The voice inside the wall: A muyto devota oração da empardeada as a confession of enclosure

Abstract

In 1992, a secret library of eleven books was discovered in the wall of an old house in the small town of Barcarrota, near the border between the Spanish province of Badajoz and Portugal. Of all the books, I will focus on a small Portuguese prayer printed in the first half of the sixteenth century titled A muyto devota oração da empardeada. Em lingoagem portugues [The very devoted prayer of the walled-in woman. In Portuguese language]. The emparedada of the title is a devoted woman who lives inside a wall. In the Iberian middle ages and early modern period, the emparedadas were women who opted to live enclosed in small chambers inside both city walls and the walls of churches, as a form of penance and reclusion. However, this penance is theorized by the emparedada herself as both a form of self-inflicted isolation – extricating the body from the commodification of sex and caretaking labor – as the embrace of a new kind of social agency. It is a social agency through which women inscribe their own bodies into public monuments while hiding them from plain sight, that is also a spiritual agency insofar as it enables them to beg pardon for their own souls and the souls of others. I argue that this is a confession that can only be articulated from behind walls and requires a certain form of self-enclosure to fulfill its actualizing and redeeming promise.