kim, Yonsoo and Seidenspinner-Núñez, Dayle, ‘Historicizing Teresa: Reflections on New Documents Regarding Sor Teresa de Cartagena’, La Corónica: A Journal of Medieval Hispanic Languages, LIteratures, and Cultures 32/2 (2004), pp. 121–50Google Scholar.

⁶ Reibe, Nicole, ‘The Convent of the Infirmed: Teresa de Cartagena's Religious Model of Disability’, Journal of Disability and Religion 22/2 (2018), pp. 136–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷ Teresa's uncle, Alonso, was instrumental in securing a papal dispensation that would allow Teresa to move from the Poor Clares to the Cistercians at Las Huelgas. See Kim and Seidenspinner-Núñez, ‘Historicizing Teresa’, pp. 123–35; Hussar, ‘Jewish Roots’, p. 152. This is not to say that Teresa's writing is limited to Franciscan formation, but rather that her framework for spiritual wisdom presses against the Franciscan cruciformity she first encountered. In general, scholars disagree about which schools of thought provide the most influential framework for Teresa's understanding of reason's relation to faith, although all discuss the impact that various schools of thought had on her writing. For Kim, Augustine and Neoplatonism influenced Teresa's view of the intellect's relation to the will, where divine grace moves faith to seek understanding. Kim, Between Desire and Passion, p. 57. Teresa also parallels sections of the Franciscan mystic Ramon Llul in passages of her work (e.g. Teresa seems to adopt his idea of groves as a foundational image for Grove). Kim, Castro Ponce and Hutton note that Teresa quotes Boethius, and that her writing shares elements with classical thinkers like Seneca and Cicero. Some contemporary commentators classify Teresa's work within the consolatio genre, where human receptivity to divine wisdom intermixes with human suffering and spiritual reflection. These commentaries demur to her classical and Augustinian sightlines. See Clara E. Castro Ponce, ‘Teresa De Cartagena: Arboleda de Los Enfermos y Admiraçión Operum Dei: Edición Crítica Singular’ (PhD diss., Brown University, 2001), p. 44; Kim, Between Desire and Passion, pp. 56–9; Hutton, ‘Introduction’, pp. 18–23. For Deanda and Garretas, Teresa was more impacted by reconciling religion to reason, forging a religious epistemology that focused first on humanism before moving to the divine revelation. Reibe argues that Aquinas deeply impacted Teresa's view of the spiritual significance of her disability. See Deanda, ‘Speak in Silence’, p. 465; Kim, Between Desire and Passion, pp. 68–9; Garretas, ‘Los Dos Infinitos En Teresa de Cartagena’, p. 248; Reibe, ‘The Convent of the Infirmed’, pp. 134–5. Teresa notes in Grove that she read Peter Lombard's Sentences. Kim points out that Teresa would have studied not only the Sentences, but glosses on the book that included texts and commentaries from other sources such as scripture, Augustine and other church fathers. Kim and Rosemann show that these glosses were included in reformulated editions of the Sentences and were necessary prior to university examinations. See Kim, Between Desire and Passion, pp. 18, 100. See also Rosemann, Philipp W., The Story of a Great Medieval Book: Peter Lombard's ‘Sentences’ (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007)Google Scholar. See also de Cartagena, Teresa, Grove of the Infirm, trans. Seidenspinner-Núñez, Dayle (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1998), p. 80Google Scholar.

⁸ See esp. Cullen, Christopher M., ‘Bonaventure's Philosophical Method’, in Hammond, Jay M., Hellmann, J. A. Wayne and Goff, Jared (eds), A Companion to Bonaventure (Boston: Brill, 2014), pp. 121–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹ Hans Urs von Balthasar, Studies in Theological Styles: Clerical Styles, vol. 2 of The Glory of the Lord, trans. Andrew Louth (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1984), p. 271.

¹⁰ Bonaventure, ‘The Tree of Life’, in The Works of Bonaventure, trans. José de Vinck, vol. 1 (Paterson, NJ: St Anthony Guild Press, 1960), p. 97.

¹¹ Ilia Delio, ‘Theology, Spirituality and Christ the Center: Bonaventure's Synthesis’, in Companion to Bonaventure, p. 400. André Ménard explains that Bonaventure ‘invites us to become more aware that everything takes place in order that we might enter into the dynamism of the movement initiated by Christ. The meaning of every human adventure is participation with Christ and, in Christ, in the life offered us by God.’ See Thomas A Nairn, ‘Fixed with Christ to the Cross’, in Daria Mitchell (ed.), Dying, as a Franciscan: Approaching our Transitus to Eternal Life, Accompanying Others on the Way to Theirs (St Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute Pubns, 2011), p. 22.

¹² She asks, ‘where hearing fails, what good is speech? One is left dead and completely isolated.’ Cartagena, Grove, p. 25.

¹³ Ibid., p. 24.

¹⁴ Some critics have focused on Teresa's connection to wisdom as light and illumination, citing the impact of both Augustine's doctrine of illumination in Soliloquies and the Franciscan philosopher and mystic Ramon Llull, who was known as Doctor Illuminatus, upon her writing. They note that illumination here must not be construed as misguided heterodoxy, but rather reason's engagement with divine wisdom. See Kim, Between Desire and Passion, pp. 63–4. I agree with this assessment of Teresa's orthodoxy, but disagree with the presentation of her writing as a dialectic between light and dark, with a clear preference for the former. Rather, I claim that these ideas interweave in her work, much as they do in the biblical authors she cites (Job, Tobit and Isaiah). What lights her work is the interweaving of imagination with the ideas of the cross, virtue and suffering, rather than a state where the light of the resurrection creates new spiritual vision.

¹⁵ Early in Grove, Teresa writes ‘what I used to call my crucifixion, I now call my resurrection’. Cartagena, Grove, p. 29. References to the cross are few (pp. 29, 67), although not entirely absent. In her discussion of virtue, as Reibe claims, ‘Teresa did not mention Jesus’ passion or any of the healing miracles; she focused on Christ's virtues instead of Christ's passion. This is a significant departure from the Franciscan spirituality in which she was formed.’ Reibe, ‘The Convent of the Infirmed’, p. 140. For more on the absence of Christ in the writings of conversos especially, see Hussar, ‘Jewish Roots’, p. 154.

¹⁶ Cartagena, Grove, pp. 39, 23. Scholars like Elizabeth Howe point out that Teresa links her journey into faith to Abraham's journey at the outset of Grove, where she opens with a verse of Psalm 44 as a reference to Genesis 12:1. See Elizabeth Teresa Howe, Autobiographical Writing by Early Modern Hispanic Women (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Co., 2015), pp. 49–50.

¹⁷ Deanda, ‘Speak in Silence’, p. 465.

¹⁸ Cartagena, Grove, pp. 24–5. As Deanda reiterates, ‘The grove is not God, it is a community of voices, of books. It is the space in which her own voice and her own book echo.’ Deanda, ‘Speak in Silence’, p. 464.

¹⁹ In Kim, this distinctive authorial contribution further separates Teresa from fellow female Spanish mystics. Kim also notes that Teresa's writings offer much more than mere replications of biblical and ecclesial sources. Teresa's theology is distinctive, according to Kim, but this does not mean that her writing was or should now be considered heterodox. See Kim, Between Desire and Passion, pp. 36–50, 117–18.

²⁰ Deanda describes Teresa's written progression: ‘Cartagena thus links theology and philosophy and in Grove moves from the physical (her body) into the metaphysical (God‘s calling) and deeply into the epistemological (her ways of knowing). Interestingly enough, this un-corporeal discourse (both metaphysical and epistemological) is profoundly mediated by her body. Cartagena‘s discourse on the (disabled) body thus serves to construct a philosophy about epistemological inquiry in the service of God as well as a theology about spiritual growth in the service of reason.’ Deanda, ‘Speak in Silence’, p. 465.

²¹ Cartagena, Grove, p. 27.

²² Kim points to Teresa's originality in her writing on patience as well as her rhetorical moves that apply her interpretation to the collective church, rather than merely herself and her personal experience. See Kim, Between Desire and Passion, pp. 88–9. Deanda also supports this idea, noting that ‘patience is not just “tolerating one's misfortunes” … but “striving with diligence and care”’. Deanda, ‘Speak in Silence’, p. 466.

²³ Cartagena, Grove, p. 77.

²⁴ Reibe, ‘The Convent of the Infirmed’, p. 141.

²⁵ Cartagena, Grove, p. 48. As Deanda argues, ‘Patience, [Teresa] says, must be interpreted as painful wisdom, issued from pathos that is suffering, and science that is knowledge.’ Deanda, ‘Speak in Silence’, p. 466.

²⁶ Cartagena, Grove, p. 48.

²⁷ Ibid., pp. 33–4.

²⁸ Ibid., p. 34.

²⁹ Reibe points out that the medieval perception of illness, disability and suffering was varied and included viewing suffering as ‘a punishment, a blessing, and a benign part of life’. Reibe, ‘The Convent of the Infirmed’, p. 131. As Reibe suggests, though, Teresa's treatise overwhelmingly engages the first – suffering as a punishment for sin – and rejects the association. Reibe argues, ‘The conflation of illness and punishment for sin was roundly rejected, for Teresa was a confessed sinner, but her deafness was not a product of that sin. Sin and illness are distinct and disconnected from each. God did not use illness as a punishment for sins, and understanding illness as a punishment fundamentally distorts how illness functions within Teresa's spiritual life.’ Reibe, ‘The Convent of the Infirmed’, p. 138.

³⁰ Reibe points out that Teresa distinguishes between punitive and corrective suffering. ‘For Teresa, there was a subtle, but important difference between illnesses being rehabilitative instead of punitive. If illness was punitive, then the illness was a way to make amends for a sin. If illness was corrective, then the illness was a way to cultivate virtues that inhibit sin from controlling the person in the future.’ Ibid., p. 139.

³¹ Cartagena, Grove, p. 38.

³² Ibid., p. 39.

³³ Ibid., pp. 39–40. In addition to Revelation, Teresa also references Luke 14:15–24. Reibe argues that Teresa uses this biblical passage to form a new opportunity for liturgical life for those with disabilities. Juan-Carlos Conde points out that Teresa works carefully to establish her personal experiences within orthodox exegesis of biblical passages. See Reibe, ‘The Convent of the Infirmed’, pp. 142–3; Juan-Carlos Conde, ‘La Ortodoxia de Una Heterodoxa: Teresa de Cartagena y La Biblia’, Hispania Sacra 145 (2020), p. 120.

³⁴ Cartagena, Grove, p. 40.

³⁵ Deanda points out that ‘there is a gap between Cartagena‘s ideal and her actual audience. Her readers were not the invalid or forgotten but the educated sphere (the letrados), a healthy and prosperous masculine sphere who knew how to read and write.’ She continues, arguing that ‘Grove sets up a masquerade because Cartagena does not actually address those who suffer but instead a very exclusive and powerful crowd.’ Deanda, ‘Speak in Silence’, p. 467. I do not dispute Deanda's argument about Teresa's audience, but her conclusion that Grove becomes a ‘masquerade’ fails to consider the theological significance of Grove as a tool for inserting the wisdom of suffering into the power circles of the able-bodied men who would read the discourse and into the treasury of the church's theology.

³⁶ Medieval thinkers inherited this tradition of Christ as a surgical healer from church fathers, such as Basil and Gregory Nazianzen, who in turn appropriated much from the classical pagan tradition of finding metaphorical value attached to medical arts and the healer's altruism. See Kim, Between Desire and Passion, pp. 38–9, 95.

³⁷ Cartagena, Grove, p. 57. Teresa points out that, ‘although in order to heal a physical ailment we will suffer great torments, swallowing bitter draughts of medicine or submitting our bodies to burning instruments or the surgeon's blade or even consenting to amputation if required to save our lives … yet, in order to cure the continuous fever in our souls, to undergo any intervention seems bad to us’. She then ‘briefly surveys’ the effects of suffering as a surgeon on the seven principal vices, or ‘seven fevers … that make our souls frantic in order to see how physical suffering can cure them’. Ibid., pp. 57–8.

³⁸ Ibid., pp. 59–60.

³⁹ Deanda points out that ‘Grove of the Infirm emphasizes the infirm's lack of vices … and stresses their exceptionality to an extent that it places them above the healthy.’ Deanda, ‘Speak in Silence', p. 465. Reibe echoes this point, stating that in Teresa's work, ‘the conflation of illness and punishment for sin was roundly rejected, for Teresa was a confessed sinner, but her deafness was not a product of that sin. … Rather than being a punishment, illness was God's merciful attempt to reach out to those God loves, pulling them near, so that they may develop virtue. Illness, instead of being punitive, was rehabilitative.’ Reibe, ‘The Convent of the Infirmed’, p. 138.

⁴⁰ Cartagena, Grove, p. 62.

⁴¹ Ibid.

⁴² Teresa here follows the rhetorical practice of expanding her initial premise with a lengthy explanation, or endoxa. For more on this practice as a literary and rhetorical device, see Kim, Between Desire and Passion, pp. 91–4; Myles Burnyeat, ‘Enthymeme: The Logic of Persuasion’, in Aristotle's Rhetoric (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 3–55; John M. Cooper, ‘Rhetoric, Dialectic, and the Passions’, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 11 (1993), pp. 175–98.

⁴³ Cartagena, Grove, pp. 52–3.

⁴⁴ Ibid., p. 64.

⁴⁵ Ibid., p. 65.

⁴⁶ Ibid., p. 64.

⁴⁷ Ibid., p. 72.

⁴⁸ Ibid., pp. 72–3.

⁴⁹ Ibid., p. 73.

⁵⁰ Ibid.

⁵¹ Ibid., p. 75.

⁵² Ibid.

⁵³ Ibid., p. 76.

⁵⁴ Ibid. Teresa reiterates this point again a few paragraphs later, writing that while the patient sufferer can have a variety of emotions ‘it may be true that patience is more secure where there is crying than where there is laughter … for if vain laughter is a sin and patience by its own nature flees from all vice, it follows that patience is more at home and secure with sad people than with happy people, and more certain where people are weeping than where they are boisterously laughing’. Ibid., p. 78.

⁵⁵ Ibid., p. 77.

⁵⁶ Ibid.

⁵⁷ Ibid., p. 78.

⁵⁸ Ibid.

⁵⁹ Ibid., p. 77.

⁶⁰ Ibid., p. 80.

⁶¹ Ibid.

⁶² Ibid.

⁶³ Ibid., pp. 81–2.

⁶⁴ Ibid., p. 82.

⁶⁵ Ibid.

⁶⁶ Ibid.

⁶⁷ Ibid., p. 80. Teresa enumerates patience's place in each of the theological virtues. She recaps this work at the end of Grove: ‘It is certain and without doubt that all these seven virtues attend to patience's lofty and perfect work … faith to believe that God gives us these travails for our own good and to avail Himself of our patience; hope to aspire to the reward prepared for us by our hardships; charity to love above all else Him from whom and through whom we receive so many blessings and await even greater ones.’ Ibid., pp. 84–5.