The Concept of Woman, Volume 3

The Search for Communion of Persons, 1500–2015

Prudence Allen

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781467445931
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Historia del cristianismo

The culmination of a lifetime's scholarly work, this pioneering study by Sister Prudence Allen traces the concept of woman in relation to man in Western thought from ancient times to the present. In her third and final volume Allen covers the years 1500–2015, continuing her chronological approach to individual authors and also offering systematic arguments to defend certain philosophical positions over against others. Building on her work from Volumes I and II, Allen draws on four "communities of discourse"—Academic, Humanist, Religious, and Satirical—as she traces several recurring strands of sex and gender identity from the Renaissance to the present. Now complete, Allen's magisterial study is a valuable resource for scholars and students in the fields of women's studies, philosophy, history, theology, literary studies, and political science.

CHAPTER 1

ENGENDERED IDENTITIES IN RELIGIOUS EVENTS AND AUTHORS

The year 1500 is the transition date between volume 2, The Early Humanist Reformation, and the present volume 3, Search for Communion of Persons. Renaissance humanism held much promise for women’s development: new access to centers of higher education; serious dialogue about wisdom and virtue with other women and men; new freedom for personal growth and friendships within marriage; and opportunities for both religious women and laywomen to contribute to the developing concept of woman within the family and the larger society in which they lived. In this chapter we will discuss this promise and the historical figures that brought it to fruition.

ISABELLA OF PORTUGAL (1451–1504)

Events within European countries, and between those countries and Africa and the New World, were often tumultuous because of wars, personal ambition, and serious diseases. In these events we can get a sense of one woman’s remarkable ability to lead a nation with both military skill and farsighted concern for the welfare of her subjects. That ruler was Isabella of Portugal. After her father and brother had died of suspected poisoning and her mother had gone insane, at the age of seventeen she sequestered herself with the Cistercian nuns of Saint Ann. Because her half brother Enrique was squandering the resources of the kingdom, the archbishop of Toledo and several nobles asked Isabella to receive the crown of Castile. Isabella wisely refused to accept because Enrique had already been crowned.¹

In 1469, Isabella married Ferdinand. Shortly afterward Enrique died, and Isabella was then crowned heir of Castile and León. Initially, Ferdinand was indignant that he was not also crowned king, but eventually an agreement was signed. Ferdinand and Isabella ruled together through frequent uprisings from various nobles and rebels.

When war threatened, Isabella rode on horseback with armor across kingdoms, to raise an army.² When word reached her that Portugal had been invaded, she miscarried the child with whom she was pregnant. However, soon Isabella coordinated military supplies and inspected the four hundred thousand troops she had amassed with Ferdinand. Like Joan of Arc (1412–1431) a few decades before,³ Queen Isabella, wearing armor, led her troops. When she discovered that there were no medical supplies or doctors for the wounded, she established military hospitals in tents on the fields. She regrouped her army and led her troops to defeat the invaders eight months later in a crucial battle.⁴

Soon, a new development occurred for which Queen Isabella has often been condemned. Tomás de Torquemada, her confessor, secured permission from Pope Sixtus IV to direct church affairs without her interference. The Inquisition began with a bull of Pope Sixtus dated November 1, 1478. By 1480, a board of inquisitors had been established.⁵

Queen Isabella wanted to regain lands previously captured by the Muslims. She enhanced her military strength by adding engineers, gunsmiths, and gunpowder from Italy and Germany. In addition, she brought in her own military expert to develop new ways to manufacture cannonballs. Soon the queen requested an official bull from Pope Sixtus to support a crusade; she then kept him well informed of progress.⁶ Finally, she organized all the food supplies needed for the military advances and moved her court nearer to the battle areas. She was successful in all these plans; Ronda was recaptured on May 14, 1485, and Loja by 1486.

Isabella and Ferdinand outfitted three ships for Christopher Columbus to sail westward from Spain. In 1492 the explorers reached the New World. It is ultimately up to historians to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of Isabella as governor of her people. Her legacy includes rather extraordinary military skill and the terrible weight of the Inquisition on innocent persons, as well as her protection of the dignity and freedom of the native men and women brought back from the New World to her court. “In 1499, when a shipment of Indians arrived in Spain, Queen Isabella intervened directly, issuing a public proclamation demanding that the Indians be returned to their homeland in Hispaniola (today the Dominican Republic).”⁷ By 1503 she had issued a decree stating that the native people were to be treated “as the free people they are, and not as serfs.”⁸

From the perspective of the history of the concept of woman, Queen Isabella’s witness to the capacity of a woman to govern well in the political and military arena serves as a counterargument, an exception, to the Aristotelian view that generally a woman’s virtue is to obey and a man’s is to rule. In the subsequent sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, many Aristotelian claims about woman’s identity in relation to man would meet convincing counterarguments.

In the first and second volumes of The Concept of Woman, religious authors often had an insight that they attempted to articulate long before adequate philosophical arguments could successfully do so. For example, Saint Hildegard of Bingen tried to defend a kind of integral complementarity of women and men using the very limited categories of medieval science. In the modern era studied in this third volume, we will describe religious events that have significance for subsequent developments in the concept of woman. Even though this volume is primarily philosophical in its methodology, other fields of study will be introduced where relevant.

TWO RELIGIOUS EVENTS AT THE BEGINNING OF THE MODERN ERA

In the first half of the sixteenth century, two images became public for the first time: one, the face and body of a pregnant woman, and the other, the face and body of a crucified man. These events offer a new window into the concept of woman, the concept of man, and their synergetic relation. Images derived from these events became public in rather extraordinary ways toward the beginning of the sixteenth century. The images also frame specific themes that will be repeated throughout the next four centuries.

Philosophy integrates conclusions from other disciplines. It also considers relations among diverse fields, especially in application to the respective identities of woman and of man. Philosophy’s task of integration takes into account hierarchical structures of reality. This philosophical methodology will now be applied to hierarchical structures of reality discovered in two examples of religious events occurring in the 1530s.

The Pregnant Woman: Mary of Guadalupe (1531)

In 1531, a woman identifying herself as Saint Mary of Guadalupe engaged in four interchanges with Juan Diego on a hill near Mexico City called Tepeyac. In historical records of these four conversations, the woman called herself “the ever perfect holy Mary, who has the honor to be the mother of the true God by whom we all live, the Creator of people, the Lord of the near and far, the Lord of Heaven and earth.”⁹ A record of Juan Diego’s memory of these meetings made by Antonio Valeriano (1520–1605) has been recently translated as The Nican Mopohua.¹⁰

In the image of woman that Mary reveals, we see frequent references to her will. This indicates her leadership and initiative in relationship with Juan Diego, whom she asked to go to the bishop of Mexico and request that he build a new temple. Mary used the expression “my will” in her frequent commands to Juan to be her personal messenger to carry out this mission.¹¹ After Juan’s first unsuccessful attempt to persuade the bishop, he asked Mary to send another messenger. In her response, the strength and steadfastness of her will ordering this man are apparent: “Listen, my youngest son, know for sure that I have no lack of servants [and] messengers to whom I can give the task of carrying my breath, my word, so that they carry out my will. But it is necessary that you, personally, go and plead, that by your intercession my wish, my will, become a reality. And I beg you, my youngest son, and I strictly order you to go again tomorrow to see the bishop. And in my name, make him know, make him hear my wish, my will, so that he will bring into being, build my sacred house that I ask of him.”¹² In a further unsuccessful attempt by Juan Diego, the bishop asked for a sign of proof of the woman’s will. In the well-known account, Mary asked Juan Diego to cut beautiful roses growing in the middle of winter at the top of Tepeyac hill where previously only “rocks, burrs, thorny plants, wild prickly pear and mesquite bushes” existed.¹³ She rearranged the roses inside his tilma, or cloak. By his account, when Juan reached the bishop, he reported: “She told me that I should give them to you from Her, and that in this way I would prove it; so that you would see the sign you requested in order to carry out Her venerable will, and so that it would be clear that my word, my message, is the truth. Here they are; please receive them.”¹⁴

At this point events shift from a dialogue of words to an image of a woman with a black ribbon tied high above her waist to indicate that she is pregnant: “And then he opened his white tilma, in the hollow of which were the flowers. And all the different flowers, like those from Castile, fell to the floor. Then and there his tilma became the sign, t...