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"Shuger, Dale"
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God Made Word
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.
eBook
Incoherent Subjects, Incomplete Lives: The Limits of Spiritual Autobiography in Spain
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.
Journal Article
Resistance from the Right: Sor María de Ágreda and the Intersections of Early Modern Feminism
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.
Journal Article
Pulling Strings: Puppets and Free Will on the Spanish Stage
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.
Journal Article
Cross Words
In Cervantes's works, everything is crossed: borders, destinies, identities. While the revelations and confusions produced by such crossings are a constituent element of the romance genre in general, Cervantes is unusual for the frequency with which he employs them within a historically verisimilar setting, one which he knew inside and out. I refer, of course, to the border between the Christian and Islamic world. Recent scholarship has focused on the fluidity of borders and identities that these deceptions make visible, in stark contrast to the prevailing official discourses of essentialism (national, religious, sexual). While the age of semiotics has perhaps passed, the analysis of signs as they are embedded in cultural systems or meaning making continues to be relevant, as evidenced by the recent spate of works on performative identities. During Cervantes's lifetime Spain was constantly at war, literal and discursive, on these two fronts, and as a result crosses proliferated. It is not surprising then to find crosses in Cervantes's works, particularly those set on the frontier between Catholicism and iconoclastic others.
Journal Article
The Language of Mysticism and the Language of Law in Early Modern Spain
After the Reformation, Catholics developed new ways to express interior religious experiences, including mystic visions. This article considers the epistemological impasse that arose when the Spanish Inquisition, created to prosecute covert Judaizers, was charged with discernment of mystical experiences. Close linguistic study of interrogations shows how a nondialogue between mystical and legal discourse pointed to a broader conflict between a newly interiorized religion and the public space of the law. Practically, these cases weakened the Inquisition; conceptually, they undermined the idea of an Inquisition. If Enlightenment reformers were able to argue for a secularization of the law, it was because a group of mystics and Inquisitors had made such thought possible.
Journal Article