Published in Languages and Cultures in Tradition

Using as corpus the Portuguese work “Virgeu de Consolaçon” – an anonymous manuscript produced in the early fifteenth century – this study examines the emergence of a spectral mode of femininity. Drawing on the theoretical and methodological framework of discourse analysis, our aim is to understand how the objectification of women is configured in the discourse of the “Virgeu de Consolaçon”. When, as a form of aleturgy, the truth revealed in the text takes the sin of lust as its theme, it gives rise to a figure to be feared, one from which the monk must fully withdraw to escape the designs of this sin. It is through the way this figure is instituted in the “Virgeu de Consolaçon”, a figure to which medieval misogyny assigns a linguistic-enunciative form, and which ascetic-monastic discourse portrays as dangerous, that we refer to it as the spectral woman.