Teresa de Cartagena

Origins and early life

Teresa de Cartagena was born at Burgos about 1425 into the most famous converso family of Castile: she was a granddaughter of Pablo de Santa María, born Solomon ha-Levi, the rabbi of Burgos who was baptised in 1390 and later became bishop of the city, and a niece of Alonso de Cartagena.

Work and career

She is recorded here through that named grandfather, and this fiche states the limit of the evidence plainly: several independent secondary sources agree on her descent from Pablo de Santa María, but the archival act naming which of his sons was her father has not been recovered, so the exact link inside the family remains to be established. She was born after the family's conversion and was raised a Christian, and she became a nun, at Santa Clara in Burgos and later probably among the Franciscans.

In early adulthood she went completely deaf, and deafness is the subject and the ground of her writing. The Arboleda de los enfermos, the Grove of the Infirm, written around 1450, turns her isolation into a spiritual argument: cut off from speech, she is driven inward and finds a hearing that others, distracted by the noise of the world, do not have. When readers doubted that a woman could have written it, she answered with the Admiraçión operum Dey, a defence of women's capacity to write and to reason that is among the earliest such texts in Castilian and the reason she is now read as the first known woman author in Spanish.