The history of women's spirituality and Christian mysticism demonstrates that women have been influential religious leaders even without benefit of priestly ordination and theological training. St. Catherine of Siena and St. Teresa of Avila are examples of women with visionary gifts of tremendous power. A less well-known Spanish visionary is Sor María of Santo Domingo, a Dominican tertiary of peasant lineage who became so famous for her raptures, austerities, and prophecies that the king, a cardinal, and nobles considered her a living saint. In 1948 research in the archives of the University of Zaragoza uncovered The Book of Prayer of Sor María of Santo Domingo (originally published around 1518) which had gone unnoticed for centuries. The text includes some of Sor María's ecstatic utterances and representations, and is a first-hand look at a women who in many ways is as representative of the early years of sixteenth century Spain as St. Teresa was of the later years. Giles' book provides the first English translation of this text as well as a study of Sor María and the issues that pushed her into the limelight.

This revisionist view of Ignatius Loyola argues that his "autobiography"--until now taken to be a literal, documentary account--is in reality a work of rhetoric, a moral narrative that exploits the techniques of fiction. In radically reinterpreting this canonical text, our main source of information about the founder of the largest and most powerful religious order in Roman Catholicism, Boyle paints a vivid picture of Loyola's world. She surveys rhetorical and artistic theory, religious iconography, everyday custom, and an astonishing array of scenes and subjects: from curiosity, to codes of honor, to the holy places of Spain, to the significance of apparitions and flying serpents. Written in the tradition of Renaissance studies on individualism, Loyola's Acts engages current interest in autobiography and in the history of private life. The book also provides a powerful heuristic for interpreting a wide range of texts of the Christian tradition. Finally, this secular treatment of a canonized saint provides revealing insights into how a prestigious sixteenth-century figure like Loyola understood himself. This revisionist view of Ignatius Loyola argues that his "autobiography"--until now taken to be a literal, documentary account--is in reality a work of rhetoric, a moral narrative that exploits the techniques of fiction. In radically reinterpreting this canonical text, our main source of information about the founder of the largest and most powerful religious order in Roman Catholicism, Boyle paints a vivid picture of Loyola's world. She surveys rhetorical and artistic theory, religious iconography, everyday custom, and an astonishing array of scenes and subjects: from curiosity, to codes of honor, to the holy places of Spain, to the significance of apparitions and flying serpents. Written in the tradition of Renaissance studies on individualism, Loyola's Acts engages current interest in autobiography and in the history of private life. The book also provides a powerful heuristic for interpreting a wide range of texts of the Christian tradition. Finally, this secular treatment of a canonized saint provides revealing insights into how a prestigious sixteenth-century figure like Loyola understood himself.

Through an examination of the role of nuns and the place of convents in both the spiritual and social landscape, this book analyzes the interaction of gender, religion and society in late medieval and early modern Spain. Author Elizabeth Lehfeldt here examines the tension between religious reform, which demanded that all nuns observe strict enclosure, and the traditional identity of Spanish nuns and their institutions, in which they were spiritually and temporally powerful women. Lehfeldt's work is based on the archival records of twenty-three convents in the city of Valladolid, and peninsula-wide documents that include visitation records, the constitutions of religious orders, and spiritual biographies. Religious Women in Golden Age Spain is the first book-length study in English to pose this chronological and conceptual framework for identifying and analyzing the role of nuns and convents in late-medieval and early-modern Spanish society.

Teresa of Avila, one of history's most beloved mystics, wrote during a time of intense ecclesiastical scrutiny of texts. The determination of the Counter-Reformation Church to dominate religious life and control the content of theological writing significantly influenced Teresa's career as reformer and writer. Gillian T. W. Ahlgren explores the theological and ecclesiastical climate of sixteenth-century Spain in this study of the challenges Teresa encountered as a female theologian and mystic. As inquisitional censure increased and the authority of women's visions and ecstatic prayer experiences declined, Teresa's written self-expressions became, of necessity, less direct. Her later writing was heavily encoded and scholars have only recently begun to decipher those protective codes. Ahlgren demonstrates how Teresa's rhetorical style and theological message were directly responsive to the climate of suspicion created by the Inquisition and how they thus constituted a challenge to sixteenth-century assumptions about women. The only female theologian to be published in late sixteenth-century Spain, Teresa sought to provide a clear defense of mystical experience, particularly that of women. Ahlgren suggests that the rhetorical strategies Teresa developed to protect women's visionary experiences were subsequently used by Church officials to rewrite aspects of her life and thought, transforming her into the model for official Counter-Reformation sanctity.

"Ultimately, I propose that considering internalization as embodiment is a critical methodological shift in understanding mystical methods in general, and especially for probing recollection mysticism in depth. The inner man as opposed to the outer man is a Pauline and Lutheran commonplace that is too frequently taken out of context, leading historians of the Renaissance in general, and of Spanish Renaissance religion in particular, to value references to internal (or mental) methods of spirituality as an improvement over external (or bodily) rituals. This book takes its cue from the recent 'cognitive turn' in medieval studies that complicates studies of the body in religion by focusing on the embodied aspects of cognition, claiming a continuum between body and soul rather than a hierarchy. I argue that medieval theories of cognition made the divorce of the body from the soul impossible for a Galenic doctor, even one who spoke of the body and the world with contempt, and by implication impossible for his Castilian audience. Without serious consideration of Laredo's reliance on an embodied soul rather than on a body-soul dualism, therefore, no proper assessment of the unitive stage of recogimiento ... can be made."--Introduction, p. 6-7.

A translation of women's testimonies about their experiences in the prisons of Spain following the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939 collected by Tomasa Cuevas, herself a surviving victim of the Francoist prison system.

Cloistered and inaccessible 'brides of Christ'? Or socially engaged women, active in the outside world to a degree impossible for their secular sisters? Nuns tells the fascinating stories of the women who have lived in religious communities since the dawn of the modern age - their ideals and achievements, frustrations and failures, and their attempts to reach out to the society around them. Drawing particularly on the nuns' own words, Silvia Evangelisti explores how they came to the cloister, how they responded to monastic discipline, and how they pursued their spiritual, intellectual, and missionary activities. The book looks not only at the individual stories of outstanding historical figures such as Teresa of Avila but also at the wider picture of convent life - what it symbolized to contemporaries, how it reflected and related to the world beyond the cloister, and what it means in the world today.