Research Summary

Alison Weber is Professor Emerita of Spanish, and she holds affiliate appointments in the Corcoran Department of History and the Program in Jewish Studies. Her expertise in Golden Age literatures, religious discourse, and women's writing in early modern Spain been widely recognized by colleagues and students. Her recent work examines eucharistic discourse and literary representations of the sacrament after transubstantiation, including polemics about what it meant to consume the divine in flesh and blood. She is especially interested in the relationship between early modern religious writing and sociocultural notions of religious and gender differences that are reflected in – and produced by – writers in the sixteenth centuries. She is the author of numerous monographs, including Teresa de Avila and the Rhetoric of Femininity (Princeton UP, 1990; reprinted in paperback in 1996 and translated into Italian in 1993); a critical edition of the Book for the Hour of Recreation: María de San José Salazar (trans. Amanda Powell, Chicago UP, 2002); Approaches to Teaching Teresa of Ávila and the Spanish Mystics (MLA, 2009); Devout Laywomen in the Early Modern World (Ashgate, 2016).

Education

Ph.D., University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (1975)

M.A., University of California, Berkeley (1970)

A.B., University of California, Berkeley (1969)

Selected Publications

Books

Devout Laywomen in the Early Modern World (Ashgate, 2016)

Approaches to Teaching Teresa of Ávila and the Spanish Mystics (MLA, 2009)

Book for the Hour of Recreation: María de San José Salazar (trans. Amanda Powell, Chicago UP, 2002)

Teresa de Avila and the Rhetoric of Femininity (Princeton UP, 1990; reprinted in paperback in 1996 and translated into Italian in 1993)

Articles

“Gender and Mysticism,” Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism, ed. Amy Hollywood and Patricia Beckman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

The Literature of Women Religious in Early Modern Catholic Europe and the New World,” Ashgate Research Companion to Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, ed. Allyson Poska and Jane Couchman (Hants: Ashgate, forthcoming).

“Los Jesuitas y las Carmelitas Descalzas: amistad, rivalidad, y recelos,” Francisco de Borja y su tiempo: Política, religión, y cultura en la edad moderna (Valencia-Rome: Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 2011), 103-113.

“‘Golden Age’ or ‘Early Modern’”: What’s in a Name? Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 126:1 (2011): 225-232.

“Could Women Write Mystical Poetry?: The Literary Daughters of San Juan de la Cruz,” Tras el espejo la musa escribe. Studies on Women's Poetry of the Golden Age, ed. Julián Olivares (London: Tamesis, 2009), 185-201.

“Thomas Jefferson’s Quixotes.” Studies in Spanish Literature in Honor of Daniel Eisenberg, ed. Tom Lathrop (Newark: Juan de la Cuesta, 2009), 351-372

“El cervantismo norteamericano: liberalismo, posmodernismo, y pragmatismo,” U.S.A. Cervantes, ed. Georgina Dopico-Black and Francisco Layna (Madrid: Polifemo, 2009), 61-85.

“‘Little Angels’: Young Girls in the Discalced Carmelite Reform,” Female Monasticism in Early Modern Europe: An Interdisciplinary View, ed. Cordula van Wyhe (Hants: Ashgate, 2008), 211-225.

“Teresa di Jesu e i rapporti con i confessori,” Storia della direzione spirituale, III, L'età moderna, ed. Gabriella Zarri (Brescia: Morcelliana, 2008), 289-309.

“‘Mute Tongues Beget Understanding’: Recovering the Voice of María de San José.” Teaching Other Voices: Women and Religion in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret L. King and Albert Rabil, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 167-175.;

“El feminismo parcial de Ana de San Bartolomé,” El feminismo reivindicado: 1450-hoy, ed. Lisa Vollendorf (Madrid: Icaria, 2006), 77-94.

“Locating Holiness in Early Modern Spain: Convents, Caves, and Houses,”   Attending to Early Modern Women: Structures and Subjectivities, ed. Joan Hartman and Adele Seeff (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007), 50-74.

“María de San José: Saint Teresa’s Difficult Daughter,” The Heirs of St. Teresa of Avila: Defenders and Disseminators of the Founding Mother’s Legacy, ed. Christopher Wilson (Washington, D.C.: ICS, 2006), 1-20.

“Teresa de Avila. La mística femenina,” Historia de las mujeres en España y América Latina, ed. Isabel Morant (Madrid: Cátedra, 2005), 2: 107-129.

“Dear Daughter: Reform and Persuasion in Saint Teresa’s Letters to her Prioresses.” Form and Persuasion in Women’s Informal Letters. 1500-1700, ed. Ann Crabb and Jane Couchman (Hants: Ashgate, 2005): 241-261.

“The Inquisitor, the Flesh, and the Devil: Alumbradismo and Demon Possession,”  Dämonische Besessenheit. Zur Interpretation eines kulturhistorischen Phänomens, ed. Hans de Waardt et al. (Bielefeld: Verlag für Regionalgeschichte, 2005), 117-191.

“Autobiografías por mandato: ¿Ego-documents o textos sociales?” Cultura escrita y sociedad 1 (2005): 116-119.

“Lope de Vega’s Rimas sacras: Conversion, Clientage, and the Performance of Masculinity,”  Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 120 (2005): 404-421.

“Religious Writing in Early Modern Spain,” The Cambridge History of Spanish Literature, ed. David T. Gies (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004), 149-15.

“The Three Lives of the Vida: The Uses of Convent Autobiography,” Women and Texts and Authority in Early Modern Spain, ed. Marta Vicente (Hants: Ashgate, 2003), 107-125.

"Spiritual Administration: Gender and Discernment in the Carmelite Reform," Sixteenth Century Journal  31.1 (2000): 127-50.

Selected Grants & Awards

National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, Spring, 2005
Rome-University of Virginia Summer Fellowship (2002)
Research Associate in Women’s Studies in Religion, Harvard Divinity School (1998-99)
Member, Virginia Society of Fellows (1999-present)
Committee for Cultural Cooperation between Spain and United States Universities (1997)