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  • The She-Apostle:The Extraordinary Life and Death of Luisa de Carvajal
  • Pauline Croft
The She-Apostle:The Extraordinary Life and Death of Luisa de Carvajal. By Glyn Redworth. (New York: Oxford University Press. 2008. Pp. xii, 276. $34.95. ISBN 978-0-199-53353-4.)

Born into an aristocratic family in 1566, but orphaned at twelve, Luisa de Carvajal spent her teenage years with her uncle, the Marques de Almazán, who was viceroy of Navarre under King Philip II. Almazán gave her a good education but also subjected her to shocking cruelty. She was whipped and scourged by others and forced to whip herself. This extreme chastisement far outstripped contemporary norms of penance, and today Almazán would be facing an extended prison sentence. It is impossible not to see these early experiences of a young girl, first orphaned then horrendously abused, as determining the neurotic spirituality that dominated Luisa's life. At age twenty-five, she undertook a regime of solitary mortification, refusing to enter a convent and moving into a squalid hovel, although, since she was untrained in domestic tasks, she also needed several servants. Subsequently, she vowed to offer herself for martyrdom and composed verse of exceptional quality as well as lively letters. She battled to release her substantial inheritance from her family, then gave it to the Society of Jesus and made her way to London via the Low Countries. The Jesuits hoped she would be useful in either obtaining tacit Catholic toleration from King James I, or conversely, exposing his eirenic words as a sham. She might also assist their struggle with the secular clergy, whose discreet ministry to English Catholics conflicted with the Jesuits' more dramatic aim of the reconversion of England. After the disaster of the Gunpowder Plot, devised by a handful of extremist Catholics, the situation worsened. Luisa managed to rent successive houses and built up a tiny community of like-minded women, although the lack of an acknowledged rule, as distinct from her own preferences, provoked conflict. The house also occasionally sheltered Englishwomen traveling abroad to enter convents. Luisa urged young priests to face a hideous death, instead of taking the Jacobean Oath of Allegiance (which many of the seculars thought acceptable), and she was an embarrassment to successive Spanish ambassadors. Insisting on the gruesome task of disinterring the quartered corpses of those priests who were caught, she reburied them or dispatched the relics to Spain. After 1611, the new regime of Archbishop George Abbot of Canterbury (caricatured here as a stupid bigot, one of few historical missteps) led briefly to imprisonment, which worsened her frail health. Luisa died in December 1613 and was given a grand funeral by the Catholic diplomatic corps. Her coffin [End Page 840]was returned to Spain, and in 1625 attempts were made to canonize her, but significantly, did not progress. Glyn Redworth writes with admirable lucidity, balance, and affection for his subject, but depicts Luisa not only as the "She-Apostle" but also as "perhaps even the first female missionary in the history of Christianity" (p. 86), traveling abroad "to champion her religion under hostile circumstances" (p. 86). His evidence hardly supports these claims. Luisa's aim was her own martyrdom, not making converts (surely the key point for a missionary), at which she was wholly unsuccessful. London's Catholic community shunned her since her activities made their own lives more precarious. Her best legacy was her writings, available in editions by M. A. Rees and Elizabeth Rhodes; here an appendix prints extracts in translation from her poems. Nevertheless, even those with doubts about the value of Luisa's idiosyncratic career will enjoy this well-written, scholarly biography. Generously illustrated, it makes significant contributions both to women's history and to our knowledge of the English religious landscape in the fraught years after the Reformation and the Armada war.

Pauline Croft
Royal Holloway, University of London

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