Teresa de Cartagena

Very little is known about her; she was probably born between 1415 and 1420 into a Jewish family of intellectuals and scholars. Her grandfather was the chief rabbi of Cartagena. She lost her hearing sometime in childhood, probably from illness; she remained sickly and fragile for the rest of her life. During the Spanish Inquisition, Jews were either forcibly deported or forced to convert to Christianity. Most of her family, including herself, converted to Catholicism, and her grandfather actually became bishop of Cartagena and later of Burjos (modern Burgos). At some point Teresa received tutoring at the University of Salamanca for a few years. She was then placed in a convent and became a nun by 1453 (the only certain known date in her life) because her family believed she would be safest there from the Inquisition. Among the first women to write and be published in Castilian Spanish, her main works are Arboleda de los enfermos (Grove of the Infirm), addressed to people like herself who were struggling to accept their disabilities; and Admiracion operum Dey (Wonders at the Works of God), in which she challenges other people's beliefs that a deaf person could not possibly have written her first book and suggests they must be denying God's power by saying so. The oldest existing manuscripts of these works were made by a copyist in 1481, but it is not known if Teresa was still alive at that time.