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Reviewed by:
  • Between Desire and Passion: Teresa de Cartagena by Yonsoo Kim
  • Raquel Trillia
Keywords

Teresa de Cartagena, Yonsoo Kim, Raquel Trillia, Arboleda de los Enfermos, Admiraçión Operum Dey, Querelle des Femmes, Las Huelgas de Burgos, converso, irony, Medieval European Women Writers, traditional (patriarchal) discourses, deafness, infrimity, spiritual health, (auto)consolation

Kim, Yonsoo . Between Desire and Passion: Teresa de Cartagena. Leiden, Neth.: Brill, 2012. 185 pp.

In Between Desire and Passion, Yonsoo Kim introduces Spanish writer Teresa de Cartagena (c. 1425-?) to a nonspecialist audience by, in large part, situating Teresa among other female Castilian and European intellectuals and authors of the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period. The book is a wonderful introduction to Teresa's life and texts, and to the field of women writing in the Middle Ages, and will be particularly useful to early graduate students looking for an overview of the possibilities of these fields. A work such as this about the other Teresa serves to remind us that Teresa de Avila is neither the only Teresa, nor the only Spanish woman to write before 1600.

Probably in the 1470s, Teresa, a deaf nun of converso heritage, writes to voice her suffering in her first treatise, Arboleda de los enfermos, and later, in Admiraçión Operum Dey, addresses a "virtuosa señora" in response to the "prudentes varones" who marveled at the fact that a woman had written a treatise. Kim argues that because Teresa's second treatise is an explicit defense of women's intellectual faculties and their ability and right to write, we must consider Teresa's work as a contribution to the querelles de femmes. Although important, this is not a novel position, since Luis Miguel Vicente García (1989), María Milagros Rivera Garretas (1992), and others have argued for Teresa's inclusion in this debate.

Kim's book consists of an introduction, six chapters, and a helpful appendix [End Page 503] containing the Bulario petitions of 1449 (also in translation) in support of the plausibility arguments she constructs about Teresa's life.

Chapters One and Two serve to present Teresa the woman and her socioreligious context. While reviewing previous scholarship, Kim reiterates and emphasizes the fact that Teresa belonged to the Cartagena family: she was the granddaughter of the illustrious converso rabbi Šelomó ha-Leví/bishop Pablo de Santa María. Additionally, based on Seidenspinner-Núñez and Kim's 2004 publication and study of the Bulario documents, Kim argues for possible dates for the onset of Teresa's deafness and the writing of her treatises.

Attempting to present a more complete picture of Teresa's life, Kim convincingly argues that after leaving the Franciscan Order, Teresa belonged to the Cistercian Order, a detail that until 2004 had been very much in question. In support of her argument, Kim calls attention to the importance of the Cistercian convent of Las Huelgas in Burgos and to the power held by its abbess (e.g., she reported directly to the Pope until 1873), making it the logical choice for a daughter of the Cartagena family. As Kim points out, it is noteworthy that the petition to move Teresa to the Cistercian order, granted by a Papal bull, is dated the same year as the 1449 anti-Jewish and anti-converso Toledan Rebellion. Kim cogently marshals relevant and supportive evidence (such as Papal bulls, testaments and Teresa's own writings), while critically discussing the speculations and interpretations of other scholars, in order to make plausible conjectures about Teresa's life.

In opposition to Rivera Garretas (1997) and M. Mar Cortés Timoner (2004), Kim's Chapter One interestingly argues that Teresa was not a mystic. In Chapter Two, Kim argues that Teresa was principally an intellectual by examining the traditional patriarchal Christian discourses that influenced Teresa's thinking and writing, the two ideological tendencies that developed in the medicoreligious history of the Middle Ages (pro-woman and misogynist), and the Christian rites that typically appealed to women, such as the imitatio Christi. Additionally, Kim sketches the religious and social constraints imposed on women and the origin of these ideas, which she traces back to Greek philosophy and medicine and...

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