Sacramentality and Consumption: Teresa de Cartagena’s Eucharistic Imagination in Grove of the Infirm

This paper explores how fifteenth-century Castilian mystic Teresa de Cartagena understands the Eucharist as a sacrifice of asceticism and abundance. As a nun in the sonically-fluent liturgical context of a Cistercian convent, she wrote Grove of the Infirm, which outlines her theology of suffering via her experience of deafness. In conversation with scholars of medieval theology and the Eucharist, this paper will: 1) examine Teresa’s theological deployment of the Marriage Supper of the Lamb and the Lukan Great Feast, and 2) demonstrate how this sacramentality argues for a transformation of creaturely consumption. In an era when our excessive consumption impinges on the flourishing of creaturely life, Teresa understands sacrifice as both costly and nourishing; as profoundly ascetic and feastly. Ultimately, this essay proposes that Teresa’s Eucharistic imagination lends an important framework for participating in the asceticism and abundance of Christ's sacrifice, which compels communion with God and with one another.