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Book for the hour of recreation PDF

205 Pages·2002·2.77 MB·English
by  Weber
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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.

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María de San José Salazar (1548-1603) took the veil as a Discalced ("barefoot") Carmelite nun in 1571, becoming one of Teresa of Avila's most important collaborators in religious reform and serving as prioress of the Seville and Lisbon convents. Within the parameters of the strict Catholic Reforma
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