Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza's Paradisal Garden, lectio divina, and Ignatian Spiritual Exercises

Taste, smell, touch, sight, and hearing permeate the garden of the Song.

(Trible 1988: 58)

'Arrimado a estas paredes hallé este día al padre fray Juan de la Cruz […] con una Biblia en la mano, ocupado como solía, en contemplación'. This pen-picture by fray Agustín de los Reyes is quoted by Terence O'Reilly in a study of San Juan de la Cruz's use of lectio divina (O'Reilly 1991: 108; 1995a: 106). The long-standing tradition of slowly savouring a passage from the Bible or other religious work, often reading it aloud or sotto voce, was closely associated with prayer. 'Buscad leyendo y hallaréis meditando', advises San Juan in his Dichos de luz y amor (see Juan de la Cruz 1982: no. 57). Not leaning against a wall, but sitting on the floor by her uncle's desk or kneeling by his library table, the young Luisa de Carvajal was to spend hour after hour in a similar way.

When her contemplative reading began to lead her to compose her own poetry, I believe that a shaping influence was another that Terence O'Reilly has studied in depth: St Ignatius of Loyola's Spiritual Exercises (O'Reilly 1995a). When Luisa came to write what is perhaps her most memorable poem, her 'Redondillas espirituales de Silva al buen empleo de su amor y frutos que de él sintió', the setting for its climax, as for so many spiritual writings, is an earthly paradise of a garden, reminiscent of that locus amoenus delighted in by Tibullus, Cicero, Seneca and Horace. It is also rich in reminders of biblical images, replicated in early works of the Church depicting the blissful garden which is a metaphor for the true self. In this area, too, O'Reilly is a guide to the tradition of the paradisus anima, the paradisal garden described by early theologians such as Gregory of Nyssa, whose writings presented to readers such as Luisa and her learned uncle an account of how 'The soul becomes a garden, in the likeness of paradise, not neglected and open, as in the time of Adam, but […] enclosed' (O'Reilly 1995b: 9–18).

Luisa's Education and Introduction to the Practice of Lectio Divina

Soon after the death in 1576 of her guardian-grandmother, 'camarera' to the Infantas and 'aya' to the royal prince, the already orphaned Luisa left the Madrilenian Court, escorted by at least two priests. She was to be the ward of her uncle, don Francisco Hurtado de Mendoza, Conde de Monteagudo and Marqués de Almazán. Doubts may be voiced nowadays about how to interpret the marqués's role as supervisor of the extreme penance described by Luisa in her Escritos autobiográficos (version edited by Camilo María Abad, see Carvajal y Mendoza 1966: 161–62), but his viceregal house in Pamplona was to become a cross between a seminary and a university for his niece, providing her with one-to-one or small-group teaching in theology and the humanities generally at a standard that could not have been surpassed in Salamanca's lecture rooms. Centuries were to pass before the majority of women would have access to such an education. Her tutor-uncle was both poet and scholar, 'muy docto en Sagrada Escritura y materias místicas' (1966: 12). It is some indication of the family's religious devoutness and the resources available to it that Luisa's grandfather, the third Conde de Monteagudo, had been introduced to the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises by none other than Francisco de Borja, and we shall see that the poetry bears traces of this heritage. (It is true that perhaps the best-known poet in her family, Don Diego de Hurtado y Mendoza, was well known for his jocoso verse, which lay well outside the religious sphere.)

The family home became a one-student theology department for the precocious and self-motivated teenager. Luisa paints a picture of how she spent most of the day in her uncle's study. While he worked...