9 - ‘Manus mee distillaverunt mirram’: The Essence of the Virgin and an Interpretation of Myrrh in the Vita Christi of Isabel de Villena

Summary

‘Yet of all the senses, none surely is so mysterious as that of smell.’

(McKenzie 1923: 139)

Alan Deyermond's pioneering work on medieval Hispanic women writers began in the 1970s with the medieval volume of his A Literary History of Spain:

Writing in 1970, I gave half a page to (Leonor) López de Córdoba, seven lines to Florencia Pinar, and three lines of a footnote to Teresa of Cartagena. Yet this inadequate coverage is a good deal more than these authors receive in any other recent history of literature (most do not mention them at all), and it was indeed condemned as excessive by a Spanish reviewer.

This article combines the study of one woman writer with another of Deyermond's areas of expertise, his many studies of biblical allusions in Hispanomedieval literature (1989, 1996, 1999). That I here address, without apology, one of the major women writers of the Iberian Peninsula, Sor Isabel de Villena, is a fitting tribute to Deyermond's work. Interest in female religious authors has been growing since the 1970s and there is no need to justify examining the work of Sor Isabel de Villena, a noblewoman and religious writer, the illegitimate daughter of Enrique de Villena, who was related to Isabel la Católica through her father's family.