The Collected Letters of St. Teresa of Avila. Volume 1: 1546-1577 (review)

This first translated volume of Teresa of Avila's letters is a very welcome addition to Fr. Kieran Kavanaugh's project of making the saint's writings available to English-speaking readers. Before the appearance of The Collected Letters of St. Teresa of Avila, little of her correspondence could be read in English. Kavanaugh's publication of 224 letters should affect future studies of Teresa and her order. His translations are based on Spanish critical editions of Teresa's work by Silverio de Santa Teresa and by the pair Efrén de la Madre de Dios and Otger Steggink. They also benefit from Kavanaugh's consultation of letters in important manuscript collections.

The translator's commentaries on the letters are no small part of this excellent volume. He dedicates his introduction to the circumstances in which the documents were produced. He remarks on the saint's uses of her letters; on the enormous volume of her correspondence, much of which is now lost; on the hazards of the sixteenth-century Spanish postal system, which impelled her to write multiple letters, sending them by different kinds of couriers when she wanted to be certain that a letter got through; on the writing materials she used; and on her habits of addressing recipients.

Kavanaugh also provides readers unfamiliar with the complicated political landscape of sixteenth-century Spain much aid in making sense of what they are reading. Each translated letter is preceded by a summary of its content and a brief identification of the letter's recipient. Footnotes supply detail about individuals or groups to whom Teresa refers. They also cross-reference other letters, give outcomes to mentioned events and provide keys to code names that Teresa began to use with several of her correspondents. Kavanaugh completes his volume with fuller biographical sketches of those to whom Teresa wrote. Thus Teresa's crisscrossing network of relationships with members of her order, with her family and with a large number of supporters, confessors, advisors and critics outside her order begins to be visible.

Recently, historians writing about pre-modern religious women have tended to concentrate on one person, making as deep a study of her as available documents have allowed. Some then have treated the woman under study, or certain features of her life, as representative of other women's lives in the era, a sometimes illuminative, but sometimes dubious way to turn to more general thought about an era. There are important exceptions to this. Two are Sr. Prudence Allen's two-volume history of developments in the ideology of gender in the West from 750 B.C.E to 1500 (The Concept of Woman: Volume 1, 1985; Volume 2, 2002) and Sr. Mary Jeremy Finnegan's study of the whole Cistercian community at Helfta during its thirteenth-century heyday (The Women of Helfta: Scholars and Mystics, 1991). However, the more usual book found on the shelf of university libraries chooses to study one pre-modern woman, or perhaps a handful of women, highlighting how they stand out from their culture.

Some of this attention to the individual has been brought about by the difficulties of conducting fair research into religious women's lives. On the whole, unexceptional women or ones who sought to be hidden from the world did not write. This means that a vast number of women's lives cannot be studied directly. Contemporary male authors tended to spend ink only on women who had gained special notoriety, a habit that presses modern examiners to think about religious women who in past times were considered to be saints, heretics or obstreperous. These, at least, left traces. The positive value given to individualism in Europe and North America has also groomed Western investigators to choose to concentrate on individual...