Book for the hour of recreation

205 Pages·2002·2.77 MB·English

by  Weber

BOOK FOR THE
HOUR OF RECREATION
THE
OTHER VOICE
IN
EARLY MODERN
EUROPE
A Series Edited by Margaret L. King and Albert Rabil Jr.
OTHER BOOKS IN THE SERIES
HENRICUS CORNELIUS AGRIPPA LUCREZIA MARINELLA
Declamation on the Nobility and The Nobility and Excellence of Women,
Preeminence of the Female Sex and the Defects and Vices of Men
Edited and Translated by Albert Rabil Jr. Edited and translated by Anne Dunhill with
Letizia Panizza
LAURA CERETA
Collected Letters of a Renaissance Feminist
Edited and translated by Diana Robin ANTONIA PULCI
Florentine Drama for Convent
TULLIA D’ARAGONA and Festival
Dialogue on the Infinity of Love Edited and translated by James Wyatt Cook
Edited and translated by Rinaldina Russell
and Bruce Merry
SISTER BARTOLOMEA RICCOBONI
CASSANDRA FEDELE Life and Death in a Venetian Convent:
Letters and Orations The Chronicle and Necrology of Corpus
Edited and translated by Diana Robin Domini, 1395–1436
Edited and translated by Daniel Bornstein
CECILIA FERRAZZI
Autobiography of an Aspiring Saint
Edited and translated by Anne Jacobson Schutte ANNA MARIA VAN SCHURMAN
“Whether a Christian Woman Should Be
MODERATA FONTE Educated” and Other Writings from Her
The Worth of Women Intellectual Circle
Edited and translated by Virginia Cox Edited and translated by Joyce L. Irwin
VERONICA FRANCO
Poems and Selected Letters LUCREZIA TORNABUONI DE’ MEDICI
Edited and translated by Ann Rosalind Jones Sacred Narratives
and Margaret F. Rosenthal Edited and translated by Jane Tylus
MARIE LE JARS DE GOURNAY
“Apology for the Woman Writing” and JUAN LUIS VIVES
Other Works “The Education of a Christian Woman”:
Edited and translated by Richard Hillman A Sixteenth-Century Manual
and Colette Quesnel Edited and translated by Charles Fantazzi
María de San José Salazar
B O O K F O R T H E
H O U R O F R E C R E AT I O N
(cid:2)
Introduction and Notes
by Alison Weber
Translation by Amanda Powell
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
Chicago & London
María de San José Salazar (1548–1603)
Alison Weberis associate professor of Spanish at the University of Virginia.
She is the author ofTeresa of Avila and the Rhetoric of Femininity.
Amanda Powellis senior instructor of Spanish at the University of
Oregon. She is translator of Untold Sisters: Hispanic Nuns in Their Own Words
andcoauthor ofA Wild Country Out in the Garden:
The Spiritual Journals of a Colonial Mexican Nun.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2002by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2002
Printed in the United States of America
11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 1 2 3 4 5
ISBN: 0-226-73454-4 (cloth)
ISBN: 0-226-73455-2 (paper)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
María de San José, 1548–1603.
[Libro de recreaciones. English]
Book for the hour of recreation /María de San José Salazar ; introduction
and notes by Alison Weber ; translation by Amanda Powell.
p. cm.—(The other voice in early modern Europe)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN0-226-73454-4 (alk. paper)—ISBN0-226-73455-2 (paper : alk. paper)
1. Teresa, of Avila, Saint, 1515–1582. 2. Christian saints—Spain—Avila—
Biography. I. Weber, Alison, 1947—II. Powell, Amanda. III. Title.
IV. Series.
BX4700.T4 M313 2002
282(cid:2).092—dc21
[B] 2002017353
(cid:2)(cid:3)The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
CONTENTS
Introduction to the Series vii
Chronology of the Life of
María de San José Salazar xxix
Introduction to
María de San José Salazar (1548–1603) 1
A Note on the Translation 27
Book for the Hour of Recreation 33
Introduction 33
First Recreation 35
Second Recreation 42
In which, as Justa and Gracia continue, the latter recounts what she saw
of Mother Angela and how long she has known her
Third Recreation 61
In which Justa asks Gracia to tell her about Mount Carmel
Fourth Recreation 66
In which Gracia continues to tell of the greatness of Mount Carmel
Fifth Recreation 78
In which Gracia continues to tell of the greatness of Mount Carmel
Sixth Recreation 82
In which they discuss the riches and precious stones of Mount Carmel
Seventh Recreation 87
In which all three nuns discuss the properties of prayer, and the practice of the same
Eighth Recreation 100
Which tells of the life of the holy Mother Teresa of Jesus and of her birth and parents,
calling her by the name of Angela, and sums up the favors that God granted her,
as she relates them in her books
Ninth Recreation 135
Suggestions for Further Reading 165
Index 169
THE OTHER VOICE IN
EARLY MODERN EUROPE:
INTRODUCTION TO THE SERIES
Margaret L. King and Albert Rabil Jr.
THE OLD VOICE AND THE OTHER VOICE
In western Europe and the United States women are nearing equality in the
professions, in business, and in politics. Most enjoy access to education, re-
productive rights, and autonomy in financial affairs. Issues vital to women are
on the public agenda: equal pay, childcare, domestic abuse, breast cancer re-
search, and curricular revision with an eye to the inclusion of women.
These recent achievements have their origins in things women (and
some male supporters) said for the first time about six hundred years ago.
Theirs is the “other voice,” in contradistinction to the “first voice,” the voice
of the educated men who created Western culture. Coincident with a general
reshaping of European culture in the period 1300–1700 (called the Renais-
sance or early modern period), questions of female equality and opportunity
were raised that still resound and are still unresolved.
The other voice emerged against the backdrop of a three-thousand-year
history of the derogation of women rooted in the civilizations related to
Western culture: Hebrew, Greek, Roman, and Christian. Negative attitudes
toward women inherited from these traditions pervaded the intellectual,
medical, legal, religious, and social systems that developed during the Euro-
pean Middle Ages.
The following pages describe the traditional, overwhelmingly male
views of women’s nature inherited by early modern Europeans and the new
tradition that the other voice called into being to begin to challenge reigning
assumptions. This review should serve as a framework for the understanding
of the texts published in the series The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe.
Introductions specific to each text and author follow this essay in all the vol-
umes of the series.
vii
viii Introduction to the Series
TRADITIONAL VIEWS OF WOMEN, 500 B.C.E.–1500 C.E.
Embedded in the philosophical and medical theories of the ancient Greeks
were perceptions of the female as inferior to the male in both mind and body.
Similarly, the structure of civil legislation inherited from the ancient Romans
was biased against women, and the views on women developed by Christian
thinkers out of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament were
negative and disabling. Literary works composed in the vernacular language
of ordinary people, and widely recited or read, conveyed these negative as-
sumptions. The social networks within which most women lived—those of
the family and the institutions of the Roman Catholic Church—were shaped
by this negative tradition and sharply limited the areas in which women
might act in and upon the world.
GREEK PHILOSOPHY AND FEMALE NATURE. Greek biology assumed
that women were inferior to men and defined them merely as childbearers
and housekeepers. This view was authoritatively expressed in the works of
the philosopher Aristotle.
Aristotle thought in dualities. He considered action superior to inaction,
form (the inner design or structure of any object) superior to matter, comple-
tion superior to incompletion, possession superior to deprivation. In each of
these dualities, he associated the male principle with the superior quality and
the female with the inferior. “The male principle in nature,” he argued, “is as-
sociated with active, formative and perfected characteristics, while the fe-
male is passive, material and deprived, desiring the male in order to become
complete.”1Men are always identified with virile qualities, such as judgment,
courage, and stamina, and women with their opposites—irrationality, cow-
ardice, and weakness.
Even in the womb, the masculine principle was considered superior. The
man’s semen, Aristotle believed, created the form of a new human creature,
while the female body contributed only matter. (The existence of the ovum,
and with it the other facts of human embryology, were not established until
the seventeenth century.) Although the later Greek physician Galen be-
lieved that there was a female component in generation, contributed by “fe-
male semen,” the followers of both Aristotle and Galen saw the male role in
human generation as more active and more important.
In the Aristotelian view, the male principle sought always to reproduce
itself. The creation of a female was always a mistake, therefore, resulting
1. Aristotle, Physics1.9.192a20–24, in The Complete Works of Aristotle,ed. Jonathan Barnes, rev.
Oxford trans., 2 vols. (Princeton, N.J., 1984), 1:328.
Introduction to the Series ix
from an imperfect act of generation. Every female born was considered a “de-
fective” or “mutilated” male (as Aristotle’s terminology has variously been
translated), a “monstrosity” of nature.2
For Greek theorists, the biology of males and females was the key to
their psychology. The female was softer and more docile, more apt to be de-
spondent, querulous, and deceitful. Being incomplete, moreover, she craved
sexual fulfillment in intercourse with a male. The male was intellectual, ac-
tive, and in control of his passions.
These psychological polarities derived from the theory that the universe
consisted of four elements (air, earth, fire, and water), expressed in human
bodies as four “humors” (black bile, yellow bile, blood, and phlegm) consid-
ered respectively dry, hot, damp, and cold and corresponding to mental
states (“melancholic,” “choleric,” “sanguine,” “phlegmatic”). In this schemati-
zation, the male, sharing the principles of earth and fire, was dry and hot; the
female, sharing the principles of air and water, was cold and damp.
Female psychology was further affected by her dominant organ, the
uterus (womb), hysterain Greek. The passions generated by the womb made
women lustful, deceitful, talkative, irrational, indeed—when these affects
were in excess—“hysterical.”
Aristotle’s biology also had social and political consequences. If the male
principle was superior and the female inferior, then in the household, as in
the state, men should rule and women must be subordinate. That hierarchy
does not rule out the companionship of husband and wife, whose coopera-
tion was necessary for the welfare of children and the preservation of prop-
erty. Such mutuality supported male preeminence.
Aristotle’s teacher Plato suggested a different possibility: that men and
women might possess the same virtues. The setting for this proposal is the
imaginary and ideal Republic that Plato sketches in a dialogue of that name.
Here, for a privileged elite capable of leading wisely, all distinctions of class
and wealth dissolve, as do, consequently, those of gender. Without house-
holds or property, as Plato constructs his ideal society, there is no need for
the subordination of women. Women may, therefore, be educated to the
same level as men to assume leadership responsibilities. Plato’s Republic re-
mained imaginary, however. In real societies, the subordination of women re-
mained the norm and the prescription.
The views of women inherited from the Greek philosophical tradition
became the basis for medieval thought. In the thirteenth century, the
supreme scholastic philosopher Thomas Aquinas, among others, still echoed
2. Aristotle, Generation of Animals2.3.737a27–28, in The Complete Works,1:1144.