Teresa de Cartagena’s Admiraçión operum Dei and women’s right to write

Abstract

Teresa de Cartagena (1425?-?) grew up in a family of Jewish aristocrats and intellectuals who converted to Christianity. After her first work, Arboleda de los enfermos, her contemporaries accused her of plagiarism and questioned her authorship. In her next text, Admiración de las obras de Dios, the author rejected these accusations. Following the research by Cortés Timoner, Deyermond, Rivera Garretas, and Surtz, among others, the objective of this article is to present the strategies employed by de Cartagena to defend women’s intellectual capacity as well as to assert women’s right to write.