Mystical Traditions Are Political: The Life and Afterlife of Teresa Enríquez

Mystical traditions are not apolitical. In this context, I understand medieval politics in a broad sense, encompassing policies of the church (secular and regular) and the monarchy (government and court) that did not always align. I will refer to mysticism as a personal religious experience in which the subject seeks to encounter God and to unite with the divinity whether or not that end is achieved. There are many possible ways of addressing the connection between politics and mysticism using examples from my main geographic area of expertise, the Iberian Peninsula, which—borrowing from Sharon Kinoshita—is where I put the foot of my compass while studying the Mediterranean. In this brief piece, I will argue not only that medieval and early modern mystical traditions are political but that those politics were gendered. Medieval virtue was as performative and as constructed as gender, and it was based on a “stylized repetition” of virtuous acts; therefore, for women to be recognized as having attained distinction in devotion and mysticism, they needed to comply with, resist, or fight against the particular roles assigned to them (sometimes all at once).¹ Similarly, because men were considered generically more virtuous, women were supposed to become manlier to be more virtuous.² It is no coincidence that the etymological root of virtue, the Latin virtus, is vir, or man; therefore virtue signified “manliness,” or “courage.”

For the sake of brevity, I will look at one example, that of Teresa Enríquez (1450–1529), known as the Madwoman of the Host (La Loca del Sacramento)—the nickname given to her by Pope Julius II. Her other popular nicknames were the Drunkard of Celestial Wine (La Embriagada del Vino Celestial) and God’s Fool (La Boba de Dios).³ I will examine how she acted and was perceived during her lifetime and how her figure was modified in a series of texts penned by male authors shortly after her death and into the twentieth century. All the authors tailored her biography to suit their own objectives and presented her experiences and those of her grandmother—both of whom were connected to the Trastámaras, the royal dynasty ruling the Crowns of Aragon and Castile—in a more mystical light. I will contend that those texts portrayed Teresa as a model for upper-class women (particularly widows) to emulate but that these portrayals obscure and diminish the agency she had in life. These writers’ aim was to convince women that the theological virtue of charity went beyond loving God above everything else. They transformed charity into a virtue that in this precise context meant the use of one’s own resources to support the church (and, typically, the specific branch of the church represented by the writer in question). This would bring women closer to God and to salvation while increasing their pious reputation and, paradoxically, their status in society and their capacity to exercise agency. If performing piety was a form of empowerment, then, to quote John Harvey, “it is true, too, that piety was power in the late Middle Ages, and humility had authority.”⁴ Teresa Enríquez certainly had it all: piety, power, humility, authority, and, since the 1970s, beatification.

Life

Teresa Enríquez was the daughter of María de Alvarado y Villagrán and Alfonso Enríquez de Quiñones, Almirante of Castile. Teresa’s connection to the royal house was through her father, who was Queen Juana Enríquez’s half-brother. Juana Enríquez (r. 1458–68) was the wife of King Joan II of Aragon (r. 1458–79) and the mother of Ferran (Fernando) the Catholic, king of Aragon in his own right and king-consort of Castile thanks to his marriage to Isabel I. Several historians have pointed out that she must have been illegitimate.⁵ After her mother’s death, she was raised by her “holy” grandmother, in the shadow of the Franciscan convent of Valdescopezo (Medina de Rioseco, Valladolid).⁶ Apparently, this inspired her to become a nun, but despite this, around 1470 her father married...