Historical Testimony of Female Disability: The Neurological Impairment of Teresa de Ávila

The objective of this chapter is to study Libro de la vida (The Book of Her Life), the personal testimony of Teresa de Avila (1515-1582), a nun suffering neurological disorders, possibly epilepsy, in order to demonstrate how the author creates a textual resistance to external labelling and social segregation. In her autobiography, Teresa explains her frequent physical problems in relation to mystical graces, involuntary and uncontrollable raptures, beatific and devilish visions, hearing of voices and prophetic messages. In a period in which both the experience of epilepsy and of having visions were stigmatized and suspected of devilish intervention in women weaken body and soul, Teresa successfully defends her right to explain her own body occurrences contravening the accepted explanations.

The Disabling of Aging Female Bodies: Midwives, Procuresses, Witches and the Monstrous Mother

This chapter studies the literary trope of the hag. The works chosen for examination, Fernando de Rojas’s La Celestina (1499, 1502), Cervantes’s Diálogo de los perros [Dialogue of the Dogs] (1613), Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache (1599, 1604) and Francisco de Quevedo’s El Buscón [The Swindler] (1626) as well as his satiric poetry, are representative of the evolution of elderly women characters in Early Modern Spanish literature. Using disability and aging theories, the chapter focuses the analysis on the major components of their depiction: their defective bodies, their relation to the healing arts (midwives) and sexual activities, their proclivity to practice witchcraft, and their inefficient role as mothers. The objective is to illustrate the mechanisms involved in the construction of aging female disability in the imaginary of the period.

The Artifice of Syphilitic and Damaged Female Bodies in Literature

This chapter examines the literary depiction of the broken and contaminated corporality of female prostitutes as illustrated in Francisco Delicado’s La Lozana andaluza [Portrait of Lozana: The Lusty Andalusian Woman] (1528), Miguel de Cervantes’s Casamiento engañoso [The Deceitful Marriage] (1613), La tía fingida [The pretended aunt], a novel attributed to Cervantes, and Francisco de Quevedo’s satiric poetry written in the first half of the seventeenth century. These works share a common representation of syphilis as a gendered metaphor of physical and moral decay that functions in opposition both to male embodiment and to the ideal of the integrity of the female body, expressed in the concept of virginity and chastity. Furthermore, they exemplify the development of the syphilitic trope through the century as well as the diverse solutions to taming alterity.

Introduction

The introduction defines and describes the academic field of disabilities studies. It explains the different models of disability, --social, medical, religious, constructionist-- as well as the recent scholarship in disability studies. It also explains the major concepts drawn from other disciplines to illuminate the construction of disability, such as Erving Goffman’s stigma theory, Mary Douglas’s notion of the other as “dirt,” and Michael Foucault’s social constructionism. Diverse theories of the body as well as phenomenological perspectives complement these constructionist positions. Furthermore, the introduction delineates theoretical disability studies in the humanities and particularly discusses applications of disability methodologies in the analysis of early modern literary productions. Finally, it expounds the feminist approach to disability theory used in the book.

The Creation of Female Disability: Medical, Prescriptive and Moral Discourses

The first chapter explores sixteenth and seventeenth century Spanish medical, regulatory and moral discourses in order to show how they inherit, reproduce and propagate an amalgam of Western traditional concepts of the female embodiment. The exposition includes selected medical works from the fifteenth to the end of sixteenth century that deal with anatomic descriptions of bodily functions, the role of each sex in procreation, and the explanation of diseases, prophylactic measures and cures. In addition, chapter 1 examines discourses of the plague and syphilis in order to show how stigmatizing diseases particularly affected women. Besides medical treatises, the chapter examines influential moral works, such as Juan Luis Vives’s De Institutione Feminae Christianae (1524) and fray Luis de León’s La perfecta casada (1583), as well as discourses on poverty such as Vives’s De subventione pauperum (1525), and Cristóbal Pérez de Herrera’s Amparo de pobres (1598), to illuminate how the established conception of female mental and physical inferiority had detrimental consequences for her diminished social role.

Conclusion

Following an examination of existing diverse Spanish discourses in the period that reproduce concepts developed in the Western tradition Disabled Bodies in Early Modern Spanish Literature: Prostitutes, Aging Women and Saints concludes that the pejorative creation of the woman's body is the epitome of early modern disability. The devalued representations of women’s corporality in literary texts are the consequence of specific ideologies and social structures of a Spanish society that need to symbolically castrate and eliminate the impure and defective groups –subversive women, moriscos, conversos-- that could potentially upset the power hierarchy. Ultimately, the early modern discourses and literary texts examined in this book demonstrate a fear of somatic otherness that undermines the system.