This work analyzes Teresa de Cartagena’s treatise on spiritual counseling Arboleda de los enfermos based on a dialectical breakdown between the spatial dynamics (be them textual, public, private or symbolic) that appear in the text and the affective cognitions that said dynamics elicit. More specifically, the work shows how this affective cognition, when coupled with a series of linguistic strategies, allow its author to assemble a female rhetorical space amidst the rigid patriarchal framework of the time and, with it, to forge new and more complex ways of imagining herself as a female subject.