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  • The Letters of Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza ed. by Glyn Redworth
  • Elizabeth Rhodes
The Letters of Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza. Edited by Glyn Redworth with contributions by Christopher J. Henstock. Translated by David McGrath and Glyn Redworth. 2 vols. (Brookfield, VT: Pickering & Chatto. Distrib. Ashgate Publishing, Willston, VT. 2012. Pp. xlix, 308 (vol. 1); vi, 358 (vol. 2). $335.00 the set. ISBN 978-1-84893-218-0.)

Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza (1566–1614), Spanish religious woman and Catholic missionary to Anglican England, is a well-known figure to Hispanists. Her remarkable life and writings are still becoming available to English-speaking readers, however. This translation of her correspondence, almost 200 letters, will enhance those readers’ familiarity with her tumultuous later life, revealing an unquiet, aristocratic soul who willingly abandoned all comfort she knew to risk everything for her faith.

The multitude of other texts written by and about Carvajal provide an unusually full backdrop on which to read her letters, and the editors supply a generous account of that information. Born into the heights of privilege, Carvajal—or Luisa, as the editors call her—was orphaned at age six and raised with the royal children in Madrid. When her guardian aunt suddenly died, she was taken in by a perverse, politically powerful uncle, who engaged his young niece in abusive “spiritual” practices throughout her adolescence.

In young adulthood, Carvajal determined not to marry or take the veil and launched her career as a professional religious by convincing her uncle and aunt to allow her to live with a few female companions, all her social inferiors, in the upper chambers of their Madrid palace. There she practiced private and public acts of humiliation as well as the exaggerated asceticism typical of the model early-modern holy woman. She became, and remained, chronically ill. When her guardians died, she began her lifelong, intense relationship with the Jesuits, to whom she donated her substantial fortune after a long court battle with her brother for it.

Carvajal’s first known letter dates from 1598, when she was intentionally living in poverty in Madrid. During this period, she took several vows: poverty, chastity, obedience, and the pursuit of perfection and any opportunity for martyrdom. In 1605 she left for London, and the vast majority of her letters were written there. She arrived a few months before the Gunpowder Plot obliged her to seek safety in the Spanish embassy. Once she moved out, her dwellings served as safe houses for the Catholic underground. For reasons of political prudence, her letters hint at, but do not fully reveal, her activities in England, which included, for example, providing religious instruction, preaching to jailed Catholics, supporting those awaiting execution, taking in and attempting to reform prostitutes, distributing contraband literature, and organizing and directing a small, secret community of Catholic women. Throughout, she relied on donations from wealthy and powerful Spaniards around Europe to support her mission.

Carvajal was arrested and jailed in 1608, after disturbing some locals in a debate about religion, and again in 1613, on order of George Abbot, archbishop of [End Page 358] Canterbury. Her nationality, class, sex, and connections made her a difficult person to persecute, however, and she was released in both cases after brief incarcerations. Her letters about these incidents reveal the veneer of her humility as well as the intensity of her religious and political convictions. Her second arrest compromised her health, and she died in her bed shortly thereafter.

These letters make for compelling reading and reveal not only the writer but also the dramatic circumstances into which she aggressively inserted herself. Her complaints about the English and life in London are embedded in cross-cultural details, about daily life in particular, and her awareness of what were theoretically state secrets is striking. She normalizes religious espionage and is likewise frank about the physical consequences of martyrdom, relaying abundant, gory details about executions. Carvajal’s correspondence extant today was likely selected from a larger corpus of letters, the rest of which was either destroyed or secreted away upon her death, perhaps by her confessor: chronologically limited, they are somewhat redundant if intensely articulated. Their silence...

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