Teresa de Avila, Lettered Woman

Introduction: The Pen and the Sword

1 Introduction: The Pen and the Sword T eresa de Ávila and her followers were tough, determined managerial types who faced obstacles every bit as daunting as the glass ceiling faced by professional women today. The difference is that for women of Teresa’s generation, the glass ceiling was not invisible; it was patent and manifest, proclaimed from pulpits throughout the land in the form of church doctrine and scriptural interpretation. These strong-willed women belonged to a new order, the Discalced Carmelites, that sought to contribute to church reform by promoting a more authentic, personal spirituality than that practiced in most Catholic communities. Although these women were contemplative nuns who belonged to a cloistered order that stressed humility and quiet, they found in the core of their belief system the courage and stamina to confront a patriarchy determined to keep women in their place. In spite of harassment by the Inquisition, the opposition of the church hierarchy, and the hostility of male authorities of their own order, they succeeded in founding convents where, removed from the pressures of a patriarchal, class-conscious society, women could find peace and spiritual sustenance. After establishing religious houses throughout Spain, they went on to carry their movement to the rest of Europe and even to the New World. Reform and Reformation Their leader, Teresa de Ahumada (1515–1582), was a Carmelite nun from the town of Ávila, then a bustling commercial center known for wool and silk. Exposed in her early twenties to the reformist ideas that had begun infiltrating Spain from the Low Countries decades before, Teresa rejected the empty, mechanistic Catholicism dominant in Europe in favor of a more personal, authentic spirituality.1 By the late Middle Ages religious practice had become highly ritualistic and many monasteries had grown lax and corrupt. To counteract these tendencies, during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries new orders formed (for example, the Carthusians and Cistercians ) devoted to a simpler, purer spirituality. During the following century , certain mendicant orders divided into “conventuals,” who continued 2 Teresa de Ávila: Lettered Woman to practice the mitigated, laxer lifestyle, and “observants,” who returned to the primitive rule.2 Around the same time, a new spiritual movement called the devotio moderna emerged in the Low Countries. Instead of the mechanical repetition of prayers that had become endemic in Christian observance, the practitioners of the devotio moderna stressed recollection—that is, interiority or withdrawal into the inner self—and mental prayer in order to cultivate a more genuine, spontaneous relationship with God. Reformers such as the humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam were highly influenced by the devotio moderna and introduced its methods into their spiritual practice. In his Enchiridion Militis Christiani (Dagger for a Christian Soldier), a best-seller in its time, Erasmus promotes a distilled, Christ-centered faith in which quiet devotion born of contemplation matters more than pomp and ritual. Erasmus enjoyed tremendous popularity in Spain, and Cardinal Francisco Ximénez de Cisneros, Queen Isabella’s confessor, not only introduced his teachings at court but even invited him to settle south of the Pyrenees—an invitation Erasmus declined.3 Teresa writes in her Life that she was introduced to recollection, a form of interior prayer associated with the devotio moderna, through The Third Spiritual Alphabet, by the observant Franciscan Francisco de Osuna, a book she read while visiting her uncle (CWST 1, 4:7).4 In spite of its acceptance among many religious, the new spirituality met with intense opposition. The tension between reformers and resisters is a complex issue. In the late Middle Ages both men’s and women’s monasteries in Spain depended in large part on patronage. Rich patrons endowed these houses, provided dowry money for professing relatives, bought artifacts for the chapel, contributed to improvements on the convent property, or donated tracts of land. Elizabeth Lehfeldt explains, “The investments of secular citizens made significant statements about their piety, communal values, and a yearning for salvation” (15). In return for their support, patrons sometimes required nuns to pray for their souls in perpetuity or display their family crest or portrait in the convent. Thus, strong ties were forged between the secular and the sacred. Secular women were often among the most generous of patrons, as charitable donations to religious institutions were one of the few ways in which women could exercise influence. Female donors were allowed to visit convents, penetrating the cloister, and nuns were allowed to visit both men and women to offer spiritual guidance and...