The experience of pain and suffering forces the sufferer to look within and thereby encourages him or her to reflect on the true dimension of existence. In the fifteenth century, Teresa de Cartagena, a nun, a conversa , and a deaf person, became the first Castilian woman to overcome religious and gender barriers of her time to produce her exemplary writings, Arboleda de los enfermos and Admiraçión operum Dey . Her deafness compels her energy inward and transforms the course of her life. In the Early Modern Period, although the female subject is barred from the world of writing, Cartagena takes advantage of her own experience to use medical discourse, which symbolizes the possibility to explore one's own identity through the therapeutic power it offers.
This dissertation studies Cartagena's treatises in order to reconstruct her innovative understanding of illness and exclusion. I examine from two complementary perspectives the behaviors of the body that evolve with illness---from Cartagena's subjective encounter with her suffering, which is the micro-level perspective, and from the societal view of the illness, which is the macro-level analysis. I focus on the way Cartagena employs images of illness and healing metaphorically in her work, especially medical and monastic literature. I argue that Cartagena and other medieval female authors incorporate medical discourse in their texts in order to make themselves part of society by giving a universal meaning to their own experience of suffering.
