The Golden Age of Spanish mysticism has traditionally been read in terms of individual authors or theological traditions. God Made Word , however, considers early modern Spanish mysticism as a ...question of language and as a discourse that circulated in concrete social, institutional, and geographic spaces.
Proposing a new reading of early modern Spanish mysticism, God Made Word traces the struggles over the representation of interiorized spiritual union – the tension between making it known and conveying its unknowability – far beyond the usual canon of mystic literature. Dale Shuger combines a study of genres that have traditionally been the object of literary study, including poetry, theatre, and autobiography, with a language-based analysis of other areas that have largely been studied by historians and theologians. Arguing that these generic separations grew out of an increasing preoccupation with the cultivation and control of interiorized spirituality, God Made Word shows that by tracing certain mystic representations we come to understand the emergence of different discursive rules and expectations for a wide range of representations of the ineffable.
For many years Teresa de Ávila’s Libro de la vida was considered an exceptional work of literature, in both senses of the word “exceptional”. The work of Isabelle Poutrin, Francisco Durán López and ...others has made us question one of these meanings: no one doubts Teresa’s great literary value, but we now know that hers is one of hundreds (if not more) spiritual autobiographies/diaries kept by early modern Spanish women (and a few men as well). None of these lesser known vidas are as comprehensive or polished as Teresa’s Vida, and many are fragmentary and even incoherent. Insofar as these partial accounts of spiritual graces have been studied or translated, they are often excerpted, paraphrased, or translated in such a way as to make them more legible than, I argue, they really are. I propose then to consider how we might integrate these failed (in the sense that their authors’ spiritual narratives were never deemed models for others), fragmentary, incomplete, and incoherent narratives into the study of the “spiritual autobiography”. This chapter will examine a selection of such autobiographies to make the argument that, by examining a more complete corpus of spiritual autobiographies, and not just the most polished and successful ones, we get a different and fuller picture of the possibilities and limits of women’s self-fashioning through language in the early modern period.
Dale Shuger discovers an intimate connection between Cervantes's integration of the discourse of madness and his part in forging the new genre of the European novel. Drawing on insanity defence ...statements from a wide social spectrum -- housekeepers, nieces, doctors, and barbers -- alongside the testimonies of the alleged madmen and women, Shuger argues that Cervantes' exploration of madness as experience is intimately linked to questions about ethics, reason, will and selfhood. In adapting, challenging and transforming these discourses, Don Quixote investigates interiority and the limitations of knowledge, reflecting on how we diagnose and deal with those we cannot understand.
Putting the auto in the auto de fe Shuger, Dale
Bulletin of Hispanic studies (Liverpool : Liverpool University Press : 1996),
03/2021, Letnik:
98, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Buried in the miscellaneous writings of Capuchin abbess Sor María Ángela Astorch (1592–1665) is a curious spiritual exercise the author calls ‘teatro santo’. In it, Sor María, never herself ...investigated by the Inquisition, imagines herself as a priest being sentenced to death in an auto de fe. The exercise is practised in total solitude, but also requires props and costume. Sor María inhabits various identities and voices in her account, moving freely between genders and roles, as well as between her embodied identity and her imagined ones. This article argues that the ‘teatro santo’, while singular in its particulars, may give insight into how a female public reacted to the diverse genres of performance that characterize the Spanish Baroque. Sor María’s identification with multiple ‘characters’, and her creative self-insertion into the narrative, shows how early modern women could cultivate creative freedom within, and without disturbing, the most restrictive spaces.
This article re-thinks the mechanisms through which a “proto-feminist” stance could be enunciated in early modern Spain, focusing on Sor María de Ágreda as a paradigmatic example. I show how Sor ...María's deeply held pro-imperial, racist, essentialist ideas across her writings allowed her to achieve the royal and Church support that ended up protecting the proto-feminist La mística ciudad de Dios, and how those alignments changed after her death. I suggest that scholars of the early modern period can best serve feminism in the present through a frank study of the ways in which women appealed to power in the past.
In the later seventeenth century, máquina real companies performed full-length religious plays in the corrales de comedia using puppets instead of human actors. Much of their repertoire consisted of ...comedias de santos affirming the sovereignty of free will. This essay explores the possible dissonance produced among early modern audiences who watched a puppet--seemingly a metonym for manipulation--insist on his free will. Through close reading of a diverse assortment of theatrical, theological, and political texts, I reconstruct the metaphorical meaning of puppet, which turns out to have curiously distinct resonances in the Catholic and Protestant traditions.
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