Saber, sabiduria, and muger fuerte: Wisdom and the feminine in medieval and early modern Spanish literature

Although the two terms “wisdom” and “Woman” are often considered polar opposites in medieval treatises, the allegorical rendering of knowledge and the feminine personification of the mediating force between the object of study and the receptor are commonplaces in the literary imagination. This dissertation analyzes five discrete contexts where this embodied image of wisdom serves as a pre-text for medieval hagiographic, sapiential, and historiographic narratives as well as for the discourse surrounding Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz's life and work. Because it appears both natural and contradictory, the association between “Woman” and “wisdom” in these texts creates receptive tensions reflected in narratological expressions of surprise and of consternation, which are often the rhetorical building blocks of narrative and descriptive discourse.; Taking the book of Proverbs as a point of analytic departure, the first chapter examines the feminine personification of wisdom as a mnemonic and persuasive device. The second chapter considers Alfonso X's thirteenth-century translations of Proverbs, where the original passages personifying wisdom are sites of marked mouvance. The third chapter turns to a fifteenth-century collection of philosophers' teachings, Bocados de oro, where the story of Teodor, a wise virgin, serves as the conclusion to the ancient philosophers' erudition. Although Teodor seems a strange figure in a text that imagines a male audience and creates a homosocial community of sages, in this case, the image of a young Lady Wisdom was included as an appropriate figure in the transmission of wisdom. The fourth chapter, “Dueña, mucho sodes parlera,” analyzes the principles of inclusion and reception that guided the elaboration of a fourteenth-century anthology of saints' lives and pious romances compiled with a mixed, and perhaps entirely female audience in mind. The fifth chapter follows the reception of the story of St. Catherine and the biblical Woman of Worth to seventeenth-century works by and about Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. As I argue, the genres and contexts, and the imagined and implied audiences of the works in which wise women represent the acquisition, retention, and application of wisdom are important factors in reading the pre-texts and intentionalities behind such representations.