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Translations by Amanda Powell

NUNC COCNOSCO EX PARTE
THOMAS J. BATA LIBRARY

TRENT UNIVERSITY
Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2019 with funding from
Kahle/Austin Foundation
https://archive.org/details/untoldsistershisOOOOunse
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Sisters
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The Costumes of the nuns of the convents of Mexico. From Artes de Mexico (Mexico,
I960). Courtesy of the Instituto Nacional de Antropobgía e Historia.
"QlnioiA
(listers
Hispanic Nuns in Their
Own Works "
electa 'îZrenal Stacey Scfilau

The publication of this book was supported by a grant

from the Program for Cultural Cooperation Between Spain’
Ministry of Culture and United States’ Universities.
University of New Mexico Press

Albuquerque
H0
Permissions p. 439
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Untold sisters: Hispanic nuns in their own works / [edited by] Electa Arenal & Stacey
Schlau; translations by Amanda Powell.—ist ed. p. cm.
Texts of the nuns’ writings are in modernized Spanish and English translation.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
ISBN 0-8263-1105-9.—ISBN 0-8263-1106-7 (pbk.)
I. Nuns—Spain. 2. Nuns—Latin America. 3. Monastic and religious life of
women. 1. Arenal, Electa. 11. Schlau, Stacey, 1948-
BX4220.S7U58 1989 88-34947
271'.9'000896—dc 19 Qip
© 1989 by the University of New Mexico Press.

All rights reserved.
First edition.
To my mother Rose Arenal, who
through thick and thin . . .
To my son and daughter Marcial and

Alina Rodriguez-Arenal, who through
days and nights . . .—E. A.
To Lester, verdadero compañero
To Gabriela, who will, 1 hope, tell her

own story.—S. S.
Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xi
Note on the Translations xiii

Introduction: Reclaiming the Mother Tongue: History and
Spiritual Politics i
Women in Christian Monasticism 2
The Hispanic Religious Context 6
Saint Teresa and the Visionary Model 8
Sexuality, Language, and Power 11
Nuns’ Writing and Writing Nuns 13
1 More Than One Teresa: A Movement of Religious Women 19
Ana de San Bartolomé; The Making of a Carmelite Oral
History—I
Maria de San José: Dialogue of a Carmelite—I 27
Ana de San Bartolomé: The Making of a Catmelite Oral
History—II 30
Maria de San José: Dialogue of a Carmelite—II 36
Recreation/Re-Creation: Libro de recreaciones (1585) 37
Carta de una pobre y presa descalza (1593) 41
Instrucción de novicias (1602) 43
Poetry 44
Texts and Translations 46
2 Two Sisters Among the Sisters: The Flowering of
Intellectual Convent Culture 131
Maternal Models ^37
Cecilia del Nacimiento, Poet i43
Maria de San Alberto, Poet 146
Theater in the Convent 148
Texts and Translations O2
3 The Poor Pray More: A Peasant Nun (Isabel de Jesús) 191
From Lowliest to Highest
Writing as Speaking, Speaking as Writing i94
Structure, Style, and Sources i95
The World Turned Inside Out; From Shepherdess to Mystic 199
Texts and Translations
4 Convent IrWerse: A Dramatist of Female Religious Life
(Marcela de San Félix) 229
From Illegitimacy to Self-Legitimation 230
vii
viii Contents
Sexual Politics and Humor: Censorship and SelhCensorship 236

The Aesthetic of Ascetism: Theater, Biography, Poetry 241
5 Spiritual Housekeepers of the Spanish Empire: The
Apóstolas of Peru 293
Class, Race, and Sexual Politics 296
Imitatio 303
A Patchwork Text 309
The Use of First Person: Josefa de la Providencia 310
A Saint in the Making: Antonia Lucia del Espíritu Santo 313
6 New Spain: (Arche)Types, (Archi)Texts 337
Mariana de la Encamación (1571-1657) 343
Venerable Madre Maria Magdalena (1576-1636) 346
Maria de San José (1656-1719) 349
Maria Anna Agueda de San Ignacio (1695-1756) 353
Indian Princesses, Catholic Nuns 355
Madre Maria Marcela (1759-18—) 360
Conclusion 411
Notes 415
Works Cited 429

Permissions 43 q
Index 44j
w w ithin the relative abundance of recent feminist schol¬
arship on women and religion, Hispanic voices have generally been absent.
This book provides a new look at old writings for what we hope will be new
audiences. We see Untold Sisters as a bridge between Hispanic and women’s
studies scholars, and between the fields of women’s literature and women’s
spirituality. During the many years the book has been in the making, a “field”
has indeed taken shape—that of women and religion and religious women’s
writings. The nearly absolute divide between feminists interested in religion
and spirituality and those who are strictly secular has begun to dissolve, in
part as a result of the burgeoning of interest in spirituality among women
and in part also because of the growing importance of liberation theology in
Latin America. Our work may provide background for the understanding of
these modem developments and clues about women’s divinely inspired au¬
thorization for autonomy.
When we started our work we were told we had discovered a field, that
we were pioneering unexplored territory. Our research was new in part because
of what we were seeing, but mainly because of the feminist ways in which
we were seeing. In the Hispanic literary canon, the only two female writers
considered worthy of note before the twentieth century were both nuns:
Teresa of Avila and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. We became interested in the
tradition and milieu out of which these two writers emerged. We wanted to
discover and make available other materials that would lead to a fuller un¬
derstanding of women’s social, cultural, and intellectual history in Spain and
Hispanic America. And we wanted the hitherto unknown nuns to speak
through their own words.
Gathering examples of how religious women reread, rewrote, revisioned,
and disrupted conventions, we began to study the extent and substance of
their participation in early modem discourse and dialogue. Our premise: what
is particular to women’s language, history, literature, and criticism has been
to a great degree—and unfortunately continues to be—textually invisible and
“otherly,” and its study must rest on several foundations, on diverse bodies
of knowledge. We have searched for methodologies and definitions that ac¬
corded with the subject matter, appropriating, as needed, elements from fields
other than our own. We have, of necessity, broken some rules of the disci¬
plines.
We crossed several barriers to look at historical, psychological, sociological,
as well as religious ideas through a group of writings and their authors. We
drew from history to understand women’s texts, not from the texts to un¬
derstand history. As feminist literary scholars we tried to be sensitive to the
relationship between the works of religious women and those of other women
ix
X Preface
and men of the times, to the influences that often remained unmentioned
such as those of Erasmus, the popular oral and visual traditions, sermons,
and saints’ lives. We paid particular attention to the assumptions about gen¬
der, race, and social hierarchy hidden in the texts and to what could be
discovered about the contributions of other speakers and writers to their
creation. We considered the women not only as writers, but also as female
readers, as they indeed considered themselves.
Untold Sisters documents writings that became isolated, fragmented, and
lost. The texts, the background, and the interpretations expand the available
evidence of a long female tradition, allow a distinct appreciation and un¬
derstanding of a series of writings by religious women, and supply a few more
threads in the tapestry of a complex period. We hope that our work will
contribute to a different understanding of the practice of discourse and power
in the periods commonly known as the Renaissance and the Baroque.
Our usage of capitalization and of Spanish attempt to be faithful to the

spirit of the original words of the writers we discuss. We therefore capitalize
all titles of nuns, whether in English or in Spanish, including those that refer
to tasks performed; “Sister,” “Madre,” Prioress,” etc. Also, we have used the
Spanish version of all names of persons and places (e.g. Maria de San José;
Convento de la Concepción). As for other words in Spanish, in general the
first time we use a Spanish word in our text, it is defined within parentheses.
Definitions may be repeated, if the interval between uses is long.
For greater ease in comprehension, we have modernized both syntax and
spelling of the Spanish texts almost completely. Exceptions are retention of
placing the object pronoun after and attached to conjugated verbs in poetry,
for meter, and occasionally in prose, to retain some of the flavor of the
original language; and some punctuation.
Quotations from all sources in languages other than English, except from
the nun writers, are given in English, with the original language in a footnote.
ÍÁcknowledgments
many years that have gone into writing this book

make omissions unavoidable. We therefore begin with an apology to those
whose names are not listed.
Amanda Powell has been more than a fine translator. She has contributed
to every stage of the project. Mary Luti read the manuscript, giving generously
of her time and expertise, especially on Teresian and theological matters.
Sharon Thompson trained her feminist writer’s eye on an advanced draft,
offering useful suggestions and speeding its completion with her encourage-
ment. Magda Bogin helped to formulate initial proposals and to gather initial
materials. Her and Marion Morgan’s critical teadings enabled us to refine the
final version of the text.
From Madrid, Maria Isabel Barbeito Cameiro nurtured our project in count¬
less ways. William Christian, Marcia Welles, and Asunción Lavrin helped
unstintingly at various stages with comments, letters, bibliographic refer¬
ences, and friendship. Keitha S. Fine helped us organize and edit a particularly
difficult chapter. She and Susan Basow often provided a shoulder to lean on.
Elsa Dixler, Mary Ellen Donovan, and Kathleen Zane cut their way through
the tangled prose of several chapters. Beth Schlau proofread with great care
and acumen.
Joan Ullman, who as a reader for the Press, went far beyond the task
assigned and offered a learned commentary that included many useful sec¬
ondary sources. Josefina Muriel shared her latest thinking about Mexican
religious women’s manuscripts and a not-so-cloistered life in the convents.
Pablo Panedas, enthusiastic about the rediscovery of Spanish religious women
writers, searched the histories of his (Augustinian) Order for information
about Isabel de Jesus (chapter 3). Teófanes Egido graciously facilitated our
access to the manuscripts of Maria de San Alberto and Cecilia del Nacimiento
(chapter 2).
Special thanks are due to the Mother Superior and community of Trinitarias
Descalzas in Madrid, of the Carmelitas Descalzas of Valladolid and Seville,
and of the Augustinas Recoletas in Madrid, who so generously shared their
foremothers’ legacy with us.
We are grateful for the help that we had during the research and proposal
stages of our project from; Margaret Cerrullo, Belle Chevigny, Jean Franco,
Stephen and Teresa Gilman, Temma Kaplan, Catherine F. Smith, Catherine
R. Stimpson, Lynn Van Dyke, Maryann Valiulis, and the members of the
Columbia University Seminar on Women and Society.
In our quest for graphic materials. Carmen Blossiers, Margaret Davidson,
Sally Fox, Macú Gil, Samuel Rudoy, and Teresa and Dario Urdapilleta prof¬
fered much-needed help. Additional help came from: Margery Bennett
XI
xii Acknowledgments
Albertson, Maria Elena Balzola, Stephen Bomstein, Graciela Castro de Are-

nal, Manuel Fernández, Barbara Gearen, Barbara Grant, Emily Honig, Vera
Lightstone, Betty and Herman Liveright of the Berkshire Forum, Manuela
Mena, Tracy Needham, Marcial Rodríguez-Arenal, Kathleen Ross, Florence
and Philip Schlau, A.ndrea Stavenhagen, and Charles Zender.
Lester Cohen has been a steadfast friend and companion throughout. It
would take pages to list the many ways in which he has helped us.
Our work has been partly supported over the years by the following grants:
Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College Fellowship, City University of New
York Faculty Research Award, Lafayette College Committee on Scholarship
and Research, National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for In¬
dependent Studies and Research, National Endowment for the Humanities
Residential Fellowship, Richmond College Presidential Award, West Chester
University Dean of Arts and Sciences Summer Research Award, West Chester
University Faculty Development Committee, and West Chester University
Research and Publications Committee.
We thank the librarians and library staff who have helped us locate and
copy from books, manuscripts, microfilms, and other documents, always with
efficiency and patience, at the following institutions: Archivo Histórico Na¬
cional (Madrid), Biblioteca del Escorial, Biblioteca Nacional (Madrid), Con¬
sejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (Madrid), Harvard University
(Widener Library), Lafayette College, New York Hispanic Society, New York
Public Library, University of Hawaii, University of Oaxaca, and West Chester
University.
At the University of New Mexico Press, the enthusiasm of Elizabeth Hadas
and David Holtby brought the initial support of the Press. Barbara Guth,
our editor, has given unswerving attention and applied her editorial skills to
matters large and small. We are grateful to all three.
Finally we cast a vote of appreciation to each other. Our collaboration has
been a joyfully complex dance of alternating solos that became an entwined
pas de deux.
Jiote
on the translations
text is unique, and cannot be

told.”^
in 1977 I arrived in Madrid and began searching card cat-

alogues and archives at the Biblioteca Nacional, convinced 1 would find what
1 had not seen and no one could point to: the works of other convent writers,
prior and contemporaneous to the “Athena-like” Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
and Santa Teresa de Avila. 1 believed that renowned women writers in Spanish
literature, as in English, would not spring full grown and armored from the
head of Zeus, but from fertile and various, if unknown, traditions of writing
women. 1 was gratified and amazed by the wealth of sources awaiting discovery.
These researches, initial efforts at translation, and my subsequent meeting
with Professor Electa Arenal—already at work on the present book—led to
my collaboration with this project.
“A text cannot be told”; the translator adds, “yet it must be.” The aim of
these translations has been to convey the varied voices, concerns, and skills
of the authors in a modem American idiom that preserves that gustatory
commonplace, the “flavor” of the originals. As far as possible while main¬
taining sense, 1 have avoided language anachronistic, in English, either today
or in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Otherwise, 1 hope each trans¬
lation has been led by the particularities of its original. Inherent to the
purpose and vision of Untold Sisters is the presentation of authors of diverse
abilities; some works are manifestly “literary” while others engage us more
simply or urgently.
A word about the verse: 1 have attempted to work within a suitable (if
sometimes shifting) meter, and to create a sound-relationship suggestive of
I. Nelly Furman, “Textual Criticism," in Women and Language in Literature and
Society, ed. Sally McConnell-Ginet, Ruth Borker, and Nelly Furman (New York:
Praeger, 1980), p. 53.
xiii
XIV A Note on the Translations
rhyme. Verse forms follow the original as closely as the poetic powers of this
translator allowed; where no congruent form exists in English prosody, as for
instance the lira, 1 have invented the parallel. The Spanish texts move from
doggerel to beauty, sometimes within a single poem. If the translations suggest
this range, they have succeeded.
Many pairs of eyes have scrutinized the translations in manuscript; I cannot
adequately thank all who helped. My gratitude goes to Rosanna Warren and
Rodolfo Cardona of the University Professors Program at Boston University,
and Emilie Bergman of the University of California at Berkeley, for their
assistahce with the poetry of Marcela de San Eélix. Joe Chadwick and Valerie
Wayne of the University of Hawaii at Manoa offered sensitive comments on
poems by Maria de San José, Cecilia del Nacimiento, and Maria de San
Alberto. Mary Luti of the Andover Newton School of Theology most kindly
provided a first-draft version of the Mexican nuns’ writings, and has extended
Teresian wit and scholarship at many critical moments. Magda Bogin has
been generous at every phase; her own scrupulous and graceful work is a
model. Not least. Electa Arenal and Stacey Schlau have read every word,
and pondered and debated most of them. Finally, Margaret Hackman has
been an unfailing biblical, conventual, emotional, and grammatical resource.
Amanda W. Powell
Introduction
‘Xedaimin^ the Mother ‘Tongue:

Jiistory and Spiritual Tolities
-ncounted Hispanic nuns wrote their Lives from the

end of the fifteenth into the eighteenth century. Many composed poems,
plays, and letters as well. Some wrote in their own hand; some dictated oral
narratives; many copied manuscripts for each other. More still provided ec¬
clesiastics with reports and testimony and supplied the faithful with guidance,
instruction, advice, consolation, and protection. Since nuns, like Hispanic
women in general, were supposed to refrain from public activities, inner-
directed religious experience was considered most appropriate for them, and
it was that experience that they wrote about most frequently. Some nuns
also translated and reinterpreted the Scriptures, the Church Fathers, and
contemporary preachers. They described and addressed questions of religious
life that counterbalanced the formality and distance, the control and indi¬
rectness of church rules and rituals. Few women of the period wrote, but
nuns were a great exception to that rule.' They contributed to the verbal,
musical, and artistic production of a time renowned for its creative fecundity.
This book tells the story of nuns who wrote. They came from Spain and
the New World, from wealth and from poverty; they included the grand¬
daughters of Jews and the daughter of one of Spain’s greatest dramatists. In
our view, they all struggled to find their own voices and, within the confines
of the convent, to live their own lives. Excerpts from the writings of some
of these Sisters are included in this study to allow them to speak for them¬
selves. None of the material has ever received wide circulation; much of it
has never been published before. Because of new interest in women’s history,
material buried in convent and library archives for centuries is finally being
permitted to surface.
The accepted literary canon has always paid homage to the spiritual values
of women’s religious writing, but has relegated their texts to the shadows.
Santa Teresa de Jesús (i5I5~í5®2) ^tid Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1651—
I
2 UNTOLD SISTERS
1695) are the only two Hispanic women of the Golden Age, or Spanish
Renaissance, who have been judged major writers.^ Saint Teresa and her
work enjoyed enormous popularity, especially after her canonization in 1622.
We regard the written material produced by the nuns who claimed her as
spiritual mother to be essential to an understanding of the history, psychology,
literature, spirituality, and sexual politics of the period. Sor Juana’s example
of interdisciplinary inquiry and her feminist sense of lineage reached a limited
audience in her own time, but inspire a wide one in ours.^
We have discovered in the passages cited in the following pages a hitherto
neglected record of women’s experience and opinion. In exploring the works,
we assume their literary, social, and historical importance. To be sure, nuns’
spiritual autobiographies contain prescribed stmctures, order, meanings, themes,
and formulas and reflect the hagiographic and biblical rhetoric of the Church,
which could either approve or censor all writing. But when they are removed
from a rigid framework, the Lives, poems, plays, and letters written by the
Sisters reveal patterns that contradict their stated intentions and express,
instead, the authors’ individuality. While the purported objective of their
work is always the praise of God and promotion of both the author’s and the
audience’s fidelity to the Church, we have discovered much more: rare glimpses
into daily life, relationships of strife and affection with other women, flashes
of insight, assertions of individual power, and daring leaps into the submerged
inner world of imagination and feeling. In fact, these texts contain almost
the only record we have of the consciousness of early modem women in
Hispanic lands.
We also consider the works, created by women who lived cloistered among
women, to be a reclaiming of the “mother tongue.’’"* This expression desig¬
nates the vernacular, the language of birthplace and family, primarily of
women. In addition, we use it to refer to the work of “mothers” in a woman’s
religious and literary tradition that grew largely separated from, although
partly parallel to, the culture of men. By far the most significant predecessor
for the writers who appear in this book was Saint Teresa, the great mystic,
writer, and reformer of the Carmelite Order. She herself issued from a milieu
rich in mystic and monastic women. She wrote in a context of other writing
women, who were her models. ^ But only she has been recognized as having
created new stylistic norms, which allowed the incorporation of the vernac¬
ular into written forms. ^ For thousands of other nuns since the sixteenth
century, many of whom also challenged prescribed literary style, she made
it possible to use the language of the mother tongue. Finally, we regard
ourselves as working in the tradition of the “mother tongue” by revalidating
these female writers and their works.
Women in Cfiristian Monasticism

From its inception women participated in Christianity, as companions of
Christ, members of gnostic groups, and collaborators with early male saints
(Pagels Reuther 1979, Schüssler-Fiorenza, Wemple). More important, doz¬
ens of Christian women became saints and mattyrs, founding mothers and
writers. For centuries, their stories were widely read, and these women became
models for women living monastic lives. In the Middle Ages, independent
Reclaiming che Mother Tongue
communities of women strengthened the tradition of female spirituality. The

Beguines, as they were called, were much like nuns, but because they did
not take formal vows, and lived and worked autonomously, the Church
ultimately deemed them unorthodox (McDonell, Labarge, Raymond).
Monasticism denotes an ascetic mode of life secluded from the world,
following a fixed rule and under religious vows in order to achieve perfection
in the love of God. The two principal forms of monasticism, the eremitical
or solitary and the cenobitical or family type, both date from the fourth
century. But it is the form devoted to life in community, which spread
throughout western Europe in the sixth century under the influence of Saint
Benedict, that most interests us. From about A.D. 500 to about A.D. 1500
this type of Christian monastery played a significant role throughout Europe
in the development and conservation of both folk and classical culture and
in the “progress” of society. While for men the importance of monasteries,
with regard to culture, declined at the beginning of the fourteenth century,
this was not true for women. The cloister, which is often represented as
either a refuge or a prison, was equally a place in which women could support
each other and even cultivate a certain amount of independence. It provided
women of greatly divergent personalities with a subculture in which they
could find sustenance, exert influence, and develop talents they never could
have expressed fully in the outside world.
Among the convents’ recognized functions in Spain and its colonies in
the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries were control and man¬
agement of real estate and ministering to the poor and the sick, and in times
of natural disaster, to the entire population. Maintenance of family status
and wealth made it advantageous to place children in the Church; some
cloisters even had waiting lists (Defomeaux 105).’ Although they required
a dowry for entry, philanthropic funds endowed an occasional lady-in-waiting
or a devoted and pious servant. Convents became repositories for daughters
of the nobility and wealthy urban classes, prisons for the “dishonored” or
“disobedient,” and sanctuaries for the studious, who had little access to higher
education. Convents became home to many women who were unmarriageable
because they were illegitimate. They offered the opportunity to forsake the
biological family for a spiritual (and possibly divine) one. The demands of
families, the dangers of childbirth, the frequent confusions and violence of
sexual experience, as well as strife, illness, and death, dulled the comfort of
family life for many women.* Despite regimentation and restrictions, women
in the convent forged a female subculture that offered a viable alternative to
life in their family homes.
Physical space in the home was extremely confined during this period. A
room of one’s own was to be found only in some monastic cells. The quarters
allotted to women, even in homes of the nobility, were often cramped and
easily accessible to men of the family and male servants. All domestic space
was shared. Women were not allowed in all rooms and frequently had only
cushions, not chairs, to sit on. Both the objects in the home and the women
themselves legally belonged to the men. In the convent, however, possessions
belonged to the women and to God.’ Women organized and ran their homes
for themselves, developing skills in management of landed property, con¬
struction, financing, and the law. Most nuns did not leave their convents.
Those who went out on special missions, such as to form a new foundation.
4 UNTOLD SISTERS
were protected by their monastic garb from the physical and social dangers
that threatened women who travelled. On the roads, secular women risked
their loss of status as “good” women, but the nun’s habit generally commanded
respect. Particularly in cities, many nuns had daily contact with secular
women and men. They carried on extensive correspondence with the faithful
and with other religious. These conditions held although the monastic orders
differed from one another. Some convents housed less than fifty nuns and
followed ascetic practices. Limiting the numbet of novices usually permitted
greater dedication to contemplative life. In some convents observance was
more externalized than in others; important holidays were celebrated in many
places with pageantry, theater, music, and song. Much of the writing of nuns
was produced for such events.
Of course, the hierarchical social structure of the secular sphere was mir¬
rored in religion. In the New World, Black, mulata (mixed Black and Eu¬
ropean blood), Indian, and mestiza (mixed Indian and European blood) women
could only be servants and slaves. Class and race privilege predominated in
Spain as well, making a mockery of the universal monastic ideals of poverty,
humility, and obedience. For women of a certain rank the opportunity to
study and learn was one of the important advantages of convent life. Women,
with few exceptions, were not allowed to enter the universities and were
increasingly excluded from participation in the economic development of
towns and urban centers in Italy, France, and Spain, especially during the
Reformation and Catholic Reformation.The curriculum of study for women
in monasteries was extremely limited during this period, however. Beginning
in the later Middle Ages, reading and study were restricted to service books,
hagiographies, theological works, a little scripture, and just enough Latin to
say prayers. A few women who were educated more broadly before they
entered the convent were able to contirê exercising their skills, but their
activities were closely watched for signs W heterodoxy.
There were barriers to scholarship and creativity on both sides of the
convent wall." Social strictures kept all but a fortunate few women from
book learning, even among the aristocracy. At court, learned women were
treated almost as freaks. The fifteenth century Italian aristocrat, Isotta No-
garola, exemplifies the sexual politics of women’s learning during the Ren¬
aissance. By turns villified and ignored because of her desire to be recognized
as a secular humanist, Nogarola turned toward the study of God, withdrew
to her estate, and sacrificed “friendship, fame, comfort, and sexuality” (King
In the monastery, educated nuns were warned by ignorant, timorous, or

anatical clerics against meddling in philosophical profundities, and each of
the nuns in this study paid lip service to the inappropriateness of learning
for women. But nuns’ writings also express resentment at the slighting of
thmr capacities; they criticize pedantry and the vacuousness of much writing
and preaching of the time. On occasion they defend the “direct education”
provided by their visions, while chiding the simplemindedness of some con¬
fessors and priests and praising the knowledge and wisdom of others. A few
o the women religious even deride the notion of women’s intellectual in-
ermrity with an irony so subtle it escaped many a clever cleric.
The official intellectual culture of the time was based on extensive study
o the Church Fathers, which was generally denied to women. The prohi-
Reclaiming the Mother Tongue
bition against book learning, therefore, virtually eliminated their participa¬

tion in patristic scholarship and writing. Saint Paul’s edict (Corinthians
14:34) against women speaking in church was continually cited as the au¬
thority for prohibition against their speaking out publicly in any form, in¬
cluding writing. In spite of this, as Lina Eckenstein’s pioneering Women Under
Monasticism indicates, a sanctioned tradition of written expression was a
significant privilege available in the convent.'^ This tradition records a small
fraction of an immense experience, most of which is lost because it took
place in the realm of oral, unwritten utterance.
Solitude—through which inner religiosity and strength were attained—
and solidarity with other women were found in the convent to a far greater
extent than in the outside world. Separation from men gave women a sense
of power and motivated creative expression. The nuns’ own words allow us
to understand what they avoided and what they embraced by entering the
Church. Most of their writing was meant to be read primarily by other women.
In autobiography and biography, in poems, plays, and letters, the nuns in¬
terpreted themselves to each other, revealing the strength and complexity /
of their bonds of affection. Women generally grew up surrounded by women,
in the convent or in the familial home.'^ In a female world, they were bom,
were bathed and dressed, were nursed, and confided in each other. Terms of
affection and physicality defined intimate friendship as well as divine love.
In the monasteries, where the only legitimate relationships of affection
were symbolic ones with the divine family, nuns and lay sisters who had
loosened their ties with home communities formed new ones with each other.
Communal activities characterized many daily routines. Nuns’ lives were
intertwined with those of their Sisters in ways that those of secular women
were not because nuns engaged in communal religious routines every few
hours, every day, as the gathering for prayer and the singing of mass. Monastic
life ideally struck a balance between group activities and individual retirement
for meditation and prayer, though this subculture nevertheless had its share
of dissension, cruelty, and violence. The texts which are the subject of our
book record the existence of women religious, revealing the ways in which
human faith and imagination aid survival. While the ideal was frequently
not realized, convent life often came closer to meeting individual psycho¬
logical needs than did life in the original family home. Within the monastery
itself, the nuns used places of retreat for intensified religious privacy. This
environment became fertile soil for both individual and collaborative creative
work.
“No institution in Europe,” Emily James Putnam tells us in The Lady: Studies
in Certain Significant Phases of Her History, “has ever won for the lady the
freedom of development that she enjoyed in the convent. . . . The impulse
toward leadership which kept the men in the world sent the women out of
it” (71, 78). Through total immersion in the Church some women achieved
political and spiritual power, or more fully exercised the power they had
already enjoyed. This was not only true of the many aristocratic and royal
women who became nuns, since prioresses and extraordinarily pious women
from common backgrounds also exerted an influence that occasionally ex¬
tended into the political sphere. Catherine of Siena, of whom the historian
Edward Maslin Hulme said, “(she] proved herself to be the leading statesman
[sic] in Italy in the fourteenth century” (14), is perhaps the most famous
6 UNTOLD SISTERS
example. In Spain, Maria de la Visitación became a cause célebre when she

prophesied the destruction of the Invincible Armada. Maria de Agreda also
achieved renown because of her visionary life; even King Philip IV listened
to her.
It is ironic that the restrictions of the Church, an important source of the
inequality of women in Hispanic culture, also provided an outlet for their
expression. In effect, writing nuns found a way of being important in the
world by choosing to live outside it.
n^fie Jiispanic Religious Context

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries religious fervor was official
government policy; the “reconquest” of Spain from the Moors, the escalating
intolerance toward Mohammedans after the fall of Granada, and the expuh
sion of the Jews in 1492 were not-too-distant memories. The influence of
Church in society extended from the politics of imperialist expansion in
two hemispheres to the smallest events in daily life. Judaism, Mohammed-
anism, Lutheranism, and all other forms of heresy were scapegoats for social
ills, phenomenal disasters, and threats to public power and private life (Vin-
cens Vives; Le Flem, et al.).
The early sixteenth century was a time of change, revolution, and religious
and political confusion. Charles I (1500-1558), king of Spain, was also
Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor. He inherited a vast European empire but
was unable to stem the Protestant Revolution, popularly known as the Ref¬
ormation. As monarch he received the news of the conquest of Mexico and
Peru and helped set in motion the Catholic Reform, or Counter-Reformation.
The imperialist politics of Charles V cannot be separated from the battle
between Reformation and Counter-Reformation forces.
The first quarter of the sixteenth century also saw the translation into
Spanish and publication for the first time of many religious and mystical
works by writers such as Saint Jerome, Saint Augustine, and Saint Gregory.
The Church, fearing both the reforms of Catholic practice proposed by
Erasmus and the rapid expansion of Protestantism throughout Europe in the
aftermath of Luther’s pronouncements, discouraged individual religious
expression except as it upheld orthodox views. During this period, orthodoxy
was enforced by the Inquisition.
Women, who had little status to lose and little stake in the status quo,
were frequent converts to new cults and instigators of religious rebellion. The
most famous manifestation of this was the alumbrados (literally, enlightened
ones) centered in Guadalajara, New Castile. This aristocratic group was
sponsored by the wealthy and influential Mendoza family; its leaders came
from Jewish families that had converted barely a generation earlier, including
their founder, the beata (holy woman) Isabel de la Cruz. Like Saint Teresa
after her, she was conscious of her status as an outsider both as woman and
as conversa, a daughter of converted Jews (Márquez 127). Radically mystical,
the alumbrado doctrine of dexamiento taught methods of abandoning rational
mought so as to permit direct communication with the Divinity. The alum¬
brados’trials before the Inquisition reveal the thin line between a heretical,
unmediated relationship with God and a mystical union that was considered
saintly in the eyes of a church leadership and a monarchy threatened by the

challenge of the Reformation. The Tribunal’s main preoccupation was the
purity of orthodoxy, and sins of excess were severely punished.
The heresies, in which women played such important roles, were swiftly
nipped in the bud in Spain. And Spanish clerics dominated the meetings of
the Council of Trent (1545-1563), where the tenets of the Catholic Ref-
ormation were set down. Despite an appeal by religious women for represen-
tation, no women’s voices were heard at the Council. Many of the Council’s
edicts nevertheless prescribed how convents should be run. Enclosure ceased
to be a choice; all nuns were henceforth to be cloistered, unable—except
for dire reasons such as natural catastrophes, or by special permission, as was
needed to found a new convent—to venture beyond monastic walls. Most
significant for this book were the proclamations of “holy ignorance” and
illiteracy for women religious. The documents that accompany this study are
evidence of the subversion of the Council’s canons, however. They also
demonstrate women’s relative success in maneuvering through the mecha¬
nisms of the Inquisition.
Functionaries of the Inquisition kept minute records of what people thought,
imagined, dreamed, and what they claimed others thought, imagined, and
dreamed. Women were significant contributors to this testimony, and the
Inquisition’s archives are another storehouse of their utterance. Claire Guil-
hem has studied the devaluation of women’s discourse by these functionaries.
The power of the Holy Office reached, directly or indirectly, explicitly or
implicitly, into every convent and every monastic life. Those pledged to a
religious life were taught to analyze every thought and action, both within
their own minds and in the confessional.'^ For monastic women, this process
was an integral part of their daily routines.
Writing and printing, especially of religious books, gained momentum in
Spain, as in the rest of Europe, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
(Eisenstein, Lagerfeld).'® Great collections of saints’ lives circulated and were
among the most popular literature. Even those who could not read—the vast
majority—were familiar with such literature through sermons and readings
in churches and, occasionally, at home. Reading was a communal activity
in all strata of society (Frenk). The printing revolution spurred both public
and individual reading. Hispanic nuns were not directly affected as writers.
Of the texts discussed in this book, only the autobiography of Isabel de Jesus
(chapter 3) was published in the seventeenth century. The Peruvian chronicle
(chapter 5) appeared at the end of the eighteenth,century.
In the early sixteenth century broadly humanistic and reformist authors
were published, but by the end of the century many of these works were
banned. In a huge revival of the hagiographic tradition, thousands of men
and women deemed saintly were urged to record their lives. Spiritual exer¬
cises, guides to prayer, devotional readings, and religious poems abounded.
But strict censorship accompanied the proliferation of books. Any word,
phrase, possible implied meaning, or intention that smacked of heterodoxy
was suspect. Writers lived in fear of being hauled before ecclesiastical judges
to explain themselves. Every written expression that was to be published had
to pass under inquisitorial eyes.'® Trepidation, self-censorship, avoidance,
and encoding were thus commonplace. Undoubtedly, the astounding formal
and conceptual complexity that characterizes the writings of Cervantes, Lope
8 UNTOLD SISTERS
de Vega, Quevedo, Góngora, Calderón de la Barca, and other Renaissance

and Baroque Spanish authors derives partly from the need to mask ideas that
might be considered questionable. With that necessity came the invention
of and the taste for ingenious verbal camouflage, which is the reason why
an interpretation of the writing of the period requires a kind of decoding.
Though Spanish society at the time was largely illiterate, it was rich in
visual, oral, and aural arts. Painting, sculpture, and monumental architecture
were predominantly religious in theme and objective. Music and song, theater
and dance, legends and ballads, crafts and pageantry marked daily life. Re¬
ligious ceremony and ritual filled the calendar. The Church supported these
productions as a way of communicating Catholic Reformation dogma. Church
celebrations were lavish and theatrical, in opposition to the simplicity of
Protestantism.
A close look at the religious art with which cloistered nuns were familiar,
and which they at times commissioned, sharpens our awareness of the images
with which they were in daily contact, as well as providing comparisons to
their writing. Nursing Madonnas, penitent Magdalens, bleeding Christs,
heaven-bound Immaculate Conceptions filled convent walls and niches.“
Visual appeals to fervent female piety and heroic sacrifices—paintings, em¬
broidered fabrics, religious objects, architecture—were everywhere. Images
of women in the visual arts describe the limits and impossibilities of female
aspirations. Held in highest esteem were Madonnas and young virgins. Having
transferred many of life s transactions to the mind, the nuns were nurtured
on the ideal. Everything considered impure in an earthly sense—desire,
thought, or act—was cleansed through repentance. Artistic iconography made
this process familiar. Paintings of the women saints and martyrs, the Virgin,
and the Magdalen were displayed in the aisles and chapels of the churches,
which the nuns passed on the way to the confessional.
Saint ‘Teresa and the Visionary Model

Although never unchallenged, women’s authority and authorship within
the Church continued as an unbroken tradition as old as Christianity itself
(Bainton, Dronke, Shahar, Wilson, Wilson-Kastner). In Spain, during a short
period of the late Middle Ages, women mystics were accorded great prestige.
Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros, advisor to Ferdinand and Isabella,
contributed to the preservation of female culture by publishing for the first
time in Spanish the works of two Italian saints, Catherine of Siena and
Angela de Foligno, and by supporting the prophecies and visions of women.
He was the benefactor of Inés de la Cruz (1481-1534), who during ecstatic
trances preached sermons that drew large audiences (Surtz 483).
Interior prayer and meditation, or recogimiento (recollection), defined Spanish
mysticism (Andrés, Sainz Rodriguez). The popular tradition of interiorized
spirituality, largely sustained by women, aided the spread of Christian hu¬
manism during the second quarter of the sixteenth century. It was, however
codified by men: Erasmus, Miguel de Molina, Saint Ignacio de Loyola, and
Francisco de Osuna. Recogimiento was also an important aspect of the in¬
tellectual and religious renewal promoted by Erasmus and his followers.^*
At the beginning of the sixteenth century, nevertheless, the quest for
direct communication with God once again became suspect. The Pope or¬
dered agents of the Inquisition to examine the visions of lay people with
greater rigor. The rigor of ecclesiastical policy intensified during and after
the Council of Trent. Censorship of women’s visionary authority contributed
to its remaining a “lost” tradition.
A major example of this lost tradition is sixteenth century Avila, a center
of lay female spirituality in which women often functioned as informal re¬
ligious leaders. Avila nurtured the girl who was to become Saint Teresa
(Bilinkoff, “St. Teresa of Avila and the Avila of Saint Teresa”). She in turn
transformed what she had learned from her childhood environment and her
readings into a methodological discourse acceptable to the Church.
Saint Teresa of Avila’s impact on the lives and writing of Hispanic nuns
can scarcely be overestimated. As a symbol of the strong, but submerged
women’s tradition in the Catholic Church, she summarizes the lives and
works of hundreds of her predecessors. In 1622, a mere forty years after her
death and despite her precarious status as a conversa and her frequent brushes
with ecclesiastic authorities, she was canonized (Egido; Llamas Martinez;
Rossi ii). Teresa de Jesus had entered the Convento de la Encamación in
1535, at twenty years of age, over her family’s opposition. She remained
there, although dissatisfied with its lax rules, until 1561. It was in the last
twenty years of her life that she accomplished her astonishing founding
activities and engaged in her prolific literary production. In those years, she
established fourteen convents for women, envisioned and led the reform of
her own Order, which eventually separated, and wrote five books as well as
hundreds of letters.
During her lifetime. Saint Teresa was best known as a reformer within the
Church. Like Protestant reformers, she criticized the hypocrisy and laxity of
monastic life. But unlike those reformers, she stuck dogmatically close to
orthodoxy and looked to ancient Christian tradition in proposing and carrying
out her reform. In Catholic Counter-Reformation Spain, the Church at¬
tempted to eliminate abuses and to reaffirm the sanctity of enclosure. But
well into the seventeenth century, practice fell short of rules. Some convents
ignored the observance of the vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience. In
Peru, for example, there were convents that numbered over a thousand
inhabitants; they were essentially secularized cities of women (Martin 171-
200). Nuns in this kind of convent dressed elegantly, engaged in an active
social life, and ate delicacies prepared for them by their private servants and
slaves.
Complex factors, including a long, incapacitating illness whose origin and
cure eluded both medical experts and popular healers, led to Saint Teresa’s
spiritual awakening and reconversion. Nevertheless, some of the strength of
purpose and extraordinary power visible in her life and writing may be at¬
tributed to her position as conversa. Her Jewish family had suffered a long
history of persecution, and this, too, is certain to have been a motivation
for her reform (Egido). “New” Christians were viewed at best with suspicion,
and at worst as heretics. Saint Teresa included as part of her reform a refusal
to make proof of “purity of blood”—as the absence of Jewish or Islamic ancestry
was called—a condition for religious profession. For her, as for other women
whose Christianity was in doubt, the cloister afforded better protection from
accusations than did the secular world. After her death, the reformed Car-
lO UNTOLD SISTERS
melite Order went back to the ptactice of insisting on proof of purity of blood
from all prospective nuns, although the majority of her rules are followed
even today.
Because of a general resistance to change and hysteria regarding Christian
lineage, Saint Teresa’s task was arduous and fraught with perils. But in ac¬
complishing the reform of the Carmelite Order in which she had been a
professed nun for twenty-six years, she was responding to widespread as well
as personal dissatisfaction. She preached a life of mental prayer, silence, and
religious thought and activity. Where she found a lack of calling among the
unreformed Carmelites, she insisted on sincere vocation; in the face of disdain
for poverty, humility, and contemplation, she taught the path to perfection
in these virtues. But she lived at a time when mystics, especially those who
felt called to proselytize, were readily suspected of heterodoxy. Even within
the reformed Carmelite Order the Saint of Avila faced considerable opposition
from male religious, some of whom had a stake in proving that her reports
of sacred mystical union were an unmediated and therefore heretical rela¬
tionship with God. Nevertheless, she achieved het goal.
By channeling and legitimizing the widespread attraction of inner reli¬
giosity, Saint Teresa’s reforms of the Carmelite Order performed a great task
fot her country and the Church—she made Spain safe for the Counter-
Reformation.^^ Through inspired practice and detailed writings, she trans¬
formed the impulse toward religious rebellion into orthodox idiom. Teresa
of Avila bent her needs to the needs and wishes of the Church in a complex
mix of submission and subversion. While bowing to and praising the rules
of silence and “holy ignorance” for women promulgated by the Council of
Trent, she pioneered a persuasive, down-to-earth, “homely,” yet spiritual style
that would pose no threat to men. In doing so, she became a major writer.
Her Life, letters. Foundations, and the two mystical works—The Way of Per¬
fection and The Interior Castle—continue to fascinate writers and literary
scholars to the present day.^"*
The nuns we have selected fot our study all belonged to Orders strongly
influenced by the “Tetesian reform,” as it came to be known. They imitated
the Saint of Avila: they founded and led new Carmelite houses; they spent
long hours in contemplation, occasionally experiencing mystical rapture; and
they wrote. Recognition and acceptance of Saint Teresa’s work paved the
way for the production of hundreds—perhaps thousands—of documents that
imitated and developed her themes. These texts include explorations of inner
religiosity visions, ecstasies, theological interpretations of petsonal and mystical
experience—and descriptions of active lives. The textual layering so often
found in the works that describe these visions comes from the contradiction
of being a woman author who asserts her own authority even as she declares
obedience to God’s and confessor’s will. Inquisitorial censorship made writing
even more dangerous and tortuous a task.
Despite these obstacles, the visionary and ecstatic path became a road to
self-expression, power, and prestige for many of the nuns considered in this
book. With the immediate example of Saint Teresa before them, they were
able to reproduce the convent’s mundane occurrences in one sentence and
the beauty of heavenly scenes or the torments of hellish ones in the next.
Yet the visionary way inevitably gave rise to images which even at the time
were judged by confessors, other nuns, lay people, and, at a later date, scholars
Reclaiming the Mother Tongue 11
as bizarre, obscene, and at worst, heretical. Devils and danger were thought
to lurk everywhere, and indeed they did. For when the unconscious—the
repressed, unarticulated side of awareness—was called up and recorded in
detail, some of the accounts were bound to smack of heresy. One of the
solutions was to elaborate orthodox interpretations of visions. This was done
either by the nuns themselves or by their confessors or religious relatives.
No doubt that strange combination of faith, fear, and conviction which
characterized many visionary women also encouraged them to write about
the mystical experience.
Sexuality, Jianguage, and Hôwer

In sixteenth' and seventeenth-century Spain and Spanish America, life
was perceived—in the Christian idiom—as a battle unto death between
World, Devil, and Flesh on the one hand, and Church, Mary, and Soul on
the other. As Marina Warner has said:^^ “It is almost impossible to overes¬
timate the effect that the characteristic Christian association of sex and sin
and death has had on our civilization” (Alone of All Her Sex 50). This pa¬
triarchal world view provided the terms for a complicated and contradictory
drama capable of endless illustration and reinterpretation in word and image.
The very lives of nuns became a symbolic enactment of this drama, and their
work became variations on the theme.
The particular characteristics of the history of sexuality in Spain have not
yet been fully studied. Michel Foucault has made a beginning by describing
the seventeenth-century Church edicts that transformed sexuality into dis¬
course in Catholic Europe:
Under the authority of a language that had been carefully expurgated

so that it was no longer directly named, sex was taken charge of,
tracked down as it were, by a discourse that aimed to allow it no
obscurity, no respite. . . . The Christian pastoral prescribed as a
fundamental duty the task of passing everything having to do with
sex through the endless mill of speech (Foucault 20, 21).
The injunction to confession in a manual for confession of the period illus¬

trates Foucault’s point that discourse became a crucial medium for channeling
sexuality: “Examine with precision all your senses ... all your thoughts,
every word you speak, and all your actions. Examine even unto your dreams. . . .
And finally, do not think that in so sensitive and perilous a matter as this,
there is anything trivial or insignificant” (quoted in Foucault 20).
Foucault makes no comment, however, on the implications for women of
transformed sexuality. A new emphasis on indirectness in references to sex,
and the requirement of total confession, actually expanded the nuns’ possi¬
bilities for expression. They participated in something quite different from
the men, who, in an intensification of Augustinian tradition, hunted down
and expunged sensuous desire. Women, instead of engaging in self-exami¬
nation and abnegation in relation to sex as they had done before becoming
nuns, created, interpreted, and translated sex into religious discourse. The
relationship of nuns to sexuality and power moved along a different axis than
12 UNTOLD SISTERS
religious men’s. Profession as a nun meant becoming the Bride of Christ; the
religious symbolism of men’s roles in entering the Church was quite different.
As we might expect from women trained in this tradition, within the texts
the theme of sex and sexuality carries many meanings. There is almost no
direct mention of sexuality as we, in the post Freudian/Lacanian epoch, think
of it. Some authors acknowledge that they will not describe human sexual
contact. In contrast, the language of religious eroticism is undeniably explicit.
One of the recurring adjectives referring to union of the soul with its divine
spouse, for instance, is inflamado (inflamed). To give a fuller example, the
Colombian Madre Castillo describes one of her visions: “. . . one night I
seemed to see Him naked and kneeling on the Cross, and a light wisp of a
cloud spiralled upwards, and wrapped itself around His body; and my soul,
melting with love for its Lord, understood it was that cloud” (Castillo I, 206-
07).^^ Removal from participation in material sexual life offered women an
opportunity for self-assertion that the conventional order of male domination
and female submission impeded. It also gave them the chance to fuse im¬
passioned spirituality with the language of sex in their written texts. In
particular. Catholic women religious evoke the fantasy of erotic domination
by “the Lord. ” “The fantasy of erotic domination embodies the desire for both
independence and recognition,” writes Jessica Benjamin (281). The impli¬
cations of Benjamin’s statement that the nuns’ writings contain a desire for
autonomy and acknowledgment are far-reaching. Sublimating sexuality in
the real world but giving it free rein in the spiritualized erotic imagination,
they submitted to external control by the Church but paradoxically won for
themselves a self-knowledge, pleasure, independence, and recognition that
secular women never achieved.
Virginity allowed women to rise to a “virility,” as Rosemary Ruether calls
it, that “conquers the fickle mind and feeble flesh” which the Church Fathers
saw as intrinsic to the female sex (“Misogynism and Virginal Feminism” 168).
The soul, after all, had been judged genderless. Like Mary, too, nuns re¬
nounced sexual activity, and at the same time adopted the virtues of a “true”
mother; obedience, gentleness, humility, and forebearance (Phillips 144-
45)- Thus, they became exemplars of domesticity by gaining a kind of sexual
freedom. Young girls might prefer the eternal beauty of the divine “groom”
seen daily in church to the real flesh-and-blood human males with bad teeth
and rough beards to whom they were often betrothed without their consent.
The expression of human feelings, of sensuality and sexuality, took various
forms in the convent, from the grotesque to the mystical. Even within the
reformed Carmelite Order, debate raged as to whether piety was better proved
through extreme penances and mortification of the flesh or through the
construction of an inner spiritual life. Communion became for some a sub¬
stitute for the pleasures of food and eating, denied because they fasted fre¬
quently. Taking communion, too, was an aggressively sensual act. For some
nuns swallowing the body of Christ was not only a release from sin but also
a prelude to visions. Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza’s confessor, for example,
tested her vow of obedience by denying her right to almost daily communiotl
(Munoz 185). He thereby controlled her dependence on the “sweet plea¬
sures” derived from communication with Christ and reinforced his own power
over her.
Some of what we can only consider masochistic and sadistic practices—

Reclaiming the Mother Tongue 13
stepping on another nun’s face, dragging her across the floor, and spitting at
her—can be partly understood as sexuality deflected to activities praised by
church authorities. Some of the self-inflicted penances, too, can be seen as
the only acceptable forms of bodily stimulation. In the other extreme, states
of purified, ineffable union with God were always experienced and described
in terms of idealized human erotic passion. For cloistered women, then,
religious eroticism took various forms, including the natural outcome of a
conversion to discourse—writing.
CHuns Writing and Writing Cûns

Sisters wrote Lives, letters, chronicles of convent founding, accounts of
spiritual experience, and plays. They wrote for the ceremonies of profession—
the great event in the life of most nuns. They wrote to decry affronts to
sacred images; to lament the death of a king or queen or royal infant. Some
nuns who had a flair for poetry participated in contests called certámenes.
These poetic games, popular among the literate, set elabotate rules governing
the subject and form of all entries. Maria de San Alberto (chapter 2) wrote
a poem to a pair of espadrilles she was awarded as a prize in such a contest.
But for the most part, the writing provided texts for the dramatic celebration
of holidays, memorialized members of the community, and taught the trials,
tribulations, and triumphs of religious life.
The writing of the nuns was extremely varied. Some pieces were serious,
some humorous. Some were imprompu ditties to accompany gifts or to offer
thanks or felicitations; some plumbed the depths of spiritual darkness and
exalted the heights of union with the divine. Some theatricalized religious
celebration. Some authors explicitly mentioned the audience to whom they
address themselves: their Sisters, confessors, and church authorities. For some
poems, such as those created for the taking of vows, the audience was much
larger—the families of the new Brides of Christ and worshippers of the parish
in which the convent’s church was located. The songs and allegorical plays
for holy days, on the other hand, were written and performed for the nuns
themselves.
Even illiterate nuns were brought up on pictorial, musical, and verbal
reriditions of Old and New Testament stories, the Mass, epic poems, ancient
lullabies, rorrumces (ballads), and a wealth of proverbs, and this culture is
reflected in their language. Community members adapted the language into
which they were bom and with which they had communicated in the outer
world. Particular convents and orders developed their own expressions, word¬
play, abbreviations, jokes, and informal verbal modes, which coexisted with
more formal linguistic expression.
Oral literature is called literatura de testimonio (testimonial literature) in
Spanish, emphasizing its function as direct witness. Much of the nuns’ writing
combines literary and extraliterary elements, all passed through filters de¬
manded by the conventional narrative and hagiographic practices of the day.
They record experience, reactions to experience, and the subtle observation
of both physical and psychological events. In a conversational tone, women
reinterpreted the religious themes upon which they prayed, heard sermons,
and listened to readings.
14 UNTOLD SISTERS
Most of their work was not written for publication. These are texts in
progress, or early drafts, rarely edited or revised. They are often patchworks
with seams that show. The nuns speak of their writing techniques and of
their preoccupation with omissions, distortions, and the veracity of their
words. All worry about taking time from other duties in order to write. They
mention the arduousness of the task, their annoyance and anxiety with
fulfilling an assignment, or their concern about Inquisitional dangers. Con¬
stant changes in official Church attitudes, and in the individual men who
held sway, turned the careful discrimination between orthodoxy and heter¬
odoxy into an act of simple prudence and hedged the exercise of writing with
risks. In the pages that follow, several authors refer to that danger. They also
observe that their relationships with their Sisters have changed, and that
they themselves have a stronger sense of self because they write. They note
other benefits of writing, including recovery from ill health, development of
telepathic and prophetic gifts, achievement of inner peace, and, often, a
respected status among their Sisters.
Recognition of these advantages enabled them to overcome what Sandra
Gilbert and Susan Gubar have termed the “anxiety of authorship” (45-92).^'’
They did this by presenting themselves as mouthpieces for their inner voices,
which belonged to God, Christ, Mary, or the saints. They also declared their
writing to be an act of obedience to their earthly superiors: confessors, other
male ecclesiastics, or the Mother Superior.
Most women who wrote in the convent were ordered to do so, often as a
result of deliberate unconscious stratagems. Some were first authorized to
write by their families. Chapter 2 of this study deals with an unusual group,
a family of writing women. The mother, a humanist, writer, and translator,
was secretary to her husband, who was secretary of a university; her two
daughters entered the same convent. Initial authorization for writing, in their
case, came from both the example of their mother and the power of their
brothers, who were highly placed clergymen. In another chapter, a nun whose
father was a famous playwright is discussed.
Another device for overcoming anxiety of authorship was a direct appeal
to Mary, to women saints nuns knew from daily readings of the saints’ lives,
and above all to Saint Teresa. This strategy was used by Saint Teresa’s com¬
panion, Ana de San Bartolomé (chapter i), who, during her leader’s life,
miraculously learned to write. The Peruvian Antonia Lucia del Espíritu Santo
(chapter 5) was assured by Saint Teresa in a vision that her efforts to found
a convent would be successful.
In addition to the anxiety of authorship, another tension informs the nuns’
writing—the tension between things-as-they-are and things-as-they-might-
be. In her introduction to Women in Hispanic Literature: Icons and Fallen Idols
^th Miller affirms that recognizing this tension and its source enables us to
better understand women’s texts (6). Nuns waged life’s battle on a mental
and spiritual plane; they lived as though things were as they might be and
focused on the hereafter. Their narratives reveal the actual imperfections and
problems of mortal life and the results of their denying and distorting inter-
pretations of reality, however. In their writing, the nuns juxtaposed two ways
o ‘ooKing at their lives—the idealized images viewed frequently in visions
and daily in art and decoration, and the conversational recounting of details
of everyday existence. They domesticated the imagery of religious myth and

allegorized ordinary reality.
All children learned the language that was taught to them by their mothers,
but girls were denied access to public discourse. For them, private language
came to bear more weight than it did for men, and some words consequently
came to have different meanings for women than for men. Women religious
domesticated religious jargon and spiritualized household terms. They com¬
bined images in a manner a man never would, as when Isabel de Jesús writes:
“One day the Lord revealed to me his most holy heart, saying that he was
engorged and that he could not find anyone to relieve his breasts: by which
I understood, the breasts of his mercy” (81-82).“ As Sisters, Mothers, and
Brides of Christ, they re-formed family units and wrote about their new divine
family in familiar, earthly terms. Women helped form the popular theological
tradition and used it extensively.^' They personalized words and images, in
opposition to the official dogmatic tendency toward abstraction. They rein¬
terpreted religious themes in a conversational tone. The need to articulate
the meaning of their world and the custom of recording their lives as they
passed motivated these writings, some of which have remained in convent
archives along with the histories of the founding and running of a particular
establishment.
An examination of the style and structure of the typical Vida, or Life, will
reveal a great deal about the strategies used by writing nuns. The genre has
its roots, for practicing Catholics, in Saint Augustine’s Confessions, but by
the twelfth century women began to write Lives to prove their own saintliness
and that of others. “ Like primitive paintings, many of these writings lack
perspective and break the rules of art. They are like quilts, stitched together
from patches of various fabrics. In the Lives, medieval narrative modes are
interspersed with phrases from Renaissance lyrics.
Sometimes the stories in the Lives are circular, reflecting unchanging
aspects of convent life and of Catholic liturgical texts the women heard day
in and day out. Besides, the medieval paintings and sculpture with which
nuns were familiar did not treat figures or narrate biblical events sequentially.
The mysterious gaps in the storytelling of the popular romances (ballads) and
in the triptich and polytich forms used in art to represent the lives of the
Holy Family and the saints also were echoed in the nuns’ Lives.” Jumps in
time are common in the narratives of the Vidas, as the author recalls some¬
thing and stops her train of thought to insert it.
The vocabulary, grammar, and syntax used by women was, of course,
related to class and experience. Most women employed the language of their
familial homes and the idiom of the towns and cities in which they had been
raised. The reproduction of speech also followed Saint Teresa s example of
naturalness. Sentences often follow a thought as it would be spoken, diverging
for asides or parenthetical remarks then picking up the thread again and
again until the thought is finished. The cadence of the ubiquitous ballads,
and even the rhythm of breathing, influenced both prose and poetry. The
formulas and conventional language of legal testimony, chronicles, and In¬
quisitional reports also found their way into the nuns’ writing.
Formulas of obedience, greeting, self-deprecation, respect, gratitude, and
closing were often used by convent writers. But they signify more than
16 UNTOLD SISTERS
conformity. They could be used to express ironic flattery, to place responsi¬

bility for taking up the pen on someone else, or to help structure a piece.
These formulas also frequently recall Christ’s words in the Gospels, and so
give their users a sense of worth and power.
Especially after the Council of Trent, the prose of women in the convent
was always an act of defiance although it purported to be an act of obedience.
Women wrote from a position of perceived strength and avowed weakness.
Strength came from a long tradition of women religious who had taught and
written, who had been martyred and sainted. These women were called madres
and maestras—mothers and teachers. Weakness came from their position as
women within church hierarchy and in society.
An analysis of the act of writing, and especially linguistic usages, can
illuminate questions of power and domination, submission and subservience,
and can reveal some less obvious aspects of the society’s hierarchical structure.
Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Hispanic nuns circumvented an ideology
that promoted women’s silence and learned to couch theit thoughts in lan¬
guage acceptable to authority. The convoluted behaviot of the Spanish Im¬
perial court had its analogous ecclesiastical modes. Where power relationships
were costumed in paradox and baroque wordplay, self-effacement could be¬
come self-placement; “On another Good Friday ... a great preacher had
come to our village. ... I was terribly sad through the whole sermon, seeing
him so tepid . . . [And I said,] If I could have preached I would have said
it better (Ana de San Bartolomé I, 295, 427).^'' The overt proclamation
of the female Christian virtues of obedience, piety, and chastity often covertly
expresses conscious or unconscious subversion of the orthodox codes:
“I admit,” answered Justa, “that . . . there have been many [women]

who have been equal or even superior in learning to many men. ...”
You speak truly. Sister,” said Gracia, “when you say that it would be
a bewilderment if men were to believe what women write. But do you
not see that they have gloried in holding women to be weak,
inconstant, imperfect, and indeed useless and unworthy of any noble
undertaking?” (Maria de San José 54).”
Although members of women’s religious communities obeyed confessors’

orders to write or desist from writing, to bum ot refrain from burning what
was written, the exercise of authority over their work was more complex than
It might at first appear. Often the impulse to write came first from the nun
herself or from one of her Sisters. She might claim that the Lord himself had
made the request in a vision or revelation. Reported to the confessor, the
impulse could then be transformed into a request from him—which the nun
could meet with humility. Secular patrons and sympathetic church authorities
exerted some influence regarding which nuns were to be permitted or re¬
quested to write and what would be published.
The power of the Mother was asserted in the Mother Church—the Mother
Mary, the Mother Superior, and the Venerable Mothers who were also Sisters
in the nunnery. These figures gave women pride in their sex, both consciously
and unconsciously. And in Mary, author of the Magnificat, a woman could
mother-in-law. The Virgin, coauthor and carrier of the
Word, became another source of the mother tongue.
We have chosen in this book, then, to look directly at the words of religious
women. The women of the cloisters were products of a society engaged in
colonizing half the world and attempting to rid itself of cultural and religious
diversity while resisting the political, social, and cultural transformations that
were taking place in other parts of the European continent. In their convents,
women both withdrew from their society and triumphed over it. In the pages
that follow, they speak to modem ears, illustrating the unending human
capacity for survival and creativity.
Saint Teresa, urriter, ” by Diego Velasquez, a frequently depicted image of Teresian icon¬
ography. Courtesy of the Editorial de la Espiritualidad.
i8
I More níHan One
Hieres a
n Movement of ‘Religious ‘Women
l-na de San Bartolomé (1549—1626) and Maria de San

José (1548-1603), two of Saint Teresa’s most beloved Daughters and direct
inheritors of her vision, played a central role in extending and institution¬
alizing the Discalced Carmelite Order. For both, fidelity to the Teresian
Constitution and Rules became a raison d’etre. Each chronicled the intense
struggles that were part of the efforts of Spain and Rome to stem the spread
of Protestantism and ultimately each contributed to women’s efforts to remain
active and visible within their Church. To read their works is to acquire a
sense of Catholic Reform in the making.
Almost daily, the nun-leaders of the first generation of Reformed Carmelites
spent time writing. Literary activity^—composing, dictating, transcribing,
'coîn^—was as much part of their spiritual practice as prayer. Both Ana de
San Bartolomé and Maria de San José had close personal relationships with
Madre Teresa. It was their love for her, the desire to emulate her spirituality,
and the will to defend the reform movement that gave them the impetus to
write.
As the authors of texts for Mistresses of Novices, as well as talented leaders
and teachers. Madre Ana and Madre Maria represent the two poles of Teresa
of Avila’s character and reform work. Ana de San Bartolomé, an unlettered
Castilian peasant who embodied Teresa of Avila s respect for simplicity and
humble origins, defended the tenet that experience took precedence over
book-learning. Direct in word and action, she insisted on copying established
precedents to the letter of the practiced Teresian law. Socially, her con¬
nections with powerful figures crossed class lines. Ingrained respect for hier¬
archy, however, made it difficult for her to be consistently independent of
official authority. In her writings she described the events and personalities
of the early years of the Reform over and over again from similar but varying
angles, creating a detailed collage of figures, emotions, visions, incidents,
and teachings.
19
20 UNTOLD SISTERS
Because of her close association with the Saint of Avila, Madre Ana became
an important missionary, attaining near-mythic stature. She was sent from
Madrid to found Reformed Carmelite convents in France and Belgium many
years after her Mother’s death. In Antwerp, she became an icon of deliv¬
erance, when on two occasions het visions and prayers were believed to have
preserved the city from invasion. A self-trained scribe, she wrote thousands
of pages of letters and recorded the historical and spiritual events of her life.
By contrast, Maria de San José grew up and was educated in an aristocratic
household. She defended the tenet that access to book-learning could advance
the cause of women by helping to bring about honorable religiosity. Madre
Teresa respected the young Maria’s learning, although she also teased her
and called her ‘"letrera” (bookworm). Direct in action. Madre Maria was
indirect in word. A sense of humor did nothing to temper the sharpness of
her irony. She represents a normative rather than an imitative attitude toward
the Reform. As a “new Christian,” she had contacts with influential new
Christians. Her trust in the intelligence and strength of women led to an
independent stance, for which she was persecuted. Her capacity for recon¬
ceptualization and analysis made her the first important historian of the
Carmelite Reform.
Maria de San José is the unsung martyr of the movement; not coinciden¬
tally, she is also one of its most able leaders and writers.' She defended
Carmelite women’s right to autonomous rule and protested the belittlement
of female intelligence.^ It was as leader of the Reformed Carmelite convent
in Lisbon for several three-year terms in the last eighteen years of her life
that she accomplished the major part of her writing. In poems she prophesied
the stormy vicissitudes through which the Reform was still to pass and which
she would suffer so directly. Imprisoned and called before the Inquisition
several times, she died in internal exile in her native land, persecuted and
ostracized.
As they differed in background and politics, so Ana de San Bartolomé and
Maria de San José differed as writers, each displaying her own style, per¬
spective, and emphasis. Following Madre Teresa’s way. Ana de San Bartolomé
combined visions with daily experience in her autobiographical and other
religious-historical narratives. She used visionary, biblical, and hagiographic
allusion, salting her sentences with popular proverbs and turns of phrase.
Her prose, which has the quality of direct oral testimony, provides a minute
account of what she witnessed in both her physical and her spiritual worlds.
Maria de San José, on the other hand, derived her literary expression from
literature itself. Her range of sources included classical literature, the Old
and New Testaments, and the Church Fathers as well as the Founding Mother.
In her writings, punctuated with quotations from Latin, she protected her
status as a theologian and woman of letters behind clever repartee. Using
fictionalized nuns as characters, she incorporated into her dialogues her Sis¬
ters admiration, fear, suspicion, and ridicule of and interest in her ideas and
opinions^ Figurative devices disguised lyric praises of contemplative life on
the one hand, and barbed assertions of resentment and protest on the other.
Both Ana de San Bartolomé and Maria de San José were persecuted for
their roles in defending the Teresian reform, and La defensa de la herencia
teresiana (Defense of the Teresian Legacy), the title of a historical narrative by
Madre Ana, could well serve as a description of the work of both women.
More Than One Teresa 21
The best of their writing was bom of conflict. Ana de San Bartolomé’s career
as a writer was stimulated by the isolation and ostracism to which she was
subjected in Paris. Her chronicles served as outlets for the anguish she ex¬
perienced over her arguments with clerical superiors and abandonment by
the French “Daughters” who had been instructed to ignore her. Although
she interpreted these hardships as a heaven-sent trial of her capacity to suffer
in imitation of Christ, she clearly resented being punished for her fidelity to
Saint Teresa’s Order.
A prophetic pessimism threads Maria de San José’s prose and verse from
first to last. Even more severely and consistently persecuted than Madre Ana,
Madre Maria responded with sorrow and anger. She charted her life by the
Carmelite stars, writing of the Order’s fortunes and misfortunes with a com¬
plex interplay of resignation and resistance. Partly a religious stance, her
anticipation of a struggle against the destruction of the Reform movement
was also informed by her astuteness regarding the workings of political power
and the vicissitudes of history.
In speaking of religious vocation. Ana de San Bartolomé underscores the
“calling” of God, while Maria de San José emphasizes the possibility of ap¬
propriate training in leading different sorts of women to discover vocation.
The house of God, Madre Maria claims, thrives on variety (413).^ But both
Ana de San Bartolomé and Maria de San José speak of their joining the
Order as a life-changing event. “Set una llamada a ser novicia, quiere decir
renovación de vida y costumbres” [I, 644] (To be called to be a novice means
a renewal of life and behavior), affirms Ana de San Bartolomé. “Un nuevo
contrato y asiento hacemos con Dios cuando venimos a la Religión” (414]
(We make a new contract and agreement with God when we come to reli¬
gion), states Madre Maria. Both women use maternal imagery, describing
the Mistress of Novices as a wet-nurse who must lovingly nurture her charges
to maturity. Both point out the pitfalls women encounter as they embark on
religious life, cautioning that they will be prone to taking on too many
obligations, to foolish striving for perfection, or to discouragement. And both
were among the pioneers of the Carmelite Reform who fought to keep the
return to ascetic, inner-directed spirituality from disappearing.'*
Sina de San 'Bartolomé: ^de Making of a

Carmelite Oral Jiistory—I
As men wrote Carmelite history over the centuries. Ana de San Bartolomé
eventually became obscured. In a book written in 1952 on Cardinal Bérulle
and the Catholic restoration in France, Jean Dagens says that Ana de San
Bartolomé “merits, in the history of Catholic Restoration in France, a place
that historians have not yet given her” (quoted in Urkiza 60 ).^ Her beati¬
fication in 1917 consecrated her as a symbol of angelic piety. But the task
of reevaluating her contributions and placing her in religious, political, and
women’s history remains.
Madre Ana came from a prosperous peasant family. Bom in the small
Castilian town of El Almendral in 1549 to Maria Manzano and Hernán
22 UNTOLD SISTERS
Garcia, farm owners, Ana was the sixth of seven children—three sons and
four daughters. The Garcias were wealthy enough to hite agricultural laborers
to help work their land and to employ teachers for their sons’ lessons in
literacy and their daughters’ lessons in catechism at home. Madre Ana claimed
to have had her first vision befóte she could walk or speak, and her description
of it conveys an early concern with God and the idea of sin in little children
(see selections at end of chapter).
The roots of her religious calling and personality go back to childhood.
Hearing her father and brothers read, she absorbed religious texts: “. . . y
los niños [como] no tienen otras actividades ... lo que oyen, se les queda”
[I, 427] (. . . and children [since] they have no othet tasks . . . what they
hear, they retain).® At nine years of age, she cried over the performance of
an archbishop who gave an arcane and uninspired sermon. Her brothers and
sisters were surprised at her precociousness when they heard her say with
conviction that were she to preach on the same topic—the Passion of Christ—
she would have done much better. She was then too young to know what
an outlandish and bold statement it was, coming from a person who as an
adult would be forbidden to speak from the pulpit by virtue of her sex. But
the wish for a sermon that was understandable and moving and the conviction
with which she uttered her claim were consistent with her eventual choice
of a Carmelite convent in the face of strong family objections. Indeed,
throughout her life she maintained a surprising boldness alongside the requisite
stance of humility.
Both her parents died when Ana was ten years old. She learned to keep
herself company, as she tended flocks of sheep, with visions of the holy
personages the Christ Child, Mary, and the saints—whose physiognomies
were familiar to her from hours spent in church. She claims an early aversion
to the^ idea of marriage, giving as one of its significant sources a youthful
Christ s assertion, in a vision, that she would be his bride. She also preferred
his beauty to the imperfections of earthly men. A major “imperfection”—
sexual abuse—was possibly one real source of her reluctance. The sole doc-
umentation for Ana s early loss of virginity is a sentence in her cousin Fran-
cisca’s Relación de Francisca de Jesús sobre la infancia y juventud de Ana de San
Bartolomé [Ana de San Bartolomé I, 781-88] (Report by Francisca de Jesús on
the Childhood and Youth of Arm de San Bartolomé), in which Francisca contrasts
her own fears with her cousin’s courage. When the two girls were plotting
trips into the desert to live as hermits, “la sietva de Dios [Ana], como ya
tenía atropellada la honra, no se le daba nada” [I, 785] (God’s handmaiden
[Ana], since her honor had already been abused, was not a bit concerned).^
Ana s siblings looked askance at her determination to follow a religious
calling and put her through many tests, such as working alongside the farm¬
hands and carrying heavy loads. She reports them as mythical-miraculous
labors. But there was no stopping her. In her case physical strength was also
spiritual prowess. Her powerful visions and the intimate friendship with her
cousin Francisca led to het entrance into the Convent of Saint Joseph of
Avila, the fitst convent of the Carmelite Reform. The meeting there with
Madre Teresa, its founder, strengthened her reliance on the inner life.
She was admired for her unshakable belief in the miraculous and her
unswerving faith in the leader of the Reform, to whose every suggestion she
was highly susceptible. Within a few years Madre Ana became so attached
to Madre Teresa that, when at the beginning of her first trip to aid in founding
a convent she was left behind because of an illness, she remained sick for
the two years of the Saint’s absence. As soon as her Mother returned, she
recovered. Just as Ana’s enormous physical strength as a young peasant had
symbolized to her sisters and brothers—and to herself—the authenticity of
her spiritual vocation, her immediate recovery from illness when she was
ordered by Madre Teresa to care for sick nuns confirmed her religious ex-
emplarity. In 1577 the Founder chose her as her personal assistant.
For the last five years of Teresa de Jesus’ life (1577-82), Ana de San
Bartolomé served in the capacity of confidante, secretary, and inseparable
companion. She is commonly referred to as Saint Teresa’s “en/ermera” (nurse).®
One of the three miracles used to prove Teresa of Avila’s qualification for
sainthood was Ana de San Bartolomé’s apparently instantaneous acquisition,
upon command, of the ability to write. In her testimony supporting her
Mother’s beatification. Madre Ana states that the impetus to write arose from
Madre Teresa’s voluminous correspondence and need for a secretary: “Si tú
supieras escribir me ayudarás a responder a estas cartas” [1, 50] (If you knew
how to write, you would help me answer these letters). Madre Ana was
anxious to please, but she insisted that she could learn only from Madre
Teresa’s handwriting. After she refused to imitate a sample of an unknown
nun’s beautiful handwriting. Saint Teresa gave her follower two lines in her
own handwriting, and Madre Ana learned to write that same afternoon.
The skill helped Ana de San Bartolomé first to take dictation, then to
create a text narrating the last years of Saint Teresa’s life (Ultimos años de la
madre Teresa de Jesús, 1583 or 1586). Her very words—in letters, historical
and autobiographical texts, doctrinal writings, and poetry—owed their in¬
scription and preservation to “Our Saintly Mother.”
Under the tutelage of the great mystic reformer she served. Ana de San
Bartolomé’s visionary life also flowered. So effective were the confidence and
assertiveness she gained from her visions that she admits having to struggle
against the sins of pride and self-love. Her peasant origins may have prepared
her for suffering and subservience, but she had to learn humility by watching
and remembering Madre Teresa’s actions.
Between 1570 and 1582, Ana de San Bartolomé received the experience
and training that would prepare her for the unexpected leadership role she
assumed in 1605. Her rise to the positions of Founder and Abbess were
unprecedented for a woman of peasant class and low religious status. In several
texts, she describes how she felt when, after thirty-five years as a lay servant-
nun, she was convinced to take the black veil in order to become a Mother
Superior. She also writes about cultural and religious differences among the
nuns and about her ignorance of the educated discourse of her native language
and of French.
After Teresa de Jesús’ death in 1582, Ana de San Bartolomé saw herself—
and was seen by many of her religious contemporaries—as one of the direct
guardians of the Constitution and Rules of the Reform. She spent her re¬
maining forty-four years (1582-1626—nearly another lifetime then, when
the average life expectancy was fifty-one),’’ on the stage of Carmelite history.
During the first twenty of those forty-four years she became a writer and
continued a twenty-nine year apprenticeship for the role of Mother Superior.
She was personal assistant, nurse, and confidante to Prioress Maria de San
24 UNTOLD SISTERS
Jerónimo in Avila and Madrid and also helped to found a new convent in
Ocaña. María de Jerónimo, who had been Madre Ana’s Mistress of Novices,
documents her former pupil’s extraordinary religious skills in a relación (chron-
icle) written in 1597 or 1598 (Urkiza 1, 732). When Marta de San Jerónimo
died in 1602, Ana de San Bartolomé held her in her arms just as she had
held Madre Teresa two decades before.
Ana de San Bartolomé lived at the center of Carmelite storms from Teresa
de Avila’s death in 1582 until her own in 1626. She found herself embroiled
in conflicts with two Sisters, Teresa’s closest spiritual daughters. Ana de Jesus
and Maria de San José; with her immediate superior in France, Pierre de
Bérulle; and with her own favored English Daughters, especially Ana de la
Ascensión. Her tenacious adherence to the Teresian doctrine of obedience,
as she interpreted it, occasioned the disagreement each time, and her re¬
cordings of each episode or series of skirmishes show that she utilized the
ambiguities involved in the enforcement of obedience toward her own ends.
Madre Ana anticipated the first set of conflicts in her prophetic visions of
1589, one year before the turmoil within the newly established Discalced
Carmelite Order reached a turning point. That year saw the propagation of
a papal brief calling upon the leaders of the Order to return to the spirit of
Madre Teresa’s Rules. Written and supported by such Teresian luminaries as
Gracián and Maria de San José and presented by Fray Luis de León, the
document took issue with some of the constitutional modifications already
being instituted by Superior General Doria and his associates and espoused
the right of women religious to choose their own confessors.
Madre Ana followed those who rescinded Saint Teresa’s liberal rulings
regarding independence for female monasteries. Although she too had grave
doubts about Doria’s new Rules, Ana de San Bartolomé was equally horrified
by the brief, because she saw in it a violation of her Mother’s strict emphasis
on obedience to one’s superiors. She and her Mother Superior Maria de San
Jerónimo actually kept knowledge of the controversy from the other nuns in
the convent, so as not to endanger their allegiance to Doria (e.g., I, 95).
Ana de San Bartolomé s bitterness toward Ana de Jesús, who had supported
the brief and was one of the six Carmelite nuns who left Spain in 1604 to
found convents in France, had its roots in the 1590 controversy." In 1604,
due to some difficulties in the founding project. Ana de Jesús wished to
abandon the French establishments and return to Spain, but Ana de San
Bartolomé refused to accept defeat. Thus, it was she who assured the estab¬
lishment of the Order in France. Ana de Jesus remained as Mother Superior
in Paris. One year later she again incurred Ana de San Bartolomé’s ire by
rejecting an English postulant who had converted from Protestantism. The
former lay nun, now Prioress, accepted the English novice at her convent
in Pontoise. She had taken to heart Madte Teresa’s omission of requirements
of proof of pure blood to enter the Order, extending it to include converts
from new as well as old religions. So convinced was she of the fidelity of her
interpretations, in fact, that Ana de San Bartolomé claimed she and her
companion, Leonor de San Bernardo, were the only true inheritors of the
Founding Mother. Speaking of the initial group of followers, especially Ana
de Jesus and Maria de San José, Madre Ana wrote to Madre Leonor; “Dios
nos la ha dado a las dos de ser hijas de la Orden, que todas las demás han
salido desbaratadas’’ [II, 642] (God has given the two of us the gift of being
daughters of the Order, for all the rest have turned out a waste). Many years
later, after Ana de Jesús’ death in 1621, when some of her Sisters led a
campaign to obtain her beatification. Ana de San Bartolomé steadfastly de¬
nied the other Ana’s saintliness and opposed the effort.
In her Defensa de la herencia teresiana (1621-1623), written toward the end
of her life when she was saddened and embittered by the English Carmelite
nuns’ rebellion against the Order, Ana de San Bartolomé remembered the
events of 1590. She retold the two incidents in which she had prevailed in
opposing Ana de Jesús’ wish to abandon France and to reject the Protestant
convert (Urkiza I, 379). Now, many years later, she again opposed what she
perceived as a betrayal, this time by another Ana. Evidence of the intimate
friendship between Ana de San Bartolomé and Ana de la Ascensión and of
their subsequent estrangement may be found in the older nun’s voluminous
correspondence. One hundred and ninety-seven of the letters the Spanish
Ana wrote to her English homologue appear in the Obras completas (Complete
Works). Ana de la Ascensión, who was Prioress of the English convent at
Antwerp, became a leader in the movement which led two convents finally
to place themselves, in 1624, under the jurisdiction of the Bishop rather
than that of the male superiors of the Order. The issue of restricting nuns’
freedom to choose confessors was central to the conflict. Her decision to
separate embittered Ana de la Ascensión’s relationship with her Spanish
mentor, whose primary modus operandi continued to be obedience to su¬
periors.
Throughout her life Ana de San Bartolomé consistently advocated obe¬
dience to the male Carmelite Order for herself and her Sisters, a concept
that was severely taxed by Pierre de Bérulle, her superior, during the early
years of the founding in France. When he first met her in Spain and during
the first two years in France, not only did Bérulle firmly support her, he also
became her devoté. But no sooner was the first convent safely established in
1606 than the two found themselves at odds. Madre Ana wanted to bring
the male Carmelites from Spain to France and to place the nuns under their
jurisdiction, an enterprise which the French priest opposed.
Madre Ana wrote bitingly of her disagreements with Bérulle in the Defensa
de la herencia teresiana and plaintively of them in letters to Fray Tomás de
Jesús. She said that Bérulle treated the nuns like slaves, not like “siervas de
Dios” (God’s servants), which was why the women wished to leave French
jurisdiction [I, 397-98]. She wrote: “Parecen las pobres monjas al grano que
cayó en los caminos, que lo uno fue pisado y lo otro comido de las aves, no
dio el fruto; que lo que cayó en buena tierra, esto es el grano que se[n]bró
esta Santa ...” [I, 398] (These poor nuns are like seeds that fell on the
roadway, here trampled, there eaten by birds, and none fruitful; but what
fell on good earth, that is the seed planted by this Saint . . .).'^ She un¬
derscored Bérulle’s interest in maintaining power and controlling his female
charges (I, 403) and accused him of breaking the promise he had made to
the Superiors in Spain before she and the other Spaniards left for France.
She claimed that they had departed with the clear understanding that there
would be a male Carmelite monastery founded in France as well [I, 400].
Speaking directly to him of his interference with her convent in Paris and
of his meanness, she compares him to the devil: “. . . no es condición de
Dios meter cizaña entre amigos, . . . poneros en odio conmigo y a mí afligirme
20 UNTOLD SISTERS
sin tener quién me dé luz del caso, no es Dios, ni su condición . . . , y esto

es al contrario” [1, 154] (. . . it is not God’s way to sow discord among
friends, ... to take to hating me and to afflict me, with no one to shed
light on the matter for me is not God, or his way . . . , but quite the contrary).
Bérulle was confessor to all the nuns of the convent, including Ana de
San Bartolomé, over whom he presided directly. He refused to relinquish the
role even after his hostility toward her became public knowledge. The French
priest turned all her Daughters against her in the Paris convent she headed,
leaving her stripped of power, totally isolated, and Mother Superior in name
only—“todas era[n] más prioras que yo” [1, 462] (they were all more prioress
than I). When her friends tried to resolve the predicament, she refused,
glorying in her suffering as imitation of Christ.
Obedience to the orders of her compatriot Tomás de Jesús finally and
permanently extricated Madre Ana from the suffering caused by her rela-
tionship with Bérulle. Tom between her loyalty to the Order and her vow
of obedience to Bérulle, Madre Ana exhibited more ambivalence in these
years than ever before or after. In her correspondence with Bémlle and with
Tomás de Jesús, Superior General of the Carmelites in the Low Countries,
who wanted her to come to Flanders and offered her his jurisdiction, she
bared her suffering and internal conflict. Nevertheless, she coolly evaluated
her French superiors’ motives for not wanting the male Carmelites to found
in France: “Que ellos no me gustaban ni me quetian para cosa, sino por
vanidad, para decir al mundo que la compañera de la santa Madre hallaba
bueno su gobierno y se quería quedar con ellos” [I, 361] (For they did not
like me, nor did they want me for any other reason than vanity, to be able
to tell the wotld that the saintly Mother’s companion found their governance
good and wished to remain with them). In another text, she claimed to be
certain the French priests were afraid that since her Daughters loved her so
much, and she was so bent on being under [Spanish] male Carmelite juris¬
diction, all the nuns would follow her (I, 344, 458).
Despite this recognition of Bérulle’s ill will. Madre Ana continued to write
solicitous letters inquiring about his health and his favorite project.'^ Her
handling of the situation and the people involved demonstrates how com¬
plicated the vow of obedience was for women religious subject to the absolute
authority of male ecclesiastic officials, especially confessors.
All these oscillations of church politics took place while Madre Ana founded,
nursed, taught, and led small groups of women in new convents established
in Pans, Pontoise, Tours, and Antwerp. Within the cloistet, the rhythms of
daily life permitted the continued growth of her own authority as a tecordet
of Carmelite history, a humble sufferer, and an extraordinary mystic who was
used as spiritual and political advisor by powerful political figures; that is, as
a woman imbued with the spirit of the soon-to-be-canonized (1622) Teresa
of Avila.
While involved in internal Carmelite conflicts. Ana de San Bartolomé

also played an active role in European political battles. In 1588 she already
had envisioned the defeat of the Invincible Armada. By the first decade of
the seventeenth century, she was a correspondent, spiritual advisor, and
confidante to commanders, clerics, regents, and princesses—all people who
acknowledged and manipulated the authority of her visionary life and her
association with Madre Teresa. Her words weighed in decisions regarding
such events as the Protestant attempts to conquer Antwerp, the escape to

the continent of young Catholic Englishwomen wanting to be nuns, the
Thirty-Year War, the twelve-year truce in the Low Countries, and the sur¬
render of Brest in 1624 (Urkiza 58’; see also 59*-62*). When she died in
1626, her fame as a Catholic emblem of saving piety was assured. More
significant for us, however, are the texts composed by a woman whose detailed
record of her life and times includes a gamut of events, public and domestic,
from visions linked to military history to clinical accounts of her Sisters’
illnesses.
Maria de San José: T)ialogue of a

Carmelite—I
Maria de San José traveled less than Ana de San Bartolomé, but her class
status, book learning, and feminist stance made her world view wider and
her situation more dangerous. While she was deeply religious. Madre María
reminds us more of Fray Luis de León than of Saint Teresa or Saint John of
the Cross: she was an ascetic, a contemplative, not a mystic. She spent her
life in five towns and cities in Spain and Portugal. Bom in 1548, she grew
up in Toledo and took the veil in Malagón in 1570. With Saint Teresa she
founded a convent in Seville, staying on as Abbess (1575-1584). In Lisbon
she founded a Discalced Carmelite convent, where she served often as Abbess
for two decades and completed most of her writing (1584-1603). She died,
exiled and abandoned, after a month-long stay in Cuerva (1603).
Almost nothing is known about her parents, who were most probably from
a family of converted Jews. There is confusion even about their names, given
by some as Sebastián de Salazar and Maria de Torres and by others as Pedro
de Velasco and Maria de Salazar. She has been confused with two other
Marias de San José of the same period and Order (Simeón de la Sagrada
Familia 10-26). Books that mention her do not discuss her education, but
it is known that she grew up in the palace of the well-educated doña Luisa
de la Cerda, where her brains and beauty made her a favored lady-in-waiting.
As she would later recount, the frivolous life of the palace, in which the
young women spent most of their time preparing gowns for gala occasions
and chattering vacuously, both attracted and repelled her.
In 1562, when she was fourteen, Maria met Teresa of Avila and spent six
months with her. Madre Teresa and her entourage made a decisive impres¬
sion on the young lady-in-waiting. These austere but affectionate women had
character. Maria wanted, like them, to be able to speak of serious matters
with a sense of humor. She began writing poetry, and hoped to grow up to
be part of their movement. Madre Teresa recognized the young aspirant’s
mettle. She also knew that the girl who spied on her while she prayed and
communed with God in ecstatic meditations (Maria de San Jose 63) lacked
a clear vocation. And Madre Teresa was right; Maria’s calling would not
mature for eight more years.
Maria’s decision to become a nun became irrevocable when, in 1568,
Madre Teresa stopped briefly at the Toledo palace. She was on her way to
28 UNTOLD SISTERS
complete the founding of a convent at Malagón, for which doña Luisa had
donated land from her huge estate. It was there, in May of 1570, that Maria
de Salazar took the veil and the name Maria de San José. A year later she
took final vows, and .scarcely four years after that Madre Teresa chose her as
an Abbess (Priora). She held this post more often than not until the end of
her life. Only the periods of accusations and harsh repression in Seville in
1575 and 1578 and again in Lisbon in 1591 prevented her Daughters from
choosing her as their leader. She had a prophetic sense of her own destiny;
lines written in the early years of her religious life predict the persecutions
and incarceration of later periods.
In 1575 Madre María traveled with Madre Teresa from Malagón to Beas.
Originally she was to head a new convent at Caravaca, but Father Jerónimo
Gracián arrived and brought a change in plans. Serving Madre Teresa as both
protégé and confessot and alteady an important personage in the Discalced
Carmelite movement. Father Gracián soon became the young Madre Maria’s
confessor and collaborator.'^ He convinced the Mother Founder to go to
Seville. There, Maria de San José would have the difficult assignments of
helping to found the first Andalusian convent and of assuming leadership.
According to her principal editor, Simeón de la Sagrada Familia (14), Madre
Maria’s written record “immortalized” this journey and founding.
Maria de San José never saw Madre Teresa again after 1576—a day after
the new convent building’s inauguration—but the two women corresponded
frequently. The strains and conflicts entailed in establishing the new cloister
and in living together and sharing power had created difficulties in their
relationship. The strong-minded Daughter often forgot humility and manners
with her beloved Mother. In turn, the Mother, who felt a reciprocal attach¬
ment and admiration for the brilliant young woman she had nurtured into
spiritual adulthood, was at times overly demanding and harsh in her scoldings.
In letters. Madre Maria apologized profusely for her behavior. Saint Teresa
admitted and explained her own harshness and accepted the apologies. A
prolific correspondence ensued, which brought them closer in spirit than they
had been when they were actually together.'®
In the initial days of the Seville founding, one of Madre Teresa’s brothers
and his children arrived from the viceroyalty of Peru just in time to help
solve the financial and political troubles caused by protests against the new
convent which were voiced by other Orders and ecclesiastic authorities.
Lorenzo de Cepeda rescued the foundering establishment with his money and
influence and paid for the building to which they moved from uncomfortable
temporary quarters. At this time Madre Maria was proving her talent for
leadership; however, she was also made to face “the first great cross of her
calvary” (Simeón de la Sagrada Familia 14). In 1575 a failed, embittered
novice appeared before the Inquisition and accused her and the other Car¬
melite women of scandalous and heretical behavior. Although they were all
cleared, the stain and suspicion cast on Madre Maria’s reputation (especially
because she outspokenly defended Gracián and her own autonomy) were to
outlive her.
In 1578, Maria de San José suffered renewed persecution and was incar¬
cerated for the first time. The Inquisition had received accusations from the
head of the warring unreformed Carmelites, from a “turncoat” or muddled
reformed confessor, and from two nuns. The calumny fell on Gracián and
Madre Teresa as well. But Madre María, cloistered in Seville, suffered most
directly. One of the two accusing nuns, whom Madre Teresa called “la negra
vicaria" (the evil Vicaress) [quoted in Simeón de la Sagrada Familia 17], took
her place as Superior. By 1579 the storm had died down, and Maria de San
José was restored as Abbess by order of the new Superior of the Discalced
Carmelites, Angel de Salazar. She was unanimously reelected by her Sisters
the next year. As Mother Superior in 1581, she joyously led the Carmelite
nuns of Seville in celebrating both the declaration of independence of the
Reform movement from the unreformed Carmelites and Padre Gracián’s
election as first Provincial Superior. The next year all the Discalced Car¬
melites grieved over the death of the “Founding Mother,” and within a year
Madre Teresa’s bereaved “letrera” began entwining their two lives in the Libro
de recreaciones, a recreation of Carmelite history.
During her years of intermittent turmoil in Seville, Maria de San José’s
connections with Portuguese royalty repeatedly eased the persecution against
her. Cardinal-Prince Albert of Portugal esteemed her and in 1582 joined
with Gracián, wishing to help Madre María avoid further mistreatment. They
arranged for the Order to send her to Lisbon, where she founded the convent
and served as Prioress. She governed adeptly there, but nevertheless suffered
persecution, meeting it first with resistance and then with abnegation. She
recorded her eighteen years in Lisbon bitterly and humorously, exquisitely
and ironically. Again with Prince Albert’s help, Maria de San José maneuvered
to prevent the execution of an edict from Spanish superiors ordering Gracián’s
exile to Mexico and succeeded in having him returned to Lisbon.
Madre María was already despised by the powerful enemies of Gracián in
the Spanish leadership of the Reform, now in its thermidor period. Her role
in protecting Gracián added fuel to an already well-kindled fire. The attacks
against her increased. In 1592, she was placed in solitary confinement for a
year. From that cell, she wrote a painful and angry letter of consolation to
her Daughters, “Carta de una pobre y presa descalza” (Letter from a Poor and
Imprisoned Discalced Nun). In jail she also began the work that documented
the persecution experienced by Gracián, the other women, and herself,
“Ramillete de mirra” (Bough of Myrrh).
The death in 1594 of Gracián’s powerful antagonist Nicolao Doria, who
had been responsible for major dissensions in the Order from 1577 to 1594,
brought a change in leadership and six years of peace. But in 1600, with
the election to highest office of another enemy of Gracián’s, Madre María
again faced trouble. A secret mandate from Spain ordered her to be kidnapped
and exiled to a remote convent in Cuerva, Spain, where the Mother Superior
had orders not to accept her as a member of the community. Madre Maria’s
powerful friends wanted to rescue her by force, but she refused to allow them
to intervene on her behalf (Lorenzo de la Madre de Dios f. iv, 94r). On
October 19, 1603, a few weeks after her inauspicious arrival in Cuerva, María
de San José died.
The complete bibliography, biography, and analysis of “the rich religious,
spiritual and literary personality of Maria de San José [and of] the place that
corresponds to her in the complicated history of the first thirty years of the
Teresian Reform have yet to be gathered and written, notes Simeón de la
Sagrada Familia, the Roman Postulate General of the Reformed Carmelites
(35). Farsighted regarding the significance of turmoil in her own life and the
30 UNTOLD SISTERS
institutionalization of the Carmelite Reform, dangerously independent in

thought, word, and deed, woman-centered in her perspective, Maria de San
José created works that highlight the potential for female autonomy and self-
direction which were implicit in Teresa of Avila’s movement.
iXna de San Bartolomé: Hîie Making of a

Carmelite Oral Jiistory—II
As Ana de San Bartolomé spoke, so she wrote—in the tongue of both her
biological and her religious mothers. While Teresa de Jesus employed popular
speech in her writing by choice and for a variety of purposes, including
protection from accusations of meddling in theology and a desire to reach
wide audiences. Ana de San Bartolomé knew no other form of expression.
Her writings exemplify the speech of peasant women of Castile, although
form and formulas were undoubtedly modified by the association with women
of more privileged classes in the convent and, increasingly, by the daily use
of spoken French during the last twenty-two years of her life. Relatively
unselfconscious in various senses—religious, psychological, literary—Madre
Ana’s words uncover the way in which thousands of people saw and inter¬
preted the world at the time. In the vernacular, she recreated personal and
religious history.
Her prose documents a language that was changing rapidly—that of six¬
teenth-century rural Spain (Urkiza I, 77*). This makes her texts especially
valuable for students of the speech of that time and place. She transcribed
directly, using the diminutive, for example, and spelling phonetically both
in Spanish and in French. Madre Ana at once paints a portrait of a class
and sketches relations among different strata of society. In her letters she
shows how the Church maintained its hierarchy yet allowed individuals to
move from one social status to another, while it provided ways for people to
communicate as equals on some occasions yet preserved the barriers that
separated them in the fundamental structuring of monastic life.
Ana de San Bartolomé’s letters and her two Vidas provide insight into the
religious practices, beliefs, and attitudes of a reform movement whose survival
was not yet assured. Of necessity, something was sacrificed to gain that
assurance. During Madre Ana’s lifetime the Reform was curtailed sufficiently
to insure its permanence. Originally a woman-inspired and woman-led move¬
ment for autonomy and ethics in spiritual life, the Reform pointed in several
directions that were considered too dangerous by the authorities.^* Ana de
San Bartolomé had breathed the spirit of the new law; she inherited the
letter. That early training was indelibly engraved on her mind because it had
been cultivated with an emphasis on a loving approach to religion. She
became an agent of the extension of the Carmelite Reform but represented,
nevertheless, a branch of the Reform that compromised women’s represen¬
tation and voice.
Almost daily for more than twenty years. Ana de San Bartolomé turned
her life into written discourse for “la Orden que es mi centro” [I, 413] (the
Order which is my center). Around this central theme she wrote hundreds
of letters, narratives about the state of het spirit and conscience for her
superiors, and declarations regarding Saint Teresa. She and other Sisters
recorded the lectures she delivered to the nuns in her charge on spiritual
themes—obedience, chastity, poverty, silence, the teaching of novices—in
Pontoise, Paris, and Antwerp (1605; 1606-1608; 1622-1624; 1621-1623).
Some of the Conferencias (Lectures), given in her native Spanish, were trans¬
lated into French, German, and Italian in the succeeding three centuries.
To these lectures Madre Ana attached basic devotional exercises and texts
on the selection and training of novices. She also recorded the expansion
of the Reform into France both as it happened and as she remembered it
years later. Fler Defensa de la herencia teresiana (Defense of the Teresian Legacy)
is a significant part of the source material for European religious history of
that period.
The prestige Ana de San Bartolomé enjoyed among Catholics in Europe
when she died can be gauged by the printing history of the longer of her two
autobiographies. It circulated widely in Spanish manuscript copies made by
her friends and Daughters (Urkiza I, 280) and in published editions in five
languages: Elemish (1632), French (1646), German (1669), Italian (1725),
and English (1917). Nevertheless, the first version (A) was not published in
Spanish until 1969. A second version of the Vida (B), only slightly more
than half as long, remained in manuscript in the archive of the Carmelite
convent in Bologna. It first saw print in 1981, when it was included in her
exhaustively annotated two-volume Obras completas (Complete Works).
To produce the longer version of her autobiography (A), Ana de San
Bartolomé gathered a potpourri of texts composed around 1605, 1615-1618,
and 1624.^^ She wrote a shorter autobiography (B) in the last six months of
1622, less than four years before her death. In this brief Vida, Madre Ana
speaks with the vivid recall of early life and the fatigue of old age:
Ahora no puedo yo decir las gracias de Dios como yo las sentía

entonces, que cuando hago esto, a cincuenta años que pasaba esta
fuerza en el espíritu, que aunque siempre me ha tratado el Señor
como flaca, haciéndome mercedes, también se ha retirado y dejádome
comer pan con corteza. (B I, 476)
(Now I cannot describe God’s graces as I felt them then, now when I
write this fifty years after this force passed from my soul, for although
the Lord has always treated me like the weak creature I am, showing me
mercies, he has also retired and left me to eat bread with a hard cmst.)
In both versions she remembers with great immediacy what people around
her said and how she felt. Each Life retells some of the same anecdotes, with
varying proverbs and colloquialisms:
En otro día estaba dando quejas a nuestro Señor, que no era para lo
que me mandaban, y decíale mi pobreza, que era como una paja, y
díjome el Señor: “Con pajas enciendo yo el fuego.” (A I, 340)
(Another day I complained to our Lord, that I was unfit for what was
asked of me, and I told him of my frailty of spirit, that I was like a
piece of straw, and the Lord said to me, “With straw do I light the fire. )
32 UNTOLD SISTERS
Yo estaba con la pena posible y dije al Señor; “Mi ad, Señor, lo

que querés de mi aceldo [hacedlo], porque yo no soy más que una
paja.” Y respondióme: “Con pajas enciendo yo el fuego.” (B I, 458)
(1 was as miserable as could be and I said to the Lord; “Look, Lord,

do with me what you wish, for 1 am nothing but a piece of straw. ”
And he answered me: “With straw do I light the fire.”)
Madre Ana had an unassailable reputation as a great mystic. Her intense

visionary life began when she was three and lasted until her death. It had
been verified and consulted by the high and mighty within and without her
Order. The account of her effusive interior life is a salient attribute of the
autobiography. From almost all her writing one gets the impression that she
was constantly tapping her inner voices. Although several other texts describe
her “gracias místicas" (mystical graces) and “penas y favores de Dios" (suffering
and favors from God), we are able to gain a fuller appreciation of their
dimensions and connotations in the Vida, where they are inextricably en¬
twined with other aspects of existence, with the daily passing of time. Her
visionary conversations were as real to her and as true to her character as
those she engaged in with the people she lived with and met; “Y dijéronme
estos angeles; ‘¿Estás contenta? ¿Quieres otra cosa?’ Yo dije que sí ...” [1,
3ro] (And these angels said to me; “Are you satisfied? Do you want anything
else?” 1 said yes . . .).
The constant companions of her spiritual life were major characters in her
writings because they so often appeared in the visions she recounted in detail.
The trinity of her intense mystic love was composed of Jesus, Mary, and
Teresa of Avila. She did not make a move without their advice and consent.
All three helped her not only to endure sorrow and failure and overcome
illness and fear, but also to fulfill leadership roles rarely undertaken by a
woman of her class and to contest the opinions and even commands of Church
authorities.
Madre Teresa and Jesus are the protagonists in most visions; sometimes
they even appear together. Madre Teresa plays the role of mother, com¬
panion, prophet, and—as intermediary—almost supplants the role of Mary.
Before leaving Paris, Madre Ana has a vision in which Saint Teresa refuses
her companions’ implorations that Madre Ana be brought to heaven to join
them; “No la he de llevar, que es menester que viva ahora y haga lo que yo
había de hacer” [1, 362] (1 must not take her, for it is necessary that she live
now and do what I would have done).
In recalling her childhood. Madre Ana claims that Christ seemed to be
growing up alongside her. He appears later in several guises: as suitor, hus¬
band, sister, sufferer, petitioner, and divinity in heavenly court. Christ assures
Madre Ana of Madre Teresa’s place next to him;
Y un día yo dije al confesor una cosa de mi alma, y él no lo tomó

bien y me dijo: “Me parece eso es cosa de la madre Teresa. Anda, no
seas como ella, deja estas cosas. . . . Con la pena que llevaba me
puse en oración, viendo que no estimaban a la Santa como era
razón. ... Y vino el Señor, como cuando andaba en el mundo,
vestido con una capa de pontifical, toda de gloria; y llegándose a mí.
alzó un lado de la capa el lado del corazón, y me mostró la Santa

gloriosa, que la traía debajo de su brazo, como hecha una cosa
consigo. Y díjome el Señor: “¿Ves? Aquí te la traigo, no se te dé
nada; déjalos decir lo que quisieren.” (1, 310-11)
(And one day 1 told the confessor something close to my soul, and
he didn’t like it and he said: “It seems to me that is an idea of Madre
Teresa’s. Come now, don’t be like her, leave such things alone.” . . .
In my pain 1 started to pray, seeing that the saint was not respected
as she should be. . . . And the Lord came, dressed as he was in the
world, with a pontifical cape, in all his glory; and coming close to
me, he raised a side of his cape on the side next to the heart, and he
showed me the saint in glory, where he carried her under his arm, as
if she had become one with him. And the Lord said to me: “You see?
Here 1 have her for you; none of this should bother you, let them say
whatever they wish.”)
Teresian righteousness fueled Madre Ana’s courage as she developed her

talent for combining realistic and symbolic representation. Time and again
in the Vida she recreates earthly scenes in one breath and makes them sacred
in the next. In the section on her persecution in Paris, Madre Ana portrays
her obstinate courage and open defiance in the face of physical danger. In
the worst of circumstances, when she is being held prisoner in the Paris
convent on his orders, she refutes her confessor and immediate superior,
Bérulle. In matters concerning the Constitution she is fierce, a willing martyr.
He might know the letters—the form—she claims, but she has the experience
(1, 349). She insists on returning to the jurisdiction of the Carmelite Fathers.
Madre Ana introduces the scene of her defiance of Bérulle by describing a
vision of Christ imitating her passion: ‘“Hija, mírame cual estoy y por ti,
atado y ligadas mis manos, . . . Así te quiero como amiga . . .’” [1, 348]
(Daughter, look at the state 1 am in, and all for you, bound and with my
hands tied, . . . So do 1 love you as a friend . . .). The conceit confirms her
lifelong intimacy with the Lord and fortifies her. After seven difficult years
in France, Madre Ana won her struggle to return to the jurisdiction of the
Reformed Carmelite Fathers in Flanders. Bérulle had confined and cajoled
her, had used another nun to threaten her, had flown into fits of temper,
but had failed in his last-ditch attempt to keep her in France. All this served
only to strengthen her resolve.
Madre Ana often protested what she considered abuse of status. As a
protégée of Madre Teresa, she challenged Bérulle. She describes other episodes
in which ecclesiastic and secular authorities are pitted against each other. In
a vision she even receives assurance of the king’s jurisdiction over covetous
nobles. On several occasions she criticizes Church authorities, such as a
Prioress and a confessor who speak ill of Saint Teresa or impede her plans
for the reorganization of the Order. Her autobiographies are filled with fre¬
quent and unabashed denunciations of the self-aggrandizing actions of the
wealthy and of power relations based on domination, in both the secular and
ecclesiastical domains.
Another notable feature of the Vidas is the dignity accorded to peasants
and servants. Her descriptions of self-sacrificing servants reflect not only the
34 UNTOLD SISTERS
general spiritual place of all nuns as “God’s handmaidens but also the author s
own employment as a lay-nun nurse, cook, and personal companion. Her
images diverge from those of more educated writers; farmers and food pro¬
duction form the basis of many similes and metaphors. Interactions among
all sorts of people—children, children and parents, peers, aristocrats and
farmers, confessors and nuns—inform her narratives. From the viewpoint of
a healer, she describes accidents and illnesses and the way the sick and injured
behave. Women, moving through time and space, both physical and emo¬
tional, are the substance of this history. It is history as many people lived it,
but as few writers except novelists recorded it at that time.
Ana de San Bartolomé’s letters recreate, justify, bemoan, and celebrate
material and spiritual events in a widespread and long-lasting movement of
religious women. They show her establishing a wide personal network of
female and male friends and helping to consolidate the Reform. A prolific
letter writer, she used correspondence for assuaging solitude and allaying
worries and for political maneuvering.^^ One letter woefully begs a confessor
to buy the nuns sandals; others complain about the postal service, give
spiritual advice, and share news about novices with other Mother Superiors
and with Sisters still in Spain. A few express deep affection for an intimate
friend.
Several letters offer assurances of obedience to one superior, while others
swear obedience to his antagonist who had issued contradictory orders. Letters
written almost simultaneously to Bérulle and Tomás de Jesús demonstrate
how adept Madre Ana was at walking a verbal tightrope between two male
superiors with contradictory ideas about her future. To Bérulle, who wishes
to keep her under his jurisdiction in France, she writes that going to Belgium
is not her idea at all and renews her pledge of obedience to him. To Fray
Tomás, she complains of Bérulle’s authoritarianism and says she will go to
Belgium if he wishes her there. She skillfully avoids responsibility for the
decision with each, and thus survives the power struggle.
Her ability to create and nurture relationships through correspondence
imitated that ability in her Founding Mother. To Leonor de San Bernardo,
for instance, she demonstrates a degree of attachment rarely seen in nuns’
letters: “No sé qué me diga del silencio de V.R., . . . que la amo de todo
corazón y estimo. . . . Pues no la dejaré en tanto que estoy en este mundo, . . .
la querré y amaré como a Madre mía y en la otra vida lo hemos de ser
también ...” [II, 846] (I don’t know how to explain your silence, . . . since
I love you with all my heart and hold you in esteem. . . . For I will not leave
you as long as I am in this world, ... I will treasure and love you like my
mother and in the next life we shall also be together . . .).
Ana de San Bartolomé’s autobiography is to be found in other writings—
the chronicles and accounts of the lives of her Sisters and Daughters—as
much as in the two Vidus and in letters. Speaking of others, and referring to
herself in the third person, she expresses direct self-praise and a sense of her
own importance. Her discussion of cultural differences between the French
and the Spanish, for instance, allows her to intimate her own strong opinions
and skill (which she lacks the humility to praise faintly). She introduces the
theme by speaking first of Isabel de los Angeles, one of the Spanish women
who took part in the initial expedition to Paris:
Fui muy confortada el tiempo que estuvimos juntas y con mucho

consuelo la una y la otra, porque ella me ayudaba mucho al coro; ya
ella lo hacía bien, que iba tomando más el estilo de la Francia y
dulzura, ... Y cierto, yo lo hallo mejor y más conforme a la
condición de Nuestro Señor Jesucristo, que, si lo miramos, andaba
con sus discípulos como hermano y compañero. Harto se ofrecía aquí
que decir sobre esto, mas temo es mal hecho y poca humildad hablar
yo en ello, que no tengo lo uno ni lo otro. (I, 185-86)
(I was very comforted during the time we were together and

consoling each other, because she helped me a great deal in the
choir; she already did this well, for she was taking on the style of
France and sweetness more, . . . And I certainly find it better and
more in keeping with the condition of Our Lord Jesus Christ, who, if
we notice, walked with his disciples as a brother and companion.
There is much to be said here on this, but 1 fear that it would be
poorly done and show little humility if I spoke of it, for I have
neither the one nor the other.)
Praising the French manner of enforcing obedience—through kindness and

criticizing the Spanish way. Madre Ana laments her isolation. The theme of
the benefits of kindness toward one’s inferiors is one to which she will return
late in life, far more reflectively.
In the last years of the sixteenth century, under orders from her own
superiors. Madre Ana set down for posterity her recollections of the dissen-
sions between the Carmelites of Mitigated Rule and the new Order begun
by Madre Teresa. The document also recounts the lives of fifteen of the first
Discalced Carmelite nuns. In some of these biographical notes. Madre Ana
left a painfully vivid and detailed account of what life was really like for the
women, revealing how their bodies and psyches responded to separation and
illness. She knew the subject well; for some sixteen years she had attended
to the nursing needs of Madres Teresa de Jesús and Maria de San Jerónimo
and of the convent community as well.
In speechlike prose she left evidence of how the women talked to each
other, how they used letter writing for many purposes—to help assure can¬
didates entry into the Order when families disapproved, for instance and
even how they cooked and ate. We learn that they guarded the convent door
to protect themselves from temptations as much as from outsiders. Forgetting
herself. Madre Ana recollects the past without veneer. There is one hair-
raising account of how Maria del Sacramento (Xuárez) suffered illness and
surgery. Another describes the psychological reactions of the widowed mother
Ana de San Pedro (Wasteels) to separation from her five- and seven-year-
old daughters.
Toward the end of her life, perhaps stimulated in part by the disagreements
with the English nuns in Antwerp, Madre Ana wrote notes, not under orders
but of her own volition, on the process of training novices. In them, she
embraces more egalitarian Christian values and holds a less rigid view of
human frailty than was common at the time. A reflective Ana de San Bar-
36 UNTOLD SISTERS
tolomé meditates on her readings and her long experience as teacher and
leader of the religious, comes to different conclusions from those of other
authors, and ventures to set out her understanding of the limits of coercion
in changing and correcting personality.
Madre Ana’s writing, like all her religious tasks, unfolded as a reflection
of her relationship, in life and in death, with the Saint of Avila. Her pro-
pensity in childhood and adolescence toward trances and visions and her
early manifestation of spiritual vocation did not lessen, but rather highlighted,
the Teresian contours of her adult personality. Within those contours, she
elaborated a religious and literary identity of her own.
Maria de San José: T)ialogue of a

Carmelite—II
Unlike Ana de San Bartolomé and many other Sisters, Maria de San José
drew fortitude and guidance not from visions but from a continous spiritual-
literary dialogue with other women religious. In her critique of persecution
and stupidity, through her use of irony and her defense of women, she seems
to anticipate the great Mexican nun and writer. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.
Like Sor Juana, Maria de San José inspired awe in those around her, and her
intelligence was seen as a threat to those in powet; but unlike the Mexican
poet, this Spanish Carmelite had a community of tesponsive women to whom
she was devoted: “. . . escribo . . . para mostrar que siempre os tengo pre¬
sentes y nunca de mi memoria os apartaré, aunque me hayan apartado a una
tan estrecha prisión . . .” [278] (. . . I write ... to show that I hold you
ever present, and you shall never leave my memory, although they have
sequestered me in such a narrow prison . . .).
Neither she nor that community could prevail against the misogynist tide
that was sweeping the Reform movement. Ana de San Bartolomé, as we saw
above, rode it out in accord with her background and with a view to saving
the Reform from destruction, though the intetests of women might be com¬
promised. On the other hand, Maria de San José, an equally fierce and willing
martyr, was intransigent in defense of the liberties ofCatmelite women. She
chose death over compromise. This was the woman to whom, in 1582, the
year of her death. Madre Teresa had written:
“Vuestra reverencia lo dice tan bien todo que, si mi patecer se

hubiera de tomar, después de muerta la eligieran por fundadora, y aun
en vida muy de buena gana, que harto más sabe que yo y es mejor;
esto es decit verdad. Un poco de experiencia la hago de ventaja ...”
(Letter 261)
(Your reverence says everything so well that, if my wishes were to be

followed, after my death you should be named foundet, and even
while I live I would with good will, see you so chosen; for you know
tar more than I and are better; it is the truth that I speak. My
advantage is a little bit of expetience . . .)
êcreation/'Ke-Creation: Lihro de
recreaciones
As its prologue makes clear, the Lihro de recreaciones (Book of Recreations)
is a book for women, by a woman, representing women. It discusses some
themes of interest primarily to the Sisters of the Order and some controversial
ones of interest to both men and women of the Reform, which was then in
the throes of internecine warfare. The work juxtaposes women’s unswerving
fidelity to the spirit of the Founding Mother’s reform of religious life with
the arrogance and ambition of some of the men. Decrying the bettayal of
basic elements of the Reform, such as inner spirituality, and lamenting the
clerical stupidity that hindered women’s fuller, reasoned participation in
religion, the author pleads for the recording of women’s history.
Historians often refer to the Libro de recreaciones by citing the accurate
physical description of Teresa of Avila^® (188) and the narrative regarding
the travails that accompanied the founding in Seville (ninth recreación). But
the book merits consideration in its entirety. It is a tour de force, a vehicle
for the Teresian Order’s “theologian” and “letrera” to display her thorough
knowledge of the Bible, the texts of the Holy Fathers of the Church, the
history of monastic orders, and contemporary theological polemics. For its
time it was daring to the point of heresy, which partly explains why its author
was harshly persecuted until her death and why it was not published until
this century. Indeed, a critique of accusations of heresy is one of its major
motifs. The Libro was also a vehicle for Madre María to express her feminist
intellectuality, her knowledge of a female lineage and heritage, and her sense
of community with women of her Order.
Madre María declares her purpose in composing the work, “pintar el trato
y vida de las religiosas” (47] (to depict the conversations and life of the nuns),
and her concern about finding the appropriate narrative, or rather dramatic
mode, “. . . una manera de representación al vivo, aunque todo como pin¬
tado” (48] (. . . a lively manner of presentation, though all shall be as if
painted). Consciousness of style and the impact of theatrical techniques
explains her choice of the dialogue form.^^ At the beginning of the Libro de
recreaciones, she makes explicit the dilemmas of self-presentation. In discus¬
sion with her real/imaginary Sisters, cast as shepherdesses, the narrator decides
that the safest, most discreet, and most artistically rich way to draw a self-
portrait will be through dialogue. She, Madre María, becomes Gracia. Other
characters, some drawn directly from an individual Sister, some a composite
of personalities, are named Justa, Atanasia, Dorotea, and Josefa. The author
uses discussion among these nun-shepherdesses to project the literary-pastoral
framework of the book. Explaining genre, she demystifies structure and launches
the collective endeavor.
The book is fashioned on the pattern of the daily religious “entertainment”
hour established in Reformed Carmelite rules; each recreación represents the
lecture-discussion of a different day. At the conclusions of the recreaciones
the characters part to go off to prayer or contemplation, each in the manner
typical of her personality; at the beginnings they are brought together again
to take up where they had left off the dialogue or to begin another topic of
conversation.
38 UNTOLD SISTERS
Twenty years before she wrote the Libro de recreaciones, the young courtier
Maria had been attracted to religious life by the intelligent and serious dis¬
cussions among Teresa and her companions. In this sense, we can see her
writing as an effort to develop and pass on the tradition of women’s engage¬
ment in matters of consequence. Authority for this enterprise comes from
proximity to Madre Teresa: “. . . y tú di lo que le viste y oíste pues te hallaste
con ella en algunas fundaciones . . . que no te veo muy medrada” [51-58]
(. . . and you must say what you saw and heard her do, since you were with
her in the founding of some of the convents ... for it seems to me you have
scarcely made a start) are Justa’s instructions to Gracia.
In one of her most feminist passages. Madre Maria recognizes the impact
of custom in preventing women from exercising God-given talents. She uses
ironic reversal, exposing ridiculous viewpoints by seeming to espouse them
and at the same time explaining the reasons for any justification which the
viewpoint she opposes might have; women by rights should be prohibited
from writing and relegated to the needle, as custom would have it, because—
and here is the catch—they have not been educated (54).
Maria de San José, in the tradition of Cristine de Pizan and the early
feminists of the querelle des femmes, recognizes a lineage of courageous, vir¬
tuous, and intellectual women to whom she and her Sisters are connected.^®
She defends the right of women to learn and use Latin, to teach, consult,
and write (105-06). She traces religious history, comparing and contrasting
Gentile and Hebrew beliefs and practices that were adopted or continued in
Christianity. That Justa is scandalized by Gracia’s incursions into such thorny
subject matter lends humor and emphasis, as well as canny protection against
male censorship. The author anticipates and mocks such objections as un¬
cultured, ignorant, and “womanish.” Atanasia overrides Justa’s resistance and
supplements Gracia s discussion by challenging the less sophisticated woman’s
fear and partial knowledge. She interjects that while it is true the greatest
influence on the “new [Christian] law” was the “ancient [Hebrew] law”:
• . . yo te daré una cosa que usa la Iglesia y no aprendida de la sinagoga,
que es consagrar vírgenes” [106] (. . . I will give you an example of one
practice which the Church uses that it did not learn from the synagogue,
and that is the consecration of virgins). The author thus implies that nuns!
like those who create the Libro de recreaciones, are the most important advance
of Christianity over Judaism.
In the first recreación the intellectual and literary aims of the work, and
criticism of its eclecticism, receive humorous treatment. Josefa compares what
Gracia (Madre Maria) is writing to “olla podrida" (“rotten pot”)—a common
stew made of various leftovers. As the joking continues, salad is suggested
as a rnore honorable” name. Another convent dish receives comment, and
two of the Sisters prostrate themselves, half in jest, when they recall that it
IS against the rules to discuss food—upon which they discuss the meaning of
that prohibition. This episode, together with the opening and closing scenes
of the recreaciones and other passages throughout the book, bring us into the
c oister and allow us to see, hear, and even taste what life was like among
the Garmelites of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain.
Early m the narrative, the anxious author balances her fears of imperfection
and awkwardness (torpeza) with affirmations of confidence in her own lead¬
ership and literary exploits. Madre Maria has been a prioress for a decade
when she writes that she is never happier than when she sees her “angel”
Daughters “alegrarse unas con otras” I56] (enjoy themselves with one an-
other). And if her writing can contribute to their mirth, so much the better.
She then explains their Mother “Angela’s” specification that each day, to
relieve the asceticism of fasting, praying, and continuous silence, there be a
time of recreation—of edifying fun.^’
The author is a prodigal daughter who rebels, criticizes, carves out an
independent life, and returns in final adoration. Madre María pays homage
to the greatness, wisdom, efficacy, and power of Teresa of Avila in a swift,
summarizing passage of classical prose. She casts Madre Teresa first as a
captain, a militant new Deborah who shames men into courageous action;
then as a dove and prophet consulted by earthly kings, whose merit and
beauty would defy any pen. In other sections of the work the author compares
Madre Teresa to Abigail and to the Virgin Mary (103, 112).
The second recreación opens with an invocation to God as muse. Gracia
then tells the story of how she met the Founding Mother, entwining bio-
graphical and autobiographical narrative. God, in this early period of reli-
giosity, “peleaba por mí contra mí” [63] (fought for me against myself). Justa
criticizes her for broaching subjects sbe would do well to avoid—ways of
teaching doctrine and drawing souls to God. Gracia sues false humility to
defend herself against the accusation of criticizing men; she claims that it is
the Carmelite women, among others, whom she is chiding for being “en¬
capotados y tristes” [64] (gloomy and sorrowful). The male ending—“enca¬
potados” rather than “encapotadas”—includes men in her claim. She issues
another criticism before agreeing she should refrain from writing about doc¬
trine and going on to another theme.
In speaking of how she came to religion, Gracia-Maria admits to having
spent two years in inward conflict which she did not reveal to anyone,
including her confessor, “even though he was a Jesuit” (67). The admission,
made in passing, reveals the strength of Maria de San José s character in her
wish to resolve her own spiritual troubles and her mistrust of even well-
educated confessors. “ Attentiveness to behavior and the workings of the
mind, the spirit, and the emotions leads her to the consciousness of imper¬
fection but also to self-knowledge.
Throughout the book, Gracia-Maria characterizes, criticizes, mocks, and
praises herself. Comparing herself to Saint Augustine, for instance, she claims
he was “necio” (foolish) because, unlike her, he had doubts about God’s
knowledge (77). The self-portrait is one of a brilliant, ironic, funny, stubborn,
rebellious, courageous woman. Fear is not an emotion she experiences often.
At one point she asserts: “. . . ni se me rinde por amenazas, ni el temor de
trabajos” [76] (. . . ñor shall I give in either to threats, nor for fear of hard¬
ships). She makes it clear that she has overcome trials and temptations and
now feels sure of herself. At this juncture, in 1585» 3ftcr two periods of serious
turmoil in the Order—two episodes in Seville that ultimately contributed to
her “transfer” to Lisbon—she is jocular about the persecutions. Confessors
who believed the accusations against her insisted on interrogating her concerning
how she felt, because externally she was so content and composed. She had
trouble from those who thought her “alumbrada (literally, enlightened, but
here refers to a heretical sect) or desalumbrada (unenlightened) ly?]*
The third, fourth, fifth, and sixth recreaciones concern the history of Mount
40 UNTOLD SISTERS
Carmel—its origins, characteristics, martyrs, and leaders. Woven into the

story are complex parallels between ancient and modem times. Many scrip¬
tural references and other citations display Madre Maria’s biblical scholarship.
She mentions places and people, saints and martyrs. Lyrical and metaphorical
pages on precious stones, gems, and minerals represent the attributes of
Christ. The Virgin Mary plays an important role in these sections.
The Virgin of Mt. Carmel, after whom the Order took its name, competes
with the highest divinity himself. The Virgin is referred to in both concrete
and abstract terms. Madre María envisions an emblematic, almost heraldic
representation of Carmel. In the center is the Virgin: “. . . el area del tes¬
tamento y tabernáculo de Dios, el archivo de la Santísima Trinidad y lecho
florido de la esposa” [97] (. . . the ark of the testament and tabernacle of
God, the archive of the Holy Trinity and flowery bed of the bride). At first
the Virgin is tacitly compared to the Founding Mother. She chooses the
captain of God’s army (97), a title already used to describe Teresa of Avila
(57). Then the figure of Wisdom brings Mary into the realm of creation
itself. The author cites the Virgin’s affirmation in the book of Proverbs:
“. . . antes que Dios criase nada estaba yo ordenada” [94] (. . . before God
created anything I was made). Earthly arts become vehicles for representation
of the divine in a manner that anticipates later Baroque poets and dramatists
such as Calderón and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.
Through the character of Gracia, Madre María repeatedly declares her
stylistic ambition. She is criticized for it, told to write in her own way as
well as she can, and not to be anxious about influence—that is, about
composing as well as Gracián:
Poca humildad—dijo a esto Justa—me parece, hermana, querer decir

con tan alto estilo como los que lo saben hacer. . . . Atanasia
dijo: . . . sólo resta ahora que para aplacar el hambre que de esto
tienes, pues no te la quitan tan delicados y preciosos manjares [los de
Gracián], guises tú a tu gusto otros con que te satisfagas y a las que
fueren de tu grosero ingenio, al modo de los pastores y gente rústica,
que se contentan más del ajo y cebolla que de los dulces manjares.
(91-92)
(Justa replied to this, “It seems to me a lack of humility. Sister, to

want to speak with such high style as those [men] who know full well
how to do it. . . . Atanasia said: “. . .all that can now be done to
quiet this hunger of yours, which cannot be stilled by these savory
and delicate tidbits [of Gracián], is for you to cook up other dishes to
your own taste, that you may satisfy yourself and other nuns who like
you have an uneducated wit; just like shepherds and rustic folk, who
are happier with garlic and onions than with sweet tidbits.)
The passage, at once a commentary on and a definition of women’s writing

as Saint Teresa defined it, juxtaposes the food of daily life to the delicious
concoctions—luxury item^-of writers such as Padre Gracián.
In the midst of her revelation of her own “hunger” to express herself. Madre
Maria laments the lack of documentation of Carmelite history: “. es lás¬
tima ver esta casa y real edificio de esta altísima Reina, la poca noticia que
de él hay y el descuido que nuestros padres han tenido hasta aquí en hacer
memoria de su grandeza . . [91] (. . . it is a shame to see the house and
royal building of this most exalted Queen receive so little notice and the
carelessness that our fathers have had until now in memorializing its gran¬
deur . . .)•
Maria de San José’s education prepared her to employ the discourse of the
elite. Her metaphors and similes refer to architecture, painting, and music,
to civil and ecclesiastic law, and to the natural order of animals, minerals,
and plants. In all her writing. Madre María is more ambivalent in her expres¬
sion of introductory formulas of humility, and is more literary, than most
nun-authors. In the Libro de recreaciones, she uses highly elaborated structures
and controlled modes of expression to affirm, through religious symbol and
history and against all opposition, the primacy of female lineage.
Carta de una pobre y presa descalza (15^3)

(Jíetter ^rom a Hôor, Imprisoned T)iscalced
Jiunl
In a spiritual letter written (appropriately) on Good Friday of 1593 from
the convent jail in Lisbon, Maria de San José once again speaks of persecution.
The struggle between her wish to embody the abnegated, joyous, pardoning
Christ-like sufferer and her deeply felt outrage, despair, and resentment lend
a poignant tension to the “letter.” Its full title is; Carta que escribe una
pobre y presa descalza, consolándose y consolando a sus hermanas e hijas que
por verla así estaban afligidas. Año de 1593.” (“Letter written by a poor
Discalced Carmelite prisoner, for her own consolation and that of her Sisters
and Daughters, who seeing her thus imprisoned, were sore grieved. In the
year of 1593”)-
With a clarity induced by the pain of solitary confinement. Madre María
crystallizes her most important preoccupations and narrative techniques.
Separated from the female milieu in which she thrives, she reconstructs it
in her imagination and visualizes a community of Sisters who must fight a
common enemy. She hears and records her Sisters and Daughters speaking
with her, consoling both them and herself as she discusses true piety, good
and evil, human weakness, and divine retribution. For many years, as a
prioress and a teacher of novices, she had taught the need to ascend to
spiritual perfection by following the Founding Mother’s teachings. Now she
was being given a chance to test her capacity for purification through suffering.
But her stubbornness and reason rebel against the ascetic and obedient part
of her nature. This was a strain she had felt all her life, but now it reached
the breaking point.
In the opening words of the letter she sets out the conflict between the
woman of flesh and blood and the saintly religious she strove to be, cleverly
placing part of herself in the personas of each of her convent companions:
No sé, carísimas hermanas e hijas mías, si dando lugar a la pasión y

ternura de mujer, acompañe vuestras lágrimas, o siguiendo la luz del
42 UNTOLD SISTERS
corazón me queje de vuestro sentimiento, pues no se compadece, en

ley de la estrecha amistad que nos tenemos, que lloréis vosotras por lo
que yo río, ni forméis quejas de quien me hace beneficios. (271)
(My dearest Sisters and Daughters, 1 know not whethet allowing for a
woman’s passion and tenderness, I should accompany your tears, or
following the understanding of my heatt, I should complain of your
feelings; for it is not fitting, in light of the close friendship between
us, that you should weep at what makes me laugh, nor that you
should form complaints of those who do me good.)
While she cheerfully shoulders the burden of suffering, the Sisters who lament
her misfortune are a representation of the real Sisters but also of the com¬
passion she imagines in them and feels herself.
Dialogue, one of her favorite narrative forms, is here implicit and collec¬
tive. Madre María imagines what her Sisters might say to her, or repeats
what they have said, using a plural subject. But rather than make explicit
the various points of view, as she did in the Recreations through this device,
she turns monologue into indirect dialogue to accompany herself in invol¬
untary solitude. She imagines the expression of worry and suffering on the
part of her Daughters, thus allowing her first person to be the ideal daughter
of Saint Teresa who can pardon her enemies, turn the other cheek, pray for
them, and be thankful for the opportunity to suffer for the highest cause.
Many sentences enclose a double (or triple) entendre. Ironic underlying
reversals of meaning, contradicting what is stated, follow one after the other
in this letter. Of those who have imprisoned her, for instance, she says;
. . . yo creo de sus piadosos corazones que no me desean tanto atormentar,
cuanto yo deseo que me atormenten . . .” [279] (. . . for I believe, of their
pious hearts, that they do not so much desire to torment me, as much as I
desire to be tormented . . .). The surface statement has one level of the
meaning. Madre María makes a supreme effort to perfect her Christian virtue.
But she is also certain that in going against Saint Teresa’s mandates, her
opponents are not at all pious.” She does not deny that they want to torment
her; she intensifies the feeling of punishment by turning the phrase. Both
courage and rage resonate undet the surface.
Like Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz almost a century later, Maria de San José
utilizes scriptural citation to convey several messages; thus, she anticipates
criticism for arrogance by criticizing herself and enfolds self-criticism in a
stronger censorship of the stupid, mean, and unjust:
. . . de mi descanso no temo decir esto, ni me apartará de confesar la

gloria de la cruz el temor de ser tenida por arrogante, pues aunque es
bueno guardar el secreto del Rey, bueno es también manifestar las obras de
Dios para que sea glorificado [Tob. 12, 7] y con razón sería juzgada por
infiel, SI habiéndoseme descubierto un gran tesoro, lo escondiese y no
hiciese a mis propias hijas participantes de él. (272; see also 274-77)
(. . . for my solace I do not fear to say this, nor will I shy away from
confessing the glory of the cross for fear of being considered arrogant,
for although it is good to keep the King’s secret, it is also good to show
God's works so that He may be glorified [Tob. 12, 7] and with reason I
would be judged an infidel, if I were to find a great treasure, and hide
it and not let my own Daughters partake of it.)
Throughout, the Carta gives a strong sense of “us” (the women of her convent)
against “them” (men): “No os desmayéis, carísimas, no os enflaquezca vuestra
fe por ver al parecer el Señor nos ha dejado tantos tiempos en manos de los
que nos persiguen y afligen” (275] (Do not be dismayed, dearest Sisters, nor
should your faith grow weak to see that it seems the Lord has left us so long
in the hands of those who persecute and afflict us).
Instrucción de novicias (1602)

Cníde Instruction of iNovices)
The theme of proper training, of cultivating spiritual strength, appears in
a brief treatise on the teaching of novices written the year before Maria de
San José’s death. Instrucción de novicias: Diálogo entre dos religiosas que Gracia
y Justase llaman, sobre la oración y mortificación con que se deben criar las novicias
(On the Instruction of Novices: A Dialogue Between Two Nuns Named Gracia
and Justa, on the Prayer and Mortification with Which Novices Should Be Trained),
was published in French in i6io. It was not translated into Spanish until
1966. In 1977, a copy of the Spanish original with Madre Maria’s own
signature and the date 1602 was found by chance in the archive of the convent
in Seville. In Instrucción de novicias, while seeking to promote the Teresian
tradition of education for religious life through loving attitudes toward God
and disciplined interior prayer. Madre Maria also expresses dismay at the
unbefitting behavior of power-hungry clerics. The betrayal of Madre Teresa’s
reform makes Madre Maria angry and bitter. Bitterness and anger sharpen
an ironic humor. The tension between celebration of suffering in the name
of Christ and unbending resistance to injustice and cupidity is a mark of
her work.
In Instrucción de novicias, as the full title indicates, two characters, Gracia
and Justa, engage in a colloquy on a variety of themes. Their discussion is
set against a background of panoramic views from the cloister’s windows of
the river Tajo flowing down to the sea and the surrounding valleys and
mountains. The themes include the choice of candidates for the novitiate,
the formation of new religious personality in women who joined the Order,
mental prayer, the art of teaching, and the aims of religious life. The animated
dialogue between the two women permits Madre Maria to present differing
points of view, to emphasize ideas about which she had strong convictions,
and to disagree with or criticize the Founding Mother.
In this work, as in the Libro de recreaciones, one notes parallel attitudes of
praise and criticism, devotion and disagreement, regarding “Mother” Teresa
of Avila. Gracia (again Madre Maria’s pseudonym) defends Madre Teresa
when Justa criticizes her for having “forgotten” to spell out a method of
prayer. Gracia says that because she was a “living rule a model, in other
words—Madre Teresa had no need to specify in writing how this central
aspect of religious life was to be carried out (410). With questions, answers.
44 UNTOLD SISTERS
discussion, disagreement, and even banter between Gracia and Justa, Madre
María composes a guide full of charm and quiet fury for future Mistresses of
Novices.
Poetry
Maria de San José had the makings of a formidable poet—a facility with
metrical forms and a resonant affective voice. A prophetic sense of her own
destiny, from the age of fourteen when she wrote her first verses, remained
a major theme of her poetry and prose. Throughout het life Madre María
expressed her religious feelings in poems of exultant suffering:
Peno por penar contino, (1 long to suffer endlessly,

y gózome en el tormento, for 1 delight in torment
y siento porque no siento and feel it sharply, not to feel
un no sé qué, donde el tino I know not what, wherein my judgment
queda a veces t[r]emulento. is sometimes left a-tremble.
con un lenguaje encubierto, hidden by difficult, veiled language

de entender dificultoso, which daunts the understanding,
porque el penar es gustoso, because there is delight in anguish,
y el gusto a veces revuelto and delight, in sudden changes,
viene y se hace penoso. (520) then turns again to suffering.)
A joyous exaltation came in poems about Madre Teresa. Some of these were
occasional pieces full of wordplay and hyperbole. Some anticipated the poems
of the Sobrino Morillas sisters, whose work is the subject of the next chapter:
Cristo y Tetesa fueron desposados (Christ and Teresa were betrothed and
wed
casta y divinamente se quisieron each bore the othet love divine and
chaste,
y divinos Gigantes produjeron and divine Giants wete by them
engendeted,
si Dioses no. Varones endiosados. if not Gods, then indeed most godly men.
Prodigio el Padre Madre monstruosa Prodigious Father, and stupendous

Mothet
Doctora de doctores muerta y viva the scholar of scholars, living although
dead,
que Vida el olio del sepulcro vale
for the holy anointment of the tomb yields
(MS 111, 361) life.)
Two of her most notable poems are political as well as teligious in nature.
The “Elegía” (“Elegy”) laments the death of Madre Teresa and grieves over
dissension and corruption in the ranks of the reformers. A contemporary
cleric copied the long “Elegy,” ptaising it in the highest terms he could
imagine, as:
[escrito] con estilo más de hombre y no mal poeta, que de mujer . . .

digno del gran entendimiento ... de la autora, que fue muy querida
y celebrada de la Santa y de otras muchas personas . . . (quoted in
Simeón de la Sagrada Familia 542) ([written] more in the style of a
man, and no bad poet at that, than of a woman . . . worthy of the
great intelligence ... of its author, who was loved and celebrated by
the Saint and by many others . . .)
One of its moving stanzas, presaging Quevedo’s famous lines about his country
(“Miré los muros de la patria mía/si un tiempo fuertes, ya desmoronados” [l
saw the walls of my homeland/once strong, now in ruins]) extends the scope
of her dismay from personal to national loss:
Forzoso me será cegar llorando, (I am compelled to weep till 1 grow blind,

cubierta con perpetuo y triste luto, clad in sad mourning garb forevermore,
los males de mi patria lamentando. (532) lamenting the evils that beset my land.)
In the “Redondillas,” Madre María warns of the coming battles for power
among men who have forsaken the spirit of the Reform and issues a women s
call to (figurative) arms.^' Fier call for the women religious to actively and
courageously resist is unusually direct and militant. Given the tenor of the
words, it is no surprise that few works by Maria de San José were published
before the twentieth century:
¡Somos mujeres! Pregunto: (We are but women! So I ask:

¿Cómo seremos oídas? Flow then shall we be heard?
¡Menos nos oirán caídas Far less will they hear us if we fall
en los males que barrunto! in the evils 1 foretell!
Salild], hermanas, no temáis. Step forth, my Sisters, have no fear;

que en tal caso ha de ir ufana if it be so, let each one go
cada cual de buena gana, full willingly, with proud good cheer
pues que trabajos buscáis. (517) for you must seek travail.)
Madre Teresa’s Daughters Ana de San Bartolomé and Maria de San José,
as we have seen, helped create the aura surrounding Teresa of Avila’s life,
thus sanctifying the terrain on which they could legitimately speak of them-
selves. These two of her many companions and daughters exemplify how the
enormous force of a perceived spiritual mission afforded women new oppor-
tunities to communicate through the written word. The writers in the ensuing
chapters do this as well. The two biological sisters Maria de San Alberto and
Cecilia del Nacimiento, subjects of the next chapter, are members of the
Reform’s second generation, to whom fell the task of preventing further
betrayals and of assuring the canonization of their venerated model. Madre
Teresa had consolidated and expanded an existing female tradition. No woman
religious who came after her was exempt from some connection with her life
and works.
46 UNTOLD SISTERS
nêxts and H^ranslations

Ana de San Bartolomé
Autobiografía*
[Niñez]
Un día, siendo yo pequeña, que aun no sabía bien andar, me tenían mis
hermanas en una pieza consigo y ellas se enbebían a hacer sus labores. Y
pasaba mi padre; las dijo: Mirad esa niña no caiga, que se lijará [matará]. Y
de que se fue mi madre, quedaron ellas diciendo la una; Si se muriera, se irá
a ver a Dios, y la otra dijo; Más vale que viva, que quizá será su sierva. Dijo
la otra otra vez: Sí, mas ahora está segura que se irá a ver su Dios y en
llegando a siete años pecan los niños. Esto se me ha acordado toda mi vida.
Como yo lo notaba y no sabía hablar, y acabando de decir ella estas palabras,
yo reparé quién era Dios, y en este instante vi una visión interiormente,
como si yo viera que se abría el cielo y Cristo Jesús se me mostraba con una
majestad muy grande y glorioso. Mas como no había visto tal cosa, me hizo
espanto y temor; mas quedé con amor de querer bien a Dios, aunque le temía
al presente. (I, 425-26)
Esto me pasó hasta los diez años, que murieron mis padres, de que yo quedé
muy afligida. Me quedaron unos hermanos y hermanas que me sirvieron de
padres y eran muy buenos. Mas en siendo de e[s]ta edad, me enviaron a
guardar el ganado al campo; aunque era cerca del lugar, yo lo sentía mucho
al principio; mas luego el Señor me consola[ba], y los campos me era[n]
deleites y los pájaros me recog[í]an [con] su canto, que, si empezaban de
cantar, me estaba las horas recogida. Y muchas veces venía el Niño Jesús y
se me sentaba en las faldas y le hallaba allí cuando tomaba en mí. (23; I,
283, para. 4)
Yo traí[a] tanta oración, si[n] saber que lo era, que lo más ordinario me
hallaba inflamada en el amor de Jesús, y pensaba cómo haría yo para irme
en donde nadie no me conociese que era mujer, y que me despreciasen todos.
Y pensaba vestirme de hombre [e] irme, que con eso daría sujeto que pensaban
mal de mí. No me parecía que temía nada que se me ofreciese. Y no trataba
con nadie esas cosas sino con una parienta que era de mi edad y nos habían
c[r]istianado juntas. Era muy buena y tenía buenos deseos, y cuando íbamos
a misa o nos podíamos juntar, nuestros corazones parecía los ponían fuego
de amor de Dios. Y la dije un día: Hermana, ¿no nos iríamos las dos a un
desierto vestidas de hombres y haríamos penitencia, como lo hizo la Mada-
I. The text and the arrangement and numbering of paragraphs come from the
edition of Obras completas (Complete Works) prepared hy Julián Urkiza. The version
that Urkiza denominates as “A” is found in volume I, pp. 278-377; our first selection
here comes from version “B,” which may also be found in the same volume. The first
page number we give corresponds to the edition of the autobiography prepared bv
Antolin, since it is far more widely available.
lena? Y ella era más prudente que yo y me dijo; Hermana, ya no es aquel

tiempo, que hay mil ocasiones y peligros. Con todo esto que me dijo yo la
apretaba en ello muchas veces y hasta que la vencí, y la dije que hiciésemos
unas esclavinas como pelegrinas [sic] y que una noche nos fuésemos. (24; 1,
283-84, para. 6)
Mis hermanos, como me veía[n] ya grande, trataban de casarme. Yo no

tenía esos pensamientos. Llamaba a la Virgen, que había tomado por madre,
y a todos mis devotos y acrecentaba las devociones y penitencias. Iba a la
iglesia y me escondía en una capilla y que había de la Concepción de la
Virgen Nuestra Señora, y los pies desnudos y las rodillas desnudas por tierra
y la llamaba que me ayudase. Y me venían mil tentaciones terribles contra
mis deseos, que me atormentaban y afligían. Con estas ocasiones no faltaban
las astucias del diablo. Mas yo tomaba di[s]ciplinas y me echaba en una cava
desnudo [sic], aunque era húmeda, en el suelo, hasta que se templase la furia
de la tentación, y dormía sobre sarmientos, y otras cosas ásperas en lugar de
la camisa y ésta daba a los pobres, porque no supie[sen] en casa iba sin ella;
y poníame otras veces un silicio de cerdas. (27; 284-85, para, i)
[Con Santa Teresa]

.... Hacía muchas cosas para hacerme boba, como si fuera discreta, que
no era menester artificio, que harto lo soy. Una vez me di[o] deseo un viernes
de la cruz, a [ijmitación del Señor y su Pasión, me diera el sacristán otro de
bofetones. Y él, como yo era portera, me tenía por buena. Y deseaba desen¬
gañarle, y le dije un día: ¿Quién pensái[s] que soy? Sabe que soy muy pecadora
y que [he] andado por el mu[n]do, quiriendo [sic] darle a entender era mala
mujer. El lo creyó, y le dije: Y por esto, te r[u]ego que de aquí adelante lo
creas, y cuando entraren esos hombre[s] con la madera—que traíamos obra—
que digas a uno que [a] aquella monja que abre la puerta, que la dé de bofetones
encima del velo. Me harás gran placer, yo te daré alguna cosa. Y el mozo lo
hizo así: abriendo la puerta, el hombre me los dio. Y después reparé en lo
que había hecho, que no era bueno ni de edificación para la casa; y como
me dio escrúpulo, lo dije al confesor, yr [sic] me riñó muy bien y él lo dijo
a nuestra Santa, que estaba allí por priora, y ella calló. ^ No me dijo nada,
mas mandó que nunca se abriese la puerta sin estar dos religiosas presentes,
que como era al principio y éramos pocas, no se había hecho esta orden hasta
entonces.^
Estaba mi alma tan encendida en la Pasión de Jesucristo, que desde niña
lo había tenido, y si iba [a] la iglesia y veía las pinturas de la Pasión del
2. Urkiza suggests that this incident occurred during the time that Saint Teresa
was Prioress in the Convento de La Encamación of the Mitigated Rule, which she
had left in order to begin her reform. She was ordered back as Prioress years later.
Ana de San Bartolomé was at this time in the Convento de San José, the saint’s first
foundation and the place where Madre Ana had professed. Maria de San Jerónimo
was Prioress.
3. This incident offers Madre Ana’s version of the origin of the rule in Saint
Teresa’s Constitution that there must be two nuns present when the cloister door is
opened.
48 UNTOLD SISTERS
Seño[r], yo lloraba y quería ser pobre y maltratada por su amor. Y cuando

salía de casa me descalzaba, iba sobre las piedra[s] y esquinitas que me hiriesen.
Esto que voy a decir y algo de lo dicho, va fuera del propósito, que iba
diciendo, sino porque no se me olvide como me lo manda. Otro día del
Viernesanto, que era bien niña, había venido allí un gran predicador. Yo y
mis hermanas fuimos al sermón. Yo iba con gran deseo que él dijese grandes
cosas de la m[u]erte de [amor] con que Crisfto] había padecido, y el buen
hombre no dijo casi nada a mi gu[sto]. Yo estaba con esto con gran pena
todo el sermón de verle tan tibio. Y en saliendo del sermón empecé de llorar,
y me dijeron mis hermanas; ¿Por qué lloras, niña? Yo dije: Yo lloro porque
no ha predicado bien este Padre. Y me dijeron: ¡Qué sabéis vos de eso! —
-. Si yo pudiera predicar, yo lo dijera mejor a lo que siento. (44-45; 1,
294-95. para. 5-7)
Y volviendo a la disposición que iba diciendo que traía de ímpetus de las

almas que el Señor me había mostrado, todo se me hacía poco lo que podía
hacer para satisfacer a mis deseos. Y como el confesor veía que duraba tanto
aquel celo y amor de las almas que traía, me dijo un día; Mira, hija, que esto
es caridad del diablo, y que os quiere engañar. Yo fui a nuestra Santa que me
dijese si era así, y la di cuenta de todo lo que me había pasado. Y me dijo
que no tuviese pena, que no era demonio, que ella había pasado por esa
misma oración, con los confesores que no la entendían. Con esto yo quedé
consolada y creí que lo que la Santa me decía era Dios. (47; 1, 295-96,
para, i)
Con estos i[m]petus se vino a gastar el natural y las fuerzas de tal manera,
que decían que me moría. Y llamaron los médicos, y no conocían qué mal
tenía; decían algunos que era ética. Me hicieron muchos remedios y me
h[e]charon [sic] más a perder, que vine a estar tan flaca que no podía alzar
los pies del suelo y todo mi cuerpo abierto y me le hacían bizmat. Mas no
me aprovechaba nada de todo lo que me hacían. (49; I, 297, para. 5)
... y me dijo la Santa aquella noche que llegó: Hija, véngase a mi celda,
aunque al presente esté enferma. Y, al parecer, no estaba para servirla. Había
al presente en casa cinco enfermas en la cama con calenturas, y una muy
mala y con tanto hastío que no comía cosa alguna, que se llamaba Isabel
Batista.
Y me dijo la Santa a la mañana, otro día en llegando: Hija, aunque esté
mala, quiero que sea enfermera de estas enfermas, que no hay quien las cure.
Yo callé por no ir contra la obediencia, mas en mí pensaba: ¿Cómo lo haré,
que no puedo alzar los pies del suelo? Yo como pude f[u]i a la cocina, aderecé
alguna cosa para la que estaba más mala. Y antes de ir a la celda había una
escalera de catorce gradas. Al pie de la escalera yo paré y [di]je al Señor:
Ayúdame, Señor mío, que no pu[e]do subir un paso. Al postrero de lo alto
se me apareció el Señor, hermosísimo como las demás veces, como cuando
andaba por el mundo, y me dijo: Sube. Y diciendo esto, me hallé subida a
sus pies si[n] trabajo. Y se fue conmigo a la celda de la enferma, y en entra[n]do,
se arrimó de cuestas a la cabecera de la cama, como un enfermero que quiere
regalar a sus enfermos, y me dijo: Pon aquí eso que traes, y vete a dar a las
otras, que yo lo daré a ésta.
Yo fui como si no hubiera tenido mal ninguno, sana y muy aprisa, con
deseos de volver a ver a mi Señor. Y aunque más prisa me di, e[n] cuando
volví no le hallé. Estaba la enlfejrma tan alegre y me dijo: Hermana, ¿qué
es esto que me ha traído, que en mi vida no he comido cosa que tan bien
me sepa? Y no la dije cosa de lo que había visto entonces, aunque nos
queríamos bien; mas después la pregunté si había estado alguien con ella, y
me dijo que no. Y con esto yo callé; mas me dijo que no se había hallado
tan contenta y confortada el alma, que no parecía que [te]nía mal. Y luego
sanaron todas mis enfelrjmas, y la Santa me dijo: Sea priora de ellas y no
me pida licencia; délas lo que viere han menester. (51-52; I, 297-98,
para, i)
En este tiempo nuestra santa Madre se quebró un brazo yendo una noche
al coro a completas; y era ya oscuro y había una escalera antes de entrar en
I el coro, y el mal espíritu la echó de allí abajo, que se quebró el hueso por
medio, y eran grandes los dolores, de que todas estábamos lastimadas, yo
más, porque la quería mucho y sentía sus trabajos y penas.
Y con estos ejercicios que el Señor me daba, tenía otras enfermas y era
provisora y compañera de la cocina, que era menester hacer las cosas de
noche, para acudir a la Santa y a las demás de día. Y como ella me veía
andar tan cansada, tomó una hermana que parecía muy buena y deseosa de
servir a Dios. Esta hermana se descontentó luego de la vida, y fingía que
estaba contenta y que tenía oración, y no tenía ninguna. A la Priora y al
confesor los engañaba, y la querían mucho. Y la dio tentación con la Santa
I y conmigo, y dijo al confesor que yo me confesaba con la madre Teresa mis
I pecados, y él lo creyó y me dijo un día que por qué me confesaba con la
! madre Teresa, que mirase que le engañaba y que yo lo estaba también, que
aquello era caso de inquisición. Yo le dije la verdad, mas no me creyó. Le
dije que aquella hermana estaba descontenta, y dijo que no era así, que era
muy buena y una santa Catalina de Sena, y que yo era la mala y que andaba
en pecados. Y esto pasaba unos días sin que la pobrecita se conociese. (57-
58; I, 300-01, para. 1-2)
Verdaderamente ello era un cielo servirla, que la mayor pena era verla
padecer, que serían poco más o menos catorce años. Porque desde que entré
a tomar el hábito me lle[v]ó a su celda ... Y todo este tiempo no me parecía
un día, y la Santa estaba ya tan acomodada a mi pobre y glosero Isic] servicio,
que no se hallaba sin mí. . . .
Los cinco días que estuvo allí en Alba antes de morir, yo era más m[u]erta
que viva. Y dos días antes que muriese, me dijo estando a solas: Hija, ya es
llegada la hora de mi mlujerte. Eso me atravesó más y más el corazón. No
me apartaba un momento de ella . . .
(La tarde del día en que se murió la Madre Teresa, el cura le dice a la Madre
Ana que vaya a comer.]... Y en yendome, no sosegaba la Santa, sino mirando
a un cabo y a otro. Y la dijo el Padre si me quería, y por señas dijo que sí,
y me llamaron. Y viniendo, que me vi[o], se rió; y me mostró tanta gracia y
amor, que me tomó con sus manos y puso en mis brazos su cabeza; y allí la
tuve abrazada hasta Iquje expiró, estando yo más mlujerta que la misma Santa,
5° UNTOLD SISTERS
que ella estaba tan encendida en el amor de su Esposo, que parecía no veía
la hora de salir del cuerpo para gozarle. (68-69; I, 306-08, para. 17-18)
[Describe la vuelta del cuerpo de Santa Teresa a Avila después de la muerte

de la Santa, tal como le había sido profetizado.] ... Y fue así, que este día
la sacaron de la casa de Alba y la trajeron a la de Avila, donde fue recibida
con grandes alegrías y luminarias; parecía toda la casa un cielo de las luminarias
que había; y la Santa hacía muchos regalos a sus hijas, que no iban a parte
del convento que no se les aparecía y consolaba. (74-75; I, 310, para. 6)
[En el Convento Carmelita de Madrid]

.... Yo me fue [sic] a mi celda y me sentía tan llena de Dios, que en
poniéndome de rodilla, me vino un gran recogimiento; y estando en él, sentí
que Cristo Jesús se puso a par de mí, como jardinero, y puso su brazo debajo
de mi cabeza y me recliné sobre su sacratísimo brazo, y me dijo el Señor:
Aquí verás qué cosa es vivir sin queja y lo que es caridad. Yo entendí como
si me lo dijeran: él que está en caridad está en Dios y Dios en él. Me mostró
haberle agradado mucho lo que había hecho en aquella ocasión. Lo que el
alma sentía aquí en este rato no se puede decir ni creer, ni se pudiera sufrir
si D[i]os no alzara la fuerza de aquel amor que encendía mi espíritu. Era en
aquella gracia lo que dice la esposa en los Cantares: Entrado se ha la esposa
/ en el verjel, entre los brazos de su amado / y a su sabor reposa / el cuello
reclinado / sobre los dulces brazos de su amado.(83; I, 315-16, para. 6)
Otra vez, en este mismo tiempo, había gran falta de agua, que se perdían
los panes, y en es[ta] tierra se hacían hartas procesiones, y el cielo estaba
como de bronce y no se veía en él señal de agua. Y llegó al tomo mi padre
confesor y me dijo—era yo tornera—: ¿No pides [a] Dios que llueva? Yo le
dije: No, Padre, que harto buenos hay que lo pidan. . . . (84; I, 316,
para. 7)
En este convento de Madrid había una religiosa, estando yo allí, que era
muy devota e inclinada a la penitencia; la daban algunas licencias trasordi¬
narias de hacerlas por satisfacer a sus deseos, y vino a enloquecerse y estuvo
siete meses muy furiosa. La teníamos atada con cadenas y las quebraba.
Teníamos a semanas para curar de ella. Y al cabo de estos siete meses, un
día en mi semana, estuvo tan fuerte que mandó la perlada la castigasen. Y
después que la azotaron fuertemente, la dejamos cerrada como solíamos. Y
al amanecer yo dormía, y parecía que me llamaban y desperté. Y vi a nuestra
Santa a la puerta de la celda como si estuviera viva, que me llamaba con la
mano si[n] hablar. Yo me levanté y me fue [sic] en pos de ella y me llevó
hasta la puerta de la que estaba loca y desapareció. Yo no la osaba abrir. Y
como ella me sentía, me dijo: Abra, no tenga miedo, que yo estoy sana. Yo
abrí, que estaba con llave, y la hallé sana y muy alegre. Y me dijo: Aquí ha
estado la Madre de Dio[s] y nuestra santa Madre y me han sanado. Y nunca
más tuvo aquella enfermedad. (87; 1, 318, para. 12)
4- Stanza of the Cántico Espiritual of San Juan de la Cruz; the quotation is not
entirely correctly recalled” (Antolín 83).
[A1 llegar al convento de París, padece un lucha interior y exterior con

respeto a su vocación, porque sus Superiores en Francia quieren que ella tome
el velo negro, mientras que ella prefiere seguir como hermana de velo blanco,
como cuando acompañaba a la Madre Teresa.]
... Y la perlada no lo quería. Yo esta[ba] sola y ella me tenía a veces en
una celda la hora entera, diciéndome cosas de arto [sic] temeridad: que no
los creyese, que me condenaría y que por mí se perdería y relajaría la Orden
en Francia y en España.
Yo estaba combatida de grandes temores, como se puede pensar, porque
en viniéndome a hablar los perlados, decían al contrario y que había de ser,
que el General de España les había dicho lo hiciesen en llegando. Y de las
compañeras, todas eran contrariáis] a la opinión de los perlados, si no era la
madre Leonor de San Bernardo, que siempre fue de esta opinión. En los
caminos y entonces ella me consolaba, que lo había bien menester. Y pasaron
unos días en dares y tomares. Y como la Madre^ estaba fuerte en su parecer
y los perlados en el suyo y[o] entre dos aguas que me combatían, vino el
padre Cotón, Jesuíta, que le trajeron los perlados que me hablase para per¬
suadirme a lo que querían. Y él, como me veía tan perpleja, me dijo: Yo y
todos los de mi convento haremos misas y oraciones nueve días para que Dios
dé luz en este negocio; y lo que sintiéramos, nos ha de obedecer en conciencia.
(118, I, 337-38, para. 1-2)
[Fundadora y Priora en Pointoise]

[En Francia, debe hablar ante las monjas.]^
En esto y en lo demás, como si entendiera la lengua y ellas la mía, nos
entendimos. Pasado el capítulo, las vi que lloraban todas, y las dije: Creo
que estáis tristes de no entender mi lengua. Y me dijeron: Todo lo que habéis
dicho lo hemos entendido sin faltar palabra, y esto nos ha dado tanto gozo,
que de esto lloramos. (124, 1, 339, para. 7)
La vista que traigo otras veces en el alma es como un gusanillo de seda,^

cómo le regalan y dan de comer los que le crían; y estando crecido ya como
ha de estar, empieza de hilar por su boca un hilo delgado de seda y hacer su
capullo, y con el gusto y suavidad que tiene en ello, no siente que se m[u]ere,
hasta que, en dando la virtud que tiene, se queda cerrado en su capullo y se
m[u]ere. Semejante a esto veía mi alma o me la mostraron, y con la misma
blandura y silencio va dando de sí lo que tiene y ha recibido de Dios, y como
el gusano se encierr[a] en un ser de nada; y con un dulce amor que siempre
está hilando en mi corazón, ya no quiero ser, que el morir es la vida del alma,
y querría tener mil vidas que gastar para que Dios me hiciese más gracia; y
las cosas me son i[m]propias si no es dar la vida por el amado. . . .
En otra vez también, pensando en mi poco ser y cosas de mi nada, me
habló el Señor y me dijo: Así te quiero, sin ser ni saber nada, por hacer por
ti lo que yo quiero; que los sabios del mu[n]do con sus prudencias humanas
no me escuchan, que piensan se lo saben todo. (124—25; 1, 34*^1 para. 10—12)
5. Ana de Jesús, Prioress in Paris.

6. Translator’s note: read the [daily] chapter of lessons from the Bible.
7. See Saint Teresa, The Interior Castle, Fifth Mansion, chapter II.
52 UNTOLD SISTERS
[Priora en Paris]
El primer año que yo estuve allí le pasé muy pacífico; y fue de gran consuelo
para mí, que las novicias andaban tan observantes en todo lo que era de
religió[n] y tan tegaladas de Dios, que, con ser damas muy principales las
más, parecían unas niñas y que se habían vuelto al [esjtado de la inocencia,
según su simplicidad, y muy clara[s] y afables conmigo, como si las hubiera
criado. Y aunque por una parte tenía este sujeto de consuelo de ver que
aquellas almas iban tan bien, en mi interior no me faltaban penas en el oficio
de priorfa] y en las ocasiones de él, que aunque estaba, como digo, entre
unos ángeles, el hacer señal y otras cosas y verme tan incapable, que no sabía
leer el breviario y me hacían rezar como si le supiera.
Esto me af]l]igía mucho, que me parecía era el mayor desprecio y humi¬
llación que había tenido; y todo me [ajpretaba. Que no sabí[a] si se había
errado en lo que se había hecho y de los que me lo habían ma[n]dado. Una
vez quise dejar el breviario, estando en esto, me habló el Señor y me dijo;
No le dejes, mortifícate y di lo que supietes; yo lo quiero así. Esto me dijo
estando en oración. Yo me alenté con esto y lo hice. Y de noche, después
de todas tecogidas, estaba las horas mirando el libro lo que había de decir
otro día, y lo que había rezado en el coro lo tomaba a pasat, que como me
había dicho esto el Señor, tenía escrúpulo de no mirarlo bien, aunque estaba
trasudando de congoja. Y después de esto Nuestro Señor me hacía tantas
gracias, que le sentía a par de mí en el coro. Yo andaba con tanta luz y
consuelo, que entendía latín como si lo supiera, en el tiempo que sentía su
compañía, lo que no hacía cuando se me apartaba. Algunas veces estaba tan
cerca, que le pedía se apartase un poco, que se ardía mi corazón de su
presencia, que no le podía sufrir; y así lo hacía. Otras veces me hacía tantas
gracias, mas no se acercaba tanto; mas parecía que estaba entte los ángeles
mi alma, y que lo eran las que rezaban conmigo. Una noche en sueños me
hallé diciendo el breviario, y vi que estaba un ma[n]cebo de buen parecer
mirándome como no acertaba y que iba turbada de su respeto, y me dijo; No
te turbes, que lo que queremos es lo que importa a la obra. . . (131; 1, 343-
44. para. 4-7)
Acabado este año primero, el demonio, padre de cizianias [sic], puso en

los superiores pechos contra mí, que hasta entonces ha, me querían en ex¬
tremo. Y empezó este disgusto que tomaron conmigo, porque empezaron de
temer era de tener yo las monjas tan de mi mano, que si venían los religiosos
de la Orden a la Erancia que todas se quedarían conmigo debajo de su
obediencia. Y era así verdad, que no pensaban ellas otra cosa, porque todo
lo que me veían hacer unas decía[n] era todo santo. Y con estos miedos usaron
de una traza muy fina y ordenada del padre de mentiras, y fueron poco a
poco ganando las monjas. Y de que las tuvieron ya en buena gracia, las
dijeron; No tratéis con la Madre vuestras almas, que su espíritu no es para
vosotras. Ella es extranjera, y más, española. . . .
Y desde principio yo no sabía nada. Y veía a las monjas que se retiraban
de mí; y en lugar de aquella llaneza que me mostraban, era muy al revés. Y
espantada, dije un día al perlado que no sabía lo que era, que las religiosas
no me hablaban ni trataban conmigo después de confesar como de antes, ni
trataban cosa conmigo; que las hallaba en extremo mudadas. Me dijo; No es
menester que os hablen, ni vos a ellas, que vuestro espíritu es malo; no
queremos que se les peg[u]e; tenés demonio y odio contra nosotros, y cosas
de esta manera; y que si yo tenía un demonio, la que trataría conmigo tendría®
dos. . . .
Y desde este prencipi[o] [sic], de día en día crecían las hrullerías. Y el

demonio en mi alma hacía cuanto podía, que como he sido siempre tan
pecadora y remisa en hacer penitencia quizá, y que quizá por no haberla
hecho y satisfecho con ella algo de mis culpas. Dios se ir[r]itó a este tiempo
y se estaba al parecer bien lejos de mí, como me lo había mostrado en
Pontuesa, que se estaba en su cielo y me miraba de lejos. Con esta ausencia
y con las ocasiones cuntinas [sic], yo era bien imperfecta y practicaba bien
mal la virtud que tenía obligación. Algunas veces me enviaban los superiores
a las sú[b]ditas, unas veces unas, y otras otras, que me dijesen mis faltas y lo
que ellos querían. Y yo lo sentía por lo que ellas se echaban a perder de su
simplicidad y espíritu con que habían encomenzado. (133-34; h 344-45)
para. 7-8, 10)
La princesa de Longavila entraba en casa—que era fu[n]dadora—, sabía

todo lo que pasaba, que las monjas se lo decían, que tenía algunas que me
eran fieles, y él que lo decía a todos por despreciarme. Y de que la madre
Ana de Jesús volvió allí para venir a Flandes, que había estado en Dijon,
como he dicho, me halló en aquella aflicción. Yo no le decía nada, aunque
la mostré contento; mas la Princesa se lo dijo, que me trajese con ella, que
temía me habían de matar. Me lo dijo; que si yo quería venirme con ella,
que se consolaría. Yo le dije que no, que hasta ento[n]ces no había hecho
nada ni empleado los deseos de padecer a que había venido. (138; I, 346-
47, para. 14)
[Describe como la atormentan las personas de la casa de Pierre de Bérulle,

su confesor y superior en Francia.)
Y aquellos señores no dejaban ni sosegaban de sus invenciones. Me ponían
a la puerta de fuera unas personas que guardasen el monasterio por ver si yo
escribía o hablaba con algunas personas, y de dentro una tornera de quien
más fiaban, y que ésta se hiciese amiga conmigo para que me sacase mis
pensamientos, que entrando como familiar en mi celda mirarse si yo tenía
algún escrito y me le tomase. Yo lo veía todo y hacía que no lo veía, y
mostraba buena voluntad teniéndola diferente, de hacer confianza de ella
haciendo que la tenía. Yo estaba ya tan llena de sus enredos, que, aunque
era fuera de mi condici[ó]n, decía que una malicia se había de curar con otra;
y han [sic] yo la tenía en disimular en muchas cosas, y esto no me era pequeña
cruz, que salí fuera de mi condición. (140; 1, 347-48, para. 17)
En otra vez estaba un día sangrada. Y vino este perlado [Bérulle] al tomo
y me llamó ... Y estuvo bien una hora litigando en cosas de la Co[n]stitució[n]
y Reg[l]a de algunas cosas que quería mudar. Yo le contradecía, y decía que
él sabía las cosas tan bien como yo. Yo le dije que eso no, que él sabría bien
8. The manuscript here and in other occurrences of this verb form reads temía.
54 UNTOLD SISTERS
de su letras, mas que no tenía experiencia como yo de las cosas de Religió[n],

y que no consentiría en ello. Y me dijo que una cosa era lo de España y otra
lo de Fran[cia]. Yo decía que la Regla y Constitución siempre había de ser
una cosa acá y allá, y que no lo consentiría. Esto duró tanto, que cuando
me aparté estaba tan mala que fue menester tomarme a sangrar; y la sangre
que me sacaron espa[n]tó tanto al médico, que llamó aparte alguna de las
religiosas y le dijo: Mirá por esta Madre, que se va muriendo y es conciencia,
que se ven en la sangre sus aflicciones, y es extranjera y estái[s] obligadas a
mirar por su salud. (141; 1, 348-49, para. 20)
.... Y lo que más me afligía era la confesión, que me había de confesar

con este hombre, que andábamos encontrados por las cosas que yo veía iban
contra Religión, y que una mujer y un ho[m]bre seglar y casados gobernaban
más el convento que yo. Y tenía en esto harto sujeto de murmurar; y el alma
temía; y los quería disculpar y no podía, por[que] las cosas era[n] tan claras
que no me podía cegar. . . .
Y estando una vez en mi celda con estas aflicciones, hice estas coplas que
no sé cómo se me vino a la memoria, que me entretuve con ellas: . . . (143;
I, 349-50, para. 22-23)
En esta borrasca me acordaba en ella que, viniendo a esta fundación, la

santa Madre salió viva, y vi que estando con ella pasábamos por entre espinas
y no nos picaban. Y se llegó a mí la Santa y me dijo: Ve con ánimo, que
ahora yo te acomodaré un poco mejor. Y así fue verdad, que después que me
alejé de estos señores que gobernaban diferentemente de lo que muchas cosas
mandaba la Regla, yo tenía más paz y libertad de hacer lo que en París no
me dejaban; y así estas deshonras y testimonios, que todo era por mí, me
eran como espinas de lejos que no me llegaban a herir. (151; I, 355, para. 3)
[Fundadora y Priora en Tours]

Eri Tur, aunque estaba consolada, que los perlados estaba[n] lejos, poco
me duró, porque tenía una Supriora que era toda de ellos. Les avisó que tenía
yo una portera de quien me fiaba; y me la quitaron y pusieron otra de su
gusto. Y habían hecho que se pusiesen dos llaves al torno, y que ningu[na]
de las dos dejase el tomo abierto, porque viesen si yo escribía a España; y
que ellas las tomasen y se las enviasen a ellos, así las que venían de España
como las que yo escribía allá. . . . (156; I, 358—59, para. 10)
Tomo a decir ... el día san Francisco a la noche, que cuando Dios la
sacó de este mundo, se me apareció acompañada de otras sus hijas, hijas que
[esltaban ya gozando con ella de Dios. Yo, en viéndola, me hallé pensando
que venía por mí a sacarme de tantos peligros. Mas como yo se lo dije con
grande gozo: Madre, llevadme con vos, y no me decía nada, y las compañeras
se volvieron a ella y la rogaban que me llevase, que pasaba mucho. Y [ejlla
las respondió severamente: No la he de llevar, que es menester que viva ahora
y haga lo que yo había de hacer. (163; 1, 361-62, para. 7)
Autobiography’
[Childhood]
One day, when I was so little that I still did not know how to walk properly,
my sisters had me in a room with them while they were deep in their
needlework. And my father went by; he said to them: “See to it that the
child doesn’t fall, for she could be killed.” And after my mother left, my
sisters kept on, one of them saying; “If she should die, she will go see God,”
and the other said, “It’s better that she live, for perhaps she will be His
servant.” The other said again, “Yes, but now it is certain that she will go
to see God, and when they reach seven years, children begin to sin. ” I have
remembered this all of my life. For I noticed it, and did not know how to
speak; but when she finished saying these words, I took heed of who God
was and in that very instant I saw an inward vision, as if I saw the sky open,
and Jesus Ghrist showed Himself to me with a very great and glorious majesty.
But as I had never before seen such a thing, it startled and frightened me;
still I was left with the desire to love God dearly, though for the present I
feared him. (I, 425-26)
This went on until I was ten years old, when my parents died, which was
a great grief to me. I was left with some brothers and sisters, who were like
father and mother to me and were very good. But at that age I was sent to
watch over the flocks in the fields; though it was not far from the village, I
suffered a great deal because of this at first. But later the Lord comforted me,
and the fields became a delight to me, and with the song of the birds I became
recollected, for if they began to sing I was recollected for hours. And many
times the Child Jesus came and sat on my lap and I found Him there when
I came to myself. (23; I, 283, para. 4)
I carried on so much prayer, without knowing what it was, that most of

the time I was inflamed with the love of Jesus, and so I would plan how I
could go where no one would know me as a woman, and everyone would
despise me. And I intended to dress as a man and go, which would give
everyone good reason to think the worst of me. I thought I would not fear
anything that could possibly happen to me. I discussed these things with no
one except a kinswoman who was my own age, and with whom I had been
baptized. She was very good and had good desires, and whenever we went
to Mass or could be together, it seemed our hearts caught fire with the love
of God. And I said to her one day: “Sister, shall we go, the two of us, to
9. The text and the arrangement and numbering of paragraphs comes from the
edition of Obras completas (Complete Works) prepared by Julián Urkiza. The version
that he denominates “A” is found in volume I, pp. 278—377; only our first selection
comes from the version he denominates “B,” which is found in the same volume.
The first page number we give, however, corresponds to the edition prepared by
Antolin, since it is far more widely available.
56 UNTOLD SISTERS
the desert, dressed as men, and do our penance just as the Magdalen did?”
But she was more prudent than I and said: “Sister, those times are long past,
for now there are a thousand risks and dangers.” In spite of all she said, I
urged this idea upon her many times until I won her over, and told her we
would make ourselves cloaks like those worn hy pilgrims, and that one night
we would go. (24; I, 283-84, para. 6)
My brothers and sisters, seeing me so grown-up, spoke of marrying me oif.

But I had other thoughts. I called upon the Virgin, whom I had taken as my
Mother, and on all my saints, and I increased my devotions and penitence.
I’d go to church and hide in a chapel dedicated to the Conception of Our
Lady the Virgin, and barefoot on the ground, kneeling on my bare knees,
I’d call to her for help. And against my desires, thousands of terrible temp¬
tations came to torment and afflict me. And on these occasions the devil
displayed all his wiles. But I would take scourges and lie down naked in a
cave, even though the ground was damp, waiting for the fury of the temptation
to pass. I slept on brambles, and put other rough things in place of my shift,
which I gave to the poor so that they would not know at home that I was
going about without it. And at other times I wore a hair-shirt of bristles.
(27; I, 284-85, para, i)
[With Saint Teresa]

... I did all I could to make myself appear foolish, as if in truth I had
really been wise; indeed no such deception was necessary, for entirely foolish
I certainly am. Once on a Friday of the Cross'® I was taken with the desire
that, in imitation of our Lord and his Passion, the sacristan should slap me
soundly. But because I was the portress, he thought me a good woman. And
I wanted to disabuse him of such a notion, so I said to him one day: “Who
do you take me for? You should know I’m a great sinner and a woman who
has known the world,” wanting to make him think that I was a wicked
woman. He believed this, and I told him: “Therefore, I pray you that from
now on you know this to be true, and when those men come in with the
wood (for we were having some work done), tell one of them to strike that
nun who opens the doot, on top of her veil. You’ll please me greatly, and I
shall give you something for it.” And the lad did so. When the man opened
the door, he struck me. And later I realized what I had done, and that it
was neither good nor helpful to the house, and feeling these scruples, I told
it to the confessor. He scolded me soundly and told out Saint, who was
Prioress of that house, and she kept silent." She said nothing to me, but
10. Translator’s note: un viernes de la cruz: literally, a Friday of the Cross; archaic
opanish term for Good Friday.
11. Urkiza si^gests this incident occurred during the time that Saint Teresa was
Fnoress in the Convento de La Encamación of the Mitigated Rule, which she had
lett in order to begin her reform. She was ordered back as Prioress years later. Ana
de San Bartolomé was at this time in the Convento de San José, the Saint’s first
foundation and the place where Madre Ana had professed. Maria de San Jerónimo
was Prioress. ^
she ordered that the door should never be opened without two nuns present,
for as it was still the beginning and we were few in number, no one had
given such an order till then.
My spirit was all inflamed with the Passion of Jesus Crist, just as it had
been since I was a little girl, and when I went to church and saw the paintings
of our Lord’s Passion, I wept and longed to be poor and abused for His love,
and when 1 left the house I would take off my shoes and walk over stones
and small boulders^^ so they’d hurt me . . .
What 1 am about to say and a bit of what 1 have just said is off the subject
of which I was speaking, but 1 put it here so that 1 do not forget to say it as
1 am commanded. On another Good Friday, when 1 was quite a little girl,
a great preacher had come to our village. My brothers and sisters and I went
to hear the sermon. 1 longed for him to say great things of the death which
Christ had suffered all for love, but the good man said almost nothing to my
taste. I was terribly sad through the whole sermon, seeing him so tepid, and
when I went out I started to cry and my sisters asked, “Child, why are you
crying?” 1 said, “I’m crying because this priest has not preached well.” And
they said to me, “What do you know about such things!”—“If I could have
preached, I would have said it better, by my own lights.” (44-45; I, 294-
95, para. 5-7)
And to return to what I was saying about my natural impulses to aid other
souls which the Lord had shown me: all that was in my power to do to satisfy
these desires of mine seemed nothing at all to me. And when my confessor
saw that my zeal and love for other souls was lasting such a long time, he
told me one day, “Beware, my child, for this charity is of the Devil, and he
is trying to deceive you.” I went to our Saint [Teresa], to ask her if this were
true, and I told her all that had happened. And she told me not to worry,
that it was not the Devil, for she had gone through that same way of prayer,
with confessors who did not understand it. With that I was comforted and
I believed that just as the Saint told me, it was of God. (47; I, 295—96,
para, i)
My nature and my strengths were so sore spent by these impulses, that

they said I would die. And they called in the doctors, who did not know
what illness I had. Some said it was consumption. They gave me many
remedies and made me worse, so that I became so feeble I couldn’t raise my
feet from the ground and all my body was an open sore and they poulticed
it. But none of this did me any good. (49; I, 297, para. 5)
. . . And the night she arrived, the Saint said to me: “Come to my cell,
my Daughter, though at present you are ill.” And indeed it would seem I was
12. This incident offers Madre Ana’s version of the origin of the rule in Saint
Teresa’s Constitution that there must be two nuns present when the cloister door is
opened.
13. Translator’s note; estjuinita, diminutive of escjuina: literally, comer; archaic for
a large boulder thrown in battle from high places.
58 UNTOLD SISTERS
not fit to attend her. There were then five sick nuns abed with fevers, and
one so ill and in such distress she could not eat a thing; her name was Isabel
Baptista.
And in the morning, the day after she returned [from Seville], the Saint
said to me: “Daughter, although you are ill, I wish you to nurse these sick
ones, for there is no one else to care for them.” I kept silent so as not to go
against what obedience commanded, but inwardly I thought: How shall I do
it, when I cannot lift my feet from the ground? And as best I could I went
to the kitchen to prepare something for the one who was the sickest. And
on the way to her cell there was a stairway with fourteen steps. At the foot
of the stairs I stopped and I said to the Lord: “Help me, my Lord, for I cannot
go up one step.” High on the very last step the Lord appeared to me, as
beautiful as all the other times, and He told me, “Come up.” And as He said
this I found myself lifted up to His feet with no effort, and He went with
me to the cell of the sick woman. And entering. He went to the side of her
bed like any infirmarian'"* who wants to cheer His patients, and He told me:
“Put what you’ve brought right here, and go to feed the others, for I shall
feed this one.”
I went off as if nothing at all were wrong with me, healthy and very quick,
wanting to return to see my Lord. But though I went as fast as I could, when
I got back. He was gone. The Sister was as happy as could be, and said:
Sister, what is this you’ve brought me? In all my life I’ve never eaten anything
so tasty.” I spoke not a word of what I’d seen, though we loved each other
well; but later I asked if anyone else had been with her, and she said no.
And with that I kept silent. But she said she’d never been so peaceful and
comforted in her soul, so that it seemed nothing was ill with her. And later
all my sick nuns got well, and the Saint said to me: “Be their Prioress and
do not ask my permission; give them whatever you see they need.” (51-52;
I, 297-98, para, i)
At this time our Holy Mother broke her arm on the way to the choir for
Complin one night. It was quite dark and there was a stairway before the
entrance to the choir, and the evil spirit cast her down the stairs so that she
broke the bone in two, and she had great pain, from which we all suffered.
I most of all, because I loved her very much and felt all of her troubles and
hardships.
And along with these trials which the Lord sent me, I had other sick
women, and I was both Cellaress and kitchen-sister; I had to do all these
things by night, so I could attend to the Saint and the other nuns by day.
When she saw me going about so tired, she took on a Sister who seemed
very good and desirous of serving God. Later, this Sister became dissatisfied
with convent life but pretended that she was happy and that she had the
way of prayer when she had none. She deceived the Prioress and her confessor,
and they loved her very much. And she was tempted against the Saint and
myself, and she told the confessor that I was confessing my sins to Madre
14- Translator’s note: enfermero, infirmarian : in a monastery, one in charge of

the infirmary and care of the sick.
Teresa, and he believed this and asked me one day why 1 was confessing with
Madre Teresa, saying I should take heed because she was deceiving him and
so was 1, and that this was a matter for the Inquisition. 1 told him the truth,
but he did not believe me. 1 told him this Sister was unhappy, and he said
it was not so, that she was very good and a real Saint Catherine of Siena
and that 1 was the bad one and walking in sin. This went on for some days
with the poor girl none the wiser. (57-58; 1, 300-01, para. 1-2)
Indeed, it was a very heaven to serve (the Saint], and the greatest grief 1
had was to see her suffer; it must have been fourteen years, more or less, for
from the first time 1 entered the convent to put on the habit, she brought
me to her cell. . . . Yet all that time seemed less than one short day to me,
and the Saint was by then so well-accustomed to my poor, rough service that
she could not get on without me. . . .
The five days that she was there in [the convent in] Alba before her death,
1 myself was more dead than alive, and two days before she died she said,
when we were alone; “My Daughter, the hour of my death has come.” Those
words pierced my heart in two. 1 did not leave her for one moment . . .
[The afternoon of the day Madre Teresa died, the priest who was with her
told Madre Ana to go eat]. . . . And when 1 went off, the Saint could not
rest, but kept looking from one side to tbe other. And the priest asked if she
wanted me, and by signs sbe said yes, and they called me. And when 1 came
and she saw me she laughed, and showed me such grace and love that she
took me with her hands and placed her head in my arms, and there I held
her till she died, while 1 was more dead than the Saint herself; for she was
so aflame with the Love of her Beloved, that it seemed she could not wait
for the hour in which she would leave her body to be with Him. (68-69; h
306—08, para. 17-18)
[She describes the return of Saint Teresa’s body to Avila after the Saint’s
death, as it was foretold to her.] . . . And so it was, for that day they took
her from the convent at Alba and returned her to Avila, where she was
received with great rejoicing and illuminations. The whole house was like a
heaven with the fireworks they had, and the Saint so favored her Daughters
that wherever they went in the convent, she appeared to them and comforted
them. (74-75; I, 310, para. 6)
[In the Carmelite Convent in Madrid]

... I went to my cell and I felt so full of God that when I knelt down I
became greatly recollected; and in this recollection, I felt Christ come to my
side, dressed as a gardener, and put His arm under my head, and I leaned
back on His most blessed arm and He said to me; “Here you’ll see what it is
to live without complaint, and what true charity is.” I understood then, as
if someone had spoken; ‘He who is in charity is in God, and God in him. ’
He showed me that what I had just done [in the previous incident] had
pleased Him very much. What my soul felt in these moments cannot be
spoken nor believed, nor could it even be endured, did not God raise up the
force of that love that burned in my spirit. My soul was in that same grace
as the Bride says in the Song of Songs; “The Bride has entered the flower
6o UNTOLD SISTERS
garden, into the arms of her Beloved, and she rests in his pleasure, her neck
reclined on the sweet arms of the Beloved.”’^ (83; 1, 315—16, para. 6)
On another occasion, during this time, there was a terrible lack of water,
so that all the wheat crops were lost, and throughout this land the people
made a great many processions, and the sky was like bronze and in it not a
sign of rain could be seen. My father confessor came to the convent turn
and said to me (for I was the Portress)'^: “Do you not pray to God for rain?
And I replied: “No, Father, for there are plenty of good men who are asking
for that. . . .” (84; I, 316, para. 7)
At that convent in Madrid, there was a nun, when I was there, who was
very devout and given to penitence; they gave her unusual permission to do
penances to satisfy her desires, and she ended up by going mad and was quite
demented for seven months. We had her bound with chains and she broke
them. We took turns by weeks to tend to her; and at the end of the seven
months, one day during my week, she was so vehement that the Prioress
ordered them to punish her. And after they had whipped het soundly, we
locked her up, as we usually did. At daybreak I thought I heard someone
calling me and I woke up. And 1 saw our Saint at the door of my cell as if
she were alive, beckoning to me with her hand without speaking. I got up
and went after her and she brought me to the door of the woman who was
mad, and then she disappeared. 1 dared not open it. But when the woman
heard me, she said: “Open up, have no fear, for 1 am well.” 1 opened it,
since I had the key, and found her sane and very happy. And she told me:
“The Mother of God has been here with our own Blessed Mother, and they
have cured me.” And she never suffered that illness again. (87; 1, 318,
para. 12)
(On her arrival at the convent in Paris, Madre Ana undergoes an inward
and external struggle with respect to her vocation, because her Superiors in
France wish her to take the black veil, while she prefers to remain a lay
Sister, which was her condition under Madre Teresa.]
. . . But the Prioress did not wish it. I was alone and she would sometimes
keep me in a cell for an hour at a time, telling me bold and reckless things:
that I should not believe the Prelates, that I would be the cause of my own
condemnation, and that on my account the entire Order in France and Spain
would become corrupted and be lost.
I was agitated by great fears, as you might imagine, for when the Ptelates
came to speak with me, they said the opposite and that it must indeed be
so [i.e., that 1 must take the black veil]—for the Superior General of the
Spanish Order had told them to do this as soon as 1 arrived. And of my
companions, all were against the opinion of the Prelates, save Madre Leonor
15. Footnote of Antolin: “Stanza of the Cántico Espiritual of St. John of the Cross;
the quotation is not entirely correctly recalled” (83).
16. Translator’s note; tornera; doorkeeper of a convent, who answers the turn, the
revolving shelf at a convent door which permits communication without visual contact.
More Than One Teresa 6i
de San Bernardo, who was always of the same opinion as myself. On the
road and there in Paris she comforted me, which I certainly needed. And
many days passed in these squabbles. And as the Mother ISuperior]'^ held
staunchly to her view and the Prelates to theirs, 1 was tom between the two
sides. Then came the Jesuit Father Cotón Isic], brought by the Prelates to
talk with me and persuade me to do what they wanted. And when he saw
me so perplexed, he told me; “I and all in my convent will say prayers and
Masses so that God may illuminate us in this matter, and what we then
decide, you shall be bound in conscience to obey.” (ii8; I, 337-38,
para. 1-2)
[Founder and Prioress in Pointoise]

[In France, she must read the daily chaptet before the nuns.]
In this and in everything else, as if I could understand their language and
they mine, we understood one another. When the Chapter was done I saw
that every one of them was crying, and I said to them: “I think you must be
sad because you do not understand my language.” And they told me: “Every¬
thing that you have said, we have understood without missing one word,
and this makes us so glad that we are weeping.” (124; I, 339, para. 7)
The vision I have in my soul at other times is like a little silk-worm,

and how it is fed and cosseted by those who care for it, and when it is properly
grown it begins to spin a thin silken thread through its mouth to make its
cocoon, and it finds so much pleasure and sweetness in this that it does not
feel it is dying until, in giving of its own virtue, it closes itself in its cocoon
and dies. Just so did I see my soul, or was shown it, and with the same
gentleness and silence it gives what it has, which it has received from God.
And like the worm, it encloses itself in a life of emptiness,'^ and with the
sweet love which is always spinning its thread in my heart I no longer wish
to live, for in dying is the life of the soul; and I long to have a thousand
lives to give, that God might grant me still more grace; and nothing is right
for me but that I give my life for my Beloved. . . .
Yet another time, thinking of my littleness and how I was nothing, the
Lord spoke to me and said: “I love you just this way, without your being or
knowing anything, so that I may do through you whatever I desire; for the
wise men of this world with their worldly knowledge take no heed of me, as
they think they know all there is.” (124-25; I, 340, para. 10-12)
[Prioress in Paris]
I passed my first year there [in the Carmelite Convent of Paris] very
peacefully; and it was a great comfort to me that the novices were so observant
in everything having to do with religion and were so favored by God, so
that, though most were very important ladies, they were like little girls who
17. Ana de Jesús, Prioress in Paris.

18. See Saint Teresa, The Interior Castle, Fifth Mansions, chapter II.
tQ. Translator’s note; literally, “in a being of nothingness.”

62 UNTOLD SISTERS
had returned to the state of innocence, for such was their simplicity, and
they wete very open and affectionate with me as if I had raised them. And
though on the one hand I had this cause for consolation, seeing that these
souls progressed so well, yet inwatdly 1 had plenty of hardships in the office
of Priotess and its duties; fot although 1 was, as 1 say, among these angels,
marking the place and other such things were more than I could do, fot 1
did not know how to read the breviary and they made me lead prayers as if
1 did know.
This was a great affliction to me, fot it seemed the wotst disgrace and
humiliation 1 had ever known; and everything distressed me: for 1 did not
know if what had been done had all been an error, perhaps on the part of
those who had directed me. Once 1 wanted to quit reading the breviaty, and
as 1 was thinking this the Lord spoke to me and said: “Do not put it away,
but humble yourself and say whatever you can; for such is my will.” He said
this as 1 was praying. This cheered me and 1 did so; and at night, after all
the others had withdrawn, I spent hours looking in the book at what I had
to say the next day. And what 1 had prayed in the choir came to pass; for
as the Lotd had told me this, 1 felt compelled to study it well, although 1
was sweating with distress. And after this. Our Lord granted me such grace
that 1 felt Him at my side in the choir. Such light and comfort came to me,
that 1 understood Latin as if 1 knew it, during the time in which 1 felt His
company, which was not true when He went away from me. Sometimes He
was so close, that 1 begged Him to draw away a little, fot my heart was so
inflamed by His presence that 1 could not bear it; and so He did. Other times
He granted me that same grace, but did not come so close; yet still it seemed
my soul was among the angels, and that they were the ones who prayed with
me. One night in my dreams 1 found 1 was saying the breviary, and 1 saw
there was a fine-looking young man watching me, who saw how I made
mistakes and how embarrassed 1 was on his account, and he said, “Don’t be
embarrassed, for our intentions are the most important part of our deeds.” . . .
(r3i; I, 343, para. 4-7)
At the end of that first year, the Devil, that old troublemaker, caused my
Superiors to suspect me; for until then they had loved me with all their
hearts. And all their annoyance with me started because they began to fear
that 1 had all the nuns in the palm of my hand, so that if the priests of the
Order should come to France [from Spain], all the nuns would stay with me
under obedience to them [the Spanish authotities]. And this was quite true,
for indeed the nuns had no othet notion, because some said that every single
thing they saw me do was holy. And having these fears, the Supetiors made
use of a very cunning scheme, planned by that Father of Lies, and little by
little they won over the nuns; and as soon as they had them in their good
graces, they told them: “Don’t tell the Mother anything concerning your
souls, for her spirit is not fot you. She is foreign, and what is mote, Span¬
ish. ...”
At first 1 knew nothing of all this. 1 saw how the nuns pulled back from
me, and instead of that cordiality they had shown me, it was another matter
entirely. And one day, quite confounded, 1 said to the Prelate that 1 did not
know what it was, but that the nuns, once they had professed, would not
speak or direct themselves to me as they used to, nor would they say a word
to me; I found them very much changed. He told me: “There is no need for
them to speak to you, nor you to them, for your spirit is evil; we do not wish
this to infect them, for you have a demon and hatred against us,” and such
things; and that if I had one devil, the nun who spoke with me would then
have two. . . .
And from this beginning, the quarrels increased from day to day. And the
Devil did all he could in my soul, for I have always been quite a sinner and
perhaps too remiss in doing penance, and perhaps because I hadn’t done it
and so answered for some part of my errors, God became exasperated at this
time. It seemed He was a good ways distant from me just as when in Pontoise,
He had shown me how He was in His heaven and watching me from afar.
What with His absence and the continual temptations, I was far from perfect,
and I practiced pretty poorly the virtue that was my obligation. A few times
my Superiors sent the nuns of lesser degree to me (sometimes certain ones,
and at other times, others), to tell me my faults and whatever else the
Superiors wished. And I was much grieved at how the nuns were allowing
their simplicity, and the spirit with which they had begun, to go to ruin.
(133-34; I. 344-45. para. 7-8, 10)
The Princess of Longueville came into that house, which she had founded;
and she knew all that was happening because the nuns told her, for I had a
few who were faithful to me, and she knew too, who it was saying these
things to discredit me. And when Madre Ana de Jesús returned there on her
way to Flanders (for she had been in Dijon, as I have said) she found me in
this state of affliction. I told her nothing, though I made a show of con¬
tentment; but the Princess told her all, and said she should take me with
her, for she feared they would kill me. She told me this; that if I wanted to
go with her it would be a comfort to her. I told her no, for I had not yet
accomplished anything nor made use of my desires to suffer, for which I had
come. (138; I, 346-47, para. 14)
[She describes how she is tormented by persons of the household of Pierre

de Bérulle, her confessor and superior in France.]
And those gentlemen wouldn’t stop or take rest from their tricks. At the
outer door they put some of the people who watched over the monastery to
see whether I wrote or spoke to anyone, and at the inner door they put a
Portress, one of the nuns they trusted most, so she could become friendly
with me and search out my thoughts, that by coming as a friend into my
cell to see whether I had written anything, she could then take it from me.
I saw through all this and pretended not to know, and I showed her my good
will, treating her quite differently [than I felt] to gain her confidence, pre¬
tending that I trusted her. I was by then so fed up with their schemes that,
although it was foreign to my disposition, I told myself that one wrong had
to be righted by another; and so I deceived her in many things, which was
no small cross for me to bear, being so foreign to me. (140; I, 347-48,
para. 17)
64 UNTOLD SISTERS
Another time, I had been bled one day. This Prelate^ came to the door
and called me . . . And for a whole hour he was disputing points in the
Constitution and the Rule tof the Order] about some things he wanted to
change. I contradicted him, and he said he knew these things quite as well
as I. I told him that was not so; that he must be great in book-learning, but
that he had no experience, as I did, of matters concerning the Order, and
that I would never agree to it. And he told me that Spain had one way, but
France had quite another. I said that the Rule and Constitution must always
be one and the same, both here and there, and I would not agree. This went
on for so long, that when 1 came away I was so ill they had to bleed me
again; and the blood they took from me so startled the doctor, that he called
aside one of the nuns and said; “Care for this nun; she is dying and it is a
matter for your conscience, for her afflictions can be seen in her blood, and
she is a foreigner, and you are all obliged to care for her health.” (141; I,
348-49, para. 20)
. . . And what most afflicted me was confession, for I had to confess with
this man, while we were quite opposed because of those things which I
observed going against the Order, and especially that a secular woman and
man, a married couple, governed the convent more than I. And there was
more than enough cause for gossip in all this, and my soul was afraid; I wanted
to forgive them and I could not, for things were so clear 1 could not close
my eyes to them. . . .
And one time when I was in my cell, afflicted by these things, 1 wrote
these verses, I don’t know how; they came into my mind and 1 comforted
myself with them . . . (143; I, 349-50, para. 22-23)
In the midst of this peril I recalled that, when I had arrived at this
foundation, the Holy Mother came out to the road, just as if she had been
alive, and I saw that when I was with her, we passed among thorns and they
did not prick us. And the Saint came to me and said; “Go with courage, for
from now on I will shelter you a bit better.” And it was so; for after I went
away from those men who governed so differently in many respects from what
the Rule commands, I had more peace and liberty to do what they would
not allow me to do in Paris. And so these disgraces and accusations, all aimed
at me, were like thorns afar off that could not wound me. (151; I, 355,
para. 3)
[Founder and Prioress in Tours]

Although in Tours I was comforted because the Prelates were far away,
this did not last long, for I had a Subprioress who belonged to them entirely.
She told them that I had a Portress in whom I confided, and they took her
from me and in her place put another who was more to their liking. And
they had arranged it so that two keys would have to be put to open the turn,
and neither one would open it alone, so that they might see whether I was
writing to Spain; and so the nuns would take my letters and send them to
20. Bémlle.
those Prelates, and so too they took the letters that arrived from Spain, just
as they took those that 1 sent there. . . . (156; 1, 358-59, para. 10)
As I was saying ... on Saint Francis’s Day, at night—which was when

God took her from this world—she appeared to me accompanied by some of
her Daughters who with her were already enjoying the company of God.
Upon seeing her, 1 found myself thinking that she had come for me, to take
me out of all these dangers. But though 1 said to her with great joy: “Mother,
take me with you,” she said nothing, and my Sisters surrounded her and
begged her to bring me, because 1 was suffering so. And she answered them
sternly: “1 shall not bring her because for now she must live and do what 1
would have done.” (163; 1, 361-62, para. 7)
Cartas^ ^
[Amberes] 2 de enero [1617/1618]
Y quite sus imaginaciones de que me leen sus cartas, que y han [sic] verlas
abiertas, no las ven. La que piensa, está más descuidada en eso y cansada,
que lo dejaría todo si no fuese a fuerza, porque no tengo otra que tenga la
lengua, que de Ana de San Bartolomé [Anne de St.-Barthélémy] no se puede
fiar un día, que es su compañera y todo lo deja, que es seca como un palo.
Así que no le dé cuidado, que yo la leo mejor que la mía, y a la hora la
rompo y va al fuego. . . .
Yo la quisiera alegrar con mis coplas que [he] hecho en la cama, mas no
tengo lugar. Díganos las suyas y si se han alegrado, que acá lo han sido mucho,
que yo las hacía hacer boberías; y han hecho un juego de monsior de BerueF^
y sus consortes, y madama Acaria” era Dionisia,” que nos mataba de risa; y
Angelito,Ymon,^^ lo mismo.Dígalo a mi Madre,” que no podré ser tan
21. All letters are to Ana de la Asención, from Ana de San Bartolomé, and are
taken from volume II of the Obras completas (Complete Works), edited by Julián Urkiza.
All annotations in brackets are his.
22. Pierre de Bemlle, their Superior.
23. Madame Acarie (1566-1618), an important personage in the transactions that

brought the Spanish Carmelite nuns to France, first organized a group of young French
women around her who later professed as Discalced Carmelites; she then entered the
convent herself and was beatified in 1791.
24. Marie de St.-Denis, a French nun in the convent.
25. Angélique du St.-Esprit, a nun in the convent.
26. Edmond de Messa, who was in Madame Acarie’s service, accompanied Bérulle
to Spain to negotiate bringing the Spanish Carmelite nuns to France. Ana de San
Bartolomé met him on that trip.
27. The author here refers to theatrical spectacles the nuns put on inside the
convent to amuse each other. This activity was an integral part of Teresian tradition
of conventual recreation and was practiced in all Discalced Carmelite convents.
28. Leonor de San Bernardo, Ana de San Bartolomé’s dear friend and companion
from Spain.
66 UNTOLD SISTERS
larga; cuando vaya Aldré las escribiré, si Dios es servido. Angelito ha sido la
priora el día de los Inocentes, que lo hacía famosamente. Yo se lo digo por
recrearla, que lo deseo que lo esté y que se asegure [l]a amo y quiero bien,
hija mía. Y quédese a Dios. . . . (417-18)
Amberes 26 de abril [1617]
Aunque no la escribo, se lo deseo y pido al Señor y la tengo muy en mi

memoria. Dígame como se halla y si está ya más [fu]erte que antes en su
espíritu, que me consolaré. Acá todas la encomiendan a Dios y deseo le luzca
y que esté ya libre en su espíritu; que se fíe de Dios, que la ama y quiere más
que ninguna criatura. Crea esto y ámele mucho, que no hallará otro amigo
más fiel. Y con esto que hiciese, tendrá salud, (qu]e la digo de verdad que el
amor de las criaturas, como es de carne y amor propio, que enferma nuestros
cuerpos y no nos [es] de provecho sino lo que ve por experiencia. Mire, hija,
mía, que la puedo yo servir, aunque nos queramos la una a la otra, sino lo
que ha sido tener pena de apartamos. Sea ya más sabia, y desengáñese a que
aunqlue] yo la quiero y haré por ella delante de Dios lo que pudiere para que
la dé su gracia, mas para el gusto natural no sirve nada; y por tanto, hija
mía, sosiégese con Dios, que la ayudará; y en todo lo que yo pudie[re la]
serviré. No pu[e]do más, carísima. Dése [toda] a Dios. . . . (430)
Amberes [15 de agosto 1617]
.... Y crea, mi hija carísima, que cuando la escribo secamente, como

bien lo dice, que no es falta de amor, que se la tengo a su alma como a la
mía. Mas ¿no sabe que dicen un refrán: El que te quisiere bien, te hará llorar,
porque te hablará sin velo? Esto tenga de mí, que todo lo que la digo es con
un deseo de su paz y que sea libre sobre sus pasiones, que son nuestros
enemigos, y venciéndolas y no nos escuchando a nuestros pensamientos, será
la paz en casa, y la paz es nuestro cielo en la tierra. Ayúdese, carísima, y crea
que es esto lo que la conviene y dejar hacer a Dios, que si le es agradable,
nos tomará a jun[tar], y si no, no lo hemos de querer, sino desear da[r]le
gusto; cuatro días que hemos de vivir en este pobre mundo, no es bien que
seamos descuidadas de nuestro bien. . . . (442-43)
Amberes 23 de abril [1618]

Jesucristo sea en la alma de V.C. [Vuestra Caridad], hermana mía carísima,
y la dé su Santo Espíritu tan copioso como puede [y] yo se le [sic] deseo. Bien
edificada estoy de la resolución que ha tenido para despedir la Inglesa. El
haberla yo dicho lo que la dije, no fue porque yo tenía de ello revelación ni
otra cosa que se le pareciese, mas por ver si estaba consolada en su vocación
o si tenía deseos de más libertad, que esto no me fuera agradable ni me causara
sino grande desamor con mi hija; y si algún pensamiento de esto he tenido,
me huelgo por sacar la verdad. Buena obra es la que hace esa señora, ma[s]
imperfecta, porque no la quiere sino al Ordinario; y otro día dirá que es ella
la que ha de mandar y a quien han de obedecer. ¡Lilnjda cosa es su humor!
Dios nos hace merced de libramos de ella; y a mi hija la haga santa. . .
(458-59)
Amberes 2 de enero [(1618/) 1619]

Jesucristo sea en el alma de V.D., hermana mía carísima, y la haya dado
muy santas Pascuas y entradas de años como yo se lo deseo y he pedido para
mi hija, que la quiero como a mi alma. Y aunque no la escriba, tenga esto
por cierto: que es mi hija querida. Y aunque tengo poco lugar, la escribo y
le envío las coplas que me pide, las de la calenda, para levantarlas y después
para bailar en el coro. Como habíamos tanto bailado por los celcas [sic], hice
para alegrarlas en el coro esas que dicen: Levántate, Eras, que oigo algún
ruido, no venga al ejido algún desolaz, porque las pueda leer; y porque estoy
con un buen catarro, las ha escrito la [her]mana Clara de la Cruz.^® Yo las
envío con el hermano Jerónimo porque no diga se han perdido como las
otras, y a mi carísima Madre dé los buenos años de mi parte, que por lo dicho
no escribo; le haré otro día. . . . (473-74)
[Amberes agosto-septiembre 1619]

... En lo que toca a su demanda le diré l[o] que siento, pues me lo
pregunta: yo hallo por mej[o]r que ya que está en este punto, que se resuelvan
y no se detengan ahora en ternuras del natural, sino que tenga ánimo para
esos sentimientos pasarlos como varones y no que las tengan por mujeres;
cada vez que haya de ser la partida harán lo mismo. Si el quedarse de esta
vez [h]viera de ser para siem[p]re, buena fue la quedada, mas no siendo, [se]rá
mejor ahora que más tarde; y aunque tenga mi hija pocas monjas, se acomo¬
darán a trabajar cada una lo que pudieren y la ayudarán, que así se han hecho
[todo]s los principios. . . . (514)
[Amberes noviembre-diciembre lórq]
Ahora, después que ha venido el padre Gregori[o] del castillo me ha dado

la letra de Vuestra Reverencia. Hi[j]a de mi alma, sería ocasión lo que en
ella me dice de enojarme, que hasta ahora, gracias a Diofs], no he tenido
sujeto ni mi cara hija me le da enojo con ella; al contrario, cada día la quiero
más y la deseo servir en lo que se ofreciere. ¿Por qué admite tales pensamientos
no habiendo por qué lo pensar? No los tenga, hija mía, que si yo tuviera algo
que me diera pena, yo lo dijera a mi querida hija; no dude de eso y esté muy
sosegada, que la amo como a mi alma y la deseo harto ver. . . .
... En lo de la estufa [he] escrito a Lieja;^° hasta que me respondan, no
sé lo que cuestan; yo también lo deseo saber por la nuestra y también se
quedará sin poner po[r] este invierno hasta otro. . . . (538-39)
[Ambres ca. noviembre 1620]
Pésame esté con pena. Tenga ánimo y no se abata por una faltilla que fue
inco[n]siderada y con buen fin. No se es[pa]nte, que en esas y otras nos deja
29. Bom in Madrid as Clara Laura de Strozzy, Clara de la Cruz (1597-1658) had
been a lady-in-waiting of Princess Isabel Clara Eugenia for years. She became Ana
de San Bartolomé’s good friend and secretary and copied out a large portion of her
writings and of the documents for beatification.
30. This refers to a monastery of male Discalced Carmelites who had founded
there in 1618.
68 UNTOLD SISTERS
el Señor caer algunas veces para proba[r]nos o, por mejor decir, que nos
conozcamos, que Dios ya nos conoce y sabe que somos llenos de faltas, mas
dejándonos caer en ellas nos hace advertir lo que somos; y no gusta de que
nos espantemos, que es señal estábamos descuidadas de nuestra miseria, mas
quiere algunas veces vemos desengañadas y que hagamos faltas, que nos ama
tanto que por nuestro bien no toma pot ofensa suya la cosa. . . . Mire las
cosas que hizo nuestra Santa cuando le dejó abandonada, el ánimo y alegría
con que sufría las murmuraciones. Sea su hija en ser varonil, y hecha la cosa,
diga al [. . .]^' Señor[:] Ya está hecho. Perdóname y seamos amigos como de
antes. Yo me enmendaré. Y de esta manera se han de tomar las cosas, y no
afligiéndose de poco, que es acobardar el espíritu y hacerle pusilámin[e].
¡Animo, hija mía, para otras cosas mayores!, que ésta no es grande, que otras
están por venir. Alégrese, que si me está triste me enojará más. Olvide lo
que ya no se [. . y dígame como está. . . . (589-90)
[Amberes, últimos meses de 1620]
Esto hago para enviarla unos parchecillos,que cr[e]o es todo lo más que
tiene mala madre;^^ de hay [sic] le viene la desgana de comer. Si la [hujbieran
puesto una ventosa al vientre cuando la sangraron, estuviera mejor. Y si
tienen una pequeña escudilla que sea bien redonda y que no esté el borde
roto, caliente y ú[n]tela con una gota de aceite y un ajo, y verá como la hace
provecho; y si esta escudilla fuese de madera, sería mejor. Hágala hacer, que
el hermano Jerónimo sabe adonde se hacen, que ha de ser de roble; mas en
tanto que la hacen, trfaiga] este parchecillo, y no coma cosa de vin[agre ni
de queso] cuando está así. Si yo la pudie[ra curar esjtuviera mejor, que yo
cr[e]o no la [curan bien] su flaqueza, que me da pena. Ah[ora esfuércese] a
comer y alegra[r]se, que ese [mal con la triste]za crece. Y esa su novicia si
t[iene buen ánim]o, espero que será buena y que se muda[rá]; es huérfana, y
Dios hará por ella como padre, la asistirá y dará la gracia de ser buena religiosa.
Y dígame como le va en los ejercicios, y déle esa cosita que va con ésta de
nuestra santa Madre, que traiga consigo, y V. Rr. tome la otra y la traiga a
su estómago. . . . (606)
[Amberes ca. 1620]
No sé por qué me dice si estoy enojada, que no tengo yo enojo con V.

Rr., sino que la quiero mucho, y cuando la digo algo es porque la amo más;
no me [ajcuerdo mas del sujeto en acabándoselo de decit, ni sé por qué lo
dice.
Hija mía, siempre la quiero bien, y aunque no la escriba a menudo, no es
falta de amor, sino que me ocupo en mis obligaciones lo que puedo, que en
una casa siempre ha[y] labor que hacer a la que ha de cuidar de todo. Yo la
31. This line is crossed out in the manuscript by another hand.

32. Here, half a line is crossed out by another hand.
33- In a good example of her creative orthography. Ana de San Bartolomé here
writes mala madre” instead of “mal de madre” for menstrual cramps.
digo en verdad, hija mía, que no me queda tiempo muchos días para rezar
las horas, que hay algunas a quien hablar; yo que soy para poco, que así me
falta el tiempo. Y no tenga esos pensamientos que no la quiero, que ya la he
dicho que, aunque no la escriba, no la olvido en mis pobres oraciones. De
lo demás, todo pasa; no es menester tomar a mirar lo que una vez hemos
hablado las dos, sino, el rato que nos quedare, darle a Dios, que es donde
hallaremols] consuelo y fue[r]zas y todo lo demás que las criaturas no nos
pueden dar.
Yo me voy a capítulo, que ayer tuvimos el Santísimo Sacramento fuera y
no se pudo hacer. . . . (609-10)
[Amberes mediados de 1621]
Yo he recibido su billete y me pesa de la ocasión que ti[e]ne de pena.

Cierto, nuestro Padre” me tomó a mí así por[que] me vino a decir; sin decirle
yo nada me dijo: el padre Veda no debe de confesar aquí a nadie sino las
hermanas legas. Yo le digo ¡Bueno efe que diga V. Rr. eso! Todas nos confesamos
con él, que no tenemos otro; solas las flamencas, tres o cuatro, van al padre
Juan. Y él me dijo: Es bueno el padre Veda. Yo le dije: Sí es, por cierto. Y
se quedó así.
Yo, hasta ahora que V. Rr. lo dice, no había pensado por qué lo decía.
Yo, mi hija, ya la he dicho como yo le hablé claro cuando vi que las monjas
las hacía que le obedeciese[n], y le dije que yo no lo hallaba bueno, que, por
hacer lo que él las mandaba, faltaban en lo que tenían de obligación, con
el amor que la gente moza toma a los confesores. El se [quedó] confuso mucho,
y dijo que no lo haría más y que si pensara me enojara, no lo hiciera. Ahora
las dice, cuando le piden licencia, que no hagan más de lo que yo quisiere.
Así es menester, mas a los demás Padres no les digo yo nada, que ellos se
quieren más unos a otros que a nosotras. Y así lo adobe V. Rr. como pudiere,
y se humille con nuestro Padre y le pida perdón y le diga que haga como
Padre lo que quiere y que no esté enojado, que lo que habló lo dijo con
llaneza como se ha de hablar con el perlado, y que la perdone, que como
había visto alguna brullería, lo dijo, mas que las mujeres somos fáciles y quizá
ellas tenían la culpa, y que V. Rr. quiere su Reverencia se [l]a eche y perdone
y no esté más enojado. No hay otro remedio con nuestro Padre. Hágalo, mi
hija; mejor es que le escriba. Esta quémela, no la vea nadie, que así hago yo
con la suy[a]; estas cosas [son] para nosotras sólo. Si el padre Prior la dijere
algo, diga lo que le parece y no que me lo dijo. . . . (658-59)
[Amberes ca. agosto 1621]
No he podido responder a la de V. Rr. antes de ahora. Por lo que toca a

la carta de nuestro Padre, no estaba mala, que bien cr[e]o le satisfaría el
hallarse V.Rr.; mas cuando nuestro Padre ha mostrado disgusto de una cosa,
aunque sea agradable a él el humillarse, se queda entero, no hace que se paga
de aquello que le dicen; mas yo sé que le [h]abrá sido agradable. No esté con
34. Tomás de Jesús, Superior General of the Discalced Carmelites in Flanders.

70 UNTOLD SISTERS
cuidado, que la cosa no es tan grave, y el padre General bien quiere que si
un confesor no es a consuelo, que se mude. Mas de este punto no lo trate
V. Rr. con ninguno de los Padres; déjelo estar, que se madure, que a poco a
poco se hará. Trate con el padre Prior con claridad a lo que de esto ha sentido,
y diciendo las verdades y la ocasión que ha tenido. Diga también: El padre
Veda es muy bueno y virtuoso que lo que en esto [ha] habido, cr[e]o lo hacía
por mejor; mas como yo ve[o] acá las cosas, no pensé que a nuestro Padre le
pesara que yo no lo dijera. A mí me pesa, que no deseo enojarle, que le debo
mucho; mas V. Rr. me disculpe si he errado, que, como digo, mejor veo ya
la ligereza de las que tengo conmigo, que el confesor no lo pu[e]de saber, y
las mujeres con poco nos pagamos; faltan a lo que tiene[n] obligación. Esto
haga con el padre Prior, que es discreto; la ayudará mucho, y tenga paciencia,
que todo se hará a pocfo] a poco bien. . . .
Siempre hay que merecer. El es bueno, mas es menester cordura y disemu-
[lajr algunas veces; decirle, como le he dicho, a él las cosas con buen color.
Adiós, hija mía, que no puedo más. Acá [ha] estado e[ padre Prior, mas no
[l]e he dicho palabra y la seré fiel, y seámoslo la una a la [o]tra. (670-71)
[Amberes primeros meses de 1622]
En lo que me dice que haga con nuestros Padres, yo sé que no la quitarán

la libertad que pide y que le darán los confesores como a todas nosotras, que
así me lo han dicho; y que lo que las dieron para fu[n]dar no se lo quitarán
jamás, y que tienen por ignorancia lo que repugnan en esa casa las Consti¬
tuciones, porque están más amplias la licencia en éstas, más que en las pasadas.
V. Rr., hija mía, lo mire y no se aflija. Mire lo que dice Contentus mundi,^^
que es a ese propósito: Anda como quieres y por donde quieres, que no
hallarás reposo sino en la simple obediencia. Y San Pablo dice: El que resiste
a la obediencia de sus perlados, resiste al Espíritu de Dios.^® Mire en esto,
hija mía, que por lo que la amo deseo no se aparte de nosotras. Y ¡cuánto
más honrada estará V.Rr. y sus hijas debajo de una santa Religión, que dejarse
gobernar de unos clérigos mocitos que no saben de Religión! Y ellos mismos
dicen [que] hacemos lo que nos mandan; y quien quiere pleitos, no falta qui”
acuerda, mal o bien. Créame que siento lo que oigo decir, y no puedo creer
que sale del corazón de V.Rr., sino que la afligen. Tenga coraje, que si sig[u]e
lo que es más perfecto. Dios y los perlados la ampararán como a hija. Y en
todo lo que yo pudiere, la ayudaré para su consuelo, que de otra manera no
le tendrá. . . . (699-701)
[Amberes primeros meses de 1622]
No tenga pena ni la dé a sus hijas, que yo cr[e]o que, pues, la fundación

se hizo con condición que tuviesen libertad, que no le hará otra cosa. Con-
. 35- The author writes “Contentus mundi” here instead of “Contemptus mundi": she
IS referring to the book, De Imitatione Chnsti, a popular religious tract at the time.
36. Cf. Rom. 13, 2.
37. An example of Ana de San Bartolomé’s style of mixing French into the Spanish.
suélelas, que en viniendo nuestro Padre, yto] haré por ellas todo lo que
pudiere. Yo cr[e]o Ino] harán otra cosa de lo que está concertado. . . . (701)
[Amberes ca. 1623]
Me he holgado de ver su letra. Y en lo que piensa que los Padres me han

mandado no la escriba, no es así, que ellos no tienen ese cuidado ni le es
menester, que en lo que es caridad y religión, antes ellos lo aman y desea[n]
lo mejor. V. Rr. es la que tiene la culpa, que se ha apartado y no ha querido
mi conversación; y pues no la hallaba buena, no me ha obligado que yo la
divierta más con mis cartas. ¡Hartas la [he] escrito con más amor del que
e[n] ellas ha hallado V. Rr.! Y aquí estoy; si me quisiere mandar alguna cosa,
no dejaré de servirla, que no me tengo por mejor que otra ninguna. En lo
pasado pensé que hablaba con quie[n] yo quería bien, y así lo hacía con amor,
y en cualquiera ocasión que me quiera, me hallará. Yo seré siempre en mi
opinión de súbdita indigna hija de mis perlados; las demás hagan lo que
quisiere[n], no es a mí a dar cuenta por nadie. . . .
Di[o]s se lo pague, que me envió la jerga, que me ha hecho caridad.
(784-85)
[Amberes comienzos de enero (1622/) 1624]^®
Yo, mi Madre, no la he dejado de escribir por falta de voluntad, que siempre

se la tengo y la amo en el Señor muy de corazón, sin acordarme de otra cosa
sino la caridad [que] nos obliga [a] amamos. Y esto haga V. Rr. por mí, se lo
suplico, para que cuando nos veamos en el cielo nos conozcamos por hijas
de Dios; y por tanto, nos ayudemos.
En lo que me pide V. Rr. de las coplas, no he hecho ninguno, mi Madre;
las de las hermanas he tenido por mías y las he alegrado con ellas todo lo
que he podido; no las he dejado estar tristes, han sido todas muy alegres, y
allá creo no será menos. . . (786-87)
[Amberes julio-agosto 1624]
Mas quisiera hablarla que escribi[r]la, mas ya que no p[u]ede ser, haré esto
para decirla que esta noche en sueños me hallé con ella, la veía y hablé de
cosas. Y deseo que aunque sea sueño, que sepa que la deseo su bien, y que
si quiere tomar mi consejo y lo gustare, que diga lo que le dará más consuelo;
venirse conmigo a la Orden, o estarse como está.
Si esto la consuela, yo haré por ella, ahora que viene nuestro Padre General.
Deje a la supriora que haga lo que quisiere, y mire po[r] su salud y paz de su
alma. Tres días que hemos de vivir démoslos a Dios en lo que fuere más
perfecto. Esto que la digo no lo diga a persona, que acá tampoco lo digo a
nadie. Respóndame con llaneza y déme a mí la carta a solas. Yo lo encomiendo
38. Although the date is not definite, it is clear from the tone of this letter that
the English Carmelites had already separated from the jurisdiction of the Order.
39. The manuscript ends here.

72 UNTOLD SISTERS
a Dios, que me la guarde, hija de mi alma. En esto verá lo que la quiero y

deseo ver.
Sierva de V. Rr. indigna,

Ana de San Bartolomé (8io)
Letters'^
[Antwerp] January 2 [1617/18]
And cease your wonderings as to whether anyone else reads the letters you
send me, for they do not so much as see them opened. She whom you mean
is as careless as could be in this matter, and so weary that she would leave
everything undone if she were not obliged to do it, as I have no one else
who knows the language, fot one cannot confide for one single day in Anne
de St.'Barthélémy, who is her companion and leaves everything undone, and
she is dry as an old stick. And so do not be troubled, for I read yours better
than my own, and then I tear it up at once, and into the fire it goes. . . .
I would have liked to cheet you with the rhymes I made up while I was
in bed, but I have no room here. Let us hear yours, and whether the Sisters
were cheered; here there has been much gaiety, for 1 had them doing all sorts
of nonsense; and they made sport of Monsior de BerueB^ and his associates,
and madama Acaria"*^ played Dionisia'*^ so that we were dying of laughter;
and Angelito'*'' did Ymon,'*’ to the same effect."*^ Tell my dear Mother,'*^ for
I cannot go on at such length: when Aldré goes that way, I shall write her,
God willing. Angelito played the Prioress on the feast of the Holy Innocents,
and did it famously. I tell you this to give you some recreation, and hope
40. The Spanish text of all lettets is modernized from volume II of the Obras
completas (Complete Works) edited by Julián Utkiza. The dates in brackets are his
estimations; the information about personages in the footnotes is also his. All letters
we offer here are from Ana de San Bartolomé in Antwerp to Ana de la Asención.
41. Sic, Pierre de BéruIIe, their Superior.
42. Madame Acane (1566-1618), an important personage in the transactions that

brought the Spanish Carmelite nuns to France, first organized a group of young French
women around her who later professed as Discalced Carmelites; she then entered the
convent herself, and was beatified in 1791.
43. Marie de St.-Denis, a French nun in the convent.
44. Angélique du St.-Esprit, a nun in the convent.
45- Edmond de Messa, who was in Madame Acarie’s service, accompanied BéruIIe
to Spam to negotiate bringing the Spanish Carmelite nuns to France. Ana de San
Bartolomé met him on that trip.
46. The author here refers to theatrical spectacles the nuns put on inside the
corivent to amuse each other. This activity was an integral part of the Teresian
vents*°*^ conventual recreation and was practiced in all Discalced Carmelite con-
47. Leonor de San Bernardo, Ana de San

Bartolomé s dear friend and companion
from Spain.
you are amused; and be sure that I love you well and fondly, my Daughter.
May you be with God. . . . (417-18)
Antwerp April 26 (1617]
Although I do not write you, I do wish you well and so 1 ask the Lord,
and I hold you much in my mind. Tell me how you are, and if you have
grown stronger than before in spirit, for it will comfort me to know. Here
we all commend you to God, and I hope He may shine in you and that you
may be freer in spirit; put your trust in God, for He loves and cherishes you
more than does any creature here on earth. Believe this and love Him well,
for you shall find no truer friend. And as you do this, your health will return,
for I tell you in truth that the love of earthly creatures, being of the flesh
and self-love, does sicken our bodies and does us no good, but rather what
you know by experience. Consider, my Daughter, whether I can serve you
in any way—however much we may love one another—save to have caused
more pain when we have had to part. Now be more wise, and be not deceived,
for although I do love you and will do whatever I can before God that He
may give you His grace, yet in the realm of earthly desires my love does no
good. And therefore, my Daughter, find your peace in God, for He will help
you; and in whatever way I can, I shall serve you. I can do no more, my
dearest. Give yourself entirely to God. (430)
Antwerp [August 15, 1617]

.... And believe me, my dearest Daughter, that when my letters to you
are dry and matter-of-fact, as you do truly say, it is not for any lack of love,
for I hold your soul as dear as if it were my own. But do you not know the
proverb which says, “He who loves you will make you cry, for he will speak
truth without disguise”? Believe this of me, for all I write you is said desiring
your peace and that you may be free of your passions, for they are our enemies;
and by defeating them, and not listening to our own thoughts, we shall have
inward peace and peace is our heaven on earth. Do help yourself, dearest,
and believe that this is what is best for you, and let God do as He will, for
if it pleases Him, He will bring us together again, and if not we must not
wish it, but only desire to please Him; the few short days we must live on
this poor earth, it is not fitting that we be careless of our welfare. . . .
(442-43)
Antwerp April 23 [1618]

May Jesus Christ be in your soul, my dearest Sister, and may He give you
His Holy Spirit as abundantly as He can and as 1 wish for you. I am edified
by your resolution to dismiss the Englishwoman. My having said what I did
to you was not because I had any special revelation concerning this matter
nor anything of the sort, but to see whether she was comfortable in her
vocation or if instead she desired greater liberty, for that would not please
me nor cause me anything but great disaffection with my Daughter; and if I
have had any suspicion of this, I take satisfaction in discovering the truth.
This woman does good but imperfect works, for she does not want to give
obedience to any but the Bishop, and some day she will say that she is the
74 UNTOLD SISTERS
one who should command and whom they must all obey. A fine thing is her
disposition! May God do us the favor of freeing us from her; and may He
make you holy, my Daughter. . . . (458-59)
Antwerp January 2 [1618/1619]

May Jesus Christ be in your soul, my dearest Sister, and I hope that He
has given you a very blessed Christmas and new year, just as I wish for you
and have asked on behalf of my Daughter, for I love you as my own soul.
And though I do not write you, be assured of this: that you are my beloved
Daughter. And though I have but little space, I write and send you the verses
you request, the Christmas Eve verses, to rouse the Sisters first and then to
dance in the choir. As we had danced so much in our cells,I wrote these
to cheer them in the choir, which say:
Wake up. Bias,

for I hear something stirring;
let no plaguey troubles come
to disturb our pasture . . .
so that you may read them; and because 1 have a fine head cold. Sot Clara
de la Cruz'*^ has written them out for me. I send them to you with Brother
Jerónimo, that it may not be said that they have been lost like the others.
And give my dearest Mother [Leonor de San Bernardo] my greetings for a
good new year, as I do not write her for the reasons I have said; I shall do
so another day. . . . (473-74)
[Antwerp August-September 1619]

To my dearest Mother and Daughter of my soul.
. . . With regard to your request, 1 shall tell you just what I feel, because
you ask me: I think it better, now that you are at this point, that you both
be resolved and that you do not tarry in fondness of an earthly nature, but
rather have courage to withstand these emotions like men, and let yourselves
not be taken for women; each time there must be a parting, you shall do the
same. If staying together this time were to be forever, it would be good to
stay; but as it is not, it will be better to part now, than later. And though
you have few nuns, my Daughter, they will adapt themselves to working each
one as they can and they will help you, for so it has always been done at
the beginning [of the foundations]. . . . (514)
[Antwerp November-December 1619]
Now that Padre Gregorio has come from the castle, he has given me the
letter from your reverence. My own soul’s Daughter, what you tell me in it
48. Translator’s note: the manuscript says “los celcas” here for “las celdas.”
49. Bom in Madrid as Clara Laura de Strozzy, Clara de la Cruz (1597-1658) had
been a lady-in-waiting of Princess Isabel Clara Eugenia for years. She became Ana
de San Bartolomés good friend and secretary and copied out a large portion of her
writings and of the documents for beatification.
might well give me cause for anger, though until now, thanks be to God, 1
have had no such occasion, nor has my dear Daughter ever given me an¬
noyance; on the contrary, each day 1 love you more and desire to serve you
in any way possible. Why do you permit yourself such thoughts, having no
reason to think them? Dismiss them, my Daughter, for if 1 were troubled by
anything, I should tell my beloved Daughter of it; do not doubt this, and be
calm, for 1 love you like my soul and 1 do long mightily to see you.
. . . Regarding the brasier, 1 have written to Lieja;^° until they answer, 1
do not know what they cost; 1 too wish to know it for ours, which will also
be put in not this winter, but next.
• • • • (538-39)
[Antwerp, circa November 1620]
It grieves me that you feel sorrow. Take heart and don’t be discouraged by
a little fault that was done thoughtlessly and with good intention. Do not
be daunted, for in these things and others the Lord sometimes lets us fall in
order to test us, or to put it better, so that we may know ourselves, for God
already knows us and knows we are full of faults; but by letting us fall into
them, he makes us aware of what we are. And He does not like us to be
daunted by it, for that would show that we were careless of our wretchedness,
but He does wish sometimes to see us thus undeceived and committing faults,
for He so loves us that He does not Himself take offense at such a thing. . . .
Look at the things our Saint did when He left her all abandoned; the courage
and cheer with which she suffered all the slander. Be her Daughter in being
manly, and as the thing is done, say . . to the Lord: “It is done. Forgive
me, and let us be friends as before. I shall mend my ways.” And this is how
such things must be taken, and not by languishing over a trifle, for that
would be to frighten the spirit and make it cowardly. Courage, my Daughter,
for greater matters! For this one is not important, and more are to come. Be
of good cheer, for if 1 find you are sad 1 shall be even more annoyed. Forget
what now is not even ...” and tell me how you are. (589-90)
[Antwerp, last months of 1620]
1 write this to send you some little sticking-plasters, which 1 think is all
that can be done for women’s ills,” for that is what causes your lack of
appetite. Had they given you a cupping when they bled you, it would have
been better. And if they have a little cup, with the lip unbroken, warm it
50. This refers to a monastery of male Discalced Carmelites which had been
founded there in 1618.
51. This line is crossed out in the manuscript by another hand.
52. Here, half a line is crossed out by another hand.
53. In a good example of her creative orthography. Ana de San Bartolomé here
writes “mala madre” (literally, “evil mother”) instead of “mal de madre” (literally,
“mother’s ills”) for menstrual cramps.
70 UNTOLD SISTERS
and smear it with a drop of oil and a bit of garlic, and you shall see the good
it does you; and if the cup should be made of wood, so much the better.
Have it made for you, for Brother Jerónimo knows where they are made; it
must be made of oak. But until they make it, use this little plaster, and eat
no vinegar or cheese when you are in that way. If I could treat you myself
it would be better, for I think they are not treating you properly for your
weakness, which does grieve me. Now you must make yourself eat and be
cheerful, for this ill increases with melancholy. And that novice of yours, if
she has good courage, I trust she will be good and will improve. She is an
orphan, and God will take the place of father to her; He will help her and
give her the grace to be a good nun. And tell me how she does in the
exercises, and give her the little trifle which accompanies this letter, which
belonged to our holy Mother, that she may carry it with her; and your
reverence must take the other and carry it upon your stomach. . . . (606)
[Antwerp, circa r62o]
I do not know why you ask me if I am angry, for I hold no anger towards
your reverence, but love you very much, and when I say something to you
it is because I love you the more; I remember nothing more of the subject
when it has been said, nor do I know why you ask this.
My Daughter, I always love you truly, and though I do not write you often
it is not for lack of love, but because I keep as busy in my occupations as I
am able, for in a religious house there is always work to be done by the Sister
who must care for everything. I tell you in truth, my Daughter, that many
days I scarce have time to recite the hours, because there are Sisters to whom
I must speak; for I am good for very little, and so my time always runs short.
And do not think those thoughts, that I do not love you, for I have told
you that though I do not write you, I do not forget you in my poor prayers.
For the rest, all things must pass; there is no need to turn back to see what
one time was said between us two; instead, the brief time that is left us, give
it to God, which is where we shall find comfort and strength and all the rest
that earthly creatures cannot give us.
I go now to chapter [of faults], for yesterday the Most Blessed Sacrament
was exposed [for veneration] and it could not be done. . . . (609-10)
[Antwerp, middle of 1621]
I have received your little note and I am very sorry for your grief. To be
sure, our Father^'' understood me in that way, because he came to tell me_
without my having said anything to him, he said to me: “Father Veda [sic,
for Beda] should confess no one here, save the lay Sisters.” I said to him: “A
fine thing it is for your reverence to say that! We all confess with him, nor
will we have anyone else; only the Flemish nuns, two or three of them, go
to Father Juan.” And he asked me: “He is good then. Father Veda [sic]?” I
told him: “Yes, he is, most certainly. ” And so it was left.
54. Tomás de Jesús, Superior General of the Discalced Carmelites in Flanders.

Until now that your reverence mentions it, I had not thought why he said
this. My Daughter, I have told you how clearly I spoke to him when I saw
that he was determined to make the nuns obey him, and I told him that I
did not think it right, for in doing as he commanded them, they would fail
in what was their obligation, given the love that these young people feel for
their confessors. He was quite perplexed, and said he would do so no more,
and that, had he thought 1 would be angry, he would not have done it at
all. Now he tells the nuns, when they ask license of him, that they should
do nothing other than whatever I may say. To act in this manner is necessary,
but I say nothing to the other priests, for they care much more for one
another than they do for us Sisters. And thus your reverence must season it
however you can, and humble yourself before our Father and ask his pardon.
And tell him that as Father he should do what he likes and that he must
not be angry, for what you said was spoken plainly, as one should speak with
the Prelate, and ask his pardon, for as you had seen some conflict, you told
him. Say, moreover, that we women are more easily swayed and perhaps the
nuns were to blame, and insist that you love his reverence, ask his pardon,
and tell him he must not be angry. There is nothing else to be done with
our Father. Do this, my Daughter; it is better that you write him. Bum this
letter, let no one see it, just as I do with yours; these things are for ourselves
alone. If the Prior should say anything to you, tell him what you think right,
and not that you told me. . . . (658-59)
[Antwerp, circa August 1621]
I have not been able to answer the letter from your reverence before now.
With regard to the letter from our Father, it was not at all bad, indeed I
would imagine you well pleased to have received it; but when our Father has
shown his displeasure with a thing, he is upright, and though he does like
us to humble ourselves before him, he does not require the sort of retribution
that they say of him; but I know that he will have been pleased. Do not be
troubled, for the thing is not so serious, and the Superior General desires
that if a confessor does not give comfort, he should be changed. But do not
speak of this matter with any of the priests; let it alone, that with time it
may work itself out, and little by little the thing shall be done. Speak to the
Prior clearly regarding as much of this as you know, telling him what you
know to be true and of the cause you have had to speak. Tell him also:
“Father Veda [sic] is very good and virtuous, for in what has occurred here,
I believe he acted for the best; but as I saw these things, I did not think our
Father would be grieved if I said them. Indeed I am grieved, for I do not
wish to annoy you, as I am greatly indebted to you; but your reverence,
forgive me if I have erred for, as I say, I see somewhat more clearly the laxity
of the nuns I have with me, which their confessor cannot know, and we
women are satisfied with very little.” Say this to the Prior, for he is wise; it
will be of great help to you, and be patient, for little by little all will turn
out well. . . .
One must always be deserving. He is good, but you must sometimes be
clever and disguise things; as I have told you, put this in the best light.
Good-bye, my Daughter, for I can do no more. The Prior has been here, but
I have not said a word to him and I shall be faithful to you; so let us be to
one another. (670-71)
78 UNTOLD SISTERS
[Antwerp, first months of 1622]
When you ask me what to do with our priests, I know that they will not
take from you the freedom you ask, and that they will indeed give you your
confessors as they do for all of us, for so they have told me; and what they
gave you [and your nuns] for the foundation, they will never take away, and
in that religious house they ignore what they find distasteful in the Consti-
tutions, because these are more permissive than those of the past. Do you,
my Daughter, consider this and be not distressed. Consider what Contemptus
mundi” says on this subject: “Go as you like and where you like, you shall
find no rest but in simple obedience.” And Saint Paul says: “He who resists
obedience to his prelates, does resist the spirit of God.”^^ Consider this, my
Daughter, for as I love you, I do not want you to draw away from the rest
of us. And how much more honor will be yours and your Daughters’ under
a sacred Rule, than if you let yourselves be governed by some callow clerics
who know nothing of the Order! And they themselves say we must do as
they command; for whoever wants an argument, there’ll always be someone
there to fight, for good or ill. Believe me when I say that 1 am grieved by
what I hear said, and I cannot believe it comes from your heart, but rather
I think that they press you. Have courage, for if you follow what is most
perfect, God and the prelates will assist you like their own Daughter. And
in every way I can, I too shall assist you to your comfort, for in no other
way will you have it. . . . (699-701)
[Antwerp, first months of 1622]
Be not troubled, nor trouble your Daughters. For I believe that, indeed,
the foundation was done on the condition that you should have this freedom,
and nothing else shall be done to you. Comfort the nuns thus, that when
our Father comes here, 1 will do for you all that I can. I believe they will
do nothing more than what has been agreed. (701)
[Antwerp circa 1623]
I was delighted to see your handwriting. And as to what you suppose, that
the priests have ordered me not to wtite to you, it is not so, fot they have
no such concern nor have they need of it, but rather indeed they do love
all that pertains to charity and religion, and desire it to floutish. The fault
lies indeed with your reverence, for you have drawn apart and have not
wished for my conversation; and as you did not find it good, I felt no obligation
to amuse you furthet with my letters. Full many have I written you with far
55. The author writes “Contentus mundi" here; she is referring to the book, De
Imitatione Christi, then a popular religious tract.
56. Cf. Rom. 13, 2.
more love than your reverence did find in them! And here I remain; should
you wish to require something of me, 1 will not fail to serve you, for 1 consider
myself no better than any other. In the past 1 thought 1 spoke with one whom
I loved truly, and so 1 spoke with love; and if on any future occasion you
should want me, you shall find me. 1 shall always remain, as 1 consider myself
to be, the unworthy subject of my prelates; other nuns may do as they like,
it is not my place to account for anyone else. . . .
May God repay you for the sackcloth you sent me, for you did me a charity.
(784-85)
[Antwerp, beginning of January 1622/1624]”
1 have not left olf writing you, my Mother, for lack of good will, for this
1 always have for you and from my very heart do 1 love you in the Lord, with
no thought for anything but charity which obliges us to love one another.
And your reverence, do this also for me, 1 entreat you; so that when we
meet in heaven, we may know one another as Daughters of God; and in the
meantime let us help one another.
Regarding what your reverence asks me, about the rhymes, 1 have not
written a single one, my Mother. Those done by the Sisters 1 have considered
my own and 1 have enjoyed myself with them as much as 1 could. I have
not let them be mournful; they have all been most cheerful, and there [where
you are] 1 think it must not be less so. . . (786—87)
[Antwerp July-August 1624]
I should rather speak than write to you, but as that cannot be, I shall write
this to tell you that last night in my dreams 1 found myself with you; I saw
you and spoke of many things with you. And although it was but a dream,
1 want you to know that 1 desire your welfare, and if you wish to heed my
advice and it pleases you, 1 shall say what will give you most comfort: come
back with me to the Order, or remain as you are.
If this does comfort you, 1 will do what 1 can for you now that our Father
General is coming. Let the Subprioress do as she likes, and look after your
own health and the peace of your soul. The few short days we have to live,
let us give them to God in the way that might be most perfect. What 1 tell
you, tell no one; nor shall 1 tell anyone here. Answer me plainly and give
the letter only to me. 1 commend you to God, and may He keep you for me.
Daughter of my soul. You shall see by this how 1 love you and long to see you.
The most unworthy servant of your reverence.

Ana de San Bartolomé (810)
57. Although the date is not definite, it is clear from the tone of this letter that
the English Carmelites had already separated from the jurisdiction of the Order.
58. The manuscript ends here.

8o UNTOLD SISTERS
Maria de San José
Libro de recreaciones'
A las carísimas madres y hermanas, las Carmelitas Descalzas, una esclava indigna
de vuestras mercedes. Salud en El que es verdadera salud.
[1585]
[Primera Recreación]
Jesús María
Año del Señor de mil y quinientos y ochenta y tres, día del seráfico padre
san Francisco, habiendo un año que este día se secó la flor de Carmelo,
invoqué el llanto y luto, viéndose despojado de su dulce Madre Teresa de
Jesús, de quien dos hijas suyas, puestas a la sombra de una muy hermosa
alameda, hablaban de ella debajo del nombre de Angela. Y aunque el tiempo
no era para buscar la frescura y campos, que en la primavera suele ser deleitoso,
empero a la plática que tenían ayudaba la soledad y ruido del viento que
movía todo a sentir la suya, y con las lágrimas en los ojos traían a la memoria
el robo que la muerte hizo dejándolas sin Madte, pastora y consuelo. Y
habiendo un rato llorado, los ojos puestos en tierra, los levantaban a tiempos
al cielo, con que se templaba su dolor, considerando tener allí cierto y seguro
su tesoro, gozándose de lo que su Madre gozaba, con esto quedando con algún
espacio mudas.
Gracia, que así se llamaba la que más moza parecía, mudando la plática
que antes tenían, dijo a Justa;
—Carísima hermana, muchos días ha que me mandó el Padre Elíseo^ que
le hiciese una memoria de mi vida, en que le dijese la manera de proceder
en la oración y las misericordias que Dios me ha hecho en ella; y no te quieto
decir para qué lo quiere, pues conoces su celo y lo que de todo se aprovecha,
sacando de la ponzoña de mis vicios miel de doctrina para todas sus hij as. Y
dejado esto, potque es hacer agravio a tan grande ingenio y virtud ponerse
mi lengua ruda a alabarla, te diré el fin para que te comencé este cuento. Yo
estoy muy afligida desde que esto me mandó, porque desde el punto que lo
quise comenzar, ha sido tanta la torpeza de mi ingenio, que no he podido
escribir letra, y todo cuanto he dicho hasta aquí de oración, me parece que
era mentira y antojo; y lo que más se me pone delante de que tendría mucho
que escribir, son mis pecados, mas no me hallo con espíritu pata escribirlos,
que es harto mal estar tan atrás que tenga vergüenza de decir a mi prelado
lo que de mejor gana le había de manifestar, y no contar gustos de oración,
pues no puedo hablar de ellos con la certeza que de los pecados, que sé que
he hecho muchos, y estotro no se si es del demonio o del temor de que
participamos tanto las mujeres; mas me consuelo que lo que dijere irá a manos
de quien de cien leguas entenderá lo que es. Lo que te pido, hermana, es
que me encomiendes muy de veras a Dios para que cumpla con la obediencia.
1. All texts by María de San José are from the edition prepared by Simeón de la
Sagrada Familia. Page numbers are his.
2. Fray Jerónimo Gracián de la Madre de Dios.
More Than One Teresa 8i
Y Justa, que con gran atención la había oido, dijo:

—Mucho me he maravillado, hermana mía Gracia, de ver que tengas
repugnancia en ninguna cosa de las que entiendes que darás gusto a nuestro
Padre, pues, fuera de ser nuestro prelado, en quien habernos de mirar a Cristo,
tú tienes por muchos respectos obligación a no le encubrir nada de tu corazón.
—Nunca Dios quiera—le respondió Gracia con gran priesa—que caiga en
semejante vicio, ni que le encubra ninguna cosa de las que tengo en mi alma;
porque, dejado de mostrarme ingrata con quien tanto debo y quiero, a mí
me haría el daño, pues sabemos cuánto se gana en tratar con claridad con
los que el Señor tiene puestos en su lugar; y créeme esta verdad, que nunca
tal tentación me ha traído el demonio, antes parece que comenzó mi alma
a pronosticar el primer día que le vi, sin ser mi prelado, el bien que por él
había de recibir, porque todo lo que pedía a la Virgen nuestra Señora, era
en nombre del Padre Eliseo, y me parecía alcanzar luego lo que en su nombre
pedía; y así lo que me da pena es no saber qué me decir. Por esto te lo he
dicho, para que me des parecer y ayudes con tus oraciones.
—Lo que puedes, hermana, hacer—dijo justa—, pues el llamarte Dios y
traerte a la Religión fue por medio de la heroica y admirable Madre nuestra
Angela, comienza por ella y di las cosas que le viste desde que la comenzaste
a conocer; y tratando de tan dulce Madre, no te acordarás de ti, y cumplirás
con la obediencia y aun darás más contento al Padre Eliseo, pues oyendo el
nombre de su Angela, con él pondrá gracia a lo que de ti desgraciado dijeres.
—Dios nuestro Señor te lo pague, hermana—dijo Gracia postrándose en
tierra—, y sea él bendito, que tan presto nos muestra el bien que hay en
humillamos a tomar parecer; y, pues Dios ha alumbrado tu entendimiento
para que me des traza, dime cómo tengo de comenzar, y no me dejes a mí
sola, sino veme ayudando y yo diré lo que sé, y dame tú orden para que vaya
con ella escribiendo, pues es tu nombre Justicia, para dar a cada cosa lo que
es suyo: a Dios la gloria de todo, y a nuestra santa Madre nombre perpetuo
por la parte que fue para que yo y otras muchas viniésemos a la Religión, y
a mí confusión por lo poco que de tantas indias me he aprovechado.
—Comienza ya—dijo Justa—, que me da gran contento oír las cosas de
nuestra Angela.
—¡Oh, hermana Justa!, y cuán de buena gana comenzara—dijo Gracia—
esa materia, porque ha muchos días que ando con grandes deseos de hacer
un memorial de algunas cosas que vi y oí a la buena Madre; pero me parece
imposible salir con ello, lo uno por mi rudeza, que no sabrá decir nada, y lo
otro, que es lo que más me acobarda, es ser mujer, a quien ya por ley que
ha hecho la costumbre, parece que les es vedado el escribir, y con razón,
pues es su oficio propio hilar, porque, como no tienen letras, andan muy
cerca de errar en lo que dijeren.
—Yo confieso—respondió Justa—que sería muy gran yerro escribir ni me¬
terse las mujeres en la Escritura, ni en cosas de letras, digo las que no saben
más que mujeres, porque muchas ha habido que se han igualado y aun aven¬
tajado a muchos varones; pero, dejemos esto, ¿qué mal es que escriban las
mujeres cosas caseras? Que también a ellas les toca, como a los hombres,
hacer memoria de las virtudes y buenas obras de sus madres y maestras, en
las cosas que sólo ellas que las comunican pueden saber, y forzosamente ocultas
a ellos; fuera de que podría ser que a las que están por venir les cuadrase más,
aunque escrito con ignorancia y sin curiosidad, que si las escribiesen los
82 UNTOLD SISTERS
hombres, porque en caso de escribir y tratar de valor y virtud de mujeres,

solemos tenerlos por sospechosos, y a las veces nos harán daño, porque no
es posible sino que cause confusión las heróicas virtudes de muchas flacas,
como por la misericordia de Dios en estos floridos tiempos de esta renovación
vemos.
—Bien dices, hermana—dijo Gracia—, que sería confusión si lo que es¬
criben mujeres ellos lo creyesen; pero ¿no ves que han tomado por gala tener
a las mujeres por flacas, mudables e imperfectas y aun inútiles e indignas de
todo ejercicio noble? Y acerca de esto te diré un cuento que te ha de caer
en gracia. Sabe, carísima, que cuando nuestra Madre Angela fue a fundar a
Sevilla, nos venían a confesar muchos siervos de Dios, entre los cuales con¬
tinuaba más que otros un sacerdote muy bueno, aunque del humor de los
dichos, y se alteraba tanto de vemos persignar en latín como si dijéramos
herejías, y muy de propósito se ponía a reprendemos, y nos decía que no se
habían de meter las mujeres en bachillerías y honduras.
—Sin duda debía de ser simple ese siervo de Dios—dijo Justa—, pues no
advertía que la Santa Iglesia nos hace gracia de que recemos las religiosas el
oficio divino y ayudemos a los santos oficios y sacrificios de la misa.
—Simple, hermana—dijo Gracia—, no lo hacía de simple, que de muy
atrás tenía ese extremo; mas hay gentes que se escandalizan del aire, y si te
hubiese de decir los trabajos y persecuciones que en aquella fundación se
pasaron con semejantes humores, nunca acabaría de contarlos. Y porque
tratábamos de nuestro Señor y de las cosas de la fe, que cada cristiano está
obligado a creer y saber, como son los artículos de la fe y cosas semejantes,
atemorizaban de suerte las flacas que se padeció harto, haciéndolas entender
que eran herejes. Yo tengo por gran desatino poner tropezón donde no le
hay, y hacer entender a las pobres mujeres que todo es herejía; pero quédese
aquí, que es cuento largo. Podrá ser que ordene el Señor que en otra parte
se escriba, para que sepan nuestras hermanas cuántos trabajos y aflicciones
costaron fundar los conventos a nuestra santa Madre, y se animen a pasarlos,
teniendo envidia de las que gozaron de estas ricas ferias.
Y volviendo a lo comenzado, digo, hermanas, que es de poca fuerza y de
ningún crédito lo que dijéremos, por ser mujeres.
—¿Qué se nos da de eso?—dijo Justa—; para quien se escribe lo creerá,
¡cuánto más en lo que fuere decir de nuestra grande Angela! El Señor se ha
mostrado tan maravilloso en su vida y muerte, que es a todos notorio. Y así,
comienza, hermana, y haz cuenta que lo cuentas a las hermanas en las
recreaciones, y si dijeres boberías de las que no te aseguro, ya sabes cuán
aceptas son en tal tiempo y cuán solemnizadas, que no hayas miedo que
ninguna te perdonen.
Pluguiese a Dios, hermana mía—dijo Gracia—, sirviese de dar recreación
a estos ángeles, porque no hay cosa de que más guste que de verlas alegrarse
unas con otras, y mi alma se goza porque se ve allí el amor y hermandad y
gran contento que tienen y la mortificación de cada una, no mostrando ningún
género de sentimiento, aunque se rían de sus boberías, que es el fin que
nuestra Madre Angela tuvo en querer que, después de comer y colación, se
juntasen con sus labores a alegrarse en el Señor, con otros muchos, que ya
se sabe que es necesario aliviar el espíritu del ayuno, oración y continuo
silencio.
Mucho importa—dijo Justa—vaya esto adelante con la perfección que
nuestra Madre lo dejó. Y ahora dime ya de ella.
—No pienses—respondió Gracia—que aunque me alargue en algunas cosas,

es salir de propósito, pues Isuyo esl lo que de bien y provecho se conoce. La
fruta redunda en alabanza del árbol que la produjo; y así cualquiera cosa que
de las hermanas fuere diciendo, de virtudes y gracias, bien se entiende que
por medio de aquel claro ingenio y heróica virtud las alcanzaron. Mas dime,
por caridad, ¿cómo quieres que me atreva a contar las grandezas de aquella
admirable mujer, pues sabes mi torpeza?
—Por cierto, hermana—dijo Justa—, no creo tiene en tan poco nuestro
Señor las cosas de su sierva que las pondrá en poder de tan ruin cronista,
porque más ingenio que el tuyo y el mío es menester para contar tales hazañas,
como son las que Dios, por medio de esta valerosa mujer, en nuestros tiempos
ha hecho, pues no sólo ha despertado a las mujeres flacas a tomar la cruz de
Cristo, mas avergonzó y sacó al campo a los varones, y los hizo seguir la
bandera de su capitana, que habían vuelto las espaldas al rigor y virtud
primitiva, para que hiciesen rostro a los enemigos que tan enseñoreados
estaban. Comenzó como otra Débora a animar el ejército de Dios, prome-
tiéndoles de su parte la victoria, no quedándose ella en la tienda, antes se
ponía a los mayores peligros y afrenta, no descansando en tiempo de paz,
sino con excesivos trabajos y sudores de su rostro plantando y trasplantando
este divino jardín del Carmelo, que tan olvidado y destrozado estaba y tan
perdida su digna hermosura, cuanta puso Dios en esta alma y cuerpo, que
mostró bien la divina Majestad para qué la criaba, dotándola de tantos dones
y gracias, cuán hermosa y de perfecta figura, como adelante de necesidad has
de decir, aunque en todo quedarás corta. Pues ¿qué será para decir cuán
graciosa y discreta era, amable y dulce en su trato, cuán prudente y sagaz,
con aviso y simplicidad de paloma, su fe y esperanza y el espíritu de profecía,
la gracia de llegar almas a Dios, el maravilloso don de consejo, pues muchos
grandes de España tomaban su parecer en cosas graves? Y así, hermana, cosas
como éstas no son para ti ni para mí, digo para que sólo tú las digas. De las
cuales no dejes, pues, de hacer alguna niñería para consolar a las hermanas,
entre tanto que quien lo sepa mejor hacer nos lo escriba; y tú di lo que le
viste y oíste, pues te hallaste con ella en algunas fundaciones, y aunque no
se te parece mucho, que no te veo muy medrada.
Gracia oyendo esto se fue a postrar en tierra, conociendo ser verdad lo
que Justa le decía; la cual la detuvo y dijo:
—Comienza, hermana, que ya es tiempo.
—Ya te dije al principio—dijo Gracia—que me habías de ayudar, y pues
me mandas que lo escriba para las recreaciones, di qué orden ha de llevar,
o qué nombre la pondremos.
—Llamemos a las hermanas Josefa y Dorotea—respondió Justa—, que en
negocio de recreación ellas tienen buen voto.
Y levantándose con esto Gracia, fue por ellas; y venidas con licencia, les
dijo Justa:
—Deogracias, hermanas, ¿les pesó de que las sacasen de las ermitas?
Dorotea dijo al punto:
—¿Y eso, carísima, se usa en las Descalzas, pesarles de lo que manda la
obediencia? No, por cierto, ni creo de la hermana Josefa viene de mala gana.
La que dijo luego:
—De mí sé decir que me holgué, porque deseaba pedir licencia para venir
a oír algo de nuestro Señor, y se me acordó que me faltaba por hacer una
mortificación de las que me han mandado que haga cada día y así lo dejé, y
84 UNTOLD SISTERS
proveyó nuestro Señor que me lo mandasen. ¡Bendito sea su nombre!, que

nada deja sin premio de lo que por él se hace.
—Ea, hermanas—dijo Gracia—, hagamos la obediencia y ved qué nombre
se pondrá a esto que la hermana Justa aquí me hace escribir.
—Es menester que se vea—dijo Josefa—para dar el voto.
—Norabuena—dijo Gracia—, mas yo aseguro que nunca nos venga vana¬
gloria con el nombre que vuestra caridad le pusiere.
—Bien dices, hermana—replicó Josefa—, que ya me va pareciendo, de lo
poco que he oído, olla podrida, que se hace de muchas cosas.
—Más honesto nombre parece ensalada—dijo Dorotea—, o aquellos hue¬
vos que nos dan en refectorio con mucho pan rallado, que nos hace entender
la hermana provisoria que es uno, y yo apostaré que no debe de salir a un
cuarto a cada una.
Gracia y Josefa oyendo esto se postraron, y Justa dijo;
—¿Por qué se postran, hermanas?
Una de ellas respondió:
—Porque la hermana dice de la comida, que es contra Constitución.
Dorotea replicó;
—Yo no dije que estaba bien ni mal guisada, que es lo que veda la Con¬
stitución; y para echar de ver que es poca, licencia hay, especial cuando el
estómago está desmayado, y aun para asir del plato cuando la hermana Inocen¬
cia, como es corta de vista, piensa que está ya acabado y echa mano de él.
Gustando todas de lo que Dorotea decía, acordándose de los trances que
en semejante caso a cada una le había pasado, de común parecer y voto de
todas, determinaron se pusiese nombre al libro De las Recreaciones, pues no
iba fuera de propósito, por ir mezclado con diversas cosas bien semejantes a
los entretenimientos de las hermanas, los cuales, compuestos de muchas
materias, sacan un fin, que es alabanzas de Dios.
Con esto Josefa, que era la que más el nombre y la historia solemnizaba,
dijo a Gracia:
—Comienza, hermana, que yo iré por el sombrero, que sospecho le habrás
mucho menester.
¡Bendito sea el Señor—decía Gracia—, que veo ya lucir las obras de
mis manos, pues dan ya recreación a mis hermanas! Mas, porque estamos de
priesa [sic] y no habrá lugar de solemnizar cada necedad poniéndome el
sombrero, trae, hermana, el libro de las crónicas, donde las tales se suelen
escribir, y ve asentando las que dijere.
Al punto Josefa, con gran presteza, respondió:
—De ese trabajo nos quita vuestra caridad, pues las escribe de su mano.
Justa, que le había caído en gracia la aguda respuesta de Josefa, después de
haberla con las demas solemnizado, mando a Gracia que comenzase, y las
demás se fuesen porque habían tañido a oración. (51-60)
[Segunda Recreación]
Donde, prosiguiendo Justa y Gracia, cuenta lo que de ¡a Madre Angela
ha visto y cuánto ha que la conoce.
Gracia, alzando los ojos al cielo, comenzó pidiendo al Señor moviese su
lengua, y dijo:
Sabrás, carísima hermana, que ha veinte años y más que conozco a la
Madre Angela, antes que fundase el primer monasterio de descalzas, siendo
monja en la Encamación, donde tenía grande opinión de santa, y teniendo

noticia de ella una señora, hija de un grande de este reino, la pidió para su
consuelo por estar recién viuda y tan afligida, que todos le procuraban traer
las personas santas que había; porque, como cristianísima, con sólo esto se
consolaba, y así le trajeron al Padre Fray Pedro de Alcántara, de quien hace
nuestra santa Madre memoria en sus libros, y así vino la santa por obediencia
de sus prelados, lo cual se pudo entonces hacer por ser antes que se publicase
el santo Concilio de Trento, y aun, según después he entendido, por mandado
de Dios para acabar de negociar los recaudos de su primer monasterio, el cual
fundó de allí a poco. Yo era entonces de trece o catorce años; estuvo en esta
casa, de aquella vez, seis meses o cerca.
Ahora quisiera, hermana, otra lengua que la mía para decir la mundanza
que causó en todos su santa conversación y el ejercicio de oración y morti¬
ficación. Comenzó a confesarse toda la casa en la Compañía de Jesús, que
hasta entonces no se hacía el frecuentar de los sacramentos y limosnas. Y,
porque hagamos la santa obediencia, aunque confieso mi culpa, que con harta
repugnancia, por parecerme es mezclar las tinieblas con la luz, diré de mi
vida, que es todo oscuridad cuanto es de mi parte.
—No importa—dijo Justa—que digas de ti, que aunque has sido tan ingrata,
soberbia y perezosa, no oscurecerá tu mala vida la luz que Dios puso en su
santa, antes es bien poner tal antorcha a tus pasos para que mejor veas quién
has sido y cómo no te has semejado ni medido con tan santas reglas. . . .
(60-62)
[Dijo Gracia] ... Y volviendo a nuestra Madre y al gran bien que en

particular y universal hizo en toda esta casa, donde era tenida en gran re¬
verencia; y así, codiciosas de ver algo de lo que entendíamos que Dios hacía
con ella, la mirábamos algunas veces por entre la puerta de su celda, donde
se encerraba, y la veíamos arrebatada, y yo, con mis propios ojos, la vi algunas
veces, de donde salía con mucha disimulación, que ya sabes, hermana, cuán
recatada fue siempre y con cuánta cautela encubría las grandezas que el Señor
le comunicaba. Y en aquel tiempo, con tener tanta noticia de su grande
humildad, entendíamos todas que con una excelente gracia y discreción
disimulaba su espíritu, que para esto tuvo particular don, y así fue menester
para que se entendiese lo que Dios obraba con ella, y que Su Majestad la
mortificase, arrebatándola en público, como yo vi dos veces en esta propia
casa, aunque fue después de haber fundado los monasterios de Avila y Medina
del Campo, y volviendo a fundar el de Malagón.
A este tiempo me llamó el Señor a la Religión, viendo y tratando a nuestra
Madre y a sus compañeras, las cuales movían a las piedras con su admirable
vida y conversación. Y lo que me hizo ir tras de ellas, fue la suavidad y gran
discreción de nuestra buena Madre. Y creo verdaderamente que, si los que
tienen oficio de llegar almas a Dios, usasen de la traza y maña que aquella
santa usaba, llegarían muchas más de las que llegan; que, como nuestro natural
es inclinado a buscar contento y a huir del trabajo, pintar la virtud y lo que
es servicio de Dios áspero y dificultoso, es atemorizar los flacos que no han
probado cuán suave es el padecer por Cristo.
—Me parece, hermana Gracia—dijo Justa—, que te vas metiendo en lo
que no te mandan ni es tuyo de hacer.
—¿En qué?—dijo Gracia.
86 UNTOLD SISTERS
—En escribir doctrina—respondió Justa—y enseñar a los otros cómo han

de llegar almas a Dios; déjalos, que si es su oficio y el Señor se le ha dado,
él les enseñará lo que han de hacer; no pienses que todos han de ir por donde
tú fuiste.
—Nunca Dios quiera—dijo a esto Gracia—que yo hable de los ministros
del Señor y de los que la Iglesia, nuestra Madre, nos tiene puestos para
enseñamos, a quien yo tengo y tendré mucha reverencia ... Y así, dejando
aparte a los que es su propio oficio enseñar, hablo de ti y de mí, y de los
demás que tenemos obligación a traer almas a Dios con el buen ejemplo, y
nos preciamos de ser del bando de Cristo y de los que más comunican con
él, que no nos mostremos tan encapotados y tristes, que no manifestemos el
trato con Dios y demos a entender a los que no lo han probado, que la
oración, silencio y ejercicios espirituales es melancolía y desesperación. Por¬
que, según está el mundo, no será menester más para que huyan de Dios, si
les decimos que han de andar tristes. ... Y yo te digo, hermana, que los
mayores ímpetus que he tenido en esta vida, han sido de irme por esas calles
a desengañar a los que piensan que es trabajo servir a Dios. Y créeme que
hay hartos ignorantes en esto, porque hay muchos que alaban las virtudes,
poniéndolas en las nubes, como ellas lo merecen, pero es de suerte que
imposibilitan a los flacos para alcanzarlas, como sea verdad que no hay nin¬
guno tan flaco que, ayudado de la gracia divina, no las pueda alcanzar. Y
porque, como dijiste, no es mío escribir doctrina, lo dejaré por volver a
nuestro intento. . . . (63-65)
Y con esto que he dicho, hermana Justa, queda contenta, que ni tengo
que decir más, ni es bien que las particularidades que el alma pasa con Dios,
ella lo diga en público, ni creo que de ello se sirve el Señor fuera de tratarlo
con quien no lo ha de guiar, que es el padre espiritual, ni aun allí hay alma
que se atreva a decirlas ni lengua a pronunciar las palabras. Y aunque yo no
tengo cosas tan altas que no se pueden decir, tengo creída una doctrina que
no debe de ser mala, e imagino que las santas muy regaladas del Señor la
guardaron, y es que, así como no consentiría un rey grave y de gran majestad
que lo que él en secreto trata con su esposa por regalarla y favorecerla, donde
dejando la majestad y grandeza se iguala y baja a hacer cosas que sólo el amor
las sufre, y a quien no lo entiende parecería indecentes a tal persona, y
enfadado ya y en alguna manera corrido, se podría quejar de la liviandad de
la esposa, a la cual sólo da licencia que signifique el amor que le tiene y la
merced que recibe y no para que cuente particularidades de amor. . . .
—No me parece que llevas mucho camino—dijo Justa—porque ¿cómo
supiéramos tantos regalos y mercedes como el Señor ha hecho a tantas santas,
como sabemos de santa Catalina de Sena, de santa Isabel, santa Brígida, y
Angela de Foligno y otras, si no gustara que se dijera?; antes para eso la da,
y no para solas las que lo reciben. (82)
[Cuarta Recreación]
Donde Gracia prosigue las grandezas del Carmelo.
Otro día por la mañana, después de acabados los oficios divinos, sentadas
junto a la fuente, dijo Justa;
—Ya de razón, hermana Gracia, tendrá mucho que nos decir.
Sí tengo—respondió—, mas no oso, porque para decir algo, de necesidad
tengo de traer algunos lugares que en diversos libros he leído, especial los de
la Sagrada Biblia, que hace mención de este sagtado monte; y como al
principio te puse por juez, no sólo haces este oficio, mas aun de fiscal,
acusándome cuando algo digo.
Riéndose todas con esto, Justa dio licencia para que sin miedo dijese,
trayendo a la memoria lo que arriba había dicho, de que no sabía más de lo
que comúnmente saben las mujeres: No era bien escribir, mas tú, hermana,
que presumes de bachillera y te tenemos por tal, bien podrás. (93)
[Prosigue Gracia] . . . Conveniente cosa era que la morada que se había

de labrar para la que es más alta y levantada que ninguna pura criatura, fuese
puesta sobre la cumbre de todos los montes, y que se labrase tabernáculo a
la que es Madre del Señor en el monte de la casa del Señor, y éste sea monte
enriscado, por que sean los fundamentos fuertes, pues se labró este edificio
para la más fuerte de las fuertes, y tanto que quebrantó la cabeza a Lucifer,
y se cría gente en esta fortaleza ejercitada en la milicia del Señor, con que
esta capitana del ejército de Dios ofende a los enemigos.
No te pongo yo. Señora altísima, emperatriz máxima, semper augusta.
Madre de la patria eterna, en fortaleza y torre porque tengas necesidad de
los muros que te defiendan, ni con gente de guarda para tu guarda, porque
tienes embrazado el escudo y fuerza de Sión y eres soberana Reina, la torre
del Líbano, que mira contra Damasco, y torre de David, de donde cuelgan
mil escudos de oro; mas porque sé que gustas de estar encerrada, y las que te
siguen lo estén y pongan ante sí muro, nunca te plugo, purísima Virgen, ser
hallada entre los tumultos y ruidos de los mundanos. Ni tampoco te puse
aquellos nombres para honrarte con los que los mortales se honran, que bien
sé tus nombres, que son altos, y tus epítetos eternos, por ser Madre del eterno
Dios, el cual quiere que te guarden sesenta varones fuertes de Israel, porque eres
lecho florido de este divino Salomón.
Capitán de todos sea, pues tú le elegiste, el gran Elias, fuerte defensor de
la honra de tu amado Salomón, por los temores nocturnos, cuando en tinieblas
estaba adorando dioses ajenos todo su pueblo, y por los temores de la noche,
de los que [en] tu limpieza había de poner lengua. Hizo voto de castidad para
que se entendiese que estaba dedicado para defensa de este purísimo lecho,
y no menos te han defendido tus sesenta fuertes carmelitas, como lo hizo san
Cirilo, Patriarca de Alejandría en el Concilio efesino, y los demás, los nombres
de los cuales no es razón calle, pues están sentados en tu bandera, ni creo
mis hermanas me darán licencia para ello.
Justa y Atanasia al punto dijeron:
—Gran gusto nos darás en ponerlos, que por no interrumpir lo que decías
no te lo habíamos pedido. . . . (94-95)
[Dijo Justa,] .... Resta ahora saber si es mayor grandeza de la Virgen

tener Religión instituida para su servicio y reverencia de por sí, [ya que] como
Madre y Señora universa] de la Iglesia, todas las Religiones, que se nombran
de otros santos, sean también suyas.
A esto Gracia respondió:
—No porque a una Reina se le den damas y criadas para su servicio y que
estén dentro de su cámara, se entiende que se le quita el mandat a todas las
demás de su reino como señora universal de él: y porque éstas la obedezcan
88 UNTOLD SISTERS
como vasallas, se entiende no haya de tener otras, que todas se empleen en

solo su servicio. Bien sabemos que aquella ciega gentilidad, que adoraban y
servían a los demonios, aunque engañados con nombre de dioses, como a
tales les ofrecían y dedicaban particulares sacerdotes, conforme entendían les
daban gusto. A la diosa Verecintia, que ellos llamaban madre de los dioses,
estaban dedicados los sacerdotes galos, y éstos andaban con vestiduras blancas;
a la diosa Vesta estaban consagradas las vírgenes vestales; de suerte que de
sacerdotes y sacerdotisas tenían poblados sus templos. Y aunque me hace
contradicción traer cosas tan vanas y llenas de superstición en consecuencia
de las que son tan verdaderas y santas, me acuerdo haber leído muchas de
las que los gentiles usaban en sus templos, tenerlas nuestra cristiana religión,
aunque con la diferencia que hay de lo falso a lo verdadero, y de lo santo a
lo profano. Digo que los sacerdotes de vestiduras blancas estén dedicados, no
a la madre de los dioses vanos, sino a la Madre del Dios verdadero; y a la
diosa Vesta, que quiere decir fuego, estén dedicadas las vírgenes que conserven
en su templo el fuego del amor de Dios.
Un poco se escandalizó Justa, como es costumbre de mujeres que poco
saben, decir que en la Iglesia se usaban algunas cosas que los gentiles en sus
templos observaban. Y entendiéndolo Atanasia, dijo:
—A eso satisfaré, por que tú, hermana, descanses, que no me espanto estés
cansada y enfadada de sufrir a la hermana Justa con sus escrúpulos.
—Caridad me harás—dijo Gracia—, que me tiene molida. . . . (104-105)
[Sexta Recreación]
Donde se trata de ¡as riquezas y piedras preciosas del Carmelo.
Llegaln]do otro día Justa y Gracia junto a la ermita de Atanasia, la hallaron
postrada en tierra; y, aunque con harta mortificación, fue con ellas por ser
obediencia, la cual sabía quiere el Señor más que el sacrificio. Con todo, por
dar recreación a las hermanas les dijo:
—Cortas sois en orar y largas en hablar, pues tanto habéis madrugado.
No dudes, hermana—dijo Gracia—, sino que debe de ser cosa muy
natural en las mujeres el hablar mucho; creo que nace de Jque], como sabemos
poco, habernos menester muchas palabras para damos a entender. Y ahora
sentaos y volveremos a nuestra historia.
Justo es demos lo primero a nuestro monte agua, pues es la cosa más
necesaria a la vida humana, sin la cual no se podría vivir, y son los ríos y
fuentes las que la hermosean y fertilizan la tierra. Y para que se vea el caso
que Dios hace de ellas, os diré lo que se escribe en el Deuteronomio, capítulo
octavo. Dice Moisés, hablando con el pueblo de Dios: Meterte ha tu Señor
Dios en una tierra buena de ríos, aguas y fuentes, en secos campos y montes salen
abismos de ríos. . . . Los que en nuestra provincia de España hay, no son de
poca estima, por ser de gran virtud y sutileza sus aguas, por estar, como dije,
esta nuestra provincia a la parte septentrional, donde las aguas que corren
por ella son más sanas y delgadas, por sutilizarlas los aires del norte y sep-
tentrión y librarse de los del mediodía, que las engruesan y llenan de va¬
pores. . . . ¡Oh dulcísimo Jesús!, con razón te nos convidas en agua, que es
la cosa más necesaria a la vida. Pues, santísimo manantial, no hay vida en
nuestras obras si no son regadas con el agua de tu gracia; en caminos y sendas
de aguas te habernos de hallar, como dice tu profeta, que tus caminos son por
la mar y tus sendas en muchas aguas. Tú eres vida, verdad y camino, y éste
ha de ser por las aguas de las tribulaciones, y así, hermanas, no es razón que
haya falta de ellas en el Carmelo, que si le alabamos y tenemos en mucho
no es por su antigüedad ni por los favores de los grandes, tantos como le han
hecho, ni porque nos vestimos de sayal, ni porque es hábito de la sacratísima
Virgen, que todo nos aprovecharía poco si no viviese en él la imitación de
Cristo. Este es el verdadero camino. Camina por él, dice nuestra Regla. Y
no piense nadie que nos jactamos de ser Descalzas ni vestir jerga, pues ni
esto ni todo lo demás que podemos hacer nos es suficiente sin la verdadera
imitación de nuestro Señor Jesucristo para alcanzar el premio de los justos,
la cual consiste en la guarda de su ley, y que nos miremos en este divino sol,
y compremos del oro de la verdadera sabiduría, que es mina de divinos metales,
en quien se halla aquella preciosa margarita por la cual truecan los sabios
mercaderes todos los bienes de la tierra por poseer a Cristo, perla de inesti¬
mable valor.
Esta es la piedra imán que levanta los corazones pesados y cargados de
hierros a la esperanza de la vida eterna; es el carbunco que resplandece y da
luz en las tribulaciones, expeliendo del corazón del que le posee toda ponzoña
y desconfianza, que a mi juicio es con lo que los demonios traen atosigados
a los que tratan de oración y recogimiento: es jacinto que defiende de los
rayos de la ira de Dios; es turquesa que preserva de las caídas ... es crisólito,
que es contra la locura y quita las fantasías y visiones; es cristal que aclara
la vista, y zafiro que la agrada a quien los trae y hace bienquistos; es esmeralda
que alegra el corazón y quita la melancolía; es la piedra amatista que ahuyenta
los demonios; es la piedra heliotropio que hace a los hombres constantes e
invisibles y alarga la vida; es la que se llama selenites, que tiene la figura de
la luna y crece y mengua como ella. No os haré agravio apropiaros a esta
piedra, pues sois. Señor mío, tan semejante a ella, pues tenéis la figura de
nuestra Reina y Madre nuestra Señora, que es llamada luna . . .
—Gran contento nos has dado—dijo Justa—con lo que en esas piedras
dices; mas deseo saber si lo que de ellas has dicho si son virtudes propias
suyas o quisiste tú irlas aplicando a nuestro Señor, conformando las piedras
o por su color, o por otra causa, con los efectos que hace este divino Señor
en el alma donde está. . . .
[Dijo Gracia . . .] se hallan grandes bienes en la consideración de las
criaturas, y como dice el glorioso san Pablo, por las cosas visibles se viene
al conocimiento de las invisibles, porque verdaderamente son pasos por donde
se sube al conocimiento de Dios como por escalera; y si tantas son las virtudes
y propiedades de las piedras, árboles, aves y animales y todas las demás
criaturas, y éstas están todas juntas en el hombre, qué tan alta y perfecta
criatura será, y cuánto mostró el Señor que la amaba . . .
Del resplandor del carbunco gozan los que se abrazan con la cruz y trabajos
del Señor, llena su alma de gozo, poseen la paz del corazón, expelida la
ponzoña de él.
Jacintos defienden de los rayos y furor de la ira de Dios a los que siempre
andan en su temor cumpliendo lo que dice David; Servid al Señor con temor
y alegraos en él con tremor. . . .
De la virtud del cristal gozan los que tienen vista sencilla y no juzgan mal
de lo que ven.
Crisólitos son los que libres de la locura han perdido la memoria de las
visiones y fantasías del mundo.
90 UNTOLD SISTERS
Zafiros y rubíes son los verdaderos humildes, que agrada su vista porque
Dios pone en ellos sus ojos, y son bienquistos porque a nadie ofenden, aunque
sean ofendidos.
Esmeralda que alegra los corazones de sus hermanos, es el misericordioso,
que con ella quitó la melancolía a los tristes.
Los verdaderos obedientes tienen la virtud de las amatistas, que ahuyenta
los demonios, porque no hay cosa con que más huyan que es con la obediencia,
que saben fueron por ella despojados y lanzados del reino que tenían tira-
nizado.
La piedra heliotropio son los verdaderos oradores, que adoran al Padre en
espíritu y verdad, la virtud de la cual es hacer, como está dicho, a los hombres
constantes e invisibles y alargar la vida. ¿Qué virtud hay que haga constantes
como la de la oración y qué ejercicio hay que haga a los hombres invisibles
y olvidados de la pesadumbre y grosería de sus cuerpos y se levanten, no sólo
con el espíritu, mas con sus mismos cuerpos a las cosas invisibles, como se
lee de muchos santos, y aun sabemos de nuestra Madre Angela? Pues que
alarga la vida, claro está, pues anticipa la eterna, comenzando desde acá a
gustar de sus bienes.
La piedra selenita, que tiene la figura de la luna y crece y mengua con
ella, son los que considerando la poca estabilidad de las cosas, reciben lo
próspero y adverso sin turbación de sus ánimos. . . . (i 15-21)
[Séptima Recreación]
Que tratan entre todas tres cosas de oración y ejercicios de ella.
Acabada la oración, volvieron todas tres adonde habían parlado; y Ata-
nasia, que como maestra la tenían después de haberlas saludado, dijo: —Pues
la oración fue por todas, y de la de cada una participó la otra, bien será que
cada una diga el modo que ha tenido en ella, por que sea a todas común
como lo fue la caridad. Y comience Gracia.
Temblando estaba—dijo Justa—si habías de mandar a mí salir la primera.
Bendito sea el Señor, que lo comenzará quien lo sabe, que ni yo sé qué es
oración, ni lo acabo de entender, ni sé qué me decir, como yo no tengo esas
cosas que vosotras tenéis, aunque harto trabajo, y lo que saco es desvanecida
la cabeza y el corazón más triste que la noche.
Me huelgo—dijo Atanasia—de que te hayas declarado, que tras de eso
andaba. Gran lástima tengo ver cuán poquitos son los que se ejercitan en
este celestial ejercicio de la oración, y de ésos, cuántos pierden el tiempo sin
provecho por no entenderse. Yo no acabo de entender qué invenciones o
artificios son estos que imaginamos de la oración, que es para atemorizar los
espíritus y hacer que se tomen locas las pobres mujeres. Y de ellas yo no me
espanto, porque somos ignorantes; pero me maravillo cuando me acuerdo
cuántos años andaba yo medio tonta con tratar con gente de la que más
nombre tiene de oración, y siempre me dejaban confusa cuando me trataban
de ella, hasta que nuestro Señor me la dio a entender. Yo no sé qué más
queremos para saber qué es oración, que ver la que nuestro Señor Jesucristo
enseñó a sus discípulos. . . . (123-24)
[Novena Recreación]
. . . Aquel primer día llegamos a la siesta en una hermosa floresta, de
donde apenas podíamos sacar a nuestra santa Madte, porque con la diversidad
de flores y canto de mil pajaritos toda se deshacía en alabanzas de Dios.

Fuimos a tener la noche en una ermita de san Andrés que está debajo de la
villa de Santisteban, donde a ratos rezando y a ratos descansando sobre las
frías y duras losas de la iglesia, pasamos la noche bien alegres, aunque con
poco regalo, porque veníamos bien desproveídas y desembarazadas o, por
mejor decir, despojadas aun de lo muy necesario, porque nuestras hermanas
las de Beas, como recién fundada aquella casa, no tenían qué nos dar, y de
lo que pudieran, aun nos quitaban con la fama de las muchas grandezas y
riquezas que el padre Mariano nos había pintado que hallaríamos, y con esta
esperanza aun nosotras les ayudábamos, y así con la seguridad que teníamos,
las unas fueron escasas y las otras fuimos pródigas, aunque no teníamos mucho
de qué lo ser, que para la costa del camino nos prestaron las hermanas de
Malagón todo el dinero que en él gastamos, que por ser aquella casa la primera
que nos hizo bien, lo es ponerlo aquí, y por ser mi madre y de las que allí
venían de aquella santa casa, que a tantas ha ayudado. . . . (193-94)
Todo se pasaba riendo y componiendo romances y coplas de todos los

sucesos que nos acontecían, de que nuestra santa gustaba extrañamente, y
nos daba mil gracias porque con tanto gusto y contento pasábamos tantos
trabajos, porque fueron más de los que aquí diré por no ser prolija. Sólo diré
algunos que más congoja nos dieron, como fue pasar el Guadalquivir, donde
nos vimos en grande aprieto, porque, después de haber pasado de la otra parte
del río toda la gente, queriendo pasar los carros, o porque fuese necesario por
respeto de ellos mudar la barca o porque no se supo dar maña el barquero,
con la grande fuerza del agua arrebató la barca y la llevó con un carro o dos
río abajo, de suerte que parecía que quedábamos sin remedio, y ya casi de
noche estábamos con harta pena; porque por una parte la falta que nos hacían
los carros, porque sin ellos no podíamos caminar, por otra estábamos legua
y media de despoblado, por otra ya se puede pensar cómo tomarían este suceso
carreteros y barqueros, que comenzaron a discantar a su costumbre sin que
bastase nadie a los aplacar. De que esto vio nuestra Madre comenzó a ordenar
su convento y tomar la posesión de él, y fue debajo de una peña en la ribera
del río, y entendiendo que aquella noche quedáramos allí, comenzamos a
sacar nuestra recámara y aparejos, que eran una imagen y agua bendita y
libros; cantamos completas, y en esto gastamos el tiempo que los otros pobres
trabajaban, deteniendo la barca con una maroma, aunque también fue ne¬
cesaria nuestra ayuda y comenzamos a tirar de ella, que por poco nos llevaba
a todas. Al fin, como nuestra santa Madre estaba allí, que tan poderosa era
su oración, quiso el Señor que fue a dar la barca a donde se detuvo y hubo
lugar de tomarla a traer, y así bien de noche acabamos de salir de este aprieto
y dar en otro, que fue perder el camino y sin saber por dónde tomar. Un
caballero que desde muy lejos había visto nuestros trabajos de aquella tarde,
nos envió un hombre que a todo ayudó, aunque primero estuvo diciendo mil
abominaciones de frailes y monjas sin se mover a poner por obra a lo que le
habían enviado. No sé si de vemos rezar se movió, de suerte que con mucha
piedad nos socorrió, y ya que se iba, habiendo tomado a perder el camino y
a enseñarlo, andando así media legua con nosotras y pidiéndonos perdón de
lo que había dicho. . . . (195-96)
¡Oh, cuánta rabia mostraban los demonios contra esta santa y valerosa
mujer, y cuán claro lo veíamos muchas veces, y en esta fundación lo ha
92 UNTOLD SISTERS
mostrado, como se verá! No sé, carísimas hermanas, lo que barruntan los

enemigos; plega a Dios sean nuestras virtudes y de las que han de venir, con
que se haga guerra al infierno.
Entramos en Sevilla otro día, jueves, a veintiséis de mayo, habiendo gastado
en el camino nueve días. Nos tenía el padre Mariano alquilada una casa bien
pequeña y húmeda en la calle de las Armas, donde nos recibieron dos señoras
amigas suyas, las cuales aquel día nos acompañaron allí y se fueron, y en gran
tiempo nunca más las vimos, ni ellas ni nadie nos enviaron un jarro de
agua. ... Yo doy a la divina Majestad infinitas gracias porque tales principios
dio a esta fundación, que me hacen ciertos y prósperos los fines.
Contemos por menudo los ajuares que aquí hallamos. Lo primero fue media
docena de cañizos viejos que el padre Mariano había hecho traer de su casa
de los Remedios; estaban puestos en el suelo por camas. Había dos o tres
colchoncillos muy sucios, como de frailes descalzos, acompañados de mucha
gente de los que a ellos los acompaña; éstos eran para nuestra Madre y algunas
flacas. No había sábana, manta ni almohada, más que dos que nosotras
traíamos. Hallamos una estera de palma y una mesa pequeña, una sartén, un
candil o dos, un almirez y un caldero o acetre para sacar agua. Y pareciéndonos
que esto, con algunos jarros y platos y cosas así que hallamos, por lo menos
ya era principio de casa, comenzaron los vecinos, a quien se había pedido
prestado para aquel día, a enviar uno por la sartén, otro por el candil, otro
por el caldero y mesa, de suerte que ninguna cosa nos quedó, ni sartén, ni
almirez, ni aun la soga del pozo. Y no es, hermanas, encarecimiento, sino
que fue así, como algunas de las que allí estabais lo visteis. . . . (200-02)
María de San José
Book of Recreations^
To My Dearest Mothers and Sisters,

the Nuns of the Discalced Carmelite Order;
an Unworthy Slave of Your Graces
Wishes You Health in Him, Who is True Health.
[1585]
[First Recreation]
In the Name of Jesus and of Mary
In the year of Our Lord fifteen hundred and eighty-three, on the day of
our seraphic father Saint Francis, I invoked both weeping and mourning, as
one year to the very day had passed since the fall of the flower of Carmel,
which was thus bereft of its gentle Madre Teresa de Jesús. Of her, two of het
Daughters were speaking as they stood in the shade of a lovely poplar grove.
I. All page numbers of this and other texts by Maria de San José refer to the
edition of Escritos espirituales (Spiritual Writings) edited by Simeón de la Sagrada
Familia.
calling her by the name of Angela. And although it was not fine weather for
seeking the fresh green leaves and fields, which in spring can be so delightful,
yet the talk between them was aided by solitude and by the sound of the
wind which moved all things to feel their sorrow; with tears in their eyes,
they recalled death’s thievery in leaving them without their Mother, she¬
pherdess, and consolation. And having wept awhile, with their eyes cast
down to earth, they lifted them at last to heaven and thus tempered their
grief, considering that there, safe and secure, was their treasure. And so
taking pleasure in the pleasure that was hers, they fell silent for some time.
Gracia, for that was the name of the one who appeared the younger, now
changing the subject of their talk, said to Justa: “Dearest Sister, it has been
many days since Father Eliseo^ ordered me to write him an account of my
life, in which 1 should tell him of my way of prayer and of the favors that
God has thus shown me. And I’d not venture to tell you why he wants it,
but you know his zeal and how he turns everything to advantage, so that
from the venom of my vices he draws the honey of doctrine for all his
Daughters. But this aside,—for it is an insult to such brilliance of mind and
virtue to set my coarse tongue to speak his praise—I’ll tell you, in short, why
1 began telling you this story. 1 am sadly afflicted since he gave me this
command, because from the very moment 1 wished to begin, my mind has
been so dull that 1 have been unable to write one word, and all 1 have said
until now of prayer, seems to me only a lie and a whim. What most clearly
appears before me, of which 1 could write at great length, are my sins; but
1 have no heart to write of them. It is bad indeed to be so backward that I
am ashamed to tell my Prelate what 1 ought to reveal to him with the best
of wills, and not to tell him of my delight in prayer. For 1 cannot speak of
such delight with the same certainty as 1 can of my sins, knowing 1 have
committed so many; 1 do not know if this inability be caused by the devil,
or by the fear to which we women are so given. But 1 console myself that
whatever 1 may say is destined for the hands of one who even a hundred
leagues off would understand what it is. 1 ask you, my Sister, to commend
me heartily to God, that 1 may fulfill this order.’’
And Justa, who had listened to her with solemn attention, then said: “1
am greatly surprised. Sister Gracia, to see that you should find distasteful a
single thing that you know would please our Father, for besides being our
Prelate, who must serve as a model of Christ to us, you are obliged in many
respects to hide from him nothing that is in your heart.’’
“May God forbid,’’ answered Gracia hastily, “that 1 should fall into such
vice, nor hide from him a single thing that is in my soul; because, besides
proving me ungrateful to one to whom 1 owe so much and love so dearly, it
would only do me harm. For we know how much is gained by conducting
ourselves plainly and honestly with those whom the Lord has set in His place;
and believe me when 1 say, that the Devil has never tempted me to such a
thing. Rather, my very soul seemed to foretell, from the first day 1 saw him,
when he was not yet my Prelate, all the good 1 would receive from him. For
all that 1 asked of Our Lady the Vitgin, 1 asked in the name of Father Eliseo,
2. Padre Gracián.
94 UNTOLD SISTERS
and it seemed that what I asked in his name was later granted me. And thus
what grieves me now is that I do not know what to say of myself. This is
why I have told you, so that you may give me your advice, and help me with
your prayers.”
“What you could do. Sister,” said Justa, “as God called you and brought
you to religion^ through our heroic and admirable Mother Angela, is to begin
with her, and tell all the things you saw her do from the time you first knew
her; and in speaking of our most gentle Mother, you will not even think of
yourself, and you will fulfill the command of obedience and will please Father
Eliseo even more, for on hearing the name of his Angela, he will lend its
grace to whatever you might say gracelessly. ”
“May God Our Lord reward you. Sister,” said Gracia, kneeling down on
the ground, “and may He be blessed, for He so quickly shows us how good
it is to humble ourselves and seek advice. And as God has illumined you
that you might give me this plan, tell me how I should begin, and do not
leave me alone, but come help me, and let me tell you what I know and
you shall give me the form in which I am to write it; for your name is Justice,
which gives each thing its due. May God be praised for all, and our holy
Mother remembered forever for the part she played, that I and many other
nuns might come to religion, and may I be confounded for how little I have
taken to advantage the very riches of the Indies that are here.”
“Begin at once,” said Justa, “for it gives me great pleasure to hear about
our Angela.”
“Oh, Sister Justa! How gladly I would undertake this theme,” said Gracia.
“For many days I have been wanting to give an account of some of the things
I saw and heard from our good Mother. But it seems to me impossible to
carry it out, first because of my rough nature, which is unable to speak. And
secondly, what most daunts me is being a woman, who by the law that custom
has created seems to have been forbidden to write; and with good reason,
for it is women’s proper task to spin and sew, since having no learning, they
tread perilously close to error in whatever they might say.”
“I admit,” answered Justa, “that it would be a very great error for women
to write about or meddle in Scripture, or in learned things; I mean, for those
women who know no more than women, for there have been many who
have been equal and even superior in learning to a great many men. But let
us leave that aside; what harm can there be if women write of household
things? For they also have the duty, as do men, of recording the virtues and
good works of their mothers and teachers, concerning things that only those
women who tell of them could know, that are perforce hidden from the men.
Besides which, it may be that such writings, though written in ignorance
and without style, will be better suited to the women in days to come, than
if they were written by men. For when it comes to writing and speaking of
3' Translator s note: The word Religión is used by the nuns in various ways.
Among the Discalced Carmelites, it frequently means “the Order” or “the Teresian
Rule.” It may also have the sense of “religious life” or “devotion.” It is translated
throughout as befits the particular context.
the courage and virtue of women, we usually consider men to be somewhat

doubtful, and at times they may indeed do us harm; for it is impossible that
the heroic virtues of so many weak women should not cause them bewil¬
derment, as we indeed see, by God’s mercy, in these flowering times of
renewal. ”
“You speak truly. Sister,” said Gracia, “when you say that it would be a
bewilderment, if men were to believe what women write. But do you not
see that they have gloried in holding women to be weak, inconstant, im¬
perfect, and indeed useless and unworthy of any noble undertaking? And in
this regard, I shall tell you a story which will certainly amuse you. You know,
dearest, that when our Mother Angela went to Seville to found a convent,
many servants of God came to confess us, among whom one stayed on longer
than the others—a very good priest, though given to the disposition of those
we have described. And he grew very angry when he saw us crossing ourselves
in Latin, as if we were uttering heresies. And quite deliberately he set about
scolding us, and told us that women should on no account meddle in all
sorts of erudite babble and deep waters.”
“Without a doubt, he must have been a bit simple, that servant of God,”
said Justa, “for he was not aware that it pleases our Holy Church that we
nuns should recite the divine office and assist at the holy offices and the
Sacrifice of the Mass.”
“Simple, Sister!” said Gracia. “He didn’t act as a simpleton, for he was
very far indeed from any such thing; but there are people who are shocked
by a puff of wind and if I were to relate to you all the trials and persecutions
we underwent in that foundation, with those sorts of dispositions, 1 would
never finish telling them all. And because we nuns were discussing Our Lord
and matters of the faith which every Christian is obliged to know and to
believe, such as the articles of the faith and so forth, they so frightened the
frailer among us, that these women suffered mightily, being made to think
that they were heretics. 1 consider it great folly to create obstacles where
there are none, giving these poor women to think that everything is a heresy;
but that is a long story, so let us leave it. It may be that one day the Lord
will order it to be written elsewhere, that our Sisters may know how many
trials and afflictions our blessed Mother was obliged to undergo in order to
found the convents, so that they may gather strength to undergo the same
thing, feeling envy for the nuns who enjoyed those festive days.
“And returning to what I had begun, I say. Sisters, that whatever we might
say has little strength and is given no credence at all, because we are women.”
“What does that matter to us?” said Justa. “Those for whom this is written
will believe it, and how much more so, inasmuch as it speaks of our great
Angela! The Lord has shown Himself to work such wonders through her life
and death, that all the world knows of it. And so begin. Sister; and remember
that you are telling it to the Sisters in their recreations, and if you should
make any foolish remarks, which I cannot say you won’t, you know how
well-received these are at such times and how revered, so you may have no
fear the Sisters would not forgive you a single one of them.”
“May it please God, my dear Sister, ” said Gracia, “that it might serve as
recreation to these angels, for there is nothing I enjoy more than to see them
happy with one another, and my soul is gladdened, for there one sees the
96 UNTOLD SISTERS
love and sisterhood and great happiness they possess, as well as the mortification
of each one, not showing any hurt, though they be laughed at for their silly
little faults. Such was the very aim of our Mother Angela in desiring that,
after the midday meal and after collation,^ they should gather together with
their needlework to take pleasure in the Lord, with many others, for it is
well known that one must needs relieve the spirit from fasting, prayer, and
continual silence.”
“It is very important indeed,” said Justa, “that all this proceed with the
same perfection that our Mother intended. And now tell me of her. ”
“Do not think,” answered Gracia, “that because I linger on certain topics,
1 am deliberately leaving the matter at hand, for everything we know that
is great or useful is due to her. The fruit springs forth in praise of the tree
which produced it; and so anything I may say of the virtues and graces of
the Sisters must be understood to have been achieved through her clear
intellect and heroic virtue. But tell me, for mercy’s sake; how can you ask
me to tell of the greatness of that admirable woman, knowing as you do of
my dull'wittedness?”
“To be sure. Sister,” said Justa, “1 do not think Our Lord holds the story
of His handmaiden in such low account that He would submit it to the hands
of such a contemptible chronicler. Indeed one would need more wit than
yours or mine to tell of such feats as those which God, by means of this brave
woman, has wrought in our own time. For not only has she roused weak
women to take up Christ’s Cross, but she has shamed the men, and dragged
them out to the field of battle; and when they had turned their backs on
discipline and primitive virtue, made them follow the banner of their woman
Captain, so that they might face their enemies who had risen to become so
lordly. She began like another Deborah to inspire the army of God, promising
victory to their side and never staying behind in the tent, but exposing herself
to the greatest dangers and affronts. Nor did she rest in times of peace, but,
with the greatest hardships and the sweat of her brow, went about planting
and transplanting this holy garden of Carmel that was so abandoned and
destroyed and had lost its rightful beauty—that beauty which God placed in
her own soul and body, showing full well the purpose for which He had raised
her, endowing her with so many gifts and graces and such beauty, with a
perfect countenance, as further on you will have to say, though in everything
you will fall short. For how could one describe how witty and tactful she
was, and how loving and gentle in manner; how prudent and wise, with the
caution and simplicity of a dove; how describe her faith and hope and spirit
of prophecy, the grace given her of bringirig souls to God, her marvelous gift
of counsel?—for, indeed, many of the nobles of Spain took her advice in the
4. Translator s note: Mortification ’ is used here in the technical sense of a process

of religious purification (purging of material desires) through which the individual
seeks spiritual perfection. See La muerte del apetito (The Death of Desire) in the
selections of chapter 4.
5. The comida is the main midday meal, first of the day, taken after communion.
The colación is the light refreshment between the main meal and supper (see Saint
Teresa’s Constitution, ch. 6, no. 8).
gravest matters. And thus, Sister, things like these are not for such as you
or I, I mean, for you alone to tell. Well then, from among all these, see that
you create some girlish trifle to console our Sisters, until such time as someone
who knows better how to do it shall write it for us. And you must say what
you heard and saw her do, for you were with her in the founding of some of
the convents, although what you say may not seem like much to you; for it
seems to me you have scarcely yet begun.”
On hearing this, Gracia started to prostrate herself upon the ground,
knowing that Justa spoke the truth; the latter stopped her, and said:
“Begin now. Sister, for indeed it is high time.”
“I told you at the very start,” said Gracia, “that you must help me, and as
you command me to write it for the recreations, tell me what form it should
take, or what name we should give it.”
“Let us call Sister Josefa and Sister Dorotea,” answered Justa, “for in matters
concerning our recreations, their opinion is very sound.”
With this Gracia arose and went to call them, and when, with permission,
they had come, Justa said to them:
“Deo gracias, ® Sisters—was it any trouble to you that they should summon
you from your hermitage?”
Dorotea straightway said:
“Well then dearest Sister, and is that the way among the Discalced nuns,
to be troubled by whatever obedience commands? No indeed, nor do 1 think
Sister Josefa came unwillingly. ”
And Josefa then said, “For my part, I can say that 1 was well pleased,
because 1 wanted to ask permission to come and hear something about Our
Lord, but I remembered that 1 still had to do one of the mortifications that
I have been commanded to perform each day, and so 1 put aside my wish;
and the Lord granted that I should be ordered to come. May His name be
praised! For nothing goes unrewarded that is done in His name.”
“Come then. Sisters!” said Gracia. “Let us comply with what obedience
commands; see what name should be given to what our Sister Justa here is
making me write.”
“We must see it first, ” said Josefa, “to give our opinion. ”
“A fine idea!” said Gracia. “But I am sure that whatever name you give it
will not make us overly vain.”
“You speak truly. Sister,” replied Josefa, “for from what little I have heard,
it is beginning to resemble a real Spanish stew,^ which is made of many
things.”
“Salad might be a truer name,” said Dorotea, “or those eggs they give us
in the refectory, with a lot of bread crumbs, which the Cellaress tells us is
a whole egg, and 1 will bet cannot be more than one-fourth for each nun.”
Gracia and Josefa, hearing this, prostrated themselves on the ground, and
Justa said:
“Why do you prostrate yourselves. Sisters?”
6. Translator’s note: “Thanks be to God”; the author uses the Latin phrase, a form
of greeting in the convent.
7. Translator’s note: “ollapodrida, ” literally “rotten pot,” a meat and vegetable stew.
98 UNTOLD SISTERS
One of them answered: “Because our Sister speaks of food, which is against
the Constitution.”
Dorotea replied: “I did not say it was well nor poorly cooked, which is
what the Constitution forbids; and it is permissible to observe that there is
little of it, especially when the stomach is faint with hunger, as it is even
permissible to keep hold of the plate when Sister Inocencia, because she is
nearsighted, thinks that it is all finished and snatches it away.”
Delighting in Dorotea’s words and remembering those critical moments in
which the same thing had happened to each of them, they all decided, with
one opinion, that the book should be called Of the Recreations; for that could
not stray from its subject, mixed as it was with diverse things related to the
nuns’ pastimes, all of which, composed of many different matters, have as a
common goal the praise of God.
With this, Josefa, who was the one who most extolled this name and the
story, said to Gracia:
“Begin, Sister, and I will go to fetch the hat, for I suspect you will certainly
need it.”
“The Lord be praised!” said Gracia. “For now I see the works of my own
hand shown to good effect, because they give some recreation to my Sisters!
But as we are in a hurry and there will not be time to observe each little
foolishness with formal ceremony, by putting the hat on me,® do Sister bring
the book of chronicles where such things are usually written, and set down
whatever I may say.”
At once Josefa, with great promptness, said:
“Of such work your charity’ deprives us, for it will write these things with
its own hand.”
Justa, who thought Josefa’s witty response quite amusing, after having
solemnly set it down with the others, ordered Gracia to begin; and the other
Sisters left, as the bell for prayers had rung. (52-60)
[Second Recreation]
In which, as Justa and Gracia continue, is told what the latter saw of
Mother Angela, and how long she has known her.
Gracia, raising her eyes to heaven, began by asking the Lord to move her
tongue, and said:
“You must know, dearest Sister, that I have known Mother Angela for
twenty years and more, before she founded the first convent of Discalced
nuns, when she was a nun in the [Convent of the) Encamación, where she
8. Translator’s note: The ceremony of the hat may be a parody of academic ritual;
it does not recall Teresian anecdotes, and we have found no other direct reference.
It was customary to show respect for such documents as papal bulls, ecclesiastical
briefs, and royal edicts by placing them on one’s head; hence, the expression “to
place (something) on one’s head” came to signify holding it in great esteem (cf.
Diccionario de la Real Academia Española, Madrid: 1970; the expression occurs in the
famous episode of the examination of books of chivalry, Quijote I, 6).
9. Translator’s note: The author here plays on vuestra caridad (lit., “your charity”)
as a form of address used by nuns (much like “your reverence”) and as the virtue of
selflessness.
was widely held to be saintly. And a certain lady, the daughter of a grandee
of this kingdom, upon hearing of her, asked that Angela be brought for her
consolation, for as this lady was recently widowed and sore afflicted, everyone
sought to bring her all the godly people there were, as she was a most Christian
woman and only this could give her any comfort; and so they brought before
the priest Fray Pedro de Alcántara, whom our blessed Mother remembers in
her books. And so too the Saint went to her, through obedience to her
superiors, which could still be done in those days, as this was before the
blessed Council of Trent was published, and was indeed done, as 1 later
understood, by God’s own commandment in order to finish arranging the
revenues for her first convent, which was founded not long after. 1 was then
thirteen or fourteen years old; she was in the house, on that occasion, about
six months or so.
“Now do 1 long. Sister, for another tongue than my own to tell of the
transformation wrought in us all by her holy conversation and her practice
of prayer and mortification. The entire household began to confess with the
Society of Jesus, for until then, there was no regular practice of sacraments
and alms. And so that we may fulfill what holy obedience demands, though
I confess my fault in saying that 1 do this with great reluctance, because it
seems to me that this will be mixing the shadows with the light, 1 shall speak
of my own life, which is all darkness where it concerns myself.”
“It matters little,” said Justa, “that you speak of yourself, for though you
have been most ungrateful and haughty and slothful, your wicked life will
not dim the light God shone in her holy one; rather, indeed, it is well to
show such a torch upon your own steps, so that you may the better see what
you have been and how you have neither resembled nor kept to the measure
of such holy precepts.”
.... (60-62)
[Said Gracia, . . .] “And returning to our Mother and to the great good
she worked for each and all in that house, where she was held in great esteem;
thus, eager to see something of what we understood God would do with her,
we watched her a few times from behind the door of her cell, and we saw
her seized by ecstasy, and with my own eyes I saw her several times, and how
she would leave the cell with a great deal of dissembling, for you know full
well. Sister, how circumspect she was at all times and with what prudence
she hid the magnificent things the Lord imparted to her. And at that time
we women, having heard so much about her great humility, all understood
that with a most excellent grace and discretion she disguised her spirit, as
she had a particular gift for this, and thus it was necessary, that people might
understand how God was working in her, and so that His Majesty should
mortify her, to seize her up in rapture in public, as I witnessed twice in that
same house, although that was after she had founded the convents of Avila
and Medina del Gampo, and upon her return to found the one in Malagón.
“At that time the Lord called me to our Order, as I saw and spoke with
our Mother and her companions, who would move the very stones with their
admirable lives and conversation. And what made me follow them was the
gentleness and great tact of our good Mother. And in truth I believe that if
those whose work it is to bring souls to God were to use the same schemes
and skill used by the Saint, many more women would come to religion than
lOO UNTOLD SISTERS
those who now come; for, as our nature is inclined to seek gladness and to
flee travail, then to depict virtue and all that is God’s service as harsh and
difficult is to frighten away those feeble souls who have not tasted how sweet
it is to suffer for Christ.”
“It seems to me, Sister Gracia,” said Justa, “that you are meddling in what
has not been asked of you, nor is it yours to do.”
“In what?” said Gracia.
“In writing doctrine,” Justa replied to this, “and teaching others how they
should bring souls to God; leave that to those men, for if it is their office
and God has given it to them. He will teach them what they must do; do
not think that all must go by your road.”
“May God forbid,” Gracia replied to this, “that I should speak thus of the
Lord’s ministers or of those whom the Church, our Mother, has assigned to
teach us, for whom I feel and shall always feel great reverence; when I hear
the word of God from whoever may be in the pulpit, or when anyone speaks
to me in the confessional, through God’s grace I am filled with love, which
I feel in my soul with great reverence . . . And so, leaving aside those men
whose office it is to teach, I speak of you and me, and of all the rest of us
whose obligation it is to bring souls to God by our good example, and who
pride ourselves on being of Christ’s own flock and of those who communicate
most closely with Him: we should not appear so gloomy and sorrowful, lest
we misrepresent our conversation with God to those who have not experi¬
enced it, giving them to understand that the practice of prayer, silence, and
spiritual exercises is a melancholy and unbearable thing. For, as is the way
in this world, nothing more will be needed to make them flee from God,
than our telling them they must be sorrowful. . . . And I tell you Sister, that
the best impulses I have had in this life have been to go through the streets,
to undeceive those who think it is a hardship to serve God. And believe me
that full many are ignorant in this, for there are many who praise the virtues
to the skies, as they certainly deserve, but in such a way that they make it
seem impossible for weaker souls to achieve them; as if truly there were no
weak soul who might reach them, with the help of divine grace. And because,
as you said, it is not my place to write doctrine, I shall leave this matter to
return to our purpose.”
.... (63-65)
“And with what I have now said. Sister Justa, be satisfied, for neither am
I obliged to say more, nor is it right that the soul should tell in public of the
intimate favors she experiences with God, nor do I believe that the Lord is
served by this, other than by speaking of it with that one who must guide
it, who is the spiritual father,nor even there, breathes there a soul who
would dare to speak of these things nor who possesses a tongue to speak the
words. And though 1 myself have no things so lofty that they cannot be told,
I am a great believer in a doctrine which cannot be bad, and I imagine that
the most saintly women deeply favored by the Lord kept to it, and it is this:
just so, a mighty king of great majesty would not permit revelation of all that
10. Translator’s note: i.e., the priest or confessor.

More Than One Teresa lOI
he does in secret with his wife, to delight and favor her, when leaving off
his majesty and nobility he lowers himself and makes himself her equal to
do the things that only love will suffer, and which to one with no under¬
standing would appear indecent; and so, angered now and in some respect
ashamed, such a person might complain of the looseness of the wife, to whom
such things are only permitted because they signify the love the king bears
for her and the favor she thus receives, but do not give her leave to speak
of the particular intimacies of love. . .
“It seems to me that you are on the wrong track,” said Justa. “For how
should we know of all the delights and favors the Lord has bestowed on so
many sainted women, such as we know occurred with Saint Catherine of
Siena, Saint Elizabeth, Saint Erigid, and the Blessed Angela of Foligno and
others, if Fie were not pleased that such things be told? Rather, that is why
such favors are given, and not solely to benefit those who receive them.”
.... (82)
[Fourth Recreation]
In which Gracia continues to speak of the glories of Mount Carmel.
On another day in the morning, when the divine offices were done and
the nuns were sitting beside the fountain, Justa said, “Now with good reason,
Sister Gracia, you must have a great deal to tell us.”
“Yes, I do,” she answered, “but I do not dare, because in order to say
anything, I must needs cite certain passages that I have read in a variety of
books, especially those of the Fioly Bible, which mentions that sacred moun¬
tain; and because at the start I appointed you judge, not only are you per¬
forming that office, but also that of prosecutor, accusing me whenever I say
anything. ”
They all laughed at this, and Justa gave Gracia license to speak without
fear, recalling what she had said above, that she did not know any more
than was commonly known to women—“That it was not good to write; but
you. Sister, who think yourself a lady scholar, which is what we consider
you, you certainly will be able.”
.... (93)
[Gracia continues] "... It was fitting that the dwelling to be erected for
her who is loftier and more exalted than any other pure creature, should be
placed on the summit that stands above all other mountains; and that a
tabernacle should be built for the Mother of the Lord upon the mountain of
the house of the Lord. And it was right that this should be a rugged mountain,
so that the foundations might be strong, for this place was built for her, the
mightiest of the mighty, so strong that she cracked the head of Lucifer. And
within this stronghold are raised up people trained in the Lord’s militia, with
which this woman. Captain of God’s army, does affront His enemies.
11. This passage echoes the advice for the ideal wife of the marriage manuals of
the period. See for example, Juan Luis Vives, Instruction of a Christian Woman (1623),
and Fray Luis de León, La perfecta casada (The Perfect Wife) [1583].
102 UNTOLD SISTERS
“I do not, exalted Lady, highest Empress, semper augusta, Mother of the

eternal fatherland, place you in a fortress and tower because you require walls
to defend you, not guardians to guard you; for upon your arm you bear the
shield and the strength of Zion, and you ate the sovereign Queen, the towet
of Lebanon, which looks out over Damascus, and the tower of David, upon
which there hang a thousand shields of gold. Rathet, 1 know that it pleases
you to be enclosed, as are the women who follow you and who place befóte
themselves a rampart. Never would 1 wish you. Virgin most pure, to be found
among the noise and tumult of the wotldly. Not have 1, to honor you, called
you by such names as those by which mortals are honored, for full well do
1 know your names, which are lofty, as yout epithets are eternal, for you are
Mother of our eternal God, who desires that you should be guarded by sixty
valiant men of Israel, for you are the flowery bed of the divine Solomon.'^
“May the great Elijah be the captain of them all, for you appointed him
valiant protector of the honor of your beloved Solomon, through the fears
of nighttime, when in the darkness his entire people adored foreign gods,
and through the feats of the night, of those who spoke against your purity.
He took a vow of chastity, that it might be known that he was dedicated to
the defense of this bed most pute, and no less have your sixty valiant Car¬
melites defended you, as did Saint Cyrilus in the Ephesian Council, and all
the others, whose names 1 shall not speak as there is no need, for they are
inscribed on your banner, nor do 1 think my sisters will give me license to
do so.”
Justa and Atanasia promptly said, “You would give us great pleasure in
setting them down; it was only because we did not wish to interrupt what
you were saying that we did not ask you to do so.”
.... (94-95)
[Said Justa,] “. . . It now remains to be seen whether it is a greater glory

for the Virgin to have one Order''' in particular established for her service
and worship, since as universal Mother and Lady of the Church, all the
Orders, which are named for other saints, are also hers. ”
To this Gracia answered, “Although a Queen may be given ladies of honor
and maid servants for her service and to wait on her in her chambers, it is
not therefore thought that this quits her of the command of all the othet
women of her kingdom, as Lady of all the land; nor because the former obey
her like vassals, is it thought she should have no others, for all are employed
in her service alone. We know full well that blind heathendom, who adored
and served the demons, though they mistakenly named them gods, as such
offered and dedicated special priests to them, in the manner they thought
pleasing to their gods. To the goddess Vetecintia, whom they called the
12. Song of Solomon 4:4.

13. Song of Solomon 3:7.
14. In Spanish, Religión.
mother of the gods,’^ the Gallic priests were dedicated, and they wore white
vestments; the Vestal virgins were dedicated to the goddess Vesta; thus were
their temples filled with priests and priestesses. And though it is a contra¬
diction for me to introduce things that are so vain and full of superstition in
support of things so true and holy, 1 remember having read that many things
used by the Gentiles in their temples are now practiced by our Christian
religion, though with all the difference that exists between the false and the
true, the sacred and the profane. 1 mean, that the priests in white vestments
might one day be dedicated, not to the mother of the vain gods, but to the
Mother of the true God; and that to the goddess Vesta, which means fire,
those virgins should be dedicated who, in their temple, preserve the fire of
the love of God.”
Justa was somewhat scandalized, as is the way with women who know very
little, to hear that certain practices observed by the Gentiles were used in
the Church. And understanding this, Atanasia said, “1 will answer that
question so that you. Sister, may rest; for it does not astonish me that you
might be tired and vexed with enduring Sister Justa and all her scruples.”
“You will be doing me a great kindness,” said Gracia, “for she has quite
worn me out.” . . . (104-05)
[Sixth Recreation]
In which they discuss the riches and precious stones of Mount Carmel.
Another day, when Justa and Gracia had come to Atanasia’s hermitage,
they found her prostrate upon the ground; and though it caused her great
mortification, she went with them because it was a matter of obedience,
which the Lord desires more then He does sacrifice. Withal, in order to
provide her Sisters with some recreation, she said to them:
“You are short on prayer but long on conversation, for you have arrived
at break of day. ”
“Have no doubt. Sister,” said Gracia, “but that it is quite natural for women
to talk a great deal; 1 think this springs from the fact that, as we know very
little, we need a great many words to make ourselves understood. And now
sit down, and we will return to our story.
“It is fitting that we should first give water to our mountain, for that is
the element most necessary to human life, without which we could not live;
and it is the rivers and fountains that beautify and fertilize the earth. And
that it may be seen how God attends to them, 1 will tell you what is written
in Deuteronomy, chapter eight. There Moses says, in speaking to the people
of God: ‘For your Lord God has brought you into a good land of rivers, of
water, of streams, and of fountains whose depths spring from the valleys and
15. The author is here speaking of the goddess Cybele, “the great mother-goddess
of Anatolia, .... primarily she is a goddess of fertility, but also cures [and sends]
disease, gives oracles, and . . . protects her people in war. . . . she is also mistress
of wild nature ...” (Oxford Classical Dictionary 303). Known in Greece by the fifth
century, she was associated with Demeter. Berecynthia was the mountain sacred to
Cybele; Virgil, in the Aeneid, refers to the goddess using the name of the mountain.
104 UNTOLD SISTERS
hills. . . The rivers in our own province of Spain are not unworthy of
admiration, as their waters possess great virtue and delicacy. For as I have
said, our province lies to the north, wherein the running waters are more
wholesome and light because they are refined by the northern winds of the
Septentrión and freed from those of the Meridian, which thickens the waters
and fills them with vapors. . . .
“. . . Oh, sweet Jesus! Rightly do you endow us with water, the thing most
necessary to human life. For indeed, most blessed source and spring, there
is no life in our works if they be not showered by the water of your grace;
we must seek you by roads and paths of water, for as your prophet says, “Your
roads are in the sea, and your paths upon many waters.’”^ You are the life,
the truth, and the way, and this way must lead through the waters of trib¬
ulation; and thus. Sister, it is not right that tribulations should be lacking
in [Mt.] Carmel. For if we praise and cherish Carmel, we do not do so on
account of its great age nor for the favors of the nobility, of which so many
have been bestowed upon it, nor because we dress in sackcloth, nor because
this is the habit of the most blessed Virgin. For all this would profit us little
if we did not live here in imitation of Christ. This is the true way. Walk in
Him, says our Rule.'® And may no one suppose that we boast of being
Discalced nor of wearing coarse cloth, for neither these nor any other thing
we might do suffices for us to reach the prize of the righteous, without a true
imitation of our Lord Jesus Christ. And this consists of abiding by His law,
and of holding this divine sun in highest regard while contemplating ourselves
in Him, and of buying the gold of true wisdom, which is a mine of holy
metals, wherein is found that precious pearl for which wise merchants ex¬
change all earthly goods in order to possess Christ, a pearl of matchless worth.
“This is the lodestone that raises hearts laden and shackled with faults'^
to the hope of eternal life; it is the carbuncle that shines resplendent through
our tribulations, expelling from the heart that owns it all venom and mistrust,
which in my judgment are the means by which demons poison and harry
those who attempt prayer and recollection; it is jacinth, which wards off the
bolts of the wrath of God; it is turquoise which keeps one from falls; ... it
is chrysolite, which wotks against madness and drives away visions and fan¬
tasies; it is crystal which clears the sight, and sapphire which pleases the
sight of those who carry these stones and makes them well-loved; it is an
emerald which makes the heart happy and rids it of melancholy; it is the
amethyst stone, which drives away demons; it is the heliotrope stone, which
makes men faithful, and invisible, and bestows long life; it is the stone called
selenite, which has the form of the moon, and waxes and wanes just as she
does. I shall do you no wrong by applying this stone to you, for you, my
16. Deuteronomy 8:7.
17. Psalms 77:19.

18. Ambulate in ea: Carmelite Rule.
19. Trarislator’s note: here there is a play on words, as “hierros" (irons, shackles)
and yerros (errors, faults, sins) are homonyms in Spanish.
Lord, do greatly resemble it, for you have the form of our Queen and Mother,
our Lady, who is called by the name of moon ...”
“You have pleased us greatly,” said Justa, “with all you have said of these
stones; but I wish to know if what you have said of them are their own
virtues, or if you meant to apply them to our Lord, suiting the stones either
by their color, or for some other reason, to those effects which our divine
Lord works in the soul where He is found.”
[Said Gracia] “. . . great good can be found in the contemplation of all

creatures, and as the glorious Saint Paul says, ‘by visible things do we come
to knowledge of the invisible,for truly they are steps by which we may
climb to the knowledge of God, as by a stairway; and if the virtues and
properties of the stones, trees, birds, and animals and all other creatures are
so numerous, and these are found all together in man, how high and perfect
a creature this must be, and how clearly has the Lord shown His love for
him . . .”
“The splendor of the carbuncle is enjoyed by those who embrace the Cross
and trials of the Lord, their souls filled with joy; they possess peace of heart,
with all venom expelled from it.
“From the bolts and fury of the wrath of God, jacinths defend those who
walk always in their fear, fulfilling what David says: ‘Serve the Lord with
fear, and rejoice in Him with trembling.’”^'
“The virtue of crystal is enjoyed by those who have plain and simple sight,
and do not judge harshly what they see.
“Chrysolites are those who, free of madness, have dispelled the memory
of the visions and fantasies of the world.
“Sapphires and rubies are those who are truly humble, whose sight is
pleasing because God places His eyes on them, and they are well-loved
because they offend no one, though offense may be done to them.
“The emerald which makes happy the hearts of his brothers, is the merciful
man, who with emerald freed the unhappy from their melancholy.
“The truly obedient have the virtue of amethysts, to drive away demons,
for there is nothing that drives them away more than obedience; for they
know that it was on account of this virtue that they were stripped and cast
out of the kingdom which they had tyrannized.
“Those who speak truly in prayer, who adore the Father in spirit and in
truth, are the heliotrope stone, whose virtue as has been said, is to make
men faithful and invisible and long-lived. What virtue is there to make us
faithful, like that of prayer; and what exercise to make men invisible and
forgetful of the weight and coarseness of their bodies, so that they may be
raised, not only in spirit but with their very bodies, towards invisible things?
20. Romans 1:20.
21. Psalms 2:11.

io6 UNTOLD SISTERS
For so we read of a great many saints, and indeed do know of our own Madre
Angela. That this gives long life is quite clear, for it thus anticipates the life
eternal, beginning from this day on to enjoy its good.
“The selenite stone, which has the form of the moon, and waxes and
wanes with her, are those who, contemplating how little stability there is in
all things, receive prosperity and adversity alike, with no disturbance of their
spirits. ...” (115-21)
[Seventh Recreation]
In which all three discuss the properties of prayer, and the practice of
the same.
When their prayers were done, all three returned to the place where they
had spoken earlier; and Atanasia, whom they regarded as their teacher, after
having greeted them, then said: “As this prayer was done by all, and in the
prayer of each one the others participated as well, it is fitting that each should
tell just how she has prayed, so that it may be common to all, as was the
practice of charity. And let Gracia begin. ”
“1 was trembling,” said Justa, “to think you might order me to go first.
Blessed be the Lord, that one who knows something about it will begin. For
I know not what prayer is, nor have I ever yet understood it, nor do I know
what to say on my account, as 1 do not have those experiences that all of
you have; and however hard 1 work at it, all 1 achieve is a weary head and
a heart more dismal than night itself.”
“I am glad indeed,” said Atanasia, “that you have spoken your mind, for
this is just what 1 was after. It makes me very sad to see how few there are
who exert themselves in the heavenly practice of prayer, and of these few,
how many waste their time to no advantage because they do not know
themselves or come to agreement. I cannot understand what we imagine
these inventions or tricks of prayer to be, for that is a thing to frighten our
spirits and to drive poor women mad. And it does not surprise me with
women, for we are ignorant; but I am astonished when I think how many
years I went about half foolish from conversing with such persons as are most
greatly renowned for their way of prayer, and who always left me confused
when they spoke to me of it, until Our Lord made me understand it. I do
not know what more we need in order to know what prayer is, than to see
what the Lord Jesus Christ taught to his disciples. . . .” (123-24)
[Ninth Recreation]
[Gracia recounts the difficulties of the trip to Seville, and the obstacles
to the convent Saint Teresa founded there.]
That first day, at the hour of the siesta, we arrived at a lovely grove, from
which we scarcely could pull our blessed Mother away, for at the abundance
of flowers, and the songs of a thousand little birds, she entirely dissolved in
praises of God. We went to pass the night in the hermitage of San Andrés,
which is below the village of Santisteban; where, sometimes praying and
sometimes resting on the cold hard paving-stones of the church, we spent
the night very happily, though with little enough ease, for we travelled quite
unprepared and unencumbered, or to put it more exactly, destitute of even
the most essential things. For our Sisters there at Beas, because that house
had just recently been founded, did not have anything to give us; and they
took from us even what little they might have given, because of the reports
of the grandeurs and riches that Father Mariano had led us to think we would
find, and with this hope we indeed assisted them; and thus, with the certainty
we felt, they were frugal while we gave lavishly, though we had little enough
with which to do so. Indeed, towards the cost of the journey the Sisters of
Malagón loaned us all the money we spent on it, and as that house was the
first that did well by us, it is right to tell it here, especially as my Mother
and other Sisters who made that trip were from that blessed house, which
has helped so many nuns.”
.... (193-94)
“We passed the whole journey laughing and composing ballads and verses
on all the events that befell us, and with these our Mother was most unusually
pleased, thanking us a thousand times because we underwent so many trials
with such great pleasure and satisfaction; for there were more hardships than
1 shall here relate, so as not to be tedious. 1 will only tell of a few that caused
us most distress, such as crossing the Guadalquivir, when we found ourselves
in great difficulty. For when all the people had crossed to the other side of
the river and they wished to bring the carts across, then—either because it
was necessary, on account of the carts, to shift the boat, or because the
boatman did not have the skill to manage—the great force of the current
swept the boat away and carried it downstream with one or two carts, so that
it seemed we were left helpless, with nothing to be done and night coming
on. We were sore distressed, because of our great need for the carts on the
one hand, for without them we could not travel on; and on the other because
we were a league and a half distant from any dwelling-place. And again, you
may imagine how the drivers and boatmen would respond to this event, for
they began to scold as is their custom, so that no one was able to appease
them. When she saw this, our Mother began to take charge of her convent
and set it to rights, and went under a bluff at the river’s edge; and under¬
standing that we were to spend the night there, we began to unpack our
bedding and our gear, which were a sacred image and holy water and books.
We sang Complin, and thus we passed the time while the others, poor things,
were working to stop the boat with a cable; although they needed our help
as well and we began to pull on the rope, which very nearly dragged all of
us Sisters away. In the end, because our blessed Mother was there, who is
so powerful in her prayer, the Lord willed that the boat should come to a
stop, and there was opportunity to bring it back; and so, well into the night,
we at last escaped from this difficulty and found ourselves in another, which
was that we lost our way and did not know which road to take. A gentleman
who from a long way off had witnessed our trials of that evening, sent us a
man who helped us in everything, although he first stood uttering a thousand
abominations against monks and nuns, without moving to undertake the task
for which he had been sent. 1 know not whether it was upon seeing us pray
that he was moved, so that he most mercifully gave us aid; and when at last
he went his way, it was not before we had once more mistaken the road and
he pointed it out, walking half a league with us and begging our pardon for
what he had said.”
.... (195-96)
io8 UNTOLD SISTERS
. . Oh, what rage the demons showed against this blessed and valiant
woman, and how clearly we saw this a great many times, as was shown in
this foundation, as shall soon be seen! 1 know not, dearest Sisters, what tales
our enemies spread about; please God, may it be by our virtues and those of
the Sisters still to come, that the war against hell shall be waged.
“We entered Seville another day, a Thursday the twenty-sixth of May,
having spent nine days on the road. Father Mariano had rented us a house,
quite small and damp, on the Calle de las Armas, where two ladies, friends
of his, received us. That day they accompanied us there and then left, and
for a great long time we saw them no more, nor did they or anyone else send
us so much as a jug of water. ... 1 give infinite thanks to His Majesty for
granting such a beginning to this foundation, for it assures me of its certain
and prosperous end.
“Let us relate in detail the furniture and effects that we found in that
house. First were half a dozen old cane-stalk frames which Father Mariano
had ordered brought from his own convent in Los Remedios;^^ they lay on
the floor to be used as beds. There were two or three very dirty little mattresses,
like those of Discalced monks, and accompanied by such a retinue as usually
accompany these things; these were for our Mother and some of the weaker
nuns. There was not a sheet, a blanket, or a pillow, but for two which we
ourselves had brought. We found a palm mat, a frying pan, one or two oil
lamps, a brass mortar, and a ladle, or little bucket, for drawing water. And
just as it seemed to us that this, along with a few jugs and plates and such
things that we found, were at least the beginnings of a house, the neighbors,
who had loaned these things for that day, began sending, this one for the
frying pan, that one for the oil lamp, and the other for the ladle and the
table, so that we were left without one single thing, neither a frying pan nor
a mortar nor even the rope to the well. And this. Sisters, is no exaggeration,
for it happened just so, as some of you who were there, indeed, did see it.”
.... (200-02)
Carta de una pobre y presa descalza
No sé, carísimas hermanas e hijas mías, si dando lugar a la pasión y ternura

de mujer, acompañe vuestras lágrimas, o siguiendo la luz del corazón me queje
de vuestro sentimiento, pues no se compadece, en ley de la estrecha amistad
que nos tenemos, que lloréis vosotras por lo que yo río, ni forméis quejas de
quien me hace beneficios. . . . (271)
No nos demos por contentas, ni por parecemos tan sin razón lo que nos
dan lo habernos de desechar. No parecería tener buen seso el pobre mendigo
a quien diesen un pedazo de oro para remediar sus necesidades, si por no
estar labrado y compuesto con esmaltes, lo desechase. Mendigos y necesitados
somos, y no hay alguno tan justo que tenga caudal para comprar la vida
eterna. Por cierto que no se da de balde, sino a precio de lágrimas y gemidos
22. Translator’s note: a district of Seville.

se alcanza. Pues quien nos da ocasión de gemir, quien nos hinche las manos
de penas, quien con la vara del rigor hiere la piedra para que salgan fuentes
de lágrimas, ¿será razón que los tengamos por enemigos? ¿No sabéis que es
necesario que se labren acá las piedras por manos de los artífices, para que
se asienten en el soberano edificio? No os parezca que como a hombres
ignorantes y ciegos los deja el Señor dar los golpes errados; que no aparta los
ojos ni desampara a los suyos de suerte que sean lastimados. Su mano aplica
a cada golpe, y aunque ellos piensan que desbastan en una parte, él lleva el
golpe a otra, como el que sabe a dónde está lo tosco y mal pulido. Ellos ligan
la lengua pensando se ha movido a cosas vanas, y el Señor las desata de su
torpeza y castiga la pereza que se ha tenido en sus alabanzas; ellos cierran los
ojos, creyendo que miran lo que no debían, y el Señor los abre con nueva
luz, y con este colirio quita las cataratas que impedían el mirar al cielo; ellos
tapan los oídos, y Cristo los purifica y dispone para que oigan sus divinas
inspiraciones a que tantas veces se han hecho sordos; ellos cortan los pasos
entendiendo que cuantos doy son fundados en maldad, y Cristo los endereza
a sí purgando en esto los que en otros tiempos di buscando mis gustos; ellos
cierran la puerta para que no se vea y traten a las criaturas, y con esto el Criador
nos abre su corazón para que en él comuniquemos a las que en él amamos.
Habémonos embarcado con Cristo en la navecilla, base de levantar tem¬
pestad, y aunque el Señor duerme y parece que nos vamos anegando. Su
Majestad recordará a tiempo, y nos librará. No os desmayéis, carísimas, ni
os enflaquezca vuestra fe por ver que al parecer el Señor nos ha dejado tantos
tiempos en manos de los que nos persiguen y afligen. Ni os parezca que es
mal propio de lo que en servicio de la Religión tantos años ha que trabajamos,
desterradas en diversas tierras, encerradas con suma pobreza, sufriendo los
intolerables trabajos que en fundar y sustentar los conventos se pasa. Ni se
os haga duro ver que los que así nos tienen, son aquéllos a quien no sólo no
habernos ofendido, mas aun habernos servido y amado en el Señor, y los que
más por amigos se nos han vendido, y a quien ayudamos a subir en el estado
en que están, y lo que más se puede sentir, son, al fin, aquellos a quien Dios
tiene obligados a que nos amparen y defiendan. . . . (274-75)
Y volviendo a mi bien, os pido, queridas hijas, que no os pese de verme

aquí encerrada, ni os aflijáis de que estén todas las puertas cerradas de los
medios humanos para mi libertad, habiéndoos puesto tantos preceptos para
que nadie sepa lo que se hace de mí, pues aquél que lo puede remediar no
está ausente. El lo mira y lo consiente y aun por ventura se alegra de verme,
por ver nuestra paciencia; con él podéis hablar; a él me podéis presentar y
con él me podréis favorecer; que en vuestra ayuda espero y tanto fío de
vuestras espirituales orejas que creo me están atentas a lo que aquí digo. Y
por esto no tengo por vano lo que escribo, aunque sé que no lo podéis leer,
mas servirá también de lo que siempre pretendo en lo que escribo de tener
un testigo delante de Dios y de los hombres, que me acuse si lo contrario
hiciere de lo que aquí con mi mano escribo, y para mostrar que siempre os
tengo presentes y nunca de mi memoria os apartaré, aunque me hayan apar¬
tado a una tan estrecha prisión.
Suplico a todas humildemente que, por que nuestro mérito sea mayor ante
nuestro Rey, todas nos conformemos en esto, que amemos a los que nos
afligen no como enemigos sino como verdaderos amigos y bienhechores, y
I lO UNTOLD SISTERS
por nuestro grande amigo Cristo. Que aun no me contento que cumplamos
con sólo el mandamiento de amar a los enemigos, que me parece que ése les
dio el Señor para los endurecidos fariseos que tenían por enemigos a quien
los injuriaban; mas nosotras, hijas, que seguimos la ley evangélica ... no es
razón que resistamos a los que nos quieren afligir, sino mostramos contentas
y ellos lo estén. De quien yo creo de sus piadosos corazones que no me desean
tanto atormentar, cuanto yo deseo que me atormenten, y este solo descon¬
tento tengo. Y cuando me quiero acompañar con algunos de los santos que
por nuestro Señor estuvieron presos, parece que me desechan como a indigna:
porque a ellos los veo en duras prisiones, y yo no las tengo; ellos entre cmeles
enemigos, yo entre piadosas hermanas; ellos en cárceles infames, yo en un
rincón del cielo donde con tanta piedad soy visitada del ángel que me dieron
por guarda; ellos por la confesión del nombre de su Señor, yo no he llegado
a tan alta dignidad. Al fin me consuelo y alivio la pena con estar a su sombra,
envidiando su buena suerte y no menosprecio la mía. . . . (272-75)
Letter From a Poor, Imprisoned Discalced Nun
My dearest Sisters and Daughters: 1 know not whether allowing for a

woman’s passion and tenderness, 1 should accompany your tears, or following
the understanding of my heart, 1 should complain of your feelings; for it is
not fitting, in light of the close friendship between us, that you should weep
at what makes me laugh, nor that you should form complaints of those who
do me good. . . . (271)
Let us not think that we should be satisfied; but neither, because what is
meted out seems to us so unreasonable, need we therefore spurn it. It would
not seem good sense on the part of a poor beggar, to whom is given a bit of
gold to relieve his poverty, that he should then cast it away because it was
not inlaid and adorned with enamel-work. Beggars and in need are we; nor
is there anyone so just that he has stored up a treasure that will purchase
eternal life. For certainly this is not given freely, but reached at the price of
tears and lamentations. Therefore, whoever gives us reason to lament, whoever
causes our hands to swell with toil and pains, whoever with the rod of severity
strikes the stone, so that fountains of tears spring forth: shall we consider
such men our enemies? Do you not know that here below, the stones must
be worked at the hands of the artisans, that they may lie properly in the
sovereign edifice? You should not think that the Lord allows them, like
ignorant and blind men, to deliver these errant blows; for He does not turn
away His eyes nor abandon His people that they may be injured. His own
hand applies each blow, and though these men think that they hammer the
stone in one place. He carries the blow to another, as one who knows where
lies the rough and the unpolished place. They bind my tongue, thinking it
has moved to speak vain things, and the Lord unties it from its dullness and
punishes the sloth it has shown towards His praises; they close my eyes,
believing them to see what they should not, and the Lord opens them with
new light and understanding, and with this collyrium removes the cataracts
that had blocked my view of heaven; they shut up my ears, and Christ purifies
them and permits them to hear His divine inspirations to which so many
times they have been deaf; they hohhle my steps, thinking that all those 1
take are founded in evil, and Christ guides them straight to Himself, thus
purging those 1 took in days past when 1 sought my own whims; they close
the door that others may not be seen or spoken to, and at this the Creator
opens His heart to us that there we may communicate with those Sisters
whom we love in Him.
We have embarked with Christ in the little boat; the storm must rise; and
though the Lord sleeps and it seems that we are foundering, his Majesty will
remember us in time and will save us.^^ Do not be dismayed, dearest Sisters;
nor should your faith grow weak to see that it seems the Lord has left us so
long in the hands of those who persecute and afflict us. Nor should you think
that this is an evil particular to all we have worked for these many years, in
service to the Order, exiled in so many lands, enclosed in the greatest poverty,
suffering the intolerable hardships that are undergone in founding and sus¬
taining the convents. Nor should it become bitter for you to see that those
who keep us thus, are the very same, whom not only have we not offended,
but whom indeed we have served and loved in the Lord, and who have most
sold themselves to us as friends, and whom we have helped to raise up to
the position they hold; and, what might hurt most sore, that they are, in
sum, those whom God has obliged to help and defend us. . . . (274-75)
And returning to my welfare, I beg you, beloved Daughters, that you be

not grieved to see me imprisoned here, nor distress yourselves because all
the doors of human possibility are closed to my freedom, because they have
placed so many restrictions upon you that no one may know what is done
with me; for He who can help is not absent. He sees and assents, and indeed
perhaps is glad to see me, for He sees our patience; you may speak with Him;
you may present my case to Him and seek my favor with Him; for 1 have
faith in your help and such trust in your spiritual ears that I believe they
attend to what I say here. And therefore 1 do not consider what 1 write to
be in vain, though 1 know that you cannot read it; but it shall also serve
what is always my intent in all I write, which is to have a witness, before
God and man, which may accuse me if I should act contrary to what I write
here with my hand; and also to show that 1 hold you ever present, and you
shall never leave my memory, although they have sequestered me in such a
narrow prison.
I humbly beg you all, (my Sisters,] so that our merit may increase before
our King, that we all agree in this: to love those who afflict us, not as enemies
but as true friends and benefactors, and for the sake of our great friend Christ.
For indeed I am not satisfied that we simply fulfill the commandment to love
our enemies, which it seems to me the Lord gave to the hardened Pharisees
who regarded as enemies any who did them harm; but we, my Daughters,
who follow the law of the Gospel ... it is not right that we resist those who
wish to afflict us, but we should rather show ourselves to be well content,
and they shall be so, too. For 1 believe of their pious hearts, that they do
not desire to torment me half so much as 1 desire to be tormented, and this
23. Matthew 8:23—27.

112 UNTOLD SISTERS
is my only discontent. And when I wish to accompany some of the saints

who for Our Lord’s sake were made prisoners, it seems they cast me aside as
unworthy: for I see them in harsh fetters, and I wear no such thing; they are
among cruel enemies, and I among merciful Sisters; they lie in vile cells,
and I am in a comer of heaven where with great mercy I am visited by the
angel they set to guard me; they are there for confessing the name of their
Lord, and Í have reached no such honor. In the end, I console myself, and
lighten my grief, with being in their shadow, envying their good fortune and
not belittling my own. . . . (278-79)
Elegía Elegy
(Lisboa, hacia 1591/1592) (Lisbon, about 1591-1592)
En una peña al mar clara se muestra High above the limpid sea there stands
una Carmela casa, no olvidada a house of Carmel, never yet forgot
del que ampara los pobres con su diestra, by One who shields the poor with His
right hand,
adonde el grande Alberto una manada and there the great Alberto tends his flock
de simples ovejuelas apacienta of simple ewe-lambs, setting them to graze
sin pasto, sin favor, sin tener nada. though they lack fodder or favor, though
they have naught.
Las olas, más que el mar, sube y aumenta Above the sea the mighty waves are raised
él que a todos persigue con trabajos, by Him who persecutes us all with trials
y con furia infernal nos atormenta. and punishes us with infernal rage.
Mas todo cuanto ordena son atajos But all that He ordains will speed the
miles
para llegar más presto al deseado the faster to attain that precious
puerto, lleno de gozos y agasajos. harbor, filled with pleasures and delights.
En medio esta tormenta se ha esforzado Amidst such tempests, in her sad distress
una afligida y simple pastorcilla a simple shepherdess now bravely tries
a cantar, como puede, su cuidado; as best she can, her sorrows to express,
y aunque con ronca voz la pobrecilla, although, poor thing, she sings with
faltering voice,
y haciendo de sus ojos un fuente, while from her weeping eyes there flows a
fountain
que provoca mirarla a gran mancilla, which moves to pity anyone who sees;
al cielo está mirando atentamente, and as she gazes steadily toward Heaven
el rostro macilento y lacrimoso, with tearful face all haggard, wan, and
lean,
un ¡ay, ay! repitiendo solamente. she utters once again her lamentation.
More Than One Teresa ”3
El aparato y traje no es curioso, Her implements and gatb ate not tefined
antes es pobre, rústico y grosero, but tathet low and tustic, rude and poor;
y el ánimo, aunque triste, generoso; her spirit generous, though sotrowing;
un meneo y mirar tiene sincero her gestures and regard are quite sincete,
y un no sé qué se muestta de excelencia, and she reveals some subtle excellence
igual a las que siguen al Cotdero; like all those nuns, the Lamb’s true
followers.
huyendo el vano ocio, a diferencia Hasting to flee that wasteful idleness

de las que en vanidad gastan su vida. in which so many women’s days are
squandered.
mil instrumentos trae de penitencia. she carries her instruments of penitence.
Muestra de gran dolor estar herida. By some great anguish she must have been
wounded.
ajena de ficción, burla o engaño. for, stranger to falsehoods, wiles or
trickery.
ni a cosa torpe o vana estar rendida; nor given to idle, trifling pursuits.
parece lamentar un grave daño, she seems to mourn some grievous injury,
y aunque no acaba de decir su duelo. and though she cannot tell het grief
entire.
entre dientes pronuncia; ¡Ay, mi rebaño! “Oh, my poor flock!” she is murmuring.
Esperando un gran rato a que se vuelva Then long I waited, thinking I might heat,
por ver si entendería su cuidado when she turned toward me, the true cause
antes que en llanto triste se resuelva. of all her sorrow, before it fell in tears;
vi que atenta miraba un extremado and saw that she gazed steadily upon
retrato de una virgen excelente; the flawless porttait of a worthy virgin:
“Teresa” escrito tiene; es mi cuidado. “Teresa” there is writ; she is my concern.
Este pone en los ojos, boca y frente. She touches this to het eyes, her mouth,
her forehead;
éste la eclipsa, turba y la serena. it overshadows, roils, then makes het
serene.
aunque el alivio en ella es accidente; although to relieve her is the more to
injure.
y el aflojar algún tanto la pena for to allow such grief the slightest ease
es para más penar, quien tiene el pecho is but to sttengthen gtief, in one whose
heart
y el alma de pesar contino llena. and soul ate filled with endless sotrowing.
114 UNTOLD SISTERS
Auméntase por horas su tormento Hour by hour her torment does increase
con el veloz discurso, y anda dando with her swift speech; and all her thoughts
mil vueltas en un punto el pensamiento. whirl in a thousand rings round each
conceit.
La voz con el dolor le va faltando When she considers how her joy is lost,
cuando su bien contempla se ha perdido; her voice, with her great grief, begins to
falter.
mas el mismo dolor la va esforzando. but the same grief renews it with more
force.
¡Ay! ¿Cómo se atrevió el funesto manto Alas! How could the dismal mantle dare
a cubrir esa luz hermosa y bella? to darken her most fair and lovely light?
¿Cómo de tu valor no tuvo espanto? Why did her courage not chasten it with
fear?
¿Cómo, Teresa, relumbrante estrella How, then, Teresa—star most pure and
bright
de nuestro firmamento, te quitaron. in all our firmament—did they pluck you
hence.
y principio se dio a nuestra querella? and thus give rise to all our woe and strife?
Forzoso me será cegar llorando, 1 am compelled to weep till I grow blind,

cubierta con perpetuo y triste luto, and clad in mourning garb forevermore,
los males de mi patria lamentando. lament the evils that beset my land.
¿Cuál campo fue más fértil, ni dehesa. What field or pasture ever has grown
greener;
ni cuál ganado ha sido apacentado what flock was better shepherded and
tended
mejor que apacentó el suyo Teresa? than her own flock was tended by Teresa?
Supo mejor que otras poner ley Better than any shepherdess, she did
de amor, porque el amor anda rindiendo impose a law of love, for love prevails
al poderoso, fuerte y grande rey. upon the almighty, great, and supreme
King.
Mas ¡ay, triste de mí!, ¿qué sirve en vano But oh, my bitter grief, what profit’s
gained
representar aquel tiempo dichoso by vain portrayals of that happy time,
sino buscar más pena por mi mano?. save by my very hand to seek more pain?
Mira que se ha secado el prado verde, See how our verdant field is dry and
parched,
y si en el sueño estás embebecida, and if in rapturous dreaming sleep you lie,
nuestro gemido triste te recuerde. let our desolate moaning call you back.
Mira esta tu manada desparcida, See how your little flock is scattered wide,
mira la cumbre toda destrozada, how all the mountain’s summit is laid
waste,
la res aquí y allí despavorida. and here and there your sheep go,
terrified.
Los perros que se ordenan contra robos, The dogs, ordained to guard us against
thieves,
contra el ganado simple y descuidado instead, against the simple, trusting herd
se vuelven y arremeten como lobos. now turn ferocious, and attack like wolves.
¡Ay de la triste grey que es dividida! Alack, for the mournful flock that has
been sundered!
Ya no hay cabaña en pie, ya no hay No little huts remain, no shepherdess,
pastoras,
que cada cual del hato es despedida, for every one is banished from the herd,
por extrañas tenidas y traidoras. considered a stranger and a traitoress.

¿Por qué así lo has trazado, bestia fiera, Why, devilish beast, did you devise this
scheme
que nuestro bien perturbas y desdoras? to wreck and tarnish all our happiness?
y aunque la menor soy, determinada . . . But though 1 be least of all, 1 am

resolved
estoy a padecer de cualquier modo, to suffer all 1 must, in every way,
que aunque me tienen muda, no mudada, for though they make me mute, 1 have not
moved,
ni mudarán jamás en parte, o en todo, nor shall they move me in little things or
great,
aunque con más trabajos me den priesa, however much their trials intend to
chasten,
y deshagan y pisen como a lodo. reviling and trampling me like lowly clay.
Que de estar sin cayado no me pesa, To be quit of shepherd’s staff is no

misfortune,
que no soy coja, ni lesión me oprime, for I am not lame nor stiff with injury;
antes salto más libre en la dehesa. rather. I’ll leap more freely in the pasture.
ii6 UNTOLD SISTERS
No me faltará Dios a quien me arrime, For God will not fail, and He will shelter
me,
aunque siento las tiernas corderillas although 1 suffer for the gentle lambs,
que cada cual por su pastora gime. as each for her loving shepherdess does
grieve.
Tiernos balidos, Madre, ofreceremos, Tender bleatings. Mother, shall we give,

y de leche estará tu altar bañado, and with milk your altar shall be bathed,
que el bien y paz común sólo queremos. for peace and the common good alone we
love.
Fuera vaya malicia y doble trato; Away with malice and with double
meaning;
conozcan. Reina mía, cómo han dado show them, my Queen, how wrongly they
reward
un premio por el bien falso e ingrato. false righteousness, unwanted and
deceiving.
Bien fuera que miraran cuán de grado Better that they, full grateful, should
regard
con las propias zamarras los cubrimos how with our own sheepskins we once
gave them cover,
en su principio pobre y bajo estado. in the poor humble state whence they
began.
Por cierto que ellos fueron porque fuimos, For surely they commenced because we
were,
y cuando nada eran en el hato and when there was nothing in the
shepherd’s lodge,
con nuestra leche y queso los servimos; to them our milk and cheese we sometimes
served.
Lo malo favorece, encumbra, abona; Evil is prized, set high upon the hill,
lo bueno es perseguido y tiene en poco; while good is persecuted and belittled,
y vueltas siempre da como atahona. and rising, falls, just like a miller’s wheel.
Mas pues todo se muda, espere un poco But as all things must change, wait just a
aquel que va perdiendo la esperanza, little,
que el tiempo se varía como loco. you who do steadily lose all your hopes,
for in its frenzied changes, time is fickle.
Mas ¡ay! quien se consuela con mudanza, But oh! if change consoles you, you should
know
que no la espere en bien, pues no la tiene not to expect it to the good; we see
aquel que de fortuna mano lanza, setting hand to fortune’s wheel cannot be
so,
pues toda vanidad en sí contiene. as it holds within itself all vanity.

En mi Virgen espero firmemente, But in my Virgin shall I put my faith,
de cuya mano el bien siempre nos viene, for from her hand all good we do receive
que pasará de presto este accidente and soon she will dismiss these fleeting
trials,
y volverá a mirar a su manada, turning again to tend to all her flock
pues de su solo amparo está pendiente, which on her shelter and her help relies,
y no la dejará desamparada. (528-42) and which 1 know she never will forsake.
(528-42)
kT kiqtti:’
Seventeenth'century map of Spain. Courtesy of the Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid.
118
"Child Jesus, ” by Murillo (seventeenth century). Je¬
sus as a child was a favorite subject in painting and
sculpture of convent collections, as well as in the nuns’
writings. Courtesy of the Hermandad de la Santa
Caridad, Seville.
"Teresa de Jesús, ” by Fray Juan de la Miseria,

portrait for which María de San José (chapter
I) and Jerónimo Gradan convinced her to sit.
Courtesy of the Editorial de la Espiritualidad.
119
"María de San José" (chapter 1), by an anonymous
artist. Courtesy of the community of Carmelitas Des'
calzas, Seville.
"Beata Ana de San Bartolomé" (chapter I), by Otto

Venius (Octavius van Veen). Discalced Carmelite
convent, Antwerp. Courtesy of the Editorial de la
Espiritualidad.
120
I
I
Ana de San Bartolomé (chapter I) holding Saint Teresa on her deathbed, by Victor Villan
de Ara. Courtesy of the Editorial de la Espiritualidad.
‘‘La Virgen del Carmelo” (The Virgin of Carmel), anon-

ymous, seventeenth century, located in the Church of
San Marcelo, León, Spain. Many paintings and sculp¬
tures in Discalced Carmelite convents and monasteries
after Saint Teresa’s death visually reminded nuns and
monks of that Order of Mary’s special concern and pro¬
tection. See abo the Fourth Recreation of the Libro de
Recreaciones (Book of Recreations) by Maria de San
José (chapter 1). Courtesy of the Editorial de la Espir¬
itualidad, Madrid.
I2I
Cecilia Morillas, mother of María de San Al¬
berto and Cecilia del Nacimiento (chapter 2)
and noted humanist during the period of Philip
II. Drawing. Courtesy of the community of
Carmelitas Descalzas, Valladolid.
LLAX
Xa/n-iaJifí’nQ. .supo con cIqí’Uco^ ¡aun .c/pa no’i jVan;' c/ c
¡míiano, paJ'ô granéej coyiccinusvícs Vihsoíta^Tcoioqnx f ja-
pracfaEirWruro,, fitc ^xccícnrc poerci. múíi’ca, pmfp'n'^ é fínmínaciciM,
dtmanuscriros, adrjdro aún maí por íuí vírnííffí i por avcr Wcío
madre i maestra de niiew ¡nsicj/ncs hjjos. m uno en ía dudixdcx
ValladoUd en el ano de mil icûinientos ochenta i
Antonio Sobrino, father of Maria de San Alberto

and Cecilia del Nacimiento. Drawing. Courtesy
of the community of Carmelitas Descalzas, Val¬
ladolid.
no ia SícríLit-ia Jc/aUnu-eríidíacJ Jc í(\‘ír

1 «líl co/eo¡ o dt ^>a. Crui ,i io Aícfaria Jf le» Corte edtuVi.'
tica . le jicifxu rcílituj , pruicncia ip>ieiaeí
•raurto en I a C¡ udad cíe Va ilacící id ,en el QÍio Je Í5S
122
Antonio Sobrino, brother of María de San
Alberto and Cecilia del Nacimiento, well-known
mystic and spiritual mentor of his sister Cecilia.
Drawing. Courtesy of the community of Car¬
melitas Descalzas, Valladolid.
Diego de San fosé, brother of Maria de San

Alberto and Cecilia del Nacimiento, family
I chronicler and naturalist. Drawing. Courtesy
of the community of Carmelitas Descalzas,
Valladolid.
i
Í
123
MARIA BE vTAN AX.BER,TO
Carmlira De?caka .natural de Valladolid, hija de ¡a inmnaís
Cecilia de Mor illas, tuvieran destreja, enla música, pm ^
rural bordado, e‘^crih¡6 marav i liosamente d¿ Mística ,m"jc
enprosa como en verso .tradujo vanos salmos con sijuiuld'’ ¿¡c
jancia ifuealmadc reconocida sanrfdad, m ¡i rio c rVa'id
cdofid Qn el arlo de rnil seicientos ctin
María de San Alberto. Drawing. Courtesy of the community of Carmelitas Descalzas,

Valladolid. The caption reads: ‘‘Maria de San Alberto. Discalced Carmelite nun, native of
Valladolid and daughter of the illustrious Cecilia de Morillas. She icios highly skilled in music,
painting, and embroidery. She wrote wonderously of mystical subjects, in both prose and in
verse; she translated several Psalms with notable elegance; and she icos renowned for her
saintliness. She died in Valladolid in the year of 1640."
124
A^ct^tmcm cmtas- Dm/ (/■ Lu.vc’C<»yJ-o tyrefuât
H Jinn■ hca?r, tiir>fjrf£é ■ ,
1 ■ ik: n re^ a/ttufjm cm
.tpmrtt Íkjtct/u.í ctnm
fxcráttW'
iL^- ¡îe atétar
4 m.muf *j ?
MhXAiui 'f
\ mum mJ'fcr irnpmm/* ‘ .1 .,
Engraving said to be colored by Cecilia del Nacimiento (chapter 2). Courtesy of the com¬
munity of Carmelitas Descalzas, Valladolid.
125
mm-
Altarpiece from the original sixteenth'Century chapel, where the two sisters prayed daily
(chapter 2). At the center is a copy of the portrait of Saint Teresa by ]uan de la Miseria
(p. 119). Courtesy of the community of Carmelitas Descalzas, Valladolid.
126
Refectory where María de San Alberto and Cecilia del Nacimiento ate (chapter 2). Courtesy
of the community of Carmelitas Descalzas, Valladolid.
“Saint Teresa, writer, ” by Gregorio Fernández,

renowned seventeenth-century sculptor, who lived
and worked in Valladolid. Courtesy of the com¬
munity of Carmelitas Descalzas, Valladolid.
127
Hermitage, perhaps one of the two Maria de San Alberto (chapter 2) commissioned when
she wôs Mother Superior. Courtesy of the community of Carmelitas Descalzas, Valladolid.
Facade of the convent in Valladolid, purchased by Saint Teresa in 1568. Courtesy of the
community of Carmelitas Descalzas, Valladolid.
128
“Cristo Yacente” (Reclining Christ). Seventeenth century, school of Gregorio Fernández-
Before such images Isabel de Jesús (chapter 3) meditated and entered mystic states. Courtesy
of the community of Franciscanas Descalzas de Santa Clara, Lerma (Burgos).
{ft ' ^
■■ cNiV'-'*'' »
I WP.
■ i-
* 'u f
'í-íV' \"'
^ .i *
c/%
.1^,
/
JM
Detail from a charcoal sketch of a float for a religious procession. Isabel de Jesús (chapter
3) viewed such popular events. Some of the many devils she describes in her visions looked
like this. Courtesy of the Ayuntamiento of Madrid.
129
Jj;'^«.u\^-ue^\.'A. ¿j
ri ¿fs yerrs nt^ in lÁnri a u^

/ /* ■' ^
/uj ac-kevju y .¡n'currvenSf.j^
/k T^nÔiX ¿'f /kÛJH'C /7f 24-<—* .

^ L
-l\i-
'y
.x;Ufi.t.:r>/M^jrfnhu%t
': /;’«.. ■’■1 Í ''/i-i- ►AV
- -' Tt
—~-~7;;r>—2*--—7" ■■"■~-«i .■"V'li"lu-y- ■'".«y ^
\iHíc>A hxíu^’ís-K .L'//í'.4ím£'f^tf’j*n'*ti/n¿v/
y Ajtu^'ftr ÛJL di pyff %'x £c ji¿.\r.v
a ^ :u.. tx xjL ^ X c, \\ V >H n. ^

■- -
rf k?
p,fr.
•■
Manuscript page showing music composed by Maria de San Alberto for her nativity play,
“Fiestecilla del Nacimiento” (chapter 2). Courtesy of the community of Carmelitas Des¬
calzas, Valladolid.
2. níwo Sisters
SXmong the
Sisters
n^ñe ^towering of Intellectual
Convent Culture
January 17, 1588, two sisters from a university family,

Maria (1568-1640) and Cecilia (1570-1646) Sobrino Morillas, took the veil
together in Valladolid, where they entered the Discalced Carmelite Convento
de la Concepción, Saint Teresa’s fourth foundation (1568). Their family
background and the somewhat unconventional £hoice of convent offered
Maria, who took the name Maria de San Alberto, and Cecilia, who became
Cecilia del Nacimiento, far greater opportunities for learning and creativity
than those generally afforded their contemporaries. The location of their
Carmelite convent in the mercantile city of Valladolid, which was the seat
of the royal court from 1600 to 1606, would maintain their access to the
predominant secular trends of the epoch.' Valladolid was also a religious
center: “There are enough monasteries to comprise a famous [principal] city
in themselves, and it is a wonder that there can be so many convents in
Valladolid” marveled a late sixteenth-century Portuguese traveler (quoted in
Defoumeaux 106). The lives and writings of these two sisters exemplify
humanistic culture as it was transplanted to the monasteries of seventeenth-
century Spain and its colonies.
Maria de San Alberto and Cecilia del Nacimiento were most fortunate in
having the model of their natural mother’s humanistic intellect as a foun¬
dation for their work in the convent. Although she died when they were
young, Cecilia Morillas (1539-1581) had had sufficient time to form her
daughters’ minds and characters.^ Maria de San Alberto gave her mother full
credit for guiding her intellectual and religious growth. Although in doing
so she was following a convention of the Vida, in Cecilia Morillas s case the
praise evidently was not exaggerated.
Cecilia Morillas was a learned woman whose life story offers readers a
glimpse of the restrictions as well as the opportunities afforded elite servants
of the aristocracy. With no direct access to formal schooling, she shared her
132 UNTOLD SISTERS
children’s classes with them. Meanwhile, it was assumed she would manage
a household staffed with servants and display her skill and productivity with
the needle. One of her seven sons, Diego de San José, the family chronicler,
recounts their mother’s story in a prose that betrays strong affection despite
its religious formulas. His chronicle, the basis for all subsequent histories of
the Sobrinos, is especially valuable for the biography of Cecilia Morillas.
Diego captures his mother’s talents in a phrase that juxtaposes verbal com¬
position with the stereotypical emblem of womanhood—sewing—and har¬
monizes them. She was accustomed to “dar manos, tanto con la pluma cuanto
con la aguja” [MS 93, f. 81] (applying her hands to the pen as readily as to
the needle).^ Although his intention is to portray the requisite sacrificing
mother of a saintly son in a spiritual biography of his brother Francisco, Fray
Diego’s admiring portrait sketches Cecilia Morillas as a multifaceted Ren¬
aissance woman.
While her eldest son studied, his mother learned along with him. Cecilia
Morillas put her hard-won learning to two immediate uses for the family: she
instructed the rest of her children, and she wrote her husband’s official
correspondence in French and Latin. Her sons and daughters all became
gifted painters, musicians, and writers. She was largely responsible for their
education in the arts and humanities of the period.
Cecilia Morillas had met and married the Portuguese Antonio Sobrino
(i5i8?-i588) in Salamanca, where he was studying law. Cecilia Morillas’s
brother was an influential attorney in Valladolid. It was to that city that the
family moved after Antonio Sobrino completed his law studies. By 1556, he
was secretary of the university. Gradually he obtained numerous other po¬
sitions of confidence, both secular and ecclesiastic. According to his son
Diego’s Relación about the family, Antonio Sobrino undertook these tasks
from economic necessity, to supplement his paltry inheritance.
Cecilia Morillas was even more active than her husband. Many luminaries
of the time, including King Phillip II, recognized doña Cecilia as an intel¬
lectual, artist, inventor, and illuminator. Her home was open to intellectuals
and artists; the king’s cosmographer and mathematician was a regular visitor.
Among the examples of her extraordinary talent, Diego de San José cites the
following three. After a family friend, a churchman at court, showed Phillip
II the illuminated manuscripts which Cecilia Morillas had executed, the king
commissioned her to do several for his monumental religious edifice outside
of Madrid, the Escorial. She also devised a method of making silk flowers so
natural looking that “only when they failed to wither and die did people
discover they were not real” (MS 93, f. 10). And, by covering a ball of cork
with pieces of brightly covered silk sewn together in the shape of geographical
areas, she fashioned a globe of the world. The project’s typically feminine
manner and materials of execution may obscure its proof of the author’s
artistry and scientific knowledge.
Many facets of the family history remain to be discovered. Available
documents nevertheless confirm that the Sobrino Morillas’s made a name for
themselves. After their mother’s death in 1581 and their father’s in 1588,
the sisters and brothers maintained the family unit by closely supporting each
other in various ways. Of the seven sons, six were clergymen and four of
these became very influential in the Church. Their brothers’ powerful posi¬
tions within the Church provided the two sisters with protection and support.
Tnjo Sisters Among the Sisters 133
The brothers as well as the sisters enriched the convent archives with many
of the treasures it still houses.'’
When the two young women decided to enter monastic life, they received
invitations from many convents. Even Las Huelgas, a prestigious convent of
Valladolid where their mother was buried, offered them a place. As educated
members of an influential family, they would have been an important asset
to any cloistered community. Influenced by their mother’s teaching and
activities and by the religious and literary model of Saint Teresa, Maria and
Cecilia chose to follow the more austere discipline of the Discalced Car¬
melites.
Each won early recognition as a leader in the convent. Maria de San
Alberto was twice elected Mother Superior (1604-1607 and 1629-1632) and
assumed various posts, including that of sacristan. Mistress of Novices, and
doorkeeper. As Prioress during the great Castilian drought of 1630-1631,
she organized food distribution to the poor. She also distinguished herself by
expanding and renovating the convent’s physical plant. Cecilia del Naci¬
miento, the younger sister, also became Mistress of Novices shortly after her
novitiate, and later held various offices such as Subprioress, Mistress of Nov¬
ices, Doorkeeper, and Sacristan.
Although educated together, the two sisters had different artistic styles and
modes of narrating their religious practice. They used their diverse talents
in a complementary manner. Together they functioned as copyists, secretaries,
and archivists of their own and others’ manuscripts. Madre María and Madre
Cecilia took care to acknowledge and authenticate each other’s labors by
praising and displaying each other’s works to their Sisters and in their chron¬
icles. They were the moving spirits behind the creation of a rich literary life
hidden by the walls of the convent. The sisters provided an example and
created an atmosphere in which poetry was nurtured and collaboration en¬
couraged.®
The two sisters separated only once, for about a decade (1601-1612). Eorty
years later. Madre Cecilia documented the years in Calahorra, a small city
in the Rioja region, in a relación (1643). The only other extant record of
her exile is a single exchange of letters between the sisters. The story illu¬
minates both international Church politics and the complex attachments
between nuns and their confessors. Cecilia del Nacimiento’s confessor, Tomás
de Jesús, left Spain on secret papal orders to help missionaries in the Congo.
Spanish church authorities, unaware of the assignment or hostile to papal
authority, sanctioned him and forbade Madre Cecilia any communication
with him. Soon after she was sent into exile, ostensibly to aid in the foun¬
dation of the Order’s new convent in Calahorra. There, she turned the exile
to her advantage, producing some of her finest works and twice becoming
Mother Superior.^ Her years in Calahorra gave Cecilia del Nacimiento an
opportunity she had never had in Valladolid to demonstrate her administrative
mettle,® but the same cleric who had sent her to Calahorra abruptly ordered
her back to Valladolid.
The collaborative efforts of the two sisters were wide ranging.The im¬
portance of their collaboration and their recognition of their destinies as
favored women leaders and writers is demonstrated in a vision recorded by
Petronila de San José, an important archivist and biographer of the convent.
Madre María received the vision, as the elder of the sisters, the one more
134 UNTOLD SISTERS
given to action than contemplation, and the one who had taken the role of
mothering when their mother died. The message was directed to both sisters,
and Madre María received it in both their names. As two long arms reached
out to her from the chalice in which the Host was kept, she heard the words:
“Para abrazar a las dos hermanas” [Petronila de San José, MS 95 4r] (So as
to embrace the two sisters).
Not only did they translate the Magnificat and Psalms together; they entered
the same certámenes (ceremonial poetry contests), glossing the same lines.
They copied out each other’s work, and each wrote the other’s biography.
Together they performed archival tasks. Soon after her sister’s death in 1640,
Cecilia del Nacimiento completed the family chronicle which had been begun
by Diego de San José. Madre Cecilia’s interpretation of their brother’s life
quotes Madre María extensively. Madre María similarly valued her sister’s
work by, for instance, exhibiting to the nuns of her convent a poem Madre
Cecilia had written for the beatification of Teresa of Avila: “. . . para que
las hermitañas que se recogen a la hermita se recreasen con ella [la poesía]
la trasladé en un papel grande y le puse cerca de la ventanica que cae al
Santísimo Sacramento” [MS gqf. qr] (. . . so that the Sisters who recollect
themselves in the hermitage might enjoy [the poem], 1 transcribed it onto a
large piece of paper, and put it near the little window that opens onto the
Holy Sacrament).
In an introductory note to a copy and catalog of Saint Teresa’s letters.
Madre María again emphasizes the sisters’ collaborative effort. She dictated
and Cecilia wrote—“leyendo yo y escribiendo ella” (I reading, she writing).
The gerunds underscore the painstaking labot with which convent documents
were duplicated. Several brief, jointly written biographies of the nuns in their
convent are also among the collection of their assorted writings which are
contained in the convent archive (MS 100). The assignment of the two
sisters to recording and copying tasks indicated their positions of leadership
in the community. When they were separated for ten years, they alleviated
their sorrow at being apart through writing letters.
As cloistered religious, Maria de San Alberto and Cecilia del Nacimiento
led an orderly existence. With few domestic chores to perform, when they
were not praying they were free to devote themselves to administrative tasks
and to the arts. Although both were celebrated for their painting, musical
skills, sewing, and embroidering, the two sisters preferred the quill to the
needle and brush. Both were deeply committed to the written word, a form
of the Verbo eterno (Eternal Word). Each wrote alone as well as in collabo'
ration with her sister. Everything they produced was in some way connected
with their religious state, whether written in the form of poetry, drama, or
prose. In her Rules, Saint Teresa had called for preventing monastic mel¬
ancholy through the creation of religious art. Theirs was Teresa’s God, who
“walked among the pots and pans.”*' They inserted the idiom of everyday
life into the abstract language of mysticism.
Immersed in a time and space marked by religious observance. Madre María
and Madre Cecilia recorded and rewrote the rituals associated with hours,
days, weeks, and years. To prayers learned and recited daily at set hours, they
added newly invented words of adoration. Communion inspired Madre Ce¬
cilia to write of the joys of religious ecstacy. To facilitate silence and temporary
withdrawal from the community, Maria de San Alberto had assured the
Tivo Sisters Among the Sisters 135
completion of new ermitas (hermitages, or cells for spiritual retreat) during

her second tenure as Mother Superior. Having provided physical space, she
exalted the practice of solitude in “O, soledad amiga ...” (Oh, Solitude,
Dear Friend), the only poem she wrote on this theme (MS 88 and 89). The
poem salutes her companion Solitude, who guides the author to spiritual
peace and an acceptance of inevitable death.
Some of the sisters’ literary production explores the life of the convent
community. Madre Maria’s records of convent history and biography, poems
for the holidays and for the taking of vows, and two theater pieces (fiestecicas)
were written for the monastic community. Madre Cecilia’s history of the
foundation at Calahorra, poems for special occasions, theological tracts, a
long descriptive poem,'^ and a single theater piece were also written for
audiences of nuns and clergy.
Other works were intended for private or spiritual exchange. Together,
the sisters translated Psalms from the Bible. Madre María wrote poems to
Saint Teresa, the Life of another nun (Estefanía de los Apóstoles), and a
narrative about her own spiritual life which included her mystical ecstasies.
Madre Cecilia’s writings included a substantial body of mystic poetry and
prose, the family biography, her autobiography, and narrations of her inner
life. The letters which both exchanged with their seven brothers complete
their oeuvre.
The two sisters participated in some aspects of secular, as well as religious,
intellectual life. Maria de San Alberto wrote many poems in support of the
beatification (1614) and canonization (1622) of Teresa of Avila for certámenes
organized all over Spain. Both she and Madre Cecilia glossed lines and won
prizes for their poetry about the new saint. Three of the most passionate of
Madre Cecilia’s twenty-eight sonnets revolve around the theme of Saint
Teresa’s vision of being pierced by an angelic ray of light. Madre María
collected her poems about Teresa of Avila in a book-length notebook that
can still be found in the archive of the Carmelite convent in Valladolid (MS
94). In these works she transformed the poetic games, a popular form of
entertainment among the learned, into a major statement about the power
and place of women in society.
The power and place of women in the Church was always precarious. Both
sisters discuss censorship of their work by Church authorities. The Church
considered many aspects of life not proper subjects for official publication.
Texts kept within the confines of the convent, however, escaped many In¬
quisitorial judgments. Nevertheless, writing nuns lived under strict surveil¬
lance. The fear of being accused of heterodoxy, or of laxity, or of engaging
in activities inappropriate to their station was constant. When power balances
within the Order or in the Spanish Church were threatened, demands for
confiscation or destruction of writing often occurred. Even though their
brothers’ elevated positions in the church hierarchy protected Madres María
and Cecilia, their writing could suddenly be endangered, as well as used
against them.'^
Cecilia del Nacimiento complained that the head of the Carmelite Order
“Me puso rigorosísimos mandatos de que no escribiese a nuestro Padre Fray
Tomás de Jesús, ni dijese mis tratos interiores con Dios; y poco después que
vine, me los quitó todos” [Cecilia del Nacimiento 484] (Cave me strict orders
not to write to Father Tomás de Jesús [who had been her confessor], nor to
136 UNTOLD SISTERS
recount my inner experiences of God; and shortly after I came [to Calahorra],
he took away all my writings on the subject). Maria de San Alberto documents
the loss of three notebooks containing her writing and that of her sister,
noting when they were surrendered and to whom, as though the attempt to
set the record straight would ward off recriminations.
Equally powerful and dangerous were the visions that frequently accom¬
panied solitary prayer and that were recorded by order of the visionary’s
confessor. From some accounts we gain an understanding of the economy of
mysticism, the manner in which power relationships were expressed, and
women’s modes of earning transcendence in this and the other world. In her
biography of her sister, Cecilia del Nacimiento recounted a crucial vision in
Maria de San Alberto’s life. Ill and depressed, the young Madre Maria had
a mystical experience that gave her the strength for leadership roles for the
rest of her life. In the vision, God revealed to Madre Maria that she had
achieved grace. Speaking in Latin, he awarded her every indulgence his
charity encompassed. Several of the “gravest” and “most learned” men of her
Order gave the vision their seal of approval. One of them, however, claimed
that while the first part of God’s words—Vade in pace—and the confirmation
of grace were valid for her lifetime, the indulgences were reserved for after
her death (MS 93; Biblioteca Nacional, MS 8693, 580).
Maria de San Alberto often justified her writing by claiming that the
miracles she described reflected God’s glory, not her own. Having provided
this obeisance as a form of religious courtesy, she then reflected on power in
a religious context, arguing that only those who despise exercising authority
should hold office (MS too). The long catalog of virtues associated with
holding religious office includes placing divine will above human consider¬
ations; she heads the list with obedience, detailing a code of behavior to
which she adhered. Belittlement of self, a requisite of such prose, counter¬
balanced self-aggrandizement. Deprecating formulas aside, her narrative sug¬
gests awareness of her uniqueness and expertise and a conception of what an
“indigna carmelita descalza” (an unworthy Discalced Carmelite nun) should be
as Mother Superior. By enforcing church precepts of the religious virtue of
obedience, she portrayed herself as the ideal religious official.
Whereas Maria de San Alberto’s visions furthered her aims as Mother
Superior, Cecilia del Nacimiento separated her administrative roles from her
mystical life. In Cecilia del Nacimiento’s chronicle of her years as Mother
Superior in Calahorra, she indirectly manifests her ability to lead through
her report on the convent’s acquisition of wealth. Small details, scenes of
strife and of pleasure regarding gifts and purchases of religious art, alternate
with formalized avowals of gratitude to the benefactor and to God. The
inventory of the convent’s riches includes “. . . religiosas de muy buenos
talentos y virtudes que importa mucho para que se conserve la de las casas,
y con el buen gobierno de las preladas, como lo es el de la presente . . .”
[Cecilia del Nacimiento 485] (. . . nuns of good talents and virtues, which
is of great importance that the virtue of the convents may be preserved, as
it is by the good governance of all in the office of Mother Superior, like that
of the present one . . .). She emphasized the convent’s stability and income
to convince her reader (the convent’s patron) that his money had not been
spent in vain.
Each sister created from a woman-centered world view, but their styles
Two Sisters Among the Sisters 137
diverged. The older sister dedicated more time to religious practice and wrote
primarily for the benefit of the monastic community. The younger one devoted
herself more to reflection and was involved in mystical theology. Madre
Maria’s actions and discourse were more directed by popular, female—mar¬
ginalized—traditions, Madre Cecilia’s by mainstream patriarchal values. Per¬
haps these divergences were the result of temperamental differences; perhaps
they may be attributed to biographical events following the death of their
mother. Maria, the older daughter, took over nurturing tasks in emulation
of their extraordinary mother’s performance; Cecilia, the younger girl, was
“babied” by her brothers, in whose company she later came to feel herself
an equal. Whatever the reason. Madre Cecilia’s literary and emotional re¬
lationships with men were more clearly and conventionally defined than
those of her sister.
Maternal Models
The entwining of the two sisters’ domestic and religious lives within the
space of the convent stimulated a series of enriching and supportive maternal
relationships. Nuns, as Sisters within Mother Church, were daughters to the
supervising Mother Superior of the community. Writing nuns employed moth¬
erly models, superimposing one on the other in a kind of maternal layering
as a means of conceiving and legitimizing their authorship. Undaunted by
societal restrictions on the lives of women, Maria de San Alberto and Cecilia
del Nacimiento were authorized in the cultivation of their intellectual and
spiritual leadership by three powerful maternal figures. Their three “mothers”
were their biological mother, Cecilia Morillas, and two symbolic mothers.
Saint Teresa and the Virgin Mary.
Unlike many of their convent Sisters, Madre María and Madre Cecilia
were fortunate to have been raised by a learned mother, a woman who held
her own in the university setting. Some women of Cecilia Morillas’s gen¬
eration benefited from a broad concept of education appropriate for a Ren¬
aissance lady, as exemplified in Juan Luis Vives’s classic treatise. The Instruction
of a Christian Woman, dedicated to Queen Catherine of England in 1523.’®
The influence of Erasmian humanism in sixteenth-century Spain included
more tolerance of female education than did the next century’s Catholic
Reformation ideology, which fueled misogynistic attacks on women in ec¬
clesiastic and literary texts. Such attacks suppressed the European medieval
tradition of learned monastic women represented by Hildegaard von Bingen
and Gertrud the Great of Helfta, as well as the double abbeys ruled by women
which had flourished in several parts of the Iberian peninsula. After the
Council of Trent, restrictions on female education increased, but in the early
part of the sixteenth century in Spain, secular women were able, although
not encouraged, to be literary and scholarly.
Just as their mother’s abilities aided her earthly husband and family, so
Madre Maria’s and Madre Cecilia’s multiple talents might be seen as serving
Christ, whom they considered their spiritual Bridegroom, as well as their
convent community. At home, the mother had time to paint, play the
clavichord, embroider, write, and pray. As contemplative nuns dedicated
primarily to prayer. Madre María and Madre Cecilia were also able to paint.
138 UNTOLD SISTERS
play musical instruments, sew, teach, perform, direct convent dramas, and
write. Despite her early death, their mother’s influence on them assured that
later in life they would attempt the recreation of a woman-centered sense of
family in the convent. As nuns, they became Mothers in their own right.
The unusual talents and skills Maria and Cecilia learned at home with
Cecilia Morillas were placed in the service of their symbolic Mother, Teresa.
The two sisters were highly instrumental in both the Carmelite Order’s
consolidation of the Teresian reform and the campaign for Teresa of Avila’s
beatification and canonization. Maria de San Alberto and Cecilia del Na-
cimiento’s activities paralleled and extended those of Saint Teresa of Avila.
Both of them emulated her; her halo provided a protection for their productive
lives which was as important as the access to Church authority that their
brothers represented.
Teresa of Avila’s impact, after her death, on the two sisters as adults parallels
their mother’s role when they were children. The Founding Mother of their
Order influenced many of her spiritual daughters in three ways; she made it
possible for a few talented women to make a place in history; she paved the
way for women’s writing; and the events of her life served as inspiration and
became the subject matter of their texts. Saint Teresa, as virgin-mother and
teacher-mother, became an overarching metaphor and hence an agent of
freedom for women’s spiritual and literary activity. Ana de San Bartolomé,
María de San José, and other pioneers of the Reform were the first to em¬
phasize Madre Teresa’s leadership and intelligence. The Sobrino sisters re¬
fashioned the image of Saint Teresa, emphasizing her androgynous femaleness—
womanist rather than womanish—and her intellectual ability.’^ They applied
their humanistic education to characterizing her in their poetry.
The quantity, quality, and extraordinary energy displayed in the two sisters’
writings on and about Teresa of Avila can be seen in the emotive tone and
amount of space they devote to the celebrated Saint and Doctor of the
Church.Maria and Cecilia witnessed—indeed, participated in—Saint Teresa’s
change from a controversial and suspect figure, when they were children,
into a sacrosanct object of devotion and national celebration. Their lifelong
fascination with Saint Teresa reflected the changes in the Saint’s status. When
as children the two girls received confirmation from a friend of Madre Teresa’s,
the Bishop of Valladolid, he was in mild trouble for having had a copy of
Madre Teresa’s Vida made for his sister, a patron of the convent Maria and
Cecilia would later join. But soon after their confirmation, their own brother
participated in collecting Madre Teresa’s works, now considered sacred, for
the king. The pride and jubilation the Sobrino sisters felt at the Saint’s
canonization in 1622 must have been tinged with pride in Spanish wom¬
anhood. Many of the poems they wrote in honor of Saint Teresa are not
mere celebrations of one who was easily consecrated; they are subtle though
ardent defenses, justifications, and explanations of a controversial woman’s
life work.
The public acceptance of Saint Teresa’s life and works spurred many con¬
vent writers. Only a few years earlier, in 1574, Padre Domingo Báñez, a
leader in Teresa’s own Reform, had opposed the making of copies of het Vida
and threatened to bum the original because “no convenía que escritos de
mujeres anduviesen en público” ILlamas Martínez 259] (it was not suitable
that writings by women should circulate publicly). Women’s decreased access
to the public domain and nuns’ increased enclosure after the Council of Trent
had not stopped female authors from writing. Censorship by Inquisitional
officials was responsible for the secrecy with which these works were read.
Nuns’ texts circulated within and among convents and to aristocratic patrons,
but they were very rarely published. If Saint Teresa’s writings could be ac¬
cepted, though, her Daughters’ might also be.
Both Madre María and Madre Cecilia especially emphasized Mother Teresa’s
intellectual stature and her extraordinary capacity for dealing with worldly
and spiritual matters. For them, Teresa was “doctora” (doctor, learned woman),
“maestra” (teacher), “patriarca” (woman patriarch), and “guerrera” (woman
warrior), as well as “virgen madre” (virgin mother). Madre María calls the
Saint of Avila:
La maestra de maestros (MS 94 f. 39V) ([Woman] teacher of [male] teachers

and a Doctor of the Church:
Doctora que a los Doctores [Woman] doctor who to the [male]

doctors,
enseñáis el fundamento do teach the principles
de toda ciencia divina (qiv) of all divine knowledge and skill
luciendo en primer lugar above all, brilliantly displaying

su sabiduría rara her most singular wisdom
Doctora en hechos y obras Learned doctor in her deeds and works,

en escritos y consejos . . . (MS roo; in her writings and her counsel . . .)
Alonso-Cortés 85)
These Unes assert women’s importance in religion as well as an author’s right

to her life of learning, teaching, and writing. Maria de San Alberto was
certainly conscious of the existence of other educated and intellectual women;
her most immediate examples were her own mother and Saint Teresa.
The nun-saint Teresa’s intellectual capacity was crucial to Madre Maria’s
appreciation of her. In another poem, she playfully and defiantly inverts the
gender of an abstract noun before announcing what was no miracle to her:
si gran milagra te muestras (as you show yourself to be a great

miracle
un mujer hombres adiestras . . . (qSr) a woman who trains men . . .)
She had seen “a woman who trains men” in her own mother, so the use of
“milagra” is probably ironic. The author accompanies the lighthearted but
pointed irreverence with the masculine form of the indefinite article, “un, ”
to modify “mujer” (woman). To veil the ironic ingenuity, she places it in a
poem that mocks the Basque pronunciation of Spanish—a kind of comic
imitation fashionable in literary circles of her day. This poet undoubtedly
had firsthand experience with the accent, since her mother’s family was
Basque. But Maria de San Alberto’s imitative aims reach further.
Her insistence on claiming masculine privilege for Saint Teresa is explicit
140 UNTOLD SISTERS
in many other instances, but nowhere so clearly as in the following double

plays on varón:
Varona que a varones habéis dado (Wo-man who has enabled men
ser fuerte y varonil, varonilmente ... to be strong and manly, manly in
(8v) manner...)
and:
La mujer varón fuerte . . . (36r) (Strong lordly woman . . .)
Sometimes, such claims result in an androgynous figure in both the sisters’

poetry about the Founding Mother. This is accomplished by referring to
women and men equally (a kind of leveling device) and by employing epithets
used for the characteristically androgynous Jesus Christ:
madre de tantas familias (mother of so many families

del uno y otro sexo of one and the other sex
y por esto patriarca and therefore, woman-patriarch
y patrona que echa el sello . . . (MS 100; and perfecting patroness . . .)
AlonsO'Cortés 85)
Here, Teresa’s conventual name—“of Jesus”—is implied in her spiritual re¬

lationship with him as Christ the Mother of humanity. The use of ‘'patriarca”
(patriarch) leaves no doubt as to the Saint’s identification with her namesake.
The woman who had called herself “de Jesús” to symbolize her marriage and
dedication to Jesus could—like Jesus, but unlike his mother Mary—be both
gentle and warlike:
De esta grande compañía (Of this glorious company

la Capitana es Teresa Teresa is the Captain
Compone sus escuadrones She forms her squadrons

de varones y doncellas . . . (Cecilia del of men and of maidens . . .)
Nacimiento 692)
As she glorifies the Saint of Avila, Maria de San Alberto also celebrates
women’s power in Christianity. The legend of the one thousand virgins had
become a trope that Madre María did not hesitate to combine with new
verbal icons. In Jesus’ name. Saint Teresa leads a phalanx of nuns to victory:
Alférez capitana (Deputy captain

del capitán (Jesús) de cielo y tierra of the Captain [Jesus] of heaven and earth
y si sólo varones and if men alone

pretendieran vencer no fuera tanto should try to vanquish, it would not be
odd
mas vencen escuadrones but squadrons of virgins
de vírgenes, qué espanto do vanquish; what awe
causa su valor fuerte y pecho santo. (i8v) their steadfast valor and holy spirit cause!)
The poet celebrates all the women of the Carmelite Reform in these lines.
The author’s pride in a woman’s leadership both of women and men, and in
women’s efficacy when united in their own “battalions,” is only slightly veiled
by a conventional reference to Jesus. Spirituality, not biology, determined
the nuns’ destiny. Separation from reproductive functions and other domestic
feminine roles entitled women religious to visions of force.
Teresa of Avila, spiritual mother, and Cecilia Morillas, biological mother,
were such powerful influences on Maria de San Alberto and Cecilia del
Nacimiento that the influence on them of the third member of the motherly
trinity—the Virgin Mary—seems to pale. The range of her functions that are
portrayed in the sisters’ writing illustrates how women of the period viewed
the mother of Jesus, but representations of Saint Teresa overshadow those of
the Virgin:
(. . . .
Juntamente imitando Joined in imitation
a la virgen Teresa of the virgin Teresa,
madre de tanta gente valerosa the Mother of so many valiant folk
cada uno mirando who watch to see, each one,
la vida que profesa the life that she professes—
cuán alta, cuán perfecta how lofty it is, how matchless,
y rigurosa and how strict,
cuán suave y hermosa how lovely and delicate;
pues la virgen María for the Virgin Mary, indeed
es de Teresa y todos is to Teresa and all, both
Madre y guía. Mother and guide.)
(MS 94)
The images of Saint Teresa and the Virgin Mary most often meet in the
national religious fervor of the period. After Teresa’s beatification, the Spanish
bishops petitioned Rome for the acceptance of Mary’s Immaculate Concep¬
tion as dogma. These efforts stimulated the two sisters’ writing. Cecilia del
Nacimiento went so far as to write a treatise in favor of the Immaculate
Conception (1617). Theological exegesis, an officially proscribed activity for
nuns, in this case was made possible by family connections. Her brother
Francisco was called to Madrid to participate in a Council of Bishops to
deliberate the same matter (Diaz Cerón 379). From their convent, the Sisters
joined with the city in rejoicing over the bishops’ petition to Rome.
In one poem. Madre Cecilia wrote in a totally different, more “domestic”
manner, as the lullaby to the baby Jesus that appears at the end of this chapter
demonstrates. In that poem. Madre Cecilia becomes the Mother, speaking
as though she were Mary soothing her fretful baby. The phrase “niño de mis
ojos” (dear child, my eyes’ delight) evokes the affection of a carnal mother
with a phrase that evokes “niña del ojo”—literally, “pupil of my eye” and
figuratively, “apple of my eye.” When she tells him not to cry, because “. . . a
la tierra y al cielo/ponéis espanto” [Cecilia del Nacimiento 704] (. . . you
cause fear/on heaven and earth), the poet fuses the image of Christ as savior
with the microcosmic world of mother and child.
Mary appears less frequently in Maria de San Alberto’s writing than she
does in the work of Cecilia del Nacimiento. Nevertheless, Madre María speaks
142 UNTOLD SISTERS
of the Queen of Heaven in an equally wide range of tones. Madre María

came close to implicitly challenging the Virgin Mary’s importance, by pre-
senting Saint Teresa either as her competitor or her equal:
Si Teresa es virgen (While Teresa is a virgin

Mi madre es también she is my mother as well,
que ser virgen y madre for being both virgin and mother
la viene muy bien suits her very well
para aconsolarme for my consolation

mi madre me envía my mother to me sends
la virgen María the pure virgin Mary
que es madre también who is a mother as well,
que ser vírgenes madres for being virgin mothers
las viene muy bien. suits them very well.)
(45V)
The author’s intensely personalized tone when speaking of “mi madte” evokes
not only Teresa, but also her biological mother and even, by extension, her
monastic Mothers. The ambiguity in the plural—“virgin mothers”—allows
the reader to extend its meaning to all Carmelite nuns. But first and foremost,
overshadowing even the Vitgin Mary, stands Saint Teresa.
Replacing her own natural mother with Teresa-as-mother, who sends her
the Virgin Mary, also a mother. Madre María affirmed her literary and religious
identity. Her insistence on Saint Teresa’s role as Founding Mother filtered
her own mother-daughter relationships through several layers of orthodox
female figures, ultimately making the environment more propitious for a
continued use of words by women. Mary was included in this quest for
legitimation.
In a notebook to which a later archivist gave the title “Favores recibi¬
dos ...” (“Mercies Bestowed”), Madre María reported having heard the
Virgin Mary in a vision calling her “Sustituta mía, sustituta mía” [MS 88 f.
iv] (“My substitute, my substitute”),^® immediately before an election for
Prioress. Maria de San Alberto protested her inadequacy, subsequently re¬
jecting election to the office four times until her confessors persuaded her to
accept the task. Empowerment fot leadership and founding roles usually came
from Christ or Saint Teresa in nuns’ texts. The Virgin Mary was most often
a petitioner for human beings with het son, rather than an actor. In this
instance, she empowers women’s leadership as a leader herself. The author¬
ization under which Madre María finally assumed the responsibility of Mother
Superior was thus derived from female divine and spiritual, as well as worldly,
sources.
The two sisters collaborated on a translation of the Magnificat, which the
Virgin was supposed to have authored. Religious symbolism supplied the
metaphors through which they proposed the dual analogy that if Teresa were
like the Virgin and the Sobrino sisters were like Teresa, they too might
recreate the world in their art.
For the two sisters, as for other women writers and readers, conventional
medieval and Renaissance tropes originating from the androgynous Christ as
Mother carried special meanings. They used Saint Teresa as literary subject
for fusing literal and figurative interpretations of those tropes. A flesh-and-

blood woman like her Daughters, she became a metaphor for freer expression
of the sublimated biological femaleness that occupied thought, prayer, and
composition:
Quién hallara mujer fuerte (Where shall we find a woman as strong

como esta virgen gloriosa as this most glorious virgin
Y abriendo sus ricos senos. And opening her abundant breasts,

todos de ellos se enriquecen . . . bestows on all men her abundance . . .)
(AlonsO'Cortés loi)
The two sisters thus chose to emphasize the Saint’s womanhood as well as
I her militancy (“captaincy”). Her “abundant breasts” would nourish everyone.
This spiritual militancy, as exhibited first by the Saint of Avila and as sung
by her two Daughters from Valladolid, allowed for the assertion of women’s
dynamic role in history. For both sisters. Saint Teresa’s metaphors of war,
employed in her autobiography, provided a way to adopt the iconography of
the Spanish Catholic Reformation. Ironically, Teresa of Avila, a female de¬
scendant of Jews, became an emblem of a society that both disdained women
and had declared war against Jews, Mohammedans, and other “heretics.” For
Saint Teresa, as for the Sobrino sisters, survival necessitated allegiance to
Spain’s “mission.” Saint Teresa, the warrior queen, dedicated to religious
sincerity and to the glory of Spain, represented in the sisters’ poetry an
affirmation of all Spanish women—those who wore the veil and those who
! did not. For she was “Profeta y doctora” and “Luz de toda España y sol que
sale” [MS 100; AlonsO'Cortés 96] (“prophet and doctor” and “Light of all
Spain the sun that now shines forth”).
Cecilia del C/acimiento, Hôet

Although both were prolific and varied writers, it was Cecilia del Naci¬
miento who achieved literary recognition in her own time. Her poetic expres¬
sions of ardent rapture were so finely wrought that for centuries two of her
poems were attributed to Saint John of the Cross. Because her writing more
closely followed the forms and themes of a male literary tradition than did
her sister’s, Cecilia del Nacimiento’s work, especially her poetry, has received
far more attention. One of Madre Cecilia’s two principal male models—her
brother Antonio—guided her along a well-defined theological and spiritual
path, as their correspondence readily indicates. The other—Saint John of
the Cross—offered an orthodox model for mystical literary production in the
; generations following the initiation of the Reform. Saint Teresa’s Daughters
; nurtured and sustained her beloved disciple. Saint John of the Cross. They
urged him to write and copied and protected his works. In the two sisters’
epoch, Carmelite nuns continued to remember his life and poetry with fam¬
ilial affection.
The same lyric quality that pervaded Saint John’s verses informed the
poetry of Cecilia del Nacimiento.^' She rendered the mystical experience
with greater technical proficiency and clarity than most of her male contem-
144 UNTOLD SISTERS
poraries. Madre Cecilia composed a great variety of poems describing different

stages of her mystic experience. Several of her mystical poems reveal that
the austerity practiced by cloistered Orders masked a tradition of playful and
richly sensuous devotion. Her talent and her constant practice since child¬
hood gave Madre Cecilia a facility with numerous rhetorical devices—an¬
tithesis, alliteration, paradox, and hyperbole—in crafting sonnets, liras,
romances, and other types of poems.
Juan Luis Rodriguez claims that had her work been recognized in time,
Cecilia del Nacimiento would have been considered among the great mystic
writers of the Spanish Golden Age (353)• Since two of her poems were
attributed for over two centuries to the first male Reformed Carmelite, among
other writers (Diaz Cerón 52), it could be said that her work was indeed
considered among the great writings of mysticism.
Perhaps the poems’ sensuality, as well as their craft, convinced critics that
the author was a man. “Liras a la transformación del alma” (“Liras to the
Soul’s Transformation”), from which selections appear at the end of the
chapter, is a sixteen-stanza lyric. The lira requires five-line stanzas and
combines seven- and eleven-syllable verses in a consonant rhyme scheme.
Madre Cecilia explicated and expanded Saint John’s mystical theme of the
dark night of the soul in these verses. Following his example, she provided
theological interpretations in two accompanying exegeses. The poem and its
commentaries constitute both an important part of her poetic production and
a key to her mystical and theological experiences and works.
“Sin figura en la memoria ...” (“In my memory no figure or face . . .”),
another poem from which selections appear at the end of this chapter, hides
complex thought in deceptively lucid lines. From beginning to end, the
movement of the poem is classical and alliterative in its rhythms. Its balanced
contrasts and lyric harmony of presentation are typical of Renaissance art.
It also uses conventional images, such as the Phoenix and the image of Love
as the naked one to whom Death delivers his weapons. “Sin figura” expresses
the union of self with God, by which opposites meet, negation brings affir¬
mation, and the All is achieved through a total embracing of Nothingness.
“Sin figura” summarizes the triple stages of the mystic path, emphasizing
the final stage of unity with the Godhead. The purgative and illuminative
stages appear in the first nine stanzas. Their note of tranquility transmits a
well-defined blueprint of the seventh room of the “interior castle,” which
Saint Teresa had used as a metaphor to describe the soul’s mystical experience.
The frame of reference and several images invoke the Founding Mother.^"'
The image of the emotions as a prison in the first stanza of the poem
counterpoints the image of escape (salida) in the last. These two stanzas
encapsulate the meaning of all nineteen; the other seventeen are variations
and elaborations on the theme of spiritual redemption through absolute denial
of material existence. In a manner similar to that of the musical compositions
of the period, the same motifs are played with and against each other; they
are intertwined, juxtaposed, recapitulated.
Todo (all) and nada (nothing) are two complementary motifs. One or the
other appears in all but two stanzas after the third. In the fifth stanza, which
is laden with negatives, the quest is explained: “Busco a Dios en mi, sin mi,/
y sin Dios no quiero nada,/que Dios, nada cuesta, nada ...” (I search for
God in me, lacking me,/and, lacking God, 1 can want nothing;/for nothing
is Gods price, nothing . . .). The final stanza, with a concentrated resolu¬
tion, brings together life and death in both verbal and nominative forms
{muerolvivo, muertelvida) with God and love, and again, finally, todo and nada.
Neither of these motifs is a result of merely conventional antitheses; each
springs from the struggle of all nuns to deny material life in favor of divine
reward. The poet’s soul lives in God, and in so doing wins an undying self.
The promise of a loving, mystic union with God was often sung in novices’
ceremonies of profession. Nuns glorified the devil’s torments; only by with¬
standing pain could the soul be reborn to spiritual perfection. Pastoral motifs
¡ often provided the settings for such struggles. The young woman taking vows
i was portrayed in an idyllic world of hunters and shepherdesses:
Zagala, muy bien se paga (Shepherdess, great is the recompense

lo que habéis estado herida, for the injury you’ve received;
pues con esta nueva vida now, with this new life you begin
quedará sana la llaga. (660) the wound will be made healthy.)
The metaphor of injury here proffers great reward—spiritual health and new
life. These were precisely the goals for which nuns strived, the themes upon
which they meditated.
The Carmelite insistence on a loving relationship to God led Cecilia del
Nacimiento to use her extraordinary proficiency in adapting Renaissance verse
forms to religious idiom. In “Definición de amor’’ (“Definition of Love”), she
expresses love’s inexplicable quality in the tone of a popular song:
Es amor un no sé qué (Love is something, I know not what,

que viene no sé de dónde that comes from 1 know not where,
y se entra no sé por dónde and enters in, I know not where;
y mata no sé con qué. (599) and kills with I know not what.)
In another poem, built of the counterposed antitheses typical of the Ren¬

aissance mode, the poet elaborates the indefinable “no sé qué”:
Vida que mata, muerte que da vida, (Life that slays, and death that offers life,
hielo que abrasa, fuego que nos hiela, ice that bums, and fire whose touch is ice,
vela que duerme, sueño que desvela, slumbering vigil, dream watching through
muerte alentada, vida decaída, the night,
cobarde audacia, cobardía atrevida, . , hastening demise, and most decrepit life,
(597) cowardly courage, boldest cowardice, . . .)
While the rhythm and counterpoint of the lines are playful, they are also
precise in describing the paradoxical nature of amor alo divino (mystical love).
Many of Cecilia del Nacimiento’s poems sensually describe mystical ecstasy
and divine love. She imitated the mystical symbolism of Saint John of the
Cross and Fray Luis de León. The poetry of the latter, copied in her hand,
remains in the convent archives. She drew her symbolism largely from the
146 UNTOLD SISTERS
“Song of Songs” and from the tradition of erótica a lo divino (divine eroticism),
that christianized troubadour lyric. Madre Cecilia’s verses defy the conven¬
tional description and expression of the experience of mystic union as in¬
describable and unexpressible. In the verse which follows, the Sacrament
that itself provides a mystic union for all believers—the act of communion
is elaborated as a love poem:
En una fiesta que hizo (In a gestute of love which God

Dios al alma enamorada made to the enamored soul.
le dio una dulce comida He offered her a sumptuous meal
de sí y de su cuerpo y alma. of Himself, body and soul.
. . . se hace manjar de su amada. . . . [and] He makes Himself her savory.
Ella con amor le come His beloved eats Him lovingly

y nunca se ve bien harta, .... (670) and is never full satisfied, . . . .)
“Linces de lo profundo y escondido ...” (“Lynxes that do espy deep and

hidden things . . .”) is another poem about union with the Divine which
refers explicitly to the Bridegroom’s physical beauty. Possibly challenged by
a statement of Saint Teresa’s that she dare not speak of God’s eyes, Cecilia
del Nacimiento composed these vetses on the subject. In the form of a
metaphorical series of “names” for the eyes of Jesus, the sonnet turns an often-
employed conceit into a light-filled love poem. Florid, sensual, and highly
visual, several of these lines exude a vital originality, such as the one which
compares Christ’s eyes to mysterious breasts, or another which likens them
to dense forests. When the poet’s eyes are watching God’s, pain ebbs away;
joy flows from the “soles que solos quitan mis enojos” (suns that singly take
away my sorrows). Here, rather than falling away as it did in “Sin figura,”
the world is better seen; paradoxically, the suspension of the senses evokes
a more sensual experience.
CMaria de San Silberto, Hôet

Although the writings of Maria de San Alberto were less well known in
the secular world than her sister’s, her literary production was in some ways
more rooted in life outside the convent than Cecilia’s. Less given to writing
in the conventional literary forms of mysticism, Maria de San Alberto’s style
was innovative and playful, using popular forms for the expression of religious
values. In her poetry. Madre Maria achieved a personalized synthesis of the
cultivated and popular traditions. She filtered the language, tones, and themes
of vernacular idiom through classical forms and modes. Yet she also preserved
the vivacious, simple, ingenious, and humorous cast of unlettered song, verse,
and talk. Madre Maria also played with materials at hand, irreverently jux¬
taposing the various literary forms and themes circulating in the court, in
the streets, and within the cloister.
For both sisters, but particularly for Maria de San Alberto, poetry contests
provided a way of indulging their own interests as well as their agility with
a variety of metrical forms. These poetry contests, certámenes, also allowed

them to participate in the worldly, secular activities of competition and
recognition. Both sisters kept one foot in the secular and the other in the
spiritual world by means of their writing. Maria de San Alberto addressed
this ability in a charming ditty written on the occasion of a poetry contest
won by both sisters. Each had won a pair of sandals. Madre Maria’s poem
celebrates the prize, using metaphors that equate their simple Carmelite
sandals with great wealth:
Más quiero la alpargata del Carmelo (1 love the Carmelite sandal more
que cuanta plata y oro cria el cielo than all the gold and silver Heaven yields
Amor quitando todo impedimento Love, removing all impediments,

por medio de alpargata y pie descalzo . by means of sandals and bare feet . . .)
(MS 94 f. 3r-v)'5
The ode to footwear espouses adherence to Carmelite values while playing

with the Latin etymology of “foot” in “impediments.”
A further example of the playfulness and ingenuity of the writing Maria
de San Alberto produced within the confines of rules for poetry contests is
the game devised in a sonnet about Saint Teresa. Comprised of three columns,
the anacrostic poem may be read in a variety of ways:
Con amor del esposo que a la esposa

robaba su afición y la encendia
pasaba el corazón el que traia
el calor fervoroso en quien reposa.
(MS 94 f. I or)
(With love of the bridegroom who from His bride

did steal her [his] affection and enflamed it,
pierced her heart from which ensued
the warmth most fervent in which she rests.)
In the original, the three columns can be read across columns one and two,
or across all three. Part of a sonnet celebrating Saint Teresa’s famous vision
of the ray of light piercing her breast, each column graphically suggests a
shaft of light.
Another favorite poetic game of Madre Maria’s was imitating and mixing
dialects, forms of pronunciation, and Latin. She had probably heard such
techniques, used for comic effect, in performances of comedias. Madre María
imitated Basque and Andalusian pronunciation. She wrote poems in Latin
and in guineo, the latter parodying the dialect of African slaves in Spain:
Gurugú, gurugú, mandinga, (Gurugú, gurugú, mandinga-girl

fachico que festa haber how we’ll make festivity,
de vistir a Teresa una ropa. so put on Teresa some clothes.
Ay, Chechu, que mi da placher! Oh, Chechu Qesus], how happy 1 be!)
(MS 94 f. 48v)
148 UNTOLD SISTERS
Madre Maria’s poetry often gives us a glimpse, as is the case above, of

infrequently recorded features of convent life—laundering and dressing tasks
performed by African women slaves and behind-the-scenes preparations for
religious holidays. Aristocratic institutions of Spanish society—religious as
well as secular—used unpaid, imported slave labor. Madre María, like other
writers of the period, wrote about slavery unselfconsciously, taking for granted
the integral role of the “unholy institution” in their daily lives.
In the foregoing examples of her poetry, as well as in her dramatic writing.
Madre María provides an outstanding model of the manner in which six¬
teenth- and seventeenth-century convent writers absorbed and transformed
the rich popular culture of their day.
Hifieater in tfie Convent

--Elaxi were a major form of monastic recreation,^r^-most-xonyents or-
ânized theatrical activities.,Dramatic represeiitîon was an effective means
of accomplishing the goals of ûcatidn and enterfammeTir'in-the-eonvenfe
It was a means as well of inventing a discourse through which a surprising
number of personal motifs—creative impulses, minor frustrations of daily
existence, swings between joy and sorrow in the quest for spiritual perfec¬
tion—could emerge.
Most religious plays—autos, coloquios, or fiestas—were written for the Na¬
tivity or for a novice’s profession. These were the two occasions seen as most
appropriate for the participation of women. The Church, on this as on other
matters, was ambivalent in giving its permission. In certain periods convent
theater was sanctioned; in others, it was not. Officially permitted or not, the
fiestas enabled women “dead to the world” to laugh, cry, sing, dance, act,
speak, and dress in costume. The performances provided a break in the
monotony and tedium that Teresa de Jesus called the scoutge of convent life.
Although there was a great variety of metric forms and styles of staging in
the fiestas, the themes and basic structure of dramatized dialogue were gen¬
erally constant—they were determined by religious lessons.
As women’s Vidas sometimes make explicit, but more often hint, theater
and music, the dramatization of services, devotional exercises, and coloquios
espirituales accompanied by instruments and the singing voice formed an
integral part of the religious year in the convent. In most convents, many
nuns did not have more than an elementary education. Vivid presentations
in lessons and sermons inspired them to seek spiritual perfection. Ana de
San Bartolomé and Maria de San José (Chapter i) wrote and participated in
animated theatrical spectacles. Madre Isabel de Jesús (Chapter 3) mentions
the masks used in the processions in her village. By becoming a nun, Marcela
de San Félix (Chapter 4) acquired the time and sphere for developing what
had amounted to an informal apprenticeship received in the household of
her famous dramatist father into a playwriting craft she used to entertain and
preach to her Sisters. The Peruvian Madre Josefa de la Providencia (Chapter
5) mentions the interruption of a rehearsal for a coloquio, which Madre
Antonia Lucia was directing. We have notice of musical and of a few theatrical
activities in Mexican convents—especially, of course, the recognized work
of Juana Inés de la Cruz. It is hard to believe that her autos and villancicos
derive exclusively from the male tradition, or that her example was not
followed, however less skillfully, by those who came after her. The theatrical
activities of women in the convents of New Spain remain largely unexplored.
The Fiesta a wna profesión by Cecilia del Nacimiento and the two Fiestecicas
del Nacimiento by Maria de San Alberto, parts of which appear at the end of
this chapter, partake of two traditions; the female tradition of convent writ¬
ing, unbroken for over a thousand years, and the tradition of the medieval
autos, which began as miracle plays performed in churches.” The family
background of the two sisters and their intense interest in literature assured
Madre Maria and Madre Cecilia’s familiarity with the theatrical currents of
their time. And their lives as religious brought them into direct contact with
monastic spectacles.
Maria de San Alberto was a versatile convent practitioner of theatrical
tradition, combining the theatrical poetry and music that thrived in the
seventeenth-century Hispanic world. Her detailed stage directions have been
used by a modem critic to document the inseparability of poetry and music
in that period (Garcia de la Concha L). At the beginning of a scene, Maria
de San Alberto would typically instruct two nuns to enter “cantando y ta¬
ñendo” (singing and strumming). Detailed staging directions, as well as an
accompanying bar of music, are features particular to Maria de San Alberto’s
script. Hers is the only example of musical notation in the manuscripts we
have examined. Based on a popular melody—the tonada—the tune was played
on the vihuela, a forerunner of the guitar.^® Madre Maria, the author-director,
states that the song should be played as background music throughout the
piece. The “production script” has other directions, sometimes written in the
margins and sometimes as verses of the play itself. These instructions, which
give the work a timeless simplicity at once medieval and modem, direct and
explain the reasons for the staging, placement, and movements of the ac¬
tresses.
The dramatist’s script, which has never been published with its notations,
describes precisely where each character should be on the stage and what
each should be doing throughout. When the four virtues offer gifts to the
Christ Child, for instance, the second is to refer to herself as she makes the
offering, and say:
La segunda es castidad (The second one is Chastity

una azucena le ofrezca and she offers him a lily,
para que imitar merezca for it so closely imitates
al Rey en su pureza y santidad. (MS 100) the King Himself in spotless sanctity.)
The directions in the margin state: “Llega y hace lo mismo [las ofrece]./Si
no hay azucena hágala de papel ...” (She reaches the place and does the
same [makes her offering]./If there is no lily, make it of paper . . .). Madre
Maria’s particular talent for and pleasure in visualizing the scene articulated
in the dialogue and in the instructions leaves no room for confusion about
what her Sisters, as actors and stagehands, should do.
The verses are as clear as the stage directions. As in her poetry, Maria de
San Alberto uses and elaborates on popular motifs and speech. She interjects
romances and octavos into the action. Simple dialogue makes the presence of
150 UNTOLD SISTERS
the Holy Family more immediately felt, as is appropriate on the holiday that
commemorates their beginning as a family.
Cecilia del Nacimiento wrote her one extant fiesta to celebrate a novice’s
marriage to Christ. It joins the realistic representation of medieval theater
and folk tradition with the idealized, classical forms of the pastoral. Medieval
theater’s stock stereotyping (woman as Vanity) serves as a pedagogical device.
Even after mainstream dramatic conventions had changed, women’s religious
theater retained the freshness and charming juxtapositions of fantasy with
reality and gravity with farce that were characteristic of earlier dramatic
periods. Madre Cecilia’s play also draws on the Italianate tradition introduced
into Spain by Garcilaso de la Vega (1503-1536). Her allegorical characters
retain a classical flavor. Christ, a surpassingly beautiful shepherd, is led and
directed by none other than Venus’ famous assistant Cupid, complete with
bow, quiver, and arrows, in his pursuit of the Soul (a shepherdess). The
combination of classical figures and biblical characters in the theater of Gil
Vicente (i465?-i54o?) may have been an influence here. The Fiesta also
adapts for the stage the mystical applications of Garcilaso’s Eglogas (Eclogues),
which had been delineated by Saint John of the Cross (Brenan 107-08).
Cecilia del Nacimiento’s use of the pastoral mode reflects her humanistic
training.^® The setting for this religious comedia is the countryside. A brief
summary of the action can illuminate this drama’s appeal. Before the final
reconciliation and union of the shepherd (Jesus) and the shepherdess (soul-
bride), the author treats her audience to a dialogue relevant to the life they
left “in the world’’ and the struggles of their present existence. Love shoots
an arrow to the shepherdess, but only after she has refused to come out of
her hut to greet the Husband. Explaining her lack of courtesy, she claims
she has just washed her feet and doesn’t want to get them dirty. This ap¬
parently comic retort evokes biblical story and song. But it also alludes to
women’s training to care for their appearance above all else. The shepherdess
initially loses her Love and must suffer, embarking on a spiritual pilgrimage
as penance for having avoided Love’s arrows and wished to remain carefree.
After the lovelorn Husband agrees that Love should shoot his arrow into the
object of his attention in order to cure his condition, Christ and Cupid leave
the stage.
Abandoned, the would-be wife then searches for her lost love. Within the
classical-pastoral-biblical mélange, a detail of the offstage action, no doubt
personally evocative for many of the nuns in the audience, refers to sexual
abuse. The betrothed shepherdess is accosted and raped before her quest for
the ideal Husband ends. In the process she is robbed of her clothes and
beaten. There are echoes here of the poem of El Cid, as well as references
to the real dangers unaccompanied women faced when traveling. “ Travail
finally shapes the shepherdess into a yearning, obedient wife, whose prize is
union (marriage) with the divine.
Threads of social, literary, and religious culture weave through the lines
of the play. The theme of honor was an integral part of secular theater of
the period; women were the repositories of the honor of their fathers, brothers,
and husbands in contemporary tragedies and comedies. Madre Cecilia’s ad¬
aptation of this theme to the convent stage reflects the extent to which the
concept permeated the society:
Two Sisters Among the Sisters
Esposo: Husband:
Aqueste anillo trueca (This ring is given in barter
por la espina y el clavo. for the nail and thorn.
Con él te doy mi honra, With it, I give my honor

que ya tú cuides della, into your constant care,
y la tuya en mis manos and your own, from this day forth,
desde este punto queda. (651) in my two hands 1 bear.)
Ecnoes of Saint Teresa’s revised concept of honor, as one based on spiritual

merit, pervade these verses. What counts in the play’s resolution is the
exchange of honor between the shepherdess and her loving Shepherd, not
her purity of blood or even her virginity.^' The spirit of reform and ethical
religiosity championed by their Mother Teresa motivated the two sisters,
whether they were writing plays for their Sisters or poems for contests to be
read by the general public.
Authorship lay at the center of the two sisters’ lives. Their writing for the
certámenes and convent theater spectacles reveals the high order of creativity
veiled by the convent’s cloister. Chroniclers, archivists, and translators as
well, they recorded, copied, and transcribed the work of many others. These
activities, along with Madre Cecilia’s richly sensuous mystical poetry and
Madre Maria’s playful experiments with popular literary forms, serve to affirm
their contribution to the flowering of intellectual convent cultute in the
seventeenth century.
Contributions to convent culture also came from less privileged quarters
of Castile. Although the acquisition of skill in writing was generally reserved
for a privileged few, the gift of rapture and an ability to communicate with
people was not. Even unlettered women from small towns in agricultural
areas became authors of texts, especially when their religious visions crys-
tallized both individual preoccupations and the wider concerns of society.
Like Ana de San Bartolomé (Chapter i), Isabel de Jesús (Chapter 3) was
the daughter of Castilian farmers. Neither learned to read and write as a
child. Madre Ana grew up at a time of relative prosperity for her family when
“the dynamism and faith of the Castilian people allowed the monarchy to
live through hours of universal euphoria’’ (Vincens Vives loi). A generation
later, during Madre Isabel’s childhood, Castile was wracked by famine, pes¬
tilence, and economic crisis. Usually in positions of leadership, women re¬
ligious with formal education like Maria de San Alberto and Cecilia del
Nacimiento were able to organize aid to the afflicted. Among the poor, popular
religiosity offered succor. The sources show an unexpected class equality with
regard to the expression of religious fervor and vocation, as will be seen in
the case of Isabel de Jesús, subject of the next chapter. Devotion and prayer
allowed both Madre Ana and Madre Isabel to be considered vessels of the
Lord’s revelations and supreme wisdom, giving them the confidence to crit¬
icize those who “gain wisdom by study. ’’ The Spanish Catholic Reformation
Church publicized the words of women like Isabel de Jesús and Ana de San
Bartolomé and allowed class and caste (racial-ethnic) antagonisms an airing,
thus preventing them from exploding and making room for all strata of society.
152 UNTOLD SISTERS
nêxts and ^translations

Maria de San Alberto
Favores recibidos de Nuestro Señor (MS 88)^
En el nombre de la Santísima Trinidad

Habiéndose de hacer elección en este convento el año de 1629 (que se
hizo por el mes de agosto) / y encomendándola todas a Nuestro Señor, a una
hermana le dio devoción de poner a Nuestra Señora en la silla prioral algunos
días antes para que intercediese con su precioso hijo por esta necesidad. Y
pidiendo licencia puso allí una imagencita de bulto de la Virgen Santísima
con su Niño en brazos, muy gracioso. Es de mucha reverencia, agradable
parece a las antiguas, que aunque no es hermosa, causa devoción. Pues estando
yo en el coro una mañana en la hora de oración, no sé cómo volví la cabeza
a mirar a la Virgen Santísima, bien descuidada de lo que sucedió me dijo
estas palabras dos veces, sustituía mía, sustituía mía, y luego inmediatamente
añadió las que se siguen, entra tú en el puesto, y verás las maravillas de Dios.
Yo me encogí y admiré, y aunque reverencié las palabras de la madre de Dios,
y agradecí a esta gran señora el amor que me mostró cuando me las dijo, vi
cuán indigna era yo de recibir tal favor, y me quedé suspensa hasta ver qué
sería. Esto me parece fue dos o tres días antes de la elección. Pues al tiempo
de hacerla, que fue en breve con grande paz y silencio, la obediencia ordenó
que yo fuese tomando las cédulas y las fuese dando afuera. Y así lo hice con
harta sencillez sólo por obedecer. Y a la más indigna de toda la casa, y que
merecía estar ardiendo en los infiernos, que es María de San Alberto, pro¬
nuncia el prelado que ella sale por prelada. Yo me puse de rodillas y renuncié,
y como aunque más hice no me valió, hube de abajar la cabeza a la confir¬
mación de la elección y obedecer por entonces. Aunque después,^ en viendo
occasión, renuncié otras dos o tres veces con nuestros padres Provincial y
General, que era [en ese?] tiempo Padre Fray Juan de Espíritu Santo, el cual,
estando yo de rodillas aguardando admitiese mi renuncia, me respondió,—
No hay sino abajar la cabeza, que se ha visto claramente que es voluntad de
Dios.—Con esto bajé la cabeza, porque aun en estas materias que tanto se
deben huir, tiemblo de ir contra la divina voluntad. Y ni nuestro Padre
General ni nadie sabía ni aun ahora lo saben lo que me pasó con la Virgen
Nuestra Señora, si no es algún confesor a quien después [acá?] lo debí de
decir entre otras cosas de que le daba cuenta. Después, sin quererlo yo saber
ni preguntarlo, me dijo quien lo sabía que no había faltado ni un voto en
esta elección, (f. ir-3v)‘'
1. All the manuscript numbers in this chapter refer to the archive of the Discalced
Carmelite Convento de la Concepción, Valladolid.
2. This phrase is written along the margin of the manuscript, without parentheses.
3. Maria de San Alberto’s note: “No por rehusar el trabajo sino por hallarme indigna
y sin caudal para ello.”
4. The folio numbers are ours.
Se ha de advertir aquí una cosa y es que el contar estas maravillas y gozarse

el alma con ellas es sólo por la gloria de Dios y por ver cumplidas sus palabras
y promesa que por lo demás que toca a estos oficios y cargos, antes los teme
y tiembla de ellos, y no sólo los teme y los tiembla sino que los abomina por
lo que tienen de mandar y ser causa de que puedan hacer faltas proprias Isic]
y ajenas, que por pequeñas que sean, se deben mucho temer y huir en quien
gobierna. Y dejando aparte la reverencia que tengo a estos oficios por lo que
representan el estar en lugar de Dios, por lo demás vuelvo a decir que les
aborrezco y abomino de ellos, y quisiera que todos los aborrecieran. Salvo la
obediencia y la divina voluntad. Que después que una persona ha hecho de
su parte lo que debe, proponiendo y renunciando, si con todo eso lo manda
la santa obediencia manifestada allí la voluntad de Dios, más falta sería ir
contra ésta, sino aceptar con humildad, conociendo de verdad que si Dios
no lo hace y suple, que no tiene suficiencia ni virtud para ellos. Y con esto
y obrar con una recta intención, sin respectos humanos, procurando hacer
siempre lo que entendiere que es más gloria de Dios. Y las faltas que hiciere,
holgarse que se las digan y enmendarse de ellas, pidiendo perdón a Dios, y
cuando convenga, a los prójimos. Haciéndose estos oficios de esta manera,
se merece mucho en ellos, porque son grandes los trabajos que en ellos se
pasan, y en unas personas más que en otras. Y llevándolos por Nuestro Señor
y por el bien de las almas, los premia Su Magestad, porque es justo y amador
de las justicias, así en castigar lo malo como en premiar lo bueno. Sea bendito.
Amen.
María de San Alberto
Indigna carmelita descalza
Este cuademito escribo en setiembre de este año de 1633. (f. lov-iiv)
Mercies Bestowed by Our Lord
In the Name of the Most Holy Trinity

In the year 1629, as it was necessary to hold an election (which was done
in the month of August,)^ we all commended this matter into the hands of
Our Lord; and the spirit of devotion led one of the Sisters to place our Lady
in the Prioress’s chair several days beforehand, so that she might intercede
with her precious Son to help with our need. And, having sought permission
to do so, she placed there a small carved image^ of the Blessed Virgin with
her Child in her arms, very lovely, reverent, and pleasing, which looks just
like the very old ones; and although not beautiful, it inspires devotion. And
so one morning it happened that I was in the choir when it was time for
prayers; I know not why I turned my head to look at the most Blessed Virgin,
entirely unaware of what was happening. Twice she spoke these words to
5. This phrase is written along the margin of the manuscript, without parentheses.
6. Translator’s note; in Spanish, “una imagencita de bulto": made of stone, wood,

or other material.
154 UNTOLD SISTERS
me: M31 substitute, My substitute. ^ And then she immediately added the words
which follow; You must take this post, and you shall see the marvels worked by
God. 1 shrank back in amazement; and though 1 revered these words spoken
by the Mother of God, and thanked this great Lady for the love she showed
to me in speaking them, I saw how unworthy 1 was of receiving such a favor,
and I waited, perplexed, to see what would come to pass. 1 believe this was
two or three days before the election. And when it was time for the vote to
be taken, which was done quickly and most peacefully and in silence, obe¬
dience commanded that 1 should be the one to collect the ballots and take
them out. And so 1 did, with all simplicity, and only for the sake of obedience.
And then the Prelate announced that she, the most unworthy creature of
the entire house, who deserved rather to be burning in hell—that is, Maria
de San Alberto—that she was to be the Mother Superior. 1 went down on
my knees and renounced the post, but as all 1 might do was of no avail, 1
had to bow my head to the confirmation of this election, and obey for the
moment, although later when 1 saw an opportunity 1 again renounced it two
or three more times,® with our priests the Provincial [Superior] and the
[Superior] General who was at that time Fray Juan del Espíritu Santo. But
while 1 was on my knees, awaiting his acceptance of my renunciation, he
answered me: “There is nothing to be done but to bow your head, for we
have clearly seen that this is the will of God.” With that 1 did bow my head,
for even in such matters as these, which are so greatly to be shunned, 1
tremble to go against God’s holy will. And neither our priest the Superior
General nor anyone else ever knew, nor do they know even today, what
happened to me with our holy Lady the Virgin, except for some confessor
to whom I later had to relate this, among other things of which 1 gave a full
account. Afterwards, without my either wishing to know or asking it, one
who knew this told me, that in the election not one vote went elsewhere,
(f. iv-3r)
One thing must be noted here and that is, that my speaking of these things
and the delight my soul takes in them is only for the glory of God, and so
that His word and His promises may be fulfilled. For in every other respect,
my soul does rather fear and tremble before such offices and responsibilities,
and not only fears and trembles before them, but holds them in abomination,
for they require the giving of commands and may be the cause of failings in
oneself and in others that, however small, are greatly to be feared and avoided
in anyone who governs. And, putting aside the reverence that 1 hold for
these offices because they signify representing God, in every other regard 1
say again that 1 abhor them and hold them in abomination, and 1 wish that
all would likewise abhor them, apart from [the demands of] obedience and
divine will. For after a person has, for her own part, done as she ought, both
proposing and renouncing—if after doing all that, one is so commanded by
7. Translator’s note: that is, “You shall represent me in the community."
8. Maria de San Alberto’s note: “Not because I wanted to refuse the work, but
because 1 thought 1 was unworthy and without the capacity for the post.”
Tivo Sisters Among the Sisters
holy obedience, wherein is manifest the will of God, it would be a greater

failing to go against His will; rather one must accept with humility, knowing
in truth that if God does not do the deed and afford whatever is needed,
one has neither ability nor virtue equal to the task. And with this, and
laboring with a righteous purpose, without regard for the good opinion of
others, but endeavoring always to do that which one understands to be for
the greater glory of God; and, whatever errors one might incur, taking pleasure
when others point them out, and then correcting them, asking pardon of
God and, when necessary, of one’s neighbors; when these offices are performed
in this fashion, there is great merit to be found there. For great hardships
are endured in these offices, more so for some persons than for others; and,
desiring them as we should for Our Lord and for the good of all souls. His
Majesty awards them to us because He is just and a lover of justice, so in
punishing evil as in rewarding the good. Blessed be His name. Amen.
Maria de San Alberto
unworthy Discalced Carmelite nun
1 write this little book in September of the year 1633. (f. lov-iiv)
Breve relación de la vida y virtudes de Nuestra Beata Madre Cecilia del

Nacimiento, religiosa descalza Carmelita en el convento de las de
Valladolid. (Petronila de San José)^
Así como entré [en la ermita], me recibió el Señor benignísimamente,

porque me mostró lo que diré. Vi a dos brazos larguísimos y muy iguales que
me parece salían de la custodia, que no sé como pueda yo significar el amor
y piedad que en ellos venía, y deleitándose la vista interior con ver esto.
También se deleit[ó] el oído con esta palabras que dijeron. Para abrazar a las
dos hermanas. Y no me dijeron a ti y a tu hermana, sino a las dos hermanas,
conociendo y viendo yo claramente que éramos la Madre Cecilia del Naci¬
miento mi hermana y yo las que habíamos de ser abrazadas con aquellos
divinos y poderosos brazos. Y le dije a Nuestro Señor, ¿qué brazos son éstos?
Al punto, casi antes de acabar la pregunta, estaba respondida y fue con unas
palabras para ambas de gran favor, (f. qr)
Brief Account of the Life and Virtues of Our Blessed Mother Cecilia del
Nacimiento, Discalced Carmelite Nun of the Convent in Valladolid.
(Petronila de San José)*°
Just as 1 entered [the hermitage], the Lord received me most benevolently,

for he showed me such things as I shall now relate. 1 saw two extremely long
9. This fragment is a quote from Maria de San Alberto cited by Petronila de San
José in her account of the life of Cecilia del Nacimiento.
10. This fragment is a quote from Maria de San Alberto cited by Petronila de San
José in her account of the life of Cecilia del Nacimiento.
156 UNTOLD SISTERS
and very well-formed arms, which seemed to come out of the monstrance,
though I know not how I could ever express the love and mercy that those
arms conveyed; or how on seeing this my inward sight took pleasure. Then
too was my ear delighted with these words which were spoken. So as to
embrace the two sisters.” And they did not say you and your sister, but the
two sisters.” By which 1 saw and understood quite clearly that we, my sister
Madre Cecilia del Nacimiento and myself, were to be embraced by those
holy and powerful arms. And 1 asked our Lord, “What arms are these?” And
at that very moment, indeed almost before I had finished asking the question,
it had been answered, and it was answered in words which bore great favor
toward us both. (f. qr)
Fiestecilla del Nacimiento— Little Fiesta of the Nativity
(Esto que sigue es una fiestecilla del (What follows is a little “fiesta” for the birth
nacimiento que cantan y tañen dos personas of Our Lord, to be sung and played by two
entretanto que las cuatro Virtudes van people, while the four Virtues are performing
haciendo sus acciones y ofrecimientos y la their actions and making offerings; and the
tonada es la que se sigue:) tune goes like this:)
(Y se ha de advertir que de propósito va el (And it should be noted that the fourth verse
cuarto pie más largo que los otros para la gala is deliberately longer than the others, for the
y tonada. A la vuelta de la hoja irá todo como words and the tune. On the next page, the
ha de estar. )'^ whole fiesta appears, just as it should be
performed.)
(Salen dos, cantando esto, l*'' (Two nuns appear, singing these words.)
11. Translator’s note; monstrance: a receptacle to exhibit the sacrament.
12. The fiesta is in MS 100, in the convent archive, in two almost identical
versions. Both are in Maria de San Alberto’s handwriting. We follow here the version
prefaced by a bar of music. Stage directions are given between parentheses. In the
manuscript, they appear in the margins and are written sideways as well as horizontally,
which accounts for their seemingly odd placement in our text. We also give some of
the stage directions from the other version of the fiesta in footnotes, because they
offer charm as well as insight into monastic play production. Also, we call this fiesta
only to distinguish it from the other, very different fiesta for Christmas from which
we offer selections, which we denominate “11.”
13. Para celebrar la festecica siguiente ha de estar puesto el niño en alguna parte
que signifique el portal, y la virgen Santísima y San Joseph acomodado [sic] de manera
que la santa comunidad vea y goce mejor lo que se ha de ir haciendo delante del
divino Rey. (To celebrate the following little fiesta, the child should he put in some
spot that shall represent the manger, and the Most Blessed Virgin and Saint Joseph
should be placed so that the holy community may the better see and enjoy all that
is to he done before the divine King.)
14. Sería necesario que saliesen como monjas por la propiedad. (Here they should
enter dressed as nuns, for the sake of propriety.)
Esta noche hay gran consuelo Tonight we take delight and pleasure
de una fiesta singular in a festival like no other,
y quien la ha de festejar and those who celebrate together
son las monjas primitivas del Carmelo'^ are the simple and devoted Carmelite
mothers,
en reverencia del rey in reverence to our great King,
que ha nacido en el portal bom in the lowly manger,
y bien le viene el sayal and well-suited, in rough swaddling,
el bajar con alegría el hombro a su ley. gladly to bow His shoulders in obeisance.
Y así vendrán por primicias And fresh as springtime’s earliest flowers,

cuatro vírgenes muy bellas four virgins fair and lovely
en nombre de todas ellas step forth to represent the others,
pues todas de su Rey son amadas y for all, from their King, receive most
propicias. loving honors.
(Aquí entran las cuatro vírgenes.)'® (Enter the four virgins,)
(La hacen [la reverencia]. La bajan [la cabeza]. (They make their curtsy. They bow their heads.
Todas con gran concierto a la par con pu[n]tuaMad All four in perfect accord, taking an equal part
a las palabras,) and keeping time with the words,)
Haránle la reverencia Together they will make their curtsy

y abajando la cabeza and, heads bowed in reverence,
de castidad y pobreza with purity and poverty
harán ofrecimientos de cruz y de offer the Cross and their obedience.
obediencia.
(Todas a la par en orden,) (All four taking an equal part, each in her turn,)
(Besan lo que dan primero que lo ofrezcan,) (They kiss what they are giving before offering
it,)
La primera que es Pobreza The first of the virgins is Poverty,

del sayal que trae vestido known by the homespun she wears,
al Niño recien nacido and now, before the newborn Baby
ofrezca su presente que es gran riqueza.'^ she offers up her gift, a mighty treasure.
15. Y adviértase que el postrero pie de cada copla va más largo de industria por la
gala y tonada que la cantan los dos por todo el tiempo que dura la fiesta. (And let
it be noted that the last verse of each stanza is intentionally longer for both the words
and the tune, which are sung by the two [nuns] for the entire length of the fiesta.)
16. Aquí salen las cuatro vírgenes adornadas como virtudes acomodando los colores
de que van vestidas. (Here the four virgins appear, adorned as Virtues, and dressed
in suitable colors.)
17. Llega y ofrece un envoltorio de jerga. (She reaches the manager and offers a
bundle wrapped in sackcloth.)
158 UNTOLD SISTERS
(Llega aquí y ofrece de rodillas, y las otras están (Here she reaches the manger and, kneeling,
de pie.) makes her offerings, while the others stand.)
La segunda es Castidad The second one is Chastity

una azucena le ofrezca'® and she offers Him a lily,
para que imitar merezca for it so closely imitates
al Rey en su pureza y sanctidad. the King Himself in spotless sanctity.
(Llega y hace lo mismo.) (She reaches the place and does the same thing.)
La tercera es Obediencia The third of these is Obedience,

el yugo le ofrecerá'^ who has a yoke to offer,
y en él se sujetará as full willingly she bends
con entera voluntad a su gran potencia. her head in meek submission to His power.
(Llega y hace lo mismo.) (She reaches the place and does the same thing.)
Paciencia le dé la cruz And Patience gives the Child a Cross,

pues la quiere tan temprano for He’s eager to receive it,
que el venir a ser humano as He has taken human form
es para que muriendos nos salve Jesús. that by His death we might all be saved by
Jesus.
(Llega y hace lo mismo, adorando y besando la (She reaches the place and does the same, wor¬
cruz primero que la dé.) shipping and kissing the cross before giving it.)
Y en habiendo así ofrecido And so when each has made her offering
se hincarán de rodillas all fall on bended knee,
y luego harán maravillas and then, awe-struck and marvelling,
cantándole la gala al niño Rey. they sing the praises of their baby King.
(Aquí se hincan todas cuatro, como tomando (Here all four kneel doivn, as if receiving a
bendición para cantar la gala y hacer mara' blessing, to sing His praises and adore the Child.)
villas.)
(Aquí lo hacen danzando solamente, sin cantar, (Here the four Virtues perform this only by danc¬
pues lo cantan ios dos.) ing, without singing, for it is sung by the other
two.)
18. Si no hay azucena, hácella [sic] de papel. (If there is no lily, make it of paper.)
19. Llega y hace lo mismo. Si no hay yugo que llevar, hacerle de un palo derecho
y otro encorvado. (She reaches the manger and does the same thing. If there is no
yoke to carry, fashion it of one straight stick and another curved one.)
A la gala, gala, gala Then sing all glory, glory, glory,

a la gala, del infante all glory to our Prince,
pase el demonio adelante who drives the Devil off before Him,
y váyase al infiemo en hora mala. and casts him headlong into the abyss.
(Aquí sale un demonio y pasa de una parte a (Here a devil appears and goes from one place
otra no muy a prisa, porque le vean bien.) to another, not too quickly, so it may be clearly
seen.)
(La gracia de esta festecica es que se hagan las (The fun of this little fiesta is that everything is
cosas con gran sosiego y puntualidad.) done gracefully and in perfect time.)
(Como se van cantando, así lo pongan en eje- (And as the words are sung, those who are
cució [sic] los que danzan.) dancing act out the song.)
Que ya no tiene poder No longer can his deviltry

para hacemos mal alguno harm us with his hate,
pues aquel que es trino y uno as our one God, of the Trinity,
se ofrece por nosotros a padecer, has given Himself to suffer for our sake,
queriendo que la persona for as He willed, the word of the Father

del verbo Hijo del Padre was embodied in His Son,
haya salido de madre bom of His dear mother,
por obra de su amor con que nos perdona. all by His love, by which He grants us
pardon.
Y porque tan alto bien And that this greatest power of good
no se vuelva en nuestro mal, never let us come to harm,
la venida del portal may His coming to this lowly shed
nos lleve camino a Jemsalem. now bear us on the road to Jerusalem.
(Hacer la reverencia y salirse con mucho sosiego, (Curtsying and making their exit with grace and
y adviértase que entre copla y copla ha de durar ease. And let it be noted that in between each
el tañido de los dos que cantan porque se gusten stanza of the song the two singers should continue
mejor las diferencias y mudanzas de las que dan¬ playing their instruments, so that the different
zan y ofrecen y quien canta descanse. steps and movements of those who are dancing
and making offerings can be better enjoyed, and
so that whoever is singing can rest.)
(Después pueden salir los entremeses.) (After this, the entertainment for the interlude
can be brought on.)
20. Hagan todos Reverencia y sálganse con sosiego mas vuelvan haciendo luego
algún entresmesico de copla-[?]■ Aquí se salen, y entretanto que vuelven, están
los dos cantando algunos Romances o octavas o lo que quisieren. (Let all curtsy and
make their exit with grace and ease, but let them return to perform some little interlude
of-[?] verses. Here they exit, and until they return, the two shall sing some
ballads or octavas or whatever they please.)
i6o UNTOLD SISTERS
Fiesta del Nacimiento—II Fiesta of the Nativity
(Entrada cantada. Cantan la[s] dos pastoras, (Enter singing. The two shepherdesses sing,
y dice la primera:) and the first speaks:)
Con el aire de la sierra When the wind comes off the mountains,
tómome morena my face turns brown and tawny.
Cuando pace mi ganado My little flock now grazes,

hace un aire tan helado and with these mountain breezes
que el color acostumbrado I fear my poor face loses
de perderle tengo gana the color that was mine:
tómome morena. I turn all tawny brown.
Segunda pastora: Second shepherdess:

No tengas pena, pastora Shepherdess, ’tis no disgrace,
que la morena enamora for many love a tawny face
si gracia con ella mora if it is the home of grace,
de que no estás ajena. which you surely own.
Responde la otra: First shepherdess:

Tómome morena My face turns tawny brown
como estoy acostumbrada because as day is dawning,
a subir por la majada 1 must go a-climbing
con la fresca de la helada to the meadows every morning,
mi color se me cubriera the color I had is gone:
tómome morena. my face turns tawny brown.
(Y repetir cada vez con el aire de la sierra.) (And while saying the verses of this song,
repeat “When the wind comes off the moun¬
tains ...” each time.)
(En diciendo este cantar, entran los pastores (Enter the shepherds, who speak the following
y dicen esto cantando y bailando:) words, while singing and dancing:)
Ahora que el ganado Now that our sheep

es ido a pacer are safe in the pasture,
en este verde prado in this green field
tomemos placer. we’ll take our pleasure.
Ahora que anochece Now peaceful night

noche sosegada falls all so still,
la luna resplancece the moon shines bright
en esta majada on sheepcote and hill;
y ya nuestro ganado and while our sheep
es ido a pacer are safe in the pasture,
Two Sisters Among the Sisters i6i
Con gran gozo y contento With mirth abounding

nos alegraremos we’ll rejoice,
y al son de aqueste viento as we sing
todos cantaremos to the wind’s own voice,
y un baile concertado and dance so sweetly
podemos hacer all together:
(Acabado éste, dice la primera pastora:) (When they are done, the first shepherdess
says:)
Ea pastores, pastores Now then, shepherds, shepherds!

miremos por el ganado We must watch our flocks
no ande descarriado lest they should be lost
entre lobos robadores; to wolves, those wicked robbers;
que allá en viniendo la fiesta but the holiday comes apace,

podemos muy bien bailar and then we may dance as we please
vosotros zapatear and you shall beat time with your heels,
en reposando la siesta. when we are taking our rest.
(En diciendo esto oyen una voz que dice así:) (As this is said, they hear a voice which
speaks thus:)
Anuncio vobis gandió magno qui a hodies natus [1 bring you good tidings of great joy. For this
est Salvator. Gloria in excelsis deo et in terra day a Saviour is bom unto you. Glory to God
pax. in the highest, and on earth, peace.]
(Luego dice la segunda pastora:) (Aquí se (Then the second shepherdess speaks:) (Here,
arroba) she is in the greatest rapture)
¿Qué es esto que hemos oído? What’s this that we have heard?
¿De quién es voz tan divina? Whose voice is so sublime?
Sin duda el ángel ha sido These must be an angel’s words,
que dice Dios ha nacido bringing news of God’s own birth,
y hacia Belén nos inclina. which to Bethlehem bid us hie.
Dice el primer pastor: First shepherd:

O mi Jesús qué cumplido Oh, dear Jesus, how complete
es este gozo que siento is this joy you’ve sent me!
quien me quitara el contento With pleasure 1 am so replete,
donde todo estoy metido nothing can rob my contentment!
Primera pastora: First shepherdess:

No se te pase en gozar The time is short; don’t spend it
un tiempo tan limitado in thinking of your pleasure!
sino dejando el ganado But leave the flocks to pasture
vamos le luego a buscar and let us go to find Him;
102 UNTOLD SISTERS
for there you’ll have plenty of joy

que no te faltarán gozos
dentro de aquel portalillo. in the little cattle stall.
Pascual, Antón, Carillo, Step as lively as goats, now, boys!
Vamos, andad a caprozos. Hurry, Carillo, Antón, Pascual!
Primer pastor: First shepherd:

El mismo Dios que ha nacido May the very God who has just been bom
me dé fuerzas para andar give me strength for the journey ahead,
que harto será caminar for it’s not easy to walk that road
según lo que en mí he sentido with this feeling that fills me now.
Di pastora, ¿qué habrá sido? Tell me shepherdess, what could it be?

La gran fuerza y alegría The mighty power and happiness
del gozo que recibiste of the pleasure that was yours
cuando del ángel oiste when you heard the angel’s words
lo que anunciaba y decía. and all he said to us.
(Aquí llegan al portal y dice la pastora pri¬ (Here they arrive at the manger, and before
mera antes que lleguen los pastores lo que se the shepherds arrive, the first shepherdess
sig[u]e en la margen:) says what follows in the margin:)
Primera pastora: First shepherdess:

O hermosísimo niño Oh, most beautiful Child!
mucho más vemos aquí How much more we see in you here
que lo que oimos de ti. than all we’d heard of you before.
Tú, pastor, que no podías And you, shepherd, who could scarcely
sufrir el gran accidente sustain that sudden blow
que oyendo la voz sentías when you heard what the voice was
saying—
mira lo que ves presente. just see what’s before you now.
([Entran.] Ofrece la primera pastora y dice:) ([They go in.] The first shepherdess makes her
offering, and says:)
Yo os adoro, inmenso Dios, I adore you, almighty God,

de todo cuanto hay criado, above all things created,
pues que siéndolo así vos • for I see You, our greatest good,
os veo tan humillado; thus humiliated;
Pues os aficionáis and as you join the poor and suffering

a lo humilde y despreciado to take part in our battle,
suplicóos que recibáis I beg you to accept this offering
mi voluntad y ganado. of my free will, and my cattle.
Tuio Sisters Among the Sisters 163

Yo os ofrezco esta jarrilla 1 offer you this little pot
llena de manteca y miel of creamy curds and honey,
para haceros la papilla, so that you may have some pap,
hermosísimo doncel. little Child most comely.
Y vos, Virgen consagrada And please, dear Virgin of holy beauty,

en haciendo la papilla when you’ve made the pap,
volveréisme la jar[r]illa remember to give me back the pot
porque la traigo prestada. because it was loaned to me.
Primer pastor: First shepherd:

Yo os ofrezco esta alma mía 1 offer you my very soul
que ya me la habéis robado as you’ve stolen it anyway—
y el corazón abrasando and my heart, that’s all enflamed
con la gloria de este día. with this great day’s glory.
Y todo desde hoy me ofrezco And I give myself from now on

en vuestro santo servicio to your holy service,
que éste será mi ejercicio so, although 1 don’t deserve it,
aunque yo no lo merezco. such shall be my office.
Segundo pastor: Second shepherd:

Yo os ofrezco este cordero, This little lamb 1 give to you,
mi Dios y mi dulce amado, my God, my gentle Love,
pues ya me habéis mostrado because you have already proved
que sois vos el verdadero. that you are the Lamb, in truth.
Este os ofrezco en señal 1 give it to you, a sign to all

que ponéis vuestro descanso that you take your rest
en el ser humilde y manso in humility and gentleness,
pues nacéis en un portal. bom in a cattle stall.
0, cuán alto y soberano Oh, how high, how superior

es el amor que se encierra is a love which encloses itself
en haceros nuestro hermano by becoming our brother
tomando madre en la tierra. bom of a mother on earth.
104 UNTOLD SISTERS
Lira a la soledad^* Lira to a Solitude
0 soledad amiga Dear friend, sweet Solitude,

que de todo te muestras ser señora you who preside as mistress over all—
no sé de ti qué diga how shall 1 speak of you,
sino que él en ti mora but to say this; the soul
goza del paraíso desde ahora who dwells in you, henceforth in heaven
dwells.
Que tú eres^^ compañía Good company you provide

al alma que de amor está sedienta to the lonely soul who thirsts for love,
y su perfecta guía and serve as her perfect guide—
porque si en ti aposenta for if in you she lodge,
no dejará de estar en Dios contenta she will be ever-joyful in her God.
Y aunque es verdad que hay veces Though truly there are times
que de solo penar queda memoria that leave no other memory than of
por lo que las ofreces sorrow,
es porque con victoria they are your gifts, designed
subamos a gozar la eterna gloria to lead to victory,
that we may climb to your eternal glory.
En ti deseo verme In you 1 long to be,

para vivir en Cristo reposando that there I might live restfully in Christ;
por que si el cuerpo duerme there, though my body sleep,
el alma esté velando my soul shall watch all night,
pues tengo de morir y no sé cuándo for though I know not when, I too must
die.
Aqueste es buen reposo It is sweet rest, indeed,

velar continuamente en tu posada to keep this constant watch in your abode,
por vivir^^ al esposo that I may be repaid
dándole tal morada when I come to my Betrothed
que con la eterna gloria sea pagada with eternal glory, for granting Him this
home.
21. We offer, with modernized spelling and one modification, the version in MS
89, because it is in Maria de San Alberto’s handwriting.
22. In the version of the poem in MS 89, this line begins with “Que” crossed out
and “eres” is spelled “heres.”
23. In MS 88, “venir.”

Otro pie del certámen^”* Another Poem for the Poetry Contest
En sayal hiló delgado Artful in sackcloth Teresa spun,

Teresa y lo que intentó and such was her intended feat,
aunque en jerga lo dejó though she left it incomplete,
lo dejó muy acabado. she left it finely done.
Glosa Gloss
La mujer fuerte y famosa, The woman of valor and renown,
Teresa, tomando el huso, Teresa, took up her spindle,
una mazorca en él puso and then filled it to the full
de hilaza bella y preciosa; with beautiful, precious yam;
y habiendo muchas hilado and when many skeins were spun
a tejer fue de mañana one early mom she wove
su fervor que hilando lana with fervor as, in sackcloth,
en sayal hiló delgado. artfully Teresa spun.
Imitando así al esposo Imitating thus her Groom

hizo tramas excelentes she made her warp, most excellent,
de las vírgenes prudentes of the virgins, skilled and prudent
que traman telar precioso who weave on that precious loom.
con el sayal que ella hiló With the sackcloth she did weave,
para Dios almas ganaba she gathered souls to God,
y esto fue lo que buscaba for this was what Teresa sought
Teresa y lo que intentó. and her intended feat.
'
Esta tela ya tramada When the warp had been devised
diose prisa a ir tejiendo sbe hastened to her weaving
y así la tela creciendo and thus, the while her cloth did lengthen
fue saliendo más delgado it emerged ever more fine;
y tan delgado salió and so fine at last, it seemed—
este provechoso hilado this cloth so profitably made—
que se parece al brocado to resemble rich brocade,
aunque en jerga lo dejó though she left it incomplete.
Buscó grandes tejedores She sought the greatest master weavers,

fuertes, sabios, y prudentes mighty in wisdom, strength, and prudence,
que así tejiendo, las gentes so that people were astonished
se asombran de sus primores at the beauty of their weaving.
puso en esto tal cuidado She gave this work such close concern,
de su amor la cintinela [sic] the sentinel of her great love,
que sin acabar la tela that without finishing the cloth
lo dejó muy acabado she left it most finely done.
24. This poem is a gloss of the four lines which appear first. That is, the rules of
this poetry contest required that poets write a poem in which each stanza ended with
a succeeding line of the four given. In the manuscript, inscriptions in Latin written
along the margins of the page accompany the text of the poem.
166 UNTOLD SISTERS
Romances a nuestra Madre Santa Teresa de Verses to our Mother Saint Teresa de Jesús,
Jesús, a su beatificación upon her Beatification
De aquella antigua ciudad From Avila, that ancient city

de Avila famosa y rara of favor and renown,
salió una estrella divina there has risen a holy star
que está en el cielo fijada fixed in heaven’s crown.
Primero alumbró la tierra First it shone on earth below

con su luz hermosa y clara its fair and brilliant light,
luz que produciendo estrellas a light that, yielding still more stars,
más grandeza en sí mostraba revealed its inward might.
También produjo luceros And it yielded morning stars

que alumbran a toda España which shine on all of Spain,
y esparcidos por el mundo and through the world convey her light,
su luz a sus fines pasa her purposes to gain.
Esta clarísima estrella This star of brightest excellence

de Jesús está cercada stands near to Jesus’ side,
y como es sol de justicia and He, the sun of tighteousness
con su eterna luz la baña bathes her in endless light.
Siete señalados rayos Seven brilliant rays of light

la tienen bien señalada display full well her brilliance,
luciendo en primer lugar illuminating above all
su sabiduría rara her uncommon wisdom.
Y aunque estos Rayos son siete And though seven be these rays
por siete mil se declaran they shine as seven thousand,
que lucen en esta estrella their splendor blazing in this star
sin ser jamás eclipsada whose light shall nevet be hidden.
Pues en alto firmamento For there on high, in heaven above,

dellos está hermoseada they shine to make her lovely,
y ella también hermosea and she in turn lends loveliness
cielo y tierra con su fama to heaven and earth with her glory.
Seguidilla a nuestra Madre Santa Teresa SeguidiUa to our Mother Saint Teresa
¿Dónde vas por el monte Where do you wander upon the mountain,
Teresa santa? Teresa, blessed by God,
¿dónde vas por el monte where do you wander upon the mountain,
pobre y descalza? poor and unshod?
Por la senda y camino By way of the footpath and the road

del monte Carmelo upon Carmel’s mountain,
el esposo divino the holy Bridegroom, your betrothed,
te guió hasta el cielo guided you to heaven,
siendo ejemplo y consuelo as example and consolation
de tu manada to yout flock.
¿dónde vas por el monte Where do you wander upon the mountain,
pobre y descalza? poot and unshod?
Tu blasón tan glorioso Your great and glorious saint’s escutcheon

no hay santa a quien cuadre is fitting to no other,
que te da el esposo given you by your Husband,
de virgen y madre showing you to be Virgin and Mother,
y Elias tu padre and like Elias, your father,
ser ermitaña a hermit in solitude.
¿dónde vas por el monte Where do you wander upon the mountain,
Mártir desde niña From childhood, a martyr,

celestial Doctora wise doctor of the heavens;
guarda de tu viña keeper of your vineyard,
zelosa pastora zealous shepherdess;
el alba y aurora throughout all of Spain
de toda España the first light and the dawn:
¿dónde vas por el monte whete do you wander upon the mountain,
¿Dónde vas por el monte Where do you wander upon the mountain,
Teresa santa? Teresa, blessed by God,
¿dónde vas por el monte where do you wander upon the mountain,
Cecilia del Jíacimiento

Autobiografía^
Desde bien pequeña comenzó el Señor a darme algunas buenas inclina¬

ciones; y la que tenía de amarme me fue dañosa, hasta que del todo la puse
en El, porque con vehemencia le ponía algunas veces en lo que me contentaba
de las criaturas; aunque esto era en lo interior, que en lo exterior nunca he
podido mostrar demasiado amor, apacibilidad sí; aunque por una parte tenía
alguna ceguedad, por otra tenía viveza en El y consideraba con profundidad
cosas de Dios: cómo era Dios, sin principio y sin fin (parece perdía pie); y
I. We take these fragments from the Obras completas edited by Díaz Cerón; the
complete work has been lost. Page numbers are from his edition.
168 UNTOLD SISTERS
otras cosas suyas. También me hacía particular sentimiento Cristo en la Cruz,

y no sé decir la viveza y estima que tenía en esto, con particular conocimiento
y amor. Tenía sosiego y lo más ordinario me estaba con mi madre y muchas
veces oyéndola cosas de la Sagrada Escritura que, como me veía inclinada a
ello aun desde muy pequeña, me las decía. Hasta que murió, que quedé de
once o doce años; me enseñó los principios de la Gramática y otras obras de
manos y cosas de virtud y devoción. (35)
Por una parte moría con ansias de Dios y de alcanzar aquel que había
barruntado, y hallaba tan cerrado el camino que era como romper un muro
fuerte. Deseaba ardientísimamente ver a Dios, como se puede en esta vida,
y veía no me era lícito desear revelación; y así me pareció no tenía otro
remedio, sino asentar en la verdad de la Fe y encerrarse el alma a buscar a
Dios en sí, sabiendo por esta fe era verdad estar toda penetrada de él y que
le tenía más en sí que a sí misma; y que la mayor grandeza, y la más verdadera
y cierta revelación era ésta, y cosa que satisfacía mucho al alma; cuán sin
límites es la grandeza de esta verdad, porque aquí con sólo creer hace el alma
suya toda la revelación de la Iglesia; y como tiene capacidad para asemejarse
a la inmensidad de Dios y de él proceden todas estas verdades, pudiendo ella
juntarse a El por este medio, lo era de mayor satisfacción y grandeza que las
cosas limitadas que se pueden recibir más bajas que el mismo Dios, las cuales
su Majestad ha comunicado a los santos y comunica algunas veces a las almas
para algunos fines, y las verdades son muchas de reverenciar; mas si tiene
grandeza y seguridad es por fundarse en lo que queda dicho, y proceder de
la mayor grandeza que es Dios, y comunicarlas El; por donde se ve cuánta
grandeza es afirmar en El sólo, y juntarse a El por las virtudes, aunque sea
sin estos medios, que ni son necesarios para todos, ni son de todos, ni el fin
de nuestros deseos, pues es Dios, y en esta vida está encubierto. (38-39)
En este tiempo miraba todas las cosas con tan gran viveza que parece las
penetraba con unos ojos de lince hasta las entrañas, por un modo extraño,
y me hacía algunas veces tal fuerza lo que conocía en ellas de Dios que parecía
insufrible. Traía una presencia de Cristo Divino y Humano con mucha gloria,
y por un medio general como cuando uno ha deheprendido una ciencia que
no sabía; que se le quedan los principios generales para siempre. (39)
Aquí se me descubrió una luz de la Encamación del Verbo, y a aquellos

ardores de gloria en que la Virgen estaba transformada; y se quedaba el alma
en sólo una sencilla y pura luz e inflamación de la voluntad, en que estaba
sin comprender entendiendo este divino misterio, y se perdía el alma de sí.
De este modo de oración me quedó grandísima devoción con la Virgen Nuestra
Señora, como cosa la más junta a Dios y al mismo Verbo Encamado. . . . (41)
Se le representaba a mi alma la deuda en que nos puso aquella sangre

vertida de un Dios Hombre, y con sólo una vista penetraba muchas verdades
juntas, con particular agradecimiento y amor; y una fuerza viva que penetraba
el alma y se puede dar mal a entender, especialmente en aquellas palabras
de San Pablo: “Qui in diebus camis suae praeces, supplicationes que ad Deum
qui possit saluum ilium ¡acere a morte cum clamare valido, et lacrymis offerens
exauditus est pro sua reverentia. Aquí se le dio al alma una profundidad de
aquel misterio y una inteligencia de toda aquella Epístola, en que le llame
Pontífice, que penetró los cielos, y palabra eficaz que penetra como cuchillo
y pasa hasta la división del alma y del Espíritu; lo cual todo entendió la mía
con un altísimo modo. (42)
Con este sumo desasimiento acaecía algunas veces estar lo exterior en

mucho desprecio y afrenta, y en lo interior una suma paz y gloria; y se
representaba cómo Cristo estuvo afrentado en una Cruz en lo exterior, y en
su interior gozaba su Santísima Anima, en lo superior, de la Bienaventuranza
que ahora goza: y aquí parece en su manera imita el alma algo de esto. . . .
¿Quién podrá decir de los caminos de la eternidad, ante quien están de¬
rribados los soberbios del mundo? . . .
Es cosa admirable los extremos que aquí Dios junta, que es la suma ig¬
norancia con perfecta sabiduría. Queda la criatura vuelta en nada y junto
con eso queda mudada en Dios. Tiene un sentir subidísimo de Ser de Dios
y cuanto más entra en este Ser queda más deshecha a sí misma, y más
consumido lo que es suyo, y apoderado de ella lo que es de Dios. (46)
Autobiography^
From the time I was quite a little gitl, the Lord began to grant me good
inclinations, but my inclination to love myself was harmful to me, until I
gave all of my love to Him; for at times I would passionately give my love
to whichever earthly creatures I found pleasing. However, all this took place
within me; outwardly I have never been able to show much love, though an
appeasing nature I do show. While on the one hand I was somewhat blind,
on the other I lived keenly in Him, and I pondered deeply the nature of
God; what God could be like, having neither beginning nor end (it seems
here that I went beyond my depth) and other things about Him. And too,
Christ on the Cross stirred particular feeling in me, so that I cannot express
the keen ardor and esteem, together with the special understanding and love,
which I felt for Him there. I felt great comfort, and most often I was with
my mother; and many times I heard her speak of the Holy Scriptures, for as
she saw my inclination towards such matters from the time I was very little,
she told me these things. Until the time she died, when I was left at the age
of eleven or twelve, she instructed me in the principles of grammar, and in
handiwork, and in matters of virtue and devotion. (35)
2. Hebrews 5:7: “During his life on earth, he offered up prayer and entreaty, aloud
and silent tears, to the one who had the power to save him out of death, and he
submitted so humbly that his prayer was heard.”
3. We take these fragments from the Complete Works edited by Diaz Cerón, the
complete work has been lost. Page numbers are from his edition.
170 UNTOLD SISTERS
On the one hand I was dying of longing for God, and yearned to reach
what I had merely surmised, but I found the road so closed to me that it was
like trying to break through a great battlement wall. 1 most ardently desired
to see God, as much as one can in this life, but 1 saw that it was not fitting
for me to desire revelation; and so it seemed 1 had no other recourse but to
affirm the truth of Faith, and for my soul to confine itself and seek God
within, knowing by this faith that my soul was already, in truth, entirely
penetrated by Him, and that it was more full of Him than of itself; and that
this was indeed the greatest possible grandeur, and the truest and most certain
revelation, and thus a state deeply satisfying to my soul. How boundless is
the greatness of this truth! For thus, by means of belief alone, the soul takes
for its own the entire revelation of the Church. And the soul’s ability to
resemble the immensity of God from whom all these truths proceed, so that
in this way she may be united with Him, was in this way a source of greater
satisfaction and grandeur than those limited things one can receive which
are lower than God Himself and which His Majesty has bestowed upon His
saints and sometimes imparts to human souls for certain ends; these truths
are greatly to be revered. But if this state has grandeur and assurance, this
is because it is founded upon what was said above, and proceeds from the
greater grandeur of God, and He bestows these truths; whereby we see how
magnificent it is to affirm Him alone, and to join Him in virtue, though it
be by some other means—for these means are not necessary for all, nor are
they right for all, nor are they themselves to be the aim of our desires, for
that aim is God, and in this life He is concealed. (38-39)
At this time I regarded all things with such eagerness that 1 seemed to
penetrate into the very heart of them, as with the eyes of a lynx, in a very
strange way; and sometimes 1 was so powerfully affected by the presence of
God which 1 perceived in them, that it seemed intolerable. This was accom¬
panied by the presence of the divine and human Christ in great glory, and
through illumination as when one has at last grasped a science that one did
not know before; the general principles remain with one forever. (39)
Then 1 received an illumination of the Incarnation of the Word, and of

that glorious ardor through which the Virgin was transformed. My soul was
left with nothing more than a simple and pure light and kindling of my will,
in which without comprehending 1 understood this divine mystery, and my
soul was lost to itself. By this manner of prayer I gained the most profound
devotion to Our Lady the Virgin, for of all things created she is closest to
God and to the very Word Incarnate. . . . (41)
There appeared to my soul the debt in which that blood, shed by a God-
made-Man, did place us, and with just one look my soul penetrated many
truths at once with extraordinary gratitude and love; and a living power
pierced my soul, which can be misunderstood, especially in the words of
Saint Paul: “Qui in diebus camis suae praeces, supplicationes que ad Deum qui
possit saluuTTL ilium facere a morte cum clamore valido, et lacrymis offerens exauditus
est pro sua reverentia. With this, my soul was given a profound knowledge
of that mystery and an understanding of that entire Epistle, in which He is
called Pontiff who penetrated Heaven itself, and the efficacious word which
pierces like a knife and reaches even to the very division between the soul
and the Divine Spirit; all of which my soul understood in the most exalted
way. (42)
With this extreme detachment, it sometimes happened that outwardly 1

met with great scorn and affront, and inwardly, the highest peace and bliss;
and this reflected how Christ was outwardly affronted on a Cross, while
within. His most Holy Soul was delighting on high in the divine bliss He
even now enjoys; and thus it seems that, in its imperfect way, the soul imitates
Him. . . .
Who can speak of all the roads of eternity, before whom the mighty of
the earth are cast down? . . .
It is wonderful to see the extremes which God here joins together, that
is, supreme ignorance with perfect wisdom. The earthly creature is left having
turned to nothing, and at the same time having become God. This creature
has a vivid sense of God’s Being, and the more it enters this Being, the more
it is diminished in itself, and all that was its own is the more consumed, and
what is God’s, gains strength from it. (46)
De la madre María de San Alberto, mi hermana . .
La perfección, espíritu y virtudes de la madre María de San Alberto fue

aprobado por muchos padres y prelados de nuestra sagrada Religión . . .
tienen por muy cierto con la certidumbre que acá se puede tener en esta
vida, que no entró en purgatorio, y lo mostró nuestro Señor, y todos la
podemos tener según su santa vida y grandes virtudes, y lo mucho que padeció,
y felicísima muerte que tuvo. Yo lo conocí bien todo como quien la trató
tantos años tan de cerca, y veía los ejercicios y crecimientos grandes con que
iba en toda perfección y virtudes. Tenía muy grande la de la obediencia,
regulando por ella todas sus acciones, hasta lo más mínimo que ella podía,
grande Resignación en la voluntad divina, que era muy ordinaria palabra
4. Hebrews 5:7: “During his life on earth, he offered up prayer and entreaty, aloud
and silent tears, to the one who had the power to save him out of death, and he
submitted so humbly that his prayer was heard. ’’
5. We take this selection from a text in Cecilia del Nacimiento’s handwriting in

the archive of the Discalced Carmelite Convento de la Concepción, Valladolid (MS
93). Written in 1640, the year that Maria de San Alberto died, these pages offer
proof of the two sisters’ continued attachment to their biological family, and especially
to each other, even after a lifetime as professed nuns. The version of the manuscript
in the convent archive begins, “Habiendo yo quedado sola de toda la familia de tan
santos padres y hermanos ..." (As the only one left of an entire family of such saintly
parents and brothers and sisters . . .). There is an almost identical text in MS 8693,
the National Library in Madrid, folio numbers 577-89.
172 UNTOLD SISTERS
suya, Hágase la divina voluntad. Era humildísima, que siempre se andaba

humillando y deshaciendo. Tenía grande mortificación, y así la ejercitó,
haciendo mucha penitencia sobre la de la Religión, y otras mortificaciones,
y con muchas y graves enfermedades. Y aun ahora a la postre cargada de ellas
y de años, proponiendo a la obediencia estrecharse más de lo que podía. Y
con tomar poquísimo de alivio y regalo, como tenía tan entrañada la pobreza
se holgaba cuando eso la faltaba, y que la hubiese nuestro Señor quitado
tanto el gusto de todo, que en nada le tenía ni hallaba alivio. En la cama le
parecía estaba en un tormento y se procuraba levantar de ordinario, aunque
era mucho el trabajo que padecía y conque andaba. Se iba al coro, a las
misas, y oración, por estar delante del Santísimo Sacramento, y a veces no
se quería abrigar con el manto por sentir más el frío que la hacía gran daño.
Y muy de ordinario volvía a la celda con tanto trabajo y mal, que apenas la
podían traer. En las cosas que se la ofrecían de asco, que lo sentía por tener
el natural muy aplicado a limpieza, se mortificaba. Si la picaban mosquitos,
los dejaba picar hasta que ellos se iban. Tomaba sus disciplinas sobre aquellos
huesos llenos de dolores, y algunos salidos con el gran dolor, y no parece
tenía más de la armadura, y casi sin manos por tener la una muy impedida
de la porlesía [sic], y la otra harto.
Tenía mucho celo de todo lo que es Religión y perfección, hasta si se
faltaba o trocaba alguna letra en el oficio divino, lo sentía mucho y advertía
para que se dijesen con más perfección las alabanzas divinas; y ella las decía
con mucha reverencia y siempre por el libro, aunque era tan diestra y de
tanta edad. Tenía grande afecto del remedio de las necesidades de los prójimos,
particularmente de las de almas; y cuando la comunicaban cosas suyas, como
tenía tanta inteligencia de las del espítitu y de cualquiera suerte que fuesen
y cualesquiera personas, muchas muy graves se consolaban de comunicárselas,
por lo mucho que hallaban de consuelo y de Dios en ella, y tenía lindo
entendimiento, talento, y capacidad. Sentía mucho los trabajos de la Santa
Iglesia y reino y guerras, y hacía mucha oración por ello. Cuando se venían
a convertir algunos de otros reinos y sectas erradas, los recibía con mucha
caridad, y ayudaba al bien de sus almas, no sólo con sus santas palabras, sino
también procurándoles con los reyes el sustento y comodidad, como le sucedió
siendo ella priora en tiempo que estaba aquí la corte.
Era muy caritativa y piadosa con los pobres, y los años de la grande hambre
que también era ella priora, a todos cuantos venían daba y hacía dar limosna,
y para todo la proveyó el Señor. Y hasta con las aves y animales era piadosa.
Trabajó mucho en todos los demás oficios, y todos los hizo con grande
perfección, y observancia, y el de supriora, maestra de novicias, y sacristana,
y aún no siendo sacristana, con la habilidad que tenía en pintar, dibujar,
bordar, y otras labores muy curiosas para corporales lo hacía, y lindas flores;
cortaba y hacía ornamentos, en que también aprovechaba algunas cosas que
nos daban de limosna, cuando no había cumplidamente para ello, componía
los pedazos, y echaba remendicos, hasta como una uña, y lo sacaría tan bien
y tan perfecto que no parecía le llegaba manos. Y cosas que las religiosas no
podían hacer, en poniéndolas en las suyas salía muy bien hecho. Lina verónica
que la señora marquesa vieja de Poza nos pidió prestada, que era de preciada
y extraordinaria pintura, cuando por su muerte nos la volvió, la trajeron tan
maltratada, desollada parte de la frente y una ceja, que llevándola a aderezar.
a Diego Diez, que es el mejor pintor de Valladolid, no se atrevió a hacerlo.

Y tomando ella los colores que le pareció eran menester al olio, la aderezó
con tanta perfección como estaba antes, sin parecer la habían llegado manos . . .
. . . Para quien no lo ve me ha parecido poner aquí una grandísima merced
que recibió y escribió allí [en los papeles suyos que tiene el padre historiador
de la Orden], por donde se pueden colegir los demás, y que las las [sic] incluye
a todos. Y fue confirmarla Dios en su gracia, y se lo reveló así, y juntamente
la dijo estas palabras: Vade in pace, et concedo tibí omnas indulgencias quas
concederé posum per meam (pojsimam f.^)] misericordiam. ® Esta merced comunicó
ella con algunos de nuestra sagrada Religión, doctísimos y graves, que se la
aprobaron. El uno fue nuestro padre Fray Esteban de San Joseph general.
Uno la dijo que el vade in pace y confirmación en gracia era para la vida, y
las indulgencias para la muerte. A esta merced precedieron unos terribles
trabajos que padeció largo tiempo, interiotes; y la gran fuerza del tormento,
la llegaba a maltratarla [sic] mucho aun el cuerpo, que como ella escribe,
eran de tantas cosas juntas que la traían a desesperación. Y verse tan en breve
¡ con esta merced, trocado el tormento en gloria, y la desesperación en se-
j guridad eterna, ya se ve qué efectos causaría en esta santa alma. Yo lo vi bien
I claro porque habiéndome comunicado estos trabajos por cartas a Calahorra,
! y respondidola [sic] yo lo que me pareció del felicísimo fin que habían de
I tener, después de venida yo de Valladolid, la vi en aquel terrible padecer. Y
en haciéndola Dios esta merced, se la quitó todo como ella lo escribe, y yo
la vi quedar como un ángel del cielo, con una paz y serenidad, que jamás la
volvió cosa semejante. Y junto con estos efectos, sus heroicas virtudes cer-
I tifican esta gran merced . . .
! Of Madre María de San Alberto, my sister. ..
The perfection, spirit, and virtues of Mother Maria de San Alberto were
confirmed by many priests and prelates of our holy Religion . . . [The author
lists six distinguished Fathers and Officers of the Church, who knew María
de San Alberto throughout her life in the convent.] They are all as certain
as one can be in this life, that she did not enter purgatory, and our Lord
himself made this clear; and thus we can all be certain, in keeping with her
holy life and great virtues, and her prodigious suffering and blessed death. 1
knew all this very well, as one who was quite close to her for many years,
and who witnessed the spiritual exercises and raptures through which she
progressed in every perfection and virtue. She had a great store of obedience,
regulating by that virtue each action, down to the slightest possible deed;
and great resignation to God’s holy will, for very often she spoke the wotds.
May God’s will be done. She was most humble, and was constantly lowering
and effacing herself. She was great in mortification, and thus she practiced
it, performing many acts of penance beyond what the Order demanded, and
6. “Ve en paz, y te doy todas las indulgencias que puedo darte por mi misericordia”
(traducción literal).
174 UNTOLD SISTERS
other acts of mortification. And all this with many serious illnesses; yet even
at the end, when she was burdened by sickness and by years, she always
intended, for obedience’s sake, to constrain herself to do more than she was
able. And although she took almost no ease or special comfort, being so
devoted to poverty, she was delighted when even this little was lacking to
her, because Our Lord had so utterly removed her taste for all things, that
she could not have nor find ease in anything. In bed, it seemed she was in
torment, so she found ways to force herself to rise. Ordinarily, although she
suffered and walked with great hardship, she went faithfully to choir, to
Masses and to prayer, in order to stand before the Blessed Sacrament, and
sometimes she would not cover herself with her cloak so as to feel the cold
more strongly, for this inflicted severe pain. And quite regularly she would
return to her cell so ill and afflicted, that the Sisters could scarcely carry her.
Since she was so given to cleanliness, whenever an occasion arose that would
go against her nature, she exercised self-mortification. When mosquitoes were
biting her, she let them sting until they flew off. She plied her disciplines
upon her very bones, full of aches as they were, and some of them protruding
with the great pain. Indeed, she seemed a mete skeleton, and had almost no
use of het hands, for the one was crippled with palsy and the other nearly
as bad.
She was most zealous in everything concerning Religion and perfection,
so that it grieved her if some word were missing or out of order in the Divine
Office, and she would let this be known, so that the divine praises might be
recited more perfectly; and she herself recited them with great reverence,
always following by the book although she was so practiced and of such
advanced age. She was very fond of ministering to the needs of her neighbors,
particularly the needs of their souls; and when they confided their hearts to
her, as she had such knowledge of things of the spirit, then whatever these
matters and whoever the persons might be, many serious troubles were allayed
when told to her, through the great comfort and presence of God which they
found in her. And she had a lovely understanding and talent and ability.
She was sadly grieved by the hardships of our holy Church and Kingdom,
and by the wars, and often prayed on that account. When from other king¬
doms, and from erring sects, people came to convert, she received and aided
them with great charity, not only helping with her blessed words for the good
of their souls, but procuring sustenance and comfort for them from their
Majesties, the King and Queen, as occurred when she was Prioress at the
time the royal court was in this city.
She was most charitable and merciful to the poor, and during the years of
the great famine, again when she was Prioress, she gave alms or ordered alms
to be given to all who came to her, and the Lord provided her with whatever
was needed for this. Indeed, she was merciful even to the birds and animals.
She labored diligently in all the other offices she held, and carried them
out with the greatest perfection and probity, including the offices of Sub¬
prioress, Mistress of Novices, and Sacristan. And even when she was not the
Sacristan, she used her skill for painting, drawing, embroidering, and other
painstaking work, to fashion the corpotal cloths,^ and made lovely flowers;
she cut the fabric and made altar cloths for this purpose also, using things
given to us as alms, and when there was not sufficient cloth for her work
she arranged scraps and put together little patches, some as small as a finger¬
nail. And when she finished they were so fine and so perfect, they did not
seem to be the work of human hands. And things that the other nuns could
not do, when put into her hands, were very well done. There was a veronica®
which the Lady Dowager Marquise de Poza borrowed from the convent, a
priceless and extraordinary painting. When because the Marquise died, it
was returned to us, they brought it back so badly damaged, with a part of
the forehead and an eyebrow flayed away, that though it was taken for repairs
to Diego Diez, who is the best painter in Valladolid, he did not dare attempt
it. But she, choosing the oil colors that she deemed necessary, repaired it so
I that it was as perfect as it had been before, as though it had never been
I touched by human hands . . .
I ... For anyone who may not see them IMaria de San Alberto’s own papers
! in the archives of the Order, attesting to the favors bestowed on her by God],
; it has seemed right to me to record here a very great favor she received, from
which all the other favors can be deduced, and which encompasses them all.
And this blessing was, to confirm her in His grace, and so He revealed
Himself to her, and at the same time He spoke these words to her: Vade in
pace, et concedo tibi omnas indulgencias quas concederé posum per meam Iposjsi-
7Tiam(?)] misericordia.'^ She communicated this favor to some of the most
j solemn and learned men of our holy Religion, who confirmed it for her. One
I whom she told was our Father General Esteban de San José; and one told
' her that the vade in pace and the confirmation in His grace were for her life,
; and the indulgences, for her death. Some terrible inward travail preceded
1 this favor, from which she suffered for a long time; and the great force of
¡ her torment did sore punish her, in her very body, so that as she herself
j wrote, her afflictions were so numerous that all together they brought her to
[ the point of desperation, and one can see what effects this would produce
j in that blessed soul, to have her torment so suddenly changed to glory, and
j her desperation to certainty of eternal grace. I myself saw it quite clearly, for
I she had told me of her troubles in letters to Calahorra, and 1 had answered
her with the joyous end I thought such hardships were sure to have; after I
came back to Valladolid, I saw how terribly she suffered, and when God
granted her this favor, she was freed of it all just as she wrote, and I saw
how she was left like an angel from Heaven, with a peace and serenity unlike
anything else that ever came to her. And along with these effects, her own
heroic virtues attest to the truth of this great favor . . .
7. Translator’s note: the “corporal,” or “corporal cloth” (Eccl.), a white linen cloth
on which the consecrated elements are placed during celebration of the Eucharist
(American Heritage Dictionary).
8. “Veronica”: the representation or image of the face of Jesus, which, according
to legend, was impressed upon the handkerchief offered to him by Saint Veronica on
the road to Calvary; also, any similar representation of Jesus’ face on a textile fabric
(American Heritage Dictionary).
9. The corrupted Latin may be literally translated as; “Go in peace, and 1 give you
all the indulgences that I can give you through my grace.”
176 UNTOLD SISTERS
Fundación de Calahorra'”
Al Señor José González, Oidor del Consejo Real y del de la Cámara, Patrón
del Convento de las Descalzas Carmelitas de S. José de Calahorra, su sierva
Cecilia del Nacimiento, carmelita.
Habiéndome Nuestro Señor inspirado escriba la fundación de este Santo

Convento, por haber estado en ella, para gloria del mismo Señor, y de su
Santísima Madre, del glorioso Padre nuestro Señor José y Nuestra Bien-
aventurada Madre Santa Teresa, me hallo obligada a hacer este servicio a la
Santa, que no menos es suya que las que ella escribió por su mano, y se verá
en ella; y por servir a V. S. en escribirla y dedicársela, que tan debido es,
pues Dios ha querido sea de V. S. ese santuario por lo que merece; y yo
reconozco la grande obligación que tengo a V. S. y deseo servirlo en cuanto
pueda, y lo hago con mis pobres oraciones. (475)
[La autora narra la historia de la fundación del convento, desde el primer

impulso hasta los nombres de las religiosas fundadoras; también alaba al patrón
por su papel en la fundación.]
Como todas eran tan santas dentro de muy pocos días estaba aquella casa
como un cielo, con gran perfección y concierto de religión, ejercicio de
mortificación y oración, que a mí me era de gran consuelo tratar tales almas,
y así se les entrañó, y a las que fueron entrando, que hasta ahora dura y
durará siempre con el favor del Señor y Nuestra Madre Santa Teresa, que
mostró ser aquella casa suya y se apareció algunas veces para consuelo de las
de ella, y en lo presente se muestra cuánto la favorece. (479)
[Describe cómo el convento ha obtenido renta, e incluye sus propios ne¬

gocios como Priora para asegurar que tiene bastantes ingresos.]
También me dio Nuestro Señor por aquel tiempo deseo de que hiciésemos
casa para nosotras en forma de Religión, y aunque me contradecían, en
especial la Madre Magdalena de Jesús, diciéndome que con qué caudal quería
edificarla, yo respondía que no con el mío, sino con el de Dios, y así fue,
que siempre su Divina Majestad favorece las cosas de su servicio. También
pedí licencia al mismo prelado y me la dio; traté de comprar sitio, que fue
una heredad de Diego Roldán, que él no tenía gana de venderla, y era de
mayorazgo, y así costó harto sacar la Provisión Real; era grande que tenía
mucho campo, y así le hubo para huerto; y también, porque eran menester,
adonde el trazador de la Orden puso la planta del edificio de la casa, se
compraron unas corralizas que tenían allí sus dueños para sus ganados; y lo
sintieron harto, mas al fin lo hicieron por Nuestro Señor. Vendimos la casa
en que estábamos, que es la que arriba dije era del Obispo a Don Pedro
Ximenez, un mayorazgo de allí, con condición que nos habíamos de salir de
10. Page numbers are from the Obras completas.

ella en tres años, hasta estar hecha la nueva de suerte que nos pudiésemos
pasar a ella, y en ellos había de ir dando a plazos el precio; y a esos se le iba
dando al artífice, muy maestro de obras, que nos le deparó Nuestro Señor
con una comodidad, que después se deseó en una fábrica de la Orden otra
como ella y no hubo quién la hiciese; que fue obligarse a hacer luego la casa,
con el dinero que se le iba dando a los plazos dichos, y después de pasadas
a ella a los tres años ir dándole doscientos ducados cada año, hasta acabar
de pagarle que se podía dar de la renta del convento, y después quedarse en
pie para las religiosas. (482-83)
! [Relata que salió de Calahorra por obediencia.]
¡ Volviendo a nuestro salir de Calahorra, el sentimiento que causó fue cuanto

j se puede encarecer, no sólo en las religiosas que quedaron desamparadas, sino
en toda la ciudad hasta los niños. Llevaron una Priora de Tarazona, . . .
murió presto; y tomó Dios tan por su cuenta el amparo de aquella casa, y
j ellas han procedido con tanta Religión y perfección, que las ha querido su
Divina Majestad bien premiar, particularmente a la Madre María de San
; Bernabé, que al presente es Priora, sobrina de V. S. y prima hermana, que
recibiendo tanto de quien es tan propio, tiene mucha obligación a ser muy
agradecida a Nuestro Señor por esa merced.
Y después que yo vine han ido entrando religiosas de muy buenos talentos
; y virtudes, que importa mucho para que se conserve la de las casas, y con el
j buen gobierno de las preladas, como lo es el de la presente, y aunque merece
¡ tanto y sus religiosas, es de tan grande estima lo que V. S. hace como cosa
tan gloriosa hecha en servicio de Dios y su Santísima Madre, y de nuestros
gloriosos Padres San José y Santa Teresa, que es para todos y para mí de
grandísimo consuelo ver esa mi santa casa tan engrandecida y amparada como
V. S. la tiene, con las grandes cosas que ha hecho en ella, haciéndoles una
suntuosa iglesia, y adornándola con preciosos retablos, ricos ornamentos,
plata y otras muchas cosas . . . (484-85)
Foundation of [the Convent of] Calahorra"
To Señor José González, Judge of the Royal and the Chamber Councils,
Patron of the Convent of Discalced Carmelite Nuns of San José of Calahorra;
his servant Cecilia del Nacimiento, Carmelite nun.
Having been inspired by Our Lord to write the foundation of this blessed
i Convent, because 1 was present at it, to the glory of the Lord Himself and
I His most Holy Mother and of our glorious Father Saint José and our Blessed
I Mother Saint Teresa, I find myself obliged to perform this duty for the Saint,
I as this is no less her own than those [foundations] she wrote with her own
hand, as shall be seen herein; and to serve your Lordship by writing and
II. Page numbers are from the Obras completas (Complete Works).
178 UNTOLD SISTERS
dedicating it to you, as is most fitting, for it has pleased God that this sanctuary
should be yours by your merits. And 1 recognize the great obligation I bear
to your Lordship and 1 desire to serve you in any way I can, as 1 do with my
poor prayers. (475)
[The author then recounts the history of how the convent was founded,
from the first impulse to establish it to the names of the Founding Sisters;
she also praises the patron for his role.]
As all these Sisters were so holy, within only a few days that house was a
very heaven, with a great perfection and harmony of observance, and practice
of mortification and prayer, so that it gave me great consolation to address
such souls. And thus did this harmony enter their innermost hearts, and
those of the Sisters who entered later, so that to this day it remains and
forever will remain in the favor of Our Lord and of our Mother Saint Teresa,
who proved this house to be her own, and who appeared there several times
to the great consolation of the Sisters; and to the present day it may be seen
how she favors it.
.... (479)
[She describes how the convent has generated income, including her own
business arrangements as Prioress to ensure its economic well-being.]
At that time. Our Lord also gave me the desire that we should create a
house for ourselves according to the [Teresian] Rule, although they opposed
me, especially Madre Magdalena de Jesús, asking me, with whose fortune did
I intend to build.it? I replied, not with my own, but with God’s; and so it
was, for His Divine Majesty always favors those things that are to His service.
1 also asked license of the Prelate himself, and he granted it; I tried to buy
a site, which was a property of Diego Roldán, which he had no desire to
sell, and it was an entailed estate so that it cost a great deal to obtain the
King’s writ. The place was large, for it had much land, and thus there was
enough for a garden; and too, because it was necessary, where the architect
of the Order placed the site of the construction of the house, some corrals
were bought which the owners had there for their cattle; and they were very
sorry for it, but in the end they agreed to it, for Our Lord’s sake. We sold
the house we were in, which as I said above belonged to the Bishop, to Don
Pedro Jiménez, a landowner of those parts, on condition that we should leave
it in three years when the new house was sufficiently completed that we could
move into it, and during those years he had to pay the price in installments;
and these payments, in turn were given to the builder, a great master of his
craft. Our Lord sent him to us to our great advantage, for later others wanted
a similar house built for the Order, but there was no one to do it. This
ensured his obligation to build the house in good time, with the money that
had been given him in the payments mentioned above; and three years after
we had moved to the new house, we had to set about giving him two hundred
ducats every year until we were finished paying him; so that it could be paid
from the income of the convent, and afterwards remain standing for the
nuns.
.... (482-83)
[She narrates how she was ordered to leave Calahorra.]
And to return to our departure from Calahorra; the emotion it caused was
as much as may be expressed, not only for the nuns who were left forsaken
but for the entire city, including the children. They brought a Prioress from
Tarazona, who . . . died soon after, and God so took to His charge the
protection of that house, while the Sisters have continued with such devotion
and perfection, that His Divine Majesty has been pleased to reward them
well; and particularly Madre María de San Bernabé, now the Prioress, who
is your lordship’s niece and first cousin,'^ who, having received so much from
you whose nature is so inclined to give, is indeed obliged to be most grateful
I to your Lordship for this good favor.
And after 1 came, there have entered nuns of very good talents and virtues,
which is of great importance so that the virtue of the convents may be
I preserved, and it is by the good governance of all in the office of Mother
Superior, like that of the present one; and though she and her nuns are very
deserving, what your Lordship does is most greatly to be esteemed, as a most
glorious deed done in the service of God and His most blessed Mother, and
of our glorious forebears Saint José and Saint Teresa, so that it is a great
comfort to all, and to me, to see this my blessed house so exalted and protected
as your Lordship maintains it, with the great things that you have done in
it, building them a sumptuous church, and adorning it with splendid altar-
pieces, rich ornaments, silver, and many other things. . . . (484-85)
Primera Relación de Mercedes*^
Estas tan divinas revelaciones, no son sólo de ahora sino también de estos
años de tantas persecuciones; ha sentido el alma en lo inferior esas penas, y
en lo superior estas glorias, y muchas veces redundando a lo inferior hasta
haberle pacificado tanto que ya le hace poco o casi ningún ruido el bullicio
de afuera. Descansa y camina el alma en una soledad sin que le haga estorbo
toda la ocupación exterior, que es harta y de trabajo para el cuerpo flaco y
enfermo que parece le renueva la fuerza interior para llevar el yugo.
La compañía de Dios en esta soledad es grande, divino y humano, que
[para] todo lo que enseña la fe está el alma mucho más ilustrada, y están sus
verdades en ella con muy mayor fuerza, y así se queda muchas veces en esta
fuerza suspendida; y otras, estando descuidada, con sólo la habitual disposi¬
ción, la coge Dios y suspende con fuerzas divinas y lo que allí le da no hay
palabras para decirlo; la conciencia está serenísima y segura con el debido
12. Translator’s note: This complex relationship (both niece and first cousin would
be possible between the patron and the daughter of a marriage between one of his
siblings and one of his uncles or aunts) was not an uncommon occurrence at that
time.
13. Page numbers are from the Obras completas (Complete Works).
i8o UNTOLD SISTERS
temor que pide el estado de esta vida, y, como ésta es prenda dada de Dios,
nada puede turbarla; la está mostrando la abundancia de paz a que la ha
traído por tantos trabajos y tormentos como ha padecido de tantas maneras,
en lo interior y exterior, que ha querido poner el Señor sobre la virginidad
el martirio, aunque no sea el de sangre, como me lo escribió mi venerable
Padre y hermano Fray Antonio Sobrino, estando yo en Falencia cuando volví
de Calahorra, por estas palabras: Pone Dios sobre la corona de la virginidad
la del martirio, animándome a padecer; y se ha cumplido bien.
.... (298-99)
Fue grandísima merced otras veces. Habiendo de romper alguna grande

dificultad, romper con la oración el espíritu interiormente una terrible difi¬
cultad que se le opone sin ver lo que es claro, y esto antes que suceda, y
después se ve en los sucesos, y cómo quiere Dios le haga fuerza la oración,
va el alma en esto por donde la llevan, impelida del Espíritu divino que la
mueve; y si me preguntasen cómo sé yo que es el Espíritu divino de eso,
aunque lo sé conocer, no lo sé poner nombre; sé que es verdad lo que digo
y que me pone en ello él que puede, como El es Señor, que puede hacer su
divina voluntad en todas las cosas como El quiere; y aunque el alma padezca
con lo que a esa repugnan las criaturas, no lo tiene en nada a trueco de que
ella se cumpla en todo, y su mayor gloria y aumento de bienes comunes y
generales y no busca el alma sus cosas sino las de Jesucristo; y está como un
diamante a cuantas persecuciones han llovido y pueden llover, porque, ¿quién
nos apartará de la caridad de este Señor?
.... (300)
First Account of God’s Favors^'*
These most holy revelations have not only come to me now, but also in
those years of many persecutions; the soul, in its lower part, has suffered
those pains, and in its higher part has felt these splendors, which many times
have overflowed to the lower part until they have so soothed it that now the
noise of the outer world causes the soul little or no disturbance. The soul
rests and walks in solitude, without hindrance from any external concern,
which is so weighty and laborious for the weak and sickly body, which seems
renewed by an inner force to bear its yoke.
In this solitude, the companionship of God, both divine and human, is
very great, so that the soul is far better illumined to receive all that is taught
by faith, and her truths are present in the soul with much greater force, and
so she is left many times enthralled by this force; and at others, when she is
all unsuspecting, and in no more than her customary disposition, God seizes
and enthralls her with divine force, and what occurs there no words can say:
the mind enjoys the greatest serenity and safety, with the proper fear required
by the state of this life. And as this is a jewel granted by God, nothing can
14. Page numbers from the Obras completas (Complete Works).

Two Sisters Among the Sisters
disturb it; He is showing the soul the abundance of peace to which He has
brought her through all the trials and torments which she has suffered in so
many ways, both within and without. For it has pleased the Lord to place
upon virginity, martyrdom, though it be not bloody; as my venerable Father
and brother Fray Antonio Sobrino wrote to me when 1 was in Falencia,
having returned from Calahorra, in these words: Upon the crown of virginity
God places that of martyrdom, inciting me to suffer; and so it truly has come
to pass.
.... (298-99)
I It was the very greatest favor that I received at other times. The soul must
I break through some great difficulty, the spirit inwardly having to overcome,
! by prayer, some terrible difficulty confronting it, without seeing clearly what
j it is; all this before the mercy would occur. And afterwards, it could be seen
j in the outcome, just how God desires the soul to take strength from prayer;
j the soul goes in these matters wherever she is carried, impelled by the Divine
I Spirit which moves her. And if they should ask me how I know this to be
I of the Divine Spirit, though I can recognize it 1 know not how to name it;
j I know that what I say is true and that One who can do so puts me in this
j state, for He is the Lord, who can work His divine will in all things as He
I pleases. And although the soul may suffer with all the repugnance which
1 earthly creatures feel for this [divine will], she considers it as nothing, for in
Í exchange she is fulfilled in all ways and to het greatet glory and the increase
I of the common and general good, and the soul seeks not her own way but
1 that of Christ. And she stands like a diamond, against however many per¬
secutions have rained down or can rain down upon her, for indeed, who
shall take from us the charity of the gteat Lotd? (300)
Sin figura en la memoria . . . In My Memory No Figure or Face’’
Sin figura en la memoria, No fetters bond me in affection,

sin prisión en el afecto, in my memory no figure or face,
subo esta senda quieto. slowly I climb this quiet path.
En cenizas convenida The little butterfly, become

la pequeña mariposa, a scattering of dust and ashes,
renace Fénix hermosa is reborn a lovely Phoenix.
¡Oh trueque maravilloso, Oh, the wonder of this barter

que por nada que he dejado by which, for nothing I have given,
en Dios todo lo he hallado! I have, in God, found everything!
Huyendo todo interés As I flee fondness for all creatures

y afición de criatura, and elude each worldly care,
esta senda se asegura. this path becomes more clear and sure.
15. Obras completas (Complete Works) 679-81.

i82 UNTOLD SISTERS
Busco a Dios en mi, sin mi, I search for God in me, sans me,
y sin Dios no quiero nada, and, sans God, I can want nothing;
que Dios, nada cuesta, nada. for nothing is God’s sole price, nothing.
La vana imaginación The vanities of imagination,

y afición desordenada, and confused and lawless longings
mortifica aquesta nada. vex and mortify that nothing.
Como faltan los deseos As desire itself is lacking

en la casa de la nada, in the house where nothing reigns,
nunca el alma está penada. there the soul can know no pain.
Deja todo lo criado It leaves behind all earthly creatures

y vuelve al afecto puro and returns to pure affection
do contemple más seguro. where it finds suret contemplation.
Nada busca y nada quiere, The soul seeks nothing and wants nothing,
y en sólo Dios se quieta and in God alone, this perfect
la contemplación perfecta. contemplation grows more quiet.
El puro amor nos penetra, Pure love enters and undoes us,
el desnudo es el más fuerte and the naked is the strongest,
a quien rinde armas la muerte. to whom death gives up its weapons.
Dulce sosiego la sombra, A sweet repose is in the shade,

y el fruto sumo deleite, and in the fruit, exceeding bliss,
que es Dios amor y la muerte. for God Himself is love, and death.
Vivo a Dios y muero a todo; I live in God and die to all,

el amor me es muerte y vida while love is death and life to me
y la nada mi salida. and nothing itself will set me free.
Niño de mis ojos Dear Child, My Eyes’ Delight*®
Niño de mis ojos, There now, stop yout weeping,

no lloréis tanto, dear child, my eyes’ delight,
que a la tierra y al cielo ot you’ll give both earth and heaven
ponéis espanto. a most dreadful fright.
De veros llorando When they hear you sob

con tanta gana so hungry and so eager
por una manzana, for just one little apple
y de frío temblando, while you tremble with the cold,
siendo Dios glorioso as you are God, so glorious
admirando tanto and so admired by all.
16. Obras completas (Complete Works) 704.

que a la tierra y al cielo you shall put both earth and heaven
ponéis espanto. in most dreadful awe.
Vos sois el sustento You are our nourishment

y el alegría, as you are our joy,
bien del alma mía, oh treasure of my soul.
Rey del firmamento. King of the firmament.
Cristo deseado, Christ of our longing,
dejad el llanto leave off your sobbing,
que a la tierra y al cielo for you’ve put earth and heaven
ponéis espanto. in most awesome wonder.
Si por el bocado If by just that little bite

que Adán comió Adam one time ate,
desobedeció, he was disobedient
ya le habéis fiado. you’ve ransomed him tonight.
Quedad satisfecho There now, rest contented,
y oíd lo que os canto, and listen to my song;
que a la tierra y al cielo you put both earth and heaven
ponéis espanto. into most wondrous awe.
Canciones de la Unión y Transformación Songs of the Union and Transformation of

del alma en Dios por la niebla Divina de the Soul in God Through the Divine Cloud
pura contemplación of Pure Contemplation: (Liras)*^
Aquella niebla oscura That dark and shadowy cloud

es una luz divina, fuerte, hermosa, is a most holy, mighty, radiant light,
inaccesible y pura, unreachable and pure,
íntima [y] deleitosa, tender, filled with delights,
un ver a Dios sin vista de otra cosa. a view of God with nothing else in sight.
La cual a gozar llega And there, to take her pleasure,

el alma que de amor está inflamada, the soul draws near, with burning love
enflamed,
y viene a quedar ciega and so bereft of vision
quedando sin ver nada, that nothing can be seen—
la ciencia trascendida y alcanzada. all knowledge overmastered and attained.
Y cuando la conquista And when the victory

del Reino de sí misma es acabada, over the kingdom of herself is won,
se sale sin ser vista the soul departs unseen,
de nadie, ni notada, unnoticed by anyone,
a buscar a su Dios dél inflamada. to seek her God, for whom she burns with
love.
17. Obras completas (Complete Works) 54, 56, 58, 79-82.

184 UNTOLD SISTERS
Y en aquesta salida, And in that departure

que sale de sí el alma dando un vuelo, when the soul quits herself and takes her
flight,
en busca de su vida she climbs the empyrean heaven
sube al empíreo Cielo in search of her own life,
y a su secreto centro quita el velo. and lifts the veil that hides heaven’s secret
heart.
Y aunque busca al Amado And though she seeks her Beloved

con la fuerza de amor toda encendida, with all the force of love with which she
bums,
en sí lo tiene hallado, in herself He is discovered,
pues está entretenida so that she finds it pleasant
en gozar de su bien con El unida. enjoying her fortune as with Him she
joins.
Está puesta en sosiego, And so she is becalmed

ya todas las imágenes perdidas, with all her visioned images now lost,
y su entender ya ciego, her understanding blind;
las pasiones rendidas, her passions are suppressed,
con fuerza las potencias suspendidas. her powers overcome by greater force.
Y cuando de contino And now that, endlessly,

del Verbo Eterno el alma está gozando, the soul with the Eternal Word delights,
su espíritu divino its Holy Spirit breathes
mueve un aire muy blando an air both sweet and mild,
que todo lo interior va regalando. caressing sweetly all that is within.
El amor la encamina, Love guides her on her way,

metida entre tiniebla tan oscura as she is led through shadows most
obscure;
y sin otra doctrina, unerring, she finds the way
camina muy segura following no other rule,
a donde Dios la muestra su hermosura. there to where God’s beauty is displayed.
¡Oh noche cristalina Dark night of clarity,

que juntaste con esa luz hermosa you who have joined, with your
harmonious light,
en una unión divina in blessed unity,
al Esposo y la esposa, the Bridegroom and His bride,
haciendo de ambos una misma cosa! making of the two a single being!
Como es tan poderosa As the most blessed might

la fuerza de aquel bien con que está unida with which she is united has such
strength,
y ella tan poca cosa, and she is frail and slight,
con darse por vencida when she is overcome,
pierde su ser y en El es convertida. herself dissolves and is transformed in
Him.
Fiestecilla para una profesión religiosa'® A Little Fiesta for a Nun’s Profession of
Vows
(Salen el Esposo, en traje de pastor, y el (Enter the Bridegroom, in shepherd’s garb,

Amor divino, con su arco y aljaba.) and divine Love, with his bow and quiver.)
Esposo: Bridegroom:
Cual fuerte león estaba Like the mighty Lion I lived
en el soberano albergue in my Father’s royal home,
de mi Padre, que a mí solo for His only son and heir
por Unigénito tiene. is myself, myself alone.
Pero tú, que allí quisiste But you, who in that place desired
mostrar que es omnipotente to prove you wield all-powerful force
tu poder, flechando el arco, did wound this mighty arm of mine
heriste mi brazo fuerte. by putting arrow to your bow.
En un cabello enlazado In a shepherdess’s lock of hair
de una pastora me tienes, you have me tightly bound,
que por su cuello esparcido for, falling loosely on her neck,
fue poderoso a prenderme. it seized me by its power.
Herido a su puerta estoy, Wounded at her door I stand;
dirásla. Amor, que si quiere do tell her, if she wishes. Love,
abrir la puerta a su Esposo, to open to her Bridegroom,
que a darla la mano viene. I do offer her my hand.
Amor; Love:
Por mi cuenta. Pastor, Shepherd, let this undertaking
aquesta empresa quede, fall to my charge and care,
que si herido te traigo for as I’ve caused you to be wounded.
herida haré que quede. I’ll see she’s wounded sore.
Que te abrirá no dudes, Have no doubt, she’ll open to you;
y si abrir no quisiere, and if she won’t unbar her door,
la costará tan caro then it will cost her such a price
que arrepentida quede. that she’ll repent, be sure.
Ya me acerco a llamar. I shall go and summon her—
¡Qué sosegada duerme! how deep and sound she slumbers!
Mas un arco y aljaba But a certain bow and quiver
habrá que la despierte. shall have the power to wake her!
Amor: (Hacia la cabaña) Love (speaking toward the hut):

Pastora, que en tu lecho Shepherdess, there in your bed
reposas descuidada, resting heedlessly,
libre de amor, que nunca untouched by love—for one who
loves
reposa así quien ama: never rests so soundly—
¿cómo duermes tranquila. how can you lie so fast asleep
18. Obras completas 639-53. Because we offer selections, and in the interests of
preserving coherence and dramatic flow, we have eliminated one (minor) character—
a shepherdess.
186 UNTOLD SISTERS
si dentro en tu cabaña when, in this very cabin,

tus falsos enemigos your false and cunning enemies
con guerra te amenazan, are threatening you with warring,
desvelándose siempre always watching for the chance
en darte la batalla to launch surprise attacks
por la parte que sienten upon the side that they suspect
estar en ti más flaca? to be your very weakest?
No duermas más, despierta, Sleep no more! Awaken!
que llama a tu cabaña At your hut is calling
el más galán Pastor the most alluring Shepherd
que habita en la montaña. who lives on all this mountain.
Si supieras quién es . If only you knew who He is!

¡qué rica te hallaras How rich you then would feel
con sólo que quisiera merely knowing that He does wish
ser dueño de tu casa! to be Lord of your dwelling!
Esposa: Bride:
¡Ay, cielo! Oh heavens!
Si es mi Esposo quien llama. It must be my Bridegroom calling.
Esposo: Bridegroom:
Yo soy, paloma mía, It is 1, my dove,
querida Esposa amada; my own beloved bride.
yo soy, ¿no me conoces? It is I; did you not know me?
¿cómo en abrirme tardas? Why have you then delayed?
Mira que ya a tu puerta See how, here hy your door,
atrevida la escarcha the insolent frost has dared
en mi rojo cabello to scatter all her snowy pearls
blancas perlas ensarta. in my copper hair.
Tu amor me tiene preso, Your love does hold me captive
y estás tan descuidada, while you have not a care,
dormida y perezosa so sleepy and so lazy
que aun responder te cansa. it tires you even to answer.
Esposa: Bride:
Ya, Esposo, he respondido, But now, my love, I’ve answered,
y conozco quién llama; and I know who it is that calls;
mas desnuda, no es bien yet it is not right that, naked,
que a abrir la puerta salga. I should run to open my door.
Lavé los pies anoche, Just last night I washed my feet:
y si a abrir voy descalza, if I go to the door unshod
podrá ser que me ensucie. they might become all soiled.
Volved a la mañana. Come back again at dawn.
Amor; Love:
Si con ingratitudes If with such ingratitude
tales finezas pagas, you reward these courtesies.
yo haré que se te acuerde. I’ll make sure you’ll not forget it.
Esposo: Bridegroom:
El arco. Amor, dispara. With your arrow. Love, let fly.
(El Amor divino dispara su arco y vase con (Divine Love shoots from his bow and exits
el Esposo; sale la Esposa en traje de pastora with the Bridegroom; enter the Bride in
medio vestida.) shepherdess’s garb, half'Undressed.)
Esposa: Bride:
¡Válgame el cielo! ¿qué es esto? Heaven help me! What can this be?
¿Quién pudo hacer tal mundanza Who has worked in me such change
en mí, que en un punto solo that in a single moment’s space
alma y corazón me falta? my heart and soul are taken?
¡Detente un poco, pastor! Stop, wait a bit, good Shepherd!
¡Espera, detente, aguarda! Wait, stop, don’t go away!
Ladrón y homicida fuiste A murderer and thief you’ve been,
que me robaste y me matas. for I’ve been robbed and slain.
Iré a buscarle, y prometo I’ll go to seek Him, and I swear
a los cielos, tierra y plantas, to heavens and earth, and all that’s
green,
animales, aves, montes, the animals, the birds, the hills,
a los peces y a las aguas, the fish and the waters where they
swim,
de no sosegar un punto that 1 shall not rest a moment, until
hasta arrojarme a sus plantas, I’ve thrown myself before Him
donde por firme merezca where 1, through constancy, may
gain,
lo que perdí por ingrata. what 1, ungrateful, threw away.
No he dejado valle o monte, Not a single valley or mountain,

selva o soto do no vaya no grove nor thicket I’ve not seen
en busca de aquel Pastor in searching for that Shepherd
que anoche me llevó el alma. who stole my soul last evening.
Pensando hallarle salí, Thinking to find Him, 1 set out,
apenas de mi cabaña and I’d scarce left my hut behind,
me aparté, cuando me encuentran when 1 found myself set upon
de aqueste monte las [sic] guardas. by the foresters of this mountain.
Atrevidos me desnudan, Boldly did they strip me,
quitáronme mi cayada, they took my shepherd’s staff,
mi zurrón, capillo y honda, my purse, my hood, my sling,
y con golpes me maltratan. and with blows ill-treated me.
Pero yo, que más sentía, But what 1 most lamented
el tiempo que me ocupaban was the long time they kept me
de buscar a mi Pastor, from looking for my Shepherd;
poco su rigor me espanta. 1 scarcely fear their cruelty.
No puedo hallarle, ¿qué haré? 1 can’t find Him; what shall 1 do?
Mas aunque el ánimo falta But though my courage falters
para tan largo camino, for such a lengthy road,
se me aumenta la esperanza. still does my hope increase.
[Después de un lapso, el Esposo y el Amor [After some time, the Bridegroom and divine
reaparecen. La Esposa, sin verbs, habb.] Love reappear; the Bride, not seeing them,
speaks. ]
Esposa: Bride:
¡Ay Dueño del alma mía! Oh, dearest master of my soul!
188 UNTOLD SISTERS
¿Cuándo cesará el rigor When will I see the end

de aquella penosa ausencia of your cruel absence and its anguish,
que mi sueño os mereció? so deserved by my dull sleep?
Grosera, Señor, anduve, Most churlish were my actions. Lord,
pero bástele a mi amor but let suffice the penalty
por pena la que le ha dado that my love has suffered
el no haber halládoos hoy. in not finding you today.
¿Cuándo aquel dichoso día When will that happy day arrive
llegará, que entre los dos when between the two
no haya división y ausencia, there shall be no more division
sino una divina unión? but union most divine?
¿Cuándo un alma y una vida, When will there be one soul, one life,
un querer y un corazón one longing and one heart
habrá entre los dos, y cuándo between us two, and tell me,
me abrasará vuestro amor? when will your love consume me?
Amor; Love:
Pastor enamorado: Adoring, lovelorn Shepherd:
aquella que allí llega she whom you see draw near
es tu amada Pastora; is your beloved Shepherdess;
llorosa viene y tierna. she comes with sighs and tears.
Esposo: Bridegroom:
¡Ay, cara prenda mía! Oh, my dearest treasure!
Esposa: Bride:
¡Ay, Esposo, quien fuera Oh, my Groom, how can I be
tan dichosa en hallaros! so blesséd as to find you!
Esposo: Bridegroom:
Ya me has hallado; llega. You’ve found me now: come here.
Esposa: Bride:
¡Ay, cielo si es mi Esposo! Dear heaven, this is my betrothed!
¡Qué turbación me cerca! What a storm surrounds me here!
Esposo: Bridegroom:
Yo soy, paloma mía. I am he, my little dove.
Esposa amada, llega. Beloved Bride, come here.
Esposa: Bride:
¿Cómo osará llegar How can this, your lowly slave,
aquesta esclava vuestra, venture to draw near,
or, si os ha ofendido? dear Lord, if she has offended you?
Esposo: Bridegroom:
Ya yo olvidé la ofensa. The offense is now forgotten.
Infinito te amo. Infinitely do I love you.

Esposa: Bride:
Infinito quisiera Infinitely do I desire you
amaros, vida mía, to love you, dearest heart,
si posible me fuera. if such be in my power.
Esposo: Bridegroom:
¡Qué rico estoy contigo! With you, how rich I am!
Esposa: Bride:
Mi bien, esclava vuestra From today, all my desire
quiero ser desde hoy. is to be your slave, my love.
Esposo: Bridegroom:
Aqueste anillo trueca This ring is given in barter
por la espina y el clavo. for the nail and thorn.
Con él te doy mi honra, With it, 1 give my honor

que ya tú cuides de ella, into your constant care,
y la tuya en mis manos and your own, from this day forth,
desde este punto queda. in my two hands 1 bear.
Esposa: Bride:
Entre mercedes tantas, Before such generous favors,
conozco mi bajeza: I know my lowly place:
hechura vuestra soy. I am your own creation.
Esposo: Bridegroom:
Grande es. Amor, tu fuerza. Oh Love, how great your power.
{Corre el Amor una cortina, y da fin, (Love closes the curtain, and ends the play,
diciendo): saying:)
Esos dulces lazos These bonds, so sweet and tender,
que agora gozas, that now give you pleasure,
por un siglo te enlacen, may they join you now and ever,
bella pastora. lovely Shepherdess.
Niño Peregrino (Pilgnm Child), o. common image of Christ in convent iconography, which
the sisters are said to have revered. Images of the Child Jesus as shepherd were a vivid aspect
of Isabel de Jesús’ visions. Courtesy of the community of Carmelitas Descalzas, Valladolid.
190
Tííe nôor ^ray
More
sr Peasant SYun
i (Isabel de Jesús)
w I'hen Isabel de Jesús (1586-1648) complains to God

I that everybody mocks her, he responds in a vision with: . . mira, yo obro
I en ti una de las grandes obras que he obrado después de mi Encamación . . . ”
I [56] (“. . . look, I am working in you one of the greatest works that I have
: worked since my Incarnation . . .). The interchange illustrates how visions
I could confer status and power on an illiterate peasant woman in a real-life
enactment of the biblical dictum that “the lowliest shall be the highest.”
Time and again Madre Isabel, who dictated her life story to a richer choir
nun, affirms her own spiritual exemplarity and her intimacy with divine
being.' Although it was recorded on paper, the text remains an oral history.
Utilizing proverbs, popular wisdom, and an unshakable faith in the reality
of her visions, Isabel de Jesús describes and analyzes a world determined by
her religious culture, her class, and her status as a woman, proving the truth
of her inner experiences and developing a popularized theological discourse.^
^rom Lowliest to Jiigfiest

Madre Isabel de Jesús is the only writer treated in our study who experienced
the common lot of women: marriage, sex, children. Bom into a family of
nine children whose sheepherding parents eked out a meager living, she grew
up tending a flock on wild mountainsides. As a frightened young girl, filled
I with loneliness and menaced by wolves, she found guidance and protection
in the form of visits from Christ and a host of heavenly figures. Their company
became the foundation of her permanent modus vivendi. Madre Isabel’s father
died when she was still a child, and her mother died shortly after she was
fourteen. Their deaths created a vacuum that Christ filled for the rest of her
life. In one of her visions Jesus asked her to tend his lambs as she had tended
191
192 UNTOLD SISTERS
those of her parents. He promised to answer her cries of distress, as her father
once had (265). In her early visions Christ played the role of a paternal
substitute, responding lovingly to manifestations of fear from his little daugh-
ter. Seeing Christ in this way became her design for survival.
Madre Isabel’s was a difficult life. As the youngest in the family, she was
assigned the newborn lambs and the old sheep that couldn’t keep up with
the flock. Madre Isabel claims that her mother taught her faith and charity.
But her mother also bowed to the pressure of one of her sons-in-law, and
married off Isabel against her will when the girl was fourteen. Isabel’s husband
was a toothless old man, and when he took her from farm to town the
villagers taunted her for having made such a poor marriage. The move made
Isabel yearn for the tranquility of the pastures where she had found solace
in God.
Like many, if not most girls (and almost all subjects of hagiographic lit¬
erature), the young Isabel had dreamed of dedicating herself to a religious
life. Monastic seclusion offered an escape from subjection to the world’s
immorality which was condemned each day in church. But everything mil¬
itated against escape. Survival always hung precariously in the balance, easily
threatened by natural disasters, fluctuations in market prices, and family
crises. By age fifteen, she was pregnant. Two more pregnancies followed. All
three of her children were sons and all three died—one at birth, one in
infancy, and another at age three. Her husband also became ill—and incon¬
tinent.
The narrative of her life as nursemaid to her chronically ill husband, servant
in a rich employer’s house, and agricultural laborer recalls the picaresque
novels of her era. But here the hero is a woman. To keep the family going,
Isabel worked hard at a variety of jobs: making bread, cleaning houses, serving
in a Franciscan monastery. Madre Isabel’s marriage was particularly unhappy;
she experienced it as a twenty-four-year torment. To overcome the trial, she
withdrew as frequently as possible into an inner world populated with holy
friends to whom she was devoted. (Her preferred companions included twenty-
one she referred to by name, as well as the Apostles, the 11,000 virgins, and
all the Saints (262-63); the Holy Trinity “of the earth”—^Jesus, Mary, and
Joseph—heads the list.) She survived the disgust marital sex aroused in her,
for example, by imagining her husband was Saint Joseph.
When her husband died, her relatives attempted to marry her off again.
To escape this fate, she took work as a servant in another village. She left
her own town early in the morning, hoping that no one would see her, but
the aunt who served as her mother after her own mother’s death begged her
to stay (118). Of her dispute with her family when she became a widow, she
says: “Todos eran tiros al corazón de came, y sangre” [117] (It all served to
twist the knife in my wounds [literally, in my heart of flesh and blood]).
Madre Isabel’s visions and powerful interpretative faculties reestablished her
equilibrium. It may have been precisely these faculties that averted the tragic
end suffered by her sister, who died young and in chains—the treatment
commonly used for madness in those days.
Isabel became increasingly observant over the years, hastening to com¬
munion and confession with a zeal that aroused the resentment and suspicion
of the townspeople. In her thirties, she had repeated trouble with male clergy
and confessors regarding her outspoken religiosity; the troubles continued
The Poor Pray More 193
even when she finally entered religious life. When, in 1623, nuns were
imported from Salamanca to found an Augustinian convent at Villa de Arenas
in the province of Toledo, Isabel applied to be a servant. But two priests
who knew her informed the nuns that she had been treated for possession
by devils. Predictably, the nuns refused her services, saying that they already
had two mad Sisters in the convent and they would not take a chance with
another. Isabel was finally admitted to the convent three years later, after
first working as a lay aide to Discalced Franciscan monks. By proving there
her capacity for toil, she was able to find other clergymen to support her
application to the nunnery.
Still, several of her Sisters in the convent treated the new arrival with
suspicion and resentment and gossiped about her. In the convent. Madre
Isabel was burdened by an antagonistic confessor for fifteen years as well.
Reports of their dialogues indicate that he either resented or disbelieved
Christ’s interest in her. Wary of her readiness to interpret visionary conver¬
sations with God, he commanded Madre Isabel to dwell on her sins instead.
Compliance brought her misery, as scenes of hell supplanted heavenly ones
in daily meditations. But God naturally took Madre Isabel’s side: “. . . cuando
me tenia tan oprimida mi confesor, me hacía su Magestad muchas, y señaladas
mercedes. ...” [169] (. . . while my confessor so oppressed me, my Lord
and God showed me many, and most outstanding favors . . .). Although she
claimed to accept her confessor’s treatment as a part of her imitation of
Christ’s suffering on earth, she also criticized him openly in her text for saying
her mystical raptures were tricks of the devil.
A change of confessors and her growing reputation as a visionary led in
1645—four years after the change and nineteen after becoming a lay nun—
to the writing of her Vida. Some churchmen consistently objected to her
writing. Other ecclesiastic leaders and censors recognized that in turbulent
times, when so many Christians were tempted to join heretical cults or simply
fall away from the Church, it might be auspicious to publicize such a naively
charismatic eloquence.^
Isabel de Jesiis’ writing reveals that she saw the paradox of Christ’s teaching—
that the lowliest shall be the highest—working in her favor (Arenal, “The
Convent as Catalyst of Autonomy,” 153). Some priests and confessors saw
her as a vehicle of Augustinian aims: bringing the wayward back to the fold;
tempering the cult of Mary (marianismo) in favor of devotion to Christ
(Warner); participating, nevertheless, in the campaign to pronounce the
Immaculate Conception to be dogma; and increasing faith and charity among
the rich and faith and humility among the poor.'* Madre Isabel implored,
exhorted, cajoled, and encouraged the repentance of sinners, the correction
of those “hanging too loose from God” (Bradstreet 216). She could speak to
peasants and laborers in their own language as many ecclesiastics could not.
Her life and text illustrate the Church’s capacity to encompass popular
forms of religious experience and expression which in a strict sense were
unorthodox or marginal. At the same time, they illustrate the necessity of
toeing the line. Names she adopted (such as pobre labradora—humble laborer)
and those given her by the clergy who endorsed and authorized her text in
prefaces (such as pastorcilla—little shepherdess) bear witness not only to
fervent religiosity but to Church politics and her peasant astuteness as well.
In any case, her portrayal of people’s lives as they were lived constitutes an
194 UNTOLD SISTERS
important contribution to the understanding of seventeenth-century Spanish

history.
Madre Isabel grounded her language in the experience of a peasant girl,
wife, and mother of Castile. She had spent thitty-eight years in these roles
before donning the habit and nineteen as a lay nun before undertaking her
three-year writing project in 1645. At that point, three years before her
death, she had earned fame as a popular carrier of messages from God.
Writing as Speaking, Speaking as Writing

The Vida that Madre Isabel dictated during the last three years of her life
was not published until almost thirty years after her death. The full title is
Vida de la Venerable Madre Isabel de Jesús, recoleta Augustina en el convento de
San Juan Bautista de la villa de Arenas. Dictada por ella misma y añadido lo que
faltó de su dichosa muerte (Life of the Venerable Madre Isabel de Jesús, Augustinian
Recollect of the Convento de San Juan Bautista in the Village of Arenas. Dictated
by her, with an Addition Telling of Her Blessed Death). The work consists of
three parts. Book I (3-152) recounts her life before entering the convent.
Book II (153-398) covers her years as a lay nun. Book III (399-470), written
by her confessor, contains the requisite description of Madre Isabel’s death,
information about her secretary Inés del Santísimo Sacramento and the col¬
laboration that gave birth to the text, and the testimony of eyewitnesses and
others familiar with Madre Isabel’s religious virtues.
Twenty years before their collaboration began. Madre Inés del Santísimo
Sacramento had noted Isabel de Jesus’ saintliness, to which she attests in
Book III of the Vida. Madre Inés had an uncle who was the prelate responsible
for issuing licenses to enter the convent (437). At Madre Inés’s urging, the
uncle helped Isabel de Jesús to profess. Madre Inés also prompted the male
authorities to request the jointly produced Vida. According to Madre Inés,
the alliance was beneficial in sevetal ways. Het own health and spitits im¬
proved, and if Madre Isabel prayed for bet during Mass, Madre Inés’s drow¬
siness, which often led her to fall asleep, would vanish. Most significantly,
soon after the manuscript was completed. Madre Inés became Abbess of the
convent.
Inés del Santísimo Sacramento was the one person in this world for whom
Isabel de Jesús expressed love. As the transcriber of Isabel’s visionary life,
she was privy, in a way the priests and confessors could not be, to Madre
Isabel’s innermost thoughts and feelings. That a person of higher rank was
serving one of lower status created a fashionable paradox—an enactment of
tbe lowliest becoming the highest. Curiously, not until two hundred pages
into the text does the author actually mention her secretary; then she calls
her variously “Inés” (201), “la secretaria” (264), and “mi Inés del Sacramento”
(208). Through the dictating process, they developed an intimacy that stretched
the boundaries of the official mandate of the Church against formation of
bonds of friendship with others.
Their work sessions took place at night after both women had finished
their chores. Madre Inés reports that she would send a mental signal and,
sensing it was time for their work to begin. Madre Isabel would hasten from
prayers to Madre Inés’s cell. A shaft of light would illuminate the sheet being
written upon, the writing hand, or the completed text (397, 432). “[V]eo
de ordinario una hermosa luz . . . cuando estamos escribiendo” [397] (1 usually
see a beautiful light ... as we are writing), Madte Isabel states, in a rare
but pointed use of the first person plural. Despite such signs of supernatural
approval. Madre Isabel expressed concern at taking up Madte Inés’s time,
because her skill in embroidery made her a valuable asset to the finances of
the impovetished convent.
But each woman was under a vow of obedience, the one to recount het
exemplary life and the other to act as scribe. Although it was a product of
that obedience, theit relationship provided an intimate refuge for both amidst
the inevitable conflicts of living in community. Madre Isabel emphasizes their
spiritual bond and makes a clear distinction between how close she feels to
Madre Inés and how distant from her other Sisters. Once, she contrasts
Madre Inés with the nun who setved as nurse in the cloister; the nurse had
come looking for Madre Isabel when she fainted and entered an ecstatic state:
. . . ignorando ella mi enfermedad, porque estas cosas son para Dios y

el alma, y para alguna familiar amiga: como lo es mi hija Inés del
Santísimo Sacramento, pot cuya mano pasan los favotes recibidos . . .
(210-1i)
(. . . she was unaware of my illness, because such things are only for
God and the soul, and for some close friend: such as my daughter
Inés del Santísimo Sacramento, through whose hands pass the favors
I receive . . .)
As the last phrase suggests. Madre Isabel envisioned words traveling from
her mouth through Madre Inés’s hand to paper, seeing this as analogous to
a holy event. She depicts the transcription process as almost magical at times,
and implies that just as the priest’s hands accomplished the transformation
of the wafet into Chtist’s body. Madre Inés’s hands were the instrument of
another holy transformation—from oral to written narrative.
Structure^ Style, and Sources

The spiritual autobiography that takes up the first two books of the Vida
is replete with descriptions of visions and comments about religion, human
nature, and the writing process. Although a rough chronology structures the
text, the progression is shaped more by Madre Isabel’s inner life than by the
calendar. The author always lifts the narrative from its moorings—which can
be a familiar time and place, a specific piece of art, or a particular fantasy—
into the realm of the sacred. As the work continues and Isabel de Jesus gains
greater self-confidence, her discussion of religious issues, biblical exegeses,
imitations of sermons, and fragmentary references to life around her become
more intricately entwined.
Madre Isabel often comments in passing on the difficulty she has had in
ordering the narrative: “Me parece que lo dejo dicho, y si no vuelvan a mí,
si no me he muerto. Otro día después de haber comulgado . . .” [141] (It
seems to me that I have already told this; and if not, come remind me, if I
196 UNTOLD SISTERS
haven’t died. Another day after taking communion . . .); “Me olvidaba de
decit una merced ...” [146] (I forgot to describe another blessing . . .);
“Dejando esto aquí, quiero volver a declarar ...” [336] (Leaving this matter
aside, I want to go back and declare . . .); and “Ahora tengo de hablar
de . . .” (262] (Now I have to talk about . . .). Madre Isabel also expresses
her dissatisfaction with the completed text: “No me parece que dejo bien
declarado algunos puntos arriba, y antes de desviarme más quiero volver a
ello” [96] (I think that I left some points uncleatly stated, and so before I go
further from that topic I want to return to it); and “No me acuerdo si dejo
bien declarado arriba . . .”[96] (I don’t remember if I said it well above . . .).
Her frustration at not being able to read and write adds poignancy to a
commonly stated yearning: “Yo quisiera saber darme a entender ...” [97] (I
wish I knew how to make myself understood . . .).^
On occasion. Madre Isabel also laments that external circumstances have
affected the production of her text, as in this passage in which she directly
addresses the reader:
En lo que dejo declarado acerca de este sacerdote, se me quedó

mucho por decir, y de otras muchas cosas, porque voy de paso, parte
por no ser cansada, y parte porque va cumpliendo mi Prelada su
trienio, y me ha mandado que me dé prisa, para que quede en su
tiempo: yo también gusto de ellos, porque no querría que lo alcanzase
a saber nadie: . . . (71)
(In what I have said about this priest, I have a great deal more to
say, and the same with many other things, because I’m going quickly,
partly in order not to be tiring, and partly because my Prioress is
completing her three-year term, and has ordered me to hurry, so that
this will be done in her time: I too would like to finish, because I
wouldn’t want anybody to find it out . . .)
She is reassured in a vision that those external circumstances will not

prevent the completion of her work. Christ reminds her that just as in
childhood she and her lambs were threatened, now her nearly completed
manuscript is in danger. Her enemies in old age have become killer wolves
(“lobos carniceros”), but her divine shepherd-father, as always, will answer
her call for protection. Christ then advises her that although her writing has
caused an uproar since she handed it in to her superiors, once her confessor
reads it he will understand and benefit.
Madre Isabel speaks as Saint Teresa might have wished to—without any
literary pretension at all. In recounting het visionary life she generously
employs colloquial usages, popular sayings and images, and depictions of
scenes from daily life. Her language is steeped in the culture of the period,
drawing from the liturgy, the vernacular of her region, and both sacred and
profane literary sources such as proverbs, various song forms, the literature
of chivalry, pastoral poetry, theater, and of course the Bible. Lines from
widely sung courtly ballads appear in passages describing her love for Christ.^
The paintings and sculpture she contemplated in church, along with popular
statues, masks, and costumes made for religious festivals in her town and
nearby villages, are the stuff of her mystical imagination. Echoes of her
childhood terrors and sadness, of the long and wretched marriage, and of
the death of her babies also surface time and again in her religious fantasies
(Arenal 154).
Madre Isabel de Jesús lived on two planes, the natural and the supernatural,
and frequently combines them in her narrative; “llegué a mi casa después de
puesto el sol, aunque en mi alma no se puso el divino que la alumbraba y
alumbra” [42] (I arrived home after the sun had set, although the divine sun
that was shining and still shines in my soul did not set). Her simultaneous
representation of the sacred and the profane often resembles popular theater
of her time, medieval sculpture, or canvasses by El Greco (The Burial of the
Count of Orgaz) and Velázquez (The Weavers, The Drinkers, The Forge of
Vulcan). Popular theater presented lively scenes of the Holy Family and
brought together characters from classical mythology and the Bible. Medieval
sculpture depicted maladies and sinfulness in the form of demons and humans.
On a single canvas El Greco painted earth and heaven, each with its per-
sonages, interacting yet within their own realm. Velázquez related working
women who wove tapestries to the sacred scenes they created, intermingling
classical and Christian motifs, peasants and Bacchus, drunks, laborers, and
gods. In Madre Isabel’s work a similar world view comes through: on earth,
fields were tended and housework was performed, while in a visible heaven
holy beings took care of matters of the soul. Biblical characters—sometimes
disguised, sometimes not—intervened in human affairs. Angels and devils
stalked land and sky. While women of the village swept their houses. Madre
Isabel cleansed her soul (40). Or as she swept, she expected to accomplish
both a material and a moral cleansing (see the Palm Saturday episode in
Texts and Translations).
Devils were real to Madre Isabel and her contemporaries and were the
cause of all human and natural troubles. Here, for example, she explains
how her leg became crippled;
. . . cargaron sobre mí tres demonios sobre la pierna derecha, fueron

espantosos, el uno cargaba hacia la rodilla ... y los otros dos estaban
por cima de aquél . . . Teníame oprimida la pierna, y atormentadas
[sic], sirviéndome de losa pesada: . . . tanto, que no me podía
sustentar sobre ella. (181)
(. . . three devils were leaning hard on my right leg, they were

dreadful, one held on by the knee . . . and the other two were on
top of him . . . My leg was squeezed tight, and in torment, like a
heavy stone to me: ... so painful, that I could not stand on it.)
The first of these devils had horns, “como acá suelen pintar” [181] (as they
paint them in these parts). All three “[t]enian las caras a modo de unas
máscaras, que acá pintan de figutas de demonios espantables” (181] (had faces
like the masks they paint in these parts to show the faces of frightening
devils).
Art and artists served as Madre Isabel’s visionary medium through which
to develop spiritual analogies. As she saw it, in an original variation of a
198 UNTOLD SISTERS
standard theological concept, God himself molded her by becoming an artist:
[Dios] también me ha dicho que es famoso Escultor . . . me puso . . .

la rodilla derecha encima, diciéndome que quería tenerme clavada
debajo de su voluntad para labrarme, y sacarme a gusto suyo. (22[8]-29)
([God] has also told me He is a celebrated Sculptor ... He put . . .

His right knee on top of me, saying He wanted to have me nailed
down by His will in order to fashion me to His taste.)
In her youth. Madre Isabel must have watched artists at work in her village.
Later, she created vivid descriptions of the images they made of wood, enamel,
metal, paper, and stone. In this vision, for example, she describes in detail
an angel carrying a cross in his hand:
. . . llevaba un geroglífico, revuelto en la Santísima Cruz, y al pie de

ella una corona de espinas, y una muerte, con dos huesos atravesados
en la boca, semejantes a los que pintan por acá . . . (38)
(. . .he carried a hieroglyph, wrapped in the Holy Cross, and at its

foot a crown of thorns, and death’s-head, with two crossed bones in
its mouth, similar to those that are painted in these parts . . .)
In some cases, carved or painted images materialized only after she envi¬
sioned them. When a sculpture of the Virgin Mary was brought to the village
for a religious holy day, for example, she said she recognized it as one she
had seen before in an ecstasy (182). The same occurred with an image of
the Holy Trinity, which she subsequently saw on some “estampas pintadas”
[191] (painted prints). Typically, the figures of devils, saints, Mary, Christ,
and the Trinity not only stimulated her faith—they educated her.
Madre Isabel de Jesus’ visions—and her text—illustrate the extent to which
religion influenced every aspect of daily life and the ways in which it per¬
meated her unconscious. Her ability to transpose and reintegrate realities was
probably more pronounced than that of other women in this study because
of her lack of formal training. Her combinations of images and ideas serve
to show how most people heard poetry and prose, saw art, and believed in
the supernatural. Sacred cultural artifacts, like the Cross, had magical powers
and appeared in her visions frequently.
Most Catholics could see angels bearing crosses, Mary ascending heav¬
enward, a winged soul taking flight out of purgatory, devils cavorting in hell,
or a wooden saint crying. Madre Isabel may have been more sweepingly
fanciful and faithful than most observers, but her blurring of the real and
imagined worlds was not unusual for her time and place. Nor were people
bothered by inconsistencies or anachronisms; for example, they did not ques¬
tion that the dress of early Christian saints as depicted in church was not
different from their own. Madre Isabel’s visions also underscore how persistent
in Spanish villages was the legacy of the ancient world in which “the sky
hung low” (Jackson Case i; quoted in Pelikan 97).
Although aware that her style was “tosco, y grosero” [109] (rough, and
crude). Madre Isabel asserts that it aptly describes delicate spiritual matters:
había viado [sic] mucho del zurrón, que de ordinario traía el pan en él, y
para mi modo grosero me ha servido esto (aunque es a lo temporal) para
entender a lo divino estas consideraciones, aunque son groseras” [87] (I had
seen a lot of the leather pouch, which ordinarily had bread in it, and for my
crude style this has served me, although in temporal fashion, to understand
these reflections in a divine way, although they are but crude).
Homely visions counterbalanced bold, original, and imaginative ones.

While she sewed with her Sisters, Jesus said to her:
. . . te llamé hilandera, porque eres casera, entendí que el decir

casera, era decir, eres para mucho, que estás dentro de tu casa,
enseñóme que el estar hilando, y atrayendo a la mazorca, que era lo
mismo que pasaba por el alma, que está atrayendo a sí los buenos
pensamientos, y que la voluntad los va recibiendo . . . (89)
(. . . “1 called you spinner because you are housewifely”; 1 urrderstood

that to say “housewifely,” was as if to say, “you are worth a lot,
because you are inside your house.” He showed me that to be
spinning and drawing the spindles was just the same as what took
place within the soul, which is drawing to itself good thoughts, and
so the will receives them . . .)
She did not refrain from distilling exemplary lessons and biblical parables,
even when her self-depiction showed a conforming, housebound wife. She
had so internalized the religious messages of the institution she embraced,
there was no taking them away from her. Rather, she claimed acknowledg¬
ment through her talent for restating them in the language of the people.
She partook of, and contributed to, a tradition of “domestic theology” that
gave women a means of interpreting dogma.
World burned Inside Out: ^rom

Sdepiierdess to Mystic
Mysticism had many functions for Isabel de Jesús. Her visions allowed her
to sever herself from one kind of life and undertake another. Through the
visions she educated herself. They also led to her increased status and power
in the world and to enough interest in her story to demand its recording.
Psychologically, mysticism was vital to Madre Isabel’s survival. While she
absorbed and internalized the culture that surrounded her, she created her
own inner world in which despair was more manageable and joy more fre¬
quent. Her transforming imagination was her protection and salvation as
both a child and an adult. Moreover, it enabled her to experience religious
ecstasy. Her mystical life with Jesus offered recompense for suffering and
allowed her to reshape her personal existence. Isabel de Jesús used her visions
to overcome fear and gain self-confidence. As she developed trust in her
inner life, there grew in her a sense of mission.
200 UNTOLD SISTERS
The tools she designed to protect herself from destruction in an alienating

world included a set of selTcharacterizing labels such as “indigna” (unworthy),
which she used to give herself an aura of humility and to refute the epithets
with which others maligned her. Madre Isabel refers to herself throughout
her text as a “pobre labradora” (poor laborer) and a “rústica pastorcilla” (simple
little shepherdess). Most likely, she had heard priests and confessors describe
her in these terms. Other people called her “la loca” [63] (the madwoman),
“fraylerona” [^g] (ffiaress), “santurrona” [62] (pseudo-saint), and “profetisafalsa”
I120] (false prophetess). Aware of these labels, she turned to her visions for
other labels that would establish her authority and bestow power: she was to
be “pregonera” (town crier) of God’s magnificence (179).
Intimacy and equality with Christ are the major themes of Madre Isabel’s
life story. A peasant and lay nun. Madre Isabel stood at the bottom of the
social scale, but in her visionary life she acquired status as Jesus’ peer and
beloved companion (412). She and Jesus are the protagonists of her book.
Throughout, she uses epithets designating her lowly birth as proof of her
place next to Christ: “labradora” (57, 58), “rústica” (64), “casera,” “hilandera”
(89), “pastorcica” (264), “Pastora” (274). The epithet “pastora, ” which recalled
her childhood, signaled an ever-stronger identification with Jesus; during the
course of the narrative she—as protagonist—metamorphoses into the divine
figure after whom she has named herself, (Isabel) de Jesús. Christ was the
shepherd of all Catholics, as she had been of her family’s flock. Her soul
becomes one of his lambs: “Pastor de mi alma, y que me la llevó a su divino
rebaño ...” [90] (Shepherd of my soul, who carried it away for me to his
divine flock . . .). She blended actual and metaphorical senses, adding to
the earthy charm of the commonplace.
To establish a connection to Jesus by calling him “shepherd of my soul”
was not, of course, unusual. But Madre Isabel expresses her special relation¬
ship to Jesus in several other ways, and these are considerably less conven¬
tional. In one of her visions, for example, Christ not only appeats as a father
figure—a common convention—but also prompts her autobiographical rec¬
ollection. The vision begins with Christ instructing her to recall an episode
from her early childhood, when she watched in terror as a wolf pinned a
lamb between its jaws. Her father, who was herding not far off, heard her
screams, came running, consoled her, and tried to quiet her fears, telling het
he was more upset by her panic than by the loss of a lamb. In het vision,
Jesus asks her to tend his lambs as she had tended her parents’ and promises
to answer her cries as did her father (265). All at once, Isabel is Christ’s co¬
worker and he is her protector, constant companion, and surrogate father.
Over time. Madre Isabel came to see herself as so close to Christ that she
porttayed their relationship not only as that of shepherd and lamb or father
and daughter but as a relationship of equals who shate an intimate reciprocity.
She captures this reciprocity in two incidents involving tears. One Good
Friday, she stands in her doorway at mealtime eating a piece of bread. Sud¬
denly she begins to feel the pains of Christ’s suffeting, and “me acudió el
Señor con unas lágrimas dadas de su mano, que me sirvieron de vianda” (42-
43) (the Lord carne to my aid with some tears given from his hand, and these
were my meal). Another day she cries while she is in mystical prayer. When
she sees the Lotd, she asks him where he is going. He responds: “[A] coger
tus lágrimas, que me sirven de refrigerio” [81] (To collect yout tears, because
they are refreshment and comfort to me).
An even bolder and more original way for Madre Isabel to establish her
intimacy and equality with Jesus is to depict him as her lover. The auto-
biographer uses the image of God as lover again and again, and Christ’s
characterization is strongest in this guise. Madre Isabel reports that God-Jesus
speaks to her “como entre amantes se habla con llaneza” I84] (as lovers speak
to each other, with familiarity). On one occasion, she “sees” a cross with a
poetic text decorating the vertical arm; “Robándome el corazón de amores,
dando alivio a mis trabajos con fineza de amor” [240] (Stealing my heart with
love, relieving my burdens with love’s delicacy).
Madre Isabel’s depiction of Christ as her lover obviously served the purpose
of further establishing her as his intimate and equal. But just as important,
it enabled her to speak—and speak freely—of such subjects as sexual feelings
and fantasies, family quarrels, lack of intimacy with her husband, forced
marriage, childbirth, children’s illnesses, and the temptations of adultery.
For all its condemnation of sin. Madre Isabel’s manuscript conveys an impres¬
sion of robust sexuality among the people she knew and in herself. Profane
sensuality manifested itself ambivalently in all aspects of Spanish culture. By
insisting on Christ’s jealousy, she justifies her repugnance to the overtures of
the men of her village; “[Dios] mandóme que huyese de los hombres, porque
no se enamorasen de mí, es celoso por extremo . . [41] ([God] ordered me
to flee from men, so that they wouldn’t fall in love with me, for He is
extremely jealous . . .); “Vuelvo a decir cuán celoso es mi divino amante,”
[187] (I repeat that my divine lover is very jealous); and “[Cristo] no quiere
que trate con los hombres, sino con él” [96] ([Christ] doesn’t want me to
converse with mortal men, but only with Him).
A few pages earlier, she has observed that because her husband is poor and
a shepherd, “a los hombres deshonestos del mundo les incitaba el demonio,
para que me persiguiesen ...” [90] (The devil incited the lecherous men of
the world to pursue me). Being “out in the world” meant facing the ever¬
present danger of socially condoned abuse of poor women and tbe confusions
and temptations that accompanied ignorance. Early in the text, she alludes
to men’s offers to remedy her poverty in exchange for sexual favors and to
the money she could have obtained “ofendiendo a la Magestad de Dios” [19]
(offending God’s majesty). Jesus, the ideal, eternally young and beautiful
lover, reined in her sexual need and softened the blows of exploitation. In
accord with her religion. Madre Isabel portrays her sexual impulses as sinful,
but she expresses explicit sexual need and excitement. Among her writing
Sisters represented here, no other is so direct.
In this period of Spanish letters, sensuality was elaborately translated into
religious terms. “In the sacred mode”—a b divino—was a common expression
used to denote the adaptations of sensual and erotic imagery to religious and
mystic motifs, especially in literature.^ Book I of Madre Isabel’s Vida ends
with a love song in the idiom of the romance: “Ay, prenda del alma mía! Ay,
que me tienes robado el corazón! Ay, mi divino amante!” [152] (Oh, precious
jewel of my soul! Alas, you have stolen my heart! Oh, my divine lover!).
Christ also appears in the favored guise of a knight errant from the novels
of chivalry, so popular at the time that characters, situations, and dialogue
became a part of everyone’s imagination; “. . . mi valeroso capitán ... de
armas blancas, caballo blanco, y todo de punta en blanco ...” [80] (“. . .
my courageous captain ... in white armor, on a white horse, and everything
embroidered in white . . .”).
202 UNTOLD SISTERS
Occasionally her rapture expresses itself in the erotic language of the Song
of Songs. In the manner of those Old Testament verses, revivified by con¬
temporary dialogue, she records a visit:
Me visitó mi divino Amado una noche. . . . Me dijo: mira cual

vengo, por venirte a visitar me ha cogido el rocío de la noche, traigo
el cabello lleno de escarcha . . . traía un manto azul que le cubría, y
no todo, porque por algunas partes le alcanzaba a ver aquellas
preciosísimas carnes, hermosas sobre toda hermosura. . . . ¡Ay Dios
qué belleza! yo quiero callar, porque no acertaré a decir, ni hay por
acá con quien le comparar. (135)
(My divine Lover visited me one night. . . . He said to me: “See how
I come; because I have come to visit you, the night dew caught me,
and my hair is full of frost” . . . He was wearing a blue cape, which
did not completely cover Him, because here and there I saw His most
precious flesh, more beautiful than any beauty. . . . My God what
beauty! I wish to keep silent, because I won’t be able to tell of this,
nor is there anyone in these parts with whom to compare Him.).
Madre Isabel’s union with her lover Christ demonstrates an originality and
boldness rare even among women mystics. On two separate occasions Christ
allows her to enter him through his rib:
Estando mirando un Santísimo Cristo de bulto, me llamó con la

cabeza Santísima, y mirándome con los ojos, me enseñó la llaga de su
Santísimo Costado: mandóme que me entrase por ella, usó esta fineza
de amor conmigo, valiéndose de su mismo retrato. (201)
(While I was looking at a carved figure [statue] of the Most Holy

Christ, He beckoned me with His holy head, and looking at me with
His eyes. He pointed to the wound in his Most Sacred Rib: He
ordered me to enter Him through it. He petformed this gesture of
love with me, by means of His own porttait.)
and:
. . . se me representó Cristo bien nuestro de resucitado, y me dijo:

Vente a mí, que soy tu Redemptor, y tu guarida, y teniendo abierta la
puerta de su Santísimo Costado, echándome los brazos, me entró por
ella. (209-10)
(. . . then Christ our good appeared to me as He was raised from the

dead, and told me: “Come to me, for I am your Savior, and your
haven,” and holding open the door of His most holy rib. He threw
His arms around me and brought me into Him.)
In these episodes, she reverses the taking into oneself of the body of Christ
symbolized by communion. By identifying with her Lover, she also inverts
and undoes the human male-female hierarchy of the temporal world.
While Jesus is most vividly characterized in the autobiography as a lover,

Isabel de Jesús identifies most strongly with him when he appears as a mother.
The link to Jesus through maternal imagery is so fluid that she appears to
become him. On one or two occasions, she represents her Lord in relation
to her children as the Pope in relation to the faithful: “Me dijo el Señor . . .que
era Redentora de mis hijos” [305] (The Lord told me . . . that I was the
Redeemer of my children). Madre Isabel’s use of maternal imagery is perhaps
her most inventive and effective equalizing device. Through it, Jesus takes
on female characteristics: he bleeds, goes through labor pains (40), gives
birth, and even nurses. As mother, he comforts his small children, among
whom Madre Isabel, he comforts his small children, among whom Madre
Isabel holds a privileged place:
. . . se ha habido el Señor conmigo, como una madre con sus hijos,

que cuando son pequeñuelos, cobran con mucha facilidad gran miedo,
y para que le pierdan, les dicen: mira que no era nada . . . (81)
(. . . the Lord has treated me as a mother treats her children, who

when they are little things are very easily frightened, and to calm
them down, their mothers say: see, there was nothing there . . .)
Once, Madre Isabel “sees” Jesus nursing dogs from his engorged breasts,
because his own children have become ill (81-82). Madre Isabel explains
that Christ’s milk-filled breasts are his mercy, but their engorgement (his
pain) is a result of his children’s refusal to accept his divine word; this refusal
is their illness. She assures the reader she knows what she is talking about,
since she too has nursed both other people’s children, and even dogs, when
her own babies died (Arenal, “The Convent . . . 155)- In this example,
the triple-tiered meaning that accompanies many visions is again salient: (i)
the initial vision (of Christ nursing); (2) the reference to material reality
and lived experience; (3) the more abstract theological significance, which
completes the lesson.
Cther visions of God as mother establish a direct link between Jesus and
Madre Isabel. Milk and blood sometimes are interchangeable or equated.
Madre Isabel replaces Christ’s blood with her own; she reports that het mouth
frequently bleeds when she takes communion (199-200). She, in turn, shares
his capacity to spill blood in sacrifice for others. Christ’s blood from his
wounds provides sustenance for humanity, and is therefore a form of nur-
turance like breast-feeding. This symbolism is made visible in the sip of wine
priests take as part of communion.® In creating inextricable connections
between herself and Jesus through the imagery of his milk of mercy and body-
blood and playing with the symbolism of fundamental religious tenets and
church dogma. Madre Isabel does what some medieval women saints had
done, according to Elizabeth Petroff. They “not only revetsed the traditional
male and female roles, . . . [but] also inverted the hierarchy of the Church”
(75). Modem scholars—Bynum, Clark and Richardson, Ruether, and Schüs-
sler Fiorenza, among others—have documented a long line of female religious
engaged in such subversion.
Once, when she sees Christ’s back full of wounds (79), he tells her that
because she loves him, his back does not bother him. The remark reminds
204 UNTOLD SISTERS
her of how women giving birth feel; they suffer great pain in labor, but
afterwards forgive the child who caused it, because of love. She equates
Christ’s crucifixion with childbirth, because he thereby offered humanity new
life. Although she calls him “father” of humankind in this passage, she uses
women’s experience to validate what is, after all, the center of the New
Testament story—Christ’s sacrifice for humanity.
Through a transmuting identification with Christ that crosses and blurs
gender lines. Madre Isabel develops the idea that she is a spiritual mother
of humanity:
. . .estando pidiendo a su Magestad por mis hijos, me dio un afecto

de amor, tan grande, . . . que están mis ojos hechos dos fuentes.
(304)
(. . . when 1 was praying to God for my children, 1 was given such a

surge of love, so great, . . . that my eyes have become two
fountains.)
Her children include all humankind: “Yo no excluyo a nadie” I303] (1 do not
exclude anybody). Madre Isabel consistently reminded the reader of her
exemplarity by emphasizing God’s greatness and her own lack of worth for
the gifts he gave her. On the other hand, she established a level of familiarity
with Christ that suggested quite the opposite of her stated unworthiness. By
the time Madre Isabel “declared” who she was for all to remember, at the
end of her life, she had become an emblematic character perhaps even to
herself.
In addition to enabling the author to set herself up as God’s intimate.
Madre Isabel’s visions enabled her to acquire an education. Her God taught
her to trust her own eyes and ears for true knowledge. Dialogues with God
were the source of Madre Isabel’s ruminations on the nature of knowing. The
similarity of God’s opinions, as she heard them, to official Church policy
demonstrates Madre Isabel’s capacity to absorb the ideology of her times,
however. Her illiteracy often frustrated her, but Madre Isabel learned to
measure wisdom by other yardsticks. God pointed the way, defending his
reluctance to let her learn how to read:
Diciéndole yo al Señor que quisiera yo saber leer, me dijo . . . que no

entendiese yo que todos los que saben leer, se saben aprovechar, que
más es el saberse aprovechar, que el saber leer. (273-74)
(When I told the Lord that I would like to know how to read. He
told me . . . that I shouldn’t think that all those who know how to
read, know how to use their knowledge, for it is more important to
know how to use one’s knowledge than to know how to read.)
Placing the Lord as her advisor. Madre Isabel thus issued a thinly disguised
criticism of her superiors, tacitly compared herself to others, and summarized
her achievement—the intelligent and clever use of native wit and wisdom.
The educational process led Madre Isabel to ever more convoluted inter¬
pretations of the cultural and theological materials to which she was exposed
as a lay nun. She became able to argue herself out of errors in biblical
chronology, for instance. When Inés del Santísimo Sacramento criticized her
for inserting Christ into the story of the Burning Bush which predated his
birth, she justified herself:
. . . aunque no se había manifestado al mundo, le tenía su Padre

Eterno en su Diadema . . . que cuando un Escultor ha de hacer una
imagen, que la forma primero que la saque a luz, en su entendimiento,
de suerte que lo que no ha hecho ve delante de sus ojos, por cuanto
lo tenía ya formado. Esto es a lo humano. Volviendo a lo Divino,
digo . . . que como tenía en su mente formada la Imagen de Cristo
bien nuestro, en la Diadema de su entendimiento, antes de ser en el
mundo . . . (269-70)
(. . . although He had not yet appeared to the world. He was already

set in His Eternal Father’s crown ... for when a sculptor is going to
make a statue [image], he forms it first in his mind, before producing
it, so that what he has not made he sees in front of his eyes, and
therefore he had already formed it. This is the human way. Returning
to the divine way, I say . . . that since He had the Image of Christ
our good in the crown of His mind, before His appearance in the
world . . .)
Christ incarnate had no rivals among human males in beauty, gentleness,

and kindness, but he spoke to Madre Isabel with the pouting, blaming, or
scolding tone of any spouse. Her conversations with him have a domestic
flavor; he might be a husband complaining about his day’s work to his wife
of many years. Though at times he sounded as her real husband may have,
he stimulated love in ways her earthly partner never did. Christ’s was flesh
she could glimpse and swoon over. He was her “true Samson” (80). Above
all, he represented a “safe harbor” (84).
Although in many instances Madre Isabel was able to supercede the opinion
of her confessors through her conversations with God, she could not manage
intervention against officially sanctioned tradition and the Council of Trent.
Her wish to have herself officially accepted as a preacher was not successful:
Me mandó el Señor un día que tenía de predicar . . . pero tengo

esta costumbre de tomar primero parecer de los Confesores para no
hacer algún desacierto . . . respondió . . . [que] no dio el Señor
potestad más que a los hombres para que predicasen . . . (73)
(The Lord ordered me one day to preach . . . but it is my custom

to consult the opinion of my confessors first, in order not to commit
a wrong . . . [The confessor] answered that the Lord gave only men
the power to preach . . .)
Before giving up the effort to obey the Lord’s command, she consulted a
higher authority, the confessor of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting from Madrid,
Padre Fray Juan de San Francisco. He consoled her cleverly:
2o6 untold sisters
Me dijo que había muchos modos de predicar . . . que unos

predicaban con la palabra y otros con el ejemplo, y que buen predicar
había sido haber dejado mi tierra para venir a buscar al Señor, que
mirase yo como había volado la fama de aquella hazaña que había
hecho en haber huido del mundo . . . (73-74)
(He told me that there were many ways to preach . . . that some
preached through words and others by example, and that my having
left my birthplace to come to seek the Lord had been good preaching,
for I should consider how far and wide my fame had spread for having
fled the world . . .)
In the face of such opposition, God rescinded the original order and let her
know she had been told the truth.
If she could not preach directly, Christ could preach through her visions.
In many passages of her book, she communicates Christ’s complaints to her
about the ingratitude and sinfulness of his people and about the errors of
some of his confessors and prelates; through her, he scolds them. She warns
against the triumph of the devil; rampant sensuality and sins of the flesh
especially concerned her. Too many people allowed their base nature the
upper hand—“de hombres es pecar y de demonios perseverar en el pecado”
[315] (it is the way of men to sin and of devils to persevere in sinning). The
correction of sinful behavior was one of the tasks with which she was entrusted
by her Lord. She did not take a stance always “from on high.” Rather, she
used herself as an example and affirmed her authority by saying “I’ve been
there.” Frequently she portrays herself as a sinner who should acknowledge
that all that is lofty in her comes from His Divine Majesty; his voice had
told her:
. . . tu natural es inclinado a cosas de tierra, así como el puerco tiene

inclinación a andar en el lodo ... y todo lo que veas que es
levantado de la tierra, lo has de tener por mío, y no tuyo, no tienes
que temer . . . (254)
(. . . your nature inclines toward earthly things, as the pig is inclined

to walk in the mud . . . and everything you see that is raised from
the earth you must consider mine, not yours, but you should not
fear . . .)
She harangues her audience and promises forgiveness and the winning of
joyous experiences of miraculous beauty, contentment, and love like hers to
those who mend their ways.
Madre Isabel’s perspective on the world gave her leeway to tell people
what to do. She was Christ’s spokesperson and he was hers. She reinforced
her authority as a preacher by having other figures speak for her; “Miren que
hay viejos verdes, y si no me creen, pregúnteselo a Santa Susana, que ella
tesponderá por mí” (312] (Think how there are lecherous old men; and if
you don t believe me ask Saint Susanna, for she will speak for me). Susanna
had become a model of chastity in the art of the period; she preferred death
to her body s dishonor. Madre Isabel s presentation of Susanna and the Elders
would not have been duplicated by a male writer.^ That story, or its artistic
depiction, may have struck an emotional chord that continued to reverberate
in Madre Isabel’s memory; she had been a fourteen-year-old married to a
man in his forties.
Curtailing her own imagined and other people’s real lustful waywardness,
as well as other sins of the body, became an important preoccupation for
her. One day a neighbor confessed to sexual desire. Masturbation, the neigh¬
bor thought, kept her free of sin:
. . . yéndola yo a visitar ... se me ofreció, que la había tentado el

I espíritu de la fornicación, que por vergüenza usó mal de sí misma, y
¡ como no hubo varón de por medio, entendió que no había entrado
1 en pecado, y no lo tenía confesado . . . (72-73)
I (. . . I went to visit her ... it occurred to me that she had been

[ tempted by the desire to fornicate, and that she had used hetself
I shamefully, and because there was no man involved, she believed
that there was no sin, and had never confessed it . . .)
Madre Isabel told the woman to repent and confess but did not identify this
I neighbor in whose salvation she was instrumental. She respected confiden¬
tiality like a confessor. In the course of the narrative Madre Isabel recounts
many such incidents which, she says, caused her to be admired by some
! people and ostracized by others.
; Visions, providing a means for her to be considered a sacred mouthpiece,
; established Isabel de Jesús’ right to function as a neighborhood spiritual ad-
I visor—to speak, preach, and mediate. For instance, she recounts the story
j of two men in her village who had been feuding for ten years without respite.
When Madre Isabel asked God how to make peace, he claimed not to have
any room to enter those two souls, which were crowded with devils. With
! her inner vision, she saw the devils inside one man. One of the devils was
a toad, which swelled up so much that it took up the entire intestinal area;
the other was a snake, which glided up the esophagus to the man’s throat.
I These demons prevented him from hearing, seeing, or speaking the truth.
j Madre Isabel acted as intermediary—indeed, as exorcist—and brought peace
i between the two men from behind the iron grill of the convent. That a
cloistered nun from the peasantry would deem it her business to unravel the
threads of a dispute between two men shows how Madre Isabel literally saw
I herself as mother of all and, on a more mundane level, how nuns participated
in solving social problems.
Madre Isabel’s narrative sheds a unique light on women’s lives in seven¬
teenth-century Spain, underscoring the dangers and difficulties of female
secular existence. Doubly marginalized because she was a peasant and a
woman, Isabel de Jesús won power as a visionary that she could never other¬
wise have hoped to achieve in the rigidly gender-conscious, class-conscious
society in which she lived. Some thought her crazy, some overzealous, some
arrogant, but many believed her to be holy. Her visions offered her an exit
from lifelong poverty, brutally demanding work, and forced marriage. They
gave her relief from pain and illness and allowed her to reshape her personal
existence, to educate herself, and to forge her own prayer life. Mystic ecstasy
2o8 untold sisters
determined Madre Isabel’s ability first to achieve Christ’s companionship and

ultimately to gain permission to inscribe her life in written form.
niexts and Hranslations

Isabel de Jesús
Vida de la Venerable Madre Isabel de Jesús, recoleta Augustina en el

convento de San Juan Bautista de la villa de Arenas. Dictada por ella
misma y añadido lo que faltó de su dichosa muerte.
Libro Primero
Me casó [mi madre] (como tengo dicho) a mi disgusto . . . fue la causa,

el ser con quien me casaron hombre que me llevaba muchos años. Digo esto,
por que no se entienda, que era virtud el no querer casarme, sino por la
desigualdad del tiempo. ... Yo quisiera darme a entender; digo, como me
había criado en el campo, y me trajeron a poblado, y me vistieron ya como
mujer, el mundo me llevó tras sí, tomando por medio a mis mismos parientes,
que me decían, dándome muchas quejas de mi madre, que mal me había
empleado. Lo mismo decía toda la gente del lugar, como me llevaba tantos
años, y no tenía dientes; de suerte que hasta los muchachos me cocaban,
permitiéndolo así Dios nuestro Señor . . .
Ay Dios, ¡qué desasosiego tenía mi alma! . . . ¡Ay que menos echaba la
paz de mi alma, que interiormente gozaba en aquellos desiertos con las ovejas
que guardaba! ¡Ay, qué lucha! .... Si no me hubieran mandado mis confe¬
sores que me detenga, dijera aquí cuál me puso la Babilonia del mundo: y
cuán solícitos andaban los demonios, tomando por instrumento a las criaturas,
para que me dijesen, que era hermosa, y estaba mal empleada. . . . Quería
pasar de buena gana por la carga pesada del matrimonio; pero la flaca na¬
turaleza, tan inclinada al mal, y a sus apetitos, me dio grande guerra ¡Ay qué
contraria! ¡Ay qué cruel enemigo! ¡Ay qué demonio tan fuerte! ¡Ay qué
ladrón casero! (12-14)
Si esto lo ve alguno en algún tiempo, podía consideratse la difetencia tan

grande que tuve en el principio de mi vida, a la que tuve después que me
casaron. Estuve en este tormento veinte años, o cerca de ellos, hasta que mi
querido San Joseph, permitiéndolo así el Señor, me hizo merced de darme
tanto alivio, que cuando veía a mi marido, se me representaba el Patriarca;
y con esto le cobré nuevo amor, porque era muy devota de San Joseph; esta
devoción la mame de los pechos de mi madre, que era muy devota de este
glorioso santo, y me decía muchas veces, que siendo la Madre de Dios niña,
la desposaron con él, siendo de madura edad. Esto me lo decía para alentarme
a llevar la carga; que bien conocía ser pesada, aunque yo no me daba por
entendida de mi trabajo, por no la dar pena. Yo me hacía grandísima fuerza
a disimular mi disgusto, procurando mostrarle a mi marido gusto y amor. A
esto ponía muchas diligencias, procurando vencerme, poniendo mi brazo
sobre el almohada, para que le sirviera de cabecera, porque sentía un vacío
en el alma grandísimo: me parecía que me procedía de que no le tenía
amor. . . . Le dio una enfermedad muy grave y penosa: le duró seis años,
afligiéndole en unos tiempos más que en otros: llegaba a tanto extremo el
mal, que era menester sacramentarle. Habiéndome el Señor dado una grande
ocasión en que ejercitar la caridad, lo perdí todo, porque lo llevaba impa¬
cientemente. Como la enfetmedad eta tan prolija, pudría la ropa, por no se
poder levantar sobre sí, y como yo tenía pocos años, tenía corto sufri¬
miento . . . (16-17)
. . . déme el Señor, por quien él es, fuerzas y gracia, para que yo acierte
a decir lo que aquella noche me pasó. . . . me manifestó el Señor muchas
j almas, espesas como las estrellas, las vi en la región del aire levantadas de
1 la tierra, todas tenían luces en las manos; vi como les acababan, que quedaban
I casi muertas, quedando aquellas almas oscurecidas, aunque no del todo. Vi
I una hermosísima doncella, con un niño en los brazos; llevaba consigo una
j grandísima luz. Iba pasando por medio de aquellas almas, encendiendo con
i la luz, que llevaba en las manos a todas las otras luces. Y aunque estaban ya
I apagadas, que no lucían, quedaron con grandísima luz todas, y lucían tanto,
I y echaban de sí tal resplandor y hermosura, que era gloria verlas, y consuelo,
i luciendo tanto, que me parecía que era un cielo. Se me ofreció que era aquella
1 doncella la Fe, y aquel niño que llevaba en los brazos, me pareció la esperanza,
i y en aquella tan hermosa luz, me pareció ser la caridad de Dios, que acude
j a alumbramos, para que no acabemos de desfallecer.
¡ Con la mucha luz que tenían estas almas, alcancé a ver otras muy diferentes
I de aquellas, algo apartadas: estaban en grandísima oscuridad. Las vi en figuras
1 de cuerpos muertos. Me pareció que eran almas que estaban en pecado mortal,
1 y por estar en desgracia de Dios, venían sin luz en aquellas oscuras tinieblas.
Vi que no tenían cabezas, que así se me han tepresentado siempre las que
están apartadas de Dios, que como no veían bien de las potencias que el
señor las dio graciosamente, están como unos troncos negros y quemados.
. . . llegó un horrible demonio . . . él no se quería dar por vencido; a este
tiempo le echaron un cerco, para que no saliese de allí. Yo comencé a tener
un razonamiento con este soberbio demonio, diciéndole: mira qué bueno es
nuestro Dios, y nuestro criador; mira como se ha humillado a que todos los
pecados pasen por él; mira cuán humilde, cuán misericordioso es, que perdona
a quien se vuelve a él; mira qué ofendido le tengo por mi culpa, y tuya,
porque me has ayudado a mal obrar: yo, habiendo sido tal, como su Magestad
sabe, he hallado tan buena acogida en él, que parece no se acuerda de las
grandes ofensas que le he hecho, y como me ha perdonado a mí, te perdonará
a ti; si tú quieres que yo se lo pida, pese a ti de haberle ofendido, y pide de
tu parte el perdón, que yo sé que no te le negará; que yo le conozco de
I condición tal, que está deseando que le pidamos. Comenzó a embtavecerse,
I no le cabiendo la soberbia, y a decirme con la cabeza, y con las acciones que
hacía, que no quería perdón. Estando con esta furia, vi que le tiraron un
1 dardo; él tenía figura de perro, era de notable grandeza; le hirieron junto al
brazuelo; a mí me parece que le pasaron el corazón. Vi la grande herida que
recibió, y como si fuera de carne y hueso, despedía sangre de sí, pero aunque
pasó todo esto, en su pertinacia se quedó. A mí me hacía lástima, que quisiera
que nada careciera de Dios; me movía muchas veces a lástima el ver su gran
perdición, y de que vi su soberbia ingratitud, se me quitó viendo aquella
bondad inmensa, que los dio justamente el castigo que tienen. (46-48)
210 UNTOLD SISTERS
Otra vez me hizo el Señor merced, que le vi con los ojos del alrna por las
espaldas. Las tenía de las llagas como una criba, que quebraba el corazón el
verle; tanto, que quisiera desviarme por haber sido yo la causa de tan gran
tormento, por mis grandes pecados. El me llamó con su acostumbrada caridad,
diciéndome—no te vayas, mira que a trueque de que me quieras, no me duele
ya nada. Benditas sean sus entrañas de caridad. A mí se me representó lo
que diré aquí, como fui madre de hijos, cuando me veía en el parto, y en el
trabajo, sentía mucho; pero era un sentimiento con amor. Después que me
veía con aquel hijo salido de mis entrañas, me olvidaba de todo el trabajo
en que me había puesto. Porque a trueque de gozarle daba por bien empleado
todo trabajo, porque campeaba en el corazón el amor. Se me ofrecía que lo
mismo que había pasado por mi, pasó primero por Cristo bien nuestro. Me
parecía que dolores fueron de parto los que su Divina Magestad padeció en
el árbol santísimo de la Cruz, para damos nueva vida sacándonos del no ser
al ser de su divina gracia. Y después de haber pasado los dolores de su
acerbísima Pasión, como se vio Redentor de las almas, que es ser padre . . .
(78-79)
Otra vez tras esto, para gloria de Dios nuestro Señor, un Sábado de Ramos,
tomé la escoba para sacudir las paredes de mi casa. Dije al Señor, que quería
barrer la morada a donde yo vivía; le supliqué se sirviese de limpiar mi Alma,
como habitación, y morada suya. Al decirle esto, me arrebató; a mí me parece
que dio conmigo en el techo de la casa. Cuando volví en mí me hallé bailando
y dando vueltas en el aire. Estaba diciendo: como daba la llaga mi Dios del
Cielo, como daba la llaga daba el remedio, y bailaba muy en son. De que
volví en mí, acuerdo y conocí que era Sábado de Ramos. Comencé a dar que¬
jas a mi Señor, diciéndole que mirase qué desatino el mío, que estaba su
divina Magestad tan cercano a su santísima Pasión, y yo bailando y tan
alere. Me dijo: no sabes tú qué ha sido esto; has de saber que en el cielo ha
habido grandes fiestas acerca de mi gusto, y así has sido participante en la
alegría. . . . (91)
Vi por estos ojos, que se han de comer la tierra, sobre la mesa de dos
casados un demonio, que les estaba incitando a que fuesen malos casados.
Estaban a la mesa para comer, y con grandísimo enojo se decían el uno al
otro muy malas palabras; y si malas las decía el uno, peores las decía el otro,
instigados de aquel demonio que estaba sobre su mesa. El era negro, de
pequeña estatura, pero de grande fuerza; tenía una arma en las manos con
la cual los estaba tirando y hiriendo; de que dejaba al uno, daba tras el otro:
y según lo que echaba de la boca, veía yo muy bien la ponzoña que estaba
descargando en sus corazones nuestro cruel enemigo. No había cómo meterlos
en razón, que estaban tan tomados de aquella furia infernal, que no estaban
capaces.
También vi otro demonio cargándose a un lado de una cabalgadura, para
torcerla la carga, y la hacía ir a un lado, y a otro, para que perdiese la
paciencia el pobre que iba tras ella. (100)
Trabajos fueron, si merecieron este nombre, criarme desde pequeñita a las

inclemencias del cielo. Porque apenas había amanecido cuando me enviaban
The Poor Pray More 21 I
al ganado, a veces descalza, sobre la nieve y la escarcha, no porque mi madre

quisiera, pero la quedaron ocho hijos, y a veces no podía, aunque quería,
que sólo uno quedó en estado, que éramos nueve. Dormía muchas noches
en el campo, porque estaba el ganado muy lejos. Me acuerdo que traía muchas
veces los dedillos descabezados y corriendo sangre, y las piemecillas azotadas
del viento venían del mismo modo. Mi madre me decía que se lo ofreciese
a nuestro Señor, que siempre que tropezase, dijese: sea por amor de Dios. Yo
lo hacía así, y parecía que se me aliviaba el dolor, y sentía un gozo grandísimo.
No sabía yo entonces de dónde me venía, aunque no dejaba el alma de
rastrear, porque me acuerdo que me metía por donde había espinas, para
tener qué ofrecer a Dios. En este tiempo era bien pequeñita. Trabajo fue en
el que me vi, cuando casándome a disgusto, me sacaron de aquel paraíso de
deleites que gozaba mi alma en aquel campo. . . . (109-10)
Me decía mi divino enamorado: anda acá a la soledad. Que de buena gana

dejara yo cuando le veía todo cuanto tenía. Me decía esto muchísimas veces,
llamándome con gran ternura, deseoso de gozar el alma a solas. Pero las
ligaduras del matrimonio me detenían. Yo deseaba darle gusto, y me quisiera
ir a estos desiertos, y él me decía que no estaría allí segura. Mas después de
pasar algún tiempo, me manifestó la soledad del alma. A mí me cansaban
mucho mis hermanos, y todos mis parientes. Me cansaban tanto, que quisiera
verme libre de ellos. Acudiendo el Señor a mis deseos, me dijo un día: yo
te sacaré de entre ellos, y te llevaré a lej[an]as tierras, y te verás en la presencia
del Rey. Sea él bendito para siempre, que tal promesa me hizo, y me cumplió;
que me parece que salí de un cautiverio, y me entré en la tierra de los vivientes,
que es la Religión, de la cual me tenía ya dado grandes noticias.
Trabajo padecí con una panadera, que la ayudé tres años a masar. Masá¬
bamos de ordinario dos fanegas, y algunos días, a tres, y la obligada a cernerlo
era yo. Era el cansancio grande, pero más me cansaba a veces el oírla, que
no acudiendo el pan de suerte que hubiese ganancias, se inquietaba, y por
cada cosita, como estaba desasosegada, tomaba nueva inquietud. Tenía ruin
costumbre de maldecir, y en viéndose inquieta, usaba de ella. . . . Después
que murió, lo andaba a ganar adonde quiera que me llamaban, que me daba
Dios entera salud, y buena disposición. Sea alabado por todo.
Tuve también por trabajo a los principios, el quitarme Dios los hijos, que
los quería mucho; y lo más que llegué a sentir, fue el perder el último, que
ya comenzaba a hablar. Le hicieron una cura tan cruel, que basta decir, que
le costó la vida. Sólo me quedó de alivio acordarme que había sido por no
haber yo querido ofender a mi Dios con él que se la hizo, que quiso mi
desgracia se aficionase de mí. Sea el Señor alabado, que me tuvo de su mano,
y al inocente le dio por este medio su gloria eterna, dejándome libre de
cuidados; que no fue lo uno, y lo otro pequeña dicha. Al Señor suplico
muchas veces, me perdone lo mucho que los quería, porque era tanto que
me traían embebecida. Harto me ha servido para la consideración de mi
divino Amante, el haber tenido hijos. El me ha dicho que todos cuantos
padres hay, y ha habido, y habrá, no llegan al amor que nos tiene. Engran¬
decido sea para siempre tan lindo Padre, y tan buen amador. Quién le satis¬
ficiera a su amor, y lo hiciera lenguas, todos los miembros, y anteojos, para
darle por todo gracias, por su infinito amor, que me hallo cada día con nuevas
obligaciones. (111-13)
212 UNTOLD SISTERS
Para haberme de venir a este lugar, tuvo el Señor por bien de quitarme
aquellos deseos que tenía de salir de mi tierra, dejándome en mi voluntad.
Quiero declararme más. Me parece a mí, que como yo tenía dada a su divina
Magestad tantas veces la palabra, de que si me viese libre, que vería como
yo ponía en ejecución el seguirle. Se me quitó el cebo de la devoción sensible
en faltando mi marido, que murió . . . dejándome su legítima para ayuda a
mi dote. Un hermano mío comenzó a tratar un casamiento que se le ofreció.
Me decía que era muy a propósito: por ser hombre muy virtuoso, y que tenía
fama de santo, y había enviudado también al presente. Yo había tenido muy
largas noticias de él, y no quise dejar al Santo de los Santos por aquel
casamiento con aquel hombre, aunque él fuese muy santo. Me fui a mi
confesor, . . . diciéndole que bien sabía él por mis confesiones, cuán lejos
estaba yo de casarme. Le pedí escribiese en mi nombre a una señora de este
lugar a quien yo había dado palabra de servir, si me viese libre, para que
enviase por mí, porque me querían casar, y me hallaba muy afligida. Lo hizo
así. Vinieron por mí; di cuenta a mis hermanos, para que me acompañasen.
Comenzó una mi hermana a llorar, que me amaba tiernamente, y ellos a
decirme palabras de mucho sentimiento: que mirase era locura y que había
de dar mucho que decir, acabado de enterrar mi marido dejarle, aunque ya
le había cumplido el alma. Me refería mucho el casamiento cuán bueno era;
conociendo yo que era mejor el que tenía aceptado. Y no me engañé, porque
dejé al hombre por el Criador, que había criado aquel hombre. . . .
Llegaron aquella noche la gente que yo aguardaba, y a la mañana quiso

Dios ayudarme a que saliese. Procuré salir temprano, porque no lo entendiese
nadie, porque estas cosas nunca falta quien las impide. . . . Con todo esto,
no me pude escapar de una tía mía, que teníamos en lugar de madre. Vino
a medio vestir desolada; comenzó a decirme bañada en lágrimas muchas cosas.
Yo me postré en la tierra, y la pedí perdón de las pesadumbres que la había
dado. Lo que aquí la carne y sangre hacía cuanto es de su parte, lo quiero
dejar en silencio. Tenía unas canas venerables, que a cualquiera que trataba
con ella, se le aficionaba mucho. Mi pecho estuvo invencible, porque estaba
la voluntad determinada muchos años había: aunque al presente, como tengo
dicho, se me retiró el que me había solicitado.
.... (116-18)
Estando otro día en recogimiento en un confesionario de los de San Andrés,

después de haber comulgado, vi un niño de estr^mada belleza, con el mundo
en las manos, como acá le pintan. Estaba desnudo en carnes, y metido en
unas grandísimas llamas de amor. Me dijo: mira, ¿cómo podré yo sosegar,
metido en este fuego? Me parece me dio a entender que me compadeciese
de él, pero como es tan corto el amor que yo tengo, y con tanto límite, ni
pude, ni puedo apagar sus llamas, que son de amor infinito. ¡Ay mi Dios! Y
quién le correspondiera, si quiera como tengo la obligación.
Yendo un día por el camino del mismo Convento de San Andrés a confesar,
y comulgar, se me representó Cristo nuestro bien sobre una mesa larga, del
largo de su Cuerpo Santísimo. Tenía proporción de un hombre de buena
estatura; sus benditas carnes estaban todas acardenaladas y sangrientas; su
Santa Cabeza tenía aquella horrible diadema, con que le suelo ver; le corría
sangre de las llagas de las espinas. Estaba su Magestad tendido como digo
sobre la mesa . . . estaba como hombre muerto. A la mano derecha estaba
otra mesa, y esta mesa era redonda, y estaba sobre ella un gran pedazo de
carne desfilando sangre por una parte y por otra; tenía sobre sí una hermosísima
corona: era redonda, y tenía por el cerco unas piedras preciosísimas de notable
hermosura. Me fue dado a entender el Misterio del Santísimo Sacramento;
y aunque se gastaba aquella Santísima carne que estaba en aquella mesa, era
representación de Cristo bien nuestro que estaba en la otra entero. Cono¬
ciendo en esto, que aunque le comemos, entero se queda, siempre está la
mesa puesta, y depositada su preciosísima sangre. Vi que estaba inclinado
Cristo bien nuestro hacia la otra mesa, aunque tenía representación de hombre
muerto. A mí me pareció que se estaba gozando de ver su misma carne en la
otra mesa. También me pareció, que se gozaba de ver su misma carne coronada
con aquella hermosísima corona de tan gran valor, y que la había ganado a
poder de trabajos con otra de espinas, que le había ceñido, y traspasado sus
santas sienes, y su santo celebro [sic]. Yo, con la luz que el Señor me dio,
alcancé muy bien a entender que esta espantosa corona fue medio en Cristo
bien nuestro para alcanzar la otra, que representaba ser corona de Rey.
.... (132-33)
Libro Segundo
Estando a la reja del coro diciéndose sus vísperas, vi interiormente venir
huyendo un dragón infernal. Veía que huía, y que como iba, volvía la cabeza
atrás, por lo cual eché de ver que iba huyendo de alguien que le corría. A
esto vi una hermosa doncella, que venía con grandísima Magestad y grandeza,
no acelerado el paso, como él iba, sino con gran señorío a paso llano. Conocí
que era Sup[e]riora aquella Señora, tanto, que la conocí por Madre de Dios,
y conocí que tenía dominio sobre aquella bestia sangrienta, que iba espantado
y huyendo de ella, admirado de ver la pureza que hubo en su limpia Con¬
cepción: que como no cayó en la mancha del pecado original, huía el demonio
de ella, temiendo que había de ser vencido por ella . . . (212-13)
Vi otra vez en la reja del coro un demonio, estando en maitines, que

andaba forcejando entre los picos de la reja, haciendo acciones, de que quería
entrar acá. Vino la Magestad de Dios, como en su seguimiento, con una lanza
en las manos, desnudo, todo llagado, mostrando las insignias de su santísima
Pasión. Poniéndose en medio de la reja, tendió sus santísimos brazos, y nos
los echó a todas [las monjas], y acudió a nuestra defensa, aventando aquel
lobo carnicero, cuidando de este su rebaño, como buen Pastor.
Otras veces he visto ángeles, estando en recreación, que andan recreándolas
en medio de ellas; a mí me sirve de consuelo, viendo la providencia de Dios,
el cuidado que tiene de nosotras, sea su Divina Magestad alabado, que tanto
nos ama, y tan deseoso de que le amemos, que amor con amor se paga, y
él se da por pagado tanto que ayuda al alma con manifestaciones. . . .
(244-45)
... Le vi [al Espíritu Santo] en figura de paloma, por encima de mí,

estando recogida. Le vi interiormente en su misma virtud, teniendo las alas
214 UNTOLD SISTERS
recogidas, inclinado él hacia abajo, como que se venía a mí. Vi que tenía
las patitas coloradas, y el piquito también, del cual salían unas hebritas de
seda colorada, representación de fuego, con que estaba inflamando a mi alma.
Me había manifestado su Divina Magestad que es fuego, y que somos nosotros
cenizas, y que anda encubierto en nosotros. Me dijo más, que cuando se
levanta el viento, su ave del divino Espíritu Santo, y abatiendo él las alas,
vuelan las cenizas con el aire, tanto que viene a quedarse en espíritu el alma,
abrasada con el divino fuego, que es él; yo tengo experimentado cómo viene
a quedar el cuerpo con estos levantamientos de espíritu. Estando yo en la
cocina, siendo Provisora la Madre Isabel de Santa Mónica, que ahora al
presente es mi Prelada, de sólo pasar de una parte a otra, me derribaba con
su aire; verdad es, que es mujer de buen cuerpo. Reparando yo en que también
tengo yo buen cuerpo, aunque no es tanto, a mí me causaba admiración el
verme caer en la tierra de sólo su aire. Me dijo mi divino Maestro: mira, que
el cuerpo no es más que una apariencia, por que tiene la fuerza del espíritu,
y tu fuerza está donde tú amas, y no adonde tú vives. Con esto que el Señor
me enseñó, conocí que se viene a quedar el alma en espíritu, no teniendo
fuerzas las cenizas del cuerpo. Hoy día, como la Prelada me ha mandado
hacer esto, se refresca mi memoria, como fue buen testigo. También me ha
dicho su divina Magestad, que es fuego, y que vino a atraerlo a la tierra,
para aprehender los corazones de los hombres, y que quiere que ardan. Tam¬
bién me ha dicho que, que si hubiese alguien, que de todo su corazón le ame,
que vendrá él, y su Padre, con el Espíritu Santo, y harán morada en él de
asiento, tanto, que conocerá el mundo adonde ellos habitan.
.... (248-49)
Me acuerdo, que me mandó un confesor mío, que pidiese al Señor por él;
yo me hallé indigna de hacerlo, por cuanto le tenía por alma santa, y así le
dije que era muy gran pecadora, como de verdad lo era, y soy. El me dijo,
que con potestad de confesor me mandaba que lo hiciese. A mí me estremeció
aquella palabra; dije lo haría. Eui desde el confesionario al coro, que no lo
quise dilatar más. Me postré delante del Santísimo Sacramento, para hacer
lo que mi confesor me había mandado. Recibí una grandísima merced de su
Divina Magestad, porque estando pidiendo por mi confesor, como digo, me
mostró su Divina Magestad su corazón muy para envidiar, y para dar gracias
a Dios, que le crió. Le vi inflamado en un ardentísimo fuego, y cercado de
ángeles que le acompañaban. Veía que en la virtud de Dios que le crió, subía
y bajaba con grandísima ligereza. Conocí muy bien que estaba abrasado en
el amor Divino, y que subía con los afectos de amor a su Dios, y su Criador.
Bendito él sea que le dio en esta vida tan gran don de amor; no digo quién
es, porque vive todavía; sólo diré aquí un refrán, que se dice en esta tierra,
para decir cuantas ventajas hace una persona a otra; dicen: que va mucho
de Pedro a Pedro . . . (278)
.... hemos de emplear todos nuestros sentidos, y este principal miembro

de la lengua, en alabar a Dios Nuestro Señor que nos crió. Qué dicha tiene,
el que tiene buena lengua, y qué desdicha le corrió al pobre que la tiene
mala, porque no hay espada de dos filos que tanto corre, como corta una
mala lengua, y cercena. No hay freno que la detenga, si de su inclinación es
desenfrendada [sic], y a mi parecer, que el Señor como eterna sabiduría, la

previno para su guarda de dos puertas: la una de los labios, y la otra cerrándola
de huesos. También la sepultó su Magestad en una sepultura, que es forma
de sepultura, para con eso detenerla. Mas, ¡ay, qué desdicha! que parece que
no nos bastan todos estos medios. Dios nos libre que comience uno a murmurar
de otros, que no parará hasta quemarle la estatua, con el calor encendido de
su mala lengua, y plegue a Dios que no haya quien ayude a echar leña en el
fuego, que antes ayudaremos a echar leña, que no apagar el fuego, con el
agua de la Caridad. Mirad, amados míos, que es un vicio éste, vicioso y sin
ningún provecho al alma. Pero este maldito vicio por un poco de gusto que
halla en sí, para vengarse de los demás, quitándolos el buen crédito que
tienen, no sabe qué medios tomar para estar siempre murmurando de unos,
y de otros. ¡Ay, que de ellos llena a los infiernos su desenfrenada lengua!
Porque así como es menester restituir la hacienda mal quitada, para pasar de
esta vida a la otra, no es menos necesario restituir la honra. Y así se tenga
por avisado, él que la hubiere quitado, que no entrará en el reino de Dios,
si no la vue[l)ve a su dueño. Más estrecha cuenta se nos ha de pedir por este
camino de la honra de los prójimos, que aun de la hacienda. No lo digo
porque no hay obligación para restituir, porque hasta el cabo de la agujera
se pedirá estrecha cuenta; lo pongo en primer lugar, porque es más grave el
pecado, y tiene más malicia; porque parece que el murmurar se está vengando
con su misma lengua. La Ley de Dios se encierra en dos Mandamientos, y a
mi parecer, todos los vicios se encierran en una mala lengua .... Miremos,
que por la puerta donde entra el Santísimo Sacramento de la Eucaristía al
alma, no es razón que salga por aquella misma puerta, palabras de nuestra
lengua, con que sea nuestro Dios ofendido.
Ea, hijos de mi alma, redimidos con sudores, y sangre de Cristo nuestro
hien, ... No os olvidéis de esta miserable Madre . . . . Yo os doy mi palabra
de Madre, y Madre pecadora, de no me olvidar jamás de vosotros ... es mi
gusto llorar por mis hijos, sin consuelo, para imitar en mi llanto a la Hermosa
Rachel. Yo enderezaré a mi Dios mis suspiros, y lágrimas, pidiéndole, que
por su amor, me favorezca a mis queridos hijos, y a mí con ellos .... el
mismo recuerdo que hace nuestra Santa madre la Iglesia al hombre, ése mismo
hace a la mujer; y así se tengan por avisadas, porque también necesitamos
las mujeres, de procurar el remedio para nuestras almas, como los hombres,
y si no más, no menos. Que aunque soy mujer, no quiero volver por las
mujeres, que antes, por serlo yo, y por la parte que me ha alcanzado de ser
tan ruien [sic] como soy, pudiera decir mucho mal, pero al fin, todo el mundo
es uno, y lo mismo digo por la naturaleza humana, que por ser toda una,
estamos todos, hombres, y mujeres, sujetos a unas mismas caídas.
.... (320-22)
Lo que es a los Señores Letrados, por lo mucho que tienen de ciencia, no

tengo yo, como soy mujer, y tan miserable, que poderlos decir: sólo diré, que
a veces el mucho saber engaña la naturaleza humana; y a mi parecer, el saber
morir, es la mayor ciencia, y la mayor hazaña . . . Miren de lo que le sirvió
al Rey Salomón su mucho saber, que está en duda su salvación, con ser gracia
que recibió del mismo Dios, la sabiduría que tuvo. Y así, no se fíe nadie de
su mucho saber, porque no venga a semejante duda, y desdicha, que por tal
2i6 untold sisters
se puede tener, de un hombre que tenía recibida la sabiduría de Dios, y le

ofendió con la idolatría, mirando más a dar a gusto a sus mujeres, que no al
verdadero Dios, que le había criado, y dorado con tanta sabiduría, y riquezas,
como le dio ... Y así, aunque no tengo letras (más que las que Cristo mi
divino Maestro me ha enseñado) me atrevo a decir, que el que quisiere entrar
por diferente camino en el Reino de Dios, entienda que va errado.
También quiero pedir por amor de Dios nuestro Señor, en cuya presencia
estoy, aunque indigna, que se aparten los sabios de tratar con Herejes, por
el peligro tan grande que hay de nuestra flaqueza, que como es inclinada a
sus comodidades, no sea que dé cré[d]ito a los Herejes; que aunque a mi
parecer alcanzan la luz, no quieren sujetarse a la ley de nuestro Dios, y Señor,
por vivir en la suya, que es ley de anchura, y de gusto para ellos, que la han
intentado, negando la verdad . . . Dios nos libre de semejante obstinación
de pecar. Hola, hola, hombre, mira que has perdido el camino, ¿dónde vas?
¡Ay, que no vuelve, que no lo oye! ¡Ay de mí, que no hay peor sordo, que
el que no quiere oír! . . . (324-25)
[Se dirige a sus “hijos.”]

... Va para treinta años, que la Real Magestad de Dios nuestro Señor,
me hizo merced de darme cargo, de que os ame, haciéndome madre vues¬
tra, . . . que estando yo con ansias de hijos, me los prometió, y me fueron
dados de su liberalísima mano. Acabada de comulgar, en el tiempo que estaba
casada, hicisteis tanto asiento y aprensión en el alma, que comencé a tener
grandes cuidados de vuestro remedio, y salvación. Buscaba medios para verme
con el Señor a solas, para poder tratar con él, como con mi Padre, y vuestro,
qué camino llevaría para darle buena cuenta de vosotros. Su divina Magestad
lo tomó a cuenta suya, quitándome los impedimentos que tenía en el siglo,
para poder gozarme con vosotros. Luego que me vi viuda, dentro de tres
meses, me desterré yo misma por vosotros, saliendo de mi tierra, con deseos
de aprovecharos en algo, sin volver jamás a ella, deseosa de padecer trabajos,
y afrentas por vosotros, a reverencia de Cristo nuestro Dios . . . (327)
... Yo voy con brevedad, y no quisiera dejar de dar algún punto sobre
los confesores, advirtiendo a todos les obedezcan, dejándose en las manos de
Dios, sin estar vag[u]eando en si saben o no saben si tienen letras, o si les
falta la experiencia, porque bien podrá faltarle todo esto, y no acertar él por
sí mismo, pero el alma no desacertará en obedecer a lo que su confesor le
ordenare. Créame que es un camino muy acertado, el sujetar el penitente su
juicio al parecer del confesor, obedeciendo al mismo Dios en él ... Y si les
parece que han menester otro confesor de más letras, miren que puede ser
tentación del demonio, para por ese camino inquietar el alma, porque no
todos pueden estar en Salamanca, para gozar de aquellos maestros aprobados
que tiene la Magestad de Dios, depositados en aquella universidad; pero el
Señor los puso allí para dar luz, se quedó con la misma luz, y potestad que
los dio a ellos; y así, aunque sea un confesor simple, le puede su Magestad
infundir tan gran luz, que no le haga falta las letras para encaminar las almas.
Y si les pareciere mal esta razón, véase si les hizo falta las letras a los Santos
Apóstoles, y Discípulos de Cristo bien nuestro, para dar luz a las almas,
aunque no tenían letras. No digo yo que no es bueno uno y otro; pero no
en todas partes se puede gozar, y así vuelvo a decir, que no deje nadie a sus
confesores, pareciéndole que les falta el talento necesario para su aprove¬

chamiento. . . . (381-82)
... Se me ofreció, como otras veces me ha pasado, que está reengendrando

el padre Eterno a su Hijo el Verbo; y entendí esto, que como la Magestad de
Dios asimiló en todo a sí mismo la imagen del hombre, cuando la formó, así
con las potencias que le dio, le dio juntamente potestad para que pueda tener
generación espiritual, ayudado con el favor, y gracia de Dios nuestro Señor,
porque obra la memoria representando, y el entendimiento conociendo, y la
voluntad amando; y como la cosa amada es un bien comunicativo, obra, y
se comunica al alma por amor, y gracia, como ya tengo dicho; ¡O bondad
de Dios! que en damos a aquella hermosa pieza, que son memoria, voluntad,
y entendimiento, nos diste de una vez todas las cosas juntas, pues con esta
valerosa pieza atraemos al alma a Dios nuestro Señor, y le concebimos en el
alma. . . . (384-85)
Life of the Venerable Madre Isabel de Jesús, Augustinian Recollect of

the Convento de San Juan Bautista in the Village of Arenas. Dictated by
Her, with an Additional Account of Her Most Blessed Death.
Book One
[My mother] made me marry (as I have said) against my will . . . the
reason being, that the man to whom they married me v/as many years older
than I. 1 say this, that you may understand that my not wanting to marry
was no matter of virtue on my part, but due to the difference in our ages. . . .
I would like to make myself understood; I mean, as I had been raised in the
countryside, and they brought me to town, and now dressed me as a grown
woman, so the world lured me away, by means of my very own relatives,
who, complaining greatly to me of my mother, told me how poorly she had
used me. The same was said by all the people of that place, because the man
was so much older than 1, and had no teeth; so that even the boys flirted
with me, for so God our Lord allowed. . . .
Oh Lord, what unrest was in my soul!. . . . Oh, how 1 missed the peace
of my soul, which once I inwardly enjoyed in those desert lands with the
sheep I tended! Oh, what a struggle! . . . Had not my confessors ordered me
to hold back, I would hete relate all that this Babylon of a world did to me;
and how solicitous were the devils, who took human creatures as their in¬
struments to would tell me how beautiful I was, and how ill-used. . . . 1
wished to undergo full willingly the heavy burden of marriage; but my weak
nature, so inclined to evil and to its own appetites, waged a great battle
against me. Oh how obstinate! How cruel an enemy! How strong is the Devil!
Oh, what a household thief! . . . (12-14)
If someone, someday should see this, it might be noticed how great a

difference there was between my early life, and my life after they made me
marry. I spent twenty years, or thereabouts, in that torment, until my beloved
Saint Joseph, as the Lord allowed, did favor me by granting me this great
ease, that when I saw my husband, he appeared to me as the Patriarch [Saint
2i8 untold sisters
Joseph] himself. And with this I felt new love for him, because 1 was greatly
devoted to Saint Joseph; I had sucked this devotion at my mother’s breast,
for she was most devoted to that glorious Saint, telling me often that when
the Mother of God was a little girl they betrothed her to him, when he was
of a very mature age. She told me this to encourage me to bear my burden;
for she knew full well it was heavy, though 1 would not let on 1 knew of my
ordeal, so as not to make her sad. I worked very hard to hide my dislike,
trying to show my husband willingness and love. 1 went to great lengths for
this, trying to overcome my feelings, putting my arm across the pillow so
that he could rest his head upon it, for I felt a huge emptiness in my soul;
it seemed to me this came from the fact that 1 felt no love for him. . . .
... He contracted a serious and painful illness; it lasted six years, afflicting
him more some times than at others; he became so deathly ill that it was
necessary to give him the last rites. Though the Lord had given me such a
fine opportunity to practice charity, 1 let it go to waste, because 1 bore it
impatiently. As the illness was so long and wearisome, his bed-clothes would
rot, because he could not raise himself up, and as my years were so few, my
patience was but short. . . . (16-17)
. . . May the Lord, being who He is, give me His strength and grace, that
I may succeed in saying what befell me that night. . . . The Lord showed
me many souls, thick as the stars; I saw them high in the sky, raised above
the earth, all holding lights in their hands; 1 saw how these [lights] were
snuffed out, so that they were left almost dead, leaving these souls in darkness,
though not entirely. 1 saw a most beautiful damsel, with a child in her arms;
she carried with her a vast light. She went about amongst those souls, and
with the light she carried in her hands, she was kindling all the other lights.
And though they were so nearly snuffed out that they no longer shone, they
all were left with the most brilliant light; and they shone so, and cast much
splendor and beauty, that it was glorious and a great consolation to see them;
they shone so that it looked to me like heaven. It occurred to me that this
maiden was Faith, and the child she carried in her arms seemed to me Hope,
and in that lovely light 1 seemed to see the Charity of God, which comes
to illumine us that we may not perish.
With the great light those souls did hold, 1 was able to see others, quite
different from the first, some ways off: they were in the greatest darkness. I
saw them in the form of dead bodies. It seemed to me these were souls that
were in mortal sin, and because they were in God’s disgrace, they went about
without light in those dark shadows. 1 saw that they had no heads, for just
so have those souls that are distant from God always appeared to me, for as
they do not make prop»er use of the abilities the Lord most graciously gave
them, they are like tree stumps, blackened and burned.
. . . Then there came a horrible demon ... he did not want to admit
defeat; at this moment they penned him in, so that he could not escape from
there. I began to reason with this haughty and prideful demon, telling him;
“See how good is our God and our creator; think how He has humbled
Himself, to let all sins pass through him; think how humble and merciful
He is, for He pardons whoever returns to Him; think too of the offense 1
have done Him by my fault, and yours, for you have helped me to do wrong;
but though I have been what His Majesty knows me to be, 1 have found
such a pleasant welcome in Him, that it seems He does not even remember
the great offenses 1 have done Him; and as He has forgiven me, so He will
forgive you; if you want me to ask this of Him, in spite of how you have
offended Him, and you ask His pardon as well, 1 know He will not deny it;
for 1 know His nature to he such that He does want us to ask Him.” The
demon began to rage, unable to contain his haughty pride, telling me with
his head, and by the gestures he made, that he wanted no such pardon.
While he was in this fury, I saw them fling a dart at him; he had the form
of a dog, and was extraordinarily large; they wounded him in the fore-
shoulder; it seemed to me they pierced his heart. 1 saw the great wound he
received, and as if he were made of flesh and blood, he began to bleed, but
in spite of all this, he stood there obstinate. It made me pity him, for I wished
that none should lack God; it moved me to pity many times to see his great
perdition, but after 1 saw his haughty ingratitude, 1 no longer felt sorry for
him, seeing that immense goodness, which justly gave [these lost souls] the
punishment that is theirs. (46-48)
Another time, the Lord granted me his favor, and I saw Him with the
eyes of my soul, from behind. His back, with the wounds that were in it,
looked like a sieve, and it broke my heart to see him, so badly that I longed
to turn away, for 1 myself was the cause of such awful torment, on account
of my great sins. He called me with His usual charity, saying: “Don’t go, for
you see, in exchange for your love, it no longer hurts me.” Blessed be His
heart for the charity it holds. Then 1 understood His meaning just as 1 shall
here relate: as 1 myself was the mother of children, when 1 came to childbed,
and to my labor, I suffered greatly; but it was a suffering with love. And later,
when 1 held the child bom of my womb, 1 entirely forgot the labor that child
had put me to. Because in exchange for the pleasure of the babe, 1 considered
all labor and suffering as well spent indeed, because love had triumphed in
my heart. It occurred to me that the same thing that had happened to me,
happened first to Christ our blessed Lord. Then it seemed to me that it was
the pain of childbirth that His Divine Majesty suffered there on the most
blessed Cross, so as to give us new life, freeing us from no life, to the life of
His divine grace. And after He had suffered the pain of His most bitter
Passion, he now became a Redeemer of souls, which is to say, a Father . . .
(78-79)
Another time after that, to the glory of God our Lord, one Palm Saturday,
I took the broom to brush down the walls of my house. I said to the Lord,
that I wished to sweep the home I lived in; and I entreated Him that He
might make clean my soul, as His own dwelling and home. As soon as I told
Him this. He carried me away in rapture; it seemed to me I struck the roof
of the house. And when I came to, I found myself dancing and turning about
in the air, and saying: “Just as he caused the sore, my God above, just as He
caused the sore, so He gave us the cure”—and I was dancing in perfect time.
Then suddenly I came to my senses, and recalling that it was Palm Saturday,
I began complaining to my Lord, telling Him to take heed of my great folly,
for there was His Divine Majesty so close to His most blessed Passion, and
here was I dancing, as happy as could be. He said to me: “You do not know
what has happened here, but I must tell you that in Heaven there has been
220 UNTOLD SISTERS
great rejoicing and celebration, much to my liking; and so you have taken
part in our joy.”. . . (91)
. . . With these very eyes, which must some day swallow dust, 1 saw, upon
the table of a husband and wife, a demon which was driving them to be bad
husband and wife to each other. They were seated at table to eat, and with
great anger they said very bad words to one another; and if the words of one
were bad, the words of the other were worse, provoked by that devil which
sat on their table. He was black, of short stature but great strength; he had
a weapon in his hands, with which he was firing upon them, and wounding
them; when he left off firing at one, he went after the other; and by what
he spewed from his mouth, 1 saw very well what poison our cruel enemy was
shooting into their hearts. There was no way to restore them to reason, for
they were so caught up in that infernal rage, that they were incapable of it.
1 also saw another demon leaning heavily upon one side of a pack-mount,
so as to twist its burden, now upon one side and now upon the other, so
that the poor man who walked beside would lose his patience. (100)
Trials 1 went through, if they deserve that name, as 1 was growing up from
the time 1 was just a little girl exposed to all the rough weather under heaven.
For it was scarcely dawn when they would send me out to tend the flocks,
barefoot sometimes, over the snow and the frost; not because my mother
wanted this; but she had been left with eight children, and at times she could
not manage, even though she tried, for only one found a position, and there
were nine of us. 1 slept many nights in the fields, because the flocks were far
from home. As I recall, many times the tips of my toes were split open and
running with blood, and my little legs, whipped by the wind, were in the
same sad way. My mother told me that I should make it an offering to Our
Lord and that whenever I tripped, 1 should say: May it he for the love of
God. 1 used to do this, and it seemed to relieve my pain, and 1 would feel
great joy. In those days I didn’t know where this joy came from, although
my soul never ceased trying to hunt it down, because I remember how I
would go in amongst the thorns, so as to have something to offer to God.
In those days I was very small. It was a real trial I found myself in when,
marrying me off against my will, they took me from the paradise of delights
that my soul enjoyed in those fields. . . . (109-10)
My divine Lover would say to me; “Come here, where we can he alone.”
Whenever I saw Him, I would gladly leave behind everything I had. He said
this many times, calling me very tenderly, for He was longing to enjoy my
soul all alone. But the bonds of marriage held me back. I longed to please
Him, and so I wanted to go off into the desert lands; but He told me that I
would not be safe there. But after some time had passed. He revealed to me
the solitude of the soul. My brothers and sisters, and indeed all my relatives,
wore me out. They wore me out so that I wanted to be free of them all.
Attending to my desires, the Lord said to me one day: “I shall take you from
among them, and I shall carry you to distant lands, and you shall find yourself
standing before the King.” May He be blessed forever, for He made me this
promise, and He fulfilled his word: for it seems to me I escaped imprisonment.
and entered the land of the living, which is to say, our Order, of which He
had already brought me good news.
I suffered a great trial with a baker-woman, whom 1 helped for three years
with her kneading. We usually kneaded two full measures' of flour, and some
days three, and 1 was the one who had to sift it all. That was wearisome,
but it was even more wearisome for me to listen to her; for if not enough
bread were sold to bring a profit, she would fret, and because she was anxious,
every little thing would make her fret all the more. She had a vile habit of
cursing; and when she was fretful, she would indulge it . . . After she died,
I went seeking a living wherever it might be offered, for God gave me sound
health, and a good disposition. May He be praised for everything.
I also endured the trial, early on, of having God take away my children
whom I loved dearly. And most painful to me was the loss of the youngest,
who was just beginning to talk. They inflicted such a cruel remedy upon the
child, that suffice it to say, it cost him his life. I was left with only this
consolation, that it all came to pass because I had not wanted to offend my
God with the man who carried out the cure upon my child, for as my
misfortune would have it, he took a liking to me. Praise the Lord, who held
me in His hand, for in this way he gave the blessed innocent His eternal
glory, and left me free of all cares, as both the one and the other are no
small blessing indeed. I often beg the Lord to forgive me for all the love 1
bore my children; 1 loved them so, that they cast a spell upon me. My having
had children has served me full well in the contemplation of my divine Lover.
He has told me that taken all together, all the parents there are, or ever
were, or ever will be, still do not equal the love He has for us. May He be
exalted forever, as such a fine Father, and such a good Lover. Would that
we could fulfill His love, and turn all the parts of our bodies to tongues, and
clear lenses, to give Him full thanks for everything, for His infinite love;
because every day, I find myself more deeply beholden to Him. (111-13)
To bring me to this place, the Lord saw fit to quit me of these desires 1
once had to leave my own land, leaving me at liberty to follow my own will.
I want to explain what 1 mean more fully. It seems to me, that 1 had many
times vowed to His Divine Majesty, that if 1 should be set free. He would
then see how I should set about following Him. He took from me the bait
of sensory devotion in taking my husband, who died . . . leaving me, as his
legitimate wife, an inheritance for my dowry. A brother of mine began to
speak of a marriage opportunity that had arisen. He told me that this would
be most suitable, being a very virtuous man, renowed as a saint, and like me
recently widowed. I had heard at great length about him; and I had no wish
to leave the Saint of saints for marriage with that man, however saintly he
might be. I went to my confessor . . . saying, that he well knew by my
confessions just how far 1 was from marrying. 1 asked him to write in my
name to a lady of this place, whom 1 had promised to serve if ever 1 should
become free, that she should send for me, because they wanted me to marry,
and I was in great distress. He did so. They came for me, and 1 told my
brothers, so that they might accompany me. One of my sisters began to cry.
I. Translator’s note; “fanega,” a measure equivalent to about 1.60 bushels.

222 UNTOLD SISTERS
for she loved me dearly; and my brothers began to speak words of great
feeling, saying that 1 should see that this was madness and would make people
talk, to leave my husband as soon as he was buried, although 1 had already
fulfilled my obligation to his soul. I was told many times how good this
marriage was; 1, knowing full well that the one 1 had already accepted was
better. And 1 was not deceived, because 1 left the man for the Creator, who
had created that very man. . . .
That night the people 1 awaited did arrive, and in the morning it pleased
God to help me leave. 1 arranged to leave very early, so that no one would
know, for in these cases there is always someone to put a stop to it. . . . But
for all that, 1 could not avoid one of my aunts, who was like a mother to us
all. She came running out, half-dressed, her face bathed in tears, and began
to say many things to me. 1 prostrated myself upon the earth, and asked her
forgiveness for the troubles 1 had caused her. How flesh and blood here did
whatever they could, I wish to leave unsaid. She had a head of venerable
white hairs; and whoever spoke with her took a great liking to her. My heart
was invincible, as my will had been determined for many years; though at
that time, as 1 have said. He who had called me, then withdrew from me.
.... (ii6-r8)
One day when 1 was in recollection in one of the confessionals in [the

convent of] San Andrés, after taking communion, 1 saw a boy of extreme
beauty, with the world in his hands, just as they paint Him around here. He
was quite naked, and stood among great flames of love. He asked me: “How
shall 1 rest, here in this fire?” It seemed to me that He was saying that 1
should have compassion for Him; but as my love is so short, and so limited,
1 could not nor can 1 extinguish His flames, which are of infinite love. Oh,
my God! And how might 1 ever repay Him, in any way even close to the
obligation that is mine.
One day as 1 went along the road to that same Convento de San Andrés
to confess and take Communion, 1 saw before me Christ Our Good, lying
upon a large table which was the same length as His most blessed Body. He
had the proportions of a man of goodly size; His blessed flesh was all bruised
and bloody; His holy head wore that tetrihle diadem with which 1 often see
Him; blood flowed down from the wounds made by the thorns: His Majesty
was lying, as 1 say, upon the table ... He was like a dead man. To the right
was another table, and this table was round, and upon it was a great piece
of flesh oozing blood from one side and from anpther; it had upon it a most
beautiful crown, which was round, and had in its circlet some precious stones
of considerable beauty. Thus 1 was given to undetstand the Mystery of the
Most Blessed Sacrament; and although the most blessed meat was spoiling
upon that table, it represented Christ Our Good, who lay upon the other
table whole and entire. By this 1 knew that although we do eat Him, He
remains whole, and the table is always set, and His most precious blood in
its place. 1 saw that Christ Our Good was leaning somewhat toward the
second table, although He was shown as a dead man. To me it seemed that
He was pleased to see His own flesh on the other table. It also seemed that
He was pleased to see His flesh crowned with that beautiful crown of such
great price; and that He had won it by dint of His trials with the other one.
of thorns, which had girded Him, piercing His blessed temples, and His Holy
brain. And with the light of knowledge given me by the Lord, I came to
understand quite well that this frightful crown was a means by which Christ
our good did reach the other crown, which was shown as that of a King.
(132-33)
Book Two
Standing at the grille before the choir, saying Vespers, I did inwardly see
a hellish dragon come fleeing; I saw that it fled, and that as it went it turned
its head to look behind, by which I could see that it was fleeing from someone
who came running after it. And at this, I saw a beautiful damsel, who came
with great majesty and grandeur, not hurrying her pace as he did, but going
with great dignity, with an even pace; I knew that this Lady was a Superior,
of such rank, indeed, that I knew her for the very Mother of God, and knew
that she had dominion over that fearsome and bloody beast, who went fearful
and fleeing before her, so astonished to see the purity of her spotless Con¬
ception: for as she did not fall in the stain of original sin, that demon fled
from her, afraid that he would be defeated by her . . . (212—13)
Another time I saw a devil upon the grille of the choir, when I was at
matins; it was striving against the tips of the bars upon the grille, and making
gestures to show that it wanted to enter in here. Then came God’s Majesty,
as if in its pursuit, with a lance in His hands, naked and all wounded, showing
the emblems of His most blessed Passion. Placing Himself in the middle of
the grille. He extended His most blessed arms, and opened them to all of us
[the nuns], and came to out defense, driving out that blood-thirsty wolf and
caring for this His flock, like a good Shepherd.
At othet times I have seen angels, when I was at recreation, who go about
among the nuns, giving them recreation; this is a consolation to me, seeing
the care God’s providence does take of us [the Sisters]; may His Divine Majesty
be praised, who so [oves us and so desires that we should love Him; for love
is repaid with love, and He considers Himself well paid, so much so that He
helps the soul with visions. . . . (244-45)
... I saw the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove, just above me, when I
was in recollection; I saw it inwardly in its own virtue, with its wings drawn
in,^ leaning downwards, as if it were coming toward me. I saw that its little
claws were red, and its little beak as well, from which there hung some little
strands of reddish silk: the representation of fire, with which it was inflaming
my soul. His Divine Majesty thus had shown me that He is fire, and that
we are ashes, and that He goes about all covered with us. He told me,
moreover, that when the gentle breeze of His divine Spirit does blow, and
He beats His wings, the ashes fly upon the breeze, so that at last the soul
comes to be spirit, burned with the divine fire, which is Himself; I have
experienced what happens to the body after those uprisings of spirit. Once
2. Translator’s note: The author here uses the same word, “recogida," to describe
her state of “recogimiento, ” or meditative recollection, and the bird’s wings.

224 UNTOLD SISTERS
I was in the kitchen, when Madre Isabel de Santa Monica was Cellaress,
who is now my Mother Superior, and by no more than passing from one side
to the other, she knocked me down with the breeze of her movement; the
truth is, she is a woman of goodly size. Upon considering that I too am of
goodly size, though not quite so large, it caused me great astonishment that
I should fall to the ground from no more than her breeze. My divine Master
said to me: “Consider, how the body is no more than appearance, for it is
the spirit that has power, and your power is where you love, and not where
you live.” By this which the Lord did teach me, I understood that the soul
comes to be spirit, for the ashes of the body have no power. Today, as the
Mother Superior has ordered me to tell this, my memory is refreshed, as it
was a good witness. His Divine Majesty has also told me that He is fire, and
that He came to bring this fire to the earth, to seize the hearts of men, and
that He wants them to bum. He has also told me, that if there is someone
who feels for Him a most heartfelt love. He will come, and His father, with
the Holy Spirit, and they will make their dwelling place in that person so
comfortably that the world will know where they do abide.
.... (248-49)
I remember that a confessor of mine ordered that I should petition the

Lord on his behalf; I felt myself unworthy to do it, in that I considered him
a holy soul, and so I told him that I was a very great sinner, as in truth I
was, and still am. He told me that by virtue of his powers as confessor he
ordered me to do it. Those words made me tremble; I said I would do it. I
went from the confessional to the choir, not wanting to delay any longer. I
prostrated myself before the most Blessed Sacrament, to do what my confessor
had ordered. Then I received a very great favor from His Divine Majesty,
for as I was asking on behalf of my confessor, as I say. His Divine Majesty
showed me the heart of this man as one most greatly to be envied, and for
which God who created him should be thanked. I saw him wrapped up in a
very hot fire, and surrounded by the angels who accompanied him. I saw
that in the virtue of God, who created him, his heart rose and fell most
lightly; I knew full well that it burned with divine love, and that it rose with
loving fondness towards his God and Creator. Blessed be He who gave him
such a great gift of love in this life; I do not say who this man is, for he still
lives; here I shall only say a proverb, which is said in these parts to say how
many more good qualities one person may have than another; they say: “One
Peter is not like another” ... (278)
... we must use all our faculties, and most especially the tongue, in praise
of God our Lord who created and cared for us. How fortunate is he who has
a good tongue, and what ill luck fell to him, who has an evil one; for there
is no two-edged sword that can do such damage, or that so cuts and slices
as does an evil tongue. There is no bridle that can restrain it, if by inclination
it is unrestrained, and indeed it seems to me that the Lord, in His infinite
wisdom, saw to it that the tongue should for its safe-keeping have two gates:
the first being the lips, and the other, having enclosed it in bone. And too
did His Majesty bury it in a tomb, for it is shaped like a tomb, so as thus to
hold it back. But alas, what misfortune! For it seems that all these measures
do not suffice for us. God forbid, that a man should begin to speak ill of
others, for he will not stop until he has blackened their reputations with the
fiery heat of his evil tongue; and may it please God there be no one to heap
wood on the blaze, for sooner will we help to heap on more wood, than to
douse the fire with the water of charity. Beware, my dear ones, for what a
vice is this, so wicked and of no benefit to the soul. But this cursed vice [is
indulged] all for the trifling pleasure it offers, to take revenge on others,
depriving them of their good name, and does not know what measures to
take next so as to be always speaking ill of this one, and of that one. Oh,
how many are condemned to hell-fires by their unchecked tongues! For just
as we must restore ill-gotten property, in order to pass from this life to the
next, so must we restore honor itself. And thus any man who has stolen
another s honor, should be advised that he shall not enter into the Kingdom
God unless he return it to its rightful owner. For He shall make us render
closer account of this path, of [respect for] our neighbors’ honor, than even
of their property. 1 do not mean to say that there is no obiigation to restore
property [as well], for down to the very bottom of the well shall we be tequired
to render close account; but 1 put the other in first place, because it is the
graver sin, and holds more malice; for it seems that slander is punished by
the tongue itself. The Law of God is contained in two Commandments, and
to my thinking, all of the vices are contained in one evil tongue . . . Beware,
that through the door where the Most Blessed Sacrament of the Eucharist
does enter the soul, there be no cause that by that same door there should
escape words of our tongue that might give offense to God.
Come then, my beloved children, redeemed by the sweat and blood of
Christ Our Good . . . Do not forget your wretched Mother ... 1 give you
my word as Mother, this sinning Mother, never to forget any of you ... it
is my delight to weep for my children, inconsolably, so as to imitate the
beautiful Rachel with my weeping. 1 shall address my sighs and tears to God,
asking him for the sake of His love to favor my children for me, and me
with them. . . . The same reminder [“Dust thou art’’] which our holy Church
makes to man, she makes to woman; and thus women should be advised, for
they too are needed to procure salvation for our souls, as are men, and if
indeed no more so, neither any less. For though I be a woman, 1 have no
wish to take women’s part; rather indeed because 1 am one, and because of
the lot that has fallen to me, being as vile as 1 am, 1 could speak much ill;
but after all, the world is one, and 1 say the same of human nature, that it
is all one, and so are all—men, and women—subject to the same lapses.
.... (320-22)
Of that which pertains to the learned gentlemen, with all their great
knowledge, 1, being a woman and so lowly, cannot speak to them; 1 will
only say, that sometimes great knowledge does deceive human nature; and
it seems to me that knowing how to die is the greatest science, and the most
valiant deed . . . Consider what good his great knowledge did for King Sol¬
omon, for his very salvation is in doubt, although the wisdom he possessed
was a grace he received from God Himself. And so let no one confide in
great knowledge, lest such a one come to similar doubt and misfortune, for
so we may consider it in a man who had received God’s own wisdom, yet
226 UNTOLD SISTERS
did offend Him with idolatry, thinking more of giving pleasure to his women,
than to his true God, who had created him and gilded him with such wisdom
and riches as He gave [Solomon] . . . And thus, though I have no learning
(other than that which Christ our divine master has taught me), I dare to
say that he who wishes to enter by another way into the Kingdom of God,
should know that he goes in error.
And next I wish to plead, for the love of God our Lord before whom 1
stand, though so unworthily, that wise men should shun all conversation
with heretics, because of the grave danger caused by our human weakness,
that inclined as it is to its own comforts, it may not be persuaded by these
heretics; for although it seems to me they reach the light of understanding,
they are not willing to submit to the law of our God and Lord, preferring
rather to live by their own, which is a law of laxity and of their own pleasure,
for they have tried it, denying the truth . . . God deliver us from such
stubborn determination to sin. Hallo, hallo, good man, see here, for you
have lost your way; where are you going? Alas, he does not turn back, he
does not hear! Woe is me; there is no one deafer, than the man who will
not hear! . . . (324-25)
[She addresses her “children.”]

... It is nearly thirty years ago that God our Lord, His Royal Majesty,
granted me the favor of giving me this charge, that I should love you, and
He made me your Mother ... for when I so longed to have children. He
promised them to me, and they were given me by His most generous hand.
After I had taken communion, in the days when I was married, you would
so take possession and cause uneasiness in my soul, that I began to feel grave
concern for your help and your salvation. I would seek ways to be alone with
God, so as to discuss with Him, as with my Father and yours, what road to
take so as to render to Him a good account of you. His Divine Majesty took
charge of the matter, removing those worldly obstacles which hindered me,
that I might take pleasure in you. And when I then was left a widow, within
three short months, I myself went into exile for your sake, leaving my land,
desiring to do you good in some way, without ever returning there again,
desiring to undergo trials and injuries for you, in reverence to Christ our
God . . . (327)
. . . My time grows short, and I do not want to fail to say something on

the subject of confessors, by advising all to obey them, putting yourselves in
God’s hands, without idle worries as to whether or not you know they have
book-learning, or if they lack experience, because a man may well lack all
this, and by himself not succeed in doing what is right; but that soul will do
no wrong, who obeys what his confessor orders. Believe me, it is the right
path for the penitent to submit his judgment to the opinion of his confessor,
obeying God Himself through him . . . And if it seems to you that you
require another confessor of greater learning, beware, for this may be some
temptation of the devil, so as to disquiet the soul by this path. For not
everyone can go to Salamanca, to enjoy those qualified teachers whom God’s
Majesty has placed in that university; but the Lord who placed them there
to shed light, did Himself keep that same light and power which He gave to
them; and thus, though a confessor be a simple man. His Majesty may fill
him with such great light that he will have no need of book-learning to set
other souls on the right path. And if this reasoning seems amiss to you, think
whether the Holy Apostles, and the disciples of Christ Our Good, had need
of learning, to shed light and understanding on men’s souls, though indeed
they had no learning. 1 do not say that both the one and the other are not
good; but one cannot enjoy all things, and thus 1 say again, that no man
should leave his confessors, thinking that they lack the talent necesssary to
benefit him. . . . (381-82)
It was revealed to me, as has happened before, that the Eternal Father is
begetting His Son the Word; and I understood this: that just as the Majesty
of God in all ways made the image of man, like Himself, when He created
it, together with the faculties He gave to man, so at the same time did He
give man power that he might enjoy spiritual generation, aided by the grace
and favor of God our Lord; for memory works through representations, and
the mind through understanding, and the will through love. And as the thing
beloved is a communicable good, so it does work and communicate with the
soul through love and grace, as I have already said. Oh, how kind is God!
For in giving us this beautiful talent, which is made of memory and will and
understanding, with a single act You did give us all things together; for with
this priceless coin do we attract to our soul our God and Lord, and conceive
Him in our soul. . . . (384-85)
"Virgen de la Soledad, ” anonymous, Madrid, seventeenth century. The painting depicts an
aspect of the Virgin Mary that inspired some nuns’ poems on solitude (chapter 4). Courtesy
of the Museo Municipal of Madrid.
228
^ Convent In/Verse
Vi ‘Dramatist of Demale
‘Religious Dije
(Jvtarcela de San Délix]
life of Marcela de San Félix (1605-1687), which

spanned an extraordinary century of Spanish cultural history, illuminates four
important issues; illegitimacy and self-legitimation; the problems and benefits
of being the daughter of a famous father; censorship and self-censorship; and
asceticism as a structure for autonomy and sublimated sensuality. Although
Marcela de San Félix is unknown even to most Spanish language readers,
nineteenth-century critic Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo (ed. 1956, 192-94)
and twentieth-century critic Francisco Garcia Lorca' have claimed that some
of her verses rival those of her father, the great Golden Age dramatist and
poet, Lope de Vega. Most of the people who have heard of her are familiar
only with a poem Lope de Vega wrote on the occasion of her profession as
a nun (227-35). If she has a claim to fame in her own right, however, it is
for her six Coloquios espirituales, seven Loas, many Romances and other poems,
and her short biography of a sister nun.
The sensuality, drama, and excess of the Lope de Vega family during the
first sixteen years of Marcela’s life did not suddenly disappear when she became
Marcela de San Félix and embarked on a quest for Ghristian perfection
through ascetic practice. Rather, throughout the remaining sixty-five years
of her life, they endured as one extreme of a polarity that found its synthesis
in her own literary work. Having grown up in the household of one of the
greatest luminaries of the Spanish Golden Age, she took many of its forms
and values with her when she decided to leave the world and enter a cloister.
More evident than the continuity and directness of her father’s influence,
however, is the contrapuntal nature of her vision and style. That is, she
counters in her writing most of what she knew of her father’s life, which he
continuously turned into literature. He delights in the garden of earthly
pleasures; she finds joy in sacred pastures. He feeds appetites; she mortifies
them. He accepts contention and sin; she demands obedience and virtue.
He is self-indulgent; she praises self-abnegation. He speaks in the plural—
229
230 UNTOLD SISTERS
“A mis soledades voy” (To my solitudes 1 go); she speaks in the singular—
“En ti, Soledad amada” (In you, beloved Solitude). He has many women;
she has one Beloved.
Îrom Illegitimacy to Self-Legitimation

If Marcela de San Félix’s illegitimate bitth made her childhood troubled
and precarious, it definitively colored both her interest in and her prospects
for an advantageous marriage. The turbulent household in which she was
raised must have made her quest for legitimating circumstances, stability, and
honor all the more urgent. Her search led her ultimately to insist on a
betrothal to Christ. Within the convent, as her artistic vocation developed.
Madre Marcela claimed legitimacy as Lope de Vega’s litetary heir. She was
the daughter of the man whom Cervantes nicknamed “el monstruo de la
naturaleza” (quoted in, for example, Garcia López 307] (the prodigy of nature).
Both implicit and explicit aspects of Madre Marcela’s life and texts reveal
how the problems and uses of being a daughter of a famous writer influenced
her passage from illegitimacy to self-legitimation. Often she recognized her
literary heritage by means of a joke or denial (knowing that her listening
Sisters would understand the game). In one of her Loas—as the short, often
comic dialogues that precede and introduce the plays are called—a “cold-
lipped” nun asks a university student who has come begging for food to write
a Loa in honot of the final vows of one of the novices. After instructing him
about what to include (a theme to which we shall return), she insists:
. . . y que nos haga una Loa (. . . and compose for us a Loa

tan acabada y perfecta of such perfection and polish
que no la pudiera hacer that even Lope de Vega
tan linda Lope de Vega. (271)^ could not make it so lovely.)
Further along, the student, projecting the completion of his tasks, says:
que yo en prosa las diré (for I, in prose shall tell them,

que al Coloquio se prevengan to prepare for the Colloquy
con benévola atención with their most kindly attention
que le ha compuesto Marcela . . . (275) for it was composed by Marcela
The road to this self-conscious recognition and legitimation began in To¬

ledo, in 1605, where on May 8th a baby was baptized “Marcela, of unknown
parents (Castro and Rennert 106, 161, n. 107). The priest, godfather, and
witnesses were poets and theater people, friends of the “unknown” parents.
The mother, Micaela de Luján, legally married to an actor, had been a
talented actress herself before she fell in love with the passionate playwright
with whom she had seven children. “Lucinda,” as she was called in Lope’s
verses, is reported to have been beautiful and unlettered and to have dis¬
appeared or died when Marcela and her closest brother, Lope Félix (two years
younger), were quite small (Castro and Rennert 529). The other sisters and
brothers also faded from view.
A trusted servant, Catalina, cared for the two children, Marcela and Lope
Convent InIVerse 231
Félix, for many years (Castro and Rennert 206, n. 14). In 1613, upon the
death of Lope’s second legal wife, they moved into his Madrid home, where
they lived with their half-sister Feliciana. They witnessed and at times even
participated in the “disordered” (Castro and Rennert 361, n. i) and “pro¬
miscuous” (Laca 112) love life of their father and his circle of theater friends.
They were also exposed to his contradictory religious life. For Lope was a
priest. He often said Mass in the beautiful little family chapel decorated with
sculptured and painted images. Even when he was sick and could not officiate,
Lope listened and watched from his bed through a grating.
Although Lope’s periods of repentance over his sinful ways were brief, it
is likely that the children sensed his intermittent anguish and remorse. Ramón
Laca emphasizes young Marcela’s worry and grief over her father’s double
existence. But in Lope’s letter reminding his patron, the Duke of Sessa, that
he had promised his daughter money for a taffeta gown (Amezua y Mayo III,
152, 232, 285), we see a Marcela pulled in two directions; toward religious
contrition and purity on the one hand, and worldly festivity and elegance
on the other. This strain later became an important theme in her religious
plays and can be felt in the forcefulness with which she urges her spiritual
daughters to embrace ascetic ideals:
Pon en tu nada tu asiento (Place your abode in your nothingness

y nada te dé contento Let oblivion be your contentment.
que no te lleve a la nada Lest you be lost in that abyss;
y contin[u]o retirada And in continuous seclusion
sea la nada tu centro. (49) Let nothingness be your center.)
The dangers of the world, the flesh, and the devil embodied in her youth
by her father and by her own problematic existence in his household, emerge
throughout her writings in her preoccupation with overcoming the endless
temptations, vanities, and disappointments that beset the soul. Thus, re¬
sisting the temptations of the flesh, which was one of the most common
themes of religious preaching and writing, held a particularly powerful res¬
onance for Madre Marcela. Additional proof of this is found in the anonymous
pages dedicated to her life that are preserved with other such biographical
pages at the monastery {Fundación f. 193-207).’ This document reports that
when speaking of her reasons for entering holy life, Marcela would say:
“. . . que sus padres la tenían poco amor y que por huir sus molestias se había
venido al sagrado como los delinquentes cuando huyen de la Justicia” [207]
(. . . that her parents held her in low esteem and that to flee their troubles
she had come to this refuge like a criminal fleeing from the law). Heaps of
pious verbiage conceal nuggets of this sort. Here the ring of authenticity is
particularly striking because of the bland, prodding prose shrouding the state¬
ment. If the autobiography she prepared under orders bore any resemblance
to the utterance quoted above, it is no wonder that after having asked her
to write it her confessor demanded that it be destroyed. The contents surely
would have been judged damaging to her as a religious and to her father’s
already tarnished reputation.
Lope de Vega was allowed to bend the rules because of his genius, his
connections with the aristocracy and the Church, and his popular appeal.
But as his bastard daughter. Madre Marcela’s choices—economic, moral, and
232 UNTOLD SISTERS
social—were as restricted as those of other women, and in some ways more

so. The contrasting fates of Marcela and her two closest sisters exemplify the
lessons, limits, and double standards that applied to women in that period.
The contrast also underscores the extent to which Madre Marcela legitimized
herself, doing so in the only manner then possible. Feliciana, the one “le¬
gitimate” daughter, married a man who helped his father-in-law prepare his
poems and plays for publication while she took care of home and children.
Antonia Clara, the younger “illegitimate” daughter of Lope and Marta de
Nevares, as a little girl dazzled her father and his circles with her dramatic,
literary, and musical talent (Laca 97-98; Gonzalez de Amezúa 13, 14, 18,
30, 94, 96-99; Sainz de Robles, 224-26 and 232-34). In adolescence, she
fell prey to a common coercive and abusive seduction conventionally called
rapto, or abduction by a suitor. Lope, the profligate priest, reacted as might
any pious, tyrannical father by banning her forever from his home.'^ Madre
Marcela, on the other hand, remained in communication with both sisters
until their deaths.
The monastic community permitted Matcela’s talents to flourish in a way
Antonia Clara’s did not. As the only one of the daughters whose tale can
be traced through her own writing. Madre Marcela exemplifies the problems
faced by women who wished to emulate fathers or mentors, follow the creative
impulse, and produce works of their own making. Speaking about her roles
inside and outside the cloister (and underscoring the paradoxical evolution
of many monastic women’s lives), she is attributed with the exclamation;
“Pobre de mi, que he venido a hacer más papel que hacía en el mundo, donde
era una desvalida, que no merecía que me mirasen a la cara!” [Fundación f.
207] (Poor me! 1 have come to play a greater role [here] than out in the
world, where 1 was destitute, and unworthy even of being noticed!). Madre
Marcela’s assertion demonstrates a necessary disingenuousness. Since it was
neither correct nor acceptable for a nun to show pride or to utter critical
judgments, she had to exercise such sentiments through humble protestations.
The “Poor me!” is equivocal. She says, at least in part, “Look at me!” or
“Good for me!,” thus demonstrating a recognizably false humility that was
one of the only ways these women could acknowledge their accomplishments.
The final part of her comment implies a consciousness of having overcome
a lack of worth, of having become valid.
In her plays. Madre Marcela unabashedly declares self-recognition within
her community. In theatrical representation it was possible to be more forth-
right, since she hid behind a male character. The licenciado (university stu¬
dent) who encourages the nuns to be attentive to the play they are about to
see claims that Marcela wrote it. Ingeniously, she uses a male character to
on the one hand represent, and on the other indirectly express herself:
Por el deseo que tiene (Because of her great desire

que las madres se entretegan that the Mothers may be amused,
porque las ama de suerte for she loves them so dearly
y de suerte las venera and so dearly adores them,
que todo cuanto trabajo thus the enormous time it takes
el escribirlo le cuesta for her to compose and write it,
y el estudiarlo también and to memorize it as well
que muy buen tiempo la lleva. (275) quite fills up her time.)
She probably did not always adore each one of her Sisters, nor they her.
The plays and poems provide ample evidence of dissension. But while living
among the nuns she dedicated willing if arduous time to writing, producing,
and acting in the plays she composed. In contrast, the only writing we know
her to have engaged in while living in her father’s home must have struck
her as disturbing and demeaning, however titillating she might have found
it. For several years, until she was twelve, Marcela was pressed into service
to her father as a messenger and letter-copier. In this role she contributed
to the family economy and to the assurance of relative confidentiality. Lope’s
insatiably curious, sensual, and artistic patron, the Duke of Sessa, had de¬
manded copies of his love letters. The passionate correspondence Marcela
copied was addressed to the last great love of Lope’s life, Marta de Nevares.
This copying was interrupted when the two lovers quarreled and again re¬
sumed when they made up. Twenty-five years younger than Lope (and eigh¬
teen older than Marcela), Marta de Nevares came to live with the family
when Marcela was twelve, four years before Marcela left for the cloister.
During those years we know of at least three events which deeply affected
her and the family; the birth of Marta de Nevares’ children, a half-sister and
half-brother to Marcela; the attempt by Marta’s estranged legal husband to
claim or kidnap the daughter, Antonio Clara (to whose fate we have referred);
and Marta’s sudden blindness (Castro and Rennert 230-35). Such, con¬
cretely, were some of the troubles impelling Marcela to flee.
What at first strikes us as surprising—that a sixteen-year-old should choose
enclosure behind convent walls over the benefits of a lively, cultured, and
celebrated home—impresses us as inevitable as we explore the story of Mar-
cela’s early life. We note repeatedly that she was more hindered physically,
emotionally, spiritually, and intellectually at home than in the cloister. In¬
tellectually, she gained time and encouragement in the cloister to practice
and develop as a writer. Spiritually, she was no longer required to practice
a religiosity fraught with hypocrisy and blatant sacrilege as she had been at
home. Physically, she had inhabited cramped as well as tumultuous quarters
at home. She had shared an upstairs bedroom with a half-sister and a servant.
The spacious downstairs receiving room was reserved for men only. In typical
fashion of the time, the women sat on the floor in a small adjacent room
that held two chairs for male visitors and that opened in two directions; to
the receiving-room study on one side, to Lope’s bedroom on the other. By
contrast, in the convent, located a few blocks away, large, high-ceilinged
communal rooms were furnished with chairs for the nuns to sit on as they
prayed, ate, sang, and sewed. They could walk and meditate in a garden
with a central fountain and flowers.^ Through a grille which allowed the
nuns to hear and see without being seen, the Sisters listened to the Masses
held in the magnificent adjoining church.^ Most important, each nun lived
in a cell of her own. To be sure, despite this privacy—which could become
privation if not well used, as Madre Marcela warned her novices—the convent
was the scene of occasional upheavals; arguments among the Sisters, invasion
of the nuns’ enclosure by secular women and men, and even knife fights
among intruders (Molins 170). Under the influence of strictly regulated
routines and the constant reminders of a higher calling, however, such turmoil
would rapidly subside.
Emotionally, Marcela could hardly mature and achieve a sense of legitimacy
234 UNTOLD SISTERS
(in the larger sense of that word) amidst her family’s divided and confused
affections. In addition to refuge, the cloister required her concentration on
the symbolic immediacy of the sacraments and their images and practices
and an exclusive affection for Christ, her Bridegroom. Through this con¬
nection the process of legitimation proceeded. The rewards of dedication to
the Church included improvements in the earthy relationship of affection
with her father. In the convent. Madre Marcela achieved a more tempered
and tenable relationship with her family.^ She assumed, for instance, the
role of mother/advisor to her aging father; she consoled him in his grief over
sickness and death in the family, while she continued to protest his Don
Juanism.®
The new relationship between father and daughter lasted fourteen years,
from 1621 when Marcela became a novice until 1635 when Lope died. It is
reported that, with the exception of periods when he was sick or traveling
or when an incensed Madre Marcela banned him from seeing her, Lope was
a daily visitor at the convent. The convent chronicle recounts two incidents
in which she chides him for continued flirtatious behavior toward her. In
one she is said to have complained about his praising her beauty and then
to have refused to see him for two weeks: “Para que así conozcáis cuánto me
ofende quien alaba una supuesta hermosura perecedera y de la que yo tan
poco aprecio guardo” (quoted in Laca 112] (So that you may realize how
greatly I am offended by one who praises an illusory, fleeting beauty, which
I myself hold in such low esteem). Nevertheless, when he died. Madre
Marcela requested that the hearse be routed along the street on which the
convent stood so that she could pay her last respects. A nineteenth-century
Romantic painting captures an idealized version of the event (Sánchez Camargo
439—41 and plate 113). If Marcela de San Félix expressed her grief in an
elegy it must have perished with those of her manuscripts that she destroyed.
Madre Marcela also developed a friendship with Jerónima del Espíritu
Santo, one of the nine original founding Sisters of the Discalced Trinitarian
Convento de San Ildefonso, which had been established in 1613. For forty-
six years Madre Marcela enjoyed the constant and loving companionship of
Madre Jerónima, who became a theatrical partner in performing her plays
and a beloved friend (Molins 178-79). It seems safe to suppose that the
spiritual and theatrical bond between them fostered Madre Marcela’s double
vocation as nun and writer.
Madre Marcela was the only child of the Lope de Vega family who followed
in both her parents’ footsteps and was able to bring her life to fruition in
doing so. Like her mother she acted; like her father she wrote and entered
religion. While her mother abandoned her career for the love of a man,
Marcela gave up worldly attachment for a career that—perhaps unexpect¬
edly—included an involvement in acting. Both continuity and counterpoint
mark the influences of each parent on Marcela de San Félix’s work. While
the details of her education are obscure, she clearly received some training
and much indirect instruction as she heard, saw, read, copied, and memorized
material to which she had access at home. Thus, she became familiar with
the handling of poetic and dramatic themes. Long after she had taken her
vows as a nun this stylistic legacy informed her writing. Under the ecclesiastic
symbolism and humor of her plays, the devout and formal praise of her
biography of another nun, and the tranquil ecstasy of her “Ballad to a Sol-
itude, included in this study, lies a literary structure full of earthly tension.
A major process of existential, spiritual, and literary self-validation began
for Madre Marcela, as we have seen, when she broke away from home and
then, at a safe distance, reclaimed her heritage. Through the exercise of
solitude. Madre Marcela built her sense of authority and authenticity. The
practice of solitude brought her into direct contact with the heritage of Saint
Teresa as well, and with the strivings of the mystic way, expressed especially
in Saint Teresa’s Las Moradas (Interior Castle), written in 1588. The nun of
Madrid read the works of the founder of Avila, using them to structure her
religious thought. Literally, they inspired the expression of her own experi¬
ence of solitude and served as models for the versified lessons on prayer,
obedience, fervor, the dangers of overzealousness, and the advantages of
wholehearted surrender which Madre Marcela composed for the edification
of her Sisters. The Trinitarian convent followed the Rule of Saint Teresa’s
Carmelite Reform. Madre Marcela’s superiors, confessors, and advisors could
hardly find her praise of solitary contemplation objectionable when it was
described and glorified under the aegis of the great saint. Mention is made
in the convent biography of her attachment to Saint Teresa’s teachings. The
appropriateness of combining activity and contemplation, deeds and prayer,
silence and speech in the monastery had been confirmed by that Mother of
them all.
But Madre Marcela seemed at times to value solitude above all else. Her
yearning to be apart expressed practical, physical needs as well as spiritual
desires. All convents had to attend to much worldly business. As Teacher of
Novices, Cellaress, or Mother Superior—all offices which she held at diffetent
times—Madre Marcela accepted many responsibilities. She often felt over¬
whelmed. She had to carve out the time to write from the hours normally
dedicated to sleep, so as not to shirk other duties. She writes in several poems
of her need for solitude and her fear that its benefits will vanish upon return
to regular routines after a retreat. It is also the theme of a poem in which
she alludes to the convent’s early years of discomfort and financial hardship
when there was not enough toom for individual cells. “Loa a la soledad de
las celdas’’ (“Loa to the Solitude of the Cells”) demonstrates the important
place of convent matters in her writing.
For the first decade after its founding, until a new endowment filled its
coffers, the convent suffered impoverishment.^ Unhappy with their cramped
quarters, the nuns moved to another location. There they were plagued with
mosquitoes, lice, and lack of water. Even more dissatisfied with the new place
than the old, the Sisters had the old convent site expanded and renovated
and returned there as soon as they could afford to so do, within a year and
a half of the earlier move. Finally, they were able to live according to the
Rule of their Order. In her “Loa to the Solitude of the Cells,” Madre Marcela
celebrates the fact that each nun at last has a room of her own:
Y este gozo se origina (And my joy atises

De ver que ya vuestras ansias when I see how the merciful Master
Y deseo de retiro now repays your longings
El piadoso dueño paga. (309) and desire for seculsion.
Vuestra santa pretensión Today, your holy aspiration
Justísimamente alcanza most justly attains
236 UNTOLD SISTERS
Hoy la alegre posesión the happy possession

De tan largas esperanzas. (310) of the hopes you have nursed so long.
Entrad, pues, Madres, gozosas Enter, then. Mothers, rejoicing,

Fervorosas y animadas: fervent, and inspired;
Que el Señor que dio las celdas for the Lord who has given these cells
También dará lo que falta. (312) will give whatever is lacking.)
Several of Madre Marcela’s plays and loos refer to this “lacking” either seri¬
ously, or, more often, in a humorous vein. Scenes and events from the life
of the convent and from her own life appear in even the most spiritual of
her poems, another characteristic of het work that links her to Saint Teresa.
In the poem we have been quoting, she warns her Sisters that the difference
between an imprisoned woman and a holy one rests on wholehearted de¬
votion:
Que la celda material (For the physical cell

ha de servir como caja should serve as a case
Que guarde la interior celda. to hold the inward cell.
Donde el Esposo descansa. Where the dear Husband sleeps.
Que si faltase el espíritu For if spirit is lacking

y la oración en el alma. and there is no prayer in the soul,
Más que santa Religiosa, rather than a holy Sister,
Será mujer encerrada. (313) one will he but a woman enclosed.)
Seclusion, in other words, must be employed wisely. This theme is reinforced

in another poem, “Romance a una soledad” (“Ballad to a Solitude”), discussed
later in the chapter, which reveals both Madre Marcela’s quest for self-
knowledge through ancient mystical wisdom and a woman’s search for respite
from her daily burdens.
Upon the approach of her death. Madre Marcela spoke with what might
be called typical Spanish realism. Her biographer quotes her use of popular
metaphor. Impatient with her long life, she says:
. . . muchos se quejan de que la Muerte viene volando, pero para

esta pobre vieja viene en carreta tirada de bueyes muy pesadas. (31)
(. . . Many complain that Death comes on swift wings, but for this
poot old woman it comes in a wagon drawn by lumbering oxen.)
Sexual nôlitics and Jiumor:

Censors flip and Self-Censorship
Marcela de San Félix’s complete extant works are contained in two manu¬
scripts. One is a 505-page volume which includes six one-act allegorical
religious plays, the coloquios espirituales; five romances en esdrújulos;nineteen
Convent In/Verse
other romances (ballads); seven has (poem-dialogues that preceded each of

the plays); and one of each of the following verse forms: seguidillas, liras,
endechas, jaculatorias, and a villancico. Two other romances, undesignated as
such, appear with the description of their occasion: “Ofrecimiento que hacen
las religiosas al Niño Jesús recién nacido” (“Offering by the Sisters to the
newborn Jesus ) and A la Pasión” (“To Christ’s Passion”). The second manu¬
script, included in a compendium of lives of nuns, is a brief biography—
thirteen pages in folio—of Madre Catalina de San José, a Trinitarian Sister.
The final page of the long manuscript, written in praise and mourning for
the author “by a Daughter,” refers in its octaves to “the pages she (Madre
Marcela] burned.” At the behest of a confessor, according to the convent
chronicle. Madre Marcela saved one of her four or five collections of poems
and plays." As a curious but not uncommon act of obedience, she also seems
to have written and then destroyed pages about her own life."
While the purported reasons for the destruction of het manuscripts, in¬
cluding the autobiographical pages, were obedience, discipline, and detach¬
ment from earthly matters, we speculate that their contents may have been
deemed unsuitable for preservation by ecclesiastical authorities, for both
religious and extrareligious reasons. The history of church literature has been
unmade and remade by the use and misuse of its documents in the maneu¬
vering for position, honor, fame, and sainthood on the part of many con¬
tenders for seats of power." In Madre Marcela’s case, her spirituality could
have been judged not strictly orthodox, or the recounting of her early life
may have seemed embarrassing to the memory of the great dramatist."
Marcela de San Félix and all other members of religious communities
obeyed the orders of confessors and other ecclesiastics in decisions to write
or desist from writing, to bum or refrain from burning what was written.
Extrareligious factors also intervened. Both Cervantes and Lope de Vega had
interceded with sympathetic and cultivated church authorities to get ap¬
proval, in the face of hierarchical conflicts, for the establishment and con¬
tinued existence of the convent to which Madre Marcela belonged (Molins
c. I, 21-72). These very authorities in turn may have exerted some influence
over such matters as which nuns were to be permitted or requested to write.
Lope himself, in his priestly and Inquisitorial roles, may have gained sanction
or provided leeway for the theatrical and poetic creations of his daughter.
What criteria, one wonders—regretting the impossibility of an answer—
dictated which poems and plays she committed to flames and which she
did not?
Madre Marcela got away with jests about monastic mismanagement, pro¬
tests against clerical and monastic stupidity, and criticisms of the court because
her audience was composed almost exclusively of nuns. She was adept at
making the nuns laugh at themselves and their circumstances. But she also
poked fun at her own foibles. In the following lines from the “Coloquio de
la Estimación de la Religión” (“Colloquy in Praise of Religion”), the character
Falsehood describes her relatives:
Y todos cuantos parientes, (And all the many relatives

He tenido son honrados: I have had are honorable.
Y por todos estimados And by everyone esteemed
De lo mejor de la Corte. (74) To be the cream of the Court.)
238 UNTOLD SISTERS
Less than a century ago, when Manuel Serrano y Sanz prepared the manu-
script of his selections from Marcela de San Félix’s work, he used a nineteenth-
century copy which censored seventy-two lines of one of the loos (II, 234-
98). The excised stanzas constitute verses in which she is at her farcical and
irreverent best, showing contemporary jokes and revealing, by implication,
subsequent shifts in attitudes and changes in the State’s perception of dangers.
We witness the development of national obsessions as the butt of mockery.
We can imagine the audience of nuns doubled over in laughter as the male
character (played by a nun) first recites a lengthy chain of infirmities—
mispronounced and mismatched:
Estoy hidrópico y tísico. (I am dropsical and consumptive,

Tengo modorra, y viruelas. 1 have the staggers and smallpox,
Sarampión, gota coral. measles, epilepsy,
Lamparones y sordera. (264) scrofula, and deafness.)
He then mentions the insects that plagued the convent—a sign of its poverty:
Y también puedo contar (And I can also tell stories
La numerosa cuadrilla Of the mighty hordes
De piojos, chinches, y pulgas. Of lice, bedbugs, and fleas.
Que esto siempre, y mucho más For all this and indeed much more
Está anexo a la pobreza. (264) is linked to poverty.)
He finally claims to be descended from a line of great rabbis on his father’ s

side and infamous witches on his mother’s side. Both these groups were, of
course, special targets of the Inquisition at the time:
Porque descendió mi padre (For my father descended

Y vino por línea recta in an unbroken line
Del más valiente rabino from the most excellent rabbi
que se halló en toda Judea . . . (265) to be found in all Judea . . .
Mi madre ... My mother . . .
Grande bruja de Logroño the Great Witch of Logroño,
famosa en toda la tierra. (266) Famous throughout the world.)
The poet is not nunlike, nor even ladylike in her ribaldry in such lines.
Rather, she has reversed and parodied her renowned father’s pompous pre¬
tensions regarding lineage. In his poem about her profession he traces her
maternal descent from the Virgin:
Yo os juro que por parte de su madre (I swear to you that on her mother’s side
toca en sangre real, y que es tan buena she inherits royal blood, and such is her
que no hay gloria y virtud que no le goodness
cuadre. (229) that no glory or virtue ill-suits her.)
Madre Marcela’s loa states:

Diéronme muy noble sangre (I was given the noblest of blood

Mis padres que gloria tengan by my parents, may glory be theirs.
Mi madre no fue tan noble, My mother was not quite so noble,

Mas su vida fue tan buena but she lived a life of such goodness,
Que suple bien pot la sangre that it quite excuses her blood,
Y excede toda nobleza. (265) and exceeds all nobility.)
The joke, of course, acquires resonance in the context of the author’s “natural”
birth from an actress mother. We suppose that the latet nun copyist omitted
these lines for the sake of gentility or propriety. Whatever the reason, the
deletion distorted Marcela de San Félix’s literary personality. Madre Marcela
herself probably experienced conflict regarding her work—its caliber, its pro¬
priety, and the appropriateness of its surviving her. Having so frequently
insisted on the need and described the struggle to transcend all earthly
attachments, she was most likely concerned about the contradiction repre¬
sented by her writing and the tecognition accorded it.
Whatever the extent obedience to confessors’ orders was involved in taking
up the pen, all women who wrote had to find the means to authorize them¬
selves to commit thoughts, experiences, and inventions to paper. Madre
Marcela’s two muses were her father and solitude. Thus, she conferred au¬
thority upon hetself in a manner quite different from that of other writing
nuns, who usually sought such self-empowerment from sacred or ecclesiastic
personages. Her literary self-consciousness was formed partly through the
implicit equation of daughter and disciple, partly through that of solitude
and self.
Marcela de San Félix’s ideas about art, which are readily apparent in her
poems and plays, sprang from two primary sources. She firmly believed in
the dictum that true eloquence is divine, that one does not need to know
the rules of art but rather gains expressive ability from the divine voice within.
Partly derived from Saint Teresa’s statement of this principle, her stance
constitutes a defense of colloquialism for the promotion of spirituality.'^ In
practice, however. Madre Marcela’s writing moves in a different ditection.
She versifies, modifying the dictum about spontaneity with aesthetic ptecepts
gained from the Golden Age theater Having lived with a prominent prac¬
titioner of patriarchal literary tradition. Madre Marcela participated in the
production of a parallel female tradition by virtue of her sex. Having overcome
her exile from the practice of writing by becoming a nun, she created a new
form and style.
In het poetry. Madre Marcela elaborates one paradoxical aspect of her
aesthetic—an aesthetic of asceticism. The well-spting of true eloquence lies
in the vety expetience of meeting God’s spirit in oneself. It is as though she
had aestheticized Saint Teresa’s mysticism. The soul’s journey leads her to
words that further explicate those of Saint Tetesa. Eloquence derives from
the speech of the Holy Spirit, that speaks to those who commune with it in
solitude. At the same time she, like Saint Teresa, eschews artifice and self-
conscious attistry; she critiques the unnatural ornamentation of the litetary
discourse of her time. Petfection of style for Madre Marcela comes not through
appealing to the ancient muses (a tradition she mocks in another loa), but
through perfection in the ascetic way:
240 UNTOLD SISTERS
Si yo espíritu tuviera (If 1 had the spirit

y elocuencia soberana, and supreme eloquence
de la amable Soledad of gracious Solitude,
Dijera las alabanzas I might speak its praises.
Porque el Espíritu Santo For the Holy Spirit,

cuando ama mucho a las almas when it loves our souls full well,
las lleva a la Soledad carries them to Solitude,
Y a los corazones habla and converses with their hearts,
Y las palabras que dice and the words it speaks
Tan sustanciales y claras so nourishing and bright,
Son de Heroica Perfección are of heroic perfection
Y santidad consumada. (310) and consummate sanctity.)
In this “Romance a la soledad de las celdas” (“Ballad to the Solitude of the

Cells”), the writer makes it clear that the quest for spiritual perfection and
consummate expression are one and the same.
Most of Madre Marcela’s work was addressed exclusively to the Mothers,
Sisters, and Daughters of the convent. But she had a wider audience for the
bos and other poems written to celebrate the taking of final vows. The
parishioners who came to the convent church (where her father sometimes
preached) and the families of nuns heard her poems, which were often set
to music.'® Still, Madre Marcela’s were not texts prepared for publication.
They were never revised or edited, as were manuscripts being readied for the
press. This is not to denigrate the wide range of her literary vocabulary, which
encompasses the rarified idealism of refined religiosity and the conversational
colloquialism of daily existence. While her mystical poems exemplify ide-
alism, her loos and plays contain the material of everyday life. In spite of the
rhymed verses of the latter, the dialogue captures the flavor and vocabulary
of conversation in Madrid during those years. Faith, for example, is:
Aunque morena hermosa (Despite her tawny beauty.

Señora de prendas raras. (219) A lady of rare gifts.)
Popular theater techniques and language, as well as the Song of Songs,

revitalize religious ideas and elements of mystical literature. The bos, written
hastily to provide the necessary prologue to the various coloquios, adhere to
the characteristic compositional mode of this subgenre, which called for a
certain rowdy irreverence. The unpolished spontaneity allowed free rein to
Madre Marcela’s talent for comic parody.
The persona of licenciado (improverished student-poet), who frequently
appears in the bos, permitted Madre Marcela to engage in subversive dis¬
course.'^ The licenciado represented a type of pseudo-educated man who was
pointedly satirized in the secular theater as well as in these bos. In secular
theater, women did not dress as men, except in order to recover or preserve
their honor. In Madre Marcela’s religious theater, these male personas served
to mock the patriarchal view of female religious life, the social and cultural
pretension of secular life, and also individual nuns, including the author
herself. As paradoxical outsiders who were intent upon participating in the
life of the female cloister even in so minimal a way as begging for food or
Convent Ín/Verse 241
writing a poem for a fee, the licenciados reveal actual social expectations of
the convent and illustrate what nuns meant to those out in the world. Women
religious functioned as spiritual mothers; these male characters complain
about the nuns treatment of them. Madre Marcela pokes fun at herself:
Mas ay, que topé a la puerta (But alack, 1 was confronted at the door
Un león, un tigre, hircano by a lion, a Hircanian tiger:
En fin, con una Marcela. (297) in sum, by a Marcela.)
She also teases her Sisters:
Tantos duelos, tantas faltas (So many pains, such deprivations

Hay en todo, que parece you find in everything, it seems
que el Mundo triste se acaba. that this sad world must end.
Todos lloran, todos gimen, All are weeping, everyone sobs.
sólo se alegra Sor Juana, Only Sister Juana’s cheered,
Porque sus grandes miserias because she sees her sufferings
Las ve ya canonizadas. (276-77) already canonized.)
Certainly, some of her most outrageously funny lines are spoken through
these male personas. Although the licenciados partly offer an opportunity to
introduce more worldly themes, their concern with form—literary, behav¬
ioral, religious—also intimates Madre Marcela’s preoccupation with spiritual
perfection and the Christian freedom to achieve unity with the divinity.
As a group, the loos, parts of the coloquios, and a few of the poems reveal
Marcela de San Félix’s artistic range. They belie the image of women as
beatific angels, which later constituted such a great part of the image prop¬
agated by critics about Madre Marcela herself.'® Her work proves she could
be solemn and silly, didactic and narrative, amorous and ascetic, sacred and
profane. She could be colloquial, rhetorical, full of flowery artifice, or haunt-
ingly lyrical. Marcela de San Félix, in short, lived up to the literary lineage
she sometimes mocked but never forgot.
l^fie iXesthetic of SZsceticism: lîieater,

biography, Poetry
By entering the monastery and submitting to its ascetic ideals. Madre
Marcela was able to reclaim language and through it a sanctified sensuality.
Whether her theme is the ardent beauty of mystical union (expressed in
metaphors of erotic love) or the need to transcend every trace of earthly
desire, she forges a discourse imbued with worldly images.
Marcela de San Félix elaborates the theme of religious love and marriage
in many poems. She draws from both sacred and profane sources: pagan
mythology offers a blindfolded Cupid; the Hebrew Song of Songs, based on
folk songs for marriage festivals but interpreted allegorically by the early
Christian Church, provides symbolic significance and imagery; the early Spanish
novel adds the celestina (go-between); courtly ballads, popular songs of court¬
ship, and Saint Teresa’s prose descriptions of ecstatic experience also con-
242 UNTOLD SISTERS
tribute to Madre Marcela’s themes and style. In “Romance a un afecto amoroso”

(“Ballad of a Loving Passion”), one of her most polished and beautiful love
poems, stanzas like the following can be linked to the troubadour tradition:
Sufre, que noche, y día (Permit me, night and day,

Te ronde aquesas puertas: to keep watch at your doors,
Exhale mil suspiros. to breathe a thousand sighs,
Te diga mil ternezas. (345) and murmur soft endearments.)
Here we recognize classical mythology:
Y que para no ver (And so that it may not see

Tiene en los ojos venda; [Love’s] eyes are tightly bandaged;
Que amor que es muy mirado for an overly vigilant love
No tiene mucha fuerza. (344) possesses little power.)
The passage of Saint Teresa’s autobiography made famous by Bernini’s

sculpture (“The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa”) may have been a source of imagery
for the following stanzas, although their motivation and intention are dif¬
ferent:
Y no entiendas. Pastor (And do not think, my Shepherd

Que me quejo, que sean that I complain, although
Las heridas muy grandes; my wounds be very great;
Ojalá, que lo fueran. (346) Ah, that they should be so!
Y que por penetrantes And thus, deeply piercing,
La muerte fuera cierta: they might bring certain death:
Ay, si me viese yo. Oh, that I might find myself

Como el alma desea; as my soul desires,
O morir de abrasada, either dying in love’s fierce flames,
O herida con tus flechas. (347) or wounded by your shafts.)
Saint Teresa described the effects of mystical union as she had experienced
them; Madre Marcela expresses an as yet unrequited yearning for such union
in verses that ultimately echo Renaissance love poetry more than the Saint
of Avila’s spiritual prose. Yet the unquestioned (and unquestionable) spiritual
intent of Madre Marcela’s life makes possible her exploration of erotic met¬
aphor.
The spiritual atmosphere of the cloister provided sanctuary for the physical
body; religious discourse provided refuge, as well, for the secular connotations
of the written word. For Marcela de San Félix, asceticism became a mode
for developing a varied literary voice. The conventions of female monastic
life gave her the opportunity to act in dramatic spectacles; ascetic language
enabled her to describe the Brides of Christ as dynamic, active partners in
the divine coupling.
Religious form and symbol structured the hours of the day, as they did the
composition of verbal expression. In a sense, the nuns allegorized themselves
as well as the religious virtues they were attempting to emulate or the vices
they wished to avoid. They exerted themselves to live in the sensation of
Convent In/Verse 243
sharing Christ s life on earth and in heaven. They perceived themselves as

personifications of abstractions and symbols. Their earthly travails became
imitations of Christ s Calvary; their conflicts embodied the devil’s tempta¬
tions. They also used objects of devotion as reminders of historic events.
Thus, images of the Christ Child that adorned niches in the convent served
to remind them of compatriots held hostage in North Africa. These trans¬
formational processes were recorded in writing for the Sisters, who requested
and responded to literary elaborations of their lives much as people today
record life’s passage in photographs.
Madre Marcela praised the initiation into religious life. She taught prayer,
to which so many hours were dedicated. But she also exposed the way in
which practice fell short of monastic goals. Her work offered a realistic
antidote to the santorales (Saints’ Lives) and other pious tomes on which
religious women were nurtured. Playful but pointed interchanges in the co¬
loquios and bos regarding the scarcity of food, the stinginess of those Sisters
assigned to provide meals, the hypochondria of some nuns, the fierce tem¬
peraments of a few and the strictness of others, show that daily existence in
the convent often bore little resemblance to the idealized portrayals created
for consumption extramuros. Careful reading of Madre Marcela’s texts reveals
the flagrant denials and contradictions of life at the time. Various disguises,
including humor and sarcasm, veil anger and pain. In the following lines,
for instance, the Cellaress (the Sister who is the keeper and dispenser of
food) is derided for her stinginess:
Aunque todo se le pudra (Although all her stores may rot.

No le da ningún cuidado. (289) she worries not a bit.)
Madre Marcela also warned that overstrenuous attempts to attain the ideal
and to judge and rule others led to insidious overzealousness. In so doing,
she alluded to dissension in some of the monasteries. She was both acceptingly
humorous and bitingly critical in revealing the failure to live up to angelic
standards.
At the same time, Marcela de San Félix described new dimensions of
Spanish religiosity and culture. Monastic women created and experienced
those dimensions, which gave them the ability to move easily from the real
to the ideal; from the physical to the metaphysical; from singing, for instance,
of the Virgin and her child as part of a band of gypsies to observing friends
and neighbors dressed as the Holy Family. In other words, they were able to
fictionalize the real and personalize the sacred.
All six of Madre Marcela’s one-act plays are coloquios espirituales (spiritual
colloquies). This allegorical form of medieval origin did not enjoy the de¬
velopment and popularity of the auto sacramental (allegorical or religious
play), which flourished in Spain from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century
(Wardropper). The spiritual colloquy, much less frequently employed for the
promotion of religion, remained a relatively simple theatrical genre which
echoed the medieval “debates.”
Five of Marcela de San Félix’s coloquios espirituales can be seen as tools for
teaching. The allegorical characters in these plays include the Soul, Morti¬
fication, Negligence, Faith, Prayer, and Fervor. Their themes are subjects
that novices studied intensely as they prepared for religious life: the control
244 UNTOLD SISTERS
of earthly appetites, the appreciation of religion, the meaning of the holy

sacraments, the difference between devotion and zeal, the undermining of
divine love by indifference {tibieza). Her sixth coloquio was written for the
celebration of Christmas; it is likely that others perished with the burned
works.
In her coloquios espirituales, Marcela de San Félix transforms elements of
secular Golden Age drama into a literary device for the education and en¬
tertainment of her Sisters. Nurtured in a household intimately related to the
theater of her time, she arrived at the convent familiar with the vocabulary
and conventions of popular theater—its stock characters, formulas, word and
concept games, techniques for dialogue, and entrances and exits. Madre
Marcela was the leading light of the theatrical activities permitted to her
convent. The convent was probably unusual in this respect, since several of
the women cloistered there came from theatrical and literary families. There
are references in her long manuscript to the writing, memorizing, and cos¬
tuming of the plays. After she wrote her plays, she, her friend Jerónima del
Espíritu Santo, and two other nuns performed them for the other forty-one
women in the convent.
Despite strict prohibitions, it seems that women and men in some mon¬
asteries carried on a thriving theatrical enterprise. They invited drama com¬
panies to give free evening performances in their monasteries and churches
(Cotarelo y Mori 466). It is not unlikely that the nuns of San Ildefonso
occasionally witnessed such performances. Certainly, throughout Spain and
its colonies, the celebrations of saints’ feast days and other holy days were
generally accompanied by musical and theatrical activities and pageantry in
which nuns took part.
La muerte del apetito (The Death of Desire) traces the battle in the soul
between earthly attachments and appetites and the purifying virtues of sur¬
render, penance, and detachment. The play illustrates the theme of material
self-abnegation as a means of salvation. In spite of this theme, the comical
debates and the farcical elements of the characterizations make the play
relevant and attractive to modem sensibilities. Desire, a dapper young man
of voracious instincts and pleasures, fights for possession of the Soul. The
latter, with Mortification’s sustenance and aided by her friends Simplicity,
Perseverance, Penance, and Prayer, finally wins the battle for spiritual health.
The play dramatizes the stages of prayer—using the Teresian model (see Las
moradas)—and satirizes aspects of daily religious life.
In the selections in this study, the jokes, double entendres, and numerous
references to food all humorously underscore the difficulties the nuns faced
in realizing the ideal of abstinence from eating. The Soul’s earthly desires
are here symbolized in the sin of Gluttony, who is Desire’s mother in the
play. Although Desire (in Spanish, Apetito, or “Appetite” in the most inclusive
sense) mentions other activities, such as gallivanting and reading novels, his
chief interest appears to be filling his stomach with the special dishes prepared
in the convent. Food, one of the few sensual pleasures permitted in some
small degree to the nuns (for instance, particular sweets were associated with
specific holy days), relieved the tedium and monotony of convent life. The
food motif recurs in several works by Madre Marcela, revealing the importance
of its acquisition, preparation, and consumption to the mnning of the con¬
vent. In one ballad, called “Otro a la miseria de las provisoras” (“Another
Convent InlVerse 245
to the Stinginess of the Cellaresses”), Escolástica, Mariana, and Marcela,

the three provisoras, become the butt of merciless and hilarious attacks for
their relentless stinginess (254-57).
Another interpretation of this humorous treatment of food is offered by
Maria Isabel Barbeito, who sees it as a mechanism of survival, a way of
helping the Sisters cope with poverty. Although there may have been periods
of scarcity, all indications are that want was relative, and that the nuns were
more concerned about strengthening their resistance to overindulgence on
the one hand and controlling their tendencies toward self-starvation on the
other. The frequency with which the hagiographic ideal was evoked in terms
of fasting and strictly limited eating in Hispanic nuns’ writings of this period
indicates that such control was an important measure of holiness for women,
just as overcoming sexual feelings was for men.
The denial of earthly desires and material needs constituted a preliminary
condition for exemplary behavior. By itself, denial meant little. Through
prayer, contemplation, spiritual exercises, and corporal penance, however,
the aspirant to extraordinary piety might begin the struggle for humility,
poverty, and obedience. Thus, in The Death of Desire, Mortification is Desire’s
chief opponent in the struggle for the Soul. Madre Marcela is extreme in her
condemnation of delight. The devil’s temptations, real and hidden, lurked
in the shadows of even the slightest indulgence of pleasure. In The Death of
Desire, the character Simplicity suggests that the active search for divine
satisfaction itself constitutes sin. She advocates the straight and narrow road
to salvation, the road of inner contemplation, with its signs reminding the
traveler that life is brief and so are its tribulations. Marcela de San Félix’s
paradoxical view of the convent as a place which permits freedom from the
prison of the senses parallels her notion of the cell as the enclosure that frees
the soul from the prison of itself, expressed in the stanzas of “Ballad to the
Solitude of the Cells’’ cited above.
Mortification requires tranquility; Desire wants excitement. Portrayed as
a young man (the noun “apetito” is masculine in Spanish) and played by one
of the nuns, the character of Desire acquires particular resonance as the
coloquio unfolds. Multiple layers of wordplay emerge from a woman dressed
as a man who reflects all the dangers the women are fighting to avoid. Male
imperiousness, flirtatiousness, and derision of women are imitated and ridi¬
culed through this lively and familiar character. He is something of a galán
(dandy) turned into a fool.
Less familiar to Madre Marcela’s audiences and to later readers—but con¬
sistent with the long tradition of women’s religious writing—is the version
of the Eve story as it appears in The Death of Desire. It deviates from the
standard patriarchal version. Here, Eve is a moral, ethical, obedient voice
who tells the serpent why she and Adam cannot eat from the tree. When
the pair succumb to “ambition and greed,” they do so together; they appear
throughout as peers in harmonious union. God, a parental figure whose
children are grateful and respectful, punishes lovingly.
Despite their allegorical nature, Marcela de San Félix’s coloquios tell us
much about what this group of women said to themselves and to each other,
how they practiced religion, and how they lived their day. In the coloquios,
the outer world of historical happenings, so central to men’s literature, re¬
ceives scant attention.^® More important is the domestic level, with all the
246 UNTOLD SISTERS
minutiae of monastic daily life. The inner life of prayer—in some senses the
seventeenth-century equivalent of psychological introspection—receives closest
attention.
Like many of her female contemporaries, Madre Marcela expresses her
self-consciousness as a writer through formulas of inadequacy. In her case
they are used, at least in part, with ironic intention. The Soul says, for
instance, “En mi estilo no repares/que es grosero y sin primor” [243] (Pay no
heed to my style/for it is coarse and unskilled) and then goes on to recite
verses that confirm that the author indeed possesses, as she (in the persona
of a male character) had claimed in “Otra loa a una profesión” (“Another
Loa to a Nun’s Profession”), “un girón de poeta” [298] (pretensions of being
a poet).
Another element which she borrows from the dramatist’s craft and adapts
to her style is the theme of honor, so central to theater in that period. Madre
Marcela describes the concept of honor as propagated by Saint Teresa, which
adapts the morality of a social code to the female religious environment.
Through the cardinal virtues of humility, silence, obedience, abstinence, and
chastity—achieved principally through interior prayer—a woman becomes
“honorable.” Perfection is realized union with God. In her coloquios, as in
Cecilia del Nacimiento and Maria de San Alberto’s plays (Chapter 2), Madre
Marcela juxtaposes a desexualized concept of the term “honor” with that used
in secular theater; those who seek this honor strive toward divine realms.
Giving her audience (and perhaps the sisterly company of actors too) a
chance to laugh through comic dramatization. Madre Marcela exalts self-
abnegation as the primary virtue. Exaggeration to the point of caricature,
variations in tone, puns, and parody are some of the vehicles through which
she conveys the theatrical lesson of virtue. The conflicts among her allegorical
characters represent her personal struggles and illuminate the nature of her
childhood wounds. Many of her sister nuns would have recognized and under¬
stood the situations to which she alluded and must have been inspired in
their calling to lead a life that was “dead to the world.”
Not all Sisters achieved the goal as quickly as the subject of Madre Marcela’s
short biography, Catalina de San José. While it is thematically complemen¬
tary, the biography is otherwise very different from the play. Madre Marcela
pictures Madre Catalina as an exemplar in extremis of the virtues of humility,
silence, mortification, and obedience. The leitmotif similar to the English
expression “she seemed more dead than alive” is intensified by the plays on
words and alliteration of the original, “más parecía muerta que mortificada”
(203r), which might be translated “she appeared more moribund than mor¬
tified.”^* According to Madre Marcela, Madre Catalina’s humility, her self-
effacement, her refusal to ask favors, her obedience to all other nuns, and
her abstinence from food promote her aspiration to be dead to this life, so
as to live after death in true life. Although every good nun held such yearn¬
ings, few went to such extremes to ensure their place in heaven.
Madre Marcela’s descriptions of Madre Catalina’s virtues imply, by con¬
trast, the personalities of other nuns. Self-mortification and death frame the
second theme Madre Catalina s ability to give up natural love. Her denial
of earthly attachments extends to her family. She does not write to them,
see them, or think about them, according to her biographer. Neither has she
formed particular attachments within the convent. Love of all kinds pervaded
the monastic environment: sisterly, maternal, paternal, and daughterly love

and passionate friendships.^^ The text hints at emotions, quarrels, attach¬
ments, minor sins, small vices, complaints, contact with the outside world,
petitions and privileges, indulgence in parties, and celebrations. The biog¬
raphy also suggests a contrast to Madre Marcela’s own life history. Her past,
specifically the destruction of her own autobiography, leads us to see this
narrative as a sort of film negative, an ambivalent paean to life undeveloped—
what her own life might have been if the virtue of negation had been stronger
in her. For it was one thing to write about it and another to live it totally.
Catalina de San José’s rejection of writing, which Marcela de San Félix,
the writer, lauded as a mark of saintliness, is charged with contradictory
meaning. Madre Catalina’s strict observance of the Rule of the Order and
the perfection she achieved provoked respect and resentment, attraction and
rejection in her biographer. Implicit irony underlies Madre Marcela’s praise
for Madre Catalina’s restraint in other forms of expression, including speech.
Silence is presented as one of Madre Catalina’s demonstrable virtues.
Some of the few ways nonroyal women could earn fame and admiration
were through heroic attempts to be sacrificed and “lost” in Christ’s name,
which were often accompanied by visions and ecstasies. They subsequently
re-presented these efforts by recording them. Madre Marcela herself had
remarked that to earn notice she had to be lost to the world. Her biography
of Madre Catalina seems to deviate from the norm only in its literary style.
But the narrative does not lack a sense of irony, although on first reading it
appears to be a standard near-hagiographic summation of a nun’s life and
death. In these pages, however, irony is laced with affection and ambivalence
with profound religiosity. On the one hand. Madre Marcela herself displays
some of each of the virtues which she praises in writing of her Sister; on the
other she separates and distances herself from Madre Catalina and her virtues.
This is clearest in the repeated commemoration: “más parecía muerta que
mortificada.” Negatives and negation are employed to speak of a life of ne¬
gation. Such usage appears in Madre Marcela’s poems and plays also:
No la espantan asperezas. (Hardships do not frighten her

Ni rigores la desmayan. nor do rigors make her faint,
Que tiene amor muy valiente for her love is most courageous
Y con nada se acobarda. (432) and cannot be made to fear.)
Madre Marcela stresses the difference between Madre Catalina’s secular

and religious existence. In the world Catalina had enjoyed considerable
privilege: she had had servants and had maintained friendships with prom¬
inent people, including a highly placed churchman who later visited the
convent and was surprised that, unlike the other nuns, she refused to see
him. She had also indulged an assertive and combative personality. Some
dramatic event, enigmatically mentioned, seems to have prompted a sudden
conversion, although its suddenness and similarity to the Augustinian model
make its veracity suspect. The silences in this biography, inherent to the
genre, do not permit more than a hint of Madre Catalina’s struggle to rid
herself of earthly ties upon entering the convent. Madre Marcela claims that
self-scrutiny and self-awareness tempered Madre Catalina and paved her road
to purification and perfection. The image of wax expresses the malleability
of Madre Catalina’s changed temperament. As a nun she became a servant
248 UNTOLD SISTERS
to all the nuns, treating each as a superior. The narrator symbolizes the
subject’s efforts at self-effacement by never using Madre Catalina’s name. Her
total submission and silence caused awe and (possibly fearful) veneration in
the community.
The narrative begins and ends with the virtue of obedience. Madre Marcela
is writing under obedience; therefore, she says, she may be both excused for
her failings and accorded honor for the attempt. Initially, the command of
obedience allows her to speak of herself, of her weaknesses and her ability,
or rather of this opportunity to test her ability. She is confident of her Master’s
aid. Even more, she declares that it is God’s will that she write, thus using
the formulas of obedience and inadequacy to establish her own authority.
These formulas contradict and disguise Madre Marcela’s self-consciousness as
a writer. In her conclusion to the biography, she invokes Madre Catalina’s
intercession and special prayer on her own behalf, and that of the community
and Church, as recompense for serving as witness to her Sister’s superhuman
perfection.
In this, the only surviving example of Marcela de San Félix’s prose, she
mixes the set phrases of hagiographic tradition with touches of characteristic
Renaissance style—repetitions, parallelism, wordplay, rhetorical exclama¬
tion—and elements of Teresian colloquialism, including diminutives and
superlatives. When she speaks of Madre Catalina’s virtues or introduces a
new theme, she uses well-known and accepted phrasing. But she is original
in drawing a typology of Madre Catalina’s exemplary behavior and in alter¬
nating the employment of the first person singular, which places herself as
authority, with the first person plural, which confirms authority in the col¬
lective voice of the monastic community. Despite the biography’s brevity,
the author manages to speak from the vantage points of an affectionate Sister,
a detached observer, a moral judge, and a woman religious and Mother
Superior.
In the ballad “To a Solitude,” on the other hand. Madre Marcela describes
and poeticizes her own chosen interior path. The ballad is both a poem of
mystical contemplation and serene ecstasy and a woman’s song of self. It
illustrates ascetic practice as a framework for autonomy and sensuality. While
in the play The Death of Desire Madte Marcela warned against the dangers
of expressing religious practice as joyful, that is exactly what she does in the
poem. In the safety of concentrated solitude, the soul/self wanders freely and
experiences intense sensual pleasure. Whether this sensuality is interpreted
as a transcription of unmixed teligious fervor or a complex mingling of spiritual
and erotic impulses, what is noteworthy is the active rathet than passive role
played by the amorous soul. On a practical plane. Madre Marcela, the convent
leader and teacher usually beset by convent responsibilities and now cognizant
of removing herself from the hubbub of activity, communicates the delights
of retreat in this poem. Free from the burdens of daily routines and rela¬
tionships with their concomitant tutmoil, she sets sail on a “sea of sweet
waters” (321). When solitude is absent, moodiness and discontent set in and
her ship founders in raging seas (325).
Having expressed the contrasts between active life in the monastery and
the peacefulness of retreat. Madre Marcela the woman envisions herself as
a dynamic, loving being and portrays the tole of motherhood as powerful.
As a religious poet, she expresses the rewards of interior prayer and the
Contient InIVerse 249
achievement of the phase of mystical union commonly called spiritual ma¬

trimony. The poem is a gopd example of how women used orthodox religious
sentiment, couched in traditional forms of writing, to convey their own vision
and experience. As a woman writer who wrote with originality and authority,
Marcela de San Félix expressed her own vision and experience, however
filtered through the sieve of the dominant cultural and religious ideology of
Spain, where politics, culture, and religiosity were practically inseparable.
While there is nothing patently unorthodox in “To a Solitude,” for instance,
it differs from most poems by men that elaborate similar themes and senti¬
ments. There is an interesting reversal in these poems of the union of the
soul (feminine) with the Beloved, Christ. Men writing such poems must
experience on a small scale what women learn as soon as they learn language—
the splitting and abstraction of self so that it can be included in the masculine
generalization. But in such poems men separate, divide the feminine soul
from their masculine selves, while women are allowed to speak of a union
of the feminine soul and self. Whether woman or man, the Catholic mystic,
like the Church itself, becomes the Bride of God.
Saint John of the Cross uses the vocabulary of everyday life and erotic love
to attempt an expression of the ineffable mystical union; Madre Marcela
employs the language of essential religious experience to convey the need
for respite from the “confusion,” “anxiety,” and “troubles” (stanza 25) of daily
existence in the convent. She requests a tempering, through harmony and
balance, of real life, rather than its transcendence. According to religious
teachings of this period, life on earth was to be disdained and dismissed in
the interest of life eternal in the hereafter. In stanza 29 of the ballad, however,
the poet envisions enjoying earthly life if only she could be accompanied by
her beloved solitude, whose absence makes life seem an unwelcome death.
This is much closer to the aescetic vision of Fray Luis de Leon’s religious
pastoral poetry than to the famous versions of “muero porque no muero” (I
die because I do not die) of Saint Teresa, of Saint John of the Cross, and of
Lope himself. Solitude offers admirable and priceless freedom from the prison
of self; it also replaces loneliness by nourishing the inwardly expressed love
of “the impossible. ”
We know of no other poem in which Solitude is personified and converted
into the love object. “To a Solitude” encapsulates the love of the soul/bride
for the Beloved/Bridegroom/Christ within the song to Solitude. The verses
pertaining to mystical marriage appear within the poem but not at the be¬
ginning or end, and thus do not form part of the poem’s structural framework.
Of the thirty-six four-line stanzas, fifteen are devoted to the mystical epi-
thalamium (“an ardent nuptial song,” stanza 9), and twenty-one are devoted
to Solitude as liberator, progenitor of saints, and emancipator of the soul
from its enslavement. The groom is an unusually abstract figure; although
“he” gives favors and gifts and has a divine beauty, he is not described
physically. Solitude has breasts and nurses real people. The groom satiates
ardor, but it is Solitude that gives pleasure, contentment, and delight. Sol¬
itude allows the author to treat Christ the Bridegroom as a lover whom she,
the poet, courts (stanzas 13-14); he remains the abstract all-knowing God
whose will must be done and who inspired the quest for perfection (stanza
18), but he is far more concrete in other poems by Madre Marcela than in
this one.
250 UNTOLD SISTERS
Solitude, too, is called the Beloved in this romance. It becomes the in¬
strument for the realization of divine union, which in turn is only part of a
larger experience of wholeness, history, and selfhood. Solitude allows for
detachment from the material world and for spiritual growth, expressed through
the lyric rendition of divine union in the sacrament of communion, the
taking in of the body of Christ. Madre Marcela here addresses Solitude the
way other poems of this genre address Christ. Although her allegorized figures’
sex corresponds to their grammatical gender, not insignificantly the person¬
ified object of desire in this poem is female. She is a “dearest presence” whose
perfections charm; she is sovereign. This empowering mother of saints makes
the poet feel at ease with her world and able to accept and reinterpret her
“captivity” and “exile.”
The thirtieth stanza begins with a hauntingly beautiful verse: “who, with
halting human tongue . . . ,” which echoes Madre Marcela’s literary as well
as biblical culture. It also expresses hesitancy, clumsiness, or impossibility.
This is a biblical theme, as can be seen, for example, in Saint Jerome’s
mention of Peter’s stammer, but women writers invest the theme of hesitancy
with special meaning and handle it in other ways. It is therefore easy to miss
the forcefulness of the first-person voice in “To a Solitude,” as it claims vigor
and ardor (stanzas 2, 8, 9, r3, 14, 16, 21, 23, 28) and says: “I experience
you,” “I value you,” “I court you,” “I promised,” “I am not contented,” “I
told,” “I gave,” “I saw,” and “I learned.”
Marcela de San Félix entered the convent skilled in the use of the written
word and was given leave to exercise her talent there. Her writings offer
glimpses of daily life in the female monastery from a perspective not often
voiced. An outsider in the secular world by virtue of her birth and sex, her
irascible temper and her literary upbringing set her apart in the convent as
well. She sought fulfillment in religious community and literary activity; she
accomplished her best writing when she allegorized the ideals and conflicts
of religious life, when she was daringly humorous about convent domesticity,
and when she depicted her encounters with the self (and with God) through
solitude.
êxts and Híranslations

Marcela de San Félix*
Coloquio espiritual intitulado A Spiritual Drama, Entitled
Muerte del Apetito The Death of Desire
Hablan en él In Which Speak
El Alma La Mortificación The Soul Mortification
El Apetito La Desnudez Desire Simplicity
‘Selections and translations of this play and of “Otro romance: a una soledad”
follow the text of Manuel Serrano y Sanz, Apuntes para una biblioteca de escritoras
españolas, except where his rendition differs from the manuscript. These differences
are indicated by asterisks. The complete works of Marcela de San Félix are now
available; Electa Arenal and Georgina Sabat-Rivers. Annotated ed. Literatura Com
ventual Femenina: Sor Marcela de San Félix, hija de Lope. Barcelona: PPU, 1988.
(Salen el Alma y la Mortificación.) (Enter The Soul and Mortification.)

Alma. Soul.
Es mucho lo que padezco I suffer more and more
con tantas reprehensiones. under all these reprimands.
Mor ti/. Mortif.
Mortifica tus pasiones Try to mortify your passions
y no tendrás más enojos, and you’ll feel no more vexation,
que si a los vanos antojos but. Soul, if you try to gratify
quieres, Alma, complacer each vain and foolish fancy
no podrás jamás tener you’ll never gain possession
ni consuelo ni quietud. of calm or consolation.
Alma. Soul.
Bien deseo la virtud; I long for virtue, surely,
su dificultad me ahoga. but its difficulty chokes me.
Mortif. Mortif
Si el vicio te desahoga Oh, most unhappy Soul!
¡oh! infelicísima Alma, If vice undoes that noose,
nunca llevarás la palma you will never win the prize
ni triunfarás de ti misma; nor triumph over yourself,
que ésta es la mayor victoria. the greatest of victories.
Sirve el destierro de gloria Such banishment is a glory
a quien se aflige y se vence, to one who vanquishes self,
y si esto no te convence and if this does not persuade you
tu precipicio está cierto your destruction will be certain
y mi pena y aflicción . . . with my affliction and sorrow . . .
Alma. Soul.
No te puedo yo dar gusto, 1 cannot hope to please you,
que de nada te contentas; for nothing will content you;
me afliges y me atormentas you afflict me and torment me
por cualquiera niñería; for every trifling thing;
tu rígida condición your stem, demanding temper
hace gran ponderación finds ponderous deliberation
aun de una pequeña acción in the smallest action
menos ajustada o recta; not wholly right or fitting.
bien sé que no soy perfecta, Of course I know I’m not perfect,
pero ni tan mala soy but neither am 1 so wicked
que no puedas tolerarme, that you can’t put up with me;
y sino, puedes dejarme, if not, then you may quit me,
que yo buscaré otra amiga for 1 shall seek other friends
de condición más amable more amiably inclined
que con caricia me hable to speak with tender feeling
y trate con caridad; and treat me charitably!
mi vecina Vanidad My own neighbot. Vanity,
siempre me ofrece su casa, frequently offers me shelter,
su lado, su mesa y más. table, friendship, and more.
Mortif. Mortif.
Pues con eso bien podrás In that way you may indeed
tratar de tu salvación seek your own salvation,
de servir a Dios y amarle. serving God and loving Him.
252 UNTOLD SISTERS
Alma. Soul.
Mi pretensión es gozarle My aim is to rejoice in Him
mas no por tanta estrechura, but not with yout austerity,
que ni yo vivo en clausura for I do not live in a nunnery
ni trato de perfección nor is perfection my goal
con tanta continuación with a constancy so steady
que me haya de condenar that it might condemn me
a vida tan retirada; to a life of utter seclusion;
ya me tiene muy cansada, I am thoroughly exhausted,
amiga, tu condición. friend, by your disposition.
Tú eres. Mortificación, You are “Mortification,” indeed;
vete a un convento descalzo, go now to a Discalced Convent,
que allí serás admitida, for there you’ll be received,
muy regalada y servida greatly favored, and well served
de quien tiene obligación by those who are obliged
de sufrir tu condición to suffer your bad temper
y conformar toda acción and make each act conform
con todo lo que gustares; completely to your liking.
en dejarme no repares, Leave me this very instant,
que no corro por tu cuenta. for 1 don’t depend on you.
Mortif. Mortif.
Saliera de aquí contenta I would gladly go away
a no ver tu perdición. did I not foresee your damnation.
Alma. Soul.
¡Qué perjudicial mujer! . . . What a nasty woman! . . .
(Vose la Mortificación.) (Exit Mortification.)
¡Qué porfiada y qué necia! How obstinate and foolish!
aun no creo que se ha ido. I still can’t believe she’s gone.
¿Si habrá Apetito venido? Has Desire not arrived?
Quiera Dios que no se tarde, Pray God he’s not delayed.
no es él mozuelo cobarde. He is no cowardly fellow—
Es valiente como un Cid he’s valiant as the Cid—
y temo alguna desgracia. may no harm come to him.
(Sale el Apetito.) (Enter Desire.)
Apetito. Desire.
¿Hay tal donaire, hay tal gracia? My, how charming! My, how funny!
¿Yo había de madrugar? For this I rose at dawn?
y más que me fui acostar And think, I did not get to bed
casi a las dos de la noche until nearly two in the morning
cansado de mil fatigas . . . worn out by a thousand demands . .
Alma. Soul.
¿Dónde, Apetito, caminas? Desire, where are you going?
Apetito. Desire.
Nunca me faltan mohínas I never lack for bothersome
pendencias y disensiones; * feuds or quarrelsome strife;
yo busco las ocasiones; I seek every opportunity—
¿qué he de hacer? Soy hombre de hecho, what else? I’m a man indeed!—
nunca quedo satisfecho; and never satisfied.
mis deseos me consumen. My appetites consume me;
que estoy contento presumen everyone thinks me contented

cuando todo lo deseo. when 1 hunger for it all.
Ea, dame colación;* Come now! Give me some sustenance.

Alma, ¿por qué estás suspensa? Soul, why do you stand in suspense?
Abre presto la despensa, Quick, open up the pantry,
que es hora de merendar. it’s time to take refreshment.
Alma. Soul.
¿Y si no puedes cenar? And if later you cannot dine?
Apetito. Desire.
Por eso haré media noche. Then I’ll have a bite at midnight.
¡Ay, quién se fuera en un coche* How I’d love to ride in a coach
a pasear por el Prado! for a ramble through the Prado!
Notable gana me ha dado I suddenly have quite a longing
de comer dos quesadillas. to eat two sweet cheese pastries.
¿Cuándo harás albondeguillas? When will you make meatballs?
Alma. Soul.
Sosiégate, que estás loco. Hush now, you’ve gone mad.
Apetito. Desire.
Ahora te pido poco, Till now I’ve requested little;
que mucho más pediré. I’ll require much more, in time.
Alma. Soul.
Pues yo no te lo daré, Well, I shall not give it
que me vas importunando. if you keep on pestering me.
Apetito. Desire.
¿Tú quieres que esté ayunando You want me to go without food
y estoy casi desmayado? when I’m nearly faint with hunger?
sácame de aquel pemil, Slice me a bit of that ham,

pues te lo envió mi madre* for it was dispatched to you
la Gula. by my mother. Greed.
Alma. Soul.
¿Hay donaire What grace
cómo tiene en el decir? is his, in the way he speaks!
Espera que por él voy Wait, while I fetch what you ask,
y también por otras cosas. and other things as well.
Apetito. Desire.
Pues mira, que sean gustosas, See here, let them be tasty,
que estoy muy necesitado. for 1 am in great need.
(Sale la Mortificación.) (Enter Mortification.)
Mortif. Mortif
¡Oh villano, mal mirado! Oh you villain, unhappy sight!
A mis manos morirás. You shall die at my hand.
¿Tan lejos me presumías? You thought I’d gone away?
Apetito. Desire.
Estas son costumbres mías; These are just my habits;
déjame, que a tu pesar leave me alone; in spite of you
con el Alma he de vivir. I’m bound to live with the Soul.
Mortif. Mortif.
No lo tengo de sufrir, I’ll not put up with that.
254 UNTOLD SISTERS
Apetito, no porfíes. Desire—push me no further.

Apetito. Desire.
¿De oír aquesto no ríes? 1 shall die of laughter!
Mira que es cosa graciosa What an amusing thing it is
ver a una vieja enfadosa to see a wild old woman
reñirme porque te asisto, * scold me because 1 attend you,
porque te sirvo y regalo because I cherish and serve you
y miro por tu salud. and take care of your health.
Mor tí/. Morti/.

De todos aquestos daños. For all these insults. Soul,
Alma, tienes tú la culpa, you are responsible,
y no admitiré disculpa and I shall spare no blame
si al Apetito no matas. if you fail to kill Desire.
Alma. Soul.
Pues ¿tú de aquesto me tratas But how can you speak to me so,
siendo tan justa y tan santa? yourself so just and holy?
¿Yo matar? ¿Qué es lo que dices? 1 to kill? What do I hear?
Mor tí/. Morti/.
Quedo, no te escandalices; Patience, have no fear;
escúchame, y te diré, I’ll explain, if you will listen,
que matar al apetito for the killing of Desire
es la acción más levantada, is the highest course of action,
más feliz, más deseada the happiest, most longed-for
de los justos y los santos. by the just and holy.
Apetito. Desire.
[E]sta mujer me atormenta, This woman is a torment to me;
¿quieres. Alma, despedirla? will you. Soul, send her away?
Alma. Soul.
No me atrevo, que es honrada I dare not; she is honorable,
y la estiman, aunque pocos. and highly esteemed, though by few.
Apetito. Desire.
Y esos dehen de ser locos. And those few must be mad.
Mor tí/. Morti/.
Los que te escuchan lo son. Like those who listen to you.
Alma. Soul.
Dime, Mortificación, Tell me. Mortification,
lo que habías empezado what you had just now begun
de matar al Apetito . . . about killing one’s Desire . . .
Apetito. Desire.
Quiero dormir un poquito; I want to sleep a little;
yo me voy presto a la cama; I shall go straight to bed.
Alma, ¿también tú te duermes? Soul, will you sleep now also?
ahora aquesto te importa. Rest is what you need.
Mor tí/. Morti/.
De palabras soy muy corta. My words are very few;
Todo mi ser es obrar. I live only by my deeds.
Apetito. Desire.
Yo me quiero desnudar. I want to get undressed.
que el calor me da fatiga. this heat malees me so sleepy.
{Siéntase el Apetito, como que duerme.) (Desire sits down, as if sleeping.)

Alma. Soul.
Por tu vida, que me digas I beg you, tell me right away
esa historia que me admira this tale at which 1 marvel;
y pienso me importará. 1 think 1 need it now.
[Mortificación le relata su versión de la caída. ] [Mortification tells her version of the Fall. ]
Apetito. Desire.
Yo pienso que me he dormido. 1 think I have been sleeping.
¿Qué historias habéis contado, What stories have you told,
buena mujer? ¿Habéis dado good woman? Have you deigned
en referimos novelas? to relate romances?
Aun Adán no está seguro Even Adam is not safe
metido en su Paraíso placed in his paradise
de vos. * by your hand.
Mor ti/. Mortif.
¡Que no calles! . . . Will you hush! . . .
¡Atrevido y sin respeto! Rude creature! Where’s your respect?
¿Alma, por qué le consientes? Soul, why do you let him?
Apetito. Desire.
Mas que te saco los dientes I’ll just pluck out your teeth
si algunos tiene tu boca. if any are left in your mouth.
Mortif. Mortif.
Mis cuidados no mereces You do not deserve my care.
Alma, pues tanto te tardas Soul, for you move so slowly
en despedir a ese loco. to dismiss this fool.
Apetito. Desire.
Todo lo tengo en muy poco, It all means little enough to me,
seria Mortificación, dismal Mortification;
pues el Alma de mí gusta for the Soul is fond of me,
y a vos teme solamente. and only frightened of you.
Alma. Soul.
Te quiero ser obediente. I want to obey, truly,
Mortificación amiga, dearest Mortification,
pero éste mucho me obliga, but this one binds me close,
no me puedo desasir and I cannot work loose
de su trato, aunque quisiera. from his ties, though I do wish it.
Apetito. Desire.
Si te salieras afuera If you were to quit
de mi trato y amistad, these bonds, which are my friendship,
sin duda que te murieras. without doubt you would die.
Mortif. Mortif.
Antes cree que vivieras On the contrary, you would live
con más gusto y libertad. with greater joy and freedom.
Alma. Soul.
Notable perplejidad This quandry hems me in;
me cerca, ahoga y consume. it oppresses and consumes me.
256 UNTOLD SISTERS
Mortif. Mortif.
Yo me pongo de por medio 1 shall put myself between you
si me oyes y ejecutas if you. Soul, heed my counsels
lo que te aconsejaré. and follow my advice.
Alma. Soul.
Si no abrazo la virtud If I do not embrace virtue
me condeno a eterno llanto. I’m damned to eternal flames.
Mortif. Mortif.
¡Oh! cuánto me gozo, cuánto, Oh, how it pleases me
de verte desengañada, to see you disabused—
quiero decir, mejorada, by which I mean, improved;
que aún te faltan más virtudes. some virtues are still lacking.
Alma. Soul.
De todas mis inquietudes I know I am the cause
conozco que soy la causa of all of my disquiet,
porque sigo mis quereres. as I follow my desires.
Mortif. Mortif
Si tú a ti misma no mueres, It is to yourself that you must die,
morirás veces sin cuento; or you’ll die countless times;
es de haber muerto argumento and the proof of such death shall reside
el no sentir las pasiones. in your feeling no more passions.
Si puesta en las ocasiones If, when the chance arises,
valientemente peleas, you raise a valiant fight—
que es. Alma, lo que te toca. that. Soul, is what you must do.
Alma. Soul.
Si el Apetito provoca, But when Desire incites me
¿qué he de hacer para no oírle? how can I turn away?
Mortif. Mortif.
Con viveza resistirle Resist him with all your strength
al principio, que él se irá. from the start, and he will go.
Apetito. Desire.
(Yo imagino algún gran mal (I imagine some great evil
que me quiere suceder: will come to do me harm:
el Alma se va rindiendo, the Soul is beginning to yield
que ya Mortificación and now Mortification
está gustosa y contenta. is cheerful and content.
El ver esto me atormenta; Oh, what a mighty torment!
¿qué haré para conservarme How shall I keep on
si conciertan acabarme? if both try to do me in?
mas pienso que no podrán, But that I think they cannot do,
que aunque me den mil heridas though they inflict a thousand wounds,
tengo yo infinitas vidas for I have infinite lives
y tantas resurreciones.) and as many resurrections.)
Mortif. Mortif
¿Buscas perfección muy alta? You seek the heights of perfection?
Pues no me olvides jamás; Then forget me never;
todo bien alcanzarás You will achieve all good.

Alma, por este camino. Soul, by this very road.
Alma. Soul.
Es lo acendrado y lo fino, That road is perfect and pure,
aqueso no tiene duda, ’ of that I have no doubt;
pero aquesto de estar muda, but tell me, how can this be
dime, ¿como podrá ser, if I must remain mute?
si soy moza y soy mujer, For that seems impossible
que me parece imposible? for a maid and a woman like me.
Mortif. Mortif
El amor lo hará posible Love will make it possible—
y el deseo de salvarte. and your desire to be saved.
Alma. Soul.
No quisiera replicarte, I have no wish to contradict you,
sino obedecerte en todo, but to obey you in all ways.
pues veo lo que me importa. Now I see what I must do.
Mortif. Mortif
Esta ciencia y este arte There is nothing new or strange
no consiste en cosas nuevas, in this science, this great art,
ni en peregrinos caminos: nor need you seek out untrod roads;
los comunes son divinos, the common roads are holy,
tienen gran seguridad offering great safety,
y están libres de tropiezos, and they are free from pitfalls,
de miedos y salteadores. terrors, or highwaymen.
Alma. Soul.
Estos sentidos traidores All the traitorous senses,
con el Apetito aleve together with treacherous Desire,
me hacen gran contradicción. constantly bar my way.
Mortif Mortif.
Trátala con Oración, You must turn to Prayer
pues que te visita ya. * since these troubles visit you still.
Alma. Soul.
Deseo tengo de verla;’ I do long to see her;
Jesús, ¡qué hermosa doncella, Lord! What a lovely lady,
¡qué urbana, y qué conversable! so affable, so civil!
Todo su trato es amable. Prayer is kind in every way.
Mortif. Mortif.
Como con ansias te veo Since I see you full of yearning
de anhelar a lo mejor, with the longing to improve,
escucharé con amor I will listen with love,
y responderé con él to whatever you may require,
a lo que me preguntares. and answer again with love.
Alma. Soul.
En mi estilo no repares, Pay no heed to my style,
que es grosero y sin primor. for it is coarse and unskilled.
Mortif. Mortif
Acompáñale de amor, Let it keep company with love,
de verdad y sencillez. with simplicity and truth:
258 UNTOLD SISTERS
que es la discreción que importa, ’ discernment is what matters;

que esotros son accidentes all else is incidental
de poquísima importancia; and entirely trivial—Soul,
Dime, Alma, lo que quisieres speak just as you wish,
con sencillo corazón. with a simple, open heart.
Alma. Soul.
Como saben que oración But as everyone knows that Prayer
es liberal y muy rica, is rich and generous,
y ven que con ella trato when they see that we converse
y callo el bien que me hace, yet 1 say nothing of her gifts,
por ingrata me tendrán they will think me ungrateful
pues oculto sus mercédes. because 1 hide her mercies.
Mortif. Mortif.
Bien manifestarlas puedes, Surely you may display them,
mas no ha de ser con palabras though it need not be with words
sino con la vida y obras, hut through your life and works
y todos entenderán and thus they all will understand
que eres muy agradecida that you are full grateful,
y que sabes estimar and that you do indeed esteem
el favor que se te hace. the favors shown to you.
Mucho más se satisface You’ll derive more satisfaction
con obrar que con hablar from works than you will from speaking.
y bien puedes preguntar Very well, ask me again
otra duda, si se ofrece. * if another question plagues you.
Alma. Soul.
Enseñada me parece 1 believe 1 have gained instruction
que quedo con tus palabras. from all that you have said.
Alma. [A Apetito. ] Soul. [To Desire.]

Ya que estoy desengañada, Now that 1 am undeceived
¿por qué no me dejarás? why will you not leave me?
Apetito. Desire.
Despedirme no podrás You cannot dismiss me
aunque tratas de virtud though you aim at virtue;
Yo entro en la mayor quietud, 1 find my way into quietude,
en los santos ejercicios, into all holy practices,
en los divinos oficios, into the divine services,
en el coro y refectorio, the choir and refectory,
capítulo y dormitorio the chapel and the dormitory,
y donde el diablo no puede; where the Devil himself cannot go;
allí busco algún relieve there 1 seek some little crack
para pasar mi carrera; where 1 may gain entry—
¿pues qué, queréis que me muera wouldst thou have me expire
de hambre, vieja maldita? of hunger, evil old hag?
De todo lleno mi alforja; It’s all more grist for my mill,

de la seglar, de la monja, the laywoman and the nun—
mas ésta me da más gusto; but the latter is much more fun;
más estimo yo que un justo I’d much rather a just man
me dé un poquito de entrada crack his door to me a bit.
y me tenga voluntad, and show me his goodwill,

que toda la cantidad than that 1 win all the roaming hordes
de pecadores corsarios of privateering sinners
que se dan a sus contentos; who indulge themselves with pleasures.
más quiero de los conventos I’d rather succeed, in the convent,
sacar una niñería, in carrying off a trifle:
un bocadillo sin orden, a mouthful without permission,
un mirar no necesario, an unnecessary glance,
una pregunta escusada an inessential question
0 vana curiosidad, or vain curiosity,
un hablar sin reparar, a word said without reflection,
una acción menos compuesta, an action lacking restraint—
más me suele regalar these always delight me more,
y recibe mayor gusto and my insatiable palate
mi insaciable paladar. savors a sweeter joy.
Alma. Soul.
Mortificación, ¿qué haré Mortification, what shall 1 do
para que no me dé enojos? to stop him from vexing me so?
Mortif. Mortif.
Nunca le vuelvas los ojos Keep your eyes turned away,
y sufre todas sus voces. and endure the clamor he makes.
Alma. Soul.
Ya mi inconstancia conoces; You know I’m all too fickle:
yo lo veo y eso temo, 1 see, to my alarm,
que es en el fingir sutil that he’s a subtle cheat,
y primoroso en engaños. and exquisite in his deceits.
Mortif. Mortif.
Advertidos esos daños Once you know the dangers
no puede salir con nada, he’ll not get away with his tricks;
y para mayor defensa and to further your defense
yo te traeré con quien puedas I’ll present you to one with whom
librarte de sus quimeras, you may free yourself of his disputes
como te dije otra vez. as 1 told you once before.
Alma. Soul.
¿Es tu hermana Desnudez? Is it your sister. Simplicity?
que mucho ha que la deseo. * 1 have long hoped to know her.
Mortif. Mortif
Aguarda que seas mejor Wait until you have improved
para así poder hablarte, so that she may speak with you;
que no podrá aprovecharte for her lofty manner
su modo tan levantado can be no help to you
si no has mucho aprovechado until you have grown accustomed
en la santa perfección. to the holiest perfection.
Alma. Soul.
¿No comunico a Oración, But after all, 1 speak with Prayer,
que es tan pura y fervorosa? who is so fervent and pure . . . ?
Mortif. Mortif
Desnudez es otra cosa Simplicity is of a higher degree
200 UNTOLD SISTERS
y consiguenla muy raros. * to which very few accede.

Apetito. Desire.
¿Piensas que a todos se fía? Do you think she confides in all
humankind?
[Aparte] [Aside]
¡Bueno está por vida mía! A good thing it is for me!
no venga la Desnudez, Don’t let Simplicity appear
que la temo más que al fuego, for 1 fear her more than hellfire;
a la muerte me prevengo 1 will give myself up for lost
si ella entrare por aquí. if she ever enters here.
Apetito. Desire.
Mira que es muy melindrosa Look here, she’s a dreadful prude
y no la podrás sufrir. and you’ll not endure her.
Alma. Soul.
El acertarla a servir At this moment, all my care
es lo que me da cuidado. is how to serve her better.
Desnud. Simp.
Muy grande prisa me he dado 1 hurried with all speed
por venir a visitarte, to come and visit you;
llamáronme en otra parte I was called from far away,
de muchas obligaciones where 1 saw to many duties
y las dejo por oírte. which 1 leave to attend you.
Alma. Soul.
¿Cómo podré yo servirte? Tell me, how may 1 serve you?
las grandes en que me pones 1 owe so much to you,
y las que tengo a tu hermana. as 1 do to your sister.
Desnud. Simp.
En la bondad soberana You must now place all your trust
confía, que sí podrás, in the highest goodness,
y con eso nos tendrás and you shall have the two of us
a las dos muy de tu parte, always at your side
para ayudar tus intentos to assist with all your aims
y librarte de este necio. and free you from this fool.
Apetito. Desire.
En tratarme con desprecio She bases all her lore
funda todo su saber. on treating me with scorn.
Desnud. Simp.
Ningún mal te podrá hacer No evil can befall you
como yo te asista y guarde; while 1 help and keep you.
delante de mí es cobarde, Before me he becomes a coward:
todas sus fuerzas se acaban all his forces fail him,
y su poder enflaquece. and his power fades.
Alma. Soul.
Que le destruyas merece. He deserves to die by your hand.
Desnud. Simp.
Alma, ten buen corazón Soul, you must take heart,
comunica a la Oración speak frequently with Prayer,
y no me pierdas de vista. and keep me in your sight.
Alma. Soul.
Mi miedo alentando vas, You cheer me in my fears,
porque me habían contado for others had been telling me
que eres severa, intratable. of your cold severity.
Desnud. Simp.
Mi condición es afable My bearing is quite friendly
para los que me conocen to those who truly know me
y aborrecen este mundo and abhor this world
con todas sus pretensiones with all its false pretensions,
pareceres y opiniones . . . appearances, and opinions . . .
Pero quiero antes decir But first 1 wish to say

otras cosas de importancia other things of great importance
que sirvan de introducción that may serve as introduction
a mi plática y discurso. to my little dissertation.
Apetito. Desire.
No tienes aquí concurso Here you’ll find no congregation
para hacer ese sermón, to listen to a sermon,
que somos aquí muy pocos for we are very few
y estamos mal avenidos and we’ve been discontented
después que tú entraste acá. since we first saw you.
[Sigue el discurso breve de Desnudez- ] [Simplicity’s brief discourse follows.]

Alma. Soul.
¿Cómo se llama tu padre? What is your father’s name?
Desnud. Simp.
Desprecio de lo criado. Scorn of all things created.
Alma. Soul.
¿Y tu madre? And your mother?
Desnud. Simp.
La Pureza Purity,
honestísima y hermosa, as honest as she is lovely,
en todo justa y piadosa. in all things pious and just.
Alma. Soul.
¿Y naciste tú primero? And you were the eldest?
Desnud. Simp.
Antes Mortificación, Mortification was first-bom.
la segunda fue Oración, Prayer was the second daughter,
y yo nací la tercera; and I was bom the third;
mas todas tan parecidas, but we all are so similar,
tan concordes, tan unidas, so harmonious and united
que una sola parecemos that we seem to be one,
y nunca nos apartamos . . . and we’re never far apart . . .
[El que ose acercarse a sólo una de las tres, [Those who try to approach one of the three
por lo tanto, fracasará,] without the others wi[[ therefore fail,]
porque nunca acabarán for they’ll never come to the end

de conseguir sus deseos. of seeking their desires.
¿Deseos? . . . ¡oh qué mal dije! Desires? how wrongly 1 spoke!
que veleidades se llaman. They are better called whims.
202 UNTOLD SISTERS
que es querer y no querer. this wanting and not wanting.

Alma. Soul.
¿Cómo puede aqueso ser? But how can that be so?
Desnud. Simp.
De esta manera será; In this way, as you shall see:
cuando las virtudes ven when they perceive the virtues
tan apacibles y hermosas, in all their peace and beauty,
quieren alcanzar gozosas they wish to pluck with eager hands
lo gustoso y apacible; what is pleasant and savory;
mas cuando ven lo terrible, but when they see how terrible,
dificultoso y amargo, arduous, bitter the virtues can be,
enfríanse los deseos the desires that so amused them
que tanto los entretienen, grow quite cold within them,
y así quieren y no quieren. and so they want without wanting.
Alma. Soul.
Yo voy adquiriendo luz. Now 1 begin to see.
Desnud. Simp.
En deleites no repares Don’t linger over pleasures,
aunque sean más divinos; however holy they may be;
Tan desasida has de estar, you must be so very detached,

tan sin jugo y sin arrimo, with neither support nor vital sap,
que si fuera tu camino that if you found your road
todo sembrado de abrojos, entirely sown with thistles,
de espinas y de malezas, thorns, and bristling thickets,
camines como por flores you’d walk as though on flowers,
y como antes caminabas just as you walked before
cuando regalada estabas. when you were showered with gifts.
Alma. Soul.
Algún tanto me he afligido, I am feeling some affliction
porque presumía yo because I had assumed
que podía consolarme that I could find consolation
con los regalos de Dios. in the gifts of God.
Desnud. Simp.
Consolarte muy bien puedes, You may certainly be consoled,
pero desearlos no, but never desirous of more,
ni tampoco detenerte nor should you pause one moment
en su dulzura y sabor, over their sweetness or flavor—
que fuera dejar al dueño which would be to abandon the Master
por estar mirando el don, while attending to what He bestowed—
para crecer y medrar so that you may grow and prosper
en el camino interior; on the inward road.
Quiere Dios amantes finos God wants only the finest lovers
que con brío y con valor who, with energy and valor,
le sirven muy a su costa will serve Him at any price
sin salario y sin ración; without wages or reward;
mas a nadie se la niega but in the end, reward is given
este liberal Señor. by our generous Lord.

Las almas interesadas But there are those selfish souls,
que por gustos y sabor seized by enthusiasm,
buscan a Dios y le sirven who seek God and serve Him
selladas desta afición, to indulge their own tastes and whims—
en lo mismo que pretenden to the measure that they aspire,
reciben su galardón. they receive their prize.
No saldrán jamás de niñas, Such souls remain little girls,
que el esforzado varón while the upright man
sólo sirve por servir, serves only in order to serve;
y a quien sabe este camino and whoever knows this road
de Desnudez y Aflicción, of Simplicity and Affliction
más le estima y más le ama esteems and cherishes it more
que otros de consolación. than all others that console us.
Esta vida es un instante, This life endures hut a moment,
y siempre va tan veloz and it always passes so rapidly,
que aunque se viva muriendo that although while one lives one is dying,
penas brevísimas son. the pain is brief as can be.
Apetito. Desire.
Antes que a matarme empieces Before you start in killing me
escúchame dos razones, hear my two objections:
pues tienes obligaciones you know you are greatly indebted
tan grandes a mis parientes to all of my relations
los afectos y sentidos, the affections and the senses,
que todos te están rendidos; who are so devoted to you;
y tan sujetos te están indeed, they profess such fondness
que yo no te pido cosa, that 1 do not ask a single thing—
ni jamás la pediré, nor shall 1 ever—
que a ti te sea dañosa. that might be harmful to you.
Para ir a la perfección 1 only wish that Prayer
sólo quiero que Oración would give you some small tokens,
te dé algunos regalillos, perhaps a few tender tears,
algunas lágrimas tiernas that you might reach perfection
para que apresures más and so that you might hasten
el paso y llegues más presto your step, and arrive at once
al fin, que es la perfección. at perfection, which is your goal.
Alma. Soul.
Que está convertido advierte. At last I see him reformed.
Desnud. Simp.
¿Convertido? En sus maldades. Reformed? In his wrongdoing.
Apetito. Desire.
Cierto que digo verdades. 1 swear what I’m saying is true.
Desnud. Simp.
Cierto que yo no las creo, And 1 swear 1 do not believe you
que penetro tus intentos . . . for I know what you intend . . .
que el Apetito se muda, Desire may mend his ways.

pero en fin, queda Apetito. But in the end, he is still Desire.
204 UNTOLD SISTERS
Apetito. Desire.
Pues dime, tú, ¿en qué pequé? Tell me, what was my sin?
Mortif. Mortif
En queremos engañar Your desire to take us in
con la capa de virtud with the cloak of virtue
y mostrártenos devoto. as if you had become devout.
Apetito. Desire.
De fingir estoy remoto, Dissemblance is far from my thoughts,
que soy sencillo y muy llano. 1 am artless and unadorned.
Mortif. Mortif.
En todo cuanto has mentido, None of the lies you’ve told till now
nunca fue como ha sido ahora. come anywhere near to this.
Apetito. Desire.
Cierto, cierto, mi señora, I swear, I swear, good Mistress,
que vusté poco me adula. you do little to flatter me.
Mortif. Mortif.
Si eres hijo de la Gula, If you are the son of Gluttony—
que es tu madre, y te ha criado, your mother, who raised you from birth—
y tu padre fue el pecado, and if your father was Sin,
¿por qué alabas tu linaje? why do you praise your family?
Apetito. Desire.
No es justo que así me ultraje, It’s not right that you should slander me,
que mi madre es poderosa, for my mother is powerful,
gruesa, rica y muy hermosa: stout, wealthy, and beautiful—
¿quiere saber otra cosa? do you want to know one thing more?
Pues es mujer de gran fama; Well then, she’s a famous woman;
todo el mundo la conoce. all the world knows her well.
Desnud. Simp.
Y viene su descendencia And she hails, by direct descent,
de aquella desobediencia from the disobedience
de la primera mujer. of the very first of her sex.
Apetito. Desire.
Muchos procuran tener Many people endeavor to receive
en sus cases a mi madre; my mother into their homes;
¿pues qué diré de mi padre, and what shall I say of my father,
mi señora Desnudez? good mistress Simplicity?
En toda la redondez Why this wide world round
de la tierra tiene nombre, his name has great renown,
y desto nadie se asombre; and this should astonish no one;
todos tributo le han dado. for all have made their tribute to him.
[Después de más discusión intentan matar a [After further discussion, they attempt to kill
Apetito. ] Desire. ]
Apetito. Desire.
¡Ay . . . ay!, ¡que me mata Desnudez! Alas! Simplicity slays me!
¡Que me acaba! Ya soy muerto. My end approaches! I die.
Alma. Soul.
Enterrémosle en el huerto Let us bury him in the garden.
Convent InIVerse
porque no viva otra vez. so he’ll never live again.

Mortif. Mortif
Sospecho que vivo está 1 suspect he is still alive
y se hace mortecino. and this death is only a sham.
Alma. Soul.
No podría ser mayor My troubles would know no bounds
mi trabajo si él viviese. were he to come to life.
Dios permita no suceda. God grant that may never occur.
¡Qué contenta estoy sin él! How happy 1 am without him!
¡Con qué quietud y sosiego! How peaceful and at ease!
sólo me congoja el miedo Save only my anguish at the fear
que vuelva a resucitar. that he may reappeat.
Desnud. Simp.
Volverémosle a matar. Let us kill him one more time.
Alma. Soul.
¿No hay más que andarse en pendencias? Carry on these quarrels, you mean?
Por tu vida no la digas. By your life, don’t tell me so.
Desnud. Simp.
¿Que estás en vida, no miras As you live, can you not see
que es guerra sobre la tierra? all is war upon this eatth?
En lo más bajo te encierra It will shut you up in the depths,
a lo más alto te sube. and follow you to the heights.
Mientras en la carne estás While you wear this garment of flesh
estas peleas tendrás . . . these battles will be yours . . .
Mortif. Mortif.
¡Quién pudiera tal pensar! Who’d think it possible!
Mirad, que ha resucitado Look! That villain Desire
el Apetito otra vez. has come to life again.
Alma. Soul.
¡Ay, amiga Desnudez! Alas, Simplicity, my friend!
¿Qué es esto?, ¿qué ha sucedido? What’s this? How can it be?
Sin aliento me he quedado. This takes my breath away.
Desnud. Simp.
Presumías que acabado You thought your struggle finished.
estaba ya tu combate.
Alma. Soul.
Mucho el corazón me late; How my heart is pounding;
de susto no puedo hablar. 1 cannot speak for fright.
Mortif. Mortif
Pues qué, ¿querías pasar What then, you expect your life
sin contradicción la vida? to pass without contradiction?
Aqueso es para la otra, That is for the next—
que en ésta hay muchos contrarios this life is full of conflicts,
extraordinarios y varios, surptising, strange, and mixed,
ya de adentro, ya de afuera, from without, then from within,
ya domésticos, ya extraños, from the household, the outer world
y tú misma para ti and you are no small opposition
eres contraria y no poco. with which you confront youtself.

266 UNTOLD SISTERS
Alma. Soul.
Que esté vivo aqueste loco, This fool has come to life,
cierto siempre lo temí. just as I always feared.
¡Con qué consuelo he vivido, What consolation filled me,
y con que paz he pasado with what sweet peace I passed
el tiempo que estuvo muerto! the time, while he was dead!
Apetito. Desire.
Todo lo tengo por cierto, I believe all you have said,
pero ya he resucitado; but now I have revived,
(Vuelve el Apetito.) (Desire returns.)
y como enterrado he estado, and since I was buried,
y estaba la tierra helada, and the earth was icy.
me ha hecho notable daño I’ve suffered considerable harm.
y estoy muy acatarrado I’ve a terrible catarrh,
y he menester muchas cosas and I must have many dainties,
sazonadas y sabrosas spicy, tasty, and warm,
para templar esta tos to soothe this nasty cough
que me da notable pena: which is a considerable bother:
una gallina muy buena bring me your finest hen,
traigan, que estoy en ayunas; for I am terribly empty;
unas buenas aceitunas some good olives from Andalucía,
cordobesas y sin hueso. and see that they have no stones.
Acaben; ¿no van por eso? That’s all—they have not gone?
¿No las mueve Caridad Are they not moved by Charity
con este resucitado? for one raised from the dead?
Mortif. Mortif.
Cierto que te has levantado Surely you come back from the tomb
del sepulcro con aliento. with no shortness of breath.
Alma. Soul.
Con grande enojo le escucho. How it vexes me to hear him.
Consuélome con no darle My one comfort is to refuse him
nada de cuanto pidiere, whatever he may ask of me
aunque se haga todo bocas. though he plead with a hundred tongues.
Apetito. Desire.
O están necias, o están locas. They are either foolish or mad.
¡Ah! buena gente. ¿A quién digo? Ah, good folk! To whom shall I speak?
Tráiganme siquiera un higo, Bring me at least a fig,
una almendra ó una pasa; an almond or one raisin;
llamen a las previsoras; call the nuns in charge of provisions,
peor que peor será, however bad your worst may be—
porque son de la miseria for they are the very quintessence
quinta esencia, y punto más. of avarice, and beyond.
Alma. Soul.
No se habrá visto jamás No one has ever witnessed
disolución tan grande. such utter dissipation.
Apetito. Desire.
Ya sufrir la sed no puedo;
1 can endure this thirst no more;
tráiganme un poco de aloja
bring me some honey-wine.
y esté de nieve sin falta. and be sure it’s cold as ice.

Desnud. Simp.
Esta es la cosa más alta; This calling is the highest:
callar, sufrir, padecer. to suffer, keep quiet, endure.
Alma. Soul
Sola no lo puedo hacer I cannot do it alone
sin la ayuda de las dos. without aid from both of you.
Mor ti/. Mortif.
Tienes la ayuda de Dios; You have help from God’s own hand,
la nuestra también tendrás, and you shall have ours as well;
y por eso vencerás and therefore you shall excel,
desconfiando de ti. even while you mistrust yourself.
Apetito. Desire.
¿No hay un libro por aquí Do you have no book 1 could read,
de novelas o de historias? of romances or histories?
De algún entretenimiento I’m bursting to see something
por ver ahora reviento. truly entertaining,
Una comedia y un baile. a farce and a lively dance.
¿Por ventura soy yo fraile? Am I am monk, perchance,
¿Que he de guardar la modestia? to guard my modesty?
¿Se ha visto cosa como ésta? Have you seen anything like it?
¡Que ninguna me responda No one gives me an answer
Ni hagan caso de mí! or pays attention to me!
cuando en camándulo di, When I was simply a hypocrite
más favor todos me hacían, all the nuns were kinder to me.
muy lindos platos me daban. Such fine dishes they gave me.
¡Alto! ¿pues he de pasar Enough! Why should I spend

esta vida miserable? this life in misery?
Luego quiero entrarme fraile: I’ll enter a monastery;
no me faltará mi coro, nor shall I miss the choir,
refectorio y dormitorio, refectory, or dormitory,
y en todos estos lugares and in each of these places
tendré yo ciertas ganancias I shall make certain gains
con que pasaré la vida. to pass my life quite nicely.
Alma. Soul.
Ya busca modos y trazas Now he searches for devices
para fundar sus trapazas; to accomplish his deceits;
ya quiere dar en devoto. he’ll pose as a man of God.
Otros fingimientos fragua. What other schemes will he brew?
Desnud. Simp.
Con sus locuras te labra; His madness impresses you;
consuélate, que ya quiere take comfort, for God intends
el Señor darte victoria. to give you victory.
Alma. Soul.
Para Él será la gloria, He shall have all the glory;
la confusión para mí. the perplexity will be mine.
[Matan a Apetito definitivamente; las tres [Desire is killed a final time; the three sisters take
hermanas se despiden.] their leave.]
268 UNTOLD SISTERS
Mortif. Mortif.
Ven, te daremos la mano, Come, we will give you our hands,
porque camines segura. that your journey may be a safe one.
Alma. Soul.
Tan grande dicha y ventura Such happiness and good fortune
nunca yo la merecí. is more than I deserve.
Desnud. Simp.
Mira que esperamos. Alma; See here. Soul, we are waiting;
despídete, que ya es tarde. take your leave, for the hour is late.
Alma. Soul.
El cielo, madres, os guarde, May Heaven keep you. Sisters,
y os dé a todas Desnudez grant you Simplicity,
y os libre del Apetito. and free you from Desire.
Recibid nuestros deseos. Accept our kindest wishes.
Desnud. Simp.
Son muy dichosos empleos It is a blessed enterprise
los de daros algún gusto. to bring some joy to you.
Mortif. Mortif.
Esto habernos pretendido. And so we have tried to do.
Alma. Soul.
Las faltas que hemos tenido Please forgive the failings
perdonad, santo senado. we have shown, blessed friends.
Desnud. Simp.
En lo que habernos errado Our errors, all in all,
no habrá sido muy poquito, will not have been so small;
que aquí da fin el coloquio but here ends the play
del triunfo de las Virtudes wherein the Virtues held sway
y muerte del Apetito. and Desire met his end.
Noticias de la vida de la Madre Soror Catalina de Sant.

Joseph. Religiosa Trinitaria Descalza
En el nombre de la Santísima Trinidad.

Alabado sea el Santísimo Sacramento. Amen.
Confieso mi imperfección, en la repugnancia que tengo en cumplir con

esta obediencia. Y en haberme dejado llevar de ella; replicando tanto y
teniendo tanto discurso, y ojos, para ver, que ¿e me encargaba una cosa,
sobre mis fuerzas: porque para hablar en las virtudes de esta teligiosa santa:
era necesario tener muy alto conocimiento de la Virtud, y ejercitarla en grado
muy superior, para con eso descubrir los quilates de las suyas. Y los primores,
que el Espíritu Santo puso en aquella alma tan singularmente enriquecida de
sus dones. Y es tan grande, y levantado el concepto que yo hago, y siempte
hice de la perfección de esta religiosa, que lo que me podía animar, que es
el haber mucho que decir, eso mismo me embaraza y encoje. Y más la cortedad
de mi entendimiento, y lenguaje. Y el ignorar de todo punto por experiencia
la materia. Y para decir las virtudes de nuestra santa hermana no basta para
mi rudeza el vérselas ejercitar tantos años: porque nunca acerté más que a
admirarme: y muchas veces a confundirme, que si bien su profunda humildad

no la dio lugar a que jamás reprehendiese a nadie de palabra, ella era una
tácita reprehensión de todo lo que no fuese muy ajustado y perfecto. Y así
digo de mí, que con sólo verla me componía interior y exteriormente.
Pero volviendo a lo que decía, parece que ha sido particular providencia
de nuestro Señor, que se me haya encargado a mí el decir algo de sus heróicas
virtudes porque se vea, que es fuerza de verdad lo que dijere y cuales fueron
ellas; pues pueden parecer, aunque escrita de mi mano, y deslustrado de mi
ignorancia, sea, siquiera sacrificio a la obediencia el ponerla en ejecución.
La santidad y perfección de nuestra santa hermana soror Catalina de Sant
Joseph fue tan singular, y el camino por donde nuestro Señora llevó aunque
llanísimo y claro, tan levantado y raro, raro digo en la eminente del obrar,
que lo más esencial, y de estimación, se habrá de quedar por decir. Porque
fue el suyo un modo sobre todo modo. . . . Pero digo, que no es muy fácil,
hablar en su camino, tan llano por una parte; y tan levantado por otras mil.
Yo habré de decir a bulto y por mayor: porque intentar otra cosa, fuera
temeridad: ni presumir desenvolver sus virtudes: de cada una se pudiera hacer
un libro. Y si queremos decir cual fue la mayor, digo, que la que menos
resplandeció en ella, lo parece y pudiera perficionar [sic] a otra alma. Un
consuelo tengo en esto: que es, el estar tan libre, de temer decir algún
encarecimiento, porque de ninguna manera aunque de intento pretendiera
eso: pudiera llegar a decir, lo menos: ella fue una mujer toda esencial y en
quien tuvo rarísimos accidentes de mujer. Y parece le faltaron los que apenas
se pueden excusar en el más espiritual. Y siendo extremada en las virtudes,
jamás tuvo ningún extremo. Hallando por privilegio especial en todas a que
el medio tan deseado y pretendido de los que andan en verdad: en que ellas
consisten, tan sin faltar, y exceder en nada: que pone grande admiración ver
la medida tan prudente y divina que tenía para todo. Me parece, lo digo de
una vez, en doce, o más años que fue religiosa, no habrá ninguna que pueda
decir la vio hacer una imperfección. No quebró jamás regla, ni constitución:
no faltó en una mínima ceremonia, porque no se le olvidó jamás la que una
vez le enseñasen. Y ella se informaba de esto y de todo lo que tocaba a las
obligaciones con grandísima humildad. Y esto sólo era lo que preguntaba.
En esta virtud fue tan excelente y alcanzó sus grados con tanta eminencia
que siempre se conoció que fue su principal estudio y cuidado en la religión.
De ésta precedía un profundo conocimiento con que presumía de sí tan
bajamente: que le parecía no había otra criatura tan imperfecta en el mundo;
inútil y sin provecho. De aquí era el hablar a todas con tan grande reverencia
y sumisión que más parecía criada de cada una que igual y hermana de todas.
Y como a Superiora las respetaba. Y jamás dijo palabra que pudiese mortificar
o contristar a nadie. Pero, de la perfección de aquella bendita lengua tocaré
algo cuando hable de su raro silencio.
De esta humildad procedía también aquella grande ponderación que hacía
de sus leves defectos o de los que su luz superior tenía por tales; que nosotras
no los pudimos advertir. Y no suele faltar esta luz en las comunidades para
con los otros, antes bien, muchas acciones que en el siglo se alabaran por
virtuosas, se canonizan en la religión por culpables: a lo menos por imper¬
fectas. Y cuando se miran con ojos muy piadosos se dice que les falta alguna
circunstancia de discreción o prudencia, pero en Sor Catalina, la más lince
no pudo ver achaque. Debió de ser, por lo que ella se supo ver y conocer.
270 UNTOLD SISTERS
Casi en todos los Capítulos decía sus culpas con tan grande conocimiento y
humildad y agrandándolos tanto, que causaba grandísima confusión y edifi¬
cación a las que conocían la pureza de su vida inculpable. Y a no disculparla
en esto su humildad el decir sus culpas fuera hacerlas, levantándose testi¬
monios. Pero en ella, que estuvo siempre la verdad tan de asiento, es de
creer, pensaba y tenía por cierto hacia todas aquellas imperfecciones de que
se acusaba.
Efecto de su profunda humildad fue también el no comunicar con otro más
que el confesor de la comunidad. Y esto de manera que una breve reconci-
lación, ni una sola palabra habló con otra persona, todo el tiempo que fue
religiosa, que es caso raro, y más en los sucesos de mudanzas de confesores,
y en otros. Y preguntada en esto respondía: que ella no tenía cosas que fuesen
de calidad, que bastasen, para gastar el tiempo de aquellos señores, cono¬
ciéndose y juzgándose por indigna de hablarlos. Aunque esto también lo causó
el entrañable afecto que siempre tuvo en seguir la comunidad en todo, que
estuvo en ella esta virtud con excelencia. Y había en esta parte mucho que
decir si se hiciera libro de su vida.
Pero lo que es más de ponderar (no porque siguió este dictamen) juzgó o
condenó en manera alguna el contrario, antes se edificaba de que las demás
comunicasen, y decía que a ellas, como buenas, y santas, se le ofrecía qué,
y que a ella como a ruin, no querría Dios que tuviese más de qué darle cuenta.
Con esta humildad y desnudez obligó al verdadero Maestro a que lo fuese
suyo, y como su decir es hacer y ella tomaba también la Doctrina se le asentó
de suerte que en lo que una criatura puede, parece siguió los ejemplos de este
Señor. . . .
La que era tan humilde, sin duda, sería muy obediente. Lo fue tanto
que esta sola virtud bastara para hacerla muy perfecta, si pudiera ser posible
tenerla sin las demás. Yo cierto no hallo palabras que me puedan satisfacer,
ni que puedan llegar a los menos que ella alcanzó ejercitó en la obedien¬
cia. . . . Esto desde el día que entró en el convento hasta el que murió: tan
dejada en las manos de la Prelada, tan resignada, tan indiferente, que mucha
más voluntad tiene una niña de cuatro años. Dondequiera que la pusiesen
estaba como nacida. Allí asentaba lindamente, sin réplica ninguna de su
parte, y aún sin repugnancia al parecer, que parecía le faltaban los primeros
movimientos, y que no estaba sujeta a ninguna pasión. Y por decirlo con más
propiedad, que las había vencido y rendido del todo. Más que de cera era su
blandura para todo aquello que la Prelada o sus compañeras querían hacer
de ella. Y aunque fuesen de natural o condición opuesta a la suya, con
marvillosa sujección y prudencia se ajustaba y unía con ellas. Y algunas veces
era forzoso pasar con no pequeñas mortificaciones.
El amor y respeto que tenía a las Perladas [sic] era indecible y esto a
cualquieta sin excepción ninguna: porque nunca miraba a las personas, sino
a lo que representaban. Pedía con notable menudencia las licencias. Y guardó
en esto hasta que murió. . . .
Rarísima fue la que tuvo en la santa pobreza. Jamás pidió cosa alguna en
cuanto fue religiosa, fuera, ni dentro del convento, ni la dio a nadie, ni tuvo
una camuesa. Lo que dejaba en el Refitorio [sic] por mortificarse a la cocina
lo enviaba, y si era forzoso fuera de él, en algunas ocasiones, de hábitos o
profesiones, tomar lo que daban en comunidad a todas de alguna niñería de
libro de cera, o rosario. Luego iba a la Prelada y le decía,—Tome V" [Vuestra]
[Reverencia] que me embaraza. Y esto aunque fuesen unos confites. Bien

quisiera ella traer el peor hábito, y que todo lo que fuese necesario para su
comida y vestido fuese lo peor, pero lo dejaba de pedir por ejercitarse otras
virtudes, de desnudez, y dejo, conque estaba sin propiedad en ninguna vir¬
tud. . . .
Ejercitaba también en no tomar para sí un instante de tiempo de la co¬
munidad ni para rezar una devoción, siempre atareada a la labor o al oficio.
Y algún rato que se suele tomar para respirar, ella para trabajar, sin levantar
cabeza, y respondiendo en el tomo un solo instante que hubiese de estar
hablando, habiendo luego de levantarse a dar el recado, tomaba la labor (y
admiraba la que hacía) con tanta ocupación. Y como fuese para ayudar a la
comunidad, no había para ella tiempo, aunque fuese el del descanso forzoso,
que no sacrificase de muy buena gana. Fue de mucho provecho siempre a la
comunidad.
Dejo aparte lo que la edificó con el ejemplo de su santa vida. Y hablo de
lo natural, que tuvo excelente, de muy lindo entendimiento: que éste es de
grandísima importancia y estimación en una monja, así para ella como para
las otras, que muchas veces, lo que no se puede hacer por falta de espíritu
se hace por un buen entendimiento.
Tuvo mucha pmdencia, asiento, y madurez en sus acciones. Y así en todos
los oficios que la pusieron dio buena cuenta de sí, haciéndolos muy escogi¬
damente. Y para todos era muy acomodada y a propósito. Y porque decimos
de lo natural (que también es don de Dios) fue de muy lindo parecer; y no
desdecía la hermosura del cuerpo de la del alma, antes se conformaron, si
bien le hizo las ventajas la del alma, que ella hace al cuerpo. Tocaba un
instrumento, y cantaba con mucha destreza y gracia. Teníala muy particular
en cuanto ponía la mano. La labor por extremo curiosa y limpia y mucha, y
en fin, en todo era consumada. Y hacía ella tan poco caudal de esto como
si fuera la más desmaniada del mundo. Nadie la oyó decir que sabía hacer
nada, ni le parecía aprovecharía para cosa. Parece volvemos a su humildad.
Como siempre vivió sumida en ella es fuerza la tope muchas veces quien
hablare de esta humildísima religiosa: y al paso que humilde mortificada. Por
cierto de su mortificación ella sola (que la supo ejercitar) con la divina gracia
supiera hablar de ella. . . .
Esta alma pura desde el día que entró en este convento, no se mortificó,
sino murió a sí misma, a su carne y sangre, murió a todos sus quereres y
pasiones, a todos sus gustos y apetitos, a todas sus propiedades. Y a sangre y
fuego destmyó todo lo que después en el discurso del tiempo le podía hacer
oposición, perturbación o inquietud, a todo humano impedimento. Parece
que pasó a cuchillo a la honra, a la estimación, al amor de la propia sangre,
a la amistad y correspondencia. Y así olvidó de una vez su pueblo y la casa
de su padre. Nadie dirá que le oyó tomar en la boca al que la engendró. . . .
Y de las muy bien prendidas y vicarras [sic], que si bien con mucha honestidad,
fue una doncella muy bizarra y amiga de amigas, y que no se había criado en
ningún rincón, sino con el trato de gente de muy buen gusto y conversación,
y ella le tenía bueno, y era muy entretenida. Para que se vea lo que puede
la divina gracia en quien la admite. Pero lo que hace grande admiración es
que no fue alcanzando estas virtudes poco a poco, sino que desde luego las
poseyese, casi sin resistencia de la naturaleza: ¡gran milagro de la gracia! . . .
Y con ser santa de veras, no escribió en cuanto fue religiosa, ni envió recado
272 UNTOLD SISTERS
a nadie. Sola una vez me pidió respondiese a una carta de un hermano suyo,
que la instaba por comunicación familiar. Y aunque sabía escribir no quiso
que fuese de su mano. . . . Vino a verla una deuda suya, que había estado
en su casa y la [había] servido de doncella de labor. Y ella la había tenido
mucho amor, que lo merecía su virtud. Le pareció darle una niñería, se lo
dijo a la Prelada, y pidiéndole licencia. Y habiéndosela dado con mucho
agrado, por ser la primera cosa que la pedía de aquella calidad, reparando un
poco aquella alma desnuda verdaderamente, volvió con gran prisa a la Prelada,
diciendo: por amor de nuestro Señor, Madre, que no la dé vuesa Reverencia
nada a fulana, no sea que con este agasajo me venga a ver otras veces. Y en
fin consiguió esto con la grande instancia que hizo. Parece que esto, por
carne y sangre lo pudo renunciar y dejar del todo.
Forzoso es que padezcan las comunidades tal vez alguna alteración por
santas y reformadas que sean. Antes por la misma razón, el Perturbador común
de la paz envidioso de la que se goza en el cielo de la religión intenta el
perturbarla. Y aunque por la bondad de Dios sale con pérdida, no deja de
afligirla con sus trazas en cualquier acontecimiento. [Pero estas cosas no
afectaron a esta religiosa, ni mostró ella emoción alguna durante las disputas
del convento] ... en tanto grado, que habiendo faltado de la comunidad el
confesor con quien ella se hallaba muy bien y desde allá fuera se confesaba,
y que también había sido medio para entrar en este convento, de suerte que
había muchas razones para que le pesase mucho de su ausencia, viendo casi
todo el convento con grande sentimiento porque el caso había sucedido con
alguna mortificación, no habló palabra en él más que ésta: llegándole a decir
las religiosas qué le parecía, y diciendo sus razones de sentimiento, ella
respondió—Madres, todos los confesores absuelven. Y luego calló. Los que
vivieren [sic] en comunidades sabrán ponderar lo raro y grande de esta virtud.
. . . Caso raro, que ni en tiempo de elecciones, de alegrías, y de pesares,

de enfermedad u oficios ocasionados como una enfermería, un tomo, no
deslizase una sola vez, que dijese una palabra inadvertida, o excusada, una
leve murmuración, una mínima queja. Si es varón perfecto el que no ofende
a nadie con su lengua, mujer perfectísima fiie, sin duda, nuestra hermana. Y
tengo por cierto que ni del Demonio dijo mal, ni se quejó. Y no hay pensar
que el natural era de sí mismo blando y pacífico, porque no era, sino muy
colérico, brioso y algo precipitado. Todo esto cuando era seglar, y de manera
que no habían de andar con poco desvelo sus criadas para poderla llevar. . . .
O mujer toda en Dios: bien digo yo, que no estabas mortificada, sino muerta.
Guardó de manera el silencio, que no hablaba ni aun en cosas de Dios,
con no hablar jamás sino de Dios. . . . Un privilegio singular tuvo su silencio,
que con ser tan grande, tan continuo, a nadie fue enojoso, ni grave, nadie
tuvo queja de él, sino estima y edificación. Callaba siempre y siempre habló
lo necesario con maravillosa medida y prudencia. Con ésta y la discreción,
sazonó lo rígido y razonado de su vida. Y con una palabra llena de agrado y
risa santa, dejaba contentas y satisfechas a las religiosas.
Este es, carísima hermana mía, el breve discurso de tus virtudes, que por
virtud de la obediencia he podido escribir. No van dibujadas bien sino re¬
bujadas mal, con simpleza dichas, pero con verdad. . . .
An Account of the Life of the Mother Soror Catalina de

Sant. Joseph, a Nun of the Order of Discalced Trinitarians
In the name of the Most Holy Trinity.
Praise be to the Most Holy Sacrament. Amen.
I confess my imperfection: it may be seen in my reluctance to fulfill this

command of obedience, and too in my having allowed myself to take it on,
after so much dispute and discussion, for had I not eyes to see that I was
being given a charge exceeding my powers? Indeed, to speak of the virtues
of this blessed nun, one must have a profound knowledge of virtue, and
exercise it to a superior degree; only then could one reveal the flawlessness
of her virtues, and the fine abilities with which the Holy Spirit endowed
that soul, so uniquely enriched thereby. Yet that which should most encourage
me, the certainty that I have much to say, is the very thing that impedes
and discourages me; for the impression of this nun’s perfection which I hold,
and have always held, is most great and lofty. And I am even more discouraged
by the limitations of my mind and discourse, and by my utter ignorance
concerning the matter at hand—for I never possessed such virtues. In order
that my simple mind might recite these virtues of our holy Sister, it is not
enough to have seen them practiced for so many years: all I could do was
marvel, and often, I was simply baffled. For if indeed her profound humility
never permitted her to speak a word of reproof to anyone, she was herself a
tacit reproof to anything not quite meet and perfect. And this was true with
me: merely at the sight of her, I became calm both within and without.
But to return to what I was saying, it seems a special providence of Our
Lx)rd, that I should have been entrusted with the task of saying something
about her heroic virtues, so that it may be seen that whatever I may say
derives from the power of truth, and so that those virtues may be known:
for they may emerge, though written by my hand, and tarnished by my
ignorance. So be it, although this task was undertaken only as a sacrifice to
obedience.
The saintliness and perfection of our holy Sister Catalina de Sant. Joseph
was so unusual, and the road by which Our Lord led her, though extremely
smooth and clear, was so lofty and remarkable—remarkable I mean in the
exemplarity of her deeds—that the very essence and what was most worthy
of praise, must be left unsaid. For hers was a way above all other ways. . . .
But as I say, it is not very easy to speak of her path, so uneventful in one
respect and so ecstatic in a thousand others. I shall have to speak in gross
and by wholesale, because it would be boldness to attempt anything more;
nor can I presume to display all of her virtues, for one could make a book
of each. And if we wish to determine which was the greatest, then I say that
the virtue which shone the least in her would perfect any other soul in which
it were to appear. I have one consolation in all this, which is my freedom
from the fear of any embellishment, for not even intentionally could I do
that. I might, at the very least, manage to say: she was entirely and essentially
a woman, in whom were rarely found a woman’s whims. And it seems that
indeed she lacked those, which can scarcely be avoided in the most spiritual
man. Yet being extreme in virtues, she never knew a single extreme. Through
her special privilege, she found in all virtues the balance sought and desired
by those who walk in the path of truth, the goal of neither exceeding nor
274 UNTOLD SISTERS
falling short in anything, so that the prudent and divine moderation she
always showed is most greatly to be admired. It seems to me—I say it once
and for all—that in the twelve or more years that she was a nun, there is
no one who could ever say she saw her commit a wrong. She never broke a
rule, nor the Constitution; she never erred in the least observance, because
what she was once taught, she never forgot. And she studied each and every
point concerning her obligations with the greatest humility. And she asked
for nothing more than this.
In this virtue [humility] she was so excellent, and achieved such eminence,
that we all knew this to be her principal study and concern in religion. From
it grew a profound knowledge, in which she boasted very humbly of herself:
for it seemed to her that there was no other creature so imperfect in the
entire world, useless and of no benefit to anyone. Hence came her way of
speaking to all the nuns with great reverence and submission, so that she
seemed the servant of each one, rather than the equal and Sister of all. And
she respected each one as she would the Mother Superior, and never spoke
a word that might humiliate or sadden anyone. But I will treat the perfection
of that blessed tongue somewhat, when I speak of her remarkable silence.
This humility also gave rise to the great deliberation with which she
examined her slight defects—that is, what her superior intelligence consid¬
ered defects; for we ourselves could not detect them. Yet in religious com¬
munities, such intelligence is not infrequently turned on others, for indeed,
many actions which in the world would be praised as virtuous, are declared
blameworthy, or at least imperfect, in holy Orders. And when these imper¬
fections are viewed with very pious eyes, it is said there is a slight lack of
discretion or prudence; but in Sor Catalina, even the most sharp-eyed nun
could find no failing. This must have been due to her ability to scrutinize
and understand herself. In almost every chapter of faults, she told her sins
with such great knowledge and humility, and enlarging them so, that she
caused great perplexity and edification to those nuns who knew the purity
of her blameless life. And were it not for her humility, which cleared her of
blame, she might be faulted for sinning through self-accusation, by raising
such charges against herself. But with one in whom the truth was always so
unshakeable, we must believe that she was certain she had committed all
those failings of which she accused herself.
Another result of her profound humility was that she spoke with no one
other than the confessot of the community. And so she would not move so
much as to settle the slightest dispute nor speak a single word to another
person the entire time she was a nun, which is most unusual, and especially
so at such times as the change of confessors. ^When asked about this she
would reply that she had no matter valuable enough to occupy the time of
those gentlemen, for she knew and considered herself to be unworthy of
speaking to them. But this also produced the deep affection she always en¬
joyed, by following the will of the community in everything; for she possessed
this virtue to a rare degree. And there would be much to say on this subject,
if a book were to be written of her life.
But even more worthy of praise (not just because she followed the rule of
silence) is the fact that she never criticized or condemned the breach of it
in others; but rather, she took the speech of others as a lesson, and declared
that they, being so good and holy, had reason to speak; while she was so
base, that God would not wish her to have anything more for which she
must render account to Him. With her humility and simplicity, she compelled
the true Teacher to make her His own. And as His word is deed, and she
also accepted His doctrine in this way, it took root in her so that it seems
she followed the teachings of Our Lord as closely as any living creature
could. . . .
She who was so humble could not fail to be obedient as well. And so she
was; so much so, that this virtue alone would suffice to make her quite perfect,
if indeed it were possible to possess this one virtue without all the rest.
Certainly 1 shall not find words to satisfy me, nor words that could approach
her very least achievement and practice in the virtue of obedience. . . . From
the day she entered the convent till the day she died she was so shaped by
tbe Superior’s hand, so resigned, so accepting, that a little girl of four shows
more will. Wherever she might be placed, there she was as if new-born. She
would remain there so perfectly, without so much as a retort, with such
apparent lack of repugnance, that it seemed as though she had not yet learned
the infant’s first movements, and was subject to none of the passions. Or to
say it more exactly, that she had vanquished and overcome them entirely.
Her pliability was greater than that of wax, toward whatever the Superior or
her companions wanted to do with her. And whether or not their nature or
temperament were the opposite of her own, with marvelous submission and
prudence she would conform and unite with them. And sometimes this was
achieved at the cost of not inconsiderable mortifications.
The love and respect that she felt for the Mother Superiors were indescrib¬
able, and this was true of each without a single exception; for she never
considered persons themselves, but rather what they represented. She seldom
asked for special dispensations. And she kept this custom until she died. . . .
Most remarkable was her perfection in the virtue of holy poverty. She
never requested a single thing while she was a nun—neither from within nor
from outside the convent. Nor would she give anything to anyone, nor take
even a pippin. As a penance she left part of her meal in the refectory, and
sent it back to the kitchen. And in addition, when it was obligatory to take
whatever trifle was given out to all the nuns, on the occasion of First Vows
or Professions—whether a candle or a rosary—then she would go to the
Mother Superior and say, “Please take this. Your Reverence, for it hampers
me,” And she would do the same thing though it were only a matter of a
few sweets. She would have preferred to wear the very worst habit, and to
have all her food and dress be of the worst; but she refrained from making
these special requests so as to exercise other virtues, of simplicity and de¬
tachment. Thus she did not hold dominion in any one virtue. . . .
She also made it her practice not to take for herself one instant of the
time devoted to the community, not even for a prayer; she was constantly
immersed in her needlework or her tasks. And in the moment usually taken
to catch one’s breath, she worked, without lifting her head; and when an¬
swering at the turn for but the one instant that it was necessary to speak,
she would rise to deliver the message, and then take up her sewing with great
concentration (and her work was a marvel to see). And so long as it was a
matter of helping the community, there was no time, even that of much-
needed rest, that she would not sacrifice with a very good will. She was
always a great benefit to the community.
276 UNTOLD SISTERS
I must leave aside all she taught the community by the example of her
blessed life. And I speak of the excellent natural gifts she possessed. She had
a fine sense of understanding: this is of the greatest importance and value in
a nun, as much for her as for her Sisters; for many times that which cannot
be done for lack of spirit, is accomplished through understanding.
She exercised great prudence, judgment, and maturity in her actions. And
so she gave a good account of herself, and scrupulously performed her duties,
in all the responsibilities which she was given. And in fulfilling her duties
she was accommodating and reasonable. As we are speaking of her natural
gifts (which are also a gift of God), she was very beautiful; and her physical
beauty did not detract from that of her soul, but rather matched it, though
indeed beauty favored the soul more than the body. She played an instrument,
and sang with great talent and charm. She was most particular about any
task to which she put her hand. Her sewing was extremely painstaking, neat,
and abundant; and in short, she was perfect in all regards. And she valued
this perfection as little as if she were the most clumsy woman in the world.
No one ever heard her say that she knew how to do anything, nor that her
abilities might be useful with any task. It seems we come back to her humility.
Because she always lived in deep humility, anyone who speaks of this most
humble nun must speak of this virtue many times; and even more than
humble, she was penitent. Certainly, of her submission, only she (who knew
how to practice it) could have spoken, with the aid of Divine Grace. . . .
From the very day this pure soul entered the convent she did not just
mortify the flesh, but died to herself, to her flesh and blood; she died to her
desires and passions, her tastes and appetites, and to all that belonged to
her. And by main force she destroyed anything, each human obstacle, that
might in the course of time have posed an impediment, a disturbance, or an
anxiety to her. It seems she took honor, and the esteem of others, and love
for her own flesh and blood, and friendship and correspondence, and ran
them through with a sword. And so at one blow she forgot the village of her
birth and the house of her father. No one can say she ever heard her begetter’s
name pass her lips. . . . And she had been one of the richly bejewelled and
elegant women of Madrid, for although quite modest, she was an elegant girl
and fond of her friends, who had not been raised off in some little corner
but rather among people of good taste and fine conversation. And she enjoyed
this conversation and was well amused by it. Let no one deny what divine
favor can achieve in one who accepts it. But what is most to be marvelled
at, IS that she did not gain these virtues little by little, but rather she possessed
them as soon as she set foot in the convent, almost without resistance on
the part of her disposition: a great miracle of God’s grace! . . . Being truly
holy, she never wrote the whole time she was a nun, nor did she ever send
a message to anyone. Only once did she ask me to answer a letter from one
of her brothers; her response was pressing, as it concerned a family matter.
And although she knew how to write, she did not wish it to be written by
her hand. . . . One of her kinswomen, who as a girl had served as seamstress
in her house, came to see her. And she had loved her very much, as she
deserved by her virtue. It occurred to her to give her relative a little gift,
and she asked the Mother Superior’s permission. And after the Mother Su¬
perior had granted this with great pleasure—being the first thing of that kind
that she had requested that truly simple soul upon reflection returned in
great haste to the Mother Superior, saying: “Mother, for the love of our Lord
do not give anything to this woman, lest after this kindness she come to see
me again.” And through her great insistence her request was granted. It seems
that thus, by her own flesh and blood, she could renounce and leave all
things behind.
It seems unavoidable that [religious] communities at times undergo some

disturbance, however holy and reformed they may be. Indeed it is for that
very reason that the common adversary of peace, jealous of that which is
enjoyed in the heaven of religious life, attempts to disrupt it. And though,
by the goodness of God, he [the Devil] loses in the end, he will not cease
from afflicting the community with his schemes on any possible occasion.
[But this nun was not affected by such things, nor showed any emotion in
any of the aitercations of the convent] ... to such a degree that, when her
confessor left the community—a confessor with whom she was well pleased,
and who had confessed her since before she became a nun, and who had
also assisted her entrance into this convent, so that there were many reasons
his absence might cause her sorrow—and she saw almost all the convent in
great emotion, because the case had involved some measure of disgrace, she
said nothing more than this: when the nuns came to ask what she thought,
and to tell her the causes of their emotion, she answered: “Mothers, every
confessor gives absolution.” And then she fell silent. Those who live in
communities may well extol the greatness and singularity of such virtue.
... It was most unusual that never once, whether at the hour of elections,
of joys or sorrows, of obligatory tasks like that of attendance upon the ill or
at the turn, did she so slip as to utter a careless or unnecessary word, nor a
trifling bit of gossip, nor the slightest complaint. If the perfect man is he
who offends no one with his tongue, then our Sister was without doubt a
most perfect woman. And I ám quite certain that she never spoke badly, nor
once complained, even of the Devil. Yet one must not think that her character
was inherently mild and peaceful, because it was not, but indeed quite wrath¬
ful, spirited, and rather abrupt. She was all of these things when a laywoman,
so that her maids had to comport themselves with more than a little watch¬
fulness to be able to endure her. . . . Oh, woman, so immersed in God! How
right I am in saying that you lived not in mortification but in death.
She kept silence in such a way that she never spoke even of matters of
God, while she never spoke of anything else but God. . . . Her silence
enjoyed this singular grace, that although it was so great and continual, it
was neither vexatious nor troublesome to anyone, nor did anyone complain
of it, but rather it was highly esteemed and instructive. She was always silent,
and when she did say what was necessary, it was always with marvelous
moderation and prudence. With these and with her discretion, she tempered
her rigorous and deliberate life. And with one word full of amiability and
blessed laughter, she would leave the nuns contented and satisfied.
My dearest Sister, this is the brief treatise of your virtues that I, by virtue
of obedience, have been able to write. Here your virtues are not neatly
drawn, but roughly sketched, told without wit but with truth. . . .
278 UNTOLD SISTERS
Otro romance: a una soledad To a Solitude
En ti, soledad amada, In you, beloved Solitude,

Hallaba mi compañía; 1 found true company;
En ti los días son glorias. In you, my days are splendors.
En ti las noches son días. And in you, my nights are days.
En ti cogí de mi amor, In you, with rich abundance,

Con abundancia excesiva, 1 gathered in, through love.
Eértil cosecha del alma, The lavish harvest of the soul
Dulce agosto de mi vida. At my sweet summer’s height.
En ti gocé de mi esposo In you at last I savored

Las pretendidas caricias. The caress of my Beloved,
Los halagos sin estorbos. The endearments freely given.
Los regalos sin medida. The embracements without end.
En ti vi de su belleza, * In you, I saw His beauty.

Aunque en tiniebla, divina; Even in darkness, divine:
¡Con cuánta razón me prende. How rightly am I held,
Con cuánta causa cautiva! How justly kept a captive!
En ti me vi alguna vez. In you, at times, I found myself

Anegada, y sumergida. Flooded and submerged
En el mar de dulces aguas, In the sea of sweet waters
Y riquezas infinitas. And endless luxuries.
En ti con los imposibles In you He sates my greed

Satisfice mi codicia; With things impossible.
Que con lo posible, amor For with what is possible
Nunca llena sus medidas. * Love’s measure’s never filled.
En ti me vi felizmente. In you I gladly found myself

Muy negada y muy vacía Empty and bereft
De criaturas y afectos, Of earthly children, worldly ties.
Y muy lejos de mí misma. Far distant from myself.
En ti gocé libertad In you I knew a freedom

De tanto precio y estima. So dear, so high esteemed.
Que darlo todo por ella That giving everything I had
No será paga cumplida. Would leave my debt unpaid.
En ti celebró mi esposo. In you did my Husband celebrate

En aquel dichoso día. The wedding of my joy.
En amoroso himineo In the ardent nuptial song
Las bodas de mi alegría. Chanted that blessed day.
En ti estuve tan gozosa, In you, I found such pleasure.

Contenta y entretenida Contentment and delight.
Que no podré encarecer That I shall never overpraise
Lo menos que en ti sentía. My smallest joy in you.
En ti, con dichas tan grandes. In you, with these great blessings.
Las horas, noches, y días My hours, nights, and days
Dulcemente se pasaban. Rolled by with blissful sweetness;
Instantes me parecían. Each seemed an instant’s span.
En ti, ¡qué corto mi sueño, In you, how brief my sleep.

Y qué larga mi vigilia! And how long my vigil!
¡Qué penoso fue el descanso! How arduous my rest.
¡Qué gustosa la fatiga! How delightful my fatigue!
En ti le dije a mi amante In you I told my Lover

Lo tierno que le quería How tenderly I loved Him,
Lo mucho que me obligaba. How great my obligation.
Lo poco que le servía. How little I could serve Him.
En ti le solicitaba In you I courted Him

Con finezas y caricias With kindness and catesses
A que me diese su amor. That He might grant His love.
Pues el mío conocía. For mine He knew full well.
En ti pudo conocer In you. He came to know

Cómo le estaba rendida How I have surrendered
Mi alma, que está colgada My soul, which hangs dependent
De su voluntad divina. On His holy will.
En ti le pedí su unión In you I begged for union.

Con ansias de amor tan vivas. So inflamed with love’s desires
Que no sé si le obligaron: I don’t know if they compelled Him:
El lo sabe y él lo diga. He knows, so let Him say.
En ti procuré entregarle In you, I tried to give Him

Tan por suya el alma mía My soul to keep as His,
Los sentidos y potencias. My faculties and senses.
Que él los mande y él los tija. To govern and command.
En ti también le ofrecí In you I also offered

Serle fiel y agradecida. To be faithful and beholden
Correspondiente a su amot, As befits His love for me.
Y por todo extremo fina. And pure in the utmost degree.
En fin, en ti le ofrecí In sum, in you I offered Him

Todo cuanto yo tenía Everything I had.
A todo lo que anhelaba. To each of His longings
Todo cuanto apetecía. Giving all that He desired.
28o UNTOLD SISTERS
En ti le di de mi amor In you I gave Him absolute

La posesión tan cumplida, Possession of my love.
Que ninguno me ha quedado And thus no more is left me
Para nadie en esta vida. For others in this life.
En ti conocí del suyo In you I learned the power

La gran fuerza y valentía, And valor of His love;
Lo ardiente con que me enciende. The ardor by which He incites me.
Lo activo con que me anima. The vigor that urges me on.
En ti le vi, liberal. In you I saw him generously

Intentar hacerme rica: Set about granting me wealth:
Que derramando sus dones. So that, pouring out his gifts.
Pudo saciar mi codicia. He could satisfy my greed.
Mas no me doy por contenta; But I am not yet contented

Que mi afecto a más aspira, Since my love aspires to more.
Y sólo él mismo podrá And only He himself
Dar satisfacción cumplida. Can satisfy me wholly.
Así, Soledad amada. And so, beloved Solitude,

Causa de todas mis dichas. Cause of all my blessings.
Después que tú me faltaste. Since you are absent from me
Me ha faltado la alegría. Happiness too has gone.
Cercóme la confusión Confusion came to surround me

El afán y las fatigas; With anxiety and troubles;
Todo me aflige y congoja All things dismay and grieve me.
Y causa melancolía. And make me melancholy.
Las criaturas me estorban. Each living being disturbs me.

Los apetitos me irritan. My appetites annoy me.
Los afectos me atormentan, My sentiments torment me.
Y las pasiones se avivan. And passions spring to life.
Tempestades se levantan. Storms arise, the sea rages.

Brama el mar, y la barquilla And my little ship
Grande tormenta padece. Founders in the beating waves
De las olas combatida. .Wracked by mighty winds.
¡Ay, Soledad, deseada Oh Solitude, desired

De mi alma y pretendida! And courted by my soul!
Cada vez que te experimento. Each time I experience you,
Tengo de ti más estima. 1 value you the more.
¡Oh, si gozara de ti If only I could enjoy you

Lo que durara mi vida, As long as my life should last—
A quien triste muerte llamo Life, which I call a dismal death.
Sin tu presencia querida! Without your dearest presence!
Convent InIVerse
¡Quién hablara dignamente, Who, with halting human tongue.

Con lengua humana y tardía, Can speak worthily
De tus grandes perfecciones. Of your great perfections.
Agrado y soberanía! Your charm and sovereignty!
¡Qué de santos engendraste! What saints you have begotten!

En ti con vida divina! In you, with life divine.
En frágil barro vivieron And framed in fragile clay
Innumerables cuadrillas. Countless holy troops have thrived.
La pureza, la oración. Divine contemplation

La contemplación divina And purity and prayer
Tus hijos son, Soledad; Are your children. Solitude,
De ti nacen, tú las crías. Borne and nursed by you.
¿Qué virtud no se alimenta What virtue does not feed

Con tus pechos y caricias? At your breast, in your caresses?
¿Quién deja de estar contento Who shall fail to be content.
Si te busca y te codicia? Who seeks and longs for you?
Tú causas los desengaños, You free us from deception.

Y a la verdad solicitas. And you woo the truth.
Para que, usando su fuerza. That with its mighty force
Atropelle a la mentira. It may thrash the lie.
Haces del destierro patria, You make a home in exile.

Y sacas con valentía And you nobly save
A las almas que te aman. The souls that love and seek you
De la opresión de sí mismas. From the prison of themselves.
Y por no ofenderte más And, to offend you no longer

Con ignorancias tan mías. With these foolish words of mine,
No diré en tus alabanzas I shall not venture, in your praise.
Lo mucho que se ofrecía. All that was offered me there.
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“Sor Marcela de San Félix” (chapter 4). The caption reads: “Our venerable Mother Marcela
de San Félix, bom into this world, took our Saintly Habit at the age of fifteen [sic]. Tirelessly
and continuously she served the Order in the positions of Abbess, Teacher, and similar
offices. In all she did she attempted perfection and was a living example of rigorous observance.
Nature and Grace competed amiably in the awesome adornment of her person—Nature
carefully endowing her with sovereign discretion, with firm tranquility; Grace illuminating
her with copious gifts of the Holy Spirit. In the rigors of monastic perfection she was a Saint
Clare; in her divine enlightenment and spiritual sweetness she was the living image of Saint
Teresa. On January 9, 1687, in the eighty'second year of her age, she died to triumph
eternally. She calls: follow me. We implore: may she live on, reign joyfully, and pray for
us forever. ”
282
Detail from seventeentk-century street map of Madrid showing the Trinitarian convent and
the street on which it still stands, then named Cantarranas, now Cervantes (chapter 4)-
The author of Don Quijote is buried in the convent. Courtesy of the Museo Municipal of
Madrid.
Floor plan of the Trinitarian convent where Marcela de San Félix (chapter 4) lived. The
convent stands. Courtesy of the Real Academia Española.
283
“Niños cautivos” (Child Hostages), anonymous. Not only do the statutes recall the Christ
child (as a wanderer), but they also are especially important to the Trinitarians, who, along
with the Mercedarians, ransomed Christian hostages of the North Africans (chapter 4).
Courtesy of the community of Trinitarias Descalzas, Madrid.
‘‘El entierro de Lope de Vega" (Lope de Vegas Funeral), by Suárez Llanos. Approximately
two hundred years after Lope's death, the romanticized version of his relationship with his
daughter Marcela (chapter 4) became a pictorial subject. Courtesy of the Museo Municipal
of Madrid.
284
“La Inmaculada Concepción, ” attributed to Luisa Roldán. An important iconographic image
in Spain during the seventeenth century, this statue of the Immaculate Conception, by the
only knoum woman sculptor of the period, belongs to the Trinitarian convent (chapter 4).
Courtesy of the community of Trinitarias Descalzas, Madrid.
285
Hunt.
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Seventeenth'century map of Peru (chapter 5) from a Dutch atlas by Blaeu. Courtesy of the
John Carter Broum Library, Broum University.
286
Seventeerith'Century map of New Spain (chapter 6). Courtesy of the Biblioteca Nacional,
Madrid.
287
“Sebastián de Antuñano. ” This portrait of the principal benefactor of the Nazarene
nuns (chapter 5) still hangs in the convent. Courtesy of the community of Nazarene
nuns, Lima.
288
“Madre Antonia Lucía del Esl)mtu Santo. ” Probably painted after her death, this portrait
shows Madre Antonia Lucia (chapter 5) dressed in the habit she created. Courtesy of the
community of Nazarene nuns, Lima.
289
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Seventeenth' or eighteenth'Century map of Puebla, showing the locations of mcmasteries

(chapter 6). Courtesy of the Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid.
Facade of the Church of the Nazarenes, Lima

(chapter 5). The convent is next to the church,
whose altar painting is of the Christ of the
Miracles (p. 292). Courtesy of the community of
Nazarene nuns, Lima.
290
“Monja Coronada” (Croumed Nun). Anon^mons, eighteenth century. Sor Josefa Francesca
de San Rafael. Some Mexican aristocratic nuns were painted in death, bedecked in rich
robes, jewelry, and a crown (chapter 6). Courtesy of the Instituto Nacional de Antropología
e Historia, Mexico.
‘‘Sor María de San José." Anonymous. Eigh'

teenth century. This portrait of the Mexican
Augustinian mystic and writer (chapter 6) forms
part of the collection of the Museo Nacional
del Virreinato, Tepozotlán, Mexico. Courtesy
of the Press of the Universidad Nacional Autó¬
noma de México and Josefina Muriel.
291
"Christ of the Miracles, ” also known as the Christ of Pachacamilla. The Christ was originally
painted in the seventeenth century by an Angolan slave; the other figures were added later.
The cult associated with this painting is still popular in Lima today, where it is taken from
the Nazarene convent (chapter 5) for a procession once a year; the image is perceived as
preventing earthquakes. An important early promoter of this cult was Sebastian de Antunano,
benefactor and patron of Antonia Lucia del Espíritu Santo and her disciples. Courtesy of
the community of Nazarene nwm, Lima.
292
Spiritual
Jiousekeepers of the
SpanisH ‘tjnpire
l^fie Apóstolas of “Teru
'T .rom Madrid we move to Peru and Mexico, to which, in

the early sixteenth century, Spaniards brought an imperial, nationalistic, and
Christian world view developed from thirteenth-century law and theory and
codified under Alfonso X. As Peggy Liss explains:
Within the ecumenical, medieval Christian construct, Spain was

thought of as a single society, a subdivision of mankind [sic], set in a
divinely ordered universe and based upon the primary Christian
(Augustinian) assumption that life was fleeting, serving only to
prepare human beings for eternal salvation (5-6, 7).
Spain governed its colonies through the two viceregal centers of Peru and
Mexico, where the largest number of convents were founded. But the dif¬
ferences between Spain and its colonies, in every aspect of life, increased
with the passage of time. Topography, ecology, and population—Indians,
Blacks, mestizos, and Creoles—influenced those changes. Social hierarchy
was more complicated, more rigid in some instances and more fluid in others.
As is characteristic of frontier societies, class dilferences in individual cases
could mean all or nothing.
The women of colonial convents took on greater symbolic and political
importance than their peninsular Sisters, because the image of their Marian
purity represented Spain's providential transatlantic mission. Since convents
generally were closer to centers of power in the colonies than in Spain, their
social function was also more significant. They contributed to the establish¬
ment of new structures on the ruins and distortions of the old ones. Many
aspects of convent culture were carried across the ocean, including orders,
rules, and constitutions; the Castilian and Latin languages in which monastic
life was conducted; and the women who served as initial founders. On the
293
294 UNTOLD SISTERS
one hand, monastic life, then as now, retained an extranational quality. On

the other, Spain considered every aspect of its colonies to be an extension
of the Crown. Less than a century after the conquest of Mexico, however,
differences between people bom on one side or the other of the Atlantic
Ocean were large enough for a Provincial Superior to criticize the laxity of
his charges, calling them “criollas regalonas y chocolateras” [Mariana de la
Encamación qqr] (pampered Creole women fond of chocolate) and for Creole
nuns to resent and reject recently arrived gachupirms (Spanish women).
Artistic and social styles and group identities changed. The architectural
design of convents adapted to new circumstances. In the Americas, women
religious often had separate living quarters, as well as retreats in buildings
independent of the main communal structures. Despite their role in sup-
porting the ideology of Spain’s imperial mission, many of the women religious
were sisters and daughters of men engaged in a financial enterprise whose
principal mechanism was the exchange of precious metals for “luxury and
consumer products” (Vicens Vives 173). The attire in which the monjas
coronadas (nuns wearing crowns) were painted, the elegance of many nuns’
lives, and the decorativeness of their prose reflect the abundance of material
wealth available to a few people in the colonies.
Women’s writing, almost synonymous with nuns’ writing in the first three
centuries of colonial Spanish America, demonstrates accretions from the
popular vernacular, since women had lengthier and more intense contact
with “substandard” idiom than men did. The writing of some of the women
transcribes colloquial speech in the various regions. The vernacular classicism
of Castile was thereby strengthened in the New World, “for vernacular spoken
by Indians and by African slaves was relegated to substandard status” (Rivers
140). Nuns in the Americas partook of a trilingual culture: Indian, Spanish,
Latin.
The next two chapters of this study examine some nuns’ texts that exemplify
how both the rigidity and fluidity of colonial society were adapted to convent
life. In chapter 5, we discuss a work produced by the first middle-class women
who engineered the transformation of a lay religious house into a full-fledged
convent in Peru. Several writings by aristocratic, bourgeois, and Indian nuns
of Mexico are discussed in chapter 6.
The only written legacy of Antonia Lucia del Espíritu Santo (1646-1709),
aside from the rules and constitution of her Institute, is the three-page report
of a prophetic vision she allowed to escape from burning. Yet Madre Antonia
Lucia is the protagonist of a work of collective authorship compiled by her
spiritual daughtet and successor, Josefa de la Providencia. Relación del origen
y fundación del monasterio del Señor San Joacfuín de Religiosas Nazarenas
contenida en algunos apuntes de la vida y virtudes de la Venerable Madre Antonia
Lucía del Espíritu Santo . . . {An Account of the Origin and Foundation of the
Monastery of San Joaquin of Nazarene Nuns . . . Contained in Some Notes
Concerning the Life and Virtues of the Venerable Mother . . .) is a history of the
convent’s founding into and around which the biography of Madre Antonia
Lucia IS insetted. It was finally published in 1793, eighty-four years after
^^1 j L Lucia’s death, when interest in preserving women’s history
could be expressed more directly than in earlier eras. Abbess Madre Mariana
de Santa Pazis wrote the “Pastoral Letter” that serves as prologue and made
spiritual Housekeepers 295
the arrangements and obtained the licenses, permissions, and approvals nee-
essary for printing.'
Curiously, the book might never have come into being had not Fray
Gregorio de Quezada suffered an untimely death. A packet of papers prepared
for him as source for the panegyric to recently deceased Madre Antonia Lucia
was handed over to the office of the Inquisition. Madre Josefa de la Provi¬
dencia reported that a dozen years later the packet appeared without expla¬
nation—the sign of a miracle—in her clothing closet. By then it was too
late to use it for its original purpose, but as she felt the convent should not
lose the record of its origins, she set about reworking the pages. With the
aid of another nun who remained anonymous. Madre Josefa collected many
pages of testimony for a ceremony of posthumous honors to Madre Antonia
Lucia del Espiritu Santo, the organizer and first leader of the nazareruts (Na-
zarene nuns).
What resulted was a patchwork text that combines the story of one insti¬
tution and one woman and also affords a view of religious and secular relations
among the residents of colonial Lima. It contains testimonial accounts of
Madre Antonia Lucia del Espiritu Santo’s confessors and Sisters regarding
her extraordinary religious virtue and psychological perspicacity; the rules
and purposes of the institution; and other briefer documents, including the
fragment by Madre Antonia Lucia herself that constitutes chapter XXIV.
Through dialogue and recollections of actual events we hear how a large cast
of colonial characters felt, how they fought, and how they behaved in office
and with their families. We learn about marriage and family life, ocean
crossings and real estate transactions, infant and child care. The “pomp and
circumstance” of the viceregal bureaucracy are laid bare in an informal,
unpompous way that sometimes seems to resemble mockery.
The Relación covers a time span of one hundred and one years, from Madre
Antonia Lucia del Espiritu Santo’s birth in 1646 through 1747, when Madre
Josefa de la Providencia added several passages to the text she had handed
to her spiritual director for approval the year before.^ The account of the
foundation of a beaterío (the community house for lay women) that was
successfully transformed into a female monastery informs us about specific
political aspects of colonial society of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
Peru: about social fluidity and hierarchical rigidity; about tensions between
the aristocracy and the newly rich owners of land on the one hand and Black
and Indian serfs and slaves on the other. Members of the nazarenas, as Madre
Antonia Lucia called herself and her followers, were drawn principally from
the social strata of impoverished hidalgos—lower nobility—who had lost or
never quite made fortunes. Women of all classes whose men were seduced
by “the ways of the devil” (which as often as not meant infidelity, adultery,
or bigamy) or whase children died of epidemic diseases came to the nazarenas
for aid, advice, and consolation and sometimes joined them. So did close
female relatives who wished to resolve pecuniary problems and secure their
salvation. Some few men who made fortunes and then joined the Church
as ecclesiastic magnates or ascetic monks also helped in the women’s struggle
to transform the lay community into an official conventual community of
formal enclosure.
The Nazarene convent was, then, a microcosm of both class and sexual
politics in colonial Peru. But it also reflected the use of imitado, the imitation
296 UNTOLD SISTERS
of Christ, in the intetest of autonomy and survival. Much as these texts

record the step-by-step process by which the Order was founded, they also
reveal how women’s historical and biographical narrative was created, influ¬
encing recorded history with the “hidden hands” of its makers.^
Class, âce, and Sexual Hôlitics

In the seventeenth century, Lima’s population of 25,000 was divided ra¬
cially almost in half; fifty percent Black and mulatto; forty-seven percent
Spanish; only three percent Indian and mestizo (Dobyns and Doughty 118).
This meant that Lima, location of the viceregal court, was culturally quite
removed from the Indian majority of the population, wh ) lived in the high¬
lands. Members of the administrative apparatus that ru' ^d the entire vice¬
royalty had almost no idea of how that vast majority of their subjects lived;
they never traveled outside of Lima except to go back and forth from Spain.
Nevertheless, the City of Kings quickly became the organizational nerve
center for the administrative, financial, and religious management of Spanish
territories in the New World.
Madre Antonia Lucia, like many religious leaders, understood that no
other city in America during the colonial period, with the single exception
of Mexico City, could provide the opportunity for patronage and enterprise
needed to accommodate her will, initiative, and independence. In the em¬
pire’s heart—the port city of Lima—she was to found her religious house,
close to the abundant wealth and cultural effusion of the viceregal court of
Peru.'*
Despite the viceroyalties’ attempts to imitate the court of Madrid, almost
everything in the colonies differed from the Spanish metropolis. Some aspects
of the economic, political, and social life of the realm were the result of
transplanted peninsulat patterns; others were grafted onto indigenous trunks.
Many fruits of the conquest and colonization were bitter. Brawn, cruelty,
and greed paid off handsomely in the establishment of the new hierarchy.
People resisted control; the new society persuaded at best, coerced as a
standard procedure, and employed violence at worst. Spontaneous Indian
protests against colonial abuses erupted regularly; they were repressed with
proverbial brutality (Dobyns and Doughty 131).
At first, very few women crossed the ocean from Spain. Indian women
were the slave-companions of the first conquerors and colonizers and the
mothers of the mestizos—the new race upon which were imposed the concepts
of racial “purity. ” Later, the Spanish government made it difficult for a man
to emigrate to America without a wife; in the official view, colonization
required the domestic stability that only European, Catholic wives could
provide. Colonial Peru was a color-conscious society; it encompassed a wide
spectrum of labeled groups between the two legal extremes of whiteness and
blackness (Martin 190). Women of European descent were officially viewed
as more desirable. At first very much in demand, as their numbers increased
in succeeding generations, they frequently found themselves unable to find
eligible men to marry. One eventual result was the founding of more female
monasteries and other less formal institutions. The number of recogimientos
(religious retreats) built for former prostitutes, aristocratic spinsters, young
girls, and widows grew with the numbers of women in the colonies. In
discussing the social context of several recogimientos in Mexico and in Peru,
Benassy-Berling suggests that in some cases, women residing in recogimientos
had autonomy similar to that of the medieval Beguines (“Mineures ou Ma-
jeures? . . 64). All such institutions, however, replicated the colony’s op¬
pressive social hierarchy based on race and class. They nevertheless provided
a wide variety of social services left unmet by other institutions: charity for
the poor, education for girls, and emergency relief in times of natural disasters
and epidemics.®
Women’s monasteries were one of the most important institutions in the
lives of all women of Spanish descent, as an acknowledgment of status, an
alternative to either marriage or untenable marriage conditions, a refuge from
wars, a source of education, and a repository for excess daughters.'’ Women
of other races—Indian, mestiza. Black, mulatta—also benefited from the
separation from secular life that beateríos and convents provided, even as
many such women exchanged one form of subjugation for another. No longer
preyed upon by men of higher station, they nevertheless worked as servants
and slaves of choir and lay nuns. Racial hierarchy in the convent usually
forbade their inclusion in either of these latter categories.’ A few light-skinned
mulattas and mestizas became donadas—servants who were allowed to wear
a nun’s habit, and who supervised the two categories of servants and slaves
below them.®
Within religious institutions, women worked at a wide variety of tasks,
not only those considered appropriate to the female sex.®* They also defended
themselves against many injustices and limitations (confinement in the fam¬
ily, sexual abuse, and other dangers) and contended as a group with Church
and temporal authorities for their own power. In his Daughters of the Con-
quistadores, Luis Martin makes a strong case for viewing women’s role in
Peruvian viceregal society as one of far greater autonomy and power than
has previously been conjectured. In a society at once more unsettled than
that of Spain, with more mixtures of people and greater mobility but also
more rigid and traditional structures and attitudes, women of certain classes
and races exercised significant control over their own destiny. This was par¬
ticularly true within certain monasteries.
By choosing chastity, religious women expanded their opportunities in a ^
society as a whole, acting as teachers, protectors, creators, and spiritual
healers. In the Relación we hear them speaking with men and women on
many topics: food, building materials, real estate, animals, religious images,
and legal documents and agreements. The beateríos and convents also ex¬
tended the possibilities for communication and relationship between the
sexes. Relieved of the role of daughter, wife, or mother in a particular family,
a beata, or nun, could become confidante and advisor to both women and
men. Madre Antonia Lucia’s biography exemplifies the independence of mind
and strength of will of women religious leaders, their familiarity with the
worldly matters of daily life, and their skill in maneuvering through the
convoluted secular and religious politics of the period.
Madre Antonia Lucia was bom in Guayaquil in 1643 to a “poor but
respectable” family, a formula which means that she was a member of the
lowest rung of nobility—the hidalgos—whose existence was often unstable.
Her father, Don Antonio Maldonado y Mendoza, died when she was a child.
298 UNTOLD SISTERS
Left with no means of support, her mother, Doña María Verdugo Gaitán,
moved the family to Callao, the port of Lima, and took a job as a cigar
maker. As soon as Antonia Lucia was old enough, her mother urged marriage.
Antonia Lucia did not want to marry, but she was an obedient daughter, and
there were financial considerations. Her groom, Alonso Quintanilla, is de¬
scribed as a hardworking, honest man. Another hidalgo pobre, he earned his
living as a traveling merchant. She accompanied him on trips to seven
different provinces, but, according to the biographical narrative, was buried
as a virgin. Whether true or not, the claim regarding Alonso’s inability to
perform sexually contributes to the holy denouement of the story. The sketch
of an older man, more paternal than husbandly in his behavior, gives the
impression that he supported her efforts at spiritual betterment. After not
being able to consummate the marriage, he brings a crucifix to bed, places
it between them, and says to his wife, “Here is your bridegroom” (4). In the
beaterío, years later, she and her followers are said to have slept embracing
a wooden crucifix with an image of the divine Nazarene, in a spirit of sacrifice
and saintly ardor.
Given Don Alonso’s benevolent attitude, one wonders why Antonia Lucia
deemed it necessary to start collecting money and other donations for a
beaterío without telling him. On the other hand, the passage which mentions
his insistence that she accompany him on all his travels, by land or by sea—
voyages during which, she claimed, the hardships were great and the means
of sustenance small—hints at another, less altruistic aspect of his character.
Yet her desire to found a religious house for lay women may well have been
encouraged by these nomadic journeys as much as by the confessor who
recognized her talent and fervor and who later arranged for her transfer from
Callao to Lima. Whatever her reasons, the scenes reporting Madre Antonia’s
early efforts to establish a beaterío are particularly dramatic. Emphasis is placed
on the need to keep her married status secret from potential donors or patrons.
In one episode. Madre Josefa de la Providencia describes Madre Antonia
carrying donated planks of wood across town at night (7). The shouldering
of such planks is later echoed in the daily shouldering of the Cross, as the
beatas repeat the viacrucis (the Stations of the Cross). When Alonso Quin¬
tanilla finds out about her secret activities, he agrees to dissolve their conjugal
vows and gives her permission to become a beata, saying he will become a
religious as well. His death, however, prevents him from accomplishing this
goal.'°
Antonia Lucia Maldonado Quintanilla’s transformation into Antonia Lucia
del Espíritu Santo began, then, before her husbaad’s death. But her strength
of will and sense of self flourished in the beaterío, as she worked to realize
her dream. Her relationships with patrons and confessors contain elements
which illustrate both the limitations of her worldly experience and the skills
by which she survived and prospered. A woman who had nothing material
to bequeath when she died (even her bedsheets were borrowed). Madre
Antonia s vigorous activities on behalf of the Instituto nazareno and her pow¬
erful inner spiritual life gave her a secular and religious authority denied to
women outside the Church. It is clear from the texts that she needed all the
secular and religious skills and authority she could muster, for religious life
in Lima, like all other aspects of colonial existence, was highly centralized.
Nothing could be accomplished without the Viceroy’s authorization, includ-
ing founding churches, parishes, and pious estahlishments (Descola 186).

But Lima also provided the opportunity for patronage and enterprise, the
abundant wealth and culture of the court, which were needed to accomplish
her goal.
Madre Antonia used her abilities to attract the support of wealthy and
generous benefactors." Indeed, her involvement in spiritual politics, by sav-
ing individual souls from hell, reportedly gave her leverage in financial spheres.
In fact, she repeatedly requested land, materials, patronage, and endowment
for the residents and their establishment, and successfully bargained for and
bought religious paintings and statues to adorn its walls. Essentially, two
wealthy gentlemen—Capitán Roque Falcon and Don Sebastián de Antu-
nano—provided the funds and support necessary to found her retreat house.
Her business acumen and psychological perspicacity, as well as the structure
of relations between classes and sexes, emerges in her relationship with the
two benefactors. Their aid to the foundation is, of course, inserted in the
texts as further proof of the saintliness that accompanied Madre Antonia’s
worldly presence.
One episode illustrative of Madre Antonia Lucia’s capabilities involves
Roque Falcon and a girl he is raising to be a nun. After attempting to teach
her to read, he brings her to the beaterío and asks Madre Antonia to try. She
attempts to accomplish the charge, “por lo mucho que le debía a dicho
Fundador y deseando darle gusto, ...” [99] (because of all she owed this
founder; and [she desired] to please him . . .), but she is successful only in
making the girl and herself miserable. Not knowing what else to do. Madre
Antonia prays for advice to God, after which she tells first the girl, and then
Roque Falcon, that “no le conviene a la niña saber leer” [99] (it is not meant
for the girl to learn to read). Everybody, including Capitán Roque, is pleased
with the outcome. An afterword informs us that the girl (who remains un-
named throughout) is still alive and an unprofessed beata in the convent.
Clearly, Madre Antonia Lucia combined faith and common sense to reach
a felicitous resolution to potentially difficult situations.
Sometimes called “señor,” sometimes “hermano” (brother), Sebastián An-
tuñano, the other benefactor, is the most prominent male character in the
chronicle. His position is solidified in the text, as well as in the actual history
of the founding, by the inclusion as Chapter XXVI of a narrative written by
him in which he tells of his youth, money-making, and religious calling. His
tale depicts a fourteen-year-old Spaniard who strikes it rich in Peru, returns
once to Spain, and then settles definitively in Peru, where he makes an even
greater fortune by mundane buying and selling, wheeling and dealing, in
colonial Lima. Subsequently he joins the Church, and at death he contributes
his earthly possessions to Madre Antonia’s religious enterprise as the aftermath
of a vision he had experienced while he was praying in Spain."
Antuñano, however, is a difficult character who inspires dislike and fear
in others. Josefa de la Providencia reports that “moría la sierva de Dios de
miedo del hermano Sebastián” [i 17] (God’s handmaiden was scared to death
of Brother Sebastian). She writes that his attempts to impose his will on
other supporters of the establishment caused them to retreat and delayed
progress. The ways in which he caused fear are never identified, but we do
know that aristocrats and merchant upstarts such as himself disputed with
each other to the point that an annoyed Viceroy intervened in the land and
300 UNTOLD SISTERS
chapel purchase which he undertook for Madre Antonia. And the texts record
that in the two years it took to complete the legal purchase (1684-1686),
“a instancias e incutsiones del Infierno todos los señores del Consejo de Indias”
[131] (through the devil’s insistence and inference, all the gentlemen of the
Council of Indies) wrote to the Viceroy to demolish the beaterío.
Madre Antonia Lucía del Espíritu Santo, however, tells her disciple that
she has received a message from God with the good news that Sebastián
Antuñano’s house will be the site of the beaterío. God has reassured her that
“ése que tú ves como león, te lo volveté cordero” [117] (he whom you see
as a lion, I will change for you into a lamb). And, as she had foretold, the
deed came to pass, reinforcing the Madre’s reputation as prophet and grantee.
Madte Antonia Lucia’s ability to establish a working relationship with
Church authorities was fat more problematic than her skills at attracting
benefactors. The themes of fear, violence, censorship, and selTcensorship
commingle in the story. Although in some instances she and her Daughters
collaborated with ptiests and brothets—for example when, during the earth
tremors of 1686, they aided a community of monks—male ecclesiastics and
Church institutions exercised direct power over women religious. Madre
Josefa provides evidence that even Madre Antonia Lucia del Espíritu Santo
was not impervious to the potential intimidation of the Inquisition. She
records a conversation with Madre Antonia Lucia, who is apprehensive when
people knock at their door:
¿Qué tiene usted que se asusta tanto? Y respondía: Hija temo me den
palos o vengan a prenderme. Y en especial si venía algún señor
sacerdote, volvía luego inmediatamente diciendo: ¡eh alguna
reprehensión es ésta! A lo cual le replicaba yo, pues Madre ¿tiene
usted alguna cosa, o ha hecho alguna obra por donde así procedan? A
lo cual respondía ¿yo sé hija si he dado motivo para que así suceda?
(84-85)
(Why should you become so frightened? And she would answer:

“Daughter, I fear they’ll beat me or come to arrest me.” And
especially if some priest appeared, she would return in haste saying,
“Oh, they must be coming to take me away!” To which I would reply:
“But Mother do you have a reason, have you committed some act
that could lead to that?” To which she would answer: “My Daughter,
how should I know whether I’ve given some cause for such a thing to
happen?”)
This section of dialogue is meant to indicate the absurdity of such feats on

het part—she who was judged a saint, a healer, a prophet, an advisor. But
it implies the opposite, demonstrating a deeply personal response to a time
fraught with fear. Yet the passage clearly also reveals the two women’s inti-
macy there is a note of teasing under the seriousness—and illustrates the
level of trust between them in the face of the politics of viceregal Lima and
its clerical-juridical arm, the Inquisition.
The impact of the Inquisition can also be found in Madre Antonia Lucia’s
refusal to write a Vida and, after she had reluctantly done so at the behest
of het confessor, in the fate of the original manuscript. Once written, she
entrusted the pages to the confessor. Seized by trepidation because a local

holy woman whom he also confessed regularly had just been arrested by the
Inquisition for doctrinal errors in her treatises, he returned Madre Antonia’s
written bundle to her via a servant. Insulted, angry, and fearful for her own
safety. Madre Antonia burned it—a story which helps to account for the
extent to which the Inquisition reached into individual lives, and perhaps
also to account for the peculiar patchwork construction of the text.‘^
Finally, Josefa de la Providencia recounts her own difficult encounters with
male authority in the secular world, as well as those of Madre Antonia Lucia.
She had to wade through a cumbersome bureaucracy and negotiate with
officers of the state. Intricate patterns of favor-seeking emerge. Having ob¬
tained some of the various licenses that would finally enable the nazarenas
to petition Rome for convent status. Madre Josefa takes them to the Viceroy,
“y se me volvió un león ... y me dijo mil cosas, y que éramos malas para
beatas, y peores para monjas . . .” [165] (and he turned on me like a lion . . .
and told me a thousand things, how we would be bad as beatas, and worse
as nuns . . .). Mortified, she retires, and seeks an intermediary to soften the
Viceroy, to make him more amenable to signing the final papers for the
establishment of the convent.’'' In one instance, she recalls an unpleasant
encounter with another Viceroy, omitting some of his words because of their
crudeness. Madre Josefa’s embarrassment at the putative obscenities reinforces
the effect on the reader of the disrespect commonly displayed toward women
by those holding power, by those of higher social status, and perhaps also by
men in general.
On another occasion, a different Viceroy makes Madre Josefa so angry that
she snaps back at him. She goes to see him when plans for enclosure are
being finalized as a result of a large donation by Doña María de Córdova,
contingent upon the construction of the convent building within five months
and three “scholarships” for novices. The Viceroy wants additional scholar¬
ships;
. . . [el] Sr. Virrey Marqués de Castelfuerte, ... me dijo le había de

dar cuatro becas: a lo cual le dije, que no podía dárselas, por lo pobre
que estaba la Casa: me dijo . . . que no las quería para él, sino para
hijas de Oidores pobres: le dije que el Beaterío no le debía a ningún
Oidor, Conde, ni Marqués un grano de trigo, y que así no podía darle
lo que me pedía . . . (165)
(The Viceroy, Marquis of Castelfuerte, . . . told me that I had to give

him four scholarships: to which I said that I could not, because the
convent was so poor: he said . . . that he didn’t want them for
himself, but for the daughters of poor judges: I said that the beaterío
did not owe so much as one single grain of wheat to any judge,
count, or marquis, and so I could not give him what he asked . . .)
Madre Josefa took a brave stand, especially considering her status as a woman
of much lower social rank than the Viceroy. Religious faith and the abundantly
recorded examples of saints and martyrs must have bolstered her courage,
considering her financial need. To be a nun, desirable as it was, meant
difficulties impossible to overcome without influence and money.
302 UNTOLD SISTERS
The financial problems to which Madre Josefa alludes were perennial in a

house that did not draw its occupants from the wealthy. The Relación refers
often to the raising of funds and materials. Madre Josefa bemoans the eco¬
nomic insolvency the house suffers and attributes it to the class of its inhab¬
itants:
... no trajo IDios] al principio Condesas ni Marquesas, sino gente

pobre; y así no quedó persona que nos ayudara a adelantar la
Casa ... Yo no era persona ni de prendas ni de plata . . . (158)
([God] . . . did not bring us either countesses or marquesas at the

beginning, but rather poor folk; so there remained no one who could
help us advance the work of the house . . . [for] 1 was not a person of
jewels or wealth . . .)
Given this situation, the women became accomplished fund-raisers and sought
benefactors who would support them on an ongoing basis. It was perhaps
inevitable, then, that these benefactors, not the Madres, took center stage
in the founding ceremonies.
The penultimate chapter appears to be drawn from viceregal records. It is
an account of the day the Institute officially became a convent, written in
the impersonal and formal language of the contemporary chronicle; it does
not once mention Antonia Lucia del Espíritu Santo or Josefa de la Provi¬
dencia. In fact, the nazarenas are mentioned only once or twice in these
pages. They are relegated to the background amidst the pomp and ceremony.
Instead, the chapter focuses on the three nuns who had been chosen from
the city’s Discalced Carmelite convent to act as officers in the new convent
of Nazarenes, and on those who accompany them—the landed aristocracy,
including the Viceroy and his wife. Their journey through the streets of Lima,
stopping at one other convent, a Jesuit chapel, the cathedral, and finally the
chapel and then the cloister of the Nazarene convent, is depicted in vivid
detail. Opulence and glorification of the wealth of Church and State mark
the event; formality marks the official description. This opulence and pro¬
tocol, however, had little to do with the lives of the women who had been
beatas and were henceforth to be the professed nuns of the convent. For the
reader, the inclusion of the official version of the occasion, a lesson in
contrasts and exclusions, sheds light on one manner in which women were
deliberately written out of history.
Madre Antonia’s Instituto Nazareno externally appeared to “keep house”
for the imperial enterprise of the Spanish colonial society into which she
was bom. Through the development of an orthodox model of female religious
behavior, her beaterío aided the established Church in the process of con¬
version to Catholicism and implantation of Spain’s religion in the colony.
Yet the Instituto, in fact, also served the needs of Madre Antonia Lucia and
other women. In the end she succeeded in meshing the interests of the
viceroyalty economic stability, political hegemony, religious conversion—
with her own needs for autonomy and independence from societal pressures
and, increasingly, for the exercise of religious authority.
Imitatio
“Imitatio" in this context designates the imitation—by means of costume,
word, and deed—of Christ and his Apostles. Imitation of the passion and
agony of Jesus characterized the lives of all nuns and monks, and in this
Madre Antonia Lucia del Espíritu Santo was no exception. Her particular
spiritual enterprise, however, was organized around an emulation of the name,
dress, colors of, and attitudes toward the persecuted Jesus of Nazareth. We
can also speculate that multiracial Peru, as Madre Antonia Lucia knew it
from her travels, reminded her of what she had imagined about the town in
Galilee, a place of pilgrimage and trade center where Jesus spent thirty years
of his life before his crucifixion.
In addition. Saint Teresa of Avila was the most natural model for imitatio—
for both her life and her texts, barely a century old, legitimated religious
innovation and discipleship among women. The Peruvian founder knew this
well. Saint Teresa recalled the early Christians and they in turn reinforced
the initial and ultimate imitatio—that of Christ. By the end of the sixteenth
century, the example of Saint Teresa served to mollify clerical resistance to
women’s religious work. The comparison of other women with Teresa had
become a topos of female hagiographic tradition even while the saint was
still alive. The difficulties of convent founding recorded in Madre Josefa’s
work had already been meticulously documented by Saint Teresa of Avila
and her spiritual daughters. That documentation thereafter served as authority
for other women. Saint Teresa was the paragon for all three women central
to the text under discussion—Madre Antonia Lucia, founder; Madre Josefa
de la Providencia, biographer; and Madre Mariana de Santa Pazis, author of
the prologue. Fray Blas de Suares, Madre Antonia’s confessor, takes care to
establish her similarity with Teresa of Avila (13). The three Peruvians, among
the many women who followed in Saint Teresa’s footsteps, clung to this
closest of role models in validating their own visionary experiences and
founding activities.
Several times during the course of the narrative. Madre Antonia Lucia
calls upon Saint Teresa. Most telling is the instance when, discouraged by
the slow progress she is making with her convent, she has a vision of Saint
Teresa, who utters the reassuring words: “Tuya es la fundación” ti20] (The
Foundation will be yours). This promise of success, an internalized Teresian
model, encourages the Peruvian woman’s continued struggle. Both Madre
Antonia Lucia’s understanding and her adoption of the history and symbolic
dimensions of religious life, then, formed a basis for the beaterío and the order
of cloistered nuns that replaced it. The text tells the story of the institution
and the lives connected to it, narrating a series of imitations of Christ
including naming, experiencing visions, costuming, and performing ritual
observances.
With the epithet ''nazarenas, ” Madre Antonia Lucia conferred on herself
and her followers religious power and a sense of entitlement; the name
impressed on others as well the seriousness of the nazarenas’ Christ-like
mission. Writing at the end of the eighteenth century. Madre Mariana Santa
Pazis names her predecessors apóstolas (female apostles) in the prologue to
the book. She underscores the heroism of Madre Antonia Lucia’s imitatio as
304 UNTOLD SISTERS
well as the significance of Madre Josefa de la Providencia’s preservation of

records. She claims that Madre Antonia Lucia’s tireless organizational efforts
and the devoted cooperation of Madre Josefa and the other lay religious
women she gathered around her merit comparison with the faith and courage
of Christ’s disciples. In employing the names Nazarenes and apostles, Madre
Antonia Lucia and Madre Mariana appropriated roles customarily reserved
for men: “nazarena” and “apóstola” represent adaptations of the masculine
nouns “nazareno” and “apóstol” to feminine forms. By this renaming, they also
restructured their relation to the sacred and dignified their function on earth;
they made themselves Christ’s companions and envisioned a direct relation¬
ship between their quest and his. They were clearly not “Btides of Christ”
languishing in love, but tather women endowed with enormous drive and
fortitude, imitating Christ’s Passion.
The Peruvian nazarenas reenacted scriptural history more dramatically than
most beatas and nuns. Their active interptetation of the legacy of the gospel
indicates that they undetstood, as Elisabeth Schiisslet Fiorenza has recently
pointed out, that “at crucial points of the [biblical] narrative women emerge
as exemplary disciples and apostolic witnesses” (in Memory of Her 322).
According to the document that states the objectives of the Nazarene In¬
stitute, the goal was to “manifest and publicize” the Messiah’s incarnation
and his suffeting and to make amends for the offense against him. Thus the
limeñas (women of Lima) identified tacitly with those against whom injustice
was done, both in the time of Christ and in theit own. Yet they wete not
able to transcend “the pattern of dominance and submission that charactetizes
[their] social-cultural environment” (In Memory of Her 321-22). In estab¬
lishing leadership patterns, they imitated not the egalitarianism of the early
group of Christ’s followers, but the strict tanking of later Church Fathers like
Benedict.
Madre Antonia Lucia unequivocally assigned herself the tole of chief Na¬
zarene when, in collaboration with het confessor, she codified the objectives
of the new community of lay Sistets. Indeed, she included a female figure as
a powerful part of an unquestioned hierarchy. While many parts of the text
desctibe a nurturing and familiar establishment, the officially stated objectives
celebtate extreme asceticism and submission in the interest of following
Christ’s footsteps. Madre Antonia Lucia unabashedly named hetself his rep¬
resentative on earth. To be a nazarena, she writes:
. . . es dejat el mundo y cuánto estima; esto es no tener voluntad, ni

queter en cosa alguna . . . sino enttegarse del todo al Señot, y en su
lugar y nombre a la Madre y Maestra fundadora o Prelada que fuere,
para que la guíe enseñe y dirija a la mayor perfección . . . (32)
(. . . is to abandon the world and all that it esteems; that is, to have
no will, nor to desire a single thing ... but rathet to surrender
totally to the Lord, and to the founding Mothet and Teacher who
represents him, or to whomevet is Mothet Supetior, thus to be
guided, taught, and ditected toward the gteatest perfection . . .)
The spititual gifts and forceful personality of this woman allowed her to
influence her Daughters and Sisters in religious life (who called her “mamita”),
wealthy patrons and donors, and confessors and other church authorities.
She managed to convince them all of her exemplarity and righteousness. In
this mission, visible imitatio was most persuasive. When she walked the streets
of Lima in the dress of Christ, other women felt impelled to recognize her
as their leader and, in turn, to imitate her. The words of one of the early
adherents illustrate this effectiveness, and they are quoted as an example of
how the Lord “provided souls” for the new establishment:
... la veía yo, y el traje me robaba el corazón, y me enternecía en

medio de estar yo divertida en algunas mocedades, y sin haber sido
casada tenía tres criaturas de tierna edad: pospuse el amor que como
madre les tenía ... y yo la fui siguiendo, y estando ya en parte
secreta, me arrojé a sus pies, y le dije: Madre aquí esta su Magdalena
de usted . . . (17-18)
(. . . 1 would see her, and her apparel stole away my heart, and 1 was
moved to pity, there in the midst of my youthful pleasures, 1 who
without ever having been married had three young children: 1 put
aside the love 1 felt for them as their mother . . . and 1 followed her,
and when she came to a hidden place 1 threw myself at her feet and
said to her: Mother, 1 shall be your Magdalen . . .)
The self-styled Magdalen joined the beaterío; she was still alive and a nun at
the time the book was being written; the text claims that “for good reason
her name is kept in silence.”
It is no surprise to find that Madre Antonia Lucia governed her Daughters
with an iron hand and was not known for a placid nature. Her confessor
confirms her zealousness and notes that while she criticizes herself for arro¬
gance, she is also quick to justify herself with the language of humility:
“. . . que si yo no fuera Madre a los pies de todas me pusiera y estuviera”
[94] (. . . if 1 were not Mother [Superior] 1 would lie down at the feet of all
of them and stay there).
Madre Josefa de la Providencia, her successor, refers with an air of do¬
mesticity and humor to Madre Antonia Lucia’s temper; by making the Madre
more “human” as well as an authoritative figure, she may have contributed
to her lasting influence. In a homely tone. Madre Josefa demonstrates how
Madre Antonia herself becomes the object of imitation. After the death of
their ''capitana, ” Madre Josefa says that the lay Sisters follow to the letter the
patterns Madre Antonia had set, “. . . porque me parecía que si dejara de
seguirlo todo, me había de dar un grito, y así ejecutaba todo, como si estuviera
viva” [65] (. . . because I was convinced she would scream at me if we failed
to follow every step, and so everything was done as if she were alive). The
expectation of immediate retribution seems naive to our modem sensibilities,
yet to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century believers, heaven and earth, the
living and the dead, were indivisibly bound to each other. Madre Antonia
served as a reinforcement between the religious and divine figures—saintly
predecessors, heroes, the Virgin Mary, and even Christ. Madre Josefa gives
us both the temporal and the sacred dimensions of the history, the one as
real to her as the other, as she writes, inspired by her reverence for her
spiritual Mother and the wish to see her justly honored. In the process, she
3o6 untold sisters
paints a portrait of religious life which, though it served as a refuge, also

replicated the hierarchies of everyday secular life.
Antonia Lucia del Espíritu Santo ensured the efficacy of mimicry—of na¬
zarenas apóstolas—through two extraordinary visions, which are included in
the selections in this study. Whether we consider them a gift of grace or the
result of canny manipulation, we must bear in mind that her contemporaries
viewed such phenomena as factual. In the first vision, Jesus of Nazareth
appeared to Madre Antonia and in the word and deed conferred upon her
the costume of Calvary. In the second, the Holy Spirit gave her a golden
plaque containing proof of authorization for the apostolic life of the Naza-
renes, to be sponsored by Saint Teresa’s Order of Discalced Carmelites.
From the inception of monastic tradition, women had been able to go
against certain prevailing rules and customs by dedicating themselves to
obeying higher laws. But it often took visions to earn the necessary author¬
ization. The account of how Madre Antonia created the clothing she and
her Daughters wore (which so impressed the unwed mother of three) is the
earliest example of her ability to extract divine aid from a vision. The vision
in which Christ provided her with the costume preceded the founding of the
beaterío. It occurred following the period of her travels when she observed a
great variety of dress among the Indian and mestizo groups.The familiar
polychromed images of the suffering Lord and the sermons of missionaries
may also have inspired the daring thought of changing into Christ’s clothing.
Change of dress brought attention, then opposition, and finally freedom from
some of the restrictions imposed on women.
The account is given in the words of one of her last confessors. Fray Bias
Suares, who claims verbatim citation of his conversations with her. She saw
Jesus approach her in his purple tunic. Saying he had nevet given his tunic
to anyone before, he cut her hair, put a tunic just like his own on her, and
placed a rope around her neck and a crown of thorns on her head. When
she returned to her normal state she found herself dressed as in the vision.
Fray Bias continues the narrative, naming her confessor at the time—a Fran¬
ciscan who worried over the turmoil the vision and change of dress had
caused. The provisor general (Vicar General), hearing of the episode, objected
and sent his notario (secretary) with orders for her to take off the tunic. Madre
Antonia obeyed so meekly that he offeted, rather, to intervene in her behalf
and reported that he had been sent to addtess a señora “more angel than
human.” The Provisor himself paid a visit. Won over, he became a devoted
friend, personally donating eight pesos a month toward support of the com¬
munity. Josefa de la Providencia concludes this part of the narrative by
confirming that she herself and three other Sisters had heard the story directly
from Madre Antonia Lucia (13-15).
At first, it seemed that Madre Antonia Lucia was carrying imitatio too far.
It was one thing for a woman to display the “virility” of Christ in word;
another, to do so in appearance. Once the authorities convinced themselves
that they were not merely confronted by a woman bent on “cross-dressing”'®
but rather by an angelic soul on whom Christ had in a vision bestowed his
sacred garments, however, they allowed Madre Antonia Lucia to continue
wearing her new outfit and to write it into her founding documents.
The centrality of costuming is underlined by the goals and rules of the

Nazarene community, for the document contains a detailed section on the
habit to be worn—one that imitated Christ on the way to his crucifixion.
The women who became members were to take off the apparel of the world’s
vanity and adopt clothing that accorded with the vows of poverty, decency,
and humility: a long purple tunic, a thick ample toca (coif) to fully cover
head and neck, a string belt for the waist, and a thick rope around the neck,
reaching down to the knees, which was knotted at the chest (sometimes
taken off for sleep). A crown of thorns was to be worn for all community
activities, and on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, the women were
to carry a wooden cross and crown. A painting of Jesus carrying the Cross
was attached to the chest (33), thus replicating iconographically the imitation
in progress.
The ritual observances and the pattern and conduct of each day were also
ordained by Madre Antonia Lucia. The daily representation of the viacrucis
would require the construction of a building with ample physical space, and
she envisioned commissioning and buying art works for it similar to those
adorning other great monasteries and churches,for her Order, too, would
expand:
. . . en todo el contorno del claustro pondrán en lienzos de pintura

excelente, toda la santísima vida, pasión y muerte de nuestro Señor y
Redentor, además de poner de trecho a trecho ... el santo ejercicio
de la Viasacra.
Porque así como la Religión de Santo Domingo y San Francisco, y
las demás de la Iglesia Católica adornan de pinturas excelentes sus
claustros ... así el Colegio e Instituto Nazareno tiene por regla
adornar sus claustros chicos y grandes, y su Iglesia e Iglesias de los
colegios que en adelante lo fueran . . . (39-40)
(. . . canvases of most excellent execution shall be placed all around

the cloister walls, depicting the holy life. Passion and death of our
Lord and Redeemer, and from place to place at intervals ... the
blessed Stations of the Cross.
Because just as the Order of Saint Dominic and of Saint Francis
and the others of the Catholic Church adorn their cloisters with
excellent paintings ... so the Nazarene College and Institute will
follow the rule of adorning its cloisters, large and small, and its
church and the churches of colleges that may one day come to
be . . .)
The power of the vision of cross-dressing was such that it authorized her to
adopt the practices of the Franciscan and Dominican Brothers, who com¬
missioned art for their monasteries. It also authorized her “deviance” from
conventional women’s roles, which in turn enabled her to set in motion
variations on orthodox ritual. The paintings would provide a visual back¬
ground for the ritual observance that extended to all areas of convent life.
The daily reenactment of the viacrucis—a replication of Jesus’ suffering; the
miniature painting each follower wore on her breast of the very scene of
3o8 untold sisters
Christ’s life she was performing; and the paintings on the walls of the cloister
of the Stations of the Cross were all moments in the shaping of the new
Order.
The second vision is also a dazzling display of divine direction. Its descrip-
tion takes up the three pages of chapter XXIV, printed from the only sheets
written in Madre Antonia Lucia’s hand. If, as we suggest, a central purpose
of imitatio was the legitimation of the creative, transcendent self and of
unorthodox means of achieving religious goals in the world. Madre Antonia
Lucia did not accidentally save this passage alone of the many she destroyed.
In the vision. Madre Antonia Lucia, like Moses in the Old Testament,
receives a tablet from God. But the Lord gives her not stone, but a gold
plaque in recognition of her position. “ The plaque bears an inscription that
assures her of the inevitability of the convent’s birth. Its “mysterious clauses,”
as Madre Mariana de Santa Pazis calls the words inscribed on it (n.p. [6]),
indicate that the tablet contains the rules for a future Nazarene convent
linked to the Reformed Carmelites—the order founded by Saint Teresa.
The imitative modes of saint-lore and the hagiographic tradition accus¬
tomed people to thinking by analogy. In creating the text. Madre Josefa
chooses dramatic passages of Madre Antonia Lucia’s life to build up the
authority of the vision contained in the gold tablet. For example. Madre
Josefa describes young Antonia Lucia carrying donated wood planks on her
shoulders across town at night, keeping these activities secret from her hus¬
band. Obviously, the incident is used to demonstrate the depth of Antonia
Lucia’s early convictions and het extraordinary stamina in overcoming ob¬
stacles—although it also underlines the reluctance with which she had obeyed
her mother’s wish that she marry. Most importantly, though, the story pro¬
vides Madre Antonia Lucia with the heroic profile that evoked for others
the legendary first Christians, the ultimate authorities for a life of service to
Christ.
Of Madre Antonia Lucia’s popularity at the time of her death and the
crowds that came to witness the expected miracles. Madre Mariana says in
the prologue: “. . . al tercer dia de estar expuesto el cadáver para satisfacer
la devoción de los fieles, que atraidos del olor de sus virtudes venian al beaterío
en tropas para venerar a la difunta . . . (n.p. [12]) (on the third day that
the body had been on display, to satisfy the devotion of the faithful, who
attracted by the odor of her virtues came to the beaterío in hordes to venerate
the deceased . . .). The paragraph which describes her funeral emphasizes
the sizable attendance; “the great crowd of people,” mentioned three times,
necessitated bringing the accoutrements of the ceremony in through the roof;
the church doors were blocked by the bodies of the faithful.
Even in her death. Madre Antonia Lucia demonstrated a talent for symbolic
mimicry; outstretching her arms, she reportedly formed a cross with her body
and died standing in that position, her arms frozen. The impact of the event
was so impressive that it was taken to be miraculous. Even more significantly,
it became a source of her Daughters’ imitation, for after her death, five other
nuns are said to have died extending their arms to form the Cross (although
they were not on their feet). The lasting impact of her will and charisma
can be seen in the vigorous female community built within the parameters
of the orthodox Catholic church, a convent which survives to this day.
Sí Patchwork Hêxt
Few works so visibly display women’s role in salvaging their records and
detailing the entire process as the Peruvian Relación. Indeed, the process by
which the book was created is unusually accessible to the reader, even while
a multiplicity of texts and viewpoints, with reports on the manner in which
the various selections were gathered and inserted, give it a “patchwork”
quality. The nuns who wanted to honor Antonia Lucia del Espíritu Santo
after her death, for example, prepared the background material which the
priest later would use to pay homage to her, following age-old church prac¬
tices. Little of the writing prepared by the women was ever printed. Rather,
it was usually simply transformed into sermons of exaltation by a priest or
monk who then became its author. Pronounced first from the pulpit, the
eulogies were only then published and distributed in the form of pamphlets
or slim volumes called honras fúriebres (funeral honors).The book authored
and edited chiefly by Madre Josefa de la Providencia, on the other hand,
contains the primary sources out of which those ceremonies and praises were
fashioned. It captures lives and times in progress and rehearses the maneuvers
involved in piecing together a book.
Those among Madre Antonia Lucia’s confessors who were still alive con¬
tributed testimonials that bore witness to her closeness to God. Their writings
were joined with “declaraciones que hicimos nosotras sus hijas“ (statements
that we, her Daughters, made) and those of many people “de fuera” [149]
(from out in the world), and these texts were then divided into chapters.
From beginning to end, the chapters are framed with the information about
sources that always accompanied documents prepared for the Church or the
Crown. The concern that all declarations fulfill the Church’s juridical re¬
quirements prompted written assurances such as “como legalmente va escrito
en los capítulos pasados” (as is legally written in the previous chapters).
Because women were less likely to handle—let alone produce—books and
manuscripts themselves, they were less accustomed than men to employing
punctuation and different typefaces to indicate transitions and citations and
more likely to use speaking modes to link the accounts of witnesses, whether
dictated or written. Madre Josefa inserted numerous phrases to guarantee
authenticity, and to share responsibility in the potentially censurable pursuit
as well: “On another page written in her handwriting she says the following”
(130); “1 will tell it with her own words” (105, 106, 132); “1 will tell the
story of the Foundation by copying it word for word, according to the book
of Professions and Elections. It says the following” (130).
The multiplicity of hands that took part in its making and the vagaries of
the texts invest the book with what we have called its patchwork character.
Yet Josefa de la Providencia maintained a unifying organizational thread,
knowing that the way to God’s glory must be marked with signs of God’s
cooperation. For her, recognition of the convent and its history was an earthly
manifestation of those signs. In recounting the story of the compilation.
Madre Josefa gave prominence to a supernatural event that assured her re¬
sumption and continued authorship of the project when it was interrupted.
The Franciscan Fray Gregorio de Quezada, who was to be its author, and
to whom “. . . para hacer el Sermón todo se lo entregué (149] (I gave every-
310 UNTOLD SISTERS
thing, so that he could write the sermon), died. In short order, however,
the Inquisition impounded all his papers, including those related to the
Nazarene founder. Recovery of the papers constitutes the first of a series of
miracles reported to have taken place after Madre Antonia Lucia’s hurial;
this one simultaneously legitimized Madre Josefa’s renewed writing activities.
Twelve years after its disappearance. Madre Josefa found the entire packet,
inexplicably, in her clothing closet (150). It appeared to her that the hand
of God had moved behind the scenes.
In the intervening years, the conversion from beaterío to convent had taken
place, and Madte Josefa was ordered to finish the chronicle of the foundation
and of Madre Antonia Lucia’s life and death. She did so, turning it over to
her spiritual directot, the Most Illustrious Señor Don Mateo Amusquibar—
ironically, the man who was in charge of the Inquisition. A year later she
returned to the manuscript, adding reports of more miraculous events. It was
then consigned to the convent’s archives, where it was again misplaced. A
half century later, the “single extant” manuscript was found by chance. To
assure its preservation this time. Madre Mariana Santa Pazis wrote an intro¬
ductory “Pastoral Letter” and secured permission to publish.
The Relación reproduces direct speech and represents the nonelite social
milieu of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Lima more accurately than
most “literary” documents. Madre Mariana de Santa Pazis, the Mother Su¬
perior who in 1793 had the history of Madre Antonia Lucia del Espíritu
Santo and the nazarenas published, herself indicates its difference from the
usual work of its kind. She defends the document’s lack of rhetorical ornament
and comments pointedly about its failure to copy commonly accepted literary
usages. The need and merit of women’s recordings of their own history
overrides stylistic shortcomings, she claims. If, she contends, one keeps in
mind “Madre Qosefa de la] Providencia’s motive in forming this little vol¬
ume”—the glory of God and the edification of the nazarenas—then censure
is incorrect; rather, this “domestic copy [of God’s works]” should be seen as
a “precious monument” (n.p. [3]).^^
n^fie Use of the Uirst Uerson

The “yo” (I) voices (including those of confessors) and the “nosotras" (we)
of Madre Josefa and the other Sisters perform several functions in the text.
Each of the many voices that make up the text \yitness the saintliness called
for by ecclesiastic tradition. The social context within which the lives of
women religious were lived is suggested by the “nosotras" and “yo" voices.
The nuns asserted a female communal voice, thus protecting themselves from
male secular and ecclesiastic authority. The record of verbal exchanges be¬
tween Madre Josefa and other nuns opens a window into the rooms in which
modem myths would have it that only prayer took place. The first person
plural nosotros” or its possessive form of “nuestro”—always refers to the
collectivity created by Antonia Lucia del Espíritu Santo. “Nuestra Madre”
(Our Mother) formulaically conforms to the hagiographic tradition. At the
same time, it embodies both the expression of reverence and affection her
Daughters feel for Madre Antonia Lucia and her unifying effect on the com-
munity of women. Madre Josefa emulates this model, attempting to insert

herself into the role of Founding Mother.
Josefa de la Providencia’s “yo, ” which asserts her intimacy with the beata
Antonia Lucia, is a vehicle for telling her own life in the biography. Her “I”
is also a unifying and connecting structural device. “[m]e dijo” 115] ([s]he
told me) and “[y]o le decía” [132] (1 would say to her) are employed to recreate
the scenes of shared life. The progressive sense of the imperfect tense un¬
derscores the repetitive, ongoing communication between the two women.
In the process, she writes her own autobiography as well. We suddenly come
upon a vignette that illustrates either daily or unusual occurrences. If it has
been told by someone else. Madre Josefa says, “Here I record in her [or his]
own words” (e.g., 145), accomplishing textual unification by means of her
own narrative voice.
When Josefa de la Providencia recounted the miracles that God performed
through his handmaiden Madre Antonia Lucia, she was always careful to call
in other voices and list names of other witnesses—some dead, others living
members of the convent. When necessary, she hedged her own voice with
a claim to a simple transmission of an observation.^^ Possibly because Madre
Josefa needed to distance herself in case something of a heretical nature were
to be discovered by the inevitable censors, she reports witnessing the scene
of the death itself incompletely. When she saw that her Mother was dying.
Sor Josefa ran to tell her Sisters and missed part of the drama.
In contrast, the description of the hours before death is detailed and
recorded without proof of the miraculous;
Con esto pasó el miércoles, jueves y viernes, y el sábado once del

mismo mes de agosto a las cuatro de la mañana me preguntó: ¿qué día
es hoy? y le respondí, sábado; y entonces me dijo: sábado nací: y
corriendo el día, a mediodía me preguntó, y me dijo: ¿Ya fueron a
comer? y le dije, sí Madre; y entonces me dijo: ¿y tú no vas? a lo cual
le dije: después iré; y entonces me preguntó, ¿qué hora es? Y dije las
doce, y me dijo: de las doce a la una, una; de la una a las dos, dos:
anda hija a comer, que me quiero recoger un ratito a oración. (134)
(In this way passed Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, and on

Saturday the eleventh of that same month of August, at four o’clock
in the morning, she asked me: “What day is this?” and I answered,
“Saturday”; and then she said: “I was bom on a Saturday.” And as the
day went on, at noon she asked me, saying: “Have they gone to eat
already?” and I said, “Yes, Mother”; and then she said: “And you’re
not going?” to which I said, “I’ll go later”; and then she asked me,
“What time is it”? And I said, “Twelve o’clock,” and she told me:
“From twelve to one, one: from one to two, two: go and eat, my
child, for I want to be recollected a bit in prayer.”)
There may well be an attempt here to follow certain traditions in the re¬
counting of the last hours of nuns or saints. But the details of the oral exchange
infuse the scene with specificity. Madre Antonia Lucia speaks here to Madre
Josefa with maternal affection. Her method of counting hours—one can
almost see her using her fingers—gives a poetic flavor to the narrative even
312 UNTOLD SISTERS
as it informs the reader that she knew precisely when she would die. And
Madre Josefa attaches herself insistently—as witness, as participant, as suc¬
cessor—to Madre Antonia’s exemplarity.
Josefa de la Providencia’s “1, ” always present in the recording of her Mother’s
life, subtly pieces together a picture of cofounding. Although she never
explicitly claims that honor for herself, it becomes evident that the comple¬
tion of her beloved mamita’s mission might not have been possible alone. As
Madre Antonia Lucia approaches the end of her life and as Madre Josefa
comes closer to the assumption of leadership, the “yo” becomes more frequent
in the narrative. The I/she juxtapositions create a portrait at once antiheroic
in its domestic realism and heroic in its recreation of universal religious
history. There is a tension in the text between the making of a saint and
the descriptions of the two women’s daily interactions.^''
The dialogic mode, which records real-life conversations, undercuts the
idealized portrait of Madre Antonia Lucia in the narrative. In describing her
relationship to Madre Antonia Lucia and elaborating on the theme of how
she took care of her. Madre Josefa manifests her own qualities. Her “yo”
informs us of her nurturance, efficiency, wit, and wisdom. She seeks the finest
doctors to attend to Madre Antonia Lucia; she approaches the highest au¬
thorities—through intermediaries when necessary—to accomplish the foun¬
der’s and her own great goal. She works tirelessly, and eventually succeeds
in obtaining the necessary approval of convent status for the beaterío.
Even when describing Madre Antonia Lucia’s funeral, Josefa de la Provi¬
dencia places herself as protagonist:
En fin se concluyó el entierro rezado, con harto trabajo . . . con

notable pena de todas sus hijas, y mia en particular; no sólo por ser
mi amantisima Madre; sino también por el cargo en que me dejó . . .
y la sierva de Dios merecia. Y digo que mucho más de lo referido
pudiera decir sin ponderación alguna. (148)
(At last, the prayers for the funeral ended, with great difficulty . . .
with considerable grief on the part of all her Daughters, and
especially on mine; not only because she was my most beloved
Mother; but also because of the office in which she left me . . . and
which God’s handmaiden herself deserved. And I declare that much
more could be said than is related here without any exaggeration
whatsoever.)
The final sentence, in which she leaves much unsaid, reminds the reader of
the control she exercises over the text; behind such silences may also lie the
spectre of official ecclesiastic judgment.
Faith and need bred ingenuity. Josefa de la Providencia faced the dilemma
of needing to prove her Mother Superior’s saintliness with the Inquisition
looking over her shoulder. Her efforts required her at the same time to be
authoritative yet humble. She managed the first-person voice (her own and
that of others) and the individual/singular viewpoint to skillfully reinforce
the collective/plural perspective. Under her surface submission, innocence,
blandness, and confusion, she moves through the text demonstrating enor¬
mous control, cleverness, strength of character, and clarity of vision.
Sí Saint in the Making

As a character, Madre Antonia Lucia is elusive. We are not told what she
looked like, for example. Rather, the text offers a composite portrait of a
woman who was courageous and timorous, stubborn and flexible, common-
sensical and visionary. In episodic fashion, we learn that she sang and arranged
for the presentation of plays for holy days; that she received many visitors;
that she reassured the frightened (religious companions as well as visiting
children and adults), interpreted dreams, and recognized a lie as soon as it
was told.
Moved by her impact on them, all sorts of people displayed admiration
for the devotion of this woman. Madre Josefa selected a report on the “great
spiritual and temporal charity” of Madre Antonia Lucia by the Chaplain who
confessed her daily. The Chaplain’s report ends with mention of “acts of
humility” such as kneeling and kissing the feet of the poor (79-81). Madre
Josefa amplifies this by emphasizing Madre Antonia Lucia’s devotion to social
service and the training of young beatas. On Fridays, according to Madre
Josefa, Madre Antonia Lucia visited the poor, brought food, washed their
hands and feet with scented water, and taught them prayers and Christian
doctrine, and insisted that her disciples do the same (81).
The only fragment of Madre Antonia Lucia’s own writing certifies God’s
interest in the establishment of the convent and in her chosen status. Reading
it makes us lament, as did her Daughters, the destruction of the rest. The
pages reveal a talented writer with a literate vocabulary and syntax and a
Teresian command of vivid religious prose. Skillfully, she reproduces the
flavor of biblical-visionary dialogue. Like the prophets, she speaks in a tone
of complaint to the Lord:
Yo fui llamada de ti para el seguimiento del Instituto Nazareno: éste

es el que me tiene al yugo de trabajos que padezco en desamparos e
incomodidades de esta casa: ¡cuándo Señor llegará la hora de este
tránsito! (114)
(I was called by you to continue the Nazarene Institute: this is what

binds me to the yoke of trials I suffer in the neediness and discomforts
of this house: When, Lord, will the hour of death arrive!)
From these written words of the prophet and from witnesses’ quotations
of words spoken with Madre Antonia Lucia, a saint emerges. Madre Josefa
is aware that each “proof” of Christ’s cooperation with Madre Antonia Lucia’s
religious project is a milestone in her journey toward the establishment of
the convent, and she exploits indications of divine approval in telling the
story. To this end. Madre Antonia Lucia’s voice is often heard in conversations
regarding dreams, visions, and prayer. Visions or their consequences appear
repeatedly; a confessor cites Saint Teresa’s and Christ’s words to her (120).
Several other people report that Madre Antonia Lucia acted as Christ would
have, implying that her deeds were graced by God.
Frequently, the texts report Madre Antonia Lucia’s talk with supernatural
beings. Her dialogue with Madre Josefa, and with others, also weaves through
314 UNTOLD SISTERS
them. Madre Josefa joins one vignette of verbal exchange with another,
unifying them with an instrumental first-person narrative. Madre Josefa re¬
ports, for instance, having urged her Sisters to recall conversations about
incidents and predictions related to the founding of the beaterío and the
convent; the recollections were then set down in writing. In one. Madre
Antonia Lucia describes a vision of the man who would donate the land,
how he would be dressed, the place where it would be located, and the
circumstances of transfer of property (121). Juxtaposing events in the story
of how Madre Antonia Lucia acquired land. Madre Josefa fortifies the impres¬
sion of arduousness on the one hand and predestination on the other.
Although Madre Josefa takes care to remark on the precise order of events,
they are not narrated sequentially; she manipulates chronology in the interests
of displaying spirituality. Increasingly conscious of the importance of special
signs of divine intervention to the completion of both the writing and found¬
ing projects, she constructs the narrative, adding significant details with
explanatory phrases such as: “En una ocasión poco antes que Dios se llevase
a la sierva de Dios” [123] (On one occasion just before God took his hand¬
maiden away).
Often, despite fervent belief, the book offers a note of skepticism and
humor. There are also recorded failures. Some of the faithful who seek Madre
Antonia Lucia’s aid are not successful candidates for the cure of maladies or
the sudden acquisition of learning powers. Once, when Madre Antonia Lucia
is ill, her heart palpitations seem to reach her feet. The doctor who is called
in attributes her condition to one of two causes: having overstrained herself
or great love of God.^^ Josefa de la Providencia says:
En lo que tocaba a su enfermedad y muerte, pudiera decir mucho,

porque su accidente fue sólo del corazón de una palpitación tan
horrenda, que muchas veces calentándole los pies le saltaban tanto,
que admirada yo le decia: Madre ¿qué es esto que salta a usted en los
pies? y me respondía: hija, el corazón; y yo le decia: ¿tan grande tiene
usted el corazón que le llega hasta los pies? (133)
(As far as her illness and death are concerned, a great deal could be
said, because her ailment was entirely of the heart, which was taken
by a palpitation so terrible that many times when I was warming her
feet they jumped so, that in astonishment I would say to her:
“Mother, what is it that makes your feet jump about?” She would
answer: “Child, it is my heart”; and I would say: “You have a heart so
big that it reaches your feet?”)
The first sentence is a good example of what happens when Madre Josefa
feels silenced. She utters a sentence laden with bridled emotion. There is
more to say; about this she is explicit. More could or should be said, she
seems to imply. In the next sentence she suggests that Madre Antonia Lucia’s
death came about from more than the heart ailment. The last sentences
quote a humorous exchange and give a brief but vivid look at how the two
women spoke to each other. (Was Madre Josefa humoring an old woman in
discomfort? The imperfect tense indicates repetition of the dialogue—a kind
of “joke” between them. Is Madre Josefa playing dumb? Was she naive? Is
there a teasing that bears a slight resentment against Madre Antonia’s fame
for having such a “big heart’’?)
Madre Antonia Lucia’s employment of symbolic responses is embedded in
spoken interchanges between intimate friends. The conversations between
her and Josefa de la Providencia, destined to prove the former’s beatitude,
evoke the dialogue of many biblical stories. Her Daughters believe that Madre
Antonia Lucia’s words carry hidden connotations. They accept her habit of
veiling meaning as akin to Jesus’ speaking in parables. In one instance, from
a hiding place. Madre Josefa watches Madre Antonia Lucia pray. Her Mother’s
copious tears bring her out of hiding to inquire what is the matter;
Mamita, ¿qué tiene usted que está llorando tanto? a lo cual me

respondió: hija estaba en oración, y me dormi, y vi que entraba un
toro muy grande, prieto con unas astas, que topando en las puertas de
la Iglesia no podia entrar; y viendo aquello le dije a mi Señor ¿qué
significaba? y me respondió: hija, ésa es la herejia que llegará a la
puerta, mas no entrará. Como soñé esto, de eso hija lloraba: pero es
de advertir que cuando nos decia algunas cosas, lo disfrazaba asi.
(123)
(“Mamita, what is wrong that you are crying so?” to which she
answered me; “My Daughter, 1 was praying and 1 fell asleep, and saw
a great bull entering, dark in color and with such horns that when it
came up to the doors of the church, it could not get in; and seeing
this, 1 said to my Lord, ‘What does this mean?’ and he answered me:
‘My Daughter, this is heresy, which will reach the door, but it will
not enter.’ Because 1 had dreamed this, that is why 1 was crying.” But
it should be noted that when she told us certain things, she disguised
them in this way.)
Since Madre Antonia Lucia’s visions often carried messages from God, it is
not unusual that her explanations of them were held to be riddles and there¬
fore repositories of further meaning. By the time she died. Madre Antonia
Lucia had won fame as a holy woman, a founder and leader, an advisor and
healer. The intimacy Madre Josefa writes of between herself and Madre
Antonia Lucia signified her own authority to bear witness, to speak and write
about the older woman. Confirmations of the sanctity of Antonia Lucia del
Espiritu Santo and her mission, in turn, of course, confirmed the sanctity of
the texts.
lêxts and H^ranslations

Josefa de la Providencia
Apóstolas del Perú
Relación del origen y fundación del monasterio del Señor San Joaquín de
Religiosas Nazarenas Carmelitas Descalzas de esta ciudad de Lima. Con¬
tenida en algunos apuntes de la vida y virtudes de la Venerable Madre Antonia
3i6 untold sisters
Lucia del Espíritu Santo, Fundadora del Instituto Nazareno. Escrita por su
Hija, la Madre Josefa de la Providencia, Supriora de dicho Monasterio.
Con las licencias necesarias.
Impresa en Lima, en la Imprenta Real de los Niños Expósitos. Año de
1793-'
VIDA Y VIRTUDES, de la Venerable Madre Antonia Lucía del Espíritu

Santo, Fundadora del Colegio de Nazarenas en el Puerto del Callao, y trans-
plantado a la Ciudad de Lima.
VIVA JESUS.
Señor, mi Padre, y mi Redentor de mi querida Madre Nazarena, me alegraré

esté V.S. con la salud tan perfecta, como mi cariño y agradecimiento le desea.
Va el cuaderno; quiera mi Señor esté a gusto de V.S. que sabe Dios tengo
buena voluntad, y malos hechos: va con mil borrones y falta de letras; pero
me consuelo, pensando lo que suelen decir, que al buen entendedor pocas
palabras.^ V.S. perdone, que harta cruz tiene con lidiar conmigo, que soy un
animalito; y queda de V.S. su hija, y sierva, que sus pies besa. (1-2)
Josepha de la Miseria.
Capítulo 1. De su patria, padres, y nacimiento.
Viéndose Doña María su madre pobre, y sin amparo ninguno, con soberano
impulso que no sabemos, determinó venirse al Puerto del Callao, siendo la
sierva de Dios de once a doce años: vivieron en el Callao con extremada
pobreza; tanto, que le obligó a su madre a ponerse en el ejercicio de hacer
cigarros para poderse mantener, y mantener a su hija, a quien amaba tier¬
namente.
Era esta Señora muy virtuosa, y como veía que su hija lo era tanto, deseaba
su remedio, y luego que la vió en edad competente, trató de dárselo con un
hidalgo vecino del Callao, virtuoso y pobre, con quien ajustó dicho casa¬
miento, sin consultárselo a su hija, que como tenía la satisfacción de que su
hija no tenía más querer que el suyo, le debió de parecer no ser necesario.
La sierva de Dios luego que le dijo su madre lo que tenía hecho, lo sintió
mucho, y por no disgustarla consintió en dicho estado, y así se efectuó con
Alonzo Quintanilla. Habiéndose celebrado el desposorio de la Sierva de Dios,
inmediatamente aquella noche le entró tal crecimiento al dicho Alonzo Quin¬
tanilla, que quedó como fuera de sí hasta el día siguiente que se levantó, y
salió a negocios que le precisaban. A la segunda noche le repitió segundo
crecimiento, y lo mismo sucedió tercera, y cuarta noche. A vista de lo que
sucedía, o con inspiración de Dios, que así lo debemos entender, a la quinta
noche puso un santo Cristo sobre la almohada entre los dos, y le dijo a la
Sierva de Dios: Antonia, aquí tienes a tu esposo.
1. This text is in the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid. The nuns of the modem
convent republished the work in 1963.
2. A buen entendedor, pocas palabras. Found in Cervantes (Quijote II, 37) and other
literature of the period.
Spiritiuil Housekeepers 317
De haberle oído tales razones, quedaría con gran consuelo; y él la miró

con respeto, porque en una ocasión sucedió, que estando dormida se le
descubrió un pie, y viéndola el dicho Alonzo, se hincó de rodillas, y se lo
cogió para besar: al mismo tiempo recordó la Sierva de Dios, y como tan
humilde sintió mucho esta acción, y le costó muchas lágrimas, que fue ne¬
cesario su madre la consolase, y disuadiese de la pena que tenía. Es de advertir
que tenía esta Sierva de Dios costumbre de hablar entresueños, y referir parte
de lo que entre día le sucedía; y así se discurre, que estos respetos que el
dicho Alonzo le tenía, procedieron de haberle oído entresueños algo de los
favores que Nuestro Señor le hacía.
Algún tiempo prosiguieron en este género de vida, y después fue Nuestro
Señor servido de que se trocase el tiempo, y pasase muchos trabajos con el
dicho Alonzo, quien a cuantos viajes se le ofrecían, la llevaba consigo, fuese
por mar o por tierra; y así solía decir la sierva de Dios, que a siete Provincias
distintas la había llevado con muchas incomodidades y necesidades, tanto
que para sustentarse le faltaba: por último quiso Nuestro Señor, que la volviese
a traer al Puerto del Callao; donde vivía su madre. (3-5)
Capitulo II. De los muchos trabajos que padeció en el principio del primer
Beaterio.
[Madre Antonia tuvo como confesor el Padre Antonio de Céspedes, de la

Compañía de Jesús, diciéndole todo lo que “Nuestro Señor le había comu¬
nicado a ella.”]
. . . Tenía este dicho Padre otra hija espiritual, que era hermana de la
mujer del Capitán Don Francisco Serrano, la cual le había oído decir en
varias ocasiones al dicho su cuñado, que de buena gana diera un solar que
allí tenía para que se hiciese un Beaterio de la Santa Rosa de Santa María.
Con esta noticia que dicho Padre tuvo, le mandó a la sierva de Dios, que
fuese donde el dicho Capitán Francisco Serrano, y le dijese secretamente los
deseos que Nuestro Señor le daba de que se fundase un Colegio de Nazarenas,
para lo cual le pidiese aquel sitio; y que por hallarse la sierva de Dios al tiempo
casada, no podía sacar la cara a hacer diligencias necesarias para sacar licencias
de los superiores para hacer dicho Colegio, que esto le pidiese. (5-7)
[El Capitán Serrano le concedió su petición.]

La Sierva de Dios secretamente empezó a solicitar limosnas para la fábrica
del dicho colegio, sin que lo supiese Alonzo Quintanilla; y permitía Nuestro
Señor que no la conociesen muchas de las personas que le daban limosna, y
hasta de noche solía pedirla: y muchas veces le sucedió cargar sobre sus
hombros tablas, que le daban de limosna para su fábrica; y conseguidas las
licencias por mano de dicho Serrano, la empezó, y dio fin a dicha obra.
No pudo ser esto tan secreto que dejase de llegar a noticia de Alonzo
Quintanilla, quien le dijo un día: Antonia, yo haré voto de entrarme Religioso
en los Descalzos de San Francisco, y tú, prosigue en tu Beaterio, que te doy
licencia para que te vistas la túnica. Permitiría Nuestro Señor este buen
deseo, para darle el premio al dicho Quintanilla; pues a poco tiempo le dio
un accidente tan violento y repentino, que en breve tiempo pasó a la eter¬
nidad, y el luto que vistió por su muerte la sierva de Dios fue la sagrada
túnica. Se tiene por cierto, se conservó virgen en el estado de matrimonio:
318 UNTOLD SISTERS
nosotras por tal la tuvimos, y así la enterramos con Palma y Corona como
se dirá después. (6-7)
Capitulo 111. En que prosiguen sus trabajos, y muerte de su madre.
Y pasando algún tiempo en obediencia y silencio, dispuso la Divina Pro¬

videncia que el dicho Padre Fray Joseph de Guadalupe le mandase a nuestra
Venerable Madre, que en virtud y fe de la obediencia que tenía dejase el
beaterío y fundación que había principiado en el Puerto del Callao, y se
viniese a esta ciudad de Lima, que él cuidaría de ponerla donde convenía.
La sierva de Dios con una pronta y puntual obediencia, determinó salir del
Callao, y dejar su beaterío, sin dar parte a nadie, ni sacar alhaja ni cosa
alguna; y con este denuedo y espíritu de desnudez y pobreza, vino en el año
de 1681 a esta ciudad de Lima a darle cuenta a dicho su confesor de que ya
le había obedecido prontamente. (10)
[Al llegar a Lima, recibió tan extraordinarias instancias de la piedad y

providencia divinas, que su confesor le mandó que se retirase al Beaterío de
Santa Rosa de Viterbo, donde habían avisado a la Madre Superiora que la
recibiese.)
En dicho Beaterío le señalaron una celdita muy pequeña, donde estuvo un
año entero, pasando mil trabajos, como llenarse de piojos, comer la comida
con gusanos, padecer espantos, por ser la celdita que le dieron como a forastera
la más retirada de la casa, y no atreverse ninguna persona de dicho beaterío
a vivir en ella, por haber experimentado se oía gran ruido y cosas extraor¬
dinarias de noche en dicha celda: a que se juntó pasar gran incomodidad,
por ser así mismo esta celdita tan pequeña, que no cabía en ella más que un
estradito en que dormía la sierva de Dios, de poco más de una vara,^ y una
mesita muy pequeña, y una papelerita de media vara en cuadro, y no otra
cosa . . . (i1-12)
Capitulo IV. De cómo el Señor le comunicó, y le vistió su sagrada túnica,

y demás insignias.
En la relación que escribió de las cosas de nuestra Venerable Madre su
Confesor, el Padre Fr. Blas Suares, en el año de 1709 dice, que la sierva de
Dios le dijo, había treinta años que estaba en aquella vocación presente,
aunque en su mocedad no había correspondido a los llamamientos que el
Señor le había hecho; y según lo que me dio a entender, por su mucha humildad
(palabras formales de dicha relación colegí que solo había sido como la mocedad
de Santa Teresa: y preguntándole yo (prosigue dicho Confesor) que de dónde
le había venido a la mente el vestir el traje que trajo nuestro Señor y Padre
Jesús Nazareno, habiendo en el mundo otros; me respondió la sierva de Dios,
que ella nunca lo había pensado: que estando una noche en oración, vio que
el Señor vestido con su Túnica morada llegaba a ella, y le cortaba las trenzas
3. A Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American unit of linear measure, varying

from thirty-two to forty-three inches.
de los cabellos, y le ponía una Túnica morada, la Soga al cuello, y la Corona

de espinas en la cabeza, diciéndole: mi Madre ha dado su traje de pureza para
hábito, a otras almas, y yo te doy a ti mi traje, y hábito con que anduve en
el mundo: estima mucho este favor, que a nadie he dado mi santa Túnica,
y volviendo en sí la sierva de Dios, se vió vestida de Nazarena.
Habiendo traído del Callao a mi Madre Antonia su Confesor, que era el
Padre Fray Joseph de Guadalupe Religioso muy Siervo de Dios de mi Padre
San Francisco, estaba la sierva de Dios padeciendo muchas calumnias sobre
el traje que se había vestido de la sagrada Túnica; y todo lo que decían había
llegado a oídos del Señor Provisor, que era entonces Provisor general el Señor
Don Pedro Villagomes y sabiendo lo que se hablaba de la sierva de Dios
determinó hacer un auto mandándole se desnudase la sagrada Túnica, Soga
y Corona, y envió a un notario del Oficio Eclesiástico llamado Don Juan de
Uría a que le notificase a la sierva de Dios, que se desnudase la sagrada Túnica;
luego que oyó la notificación se hincó de rodillas, diciendo, obedezco a mi
Prelado; y quitándosela al mismo tiempo, le dijo el Notario: Señora vuélvasela
a poner que voy donde el Señor Provisor: fue, y le dijo al Provisor; Señor, no
he visto en aquella señora sino un Angel. Con esto fue el Señor Provisor
luego a las Viterbas, que era donde asistía la sierva de Dios le mandó se la
vistiese, y quedó tan amante de mi madre Antonia, que la iba a visitar al
Beaterío cuando lo fundó, y se quedó dando ocho pesos todos los meses. Esto
lo supo la Hermana Ana de Jesús Nazareno, la Hermana Juana del Niño
Jesús, la Hermana Tomasa de la Soledad, porque la sierva de Dios se lo
contaba después que puso el Beaterío: yo lo oí después que entré en el Beaterío,
cuatro años después.
Para recibir este favor me dijo la sierva de Dios, que el Señor la había
tenido un año como estática, y tan abstraída, que estaba toda embargada,
sin poder usar de ninguno de sus sentidos perfectamente. (13-15)
Capítulo VI. De como plantó el segundo Beaterío.
Para conseguir este fin [perfección en la virtud de ser humilde], siempre

se ejercitó nuestra Venerable Madre en ser la primera que en tocando la
campana al ejercicio de barrer la casa, cogía la escoba y barría todas las
oficinas, y no se desdeñaba de coger con sus mismas manos las basuras, y las
cosas más inmundas y asquerosas, y así lo hacían sus hijas a su ejemplo; y
cuando sus hij as llegaban a quererle quitar la escoba, o comedirse a coger la
basura, no lo permitía, porque les decía, que ella no era más que una hermana
y compañera. . . .
Con el mismo ejemplo, y puntualidad se ejercitaba la semana que le tocaba
ser refitolera: cuidaba de fregar los jarros y platos, y demás aseos de este
ministerio, y servía la comida de rodillas toda la semana . . . (20—21)
Capítulo X. De la penitencia, y vida cuaresmal de la Sierva de Dios.

Era tan grande su abstinencia (para que se reconozca como era fortalecida
de Dios) que su sustento era de veinte y cuatro a veinte y cuatro horas, y
esto un poquito de pescado, o dos yemas de huevos: jamás le reconocí entre
día alguna parvedad, sino siempre igual en su abstinencia. Así mismo todo
el año ayunaba al traspaso desde el jueves a mediodía, hasta el sabado a las
dos de la tarde que volvía a comer. La Semana Santa desde el Sábado de
320 UNTOLD SISTERS
Ramos a mediodía que comía, hasta el Domingo de Pascua no se desayunaba,

y entonces comía unos yullitos, o espinacas, a instancias de su confesor.
Así mismo eran tan crueles las disciplinas que usaba, que no se las daba
solamente en las partes acostumbradas del cuerpo, sino en todo él, siempre
hincada de rodillas: los viernes eran de sangre, y los demás días ordinarias,
con todos los demás instrumentos de penitencia que usaba de ordinario, y
muchas mortificaciones y penitencias que hacía públicas en el refectorio. Su
cama era una tarima, una fresada arriba, y otra abajo, y una cruz grande en
medio, en la cual los brazos le servían de cabecera, y un santo Cristo, con
que se abrazaba. El vestuario era dos túnicas blancas, la una de lanilla, y la
otra de cotense, y la túnica morada. (40-41)
Capítulo Xll. De las apariciones, éxtasis, y favores que hizo el Señor a su

Sierva.
Estando en el beaterío de la calle de Monserat (sic], tenía la sierva de Dios

en la huerta un ranchito junto a la acequia de la huerta, y habiéndose ido
un día a hacer oración, se anegó la huerta; y todas nosotras asustadas de ver
el aniego fuimos corriendo a ver lo que le había sucedido a nuestra Madre,
y la hallamos sentada sobre el agua (que había entrado en el rancho más de
una tercia de agua) en oración puesta en cruz; y nosotras viendo que no
estaba en sí por estar arrobada, entramos en el agua y la cargamos y la llevamos
a su celdita, y se quedó arrobada como estaba muy buen rato, hasta que
volvió en sí, y todas la vimos que salió sin mojarse ni un pie, ni nada de la
ropa, y nosotras gozamos del agua y nos remojamos bien por sacarla: de las
que éramos entonces, y lo vieron, viven la [sic] siguientes: la Hermana Ana
de Jesús Nazareno, la Hermana Luisa de San Pedro de Alcántara, la Hermana
Tomasa de la Soledad, y ésta su pobre hija la Providencia. (52)
Capítulo XIV. De la prudencia con que enseñaba y advertía a sus Hijas.
Y así siempre reparamos en su compostura y ejemplo mucho que aprender,

porque cada palabra de nuestra venerable Madre, era un rayo que penetraba
y encendía el corazón más tibio, de que es manifiesta prueba lo que asegura
una Hermana. Esta siempre con el cuidado de que la dirigiese y corrigiese,
porque le parecía que era inútil, y recelaba no acertar en el camino de
perfección; la venerable Madre la consolaba, y dirigía con tanto amor, y deseo
de su aprovechamiento, que solía algunas veces dejar sus dudas, llevada de
la doctrina y enseñanza del espíritu de la sierva del Señor.
Y así mismo de ver su admirable prudencia solían muchas personas solicitar
la comunicación de la sierva de Dios, y la buscaban cuando afligidos se
hallaban, y salían tan consolados con su doctrina, que a muchos les sucedió
mudar de vida, comenzando a despreciar lo terreno, y aspirando sólo a lo
eterno.
Muchas veces aconteció, que algunas personas, entre las cuales se numeran
muchos eclesiásticos y doctos, salían admirados del razonamiento tan prudente
y discreto de nuestra Venerable Madre, para quien no había dificultad que
no la penetrase, como águila que registra los rayos del SoP . . . (57-58)
Capítulo XV. De las distribuciones cotidianas, y ejercicios en que la sierva

Slîritual Housekeepers 321
de Dios impuso su Beaterio, y en que exercitamos hasta que entramos en

clausura, sin faltar un punto.
Esto es lo que hacía en nuestra compañía, y en comunidad; lo que en

oculto hacía, como no quedó nada escrito, no lo puedo saber; solo oíamos
en la huerta en un ranchito que hizo hacer para irse a hacer oración entre
día, largas disciplinas. (64)
Capítulo XVII. De la gran caridad que tenía la Venerable Madre con sus
Hijas, con todos sus prójimos, y curas milagrosas.
Así mismo sucedió que estando una Beata de las Viterbas con un dedo
valdado, y casi acancerado, sin poder usar de él, y dándole noticia de su
dolencia a la sierva de Dios, la consoló, diciéndole pediría al Señor la sanase;
y aplicándole la saliva de su boca la sierva de Dios, repetidas veces, quedó
buena y sana del dedo, Margarita, que así se llamaba dicha enferma, y quedó
tan agradecida, que siempre que veía a la sierva de Dios, le daba las gracias
por haberla sanado con su saliva. (75)
Capítulo XIX. Como la Venerable Madre replandeció maravillosamente

en la virtud de la humildad.
[Durante cinco o seis meses antes de su última enfermedad, el confesor de

la Madre Antonia Lucía insistía en que escribiera su Vida. ]
... la sierva de Dios se afligía, y lloraba mucho; y yo viéndola tan afligida,
le dije: ¿Mamita, qué tiene Usted que la veo tan afligida^ y me respondió: ¡qué
he de tener hija! el Señor Garcés quiere que escriba mi historia, y si aprieta a que
lo haga, me llevará Dios. Yo le dije le ayudaría, y el Señor Don Basilio también:
con que instando el Señor Garcés a que lo hiciera, puso la sierva de Dios en
un papel dónde nació, y quiénes eran sus padres, y dónde la bautizaron, y
no más: me llamó, y me enseñó lo que había escrito: y yo le dije que si no
escribía más que aquello tan poquito; y me dijo: para obedecer esto basta.
Instándola de nuevo el Señor Garcés a que lo hiciera, volvió a decir otra vez
me llevará Dios; y de hay [allí] a poco enfermó, y estuvo dos meses más o
menos en la cama, y se la llevó Dios como lo dijo. (86-87)
Capítulo XX. En que se prosigue la misma materia de la humildad con que

se portaba con sus Confesores, y la obediencia que les tenía, y de su rara
pureza y castidad.
En una ocasión le mandó el confesor que se dejase retratar, y excusándose
4. Translator’s note: the eagle is “Supposedly [the] only creature capable of gazing
at the sun without being dazzled, interpreted to mean that it is capable of contem¬
plating divine splendor, [and represents] judiciousness, speed in apprehension . . .’’
(Gertrude Jobes, Dictionary of Mythobgy, Folklore, and Symbols [New York; Scarecrow
Press, 1961]). The eagle is thus also a figure of Christ, the all-knowing, who gazes
directly on God the Father.
322 UNTOLD SISTERS
por causas que le dio, todas hijas de la humildad, se lo mandó en obediencia,

y con ella consintió que viniese el Pintor; y al tiempo de sacarla se puso a
oración, pidiendo á Dios no permitiese que la retratasen; y cuando el pintor
había dado unas pinceladas que volvía a [sic] para proseguir, la hallaba de
otra manera; de suerte que habiendo ido tres veces, y puéstose a sacarla,
nunca pudo, hasta que confesó que no podía sacarla, que era misterioso el
caso.
Este mismo Confesor le mandó escribir su vida, y sólo la obediencia lo

pudo conseguir, y sabiendo que se leían los cuadernos, deseó mucho que
volviesen a su poder, como sucedió así, y luego armó una hoguera de fuego,
y los quemó todos; por cuya causa se ha perdido mucho de su vida, y también
con la muerte de sus Confesores.
Le dijo la sierva de Dios a su compañera, que un día de los que iba a la
Iglesia a confesarse, le dio el confesor dos cuadernos de los que estaba escri-
hiendo de una Angela que hubo en esta ciudad, y en este tiempo estaba la
dicha Angela en grandes aplausos, y veneraciones en toda la ciudad, que no
se hablaba de otra cosa que de su virtud y santidad y después fue penitenciada
por el Santo Oficio de la Inquisición: recibió los dichos cuadernos nuestra
venerable Madre Antonia, y habiéndolos leído enteramente, luego aquel
mismo día se los volvió por su propia mano, y recibiéndolos el dicho Padre,
y reparando que no le decía nada, le dijo entonces: Nazarena, ¿pues no me
dices nada? a lo cual respondió con rendida humildad la sierva de Dios: ¿me
manda Usted que le responda? Sí te mando que me respondas: a lo cual dijo:
pues Padre, esto que esta aquí escrito es una ley, y la que yo sigo es otra.
Tenía la sierva del Señor su vida escrita, como ya llevo referido, y en una
revolución que hubo en esta Ciudad con dicha Angela, cuando la prendió
la Santa Inquisición, su confesor de la sierva de Dios, sin decirle nada, le
envió todo lo que tenía escrito en su poder de su vida, y era en volumen
bien grande, y la sierva de Dios luego que lo recibió y vio lo que era, dijo:
¡Válgame Dios, cosas de mi alma que me las tenía mi confesor me las envía así
con su criado, no debe de ser esto bueno, y mandó hacer una fogata de candela,
y lo quemó todo como y llevo referido, de que soy testigo, y vi en las cenizas
de los papeles las letras tan claras, que parecían hechas de plomo, que si no
hubiera estado la sierva de Dios presente, hubiéramos leído muchas cosas.
(88-90)
Capítulo XXL De como la Venerable Madre tenía don de conocer inte¬

riores.
El Capitán Roque Falcón deseaba que una niña que crió para que fuese
monja supiera leer: hizo todas las diligencias posibles, y no entraba en el
leído. Se la entregó a la sierva de Dios, y le hizo grandes instancias sobre
que aprendiese; y viéndose la sierva de Dios afligida, por lo mucho que le
debía a dicho fundador y deseando darle gusto, hizo todas las diligencias
posibles para que entrara en el leído, y con esto no se conseguía más que
afligirse demasiadamente la niña; y viendo esto la sierva de Dios, se fue a
oración a pedírselo al Señor, y así que salió le dijo a la niña, alégrate que
no te conviene saber leer. Con esto quedó muy alegre de que no se afligiría
más con el leído, y así que vino el dicho Roque, se lo empezó a contar muy
alegre, de lo que le había dicho la sierva de Dios, y no dándole crédito a la
niña, salió en esta ocasión la sierva de Dios, y le dijo: sí Señor, no le conviene
a la niña saber leer; y con esto se sosegó el bienhechor, y no habló más
palabra sobre esto, y así persevera hasta hoy que vive en este monasterio de
beata, sin profesión, y sin saber leer, y rezaba de memoria en el coro de la
comunidad el oficio de la Santísima Virgen, y entonaba las antífonas como
todas las demás Hermanas. (98-99)
Capítulo XXIII. De la devoción que tenía la Venerable Madre al Santísimo

Sacramento, a la Reina de los Angeles, y a otros Santos.
[No tenían las beatas una imagen de la Virgin María, y estaban deseándola
mucho, cuando una señora les manda una.]
Tenía la imagen más de vara de alta, y envió un papel dicha Señora diciendo
vendía a aquella imagen en doscientos pesos, que era de la Purísima Con¬
cepción. Con esto todas nosotras muy contentas le dijimos: Madre no se ha
de ir, que queremos para esta Pascua que nazca el Niño Dios acá. La sierva
de Dios nos decía: Hijas, si no tengo plata, ¿cómo la he de comprar? Por fin
le escribió papel a la señora dueño [sic] de la Imagen, y le dije yo: póngaselo
usted en las manitas a la Virgen, para que le mueva el corazón a la señora;
y es de advertir, que tenía la Santísima Virgen las manitas pegadas por las
palmas y deditos, y al ponerle el papel la sierva de Dios, dio un traquido,
que todas las que estábamos presentes lo oímos, y lo vimos, y le quedaron
así las manitas bien desunidas, hasta el día de hoy.
. . . Nuestra venerable Madre le dijo [a la señora], que no tenía más plata

que los cien pesos, y con esto le dijo la señora a su criado que cogiera la
imagen para llevársela a su casa: llegó el mismo criado que la trajo, y no la
pudo mover y decía: Yo la traje y no la puedo mover, porque se puso como si
fuera de bronce: con que viendo la señora tantos prodigios recibió los cien
pesos, y se fue muy espantada de ver los milagros . . . (111-12)
Capítulo XXIV. De la revelación que dejó escrita de su letra, y se escapó

de la quema que hizo de sus papeles la Madre Antonia Lucía del Espíritu
Santo, cuyo original está en el Archivo de este Monasterio de Nazarenas de
Lima.
Estando así llorando, sentí de repente como una marea suave, con incom¬
parable consuelo, toda en gozos de la fe, que con ella daba ya por hecho lo
que poco antes lloraba dudosa: pasó esto a elevación de los sentidos: y sus¬
pensos ellos de lo que el alma gozaba, entendí en la mente, que veía al
Santísimo Espíritu Santo, tan amoroso, como Padre de amor, abrazándose
en el fuego de su caridad ardiente, y con ella me decía: mírate en ese espejo.
Atendió mi alma, y vi que de las manos del Santísimo Señor salía una tabla
dorada con unas letras que decían: La regla del Carmen ceñida al instituto
Nazareno: vida Apostólica sigue mi Evangelio en ella: Volví, y dije: Señor, ¿a
mí tanta dicha? me temo de la ilusión; y me dijo el amantísimo Bien Nuestro:
para venideros tiempos te muestro esta tabla, para c¡ue se diga cjue fue dada y
324 UNTOLD SISTERS
dirigida del Espíritu Santo. Yo di las gracias a su Magestad, si es que cabe en

mí desagradecimiento, (i 14-15)
Capítulo XXV. Como el Señor manifestó a nuestta Madre lo que había de

ayudar para el aumento del Santo Instituto el hermano Sebastián de Antu-
ñaño, lo cual se vio comprobado con lo mucho que hizo a este fin, y de otras
profecías, y revelaciones.
A un paisano del Señor Sebastián, hablando acerca del beatetio, que no

había quien ayudase en nada, lamentando el veer [sicl la casa tan sin amparo,
le dijo la sierva de Dios; no nos cansemos Señor, que hasta que no salga de
aquí un cuerpo de un siervo de Dios, no ha de haber nada, y en saliendo
crecerá como espuma; y así fue, que luego que murió el Señor Sebastián, se
empezó a hacet el Convento. (117)
Un día que yo tenía algunas dudas en mí, dice en su relación el Licenciado

Don Juan Carrión, la pregunté algunas cosas de su espíritu; y en algunas que
ya no me acuerdo, me dijo: como aunque indigna, Santa Teresa de Jesús, la
había consolado mucho, diciéndola: no temas, no te aflijas, tuya es la fun¬
dación. Con esto era muy fortalecida, y de muchas dudas que la afligían la
sacó la Santa muchas veces, enseñándola y alentándola.
Así mismo diciéndome la sierva del Señor las grandes misericordias y efectos
que estaba experimentando, me contó, que cuando en el otro beaterío de
Mon[t]serrat las estaban abatiendo, y casi ya perdiendo las esperanzas de venir
al sitio del Santo Cristo de los Milagros, la dijo el Señor: es mi voluntad que
padezcas lo que mis Santos; yo te llevaré honrada, y antes iré yo a aguardarte;
y así sucedió ... de que la sierva de Dios cuando lo vio, advirtió la mise¬
ricordia dicha y prometida. Todo lo dicho arriba, lo refiere el Licenciado Don
Juan Carrión, como Capellán que fue de nuestro beaterío y la confesaba todos
los días. (119-20)
Capítulo XXVII. De la última enfermedad, muerte y entierro de la venera¬

ble sierva de Dios.
... y poniéndose en pie con velocidad, sin que nadie la ayudase a levantar,
se puso en cruz, con los brazos extendidos y los ojos clavados en el Cielo, y
el un pie sobre el otro, y en ademán de estática estuvo así cerca de un cuarto
de hora, y así expiró . . . (135)
Capítulo XXVIII. De los prodigios que obró Dios por medio de su sierva
mi venerada Madre Nazarena después de difunta.
Al cuarto día de difunta, puesto ya el cuerpo en la Iglesia en su cajón

como ya se dijo; antes de empezat el entierro, se formó de repente una cruz
como de humo, de más de tres varas de largo, y cerca de una tercia de ancho
poco más o menos, y esta dicha cruz la vimos todas sus hijas que estaba sobre
el cajón donde estaba el cuerpo . . . Con el asombro alzamos la voz diciendo:
miren la cruz que se ha hecho sobre el cajón del cuerpo de nuestra Madre.
A la repetición de estas voces, subieron todos los señores sacerdotes que
estaban para hacer el entierro al coro, diciendo: alborotos de mujeres, y quiso
Dios, que cuando llegaron, ya se había desbaratado la cruz. Y estando viendo

por la reja del coro, delante de todos los dichos Sacerdotes, se volvió a formar
tan clara, y más que la vez primera, viéndolo con sus ojos todos los señores
ya referidos; por lo cual dieron mil gracias a Dios: las que vivimos que nos
hallamos presentes, y vimos este prodigio: somos, yo Josepha de la Provi¬
dencia, Ana de Jesús Nazareno, Luisa de San Pedro de Alcántara, Tomasa
de la Soledad, Tomasa de Jesús Nazareno, Nicolasa de Santa Gertrudis, Juana
del Espíritu Santo, y Doña Magdalena de Valenzuela y Pérez. (147)
The Apóstolas of Peru:
An Account of the Origin and Foundation of the Monastery of San Joaquin,

of Discalced Carmelite Nazarene Nuns, in the City of Lima. Contained in
some notes concerning the Life and Virtues of the Venerable Mother Antonia
Lucia del Espíritu Santo, Founder of the Nazarene Institute. Written by her
Daughter, the Mother Josefa de la Providencia, Subprioress of the Monastery.
Printed in Lima, with the required licenses, at the Royal Press of Foundling
Children. 1793.^
THE LIFE AND VIRTUES of the Venerable Mother Antonia Lucia del
Espíritu Santo, Founder of the Institute of Nazarene Nuns in the Port of
Callao, later moved to the City of Lima.
JESUS BE PRAISED.
My Lord, my Father and redeemer of my beloved Nazarene Mother: 1 will

be gladdened to know that your Lordship’s health is as perfect as my affection
and gratitude wish it. 1 send the book: may the Lord grant it pleases your
Lordship, for God knows my intentions are good, and my actions are bad.
The book has a thousand blemishes, and little learning; but 1 comfort myself
with the thought that, as they say, a word to the wise is sufficient.® May your
Lordship pardon the great cross you must bear in contending with me, for 1
am no more than a despicable creature; and 1 remain your Lordship’s obedient
daughter, and servant, who kisses your feet, (1-2)
Josepha de la Miseria.
Chapter 1. Of her homeland, her parents, and her birth.
Her mother Doña María, finding herself poor and without any protection,
did determine, by some lofty impulse unknown to us, to go to the Port of
Callao when the servant of God was eleven or twelve years old. They lived
5. This text is deposited in the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid. The nuns of the
modem convent republished the work in 1963.
6. Translator’s note: A buen entendedor, pocas palabras. Found in Cervantes (Quijote

II, 37) and other literature of the period. Literally, “to the wise man, few words [are
needed].’’
326 UNTOLD SISTERS
there in Callao in such extreme poverty that her mother had to go to work
making cigars to support herself and her daughter, whom she loved dearly.
This lady was very virtuous, and seeing that her daughter was also, she
desired that Antonia Lucia’s state should be improved and when the girl
came of age, the mother set about to give her in marriage to a virtuous and
poor gentleman, their neighbor in Callao. She arranged this marriage without
consulting her daughter, which must have seemed unnecessary to her, as she
was satisfied that her daughter’s desires were the same as her own.
When her mother told her what she had done, God’s handmaiden was
very unhappy, but not wishing to displease her mother she consented, and
so it was arranged with Alonzo Quintanilla. When her nuptials had been
celebrated, that very night Alonzo Quintanilla was taken with such an ecstasy
[(?) crecimiento] that he was as if transported until the following day when
he arose, and went out to see to some important matters. The second night
a second ecstasy occurred, and the same on the third, and the fourth nights.
Having seen what was happening, or rather with inspiration from God—for
really that is how we must understand it—on the fifth night he placed a Holy
Christ on the pillow between them, and he said to the servant of God;
“Antonia, here is your Husband.”
Hearing him speak such thoughts, she was greatly comforted. And he
treated her with respect; for one time while she was sleeping one of her feet
came uncovered, and seeing this, Alonzo got down on his knees and took it
to kiss it. At that moment she awoke, and as she was so modest, she was
most troubled by this act, and shed a great many tears, so that her mother
was obliged to comfort her and dissuade her from such grief. It should be
said that this handmaiden of God had the habit of speaking in her sleep,
and telling some of what had happened to her during the day. And so the
respect Alonzo felt for her arose from having heard her speak, in her sleep,
of the favors bestowed upon her by Our Lord.
For some time they continued in this way of life, and then it pleased Our
Lord that times should change, and she should undergo many trials with
Alonzo, who took her with him by land or sea, on every one of the journeys
he had to make. This is why she used to say that he had taken her to seven
different provinces, under conditions of such discomfort and want, that she
had not even enough to eat. At last Our Lord was pleased to return her to
the Port of Callao, where her mother still lived. (3-5)
Chapter 11. Of the many trials she suffered when her first beaterío was
founded.
[Madre Antonia took as her confessor Father Antonio de Céspedes, of the

Company of Jesus, telling him all that “Our Lord had communicated to her.”]
. . . This priest had another spiritual Daughter, who was sister to the wife
of Captain Don Francisco Serrano, and who on various occasions had heard
this brother-in-law say how he would like to give a bit of land to establish
a Beaterío dedicated to Saint Rosa de Santa Maria. On hearing this news,
the priest told the servant of God to go to Captain Francisco Serrano, and
to tell him secretly of how Our Lord inspired her with a desire to found a
House of Nazarenes, and to ask him to give his land for that purpose. And
because God’s handmaiden was married at that time, she could not show her
face to make all the necessary arrangements to obtain licenses from the
authorities, and so she was to ask him to do this as well. (5-7)
ICaptain Serrano granted her petition.]

She began secretly to beg alms for building the house, without Alonzo
Quintanilla’s knowledge; and Our Lord granted that many of the people who
gave alms should not recognize her. She used to go about begging until
nightfall, and many times she had to carry boards, given her as alms for the
building, upon her own shoulders. And after Serrano had obtained the li¬
censes, the construction was begun, and was completed.
All this could not be kept so secret as to escape the notice of Alonzo
Quintanilla, who said to her one day: “Antonia, I shall take vows to enter
the Discalced Order of San Francisco, and you go on with your Beaterio, for
I give you permission to put on the tunic.” Our Lord must have granted him
this pious wish as a reward to Quintanilla, for soon after, he suffered such a
violent and sudden malady that in no time he had passed to eternity, and
the blessed tunic became the mourning dress worn by God’s handmaiden.
There is no doubt that she remained a virgin in the state of matrimony; such
we always considered her, and as such we buried her with the Palm and
Crown, as will be told later. (6-7)
Chapter HI. In which her trials continue, and the death of her mother.
And when she had passed some time in obedience and silence. Divine
Providence arranged that this priest. Padre Joseph de Guadalupe, should
command our Venerable Mother, by her faith and virtue in obedience, to
leave the beaterio and foundation which she had established in the Port of
Callao, and to come to the city of Lima; for he would take care to find her
a suitable place. With prompt and fitting obedience the servant of God
resolved to leave Callao, and quit her beaterio, without notifying anyone or
taking with her a single thing she prized. And with just such bravery, and
in that spirit of simplicity and poverty, she came in 1681 to this city of Lima
to tell her confessor how promptly she had obeyed him. (10)
[Upon arrival in Lima, she received such extraordinary instances of divine

mercy that her confessor instructed her to enter the Beaterio de Santa Rosa
de Viterbo, where the Mother Superior had been advised to receive her.)
In the beaterio they showed her to a very tiny cell, where she lived for a
whole year, and had to undergo a thousand trials, being covered with lice,
and eating wormy food, and suffering great horrors. For the little cell they
gave to her, as a stranger, was the most solitary in the house, and not one
person in that beaterio dared live in it, because great noises and extraordinary
things had been heard at night in that cell. And too she endured great
discomfort, for the cell was so small that it held no more than a little platform,
scarcely more than one vara^ in length, upon which God’s handmaiden slept.
7. Translator’s note: vara, a Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American unit of

linear measure, varying from thirty-two to forty-three inches.
328 UNTOLD SISTERS
and a very small table, and a little writing-desk a half-vara square, and not
one thing more . . . (11-12)
Chapter IV. How the Lord spoke to her, and dressed her in His sacred
tunic, and other emblems.
Her confessor. Fray Bias Suares, in his account of the affairs of our Venerable
Mother, says that in the year 1709 she told him that she had passed thirty
years in her present vocation, although in her youth she had not responded
to the calls the Lord had made to her; and as she gave me to understand,
through her great humility (in the exact words of that account) I gathered that
her youth had resembled nothing so much as that of Saint Teresa. And when I
asked her (he continues) how it had occurred to her to put on the dress worn
by Our Lord and Father Jesus, Nazarene—for there were others to be found
in this world—, the servant of God answered me that she had never even
given it thought: for one night in prayer, she saw that the Lord in His purple
tunic came to her, and cut off the braided tresses of her hair, and dressed
her in the purple tunic, with the rope at her neck, and the crown of thorns
on her head, saying: my Mother has given her dress of purity, as a habit to
clothe other souls; and I give you my own dress, and the habit in which I
walked this earth. This favor is a great honor, for I have given no one else
my holy tunic. And when God’s handmaiden came to herself, she found she
was dressed as a Nazarene.
When her confessor, who was the Father Fray Joseph de Guadalupe, a
most humble servant of God, of the Order of my Father Saint Francis, had
brought my Mother Antonia from Callao, she was the victim of slander
because of the garb of the sacred tunic which she had put on. And everything
they were saying about her reached the ears of the Lord Vicar,® who was at
that time the Vicar General Lord Don Pedro Villagomes, and when he learned
what was being said about her, he resolved to send a decree ordering her to
take off the sacred tunic, the hempen cord and crown, and he sent a notary
of the Ecclesiastic Office, named Juan de Uria, to tell her. As soon as she
heard the order, she got down upon her knees, saying, “I obey my prelate,”
and at the same time she took off the tunic. Then the Notary said to her:
“Lady, put it on again, for I will go back to the Lord Vicar. ” He went, and told
the Vicar: “Lord, in that Lady I have seen nothing less than an angel. ” When
the Lord Vicar heard this, he went himself to Viterbas, where the servant of
God was then living. He directed her to wear the tunic, and became so fond
of my Mother Antonia, that he went to visit her at the beaterio when she
founded it, and he donated eight pesos every month. Sor Ana de Jesús
Nazareno, Sor Juana del Niño Jesús, and Sor Tomasa de la Soledad knew of
this, because she told them after she established the beaterio; I heard it after
I entered the beaterio, four years later.
God s handmaiden told me that, so as to ready her to receive this favor,
the Lord had kept her for one year as if in ecstasy, and so withdrawn that
she was utterly bound, without having perfect use of a single one of her
senses. (13-15)
8. Translator’s note: Provisor: Vicar General, ecclesiastical judge.

Chapter VI. On how she founded the second beaterío.
To achieve this end [perfection in the virtue of humility], our Venerable

Mother always made herself the first, when the bell rang for the task of
sweeping the house, to take up the broom and sweep up all the workrooms.'^
Nor was she above taking up the refuse in her own hands, even the filthiest
and most disgusting things; and so her Daughters followed her example. And
when her Daughters wanted to take the broom from her, or to oblige her by
taking up the refuse, she would not allow it; for she told them that she was
no more than their Sister and companion. . . .
She set the same example, and was just as scrupulous, during that week
when she had charge of the refectory; she took great care in scrubbing the
pots and plates, and in all the tidiness required of those duties, and she served
the food on her knees the entire week . . . (20-21)
Chapter X. Of the penitential and Lenten life of God’s handmaiden.

Her abstinence was so great (that all may see how she was strengthened
by God), that she ate only once in twenty-four hours, and then nothing
more than a little fish, or the yolks of two eggs; I never knew her to take
the slightest breakfast during the day, but rather she maintained her absti¬
nence unchangingly. Likewise, during the entire year she kept the Easter fast
from Thursday at noon, until Saturday at two in the afternoon, when she
would eat again. During Holy Week, from Palm Saturday at noon when she
ate, until Easter Sunday, she did not break her fast, and then when it ended
she ate only a little bit of herbs, or some leaves of spinach, at the insistence
of her confessor.
In the same way, the disciplines she used were so harsh, that she did not
only apply them to the usual parts of her body, but all over it, and always
while kneeling down; on Friday they were blood-disciplines and the rest of
the week ordinary ones, besides all the rest of the instruments of penance
which she ordinarily used, and a great many mortifications and penances
which she performed publicly, in the refectory. Her bed was a hard little
cot,'° with one blanket above and one below her, and a great cross in the
middle, whose arms she used as a pillow, and a Holy Christ, whom she
embraced. Her wardrobe consisted of two white tunics, one of flannel and
the other of coarse linen, and the purple tunic as well. (40-41)
Chapter XII. Of the apparitions, ecstasies, and mercies that the Lord gave
to His handmaiden.
When she was in the beaterío in the street of Monserat [sic], the servant
of God had a little hut in the garden, beside the stream; and one day when
9. Translator’s note; oficinas here corresponds to the (chiefly British) “offices”; that
is, “the apartments, attached buildings, or outhouses (as kitchens, pantries, laundries,
etc.) in which the activities attached to the service of a house are carried on” (Webster’s
Third New International Dictionary).
10. Translator’s note; tarima, a crude portable bedstand like those used by shep¬
herds.
33° UNTOLD SISTERS
she had gone there to pray, the garden was flooded. And all the Sisters,
frightened by the sight of the flood, went running to see what had happened
to our Mother, and we found her sitting on the water (for more than a third
of a vara of water had entered the hut), praying with her arms outstretched
in the form of a cross." And seeing her thus transfixed because she was
enraptured, we went into the water and lifted her and carried her to her cell,
and she remained enraptured, just as she was, for quite a while, until she
returned to herself. And we all witnessd how she came out of the water
without wetting so much as her foot, nor a bit of her clothing, whereas we
all felt the water and got quite wet in removing her. Of those among us then,
who saw it, the following are still alive: Sor Ana de Jesús Nazareno, Sor
Luisa de San Pedro de Alcántara, Sor Tomasa de la Soledad, and myself her
humble Daughter, Providencia. (52)
Chapter XIV. Of the prudence with which she instructed and advised her
Daughters.
And so we always heeded and drew lessons from her composure and ex¬
ample, because each word of our Venerable Mother was a ray of light that
could penetrate and kindle the coolest and most indifferent heart." Manifest
proof of this can be found in the assertions of one of the Sisters. This Sister
was always anxious to be guided and corrected by her, for she felt herself
unworthy, and she feared that she would never succeed in the way of per¬
fection. The Venerable Mother comforted her, and guided her with so much
love, and with such great desire for her progress, that this Sister at times
used to be quit of her doubts, for she was quite uplifted by the doctrine and
spiritual teaching of God’s handmaiden.
And likewise, having seen her wonderful prudence, many people used to
ask to speak with the servant of God, and when they found themselves in
some affliction they came to her, and went away so comforted by her doctrine,
that many eventually took up a new and pious life, for they began to scorn
the things of this world and to aspire only to what is eternal.
Many times it happened that certain persons, among whom could be found
many priests and learned men, were astonished at the very prudent and
discreet judgment of our Venerable Mother, for whom no problem was im¬
penetrable, like the eagle who gazes directly at the beams of the sun" . . .
(57-58)
Chapter XV. Of the daily order and exercises which God’s handmaiden
established in her beaterio, and which we practiced faithfully until we became
encloistered, without failing in any detail.
11. Translator’s note: puesta en cruz, literally, “arranged in a cross.”

12. Translator’s note: literally, “the most tepid heart.”
13. Translator s note: the eagle is: Supposedly [the] only creature capable of gazing
at the sun without being dazzled, interpreted to mean that it is capable of contem¬
plating divine splendor, [and represents] judiciousness, speed in apprehension . . .”
(Gertrude Jobes, Dictionary of Mythology, Folklore, and Symbols [New York: Scarecrow
Press, 1961]). The eagle is thus also a figure of Christ, the all-knowing, who gazes
directly on God the Father.
This is what she did when she was in our company, and among the
community; what she did in secret, I cannot know, as she left nothing written
down: only, in the garden, in a hut which she had made so that she might
go there to pray during the day, we would hear her endless disciplines. (64)
Chapter XVll. Of the bountiful charity that the Venerable Mother ex¬
tended to her Daughters, and all humankind, and her miraculous cures.
Likewise, it happened that there was a beata of the Viterbas whose finger
was crippled and eaten with canker so that she could not use it; and when
she informed God’s handmaiden of her ailment, the latter comforted her,
telling this Sister that she would ask the Lord to cure her. And when our
Venerable Mother repeatedly applied the saliva of her own mouth to the
finger of Margarita (for that was the name of the sick woman), it was left
hale and hearty, and she was so grateful, that each time she saw the servant
of God, she thanked her for having cured her with her saliva. (75)
Chapter XIX. How the Venerable Mother shone marvelously bright in the
virtue of humility.
[For five or six months before her final illness, Antonia Lucia’s confessor
insisted that she write her Life.]
. . . the servant of God was much distressed, and wept a great deal; and
1, seeing her so distressed, said to her: “Dearest Mother, ivhat is the matter
that I see you so grieved?” And she answered: “Why, what else could it be, my
Daughter! Father Garcés wishes me to write down my life, and if he presses me
to do so, God will take me. ” 1 told her 1 would help her, and Don Basilio also;
so that when Padre Garcés insisted that she do it, the servant of God put
down on paper where she was bom, and who her parents were, and where
she was baptized, and nothing more. She called me, and showed me what
she had written, and 1 asked if she would write no more than that little bit;
and she said: “This is enough to show my obedience.’’ When Father Garcés
insisted once more that she do it, she said again, “God will take me"; and a
little while later she fell sick, and she passed about two months in bed, and
then God took her just as she had said. (86-87)
Chapter XX. In which is continued the same theme of the humility which
she showed her confessors, and the obedience she offered them, and her
extraordinary purity and chastity.
On one occasion, her confessor ordered that she should let het portrait be
painted; and when she attempted to excuse herself, by explaining that we
are all Daughters of humility, he ordered her to do it in obedience, and with
that, she consented that the painter should come. When the time came for
14.Translator’s note: The Spanish diminutive Mamita lends a tenderness to this

address that is difficult to render in an English religious context; the formal “mother”
here becomes something like “Mamma” or “Mommy,” while retaining a perfectly
respectful tone.
332 UNTOLD SISTERS
her sitting, she began to pray, asking God not to allow her portrait to he
painted; and when the painter had done a few strokes with the brush, and
turned to see het in order to continue, he found her changed; so that, having
gone three times and ptepared to take her likeness, he could never do it. At
last he confessed that he could not paint her portrait, and that it was a most
mysterious case.
This same confessor ordered her to wtite het Life, and only obedience was
able to make her do so; and knowing that the notebooks wete being tead,
she wished to have them back in her possession, which is what happened.
Then she started a bonfire and burned them all; fot that reason so much of
[the account of] her life has been lost, and more still with the deaths of her
confessors.
The servant of God told her companion that one day when she went to
church to confess, her confessor gave her two of the notebooks that he was
writing about a certain Angela who lived in that city; and at the same time,
this Angela was greatly praised and venerated throughout the entite city,
where people spoke of nothing but her great virtue and holiness. And later
she was punished by the Holy Office of the Inquisition. Our venerable Mother
Antonia received these notebooks, and latet that same day, having read every
word of them, she returned them herself. And when this priest received
them, observing that she said nothing, he said to her: "Nazarene, have you
nothing to say to me?" To which the servant of God responded, with utter
humility: “Do you order me to answer you?" “Yes, I order you to answer me"; to
which she said: “Well Father, what is written here is one law, and what I follow
is another. ”
God’s handmaiden had written het Life, as I have alteady said. And during
a great disturbance which took place in the city concerning this Angela,
when she was charged by the Holy Inquisition, Madre Antonia Lucia’s con¬
fessor, without telling het anything, sent her everything that he had in his
possession concerning her life. Altogether her writings formed quite a large
volume. And when she received it and saw what it was, she said “May God
help me! These are matters of my soul which 1 gave to my confessor and he has
sent them back to me with his servant; no good can come of this." And she ordeted
a blazing fire to be made, and as I said, she burned it all, to which I am a
witness. And in the ashes of the papers I saw the lettets as cleat as if they
were fashioned of lead, so that if the servant of God had not been present,
we might have read a great many things. (88-89)
Chaptet XXL How the Venerable Mother had the gift of innet knowledge.
Captain Roque Falcon wished that a certain little girl, whom he had raised
to become a nun, might learn to tead; he made evety possible effort, and
still teading was quite beyond her. He delivered the gitl to God’s handmaiden,
and strongly urged her to teach the child. God’s handmaiden was worried,
because of all she owed this founder; and desiring to please him, she made
every possible effort that the gitl might take up teading. But all this served
only to disttess the child gteatly; and the setvant of God, seeing this, went
to pray for God’s help. As soon as she left her prayers, she told the child,
“Take heart, for you are not meant to learn to tead.’’With this, the girl grew
Spirittial Housekeepers 333
very happy, to think she would no longer be tormented by having to read.

The moment Roque came back, the girl very happily began to tell him what
the servant of God had said, and as he did not believe her, the servant of
God intervened and told him, “Indeed my Lord, it is not meant for this girl
to learn to read. ” And with this, her benefactor was appeased, and spoke not
another word on the subject; and so she continues to this day in this monastery
as a lay Sister, never having professed, and without knowing how to read,
and praying the Offices of the Most Holy Virgin from memory, during the
services among the community, and chanting the responses just like all the
other Sisters. (98-99)
Chapter XXIII. Of our Venerable Mother’s devotion for the Most Blessed
Sacrament, the Queen of the Angels, and other Saints.
[The beatas did not own a statue of the Virgin Mary, and were fervently
wishing for one, when a lady sent them one.]
It was more than one vara tall, and this lady sent a message saying that
she would sell this statue, which was of the Immaculate Conception, for two
hundred pesos. With this we were all very happy, and said; “Mother, it must
not leave, for we wish, this Christmas, for the Baby Jesus to be bom here.”
The servant of God said to us: “Daughters, since I have no money, how shall
I buy it?” Finally she wrote a note to the lady who owned the statue, and I
myself said to her: “Place the paper in the little hands of the Virgin, so that
the lady’s heart will be moved”; and it should be said that the Most Blessed
Virgin’s little hands were quite firmly joined to one another at the palms and
fingers, and when the servant of God placed the paper there, it gave a great
crack, which all of us who were present did hear, and we saw it, and so its
little hands were left free and unattached, and so they remain to this very
day.
. . . Our venerable Mother told the lady that she had no more than a
hundred pesos, and in reply the lady told her servant to take up the statue
and carry it home; the same servant who had previously brought it came
again, and could not move it, and he said, “/ brought it and now I cannot
move it”; for it had become as heavy as if it were made of bronze. And so
the lady, seeing such wonders, accepted the hundred pesos, and she left in
fear and amazement at such miracles . . . (111-12)
Chapter XXIV. The revelation left by Madre Antonia Lucia, written in

her own hand, and which escaped the burning of her papers, the original of
which is found in the archives of this Convent of Nazarene Nuns in Lima.
While I was thus lamenting, I suddenly felt something like a gentle sea
breeze, bringing unsurpassed consolation; I was made complete in my joy
through faith, for with this faith I now considered as given and accomplished,
that which a little while before I had, in my doubt, lamented as impossible.
This in turn was followed by an elevation of my senses; and while they were
suspended as a result of all that my soul enjoyed, I knew in my mind that I
was seeing the Most Blessed Holy Spirit, who is so loving, like the very
Father of all love, burning in the flames of His fervent charity, and with this
334 UNTOLD SISTERS
ardor He said to me: '‘Look at yourself in this glass. ” My soul took heed, and
I saw that from the hands of the Most Blessed Lord there came a golden
tablet with letters which said: “The Rule of the Carmelites, bound to the Nazarene
Institute, wherein my Gospel is fulfilled through Apostolic life. ” I turned to Him
and said: “Lord, you give me such good fortune? I fear such great joy, I fear
this is but an illusion.” And our most loving Treasure said to me: “I show you
this tablet, so that in times to come it may be said that it was given and commanded
by the Holy Spirit.” I told His Majesty of my gratitude—as if ingratitude were
possible for me. (i 14-15)
Chapter XXV. How the Lord showed to our Mother the way in which
Hermano Sebastián de Antuñano would help the growth of the Blessed
Institute, which was indeed confirmed by all he did to this purpose; together
with other prophecies, and revelations.
To a countryman of Señor Sebastián’s, who was speaking about the beaterio

and how there was no one to help in any way, and lamenting to see the
house thus destitute and unaided, God’s handmaiden said, “Let us not grow
discouraged, my lord: for until the body of one of God’s man servants is
carried out of here, we shall have nothing; but when it does, the house will
grow and increase like the sea foam.” And so it was, for later, when Señor
Sebastián died, the convent was begun. (117)
One day when I was troubled by doubts within, says the Licenciado Don
Juan Carrion in his account, I asked her some things concerning her soul.
And in answer to some questions, which I no longer recall, she said to me
that although she was unworthy. Saint Teresa de Jesús had comforted her
greatly, telling her: “Do not fear, do not be grieved, for the foundation will
be yours.” With this she was greatly strengthened, and by guiding and en¬
couraging her, the Saint freed her many times from the many doubts which
afflicted her.
Likewise, in telling me of the great mercies and effects she was receiving,
God’s handmaiden described bow, in the other beaterio, in the street of
Monserrat [sic], when the Sisters were downhearted and had lost almost all
hope of reaching the place of the Blessed Christ of Miracles, the Lord said
to her: “It is my will that you should suffer as did my Saints; I will take you
there as an honored woman, and before then I myself shall go before to await
you. ’ And just so did it occur . . . And when the servant of God saw that
this was done, she observed it to be the very same mercy that was foretold
and promised. All that has been said above is related by the Licenciado Don
Juan Carrion, who served as chaplain of our beaterio, and confessed her every
day. (119-20)
Chapter XXVII. The last illness, death, and butial of the venerable servant
of God.
. . . and standing up with great speed, though no one helped her to rise,
she took the posture of a cross, with her arms outstretched and her eyes fixed
on Heaven, and one foot ovet the other; and in this gesture of ecstasy she
remained for about a quarter of an hour, and thus she died . . . (135)
Chapter XXVIII. Of the prodigies that God worked through His hand¬
maiden my venerable Nazarene Mother after her death.
On the fourth day after her death, when her body had been placed in the
church in its coffin, as has already been said, and before the funeral began,
there suddenly appeared a cross, as if of smoke, more than three varas long
and almost a third of a vara broad, more or less. And all of us, her Daughters,
saw this cross, which hung there above the coffin that held her body ... In
astonishment, we raised our voices, saying; “See the cross that has formed
above our Mother’s coffin.” At the sound of our cries, all the priests who
were there to perform her burial in the choir arose, saying: “These are but
the frenzies of women”; and as God willed it, when they arrived, the cross
had dispersed. And as we watched through the choir-screen, before all the
priests, the cross formed again quite clearly, indeed more so than the first
time, and all those priests saw it with their own eyes; for which they gave a
thousand thanks to God. Of the Sisters who were there and saw this marvel,
and who are still living, we are: myself Josefa de la Providencia, Ana de
Jesús Nazareno, Luisa de San Pedro de Alcántara, Tomasa de la Soledad,
Tomasa de Jesús Nazareno, Nicolasa de Santa Gertrudis, Juana del Espíritu
Santo, and Doña Magdalena de Valenzuela y Pérez. (147)
An example of pictorial representation of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the syncretic figure who
nationalized Catholicism in Mexico (chapter 6). Courtesy of the Ministerio de Cultura,
Dirección General del Patrimonio Artístico, Archivos y Museos, Patronato Nacional de
Archivos, Mexico.
336
SYew Spain
(£írcñe)‘lypes, üZrcfiO'l’exts
women—and especially the nuns—of New Spain, as

Mexico was officially called from the sixteenth to the beginning of the nine¬
teenth century, made important contributions to the vibrant and tragic criolla
and mestiza culture that emerged from conquest and colonization. Nuns were
instruments of the enforcement of the social order by the religious and royal
elite; nevertheless, the relatively peaceful structure of their contemplative
life, separate from men, gave them some autonomy. Thus, as both actors
and instruments, women religious helped to mediate the transformations that
shaped Mexican society.
Mexico’s transformation into New Spain was characterized by bloodshed
and death. The battles of conquest were followed by imposition of forced
labor, spread of disease, and systematic destruction of native religions. During
the first great epidemic of the sixteenth century (1545-1548), possibly three-
quarters of the Indian population of central Mexico died; their immune
systems lacked the antibodies to fight off the European disease they called
cocolitzli—pestilence (Israel 12-13).' Fray Juan de Zumárraga, the first bishop
of Mexico, averred in a letter in 1531 that five hundred pagan temples and
twenty thousand idols had been destroyed (Israel 7-8). Viceregal rulers, like
their royal superiors in Spain, attempted to maintain hegemony by prohibiting
and expunging cultural and religious diversity.^
Despite the value placed on maintaining purity of blood, the races inter¬
married, and a mestiza (mixed Indian and European) culture developed.'
Spanish and Creole attempts to reproduce the way of life of their mother
country produced a hybrid society. The attempted rigid imitation failed in a
society built on the ruins of a rich civilization, but the effort created tensions
that enhanced the character of the new culture, as evidenced in the art and
architecture of the period (Carrillo A. 59-61; Markman chap. VI; Maza,
Páginas . . . 53-59; Toussaint 23-24).
337
338 UNTOLD SISTERS
Although the Church directed the dismantling of indigenous religions,

some of its members played a significant part in preserving pre-Hispanic
civilization. Many missionaries learned and recorded the languages and forms
of preconquest societies in works that scholars consult to this day.'* Defenders
of the Indians arose among the Spanish religious, who advocated gentler
means of conversion than the sword. The most notable and influential of
these was Bartolomé de las Casas. ^ Many Catholic writers of dogma pro¬
claimed the purity of indigenous souls, but they also exploited the Indians,
who were equated in the rhetoric of the Church with the biblical poor,
eligible for redemption and reward in heaven (Phelan).
Students of the period have not yet fully gathered and explored the history
of the encounter, clash, and partial synthesis of cultures from the vantage
point of women. The first female historical figure of the conquest, for instance,
has only begun to be vindicated.*’ Malintzin, known to the Spaniards as doña
Marina, has been maligned as Cortés’ concubine and a traitor to her people,
with little or no attention paid to her important role as a translator and
strategist.^ She helped Cortés in making allies of indigenous groups that
resented the harsh treatment received under Aztec rule. The fate of these
groups is paradigmatic of the dashed hopes of all Indian enemies of Aztec
oppression; seeking relief, they aided the Spaniards, only to find themselves
betrayed.® They had believed that Cortés and his followers would bring an
improvement in their situation, but instead witnessed more violence than
they had ever known under their Indian masters. The Spaniards’ destruction
of autochthonous societies fell with especially cruel force on women (Clen-
dinnen 431-33).'^
In the sixteenth century, the Spaniards viewed the conquest of America
as an extension of their mission to convert the world to Catholicism. To
them, all Indians were potential neophytes. Authors of reports, letters, chron¬
icles, and other texts attempted to prove the conquest’s providentiality. In
the seventeenth century, female figures, most notably the Virgin of Guadalupe
(to whom we shall return), became emblems of this world view. In more
than one instance, women’s literary production was reworked to transform
reality into a symbolic re-presentation of the creation of New Spain. The
1684 chronicle Parayso occidental (Western Paradise) presented the daughters
of the conquistadors who chose religious life as inhabitants of an American
Garden of Eden. To create the work, Carlos Sigiienza y Góngora, a famed
mathematician, historian, and intellectual, compiled texts and oral state¬
ments of nuns from the Conceptionist Convento de Jesús María.In his
edition, he replaced the women authors of flesh and blood with an image
that suited the ideology of Creole Mexico—an America abundant in natural
riches and inhabited by innocents and “angelic” virgins, well suited to the
brave new world the Spaniards thought they were creating.
At the end of the colonial period there were over 2,400 nuns in New
Spain (Lavrin, “Values and Meaning . . .” 367)." Proportionately few in
number, they nevertheless were significant as actors and chroniclers of the
gradual creation of a new country. The first women’s monastery. La Con¬
cepción in Mexico City, had been established in 1541, but most of the
convents of the eight Orders*^ with foundations in Mexico were established
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, during and after a period of
economic expansion in the colony.'^ In these cloisters that housed female
New Spain 339
relatives of officials and bureaucrats, landowners and merchants, and some

professionals (Muriel, Cultura femenina 4g4), self-adomment, indulgence in
sweets and delicacies, and spiritual laxity went hand in hand. The majority
of the women lived in separate apartments within the cloister and were
attended by Indian and Black servants and slaves. They dressed themselves
and their religious images in finery, engaged in endless conversation, and
received visitors as a matter of course. Only the Carmelites and Capuchines
observed strict rules from the start, regarding such matters as shared work
and communal living. The Dominicans, among others, finally adopted re-
forms by living in community and reducing the number of servants. But many
communities, entrenched in their ways, heatedly resisted the call for such
changes.
Like monasteries in the Old World, women’s monasteries were educational,
economic, political, and social institutions as well as religious ones. Beyond
their spiritual functions, the nuns of New Spain lent money, rented land,
and lobbied for various causes among the political and ecclesiastical elite.
Their connection to the highest spheres of power was in general greater than
that of their counterparts in Spain. In writing they left proof of contemplation
and of action. They entertained bishops and Viceroys with their songs and
music, sewed and embroidered ecclesiastical vestments and ritual linens,
created what is now known as Mexican cooking, and trained girls of all races,
preparing them for the tasks appropriate to their station in life and enabling
an isolated few to rise in social status through the acquisition of learning.'^
The convents replicated the social hierarchy of New Spain. Racial strat¬
ification and race and class prejudices explain why Indian women were not
allowed to become full-fledged nuns until the eighteenth century. They, next
to slaves, belonged to the lowest stratum; like them, they were denied all
training except for servitude. Mestiza, Indian, mulatta, and Black women
servants outnumbered those they served. Nevertheless, the proximity in which
these women lived, without men, must have changed the dynamics of com¬
munication among the classes. All the women saw themselves as servants of
the Lord. In the convent, poorer women were less often sexual prey for the
men to whom the richer secular women belonged. To a certain degree all
denizens of the convent shared the quest for spiritual perfection. Criolla
women religious substituted the actions, thoughts, and prayers of sacred life
for the colonizing activities of their male relatives. Their servants, by taking
care of most material needs, made this inner journey possible, and the servants
were occasionally lucky enough to make the journey themselves. Convents—
women’s communities, women’s spaces—helped the larger community to
consolidate and institutionalize Mexico’s passage from a conquered indigenous
territory to a colony with established social, economic, and political insti¬
tutions of the Viceroyalty in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth
centuries.
But in the transition from Spanish colony to the modern independent
state of Mexico, convent archives, repositories of the majority of women’s
texts, were sacked, destroyed, or at best dismantled. In the i86os, during
the liberal presidency of Benito Juárez, and again in the 1920s, during the
revolutionary era, the drastic measures taken to curtail the Church’s enormous
wealth and abuse of power resulted in the loss or dispersal of some of the
material needed for a full reconstruction of women’s lives and times in the
340 UNTOLD SISTERS
colonial period. Many of the extant female Vidas from that epoch survive
only as fragmented quotations in biographies by admiring clergymen.From
those extracts and from the few full texts that are available, we venture a
revisionary interpretation of Mexican women’s early writings.
Surviving nuns’ works in New Spain record the ornate complexity of life
inside and outside the convent. Even more than the viceregal court of Peru,
that of Mexico delighted in the use of ingenious language and literary games,
music, and costume. The religious establishment, inseparably intertwined
with the Viceroyalty, was similarly ornate in its tastes. Fireworks and floral
arches of triumph with depictions of mythological figures and historical scenes
welcomed new Viceroys, Vicereines, and Archbishops. Authors of pamphlets
printed for the occasion explicated in prose and verse, with elaborate detail,
the figures and scenes of the arches. Religious architecture, art, and literature
were baroque in conception and style. The stance of wonderment before
incomprehensible phenomena and the working and reworking of ornate con-
ceits characteristic of baroque art reached full-blown development in Spanish
America. But almost from the beginning, the American baroque—barroco de
Indias—took European chiaroscuro and deepened the extremes of light and
dark, added color, feasted the senses, and introduced Indian motifs. Both
artists and writers marked the distance between any two points with a line—
visual or verbal—that twisted and turned.’^ This style satisfied the need for
dissimulation. Politics and art merged in the seventeenth-century colonies.
Spaniards, still attempting to tame the American civilizations they had con¬
quered, continued, perhaps inadvertently, to foster a nascent nationalist
consciousness among various sectors of the population.
Almost immediately after the conquest, the language of New Spain began
to incorporate American reality. Vocabulary was invented or adapted to name
the places, peoples, plants, and animals of Mexico. The influence of Náhuatl,
the Aztec language, was evident in the incorporation of words into Spanish
and in a notable increase in the use of diminutives. Formulas of courteous
expression became more ornate as the colonial system attempted to imitate
the Spanish court, while the social caste system became increasingly complex.
And preoccupations with maintaining this hierarchy complicated the lan¬
guage.
Multiple contradictory elements entered into play when nuns began writ¬
ing. Epistolary forms of address and direct references to spiritual directors or
confessors, at whose behest they were produced, link the female Vidas to
letter writing as well as to confessional discourse. Despite the Vidas’ recording
an abundance of details about daily life, social mores were so encased in
patterned language that nun-authors were able to give only a muted version
of their relationships with each other. Thus, colonial female Vidas described
inner lives more frankly than they related external events. Even more than
in the “mother country,” the lives the nuns lived and recorded in prose were
symbolic dramas, re-presentations, with infinite variations, of the bloody
Passion of Christ.
Violence dominates the Mexican texts. It is recorded that Mother Superiors
and Mistresses of Novices taught and disciplined by whipping. The nuns
describe angry disputes, cruel punishment, and harsh medical cures. They
inventory the instruments of self-inflicted beatings. In addition, blood is a
salient motif in recorded dreams and visions. Just as bloodied Christ figures
hêw Spain 341
and images of martyrs abound in colonial art, blood runs freely in the nuns’
visions. An image of a lake of blood appears in the visions of Madre María
Marcela of Querétaro. Madre María Magdalena of Mexico City repeatedly
asks Christ to bathe her in his blood, influences for such visions include pre-
Columbian religious practices, the war of conquest, forced labor and slavery
of the Indians, as well as biblical and religious stories and the female expe¬
rience of menstruation. The first three influences differentiated American
from Spanish texts; the last, common to both, was actually referred to in a
letter regarding remedies for menstrual discomfort by Ana de San Bartolomé
(Chapter i).
But there were pacific religious images as well. The syncretistic mestiza
Virgin of Guadalupe, resisted by the Church hierarchy for over a century
after her miraculous appearance, represented the partial integration of in¬
digenous cults hidden behind Christian altars. Her enormous popularity made
the Church reconsider its objections (Maza, El guadalupanismo mexicano).
The history of Mexico from the arrival of Cortés through the struggles for
independence has been inseparably linked to the image of the Virgin Mary.
Very shortly after the conquest she made her appearance in an autochthonous
guise at the very place where the Aztec mother of the gods, Tonantzin, was
venerated (Lafaye). For these reasons, Marian worship was much more wide¬
spread among Mexican nuns than among women of other regions. The cult
of the Virgin of Guadalupe gave a special stamp to the cult of Mary. It
nationalized religious worship and linked it to the mother goddess of the
Aztecs, but it also directly related Mary to the wise and active woman of the
Apocalypse, dressed in the sun, savior of a people. This identification with
Mary confirmed, for nuns who wrote, the vitality, intelligence, and authority
of women.
Of all the authors of New Spain, however, only Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
explicitly criticized male violence.'® She used Catholicism to structure a
feminist ideology, synthesizing the elements of an emerging America in both
secular and religious writing. While she enjoyed enormous fame in her time,
only in the twentieth century have these dimensions of Sor Juana’s contri¬
butions to culture begun to be understood. She was bom in 1651 to unmarried
parents—a criolla who managed a hacienda and a Basque captain. Sor Juana,
who claimed to have been passionate about learning and versifying by nature,
grew from a child prodigy into a figure of towering poetic achievement. She
has been treated as an isolated exception as a writer and labeled a “Phoenix”
arid “Tenth Muse.” Yet hundreds of nuns wrote, and her similarities to other
authors of the convent may have been hidden through their losses, suppres¬
sions, and silences. In her famous epistolary self-defense “Respuesta a Sor
Pilotea” (“Response to Sor Pilotea”), she uses narrative attitudes common to
most writings by nuns and to women’s autobiographical works; self-effacement
and proclaimed humility, which disguise self-assertion, competitiveness, and
ambition; veiled irony; and commentary—at times, self-criticism—on the
act of writing.
In Mexico, particularly in her manifestation as the Virgin of Guadalupe,
Mary seems to have played the authorizing and inspiring role that Saint
Teresa played in Spain. Sor Juana refers to Mary as the Queen of Wisdom
and the highest authority. Nevertheless, Sor Juana also supports her arguments
about women’s intellect and writing with three references to “Holy mother
342 UNTOLD SISTERS
and mother of mine Teresa” in the “Respuesta” (IV, 453, 467-68). As she
points out, the Church allowed the works of the Saint of Avila, like those
of Gertrude and Bridget, to circulate before their authors were sainted. To
push the analogy between herself and these women further. Sot Juana men¬
tions that Saint Teresa, too, had rejected marriage.
Juana Inés de la Cruz defends women’s right to education in an oft-cited
passage of her intellectual autobiography in which she allies herself to a great
tradition of active, creative, learned women from ancient, biblical, Christian,
and recent times. A comment she makes as she sums up her impressive list
of outstanding women in the “Respuesta” is seldom cited. In it, she under¬
scores the dividing line between the female lineage with which she identifies
and that of most other nuns. And her remarks help to answer questions about
what became of other women with scientific curiosity, a penchant for books,
or strong feminist sentiments:
El venerable Doctor Arce (digno Profesor de Escritura por su virtud y

letras), en su estudioso Bibliorum . . . resuelve . . . que ... a las
mujeres ... el estudiar, escribir y enseñar privadamente, no sólo es
lícito, pero muy provechoso y útil. . . . (462) . . . dice que conoció
en esta ciudad [México] dos monjas: la una . . . que tenía el breviario
de tal manera en la memoria, que aplicaba, con grandísima prontitud
y propiedad, sus versos, salmos y sentencias de Homilias de Santos,
en las conversaciones. La otra . . . tan acostumbrada a leer las
Epístolas de mi Padre, San Jerónimo y locuciones del Santo, . . . que
[Arce] supo, después de su muerte, había traducido dichas epístolas en
romance; y se duele de que tales talentos no se hubieran empleado en
mayores estudios, con principios científicos. (469)
(The venerable Doctor Arce (by his virtue and learning a worthy
teacher of the Scriptures) in his scholarly Bibliorum . . . resolves . . .
that ... for women ... to study, write, and teach privately, not
only is permissible, but most advantageous and useful. . . . (Peden
123-25) ... he says that he knew in this city [Mexico] two nuns:
one . . . who had so thoroughly committed the Breviary to memory
that with the greatest promptitude and propriety she applied in her
conversation its verses, psalms, and maxims of saintly homilies. The
other . . . was so accustomed to reading the Epistles of my Father
Saint Jerome, and the Locutions of this Saint, . . . that after her
death he [Arce] learned that she had translated these Epistles into the
Spanish language. What pity that such talents could not have been
employed in major studies with scientific principles. (Sayers Peden
157-59)-
Although other nuns were not as prodigious in their artistic talent and
intelligence as Sot Juana, it is more than likely that some stifled similar
intellectual concerns, resentments against abuse, and wishes to study and
write. Many turned their talents to the establishment of schools, hospitals,
and places of religious retreat. Some withdrew into illness. Some experienced
mystical rapture. Some had troubles with the Inquisition. Still others wrote
texts like the ones we study here. The lament, which Sor Juana attributes
New Spain 343
to Dr. Arce, for the loss of the two women’s potential, energy, and intelligence
suggests that by listening to the silences and reexamining possible meanings
of words, we can better understand nuns’ texts.
In an attempt to do just that, we have selected six Mexican figures, or
groups of figures, who span the period covered by the first five chapters of
this study. The earliest document we include chronicles the determination,
struggles, and ultimate success of Mariana de la Encamación and her spiritual
Mother, Inés de la Cruz, two Conceptionist nuns from Mexico City who
wanted to become Discalced Carmelites. Madre María Magdalena, a bedrid¬
den Hieronymite, wrote New Spain’s first mystical text and gained a repu¬
tation as a spiritual advisor. A founder and convent leader in Puebla and
Oaxaca, the Augustinian Maria de San José employed her intimate connec¬
tions with a powerful Archbishop and her ability to tame the outward man¬
ifestations of her mystical life in order to rise to authority in the female
ecclesiastic realm. Closer in intellectual development to Juana Inés de la
Cruz than any other writer we discuss in this chapter, the Dominican Maria
Anna Agueda de San Ignacio was one of the few women—perhaps the only
one—in New Spain who wrote theological treatises with official permission.
The Lives of the Franciscan cacique nuns of Mexico City—Apolonia de la
Santísima Trinidad, Maria Magdalena de Jesús, Maria Felipa de Jesús, Sor
Rosa—lay bare the mechanisms through which the Spaniards imposed cul¬
tural and religious hegemony. One Indian woman religious, Teodora de San
Agustín, later traveled from her convent in Mexico City to found a similar
convent for Indian women in Oaxaca; her letters reveal their author’s ability
to maneuver through potential viceregal obstacles. And finally, the Capu-
chine Madre Maria Marcela of Querétaro’s Vida typifies the path a daughter
of the landowning class might take to achieve spiritual perfection in a society
characterized by contradiction and conflict.
Mañana de la Encarnación
In the chronicle by Mariana de la Encamación, subversion—in the interests
of a deeper religiosity—is consistently praised but not always practiced. For
Madre Mariana, disobedience becomes holier than obedience because she
equates it with suffering for the achievement of a more contemplative and
godly existence. This crónica (chronicle), which the 1823 copyist titled Re¬
lación de la fundación del Convento Antiguo de Santa Teresa escrita por la Madre
Mariana de la Encamación en 1641 (Chronicle of the Founding of the Convento
Antiguo de Santa Teresa, Written by Mariana de la Encarnación in 1641), could
be subtitled “the long wait.” It centers on the nearly three decades between
the author’s vow to become a Discalced Carmelite nun (5/9)''^ and the ac¬
complishment of that goal (1616). The founding of the Discalced Carmelite
Convent, which required cunning, pleading, and detailed planning, took
place amidst a pageantry that, as in the case of the Peruvian Nazarenes,
contrasted with the ascetic way of life assumed after the elaborate celebration.
The pages of the text tell a tale of impatient patience on the part of two
women, Inés de la Cruz and the author, who are portrayed at times as allied
embattled exiles in their own commodious cloister.
The manuscript follows Madre Mariana from birth to a few years beyond
344 UNTOLD SISTERS
the founding of the Carmelite convent. She says nothing about her childhood
except that she had lived in the Conceptionist convent as a student from
the age of nine. Young Sor Mariana had experienced interior prayer naturally,
she says, under God’s tutelage. She began to wish to be a Discalced Carmelite
after reading a manuscript copy of the Vida of the as yet uncanonized Teresa.
Her private vow followed soon after her official profession at the age of sixteen
as a Conceptionist (1587). Madre Mariana, like Madre Teresa, felt that she
too had received a call from God to reject the lax practices of the convent
in which she had spent many years and become a reformer. Religious duties
left little time for spiritual perfection. Trained as a musician, Mariana de la
Encamación was so talented that the Mother Superior appointed her leader
of the choir. Her services were required not only for teaching, rehearsing,
and divine office but also for command performances in the locutorio (visitors’
receiving room). There, food and conversation with the guests complemented
the music. Though she was required to sing with organ accompaniment on
these occasions. Madre Mariana in fact craved quiet prayer.
Madre Inés de la Cruz was her partner in the musical life of the convent
(11-7/13). As musical leaders (one a performer, the other a composer and
conductor), the two women worked together daily. The Spanish-born Madre
Inés wrote in her own chronicle that she had wished to become a Carmelite
as a girl of fourteen in Toledo:
Vivian mis padres en Toledo, muy cerca del convento de carmelitas

descalzas. No merecí tomar allí el hábito por venirse ellos a las Indias
siendo yo de catorce años. Mi madre y dos hermanas venían para
morirse de pena, yo muy alegre pensando habría ocasión en este reino
para morir mártir, (quoted in Muriel, Cultura femenina 65)
(My parents lived in Toledo very near the convent of Discalced

Carmelite nuns. I was not fortunate enough to take the habit there
because my parents came to the Indies when I was fourteen years of
age. My mother and two sisters came ready to die of misery and I
came with great joy, believing that in this realm would be the
opportunity to die a martyr.)
Both had desired to be Carmelites since theit teens, and the two nuns saw
each other as kindred souls. Their musical partnership facilitated their col¬
laboration in developing the political strategies necessary to achieve the
objective to become Carmelites which they both fervently desired.
Madre Mariana’s life, as she chronicles the long years of efforts to enlist
support for their plan to become Carmelites, is inseparable from that of Madre
Inés. Madre Mariana acknowledges that what she is about to re-record is the
history of a collaboration. Both her earlier chronicle and that of Madre Inés
have been lost, she claims. “ In telling the multiple tale of the projected
founding, the life of each woman, and their lives together. Madre Mariana
describes the luxurious, worldly life of the Convento de Jesús María. She also
reveals the enormous energy and interminable maneuvers with which they
went about getting funds and licenses for the new foundation. In a variety
of tones most often one of solemn deference—she speaks of her beloved
Neu» Spain 345
collaborator. Using the first-person plural, Madre Mariana links herself and
Madre Inés throughout the narrative.
Part of the histotical and biographical interest of this crónica is the way in
which it records disagreements and the ensuing resolutions or consequences
of conflicts. Clearly, Madre Mariana often fails to live up to the spiritual
ideals which paradoxically demand subversion and disobedience. In her early
years she claims to have been seduced by the customs she wished to reject
and accuses herself of being the best of the worst (because she obeys rather
than disobeys the rules of the Convento de Jesús María) (4/7]. Later, she
presents Madre Inés, always clear-sighted and steady, as a counterfoil to her
own ambivalence and a role model. From Madre Inés, Madre Mariana learned
how to manage the rivalry and resentment of other nuns who created obstacles
to prevent their founding a new convent and leaving their old one.
The Discalced Carmelite nuns in the already established convent in Puebla
were not the only ones to rant against Madres Inés’s and Mariana’s plans for
a Mexico City foundation (Mariana de la Encamación 114). The Concep-
tionist Sisters of the Convento de Jesús María, feeling their Creole pride
wounded, mobilized themselves duting a visit by the Marquesa de Guadal-
cázar, who was recently arrived from Spain. The Marquesa had spent three
months in a Carmelite convent in Spain and had desired to become a nun
there, but the queen, whom she served, forbade her profession (50). Soon
after her arrival in New Spain, upon hearing that two Conceptionists wished
to become Carmelites, the Marquesa hastened to their convent to discuss
with them her particular attachment to the Order. The Spanish noblewoman
did not follow the appropriate protocol; ignorant of highly titualized Mexican
customs, convent ways, and the sensitivities of Creole nuns, the Marquesa
broke the tacit rules of the cloister’s hierarchical system, causing great re¬
sentment among the Conceptionist Sisters. Instead of paying attention to
the Mother Superior by entertaining her, bringing her gifts, and showing the
appropriate respect, the Marquesa spent many hours in conversation about
the Carmelites with Madres Inés and Mariana. The consequences for the
two were grave. Their furious Mother Superior and Sisters isolated them for
months. Madre Mariana felt compromised and uncomfortable, although she
was flattered by the attention and the promise of help in finally bringing the
convent into being. The turmoil ultimately subsided and was resolved when
one of the angry nuns had a vision. The Marquesa also reformed her behavior
on her following visit (24V/48-29V/58). The ten-page account of the crisis
and its resolution prefaces that of the final triumph.
Madre Mariana’s chronicle describes the environment of the convent, the
dialogue among the nuns and with visiting dignitaries, the preparations for
the founding procession, and the joint work with Indians to finish the con¬
struction of the convent in realistic detail.^* Madre Mariana sees the Indians
as a Catholic missionaty, praising them as humble, hardworking, and desirous
of sacrificing themselves for the faith. The chronicles of New Spain and other
colonies and the endless number of documents created by the viceregal bu¬
reaucracy influenced the form of her relación in its unliterary notation of
comings and goings and its concern for historicity regarding oral and written
legal agreements. More important, however, was the variation on the writings
of Saint Teresa.
346 UNTOLD SISTERS
In part, Madre Mariana’s writing emulates the patterns of Madre Teresa’s

Fundaciones. But it is a very different saga from those of the original Spanish
Carmelites. Its spaces are proscribed. Unlike the Spanish women, who trav¬
eled in Europe to found new convents, the Mexicans remained cloistered.
Madre Mariana’s story is told both more and less personally than that of the
Spaniards. Her relationship with Madre Inés retains an immediacy rarely
found in the peninsular texts, yet she writes with the convoluted phrases of
the period. Despite their almost daily contact with the men who ran the
Viceroyalty, the Americans were compelled to use complicated formulas of
courtesy. Madre Mariana’s crónica is a document of Mexican manners.
The text is built on sets of oppositions between numerous pairs: the two
future Carmelites and the Conceptionist Sisters; the Carmelites of Puebla
and the Mexico City aspirants; criollas and gachupinas;^^ cooperative and
uncooperative superiors, patrons, and ecclesiastics; argument and understand¬
ing; optimism and despair; laxity and asceticism; interior prayer and active
devotion; sound and silence. The oppositions and the dialectic of subversion
led to a synthesis—the American Reformed Carmelite Convento de San José
of Mexico City, named after Saint Teresa’s first foundation in Avila.
Venerable Madre María Magdalena
Mexico’s first mystic text issued from the pen of a bedridden nun (Muriel,
Cultura femenina novohispana 319). The title page of the manuscript reads:
Libro en que se contiene la vida de la Madre María Magdalena, monja profesa del
Convento del Sr. S. Jerónimo de la Ciudad de México hija de Domingo de LotT'
avaquio, y de Isabel Muñoz su legítima mujer (A Book Containing the Life of
Madre María Magdalena, Professed Nun in the Convento del Señor San Jerónimo
of Mexico City, Daughter of Domingo de Lorravaquio and of Isabel Muñoz His
Legitimate Wife). Below that not unusual title we read an unusual note:
Estuvo en una cama cuarenta y cuatro años y tres meses ejercitada

con trabajos, enfermedades, temblores, y regalos de su divina
Magestad. Le mandaron sus confesores fuese escribiendo su vida, y los
particulares regalos que de continuo recibía de Nuestro Señor
Jesucristo.
•
(She was bedridden for forty-four years and three months, tested by
trials, illnesses, tremors, and favors from his divine Majesty. Her
confessors ordered her to keep a written record of her life and the
special mercies she continuously received from Our Lord Jesus
Christ.)
Erancisco de Lorravaquio, Madre María Magdalena’s nephew, a priest and

officer (comisionado) of the Inquisition, wrote the note in 1650. It was he
who carefully copied the manuscript from the original, which had passed into
the hands of his aunt’s cousin (a nun in the same convent).
New Spain 347
The Vida begins with a declaration of obedience to two Jesuit Fathers,

Gerónimo Ramírez and Juan Sánchez, who had requested that she write
“manifestando el discurso y distribución del tiempo de mi vida” [2] (revealing
the passing and apportionment of the hours of my days). Without literary
pretensions and without expressing concern regarding her ability to fulfill the
assignment, she related her life story in twenty-two pages and her daily
schedule in four. These pages precede the one hundred thirty-two she had
completed earlier, which treat her inner, mystical life.
Maria Magdalena Lorravaquio Muñoz sketches her childhood according to
hagiographic convention. A melancholy little girl seeks refuge in images of
Christ and his Mother, whose daughter she becomes in the privacy of lonely
hours. She feels closer to the Virgin Mary than to her real mother, with
whom she cannot have the same intimate conversations. By spontaneous
inspiration the fervently religious little Maria Magdalena learns to read and
puts herself on a monastic schedule of prayer, embroidery, and reading. The
reading of sacred books became her staircase to heaven. At the age of fifteen,
lacking guidance from a priest, she asks the Virgin to stand in as Spiritual
Father as well.^"* Years later, unable to leave her bed, she intensifies the
identification in visions of herself, Mary, and Christ as a family unit.
Despite the lack of specific information about where and how the author’s
family lived, we conclude from the sketch that the child Maria was highly
sensitive, felt rejected from the family circle for some reason, and searched
for a way to survive in a terrifying world. Fier parents must have been wealthy.
She mentions hating to see their servants mistreated and tells of robbing all
she could from her mother and father to give to the poor. It was holy robbery
to her, occasioning no moral compunctions. No question arises about the
availability of funds for the convent dowry, for the support of the extra
servants that were needed to care for her when she became ill, or for doctors’
fees.
The transition from health to illness began in 1592, two years after Maria
Magdalena joined the five-year-old Hieronymite convent, the same which
eighty years later became the home of Juana Inés de la Cruz. She developed
rheumatic fever and from that St. Vitus’ dance, a nervous ailment causing
involuntary muscle contractions. Doctors cut her muscles and bled her from
“fountains” (a literal translation of the contemporary medical term, or “issues”
in English) which they opened in her limbs. Ironically, it was this medical
attention that destroyed her remaining health and left her permanently in¬
capacitated. Medical cures—to which only the privileged had access—were
often much worse than the disease they sought to relieve. In the end she
could no longer walk and had to spend up to four hours a day cleaning the
old wounds and sores that continually plagued her:
. . . después de algún tiempo me dio una apostema en parte que fue

de muy gran mortificación para mí el curarme los médicos y de ésta y
de los demás males ha sido el estar ya ordinariamente en la cama
hartos años ha que son treinta y tres años desde el principio de estos
males, (iiv)
(. . . after some time I got an abscess in a place that caused me great

mortification when the doctors were to cure me, and as a result of
348 UNTOLD SISTERS
this and my other illnesses 1 have usually had to stay in bed for a
great many years, for it has been thirty-three years since the onset of
these ills.)
She herself, as well as those around her, interpreted the severely increased
jerking motions with which she was afflicted as holy gesticulations, associating
them with her visionary experiences.^^ She kept by her side a volume written
by a Jesuit on the death and passion of Christ, with meditations for the
canonical hours (5r).“ The volume provided the basis for the spiritual ex¬
ercises she practiced thereafter, which in turn helped her to accept her
condition.
Sometimes she was able to emulate the Virgin and intercede directly with
Christ on behalf of others:
. . . le preguntaba que qué quería que a qué había venido y me

respondió que a pedirme por amor de Dios la encomendara a Nuestro
Señor y la sacase de las penas en que estaba . . . (ySv)
(. . . I asked her [a supplicant nun] what she wanted and what she
had come for and she answered that [she’d come] to ask me, for the
love of God, to commend her to Our Lord and to get her out of the
troubles she was in . . .)
At other times the Virgin takes on the attributes of a nun:
... vi ... a Nuestra Señora de rodillas . . . con el rostro alto y con

una mano alta como que daba aquel voto [de elección de Madre
Superiora] que en la mano tenía . . . (43V)
(. . . 1 saw . . . Our Lady kneeling . . . with her face turned upwards

and her arm raised as if handing in the vote [in the election of
Mother Superior] which she held in her hand . . .)
Before earning acceptance as a mystic, however. Madre María Magdalena

endured pain, punishment, and cruel treatment at the hands of religious
superiors. They accused her of possession by the devil and of madness. Whip¬
ping, they thought, might bring her to her senses. First implicitly and then
explicitly, the text reveals the excessive discipline from the Mistress of Nov¬
ices to which she submitted as a form of penitence:
... los temblores no se quitaban sino que antes iban a más volvieron
a tratar que con engaño del demonio lo fingía para que se me quitase;
determinó mi perlada que me había de azotar y poniendo por obra
con mucho rigor yo lo sentí con mucho extremo y ofreciéndoselo a
Dios muy de veras por las afrentas e injurias que por mí había pasado
en la cruz me hizo su Magestad muchas mercedes . . . (qv-io)
(. . . the tremors did not cease but rather increased, and again they
said that because of deception by the devil I was feigning them; and
to cure me of them my Prioress decided 1 should be beaten, and as
New Spain 349
she did so with great rigor, I felt great pain which I offered to God
most earnestly in exchange for the affronts and insults He had
suffered for my sake on the cross. His Majesty offered me many
mercies . . .)
Finally, would-be exorcists and doctors gave up their vain attempts to cure
Madre María Magdalena. They too reinterpreted the trembling and wild
spasms, manifested as she came out of trances, as a sign of holy favor and
reward.
“Suspensions” is the word she employed in describing some 113 of these
mystic experiences. Stringing the episodes together in paragraphs of varying
length, like beads in a rosary. Madre María Magdalena recomposed the litanies
and colloquies that kept her distracted and gave her joy for hours every day.
In her writing, she repeated the framework as well as the words of her acts
of prayer over and over again, in a repetitious structure into which she inserted
the variations on a few themes provided by her visions.
The result was a detailed anatomy of her meditational prayer. Describing
altered states of consciousness, she recreated the sensorial qualities of each
phase and communicated her experiences of nothingness, of vagueness, and
of rapid and slow transitions between one contemplative state and another.
According to her descriptions, each prayer episode, lasting minutes, hours,
or sometimes days, consisted of several segments. The sequence followed a
set pattern: prayer on a theme, frequently started after communion, most
often on some aspect of the Passion; petition on her own behalf at first and
then, increasingly, on that of others; dedication of her suffering as an offering;
suspension; vision; disappearance of the vision, which always left a void; its
effects; renewed suspension; second vision; disappearance of the vision; effect;
expression of gratitude. Sometimes the series included more than two suspen¬
sions; rarely, only one. The repetitiveness of words and structure turns the
prose into ritual. Unable to attend community rituals, she devised her own.
Madre María Magdalena lived cloistered within the cloister. The double
enclosure excluded her from participation in community-wide activities. Only
once does she record her sadness at not being able to attend choir with her
Sisters. Otherwise, a strange absence haunts the text. Very little is said about
her relationships with the other women in the convent. They appear as
shadowy figures in her visions, sometimes as reflections of nuns who requested
her prayerful assistance. She gradually became an advisor and spiritual ad¬
vocate for women and men of the viceregal capital, including nuns and priests,
who were drawn by her reputation as a mystic to consult her about their
problems and worries. She reports rescuing souls from purgatory and in¬
terceding on behalf of worldly enterprises, encouraging the troubled, and
prophesizing the recovery or death of the infirm. By the end of her manuscript
we are aware that from her bed of discomfort and tears she had carved a
place for herself in the convent and in the world.
Maria de San José

Maria de San José was ordered to write her Life partly because of a fear of
heresy that was spread by the persecution of the alumbrados in New and old
350 UNTOLD SISTERS
Spain.She had great power of expression, a capacity for leadership, a

potentially rebellious personality, and a mystic’s life. All these qualities,
dangerous in ecclesiastic eyes, were tamed and harnessed for the good of the
Church.
Her Vida traces the emotional, spiritual, and intellectual self-education of
a personality. Mystic experiences allowed her some measure of control over
that self-education. Madre Maria’s temperament got in her way at times,
making the exercise of patience, resignation, and equanimity difficult for her
even as an adult and a convent officer. When her wish for perfection as a
Mistress of Novices faltered, the Virgin Mary came to her aid, offering in a
vision to be her substitute (396).^® Such visions bolstered her faith in herself,
which had been gained from the highest authority and, perhaps, from the
influence of indigenous ideas assimilated while she played on her parents’
hacienda.
Her self-confidence as a writer is stronger than that of most writing nuns.
Nevertheless, at times she felt great anguish on this account:
... me parecía, que a la hora de la muerte no he de tener otra cosa

que mas me atormente, y cause pena, que estos escritos. Tanta era mi
apuración, que me parece, que si por mí fuera, antes de bajar a
comulgar hubiera echado fuera de la celda todo el recado de escribir,
para no tomar más la pluma. (Muriel, Cultura femenina 397)
(It seemed to me, that at the hour of my death nothing should so

torment me and cause me anguish as these writings. So troubled was
I, that I think if it were up to me, I would have thrown all my
writing implements out of the cell, before going down to communion,
so as never to pick up the pen again.
She resolves the preoccupation by laying responsibility for her talent squarely
on divine shoulders:
Aquí oí una voz . . . que era de su Majestad ... y me dijo estas

razones: Mira que yo te asisto y no te falto; escríbelo, que todo es de
mí, y nada de ti y si no, mira si por ti sola hubieras podido dar un
solo paso y hecho lo que has hecho. (397)
(At this point I heard a voice . . . which was that of his Majesty . . .
and he explained thus: “See how I aid you and fail you not; write it
down, for everything comes from me, and nothing from you; if it
were not so, think whethet, left to yourself, you could have taken
one single step or done what you have done.”
We have seen the same recognition of divine affirmation and authority before,
most notably in Isabel de Jesús. Explicitly or implicitly all the writing Sisters
attribute their powers of expression to a holy source. Maria de San José writes,
here and elsewhere, with unusual resolve and clarity.
The author takes up the theme of her relationship to literacy as she tells
the story of her life. When she was very young, Juana (as she was called “in
New Spain 351
the world”) was taught the elements of reading and writing by her mother;
but her mother, busy with almost annual pregnancies, left Juana at about
age five without further schooling to fend for herself among the poorer chil¬
dren at the hacienda. Until Madre María was ordered to write as a nun by
her confessor, she claims not to have written and to have forgotten how.
With familiarity and a twist of ironic humor, she urges God to employ his
omnipotence in bestowing on her the ability to write in order to follow the
confessor’s command, while keeping her from finding any unsuitable pleasure
in possessing the skill. The wryness is typically Mexican. She is willing to
suffer as much for knowing how to write as she did for not knowing how
(376). And, indeed, she did suffer. Her despotic or unbalanced confessor first
ordered that she write literally twenty-three hours a day. After being repri¬
manded by her Mother Superior, he spitefully ordered Madre María not to
read or write anything at all. The confessor’s capriciousness certainly fulfilled
her plea to the Lord.
Madre María de San José did not become a nun until she was thirty-two
years old, but lived a retired and celibate life in her family home. She felt
great confidence in herself as an object of divine mercy. The maturity of her
vocation, the influence of her society and her readings, and two conversion
experiences determined the character of her ideas and writings. One con¬
version experience resulted from her being struck off a horse by lightning
when she was eleven (like Saint Paul). Subsequently, an illness that lasted
five years and caused blindness provided a second conversion experience.
When she was suddenly cured of the blindness, Juana saw the sun, was bathed
in an interior light, and “En un punto me hallé hecha un Cielo ...” [Muriel
381] (Suddenly I found myself become a creature of heaven . . .). Influential
family friends arranged for her to enter the Colegio de Santa Monica of
Puebla, founded by the Bishop don Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz. Soon
after, in 1687, it became a convent.
In the cloister. Madre Maria’s mystic flights initially caused trouble—
scoldings, beatings, and humiliations from her Mother Superior and Sisters
and warnings from her confessor. Before long she learned to keep her mystic
joy to herself, controlling the external signs of trances. Like many women,
she achieved a balance between repression and freedom through the power
of ecstatic states. Her narrative on this theme illuminates the process. Writing
enabled her to express what she was prohibited from manifesting by physical
means. She writes about her body’s peculiarities as though they were phys¬
iological adaptations to her mystical nature. She relates that God made a
permanent change in her rib cage, lifting two ribs to make room for a heart
inflamed with divine love (Muriel 388).^°
In another instance, while she is in prayer one evening. Madre Maria’s
heart abandons her body when she has finished praying and remains in the
choir for the night. She describes the heart as it hangs, inflamed with love,
in front of the Holy Sacrament (387-88). Through her imaging of this event,
she transforms herself into a figure analogous to those depicted in artistic
representations and to characters in American saintlore. The mixture of the
real and the supernatural in her narrative offers a literary parallel to mestizo
painting. Religious narrative, like the plastic arts, incorporated Indian ele¬
ments and altered the aesthetic of European spirituality.
352 UNTOLD SISTERS
Upon becoming an Augustinian, according to Madre María herself, she

gave to God the only thing she had left—love of her family (“los suyos”):
Desde este día he vivido, como si no hubiera nacido, ni descendido

de persona humana de esta vida; sino como que hubiera nacido en las
yerbas o de las piedras . . . (385)
(Since that day 1 have lived as though 1 had never been bom, nor
descended from a human being in this life; but rather as if I had
sprung up among the grasses or from the rocks . . .)
God helped her to detach herself:
. . . pues este amor tan natural, fue el que su Majestad arrancó de

raíz y lo apartó de mi corazón y de mi memoria tan de veras, y tan
del todo, que no he vuelto a sentir este amor tan grande que tenía a
los míos . . (385)
(. . . for this love, which is such a natural inclination, was what my

Lord pulled out by the roots, and he so tmly, and so completely
separated it from my heart and my memory, that 1 have never again
felt this great love that 1 once had for my family . . .)
Nevertheless, she wrestled with her attachment to other human beings

throughout her life. She transferred to her confessors and others the family
affection that, as she described, was uprooted with God’s help at the beginning
of her religious life. A year and a half before she died, she wrote to her Puebla
confessor asking him to pray to the Virgin that her Oaxaca confessor might
outlive her, to assist her passage from this world. She claimed that the
hardest part of life was feeling isolated from human beings or God: “. . . con
un total desamparo de Dios y de todo humano consuelo, que éste es el mayor
torcedor, que padecía ...” [395] (. . . totally abandoned by God, and for¬
saken by any human consolation; for this has been the greatest affliction 1
have suffered . . .).
Whether speaking of the hardest or the most rewarding times of her life.
Madre Maria’s style is dynamic. The lively, popular language of her writing
is rooted in the culture of the countryside where the young Juana was raised,
and where, in the words of her eighteenth-century biographer Sebastián de
Santander y Torres, she played with a mischievous girl a little older than
she, “aprendiendo las mentiras, juramentos y palabras torpes que con el trato
y comunicación le iba sugiriendo y pegando la compañera” [chap. 11, 16-19;
Muriel 379] (learning the lies, oaths, and vulgar words that were suggested
and passed on to her by the games and conversation with her companion).
Juxtaposed with Madre Maria’s use of popular language is a formal literary
structure. Her style blends the rhetoric of the Renaissance with the Mexican
variety of the barroco de indias. In sentences that carefully balance syntactical
elements, American fire imagery enhances Catholic mysticism. She casually
yet elegantly links heaven to earth, breathing life into her self-representation
and making her work eminently readable. A prioress, a mystic, and a writer,
Maria de San José was idealized by Church officials as a paragon of Creole
womanhood.
New Spain 353
Maria ÍÁnna iûeda de San Ignacio

(16^5-175^^
The only known woman who took up the pen in order to write inten¬
tionally about theology, ... was the criolla of New Spain Maria Anna
(Aguilar Velarde) Agueda de San Ignacio,” writes Josefina Muriel in her
Cultura femenina novohispana (467).^^ Whether or not we accept Muriel’s
conclusion about Madre Maria Anna’s singularity, it is clear that the nun’s
wide-ranging knowledge, her emphasis on the intellectual basis of religion,
and her finely tuned womanist interpretations of mystical events demonstrate
that Sor Juana was not alone in asking certain questions.” Both women
began to read at a very early age and both absorbed and supplemented the
tradition of convent writing in New Spain.
Maria Anna was bom in the year of Sor Juana’s death into a Puebla family
that had lost its wealth. At an earlier age than most, she received the typical
education of upper-class girls in an amiga, as the schools improvised by
cultured women in their homes were called. After that she became an au-
todidact, reading widely in patristic tradition. She understood her intellectual
and religious vocations early in life but lacked the necessary dowry to profess.
A sympathetic confessor helped her to enter the Dominican Beaterio de
Santa Rosa in 1714. There, for twenty-five years, she held a series of offices
and ultimately became Mistress of Novices. Twenty-five years after her en¬
trance, when the house became a Dominican convent under direct papal
jurisdiction, she was elected its first Prioress (1741). In that role. Madre
María Anna expanded and beautified the physical plant, including the kitchen,
which is still a lauded tourist attraction for visitors to the convent-museum.
Bishop Domingo Pantaleón Alvarez de Albreu, an intimate friend, supported
the architectural project. It was he who gave her permission to write about
mystical theology (Muriel 440).
Madre María Anna was a prolific writer of prayers, mystical-theological
treatises, and pedagogical texts for nuns about the exercise of virtue and daily
religious practice. Her explicit descriptions, grounded in concrete detail and
occasionally expressed in colloquial language, and her strong emphasis on
the Mother of God are characteristics of many women’s writings. Her treat¬
ment of the Virgin includes mystical explications of Mary’s breast milk.”
Two works exemplify this theme and treat it specifically. Their titles ac¬
knowledge their focus: Devoción en honra de la Purísima Leche con que fue
alimentado el Niño Jesus (Devotion in Honor of the Purest Milk with Which the
Child Jesus Was Nourished) and Mar de gracias que comunicó el Altísimo a María
Santísima, Madre del Verbo Humanado en la leche purísima de sus virginales pechos
(Sea of Grace Which the Highest Passed on to Most Holy Mary, Mother of the
Word Incarnate in the Most Pure Milk of Her Virginal Breasts). In other books.
Madre María Anna includes revisions of Mary as part of mystical exegesis.
Maternal imagery appears in all her writing. In one work. Madre María Anna
reminds the reader that the Virgin Mother is so virtuous that “podían tomar
de María los ángeles lección” [445] (the angels themselves could take lessons
from Mary).
Mar de gracias shows God’s humility and exalts Mary’s receptivity, which
makes her worthy of being God’s mother: “. . . el que como Dios todo lo
354 UNTOLD SISTERS
sustenta y cría, como Hombre es criado y sustentado de María [443] (. . . and

He who as God sustains and cares for everything, as Man is cared for and
sustained by Mary). The book begins by praising God’s blessedness for having
such a saintly mother: . . siendo conocido de su madre, era amado, rev-
erenciado y adorado” [445] (. . • being known by his mother, he was loved,
venerated, and adored). When Madre María Anna speaks of Mary s privilege
in being able to nurse with her own blood transformed into innocent milk
(443) and refers to the God-bahy as the Eternal Word, she transforms the
female functions of menstruation and lactation into the food of divine crea-
tivity. Thus she implicitly raises the status of women above the traditional
disparagement of their biological identity.
In Mar de gracias, Mary is depicted as nourishing all who wish to be fed
with the mystical milk from her breasts. There is a prerequisite to receiving
sustenance; one must desire this nourishment like a child: “. . . el que quisiere
esta leche, aunque sea viejo, hágase niño para llegarse a los pechos de María
santísima” [445] (. . • let him who would desire this milk, although he be
old, become a child to approach the breasts of most holy Mary).” Madre
María Anna contrasts milk with wine, suggesting that only milk is indis¬
pensable to all people.”
Mary’s milk also represents prayer, especially mystical prayer:
... los que como hijos de María Purísima quieren gozar en su leche
mística la oración, se han de disponer con limpiar los ojos del alma
para ver por fe a Dios, y por este conocimiento se encenderá la llama
del divino amor, que hallarán en la leche de la dulce, y amorosa
Madre María santísima. (447)
(. . . those who, as children of Mary Most Pure, wish through her

mystical milk to enjoy prayer, must make themselves ready by
cleansing the eyes of their souls, that they may see God through
faith; and by this knowledge shall he ignited the flame of divine love,
which they will find in the milk of the sweet and loving Mother
Mary Most Holy.)
In her De los misterios del Santísimo Rosario (Of the Mysteries of the Most Blessed
Rosary), Madre María Anna makes an appeal to the rational practice of faith,
rather than the emotional family imagery of Mar de gracias: “la oración vence
los apetitos, doma las pasiones, endereza las potencias, alumbra el entendi¬
miento, inflama la voluntad y perfecciona la.memoria” [447-48] (prayer
conquers the appetites, tames the passions, strengthens the capabilities, il¬
luminates the understanding, inflames the will and perfects the memory). In
this attitude of respect for intelligent faith, bom of a woman-centered Mar-
ianism, Madre María Anna emulates the argument put forward by Sor Juana
Inés de la Cruz.” She, like Sor Juana, emphasizes reason, understanding,
and wisdom and urges clarity of mind in religious devotion. Like Sor Juana,
although perhaps to a lesser extent, she exploits some of the affirmative
possibilities for women in Catholic, and especially Marian dogma.
In other works by Madre María Anna the metaphor of hreast milk for
maternity is extended to include allegorical figures and concepts. In ecstatic,
lyrical prose addressed to God, Madre María Anna first thanks Him for making
New Spain 355
the Church her mother and then speaks to faith, whom she calls “amable
madre mía” (my kindly mother);
Yo soy pequeñita, y no sé hablar. Sólo me gozo de ser hija tuya,

andar en tus brazos y ser sustentada con tu leche regaladísima. (465)
(I am a little girl, and don’t know how to talk. I rejoice only in being
your daughter, being held in your arms, and being nourished with
your most exquisite milk.)
Through both her reason and her visions. Madre María Anna returns re¬
peatedly to the concept of maternal sustenance symbolized in the milk that
all mothers give to their children and which nourishes spiritual life. She
could well be considered one of those authors who, Héléne Cixous claims,
w'rite in white ink.^®
Indian H^rincesses, Catholic CNuns

During the conquest and colonization of New Spain, Indian women were
those who suffered the most oppression and disdain. Malintzin, the lengua
(tongue) of Cortés, as she was called because of her role as translator, was
given to him as a slave. Other women fared equally badly. Missionaries
catechized Indian girls and women and trained them for European-style do¬
mestic work. Yet a refusal to learn Spanish and adopt the ways of life of the
conquerors was widespread among the women in certain areas (Super 217).'*°
Such resistance was interpreted as stupidity and limitation. The complexity
of the resistances and silences caused by the traumatically abrupt destruction
of an entire social system has been interpreted in various ways by twentieth-
century intellectuals. Many scholars still ignore the obvious, that through
domestic labor and in the arms and rebozos of Indian, poor mestiza, and some
Black women, the new society was built.
The influence of Indian women on Mexican religiosity has yet to be ex¬
amined from a womanist viewpoint. Daughters of the conquistadores may
have mistrusted Indian women because the latter continued to adhere to
their own beliefs. In any case, with the notable exception of Luisa Tapia
(Muriel, Conventos de monjas 164-65; Super 209; Gallagher 179-80),In¬
dians were not allowed to profess until 1724, when a separate Convento de
Corpus Christ! was founded in Mexico City for the daughters of caciques, as
Indian aristocrats were called. As institutions intimately linked to the eco¬
nomic and political hierarchy of the dominant class, convents generally
demanded large dowries and reserved places for those who could prove they
were of the proper class or were sponsored by someone who was. With the
exception of the Corpus Christ! Convent in Mexico City and others later in
Oaxaca and Valladolid (now Morelia), Indian women entered the cloister as
servants both of God and of nuns.''^
The Church astutely used its women to complete the conquest and sustain
the secular arm of society. Through them, it worked to prevent the more
educated Indians from adopting the new ideas of the resentful and restless
Creoles, who sought to equate political and religious perfection (and who
356 UNTOLD SISTERS
less than a century later would carry on the struggle for independence).
Instead, the Church insisted that Spain was the anointed missionary on earth.
Under the conquest, almost all Indians, even those who had lived sump¬
tuously before the arrival of the Spaniards, lived in poverty.
Many conflicting tendencies played a part in the formation of Mexican
national consciousness. The Church in America, as well as in Spain, per¬
mitted a certain social fluidity. Joining an Order was one of the only ways
to acquire education or to achieve social mobility. For women, the Church
also provided a degree of opportunity for leadership, pursuit of knowledge,
and engagement in the arts. How Indian women took advantage of such
opportunities is a matter for further research. Muriel and earlier scholars insist
on the fervor and purity of Indian women’s religious vocation under Chris¬
tianity. While we must agree, it is also important to point out the danger to
Indian religious aspirants, as daughters or sons of the recently conquered
living under colonial rule, that their infraction of convent rules might have
incurred. Outward signs of rebellion from Indian nuns would have been
treated far more harshly than those of criollas. The criolla nuns’ rebellions
against the rule of obedience occurred when the Church attempted to enforce
rules that required living in community. The imposition of new rules was not
easy. Many of the nuns had lived in their own individual quarters—more
like suites than cells—for decades, and resisted a more communal life-style.
Nor did these women want to live without servants.
The Corpus Christi convent was ascetic from its inception. The noble
Indian women—very few from wealthy families—became model nuns and
strictly emulated Christian virtues. Nonetheless, they suffered seventeen years
of obstacles and difficulties before they could assure the continued Indian
character of their convent. When they triumphed, an ironic reversal of the
rule of “purity of blood” was instituted. It became necessary to prove that
one had no European blood at all in order to be admitted as a novice. Muriel
claims that convent life remained tranquil despite seventeen years of fighting
to maintain the Indian character of the establishment. It is difficult to believe,
however, that the efforts of two of the six European founders to dedicate the
institution primarily to Spaniards and Creoles and to relegate Indians to
menial roles created no conflict. Such efforts underscoted how necessary it
was for Indian women to be and to appear to be even more perfect than
other nuns dedicated to Christian perfection. They would have had to main¬
tain strict vows of obedience and silence, even while developing strategies
to save their monastery from reforms that would tetum them to second-class
status.
The successful struggle to maintain the Indian identity of the Corpus
Christi convent led to its expansion to Valladolid and Oaxaca. The women
who carried out these foundations had honed their organizational and dip¬
lomatic skills during the initial years in Mexico City. In 1779, Madre Teodora
de San Agustín of Corpus Christi convent wrote a letter of welcome to the
new Viceroy and Captain General. The letter reveals how women religious
addressed high dignitaries. Respect, affection, courtesy, but also confidence
in the spiritual efficacy of the nuns’ congratulations characterize the prose.
Madre Teodora speaks at once for herself and for the entire community:
Ofrecemos nuestros afectos, e inutilidad para todo lo que pudiere contribuir
en servicio de su excelencia ...” [92] (We offer our affection and our use-
New Spain 357
lessness to serve in any way that they may be of aid to Your Excellency . . .)•
The nuns clearly understood that their “uselessness” meant the most effective
and perfect humility with which they stood before the secular world.
In many cases, the letters represent the culmination of efforts to obtain
aid and favors for the convent. They acknowledge the initiation of a petition
or its successful conclusion. Madre Teodora knew how to maintain good
relations with both the Archbishop and the Viceroy. In a letter to the Viceroy
from January 1782, she announced her departure from Mexico City to found
a convent in Oaxaca with six other nuns and asked his blessing. At the
beginning of February, she informed him of her election as Abbess of the
new convent. Subsequently, her request that he join the spiritual fraternity
that supported the monastery was accepted.
Madre Teodora de San Agustín’s letters to the Viceroy and the Archbishop
were saved, but we have been unable to locate any other works. She is
reputed to have been a fine writer. A Oaxaca scholar, Luis Castañeda Guzmán,
has said that she also collected Indian idols.
The collection of cacique nuns’ Vidas from the convent in Mexico City,
Apuntes de varias vidas de las religiosas que han florecido en virtudes de este
convento de Corpus Christi de indias caciques (Notes on the Lives of the Nuns
Who Have Flourished Virtuously in this Convent of Corpus Christi of Indian
Princessesy'^ demonstrates extreme alienation, cultural distortion, and false
consciousness.Indians with aspirations to power, whether secular or reli-
gious, had largely to disdain their own culture and its ways in favor of those
of the Europeans. What was expected of virtuous nuns, these Indian nuns
expected doubly of themselves. The denial and punishment of the flesh
reached such intensity among them that their biographies cause us conster¬
nation. The biographer strained harder too, in prose even more formulaic
than usual, to produce hagiographic literature. What was not said is as
important as what was; and much of what was actually written was buried
or dispersed. Because of these losses we lack a complete picture of the convent
as an educational institution, as a granter of authority and respect, and as a
center of what today is called social work.
In two cases in the Apuntes, a sentence added at the end by a hand other
than the biographer’s gives a detail that emphasizes the subject’s responsibility
for the welfare of others. An annotation about Sor María Magdalena mentions
that “cuidaba de una enferma loquita” [293] (she took care of a poor crazy
sick woman). A few final words in the vida of Sor Apolonia de la Santísima
Trinidad remark on her affectionate relationship with the novices; to keep
them from worrying about rising in time for early morning prayer she would
wake them up herself. A few sentences in the central body of the Apuntes
enliven the formal prose and show the women varying daily routines. Sor
Rosa “juntaba a las jovencitas después de los maitines de medianoche y
formaba con ellas una procesión por los alrededores de la huerta, cantando
la Letanía de los Santos en honor de los espíritus celestiales” [153] (gathered
the young novices after midnight matins and with them made a procession
around the edge of the orchard, singing the Litany of the Saints in honor of
the heavenly spirits).
The collected biographical Apuntes also describe the life of a cacique nun
named Maria Magdalena de Jesús who had left her native city as a child,
with two less devout siblings, to be educated by the respected Abbess of
358 UNTOLD SISTERS
Guadalajara. Indigenous girls were prepared to be “provechosas en las familias”

I247] (useful in families). Under the tutelage of Madre Isabel Cierva, her
spiritual mother, only Maria Magdalena “concibió horror al siglo, cuyos pe¬
ligros e impedimentos para lo bueno conocía ya con mucha claridad” [247]
(developed a horror of che world, whose perils and obstacles to goodness she
already understood most clearly). With great care, she and her teacher set
about assuring her a place in the new convent for cacique women.
Witness to the manner in which the Church co-opted the aristocracy
among the Indians was the ceremony with which Madre Maria Magdalena
entered the convent. When acceptance came, Maria Magdalena’s proud
father prepared a special entourage to accompany her to Mexico City. His
purpose, according to her biographer, was to spread the good news and to
guard against the dangers “que son ocasionados con la cercanía de los indios
bravos” [257] (posed by the proximity of wild Indians);
Asalarió una competente comitiva de indios mecos [chichimecas],

mansos, que armados de arco y flecha hacían escolta para la defensa,
llamando al mismo tiempo la atención para averiguar el motivo de
aquel extraño acompañamiento, tan extraño que pareciendo
resguardo, tenía visos de triunfo . . . (257)
(He hired a competent party of tamed Meco [Chichimeca] Indians

who, armed with bow and arrow, served as an escort for her defense,
at the same time attracting attention and curiosity regarding the
motive for that strange cavalcade, so strange that while it looked like
a guard for protection, it had all the appearance of a triumphal
procession . . .)'‘®
The description typifies Mexican religiosity: its taste for pageantry, the use
of the Indian as an emblem of the inclusion of all social groups in the new
Christian culture, and the exploitation of symbols of the defeated and po¬
litically powerless civilization.
Sor María Magdalena earned a reputation as a nurse. She cured her Sisters
when they had accidents or fell ill, preparing what the biographer calls
homespun remedies until the doctor arrived (283). She was also known as
a mystic, but we know nothing about her visionary life except that her Sisters
became fearful and advised her to suppress her mystical experiences, so as to
avoid being an object of investigation by the Inquisition (287). The biog¬
rapher notes that Madre María Magdalena’s confessor’s records of her spiritual
life were lost (273). As a result of fasting, “llegó a desflaquecerse tanto
Magdalena, que parecía un esqueleto animado . . . empero lo que había
engordado su espíritu la traía tan ágil . . . [275] (Magdalena grew so skinny,
that she looked like an animated skeleton ... but her spirit had so fattened,
that it kept her nimble). The phrase describing Sor María Magdalena’s self¬
starvation conjures up images of Mexican death figures, still commonly used
visual symbols in Mexico.
The vidas written about some of the first cacique nuns are terrifyingly sad.
Sor Apolonia de la Santísima Trinidad was dead by the age of thirty-five,
exhausted by endless work. Significantly, before dying she had lost the power
of speech because of the strain of toil and self-mortification. In contrast to
New Spain 359
the parents of many other religious, her mother is reported to have been
cruel and to have beaten her daughter often. Sor Apolonia’s indoctrination
in self-destruction, which began early, helps to explain the fervor of her
penitences and the harsh tasks she chose in the cloister. The text notes,
however, the tasks Indian women, even caciques, were in charge of every¬
where; laundry, ironing, cooking, and cleaning.
Sor María Felipa de Jesús, the first Indian prioress of Corpus Christi, was
descended from Aztec warrior princes. Her father had helped the Spaniards
to subdue the province of Tepeaca.'*^ The mother of this “intelligent, virtuous”
girl taught her reading, writing, and embroidery. A priest on a trip from
Oaxaca to Mexico City was responsible for removing the girl from devout
isolation in her native town of Metepec: “Quedó el devoto padre gozozamente
admirado, de haber encontrado en aquel miserable pueblo, a una pobre indita
en quien Dios había derramado tan superabundantemente los tesoros de su
gracia . . .” I311] (The devout Father was pleasantly surprised to find, in that
wretched town, a poor little Indian girl on whom God had showered in such
abundance the treasures of his grace . . .). Although her father did not grant
permission for her to leave because “amaba tiernamente a su hija” (he loved
his daughter so tenderly), the priest participated in a “piadoso robo” (godly
theft), helping Felipa to escape at midnight from her house (315). After a
long wait in Mexico City, the “modestia y compostura de la indita” [323]
(modesty and composure of the little Indian girl) won her a benefactor, who
paid a dowry. Relief from the guilt Sor María Felipa felt for running away
from home and entering the nunnery did not come until she heard the Life
of Saint Clare read in the refectory. Even her father’s refusal to answer her
letters no longer troubled her. She could see herself as another Clare, fol¬
lowing Saint Francis’ advice to run away from her father’s house (331).
What she had learned at home served her well. She was honored with the
request to embroider the vestments of the Cult of the Holy Sacrament. Having
gained the trust of all her Sisters, she became Mistress of Novices, making
special efforts to ensure the novices’ contentment. As she attained higher
positions in the convent, she insisted more on her fear of anything that could
incite accusations of idolatry, her fear of the Inquisition, and her status as a
“poor Indian woman” (355, 371): “Discurría para si que esta felicidad le había
venido por haberse efectuado la conquista de estos reinos ... y hará 300
años ¿qué eran mis abuelos, mis ascendientes? ¡Ay, de lo que me libró Dios!”
[357] (She used to ponder how this happiness had come to her as a result of
the conquest of these kingdoms . . . and what were my grandparents, and
my forebears, three hundred years ago? Oh, what God has freed me from!).'*®
She confidently performed the tasks of Mother Superior for two years (367).
It must have been a hard-earned confidence, because she was the first Indian
to hold that post.
Another nun. Madre María Felipa, was the daughter of an Indian convert
and especially desired the conversion of the most indomitable Indians in
New Spain, the Chichimecas. The biographer emphasizes Madre María Fe-
lipa’s conviction that these Indians were close to conversion as well as her
delight in knowing that missionaries were among them:
Desde que leyó en las cartas de la Madre Agreda (de) los pueblos de
Indios mecos que están por el Nuevo México y que no se han
300 UNTOLD SISTERS
descubierto, se le excitó en su corazón un vivísimo deseo de que se

internaran los operarios evangélicos en aquellas partes, para que
aquellos miserables recibiesen la luz del evangelio, y como en las
mismas cartas expresa la misma venerable madre las buenas
disposiciones que tienen aquellos infelices para ser reducidos, fue su
deseo acompañado de congoja y santa impaciencia . . . (385, 387)
(When she read in the letters of Madre Agreda about the settlements
of Meco [Chichimeca] Indians throughout New Mexico that are as
yet unexplored, there was bom in her heart an ardent desire that
missionary priests might be sent into that country, that those
wretched creatures might receive the light of the Gospel. And
because in those very letters the same venerable Mother speaks of the
willingness of those unhappy beings to submit, her desire was
therefore accompanied by anguish and holy impatience . . .)
Madre María Felipa considered her own desire, the Indians’ readiness for
conversion, and God’s will sufficient impetus to make the missionaries’ task
an easy one. The mention, in this connection, of the work of the famous
Spanish nun Maria de Agreda demonstrates the diffusion of some religious
women’s texts from the Old World to the New and the use of women’s visions,
in this case Maria de Agreda’s supernatural appearances in Mexico, to aid
the expansion of the Church.
Madre María Felipa’s identification with the conquest and conversion to
Christianity of other Indians facilitated not only her own modes of submission
but also of rebellion. The first and only sign of resistance in the entire
collection of Lives of cacique nuns can be found in the description of an
incident in which she refused to explain to a priest why she had denied a
novice admission to the convent: ‘“que no estamos ya en estado de que el
padre cura nos mande moler al teneculi’” [sic] [353] (for we are not nuns so
that the priest can order us to go grind com [i.e., can order us around]).
With this exception, the hagiographic prose obscures direct knowledge of
the woman Sor María Felipa, but it does permit a glimpse of a complex figure
of Mexican monasticism: a woman who read, taught, helped others to die,
and bemoaned her ability to retain in all aspects of her life the clarity of
mental prayer (395).
Madre María Marcela í 1755-1^—)
In the Capuchine convent in Querétaro, Sor María Marcela wrote a Vida

remarkable for its author’s self-aggrandizement. The extant manuscript is one
copied in 1844 by a Brigittine nun. Madte Maria Marcela’s primary concern
was to demonstrate how her contemplative life, in both its interior and
exterior manifestations, followed a path clearly delineated by God. The
author self-consciously maps out her life to conform to saints’ lives rather
than to any literary narrative. The Vida recounts precise categories of visions
and religious events but provides almost no historical data. Places and dates
are of little consequence, except as they have an impact on the religious
intent of her narrative.
New Spain 361
Ana Maria, as she was christened, grew up on her father’s moderately

wealthy hacienda in Marabatio (41), to the northwest of Mexico City. The
account of her early life draws a portrait of hacienda life—of race and class
relations, household structures and finances, legal problems, and natural
disasters such as droughts, fires, and epidemics. The discussion of her child¬
hood excludes physical description of the land or people with whom Ana
Maria spent the first nineteen years of her life. It focuses instead on incidents
that demonstrate the future nun’s spiritual maturation. Indirectly, for ex¬
ample, she relates that her father had a violent temper; he was prone to
whipping servants and slaves and shouting at his daughter. Madre Maria
Marcela contrasts his cruelty and egotism with her own charity and kindness
to those less fortunate than she. We learn of leprous children, of prisoner-
slaves, of mulatto servants living on the hacienda whom she aided.
A muted Augustinian model of spiritual conversion is evident. Unlike
many other nun-writers we have studied, she did not, as a child, want to
become a nun, nor was she pious and demure. Rather, she was an attractive,
popular girl, interested only in her appearance and having a good time. At
one point, more than ten declared suitors courted her, she says (20). The
only one she desired lost all his money and property after they were betrothed,
and the wedding was called off. To Madre María Marcela, the unconsummated
engagement was one of a series of tragedies and contratemps, signs from God
that her life path was to lead elsewhere. Although Ana Maria suddenly realized
her religious vocation when she was twelve years old, she emphasizes her
predilection for helping the weak, sick, and needy throughout the narrative,
thus intimating her own hidden worth from childhood. Her mother’s death
when she was sixteen added to her burdens, as she took over management
of the household. Subsequently, both her duties and her attachment to her
family made the decision to enter the convent a difficult one.
It took a year and a half of waiting in Quéretaro (57), during which she
cajoled the nuns who questioned her limpieza de linaje (purity of lineage) and
initially rejected her, endured harangues from her former suitors, and resisted
her family’s attempts to lure her back home. Ana Maria took the veil in the
Capuchine convent in Quéretaro in 1778. Her portrait of daily convent
rituals and tasks, conflicts among the Sisters, and women’s emotional and
visionary existence is as detailed as the one she paints of hacienda life.
Madre María Marcela’s visions spring from a variety of sources, including
art, the Bible, and Indian lore. The prose is unadorned, but her descriptions
are more baroque than those of the Spanish nuns we have read. The dress
and adornment of religious statues and paintings become allegorical in her
visions. Biblical imagery alternates with syncretistic symbols like that of the
Aztec sun. One vision (128), selected at the end of this chapter, exhibits
several of these elements. Superlative adjectives communicate the visionary’s
childlike amazement and delight in the bejeweled and enchanted world of
her ecstatic life. Visually, she places herself in a comer of the heavenly scene
and sees her soul in the form of a dove, while affectively, she succeeds in
making herself central to the vision by emphasizing her unswerving love of
the Christ Child.
Madre María Marcela’s orderly series of mystical experiences that are con¬
nected to religious celebrations gives the impression of a programmed quest
for recognition as an exemplar. The list provides the basic formal structure
302 UNTOLD SISTERS
for almost all the descriptions of her inner life. Using a list, she reenacts in
her visionary life the processions in which she had participated as a young
girU'
... no sería justo que yo no la sacara en el reino de mi alma y así

barría las calles con exámenes, las regaba con contrición, las
perfumaba con dar buen ejemplo, las enfloraba con actos interiores,
las colgaba con actos de mortificación y de penitencia . . . eran los
danzantes los inquietos afectos del corazón, los gigantes mis pecados
que los ponía delante del Señor para que me los perdonara . . . (144)
(. . . it would not be right if 1 failed to take it [the statue] out in the

kingdom of my soul and so I swept the streets with examinations [of
conscience]; 1 watered them with repentance; I perfumed the good
example that 1 gave; 1 strewed flowers upon them with interior acts; I
hung them with acts of mortification and penitence; . . . the dancers
were the restless affections of my heart, the giants were my sins which
I placed before the Lord so that he might forgive me . . .)
Madre María Marcela’s visions always place her center stage. Her soul be¬
comes a mini-city of religious virtues and vices in this personalized and naive
use of catechism.
Similarly naive attitudes toward mystic states summon up images of fire
and blood, recollections of Aztec sacrificial ceremonies. In the unitive stage
of mystical union, she sees bloody lakes and representations of the Holy
Trinity as light, sun, and fire:
. . . vi al Señor como un lago de sangre con la cual bañó a mi alma

la que salió de este baño como una blanca ave la cual iba retirándose
así al centro donde se goza con Dios el cual le salió al encuentro como
un globo del fuego y la penetró y unió conmigo de tal manera que
quedó en todo semejante a él ardiendo en el mismo fuego . . . (156)
(. . . 1 saw the Lord as a lake of blood with which He bathed my

soul, which emerged from this bath like a white bird which then
withdrew toward the center, there to enjoy God, who came out to
meet it like a ball of fire and He penetrated it and united with me in
such a way that my soul became the same as Him burning in the
same fire . . .)
By the period in which Madre María Marcela writes, Aztec civilization and
religion, vitiated of their power, had been reduced to mere motifs of popular
art and literature of the dominant Mexican culture.
Madre María Marcela, criolla and daughter of the landowning class, typifies
the vast majority of nuns in colonial Mexico. The extent to which she parrots
Spanish imperialist theology and dogma bares the ideology that shaped social,
cultural, political, and economic life in New Spain. Through the production
of her auto-hagiography, the values that determined her country’s culture
emerge.
In Mexico, as we have seen, prioresses and writing nuns—biographers.
New Spain 363
chroniclers, poets—often had contacts with the highly placed clergymen and
viceregal authorities as leaders and spokeswomen of monastic institutions
with a fundamental role to play in the colonizing project. The rich mystical
life of some of these women was interpreted as proof of the validity of
Catholic—as opposed to Protestant—Christianity, for God had arranged for
his reign on this earth to be the Indies, and especially New Spain.
lêxts and l^ranstations

Mariana de la Encamación
Relación de la fundación del Convento antiguo de Santa Teresa [escrito

por otra mano:] por la Reverenda Madre Sor María de la Encamación^
O benignísimo Dios de mi alma que con su infinito amor y altísima provi-

dencia me había dado a gustar el camino de la oración para que en demanda
de él buscare siempre y desease con todas mis fuerzas un modo de vivir y
religión como ésta, a donde se tiene por oficio el trato y comunicación con
Dios. Así se dolía su Magestad de mi destración [distracción], trayéndome a
este tiempo para despertador, unos cuadernos de la Vida de nuestra Santa
Madre Teresa de Jesús, misericordias todas no merecidas. Eran de mano estos
cuadernos, que sus libros aún no estaban impresos, y si lo estaban, no habían
llegado a mi noticia. Leyendo en ellos hicieron tan mi propósito, que me
parecía con mi ignorancia tenía alguna semejanza con mi camino, que eran
de los principios de su vida. Fue tan grande la ternura, devoción y amor que
cobré con esta divina criatura, que leyendo sus papeles me fui un día delante
del Santísimo Sacramento, y llorando el haber dejado totalmente de tener
oración, y pareciéndome no había camino ni modo para volver al primer
llamamiento, según sentía de dificultad para recogerme, hice voto (muy bien
pensado) a nuestro Señor, que en cualquier tiempo que hubiese convento de
esta sagrada religión, procurar con todas mis fuerzas y diligencias ser religiosa
en ella, y a imitación de nuestra Santa Madre, por obligada a que me ayudase,
prometí de celebrar todos los años la fiesta de nuestro Patriarca San José (cuya
devoción ella tanto encarga). La hacía con toda solemnidad y ostentación,
y hasta vanidad, que sólo en esta imperfección supe imitar a nuestra Santa
Madre. Con estas promesas quedé algo consolada, pareciéndome había hecho
alguna grande [hjazaña. ... Y con la nueva devoción de estos cuadernos, se
vinieron a aficionar desde las compañeras del ejercicio de la música, de grandes
talentos, de manera que ya tratábamos todas de ser carmelitas en lo que
pudiera . . .
Había dos años, poco más o menos que había entrado a ser religiosa la
Madre Inés de la Cruz, sujeto tan singular en virtud, habilidad, memoria, y
I. This text is the version in the manuscript collection of the Library of the
University of Texas, Austin.

364 UNTOLD SISTERS
raro entendimiento, y sabiendo antes de que entrase lo que se estimaba en

aquel convento entonces a las que sabían música, recibiéndolas de buena
gana, la aprendió con tanta eminencia, que alcanzó consumadamente toda
la ciencia que pudo saber un maestro de música. No quiso nuestro señor se
ocupase en ciencia tan terrestre, como son todas las de esta vida, que la
ocupaba su Magestad en otra mayor, aun desde seglar, y según me decían sus
padres y confesores, desde [la] edad de tres años. Y así permitió nuestro Señor
que teniendo la plática y ciencia de la música, no tuviere ejercicio y práctica.
Porque jamás pudo entonar un solo punto (como se dice de San Agustín).
De manera que las composiciones que hacía eran tan dificultosas (como ella
no las entonaba) que no se podían cantar, con que quedó frustrada toda su
ciencia. O secretos de Dios, cuán incomprensibles son. Queríala [sic] su
Magestad librarla de distracciones que semejantes ocupaciones causan. Y era
excelente escribana y contadora, y la ocupaban en puntar y escribir los libros
de música. Con esta ocasión comunicaban más las cantoras con ella con más
continuación y familiaridad que las demás. Vino de aquí a conocer nuestros
intentos y deseos. Era natural de la ciudad de Toledo y había deseado mucho
en ella ser religiosa Carmelita descalza, y no lo consiguió por algunas causas
que obligaron a sus Padres a pasar a estas partes. Y siempre vivía en estos
deseos. . . . (f. 7-13)
... Le sucedió [a Juan Luis de Rivera] en el Arzobispado de México, Don

García Guerra, fraile dominico, que fue Arzobispo y Virrey. Era aficionadísimo
a [la] música; estando a visitamos, le pedí absolución de mi oficio por muy
poca mi salud, y que también me absolviese del voto que había hecho de ser
carmelita descalza, porque mi falta de salud no me obligaba a cumplirlo. Me
respondió que por entonces no había rastro de fundación, que por ventura
cuando la hubiese me daría Dios salud, y que no quería absolverme del
voto. . . . Murió a los cinco años, poco más o menos. Quedamos en sede
vacante y sin Virrey, y la ciudad tan revuelta, que no había lugar de tratar
cosa alguna . . . (f. 33-34)
... La Abadesa y su amiga, viendo que a nosotras visitaban, y daban

cuenta de estas cosas, estando yo un día con ellas pasando lo que habíamos
de cantar en el coro, se volvió a hablar con su amiga, y le dijo: me parece
se van componiendo ya las cosas de la fundación de las carmelitas; esta gente
de España tiene su estrella en las Indias; Inés de la Cruz es gachupina, y ha
de salir con la fundación; no hay sino retiramos nosotras, y allá de lo haya
[sic] ella y las que la siguieren. Desde entonces nunca más les dimos cuenta
de lo que se trataba, y sólo a la Madre Ana de la Concepción, que era la
otra pretensora de esta fundación, y la que en la ocasión que se comenzó a
tratar era Prelada. Y así quedamos las tres no más. La Abadesa como ya
divisa[ron] ella y su compañera, nos daban mucho trabajo. . . . Acordó la
Madre Inés pedir licencia al Prelado para escribir en esta materia [de la
fundación] sin registro, que fue muy grande trabajo para ella, como era tan
callada, por haber de darle cuenta de todo lo tratado. Dio de muy buena
gana la licencia, que era gran siervo de Dios. Pienso se llamaba Bernardino
de Arbomos [sic. Albornoz]. . . . Que era harto trabajo tratar de fundar
convento de perfección, y andar encontradas con la Prelada (que así lo decían
todas). Me acuerdo que en medio de nuestros trabajos, antes de la muerte
New Spain 365
de nuestro Padre Fray Pedro de San Hilarión, llegó a noticia de nuestro Padre
Provincial y Visitador, Fray Tomás de San Vicente, que se trataba de esta
fundación, y reportándola decía en ocasiones que no en sus días, que mientras
él fuese prelado no consentiría fundasen convento de religión que profesa
tanta perfección criollas regalonas y chocolateras, que traíamos tres o cuatro
criadas cada una que nos sirviesen, y a este tono otras muchas cosas, que
tuviera mucha razón el Santo de decirlas si fuera yo la que lo fundaba, y no
una tan gran santa como la Madre Inés de la Cruz, a cuya sombra venía una
tan miserable como yo, con todas aquellas faltas y otras muchas, (f. 41—44)
. . . Aquel año vinieron los Marqueses de Guadalcazar deseosos que hallar

en las Indias convento de Carmelitas. Luego que llegaron fueron nuestros
padres a darles la bien venida. Les preguntó la señora Marquesa si había en
esta ciudad religiosas de la orden. Dijeron que no, aunque había muchas que
lo deseaban, en especial dos religiosas del Convento Bendito [/] de Jesús
María. Se alegró mucho la señora Marquesa diciéndoles que con la brevedad
posible irían a vemos, y que nos ayudaría en viniendo Arzobispo a conseguir
nuestros buenos intentos, que estaba ya proveído y le esperaban en la primera
flota, como en efecto vino. Y dio licencia a la señora Marquesa para visitamos,
y con la noticia que de nuestros Padres y el señor Quesada le habían dado
de nuestros deseos, entró en el convento con grande alegría, diciendo; Madre
Abadesa, llame aquí a las que quieren ser carmelitas, que desde luego han
de ser mis amigas, y las tengo de ayudar mucho. Nos mandaron venir a su
presencia, y así en dos de las manos nos llevó hacia la sala, que la tenían
aderezada para darla música y de merendar. No consintió nos apartásemos
un instante de ella, sin reparar a la cortesía que se le debía a la Madre Abadesa
a quien nada de esto hizo buen gusto, ni a las demás, porque la emulación
donde quiera se entra—y [a]preciéndoles [sic] una culpa nuestra no advertir
a la señora Marquesa que aquel agasajo se había de hacer a la Prelada. Se
pasó toda la tarde en hablar de las carmelitas de España, y nos contó cómo
ella había estado tres meses en un convento nuestro, y había deseado mucho
ser religiosa en él, y que no la dejó la Reina por ser de poca edad, prome¬
tiéndola que en teniéndola, la dejaría con mucho gusto. Estábamos las dos
pensando se alegraran las demás de oír hablar lo que nosotras deseábamos, y
era al contrario, porque estaban concibiendo la ponzoña que antes de la
noche descubrieron, que yéndose la señora Marquesa, y dejándonos llenas
de mil favores y promesas, no reparando en hacer lo mismo con la Prelada,
y con las demás, o porque Dios lo permitió para damos a padecer un poco,
al punto que se fue comenzó tan grande alboroto y ruido de las amigas y
deudas de la Prelada, diciéndonos éramos unas descomedidas ambiciosas, que
nuestros malos respectos no había hecho la Marquesa caso de la Prelada y
demás Madres como si fueran estropajos como nosotras . . . con tanto al¬
boroto de todo el Convento, que nos echaban de él de muy buena gana.
La Madre Inés de la Cruz en estas ocasiones se veía en sus flandes, según
la paciencia y alegría que en ellas mostraba. Yo como pusilánime lo sentía
mucho, porque era la Prelada y muchas de ellas mis amigas, y me había criado
con ellas. Se me juntaba el cielo con la tierra de ver el ruido que habíamos
hecho sin culpa, y sin pensar sucediera tal, porque habíamos estado tan
metidas y atentas en nuestro negocio que no habíamos reparado. Mis her¬
manas y deudas que eran hartas, me ayudaban a atribular, diciéndome para
366 UNTOLD SISTERS
qué me metía en aquellas novedades, que Dios me había traído desde pequeña
a aquella religión donde era amada de todas, y me [había] dado talentos para
vivir en su compañía con gusto, que dejase a la Madre Inés de la Cruz que
era propiedad de gachupinas ser noveleras, amigas de hacer ruido, ambiciosas
para ganar fama, y que hicieran caso de ellas—razones que me afligían por
saber yo sus santos deseos y pura intención. Tan atribuladas como aquí he
significado, nos fuimos al dormitorio, a nuestras camas, que no había más
celdas, sin haber pasado otro bocado que el de lágrimas de vemos hechas
estropieso [sic] de aquella comunidad.
Estando toda la casa en silencio sosegadas y durmiendo ya todas, me parece
sería como las diez o las once de la noche, comenzó una religiosa que dormía
en nuestro dormitorio a dar voces diciendo: Sí, Señor, sí. Señor, yo lo haré,
misericordia, misericordia. Se llegaron las más cercanas a dispertarla [sic],
pareciéndoles le daba pesadilla entre sueños. Ella decía: dispierta [sic] estoy,
no es sueño, llámenme a la Madre Abadesa. Nosotras, aunque estábamos en
aquel dormitorio, no osábamos llegar, como había sucedido aquel ruido el
día antes. Y ella no se sosegaba. Se llegaron todas a ver lo que era, y la [sic]
llamaron a la Madre Abadesa, a la cual dijo estas razones en alta voz: Estando
dormida me recordaron; abrí los ojos y vi un rostro de una Verónica airado
el semblante, que me dijo—enojado me tiene este Convento con lo que han
hablado; el intento de estas monjas es santo. Y determinándome yo interi¬
ormente a no decirlo, replicó si no lo dijeres te castigaré yo a ti y a todas.
Concebí de esto grandísimo temor, y por él di estas voces diciendo sí Señor,
yo lo diré, y se me desapareció.
Era esta religiosa sobrina del Padre Losa, el compañero del Santo Gregorio
López, y muy gran sierva de nuestro Señor, callada, y que no se preciaba de
cosas sobrenaturales. Era muy humilde, y aunque no era nuestra particular
amiga, nos comunicaba algunas veces, y aprobaba nuestros buenos intentos.
Luego que acabó esta sierva de Dios de decir lo que había visto, la sosegaron
diciéndola que era todo sueño e imaginación, y unas lo echaban a risa [be-
chavan arrisa] diciendo era chanza, otras que era embuste urdido de nosotras.
Otras siervas de Dios no dejaron de tener algún temor, y decían era obra de
su Magestad como se vio en los efectos. En estos ruidos llamaron a Maitines
y nos fuimos al coro donde nos quedamos las dos hasta la mañana suplicando
a nuestro Señor sosegase tantos ruidos. Lo que a la Madre Inés de la Cruz
daba cuidado era no fuesen estas inquietudes causa de que los prelados im¬
pidiesen en tan buena sazón el tratar de nuestro negocio. Fue Dios servido
de oír nuestros pobres ruegos.’
Luego cuando por la mañana supo la Madre Abadesa que estábamos tan
afligidas, fue a vemos, y como tenía tan buen entendimiento, y [era] una de
las que habían pretendido, y muy sierva de Dios, le causó algún temor lo
sobredicho, y nos dijo no estuviésemos desconsoladas, que cosas de tan grande
importancia como lo que pretendíamos, y tan del servicio de nuestro Señor,
no se podía conseguir sin trabajos, y porque no había sido voluntad de su
Magestad que ella nos acompañara en nuestra pretención [sic], que no nos
estorbaría en nada, que tratásemos con llaneza de nuestro negocio, porque
ya nuestro Señor había traído Arzobispo, que ella nos ayudaría en lo que
pudiere. Dicho se está el consuelo que nos causaría ver tan súbita mudanza
en aquel corazón, conque nos persuadimos había sido obra de Dios lo sucedido.
Para conservar esta paz que la Prelada mostraba, procuramos que nuestros
New Sixain 367
Padres advirtiesen a la señora Marquesa mostrase a la Madre Abadesa amor

y agasajo, que nos importaba para hacer todos nuestros negocios con con¬
formidad y gusto. Era su Excelencia tan humilde y señora que lo haría con
especial cuidado todas las veces que enttaba en el convento. . . . (f. 47-58)
. . . Nos certificaba el doctor Quesada que era admiración ver trabajar los
indios en la Iglesia con la devoción que era casa de nuestra Santa Madre
Teresa de Jesús, que cayendo aguaceros recísimos, no podía con ellos, que se
bajasen, mientras que pasara el rigor del agua, diciendo que no les hacía mal
porque santa Teresa los guardaba, y querían acabarle su casa presto. . . .
(f. 94-95)
. . . Viendo el señor Arzobispo que iba tan adelantada la obra, y que era
necesario disponer algunas cosas para el consuelo espiritual de las religiosas,
se fue un día a Santa Fe donde era ermitaño el Licenciado Francisco Losa,
compañero del Santo Gregorio López, y diciéndole como la fundación de
este convento estaba ya dispuesta, y que no hallando persona de satisfacción
que poner por Capellán de él, quería su Ilustrísima darle a él este cuidado,
y que así determinase a obedecerle, y se viniese luego a México porque esto
sería el gusto de nuestro Señor. Sintió mucho el siervo de Dios dejar su
antiguo desierto y haber de mudar vida y ejercicios. Con todo eso respondió
lo haría de muy buena gana, como trajese al nuestro Convento los huesos
del Santo Gregorio López, que no los podía dejar entre aquellos indios, y se
habían prometido los dos de no apartarse en vida, ni en muerte. Vino en
ello el señor Arzobispo, y concertaron los dos la traza que tendrían para
sacarlos sin que los indios se alborotasen. Se volvió su Ilustrísima muy alegre,
y nos envió a decir como tendríamos presto en nuestra compañía estos dos
santos. . . . (f. 101-02)
... Se convenció el señor Arzobispo [de que no se dilatara la fecha de la

fundación oficial] y dijo: algún trabajo nos ha de costar. Mandaré luego se
pregone la procesión para primero de marzo, que ha de haber bien en qué
entender. Y así fue que dieron petición en sabiendo esto los de la Santísima
Trinidad, que les hacía manifiesto agravio en impedir el día de su fiesta.
Respondió su Ilustrísima que ambas se hacían juntas, que el Angel vendría
de muy buena gana acompañando a las Carmelitas (que con estas gracias
vencía los estorbos que se ofrecían). [El Arzobispo] avisó a todos sus conventos
de religiosas que en el puesto que les señalasen, por donde había de pasar la
procesión, pusiese cada uno su altar, como lo hicieron, con el adorno que se
verá en la relación de dicha procesión. Dispuesto todo como digo, fuera
nunca acabar decir las mortificaciones que por esta solemnidad se nos ofre¬
cieron dentro y fuera de casa, como si nosotras tuviéramos la culpa de la gran
fiesta que se prevenía. A este tiempo recibimos un cuaderno de medio pliego,
de más de veinte hojas, que desde Puebla nos escribió el Mayordomo de
nuestras hermanas las Carmelitas de aquella ciudad. Padre de la Madre Mel-
chora de la Asunción, religiosa de aquel convento, dándonos en él tantos
consejos y ejemplos de sagrada Escritura, que parecía algún gran filósofo o
letrado, diciéndonos muchas sentencias, con mil injurias con que reprendía
nuestra temeridad y soberbia, amenazándonos de parte de Dios con el castigo
que merecía el agravio que se hacía a las Madres de Puebla. No digo cosas
368 UNTOLD SISTERS
más particulares porque no me lo dejaron. Esto todo lo remitió la Madre Inés

de la Cruz a nuestros Padres, preguntándoles qué convendría hacer en aquello.
Respondieron que no más devolver el cuaderno, diciéndole que por estar ya
señalado el día de la fundación, y nosotras muy ocupadas previniendo las
cosas necesarias para ella, no teníamos lugar de leer tan [sic] voluntad, que
nos perdonase por amor de Dios . . . Llegado el día de la fundación, hizo su
Excelencia pregonar que la víspera en la noche se pusiesen en toda la ciudad
luminarias, y ese día que fu [sic] lunes tenían la, Iglesia de Jesús María muy
bien adornada para el hábito y Vísperas a que asistieron la señora Marquesa
y sus dos niñas dentro del convento, y en la Iglesia el señor Marqués de
Guadalcazar con toda la Audiencia y ciudad, y el señor Arzobispo con el
cabildo Eclesiástico, y la pilla de cantores, y demás gentío que se puede
pensar. . . . (f. 112-16)
Chronicle of the Founding of the Ancient Convento de Santa Teresa

(written by another hand) by the Reverend Mother Sor María de la
Encarnación^
Oh, most benevolent God of my soul, who with infinite love and great
providence has shown me delight in the way of prayer, that in search of it
1 might always seek and desire, with all my strength, a way of life and
observance like this, in which it is one’s duty to maintain conversation and
communication with God. His Majesty was so grieved by my distraction,
that He brought me at this time, so as to awaken me, some notebooks of
the Life of Saint Teresa de Jesús, all of which were to me the most undeserved
mercies. These notebooks were in manuscript, for her books had not yet been
printed, or if they were, I was not aware of it. As 1 read them, they so
strengthened my resolve, that it seemed to me, in my ignorance, that they
bore some resemblance to my own path, for they treated the early part of
her life. The tenderness, devotion, and love 1 began to feel for this divine
creature was so great that one day, while 1 was reading her papers, 1 went
before the Blessed Sacrament; and, weeping that 1 had totally neglected
prayer, for it seemed to me that there was no path or way by which to return
to my earliest vocation, as 1 had such difficulty in achieving recollection, 1
made a vow (vety well considered) to Our Lord, that whensoever there might
be established a convent of that sacred Order, 1 would try with all my strength
and diligence to be a nun in it. And in imitation,of our holy Mother [Teresa],
that she might be obliged to help me, 1 promised each year to celebrate the
feast of our Patriarch, Saint Joseph (for she so heartily advises devotion to
him). 1 did this with the greatest solemnity and ostentation, and indeed such
vanity, that only in this imperfection did 1 succeed in imitating our holy
Mother [Teresa]. With these promises, 1 felt somewhat comforted, for it
seemed to me that 1 had done some great deed. . . . And even my companions
2. This text is the version in the manuscript collection of the Library of the
University of Texas, Austin.
Neu; Spain 369
in the practice of music, who had very great talent, came to feel great zeal
for the renewed devotion inspired by those books, so that in time we all
intended to be Carmelites in any way we could . . .
It had been a matter of some two years, more or less, since Madre Inés de
la Cruz had entered the convent to become a nun; she was a person of most
exceptional virtue, ability, memory, and unusual understanding; and know-
before she entered, of the esteem in which nuns who know music were
then held in that convent, where they were received with a very good will,
she learned the art so outstandingly, that she most thoroughly attained all
the skill that a great master of music could have. Our Lord did not wish her
to be employed at such an earthly art, as are all those of this life, for His
Majesty intended her to be employed at something greater, even when she
was still in the world, and indeed, as her spiritual directors and confessors
tell me, from the time she was only three years old. And thus Our Lord
permitted that, though she possessed the discourse and art of music, she
should command neither the practice nor the method of it. For she could
never sing one single note (as is also said of Saint Augustine). With the
result that the compositions she wrote were so laborious (as she herself did
not sing them) that they could not be sung, so that all her skill was thwarted.
Oh, secrets of God, how incomprehensible they are! His Majesty thus wished
to free her from the distractions occasioned by such occupations. And she
was an excellent copyist and book-keeper, and she was employed in scoring
and writing the music books. Having this opportunity, the singers commu¬
nicated with her more frequently than did the other nuns. Thus did she come
to know of our intentions and desires. She was a native of the city of Toledo
and had greatly desired to be a Discalced Carmelite there, but could not do
so for certain reasons which obliged her parents to come to these parts. And
she lived always with those desires. . . . (f. 7-13)
... In the Archbishopric of Mexico, [Juan Luis de Rivera] was succeeded

by Don Garcia Guerra, a Dominican friar, who was Archbishop and Viceroy.
He was most fond of music; when he was visiting us, I asked him to relieve
me of my duties [as musician], as my health was very poor, and I also asked
that he absolve me of the vow I had made to become a Discalced Carmelite,
as my lack of health released me from the obligation to fulfill it. He answered
me that for the present there was not a trace of any such foundation, and
that perchance when there were, God would give me health; thus he did
not wish to absolve me of my vow. ... He died some five years after, more
or less. We were left with the Archbishop’s see empty, and with no Viceroy,
and the city in such an uproar that it was impossible to proceed with any
business whatsoever. . . . (f. 33-34)
. . . The Abbess and her favorite saw that they [the Archbishop and a
patronl came to visit us, and were informing us of these matters. And one
day when I was with them reviewing what we were to sing in the choir, the
Abbess turned to speak to her friend, and said to her: “It seems to me that
matters are all being settled for the foundation of Carmelite nuns; these
Spaniards have a lucky star here in the Indies. Inés de la Cruz is a gachupina
and shall have her way with this foundation, while we ourselves have no
choice but to withdraw, and there she shall go with whichever nuns choose
370 UNTOLD SISTERS
to follow her.” From then on we never again informed them of the plans,
save only for Madre Ana de la Concepción, who was the other nun who
sought this foundation, and it was she who was Mother Superior at the time
when arrangements were begun. And so we were just three and no others.
The Abbess, when she and her companion discerned it all, caused us great
trouble. . . . Madre Inés agreed to ask license of the Superior to write on
this subject [of the foundation] without stint (which was a great trial to her
as she was so quiet and timid), because it was necessary to inform him of all
that we had discussed. Most willingly did he grant permission, for he was a
true servant of God. I think he was called Bernardino de Arbomos [sic.
Albornoz]. . . . Indeed, it was a great trial to attempt to found a convent of
perfection, and to find ourselves in conflict with our Abbess (for thus said
all the nuns). I recall that in the midst of our trials, before the death of our
Padre Fray Pedro de San Hilarión, it came to the attention of our Provincial
Superior and Visitant, Fray Tomás de San Vicente, that there was talk of
this foundation, and meaning to restrain it, he said on more than one oc¬
casion, never in his day, that fot as long as he might be Superior he would
never permit a convent of an Order professing such perfection to be founded
by pampered criollas fond of chocolate, who would bting along three or four
maids to serve each one of us, and many other things of that style; indeed,
that holy man would have had good reason to say such things had I been
the one to found it, rather than such a holy woman as Madre Inés de la
Cruz, in whose shadow walked such a wretch as I, with all these faults and
many more besides, (f. 41-44)
. . . That year, there came the Marqués and Marquesa de Guadalcazar,

who desired to find a Carmelite convent here in the Indies. Soon after they
arrived, our Superiors went to bade them welcome. Her ladyship the Marquesa
asked them if there were nuns of the Ordet in this city. They said there were
not, although there were many who wished to be, in particular two nuns of
the blessed Convento de Jesús María. At this her ladyship the Marquesa was
very glad, and told them that they would make all possible haste to go and
see us, and that she would help us to achieve our good intentions as soon
as the Archbishop should arrive, for this was now resolved and they expected
him with the next fleet, when indeed he did come. And he gave the Matquesa
permission to visit us; and having heatd the tepott that our Superiors had
given her of our desires, she entered the convent with great joy, saying:
“Mothet Abbess, do summon those who wish to be Carmelites, fot from this
time forth they are to be my friends, and I must help them in every way.”
They called us to come before her, and thus between the two of us she took
our hands and bore us to the hall, which they had adorned to give het music
and refreshment. She would not allow us to part ftom her for one instant,
not heeding the courtesy due the Mother Abbess, to whom none of this was
in the least pleasing, nor was it to the other nuns, for envy enters where it
will—and it seemed to them a fault on our part not to tell her ladyship the
Marquesa that these attentions should instead be paid to the Abbess. All
that afternoon was spent in speaking of the Carmelite nuns of Spain, and
she told us how she had spent three months in one of our convents, and
had greatly wished to be a nun there, but the Queen did not allow het because
she was so young, promising that when she was older, she would be very
hJeu) Spain 371
happy to let her enter. We two were thinking how happy the others would
be to hear this talk of what we all desired; but it was quite the opposite, for
they were conceiving that venom which before nightfall they revealed. For
her ladyship the Marquesa departed, leaving us with a thousand favors and
promises without attending to the same with the Abbess, or with the other
nuns, perhaps indeed because God allowed this so as to cause us to suffer a
little; the very moment she left, there arose a terrible uproar and disturbance
among the friends and kinswomen of the Abbess, who told us we were rude
ambitious things, that our bad manners had failed to make the Marquesa
acknowledge the Abbess and the other nuns, as if they were just such worthless
rags as ourselves . . . with such great uproar throughout the convent, that
they would very gladly have thrown us from it.
On such occasions. Madre Inés seemed to be in her glory^ by the patience
and joy she showed at these times. I, being cowardly, did suffer badly, for
this was the Abbess and many of the others were my friends, and I had been
raised with them. For me the very sky had fallen, to see the trouble we had
caused so blamelessly, and with no thought that such a thing might come to
pass, because we had been so absorbed and attentive to our own affair that
we had taken no notice. My Sisters and kinswomen, of whom there were
full many, took part in afflicting me, asking me to what end did I involve
myself in these novelties, for God had brought me when I was just a little
girl to that Order where I was beloved by all the nuns, and had given me
talents that I might live in their company with pleasure; they said I should
leave such things to the Madre Inés de la Cruz, for it was natural for gachu-
pinas to be innovators, they were so fond of causing trouble, and ambitious
for fame and attention, but that I should heed their words—all arguments
which distressed me greatly, for I knew their holy desires and pure intentions.
And so distressed as I have here described, we two went to the dormitory,
to our beds (for we had no other cells than these), without having tasted a
single bite other than our tears at seeing ourselves the cause of such turmoil
in the community.
When all the house had fallen silent and the nuns were all peacefully
sleeping—I think it must have been about ten or eleven o’clock at night—
a nun who slept in our dormitory began to cry out, saying: “Yes, Lord; yes.
Lord; I will do it, have mercy, have mercy.” The nuns nearest her went to
wake her, for they thought she had had a nightmare in her sleep. And she
said: “I am awake, it is no dream; call the Mother Abbess here to me.” We,
though we were there in that dormitory, did not dare go to her, as all that
trouble had occurred in the house earlier the same day. And she would not
be quieted. All the nuns came to see what was the matter, and they called
the Mother Abbess to her, to whom she explained in a loud voice: “As I was
sleeping, I was awakened; I opened my eyes and saw the face of a Veronica,''
3. Translator’s note: literally, “in her Flanders”; figuratively, “Flanders” signified a

very precious thing.
4. Translator’s note: Veronica: the image of Jesus’ face, impressed upon the hand¬
kerchief offered to him by Saint Veronica on the toad to Calvary; hence, any similar
image on a cloth.
372 UNTOLD SISTERS
with its countenance vexed, which said to me: ‘I am angry with this convent,
because of what has been said; for the intention of these nuns is holy. And
as I determined inwardly to say nothing about this. He answered me: ‘If you
do not say it, I myself shall punish you and all the nuns.’ Because of this I
was struck with great fear, and so I cried out saying, ‘Yes Lord, I will do it;
and the face disappeared from my sight.”
This nun was the niece of Padre Losa, the companion of the holy Gregorio
López, who did not presume herself given to supernatural things. She was
very humble, and though she was not our particular friend, she sometimes
spoke to us, and approved our good intentions. After this handmaiden of
God finished telling what she had seen, they hushed her, saying it was nothing
more than a dream and her imagination, and some nuns began to laugh,
saying it was a jest; others said it was a hoax that we ourselves had devised.
Other handmaidens of God still felt some fear, and said it was the work of
His Majesty, as could be seen in its effects. In the midst of this clamor, the
bell for Matins rang and we went to choir, where we two remained until
morning, begging Our Lord to pacify all these disputes. What most concerned
Madre Inés de la Cruz was that these disturbances might cause our Superiors
to hinder, at such an opportune moment, the pursuit of our negotiation. But
God was pleased to hear our poor prayers.
In the morning, when the Mother Abbess heard that we were in such
distress, she came to see us, and as she was of such good understanding, and
was one of those who had once sought [to become a Carmelite], and was a
true handmaiden of God, all that has been said above caused her some fear,
and she told us we must not be disconsolate, for things of such great im¬
portance and of such service to Our Lord as what we sought could not be
achieved without trials; and the fact that it had not been His Majesty’s will
that she accompany us in our purpose, should not in any way perturb us, but
we should speak plainly of our business, for now Our Lord had brought us
an Archbishop, and she herself would assist us in any way she could. It may
be understood what consolation it gave us, to see the sudden change wrought
in that heart, such that we were convinced that this happening had been
the work of God. To preserve this peace shown by our Abbess, we arranged
that our Superiors should advise her ladyship the Marquesa to show the Abbess
her love and attentions, for this was important to us, that all our business
might be conducted properly and pleasingly. And her Excellency was so
humble and such a lady, that she would do so with special care every time
she entered the convent. . . . (f. 47-58)
. . . Doctot Quesada assured us that it was a wonder to see the Indians

work on the church with such devotion because it was a house of our holy
Mother Teresa de Jesus; for when the harshest downpours fell, against which
nothing could be done, the Indians would climb down until the worst of the
rain had passed, saying that it did them no harm, for they were in Saint
Teresa’s keeping, and they wanted to finish her house for her quickly . . .
(f. 94-95)
. . . When his Lordship the Archbishop saw how the construction pro¬
gressed, and that it would be necessary to arrange certain matters for the
comfort of the nuns, he went one day to Santa Fe where the Licenciado'^
New Spain 373
Francisco Losa, the companion of the holy Gregorio López, was a hermit;
and the Archbishop told him how the foundation of this convent was now
arranged, and that, finding no other satisfactory person to install as Chaplain
for the convent, his Grace wished to give him this charge. And so [Padre
Losa] determined to obey him [the Archbishop], and to go quickly to Mexico,
for this would be pleasing Our Lord. This servant of God did suffer greatly
to leave the wilderness where he had been so long, and to have to change
his way of life and spiritual exercises. But in spite of it all, he answered that
he would do so most willingly, as he would bring to our convent the bones
of the holy Gregorio López, for he could not leave them among those Indians,
and the two had promised each other never to part in life or in death. His
Lordship the Archbishop took part in the matter, and the two agreed on the
scheme they would use to take away the bones without causing the Indians
to riot. The Archbishop returned quite full of cheer, and sent word to us
that we would soon have these two holy men in our company. . . .
(f. 101-02)
His Lordship the Archbishop so determined [that the date of the official
foundation should not be delayed], and said: “This shall cause us no small
hardship. I shall order that the procession be proclaimed for the first of March,
for good shall come of it when agreement is reached.” And thus it happened
that, when they heard this, the community of the Santísima Trinidad made
a petition, saying that it was a clear affront, to hinder their own feast day.
The Archbishop responded that both celebrations would be observed to¬
gether, and that full willingly would the angel accompany the Carmelite nuns
(for with such witticisms did he overcome the obstacles that arose). He
advised all his convents of nuns that each convent should place its altar in
the designated position, where the procession was to pass by, as indeed they
did, each with the adornment that shall be seen in account of this procession.
All was arranged as I have said, save that one could never finish telling all
the mortifications we faced within and without the convent on account of
this ceremony, as if we ourselves were to blame for the great celebration that
was planned. At this time we received a notebook of bound pages written
to us from Puebla by the Majordomo of our Sister Carmelites in that city,
the spiritual father of Madre Melchora de la Asunción, a nun in that convent,
giving us so much advice and so many examples drawn from the Holy Scrip¬
ture, that he seemed to resemble some great philosopher or scholar, uttering
a great many maxims, and a thousand abuses with which he rebuked our
temerity and arrogance, threatening us on God’s behalf with the punishment
due this injury done to the nuns of Puebla [by our foundation]. I say nothing
more particular, because they have not given me leave. Madre Inés de la
Cruz sent all this to our Superiors, asking them what it would be fitting to
do with it. Their answer was simply to return the notebook, and to say that
the day for the foundation was already designated, and as we were very busy
arranging everything necessary to it, we had no opportunity to read such ill
will, begging his pardon, for the love of God . . . When the day for the
5. Translator’s note: licenciado, a priest who is given license to preach.

374 UNTOLD SISTERS
foundation arrived, his Excellency had it proclaimed that in the evening at

nightfall, illuminations should be placed throughout the city; and that day,
which was Monday, the Church of Jesus Maria was beautifully adorned for
the taking of the [Carmelite] habit and the vespers service, which her Lady-
ship the Marquesa attended with her two daughters within the convent; and
within the church were his Lordship the Marqués de Guadalcazar with all
the governing body and the city, and his Lordship the Archbishop with the
chapter council and the choir of singers, and a greater crowd than can be
imagined . . . (f. 112-16)
Maria Magdalena Lorravaquio Muñoz
Libro en que se contiene la vida de la Madre María Magdalena, monja

profesa del Convento del Señor San Jerónimo de la Ciudad de México
hija de Domingo de Lorravaquio, y de Isabel Muñoz, su legítima mujer.
... me dio mal de garganta, y por no hacer los remedios necesarios me

dieron unas llagas en la garganta tan incurables que después con cuantos
remedios hacían no bastaban, porque como quería su Magestad fuese esta
enfermedad el crisol donde mi alma se purificase no me hacía provecho ningún
remedio que por esta ocasión me dieron los médicos unos sudores muy fuertes
y luego me dieron unciones. Después de estas unciones me volvieron a dar
otros sudores más fuertes y visto los médicos que con esto no sanaba me
dieron un botón de fuego en la mollera que me vi en muy gran detrimento
y riesgo de perder el juicio. Mas su Magestad como quería que todos fuesen
instrumentos para el martirio que quería que en esto pasase a su imitación,
nada me hacía provecho que parecía el Señor me tenía hechada [sic] una
soga en la garganta como la que pasó por mí . . . (f. óv-y)
... en creciendo en mí la devoción y fervor crecía el temblor . . . hicieron

gran junta de médicos y después de muchas curas y que no acertaban a conocer
qué mal era . . . empezaron ellos en mí a hacer pruebas de remedios y
determinaron de que me zafasen los muslos y piernas yo sintiendo esta mor¬
tificación y vergüenza mucho por haber de estar a la vista de los hombres se
lo ofrecía a Dios muy de veras y considerando lo que Cristo Nuestro Señor
por mí había sentido en la columna® ... y la vergüenza que su Magestad
había pasado cuando le desataron de la columna, y no hallaba sus vestiduras^ . . .
(f. 8)
. . . temblaba de modo que muchas personas no me podían tener según

me hacía pedazos. Esto era ordinario en todos los pasos de la pasión ... y
también cuando era de coloquio con Dios donde me comunicaba muy grandes
suavidades y afectos amorosos y como de estos no sabían dieron en decir mis
prelados y todos que no era sino que estaba endemoniada . . . (f. 9)
6. During the “flagellation.”
7. Because the soldiers had already cast lots for them.

New Spain 375
Después de estas tempestades y trabajos exteriores empezó su Magestad los

interiores ... en mi alma y darme tantas sequedades, tinieblas, desamparos
que parecía nunca haberle conocido . . . los cielos eran de bronce para mí.
No me oía Dios al parecer en mis clamores y peticiones; carecía del favor de
su Santísima Madre y de todos los santos a quien [sic] invocaba ... y otras
veces en sosegando de este trabajo venía otro de blasfemia de Dios y de sus
santos ... y en quitándose ésta venía la tentación tan vehemente de la
lujuria que me parecía a mí no tenía remedio . . . (f. lov)
. . . aliviando el mal interior Nuestro Señor apretaba el exterior y como

los males eran tantos y apretaban en demasía ordenaron los médicos que me
hicieran cuatro fuentes en los brazos y piernas y con esto pasé otras muchas
enfermedades y trabajos interiores . . . (f. iiv)
. . . estoy en oración un muy gran tiempo después de ésta procuro rezar,

o ganar algunas indulgencias por las ánimas del purgatorio; en ese tiempo
paso hasta las siete de la mañana desde esta hora hasta las nueve gasto en
curarme las fuentes y postemas, y enseñar la doctrina cristiana a todas las
mozas de servicio que quieren aprehenderla ... las recibo con muy gran
amor y voluntad a todas las peticiones de los trabajos y necesidades de todas
las que me encomiendan. Acudo con ellas a su Magestad y con muy gran
deseo de que Dios acuda a favorecer a todos, y se lo suplico con muy grande
eficacia ... (f. 12)
Otra vez habiendo comulgado y estando en oración y en una muy profunda

contemplación quedé suspensa y en ella se me apareció en lo íntimo de mi
alma una paloma muy albísima y no tenía en las alas plumas sino unas
amaneras de conchas muy doradas y blancas, el pico muy colorado y exten¬
diendo sobre mí las alas cubría mi corazón y le incorporaba en sí. Yo con
muy gran júbilo y alegría me iba a él que sentía los afectos de ser el Espíritu
Santo que me visitaba. ... (f. 17)
Otra vez estando en oración de coloquio ofreciéndome a Dios, y resignán¬

dome en sus divinas manos y voluntad suplicándole fuese yo agradable a sus
divinos ojos. Quedé suspensa y en ella sentí en lo infinito de mi alma una
profundísima soledad: o como un desierto. Y estando mi alma en éste con
unos ardientes deseos de amar a Dios se me apareció una figura de Jesucristo
en pie, su santísimo cuerpo desnudo y muy llagado. ... y estándole mirando
con los ojos del alma oí una voz que decía: “ésta es mi recámara.” Y luego se
me desapareció . . . (f. i8-i8r)
Otro día . . . quedé suspensa y en ella me llevaron el alma a una soledad

y quyietud [sic] muy grande y en ésta se pasó un muy gran rato cuando de
repente me llevaron a un [?] aposento y en él vi a una religiosa muy cerca
de mí y la conocía yo muy bien quien era y . . . más después vi a la otra y
también la conocía y me alegraba yo mucho de verlas allí y luego me llevaron
a otro aposento más adentro y en él vía [sic] a otras dos religiosas de que me
alegraba mucho más y les hablaba porque las conocía en este gozo y habla
que les tenía se me desaparecieron y quedé sola ... y luego vi de fuera de
aquel aposento un sol muy resplandesciente y claro que corría un muy gran
376 UNTOLD SISTERS
campo o parte de él y estando atenta con los ojos del alma mirando esto se
me desapareció todo y quedé en mas profunda suspension como si estuviera
muerta ... y luego estando en ésta volvieron a llevarme a aquel aposento.
Se cubrió él todo de una luz y resplandor muy grande que hasta el techo
cubría y de ésta me rodeaban unos rayos muy encendidos como de un oro
muy fino y todo aquel aposento también embestían y estando en esto a mi
parecer mucho tiempo se desapareció todo y quedé tan profundamente absorta
que parecía me habían sacado el corazón según estaba muerta y después de
esto volví temblando resignadamente que me hacía pedazos y quedé con unos
amorosos afectos y deseos de amar a Dios y de no ofenderle con un muy gran
deseo de padecer por Dios. . . . (f. 67-68)
A Book Containing the Life of Madre María Magdalena, Professed Nun

of the Convento del Señor San Jerónimo of Mexico City, and Daughter
of Domingo Lorravaquio and of Isabel Munoz, His Legitimate Wife
... 1 contracted an illness of the throat, and because the proper remedies
were not applied, 1 got such incurable sores in my throat that later, all the
remedies attempted were to no avail; for, as His Majesty wanted this sickness
to be the crucible in which my soul was to be purified, none of the remedies
did me any good: at this time, the doctors induced very severe sweats and
rubbed me with oils. After these unctions they induced yet stronger sweats
and when the doctors had seen that with all this 1 was not recovering, they
applied a cautery® to the crown of my skull such that 1 was in great peril and
in danger of losing my mind. But His Majesty, desiring that all these should
be the instruments of the martyrdom that He wished me to undergo in
imitation of His own, let none of this treatment work to my benefit, for it
seemed that the Lord had drawn a noose about my neck, like the one He
suffered for me . . . (f. 6V-7)
... As my devotion and fervor increased, so did the tremor. . . . They

called a great conference of the doctors, and after having tried many cures,
when they had not determined what my illness was . . . they began to try
various remedies on me and they determined that they would dislocate my
thighs and legs, so that I suffered great mortification and shame because I
would have to lie in the sight of men; I most sincerely offered it up to God,
recalling what Christ Our Lórd had suffered for me when they tied Him to
the column’ . . . and the shame His Majesty had felt when they untied Him,
and He was unable to find His clothes‘° . . . (f. 8)
... I trembled so that many people could not hold me as I was shaken
8. Translator’s note: cautery, a treatment with a red-hot iron.
9. Translator’s note: i.e., during the flagellation of Jesus, when he was scourged
by Pilate (John 19:1); the scene was frequently and vividly depicted in art from the
fifteenth century onwards.
10. In the same episode, because the soldiers had already cast lots for them.
hJew Spain 377
all to pieces. This was most common at all the Stations of the Cross . . .
and it happened also when 1 was in conversation with God, when He bestowed
upon me great sweetness and loving caresses; and because they knew nothing
about these things, my superiors and everyone else came to say that there
was no other explanation than that 1 must be possessed by the Devil . . .
(f. 9)
After all these outward storms and trials. His Majesty commenced the
inward ones ... in my soul, and began to give me such aridity, darkness,
and abandonment that it seemed 1 had never known Him ... the heavens
were hard as bronze against me. God seemed not to heed my lamentations
and pleas; 1 lacked the favor of His Most Holy Mother and of all the saints
whom 1 invoked . . . and at other times, as this trial abated, there came
another, of Ithe temptation to] blasphemy against God and his saints . . .
and when this passed, the temptation to lust came over me with such ve¬
hemence that it seemed to me there was no help for it . . . (f. lov)
. . . [then,] while alleviating my spiritual ills. Our Lord made the bodily
ones more severe, and as these ills were so numerous and made me suffer too
severely, the doctors ordered that four issues should be cut in my arms and
legs, and with this treatment 1 suffered a good many other ills and inward
trials . . . (f. iiv)
... 1 am in contemplation for a very long time, after which 1 try to pray,
or to gain some indulgences for the souls in purgatory; I spend this period
until seven in the morning; from that hour until nine 1 spend the time in
treating my open wounds" and abscesses, and teaching Christian doctrine
to all the servant girls who want to learn it ... 1 receive with great love
and good will all petitions concerning the needs and troubles of all the Sisters
who entrust them to me. 1 present them to His Majesty with a very great
desire that God grant them all His favor, and with the greatest efficacy 1 ask
Him to do this. . . . (f. 12)
Another time, when 1 had received communion and was at prayer in very
deep contemplation, my senses were suspended, and in this trance there
appeared to me in my innermost soul a little dove of the very purest white,
and it had on its wings no feathers, but something like little seashells, brightly
gilded and white; its beak was very red, and it spread its wings over me,
covering my heart and taking it into itself. With great joy and happiness 1
went to it, for by the love 1 felt 1 knew it to be the Holy Spirit who was
visiting me . . . (f. 17)
Another time 1 was in conversational prayer, offering myself to God, and

placing myself in His divine hands and holy will, making supplication that
1 might be pleasing in His eyes. 1 became suspended and there 1 felt in the
II. Translator’s note: these wounds or “issues” were caused by incisions for the
purpose of letting blood.
378 UNTOLD SISTERS
infinity of my soul a most profound solitude, or something like a desert. And

as my soul sojourned there with ardent desires to love God, there appeared
to me a figure of Jesus Christ, standing upright. His most blessed body naked
and full of wounds. . . and looking at him with the eyes of my soul, 1 heard
a voice that said: “This is my bedchamber. ” And then He disappeared from
my sight . . . (f. i8-i8r)
Another day ... my senses were suspended, and in this trance my soul
was carried to a very great solitude and stillness, and there it remained for
a long time when all of a sudden I was carried to a [?] chamber and in it I
saw a nun very near me and I knew very well who she was . . . and later I
saw another and I knew her as well, and it made me very happy to see them
there; and then I was carried to another chamber, further within, and there
1 saw another two nuns whom I was even happier to see, and I spoke to
them because 1 recognized them; in this joy and conversation 1 had with
them, they disappeared from my sight and 1 was left there all alone. . . .
And then outside that chamber 1 saw a most clear and brilliant sun which
shone across a very broad field or a part of it, and while I gazed at this with
the eyes of my soul fixed upon it, everything disappeared and 1 entered into
the most profound trance as if 1 were dead . . . and while in this trance 1
was once again carried to that chamber. It was all bathed in very great light
and brilliance which covered even the ceiling, and rays of that light sur¬
rounded me, blazing like fine gold, and they also adorned that entire chamber,
and after having spent what seemed to me a great deal of time like this,
everything disappeared and 1 remained so deeply absorbed that it seemed
they had taken my heart from my body, so dead was 1, and after this I
returned, trembling resignedly, for I was again falling all to pieces; and 1 was
left with passionate longing and desire to love God and never to offend Him
again; with very great desire to suffer for God. (f. 67-68)
Maria de San José
Vida'^
No sabía yo escribir y le dije a Su Majestad, Señor, yo estoy en el aprieto

que la obediencia me manda que sepa escribir, yo no puedo ni es posible el
saberlo hacer, tú Señor, sabes cuántos años ha que estoy trabajando y por¬
fiando a querer saber escribir y ésta es la hora que no sé poner una sola razón.
Señor, para ti no hay imposibles, puedes hacer todo lo que quieras y así
bien puedes hacer que yo obedezca en saber escribir y que no tenga consuelo
en ello, sino que padecen [sic] lo mismo que padezco en no saber escribir.
Así lo hizo Su Majestad, que escriba todo cuanto quiero; pero el trabajo
y fatiga que me cuesta, sólo Su Majestad lo sabe.
12. The first set of selections is taken from Josefina Muriel, Cultura femenina
novohispana; page numbers refer to that volume. The selections after her page 391
are taken from the version of the manuscript edited by Kathleen Meyers; page numbers
are hers.
New Spain 379
[Mi confesor] me mandó que escribiese todo el tiempo que pudiese tener,
sin tomar más de una hora de noche que sólo esta hora durmiese y todo lo
demás del tiempo lo gastase en escribir. Yo le obedecí en esto y fui escribiendo
de día y de noche. Luego que nuestra madre priora supo esta orden del padre
Cárdenas, que fue después de algún tiempo, cuando yo no podía ya pasar
adelante con tanto trabajo, le habló y dijo me alzase esta obediencia, pues
era cosa que no se podía hacer.
Pasados algunos meses, después de lo dicho, vino un día al confesionario
y me mandó que nada escribiese, no tomase la pluma en la mano, ni tuviese
libro alguno en la celda, también le obedecí en esto, sin replicarle en nada.
Pasé muchos días sin escribir nada, ni hablarle palabra. Luego le dio gana de
volverme a mandar que prosiguiese escribiendo. Luego dio en que los papeles
que le remitía, no podía leerlos ni saber lo que en ellos iba escrito, que
cerrados como iban, se los llevaba a su confesor, que era un padre de la
Compañía [de Jesús]. Estos papeles no sé qué se han hecho. (376)
Los gozos tan llenos de dulzura, y suavidad, que aquí dio el Señor a sentir
a mi alma, fueron grandes: las fuerzas desfallecían, los alientos exteriores
desmayaban, porque no podían sufrir tanto gozar. No sentía la oscuridad de
la noche, ni podía darme pena cosa de esta vida. Esto duró tres o cuatro días,
aunque juntamente padecía más era tanto el gozo, que no lo sentía; a ratos
era más, a ratos menos; y estando una tarde cosiendo en la celda, creció
tanto la llama de este fuego, que comencé a cantar, sin acordarme que me
habían de oír. Tocaron a barrer, salí con la escoba en la mano, cantando con
mi mala voz, me encontré con una hermana y como me oyó cantar, volvió
y me dijo: Hermana, nuevo se me hace el oírla cantar; yo me reí, y no le
respondí. (390)
¿Quién es éste a quien así obedecen mis potencias? ¿Quién es éste, que
en tanta obscuridad introduce la luz? ¿Quién es éste, que en un momento
ablanda, y liquida un corazón, que parecía de piedra? ¿Quién es éste, que
da, y hace brotar agua de lágrimas suaves, donde parecía había de haber
mucho tiempo abrojos, sequedades y espinas? ¿Quién pone esos deseos? ¿Quién
me da este ánimo? Yo deseo servir a este Señor. Yo no pretendo otra cosa,
sino contentarle. No quiero contento, ni descanso, ni otro bien, sino hacer
sólo su voluntad, porque si este Señor: es poderoso, como lo veo, lo expe¬
rimento y sé, que lo es; ¿por qué no he de confiar yo en este Señor, que me
sacará con bien de tantos trabajos? (390-91)
. . . Llegué a comulgar este día de San Pedro, tan trabajada; así en lo

exterior con mi poca salud, como en lo interior mucho más; que uno y otro
era mucho. Estaba casi fuera de mí y sólo podía seguir la comunidad con gran
fatiga, pues sólo tenía sentido para sentir, lo que padecía. . . . Estando ya
con su Majestad en la boca, quise pasar la forma y no quiso el Señor, sino
que se detuvo un buen rato, haciendo a mi alma mil caricias y regalos. Yo
comencé a quejarme a su Divina Majestad, diciéndole que cómo me había
dejado en tanto desamparo y desolación, entregándome en manos y poder
de mis enemigos, para que me atormentasen cruelísimamente, padeciendo
terribles y exquisitos martirios. A esto me respondió el Señor, diciéndome:
Hija, [el tormento] no puede ser menos, porque para estar con la unión y
38o UNTOLD SISTERS
trato de estar conmigo, es menester, que estés como el oro más acrisolado y
para esto es necesario, que padezcas tanto como padeces, para purgar y sa-
tisfacer las culpas e imperfecciones en que estás cayendo. (391)
Una tarde me salí de la sala de mi madre al patio, y me puse a moler arena

[sic]. Aquí se me llegaron otras de mi edad, como lo acostumbrábamos las
más tardes divertimos en moler arena. Yo era la molendera. Estábamos todas
arrimadas a la pared que cercaba el patio. Una de las que me rodeaba me
hizo no sé qué perjuicio. Yo como mal habituada, le eché una maldición, y
antes de acabar de pronunciar la palabra, permitió Dios que cayese un rayo.
Y aunque a lo que pareció fue rayo natural, mas para mí no fue sino rayo de
luz que el Señor tiró a mi corazón. El rayo cayó en medio de todas las que
estábamos juntas, y aunque nos dejó a todas tendidas por aquel suelo, no
hizo daño a ninguna. Mas partió la esquina de la pared, y por la abertura
que hizo, salió afuera y mató a una bestia que estaba en el campo cerca de
la misma pared.
Después de pasado el susto y espanto, que fue terrible, nos levantamos del
donde habíamos quedado tendidas, aturdidas y atarantadas del rayo. Yo sin
atender a ninguna ni hablar, caminé a la sala en donde estaba[n] mi madre
y mis hermanas. Y al pasar por una escalera, encontré con el demonio, que
estaba sentado en el primer escalón en forma humana, como un mulato
desnudo en carnes. Estaba mordiéndose una mano. Así que lo vi, levantó el
dedo como que me amenazaba, y me dijo: Mía eres. No te has de ir de mis
manos. Esto más fue verlo con vista interior del alma que con los ojos del
cuerpo. Las razones que me dijo sonaron en mis oídos, y las oí pronunciar.
Mas, confortada y asistida del que todo lo puede, que es Dios, pude hasta
entrar en la sala donde estaba mi madre. (1, 126-27)
La casa de mi madre era muy buena, aunque corta, porque sólo tenía tres
piezas, una sala, y dos aposentos, y así no tuve parte ninguna donde retirarme
a solas, si no fue en la forma y manera que aquí diré con grandísima incomo¬
didad y trabajo. Había una huerta muy grande donde había muchos árboles
y otras plantas sembradas. Para entrar en esta huerta, se pasaba por un
aposento que estaba pegado a la pared de la huerta. Este aposento estaba
techado de paja o sacate como sea costumbre en el campo en las haciendas
de labor. Este aposento servía de guardar en él trastes, y a tiempos solía servir
de gallinero. Ya se entiende lo incómodo que estaba para habitar en él. Pues
en éste me acomodé, siendo tan inmundo por no haber otra parte más decente.
La huerta era todo mi consuelo, con ser que estaba a las inclemencias del
cielo sin tener dónde estar que no fuese al sol y al aire y al agua. (1, 142)
Pues como voy diciendo de la incomodidad de no tener aposento ni rincón

en toda la casa en donde retirarme y estar sola y apartada del ruido y bullicio
de la familia de la casa, que era muy grande, me determiné hacer una choza
13. She most probably refers to the main house; the kitchen, for example, would
have been in a different structure.
New Spain 381
de tablas en la huerta que he dicho arrimada a un árbol. No pude por mí

sola hacerla. Llamé a Polonia, la india que he dicho me dio licencia mi
madre para que me acompañara en ésta o semejantes ocasiones de no poder
por mí sola hacer la cosa. Hicimos la chozita entre ella y yo, de tablas tan
estrechas que no cabía en ella si no era hincada de rodillas, y para entrar por
la puerta era necesario doblar el cuerpo o entrar de rodillas. Esta chozita sólo
era para cuando estaba el aposento que he dicho con gente ocupado, que
entonces no podía estar en él ni hacer mis ejercicios. . . . (I, 143)
. . . Todas suelo pensar y traer a la memoria lo que he de escribir; y cuando

tomo la pluma para escribir lo que tengo ya pensado, y sin saber cómo ni de
qué manera, se me borra de la memoria, y pongo otra cosa muy diferente,
que yo no había pensado, y que tenía olvidado. Más me ha acaecido, y es
que he escrito algunas cosas según y como me habían parecido eran, y después
me ha sido fuerza el leerlas para seguir la materia. Y he hallado que algunas
razones que yo había puesto conocidas y señaladas, las he hallado mudadas
y puestas otras, y otras algunas quitadas en el todo. Puede ser que yo me
engañe, pero me parece que es así verdad lo que digo. ... (1, 208)
Fue andando el tiempo. Mi madre, como me veía tan deseosa de ser

religiosa, negoció el que me recibiesen en el Convento de las Madres Capuchi¬
nas de México, y estando ya dispuesto el viaje y lo necesario para ponerme
en México y tomar el hábito en las Capuchinas, mas como el Señor me tenía
para Recoleta, se desbarató luego, y volví a quedarme como me estaba. Viendo
mi madre que no había conseguido lo que quería en esto volvió a hacer nuevas
diligencias, y negoció el que me diesen el hábito para religiosa en Atrisco,
que hay Convento de la Gloriosa Santa Clara. Fueron tantos los imposibles
y inconvenientes que se opusieron a estorbar el que esto no se consiguiese,
que tuvo por bien mi madre y yo, el doblar la hoja en esta materia y no
volver a hablar más palabra para tener paz y sosiego.
El Señor Obispo Don Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz tuvo noticias de
mi madre, y como era una pobre viuda cargada de siete hijas sin estado ni
remedio de tenerlo, salvo a la Carmelita, mi hermana Leonor de San Jo¬
seph . . . Pues, habiendo sabido su Señoría como estábamos todas sin estado,
escribió una carta a mi madre, pidiéndonos a todas para entramos en un
colegio que había hecho y tenía ya fundado.
Mi hermano Tomás siempre fue muy entero en todas sus cosas. Luego que
vio lo que contenía la carta, comenzó a alterarse, diciendo que viviendo él,
sería descrédito suyo el entrar a sus hermanas en colegio ninguno; que si fuera
convento de religiosas, que en tal caso se podía entramos, pero que de no,
que por ninguna manera. ... (I, 209-10)
... [Mi confesor] aunque naturalmente era hombre muy entero y seco,
con esto hizo empeño de tratarme con sequedad y desaprimiento por ir yo
por camino muy extraordinaro. El modo con que me hablaba era como si
14. This was the Colegio de Santa Mónica, later the Convento de Santa Mónica,
which María de San José did, indeed, enter.
382 UNTOLD SISTERS
estuviera hablando con otra que no fuese yo. Cuando me decía que hiciese
alguna cosa su término era; la Madre María hará esto o no haga lo otro. Me
sucedió un día el estarme diciendo no sé qué, y como me hablaba con el
término que he dicho, entendí y me pareció cierto que era otra y no yo la
que estaba mentando. Y le dije: Padre, ¿quién es esa Madre María? Y me
respondió: La Madre María con quien estoy hablando. Nunca me decía nada
de los cuadernos que le enviaba, si no fue en rara ocasión que era necesario
el preguntarme alguna cosa, y eso muy de paso. Y si yo le quería decir algo,
me atacaba, luego respondiéndome otra cosa distinta de lo que yo le decía.
En siete años que fue mi padre espiritual no oí de su boca palabra en que se
pudiese entender que yo era su hija de confesión. (V, 2)
. . . [Una vez] estaba oyendo la misa conventual, que era cantada. Estaba
el Señor descubierto. Yo estaba toda recogida en el misterio que se estaba
celebrando. . . . Pues estando en esto, me acaeció el ver a una imagen de
bulto de la gloriosa Santa Teresa de Jesús que está en un altar del coro. Vi a
esta imagen bañada toda de una luz clarísima y muy alegre. Aquí oí estas
razones que, según me pareció, la Santa Madre me las dijo y son éstas: Te
prometo cuidar de tus escritos con tal que estés firme en cumplir con lo que
le tienes prometido al Señor, que es de nunca pedir ni querer cosa ninguna
de esta vida con ainco no [sic, ahinco ni] con ansias, sino con mucha con¬
formidad. Que, si conviene y es del agrado de Su Majestad se haga lo que
deseas, poniendo primero antes todas las cosas el que se haga la voluntad de
Dios Nuesto Señor que la tuya. (V, 6)
Voy diciendo. Y luego que las criollas de acá vieron que Nuestra Madre
Priora iba trayendo niñas de la Puebla para que fuesen religiosas acá,'^ se
fueron declarando de manera que no es sólo acá dentro, sino también por
fuera, está ya extendida la oposición o bando que las de acá tienen con las
que han venido de la Puebla. El motivo que Nuestra Madre tuvo en esto no
fue otro más que el haber experimentado que los naturales de acá, por ser
tierra caliente, no pueden aguantar el rigor de nuestro instituto. . . .
Ocho años ha que este gran trabajo se declaró. En todo este tiempo de
estos ocho años no hemos tenido un día de quietud ni de gusto, porque ha
faltado la paz y la unión que, de total, no la hay en la comunidad ni caridad
unas con otras ni la puede haber en donde falta la unión y la hermandad.
Todo ha sido y es una continua guerra y un luchar con cada una para meterlas
por camino y conseguir la paz y unión, que es a lo que venimos a la religión.
(X, 2)
15. It was a high mass.
16. For veneration, as in Benediction. This was a common practice until Vatican II.
17. Maria de San José was one of a group of nuns sent by her Order to Oaxaca to
found a convent there.
18. The first set of selections is taken from Josefina Muriel, Cultura femenina
novohispana; page numbers refer to that volume. The selections after her page 391
are taken from the version of the manuscript edited by Kathleen Meyers; page numbers
are hers.
New Spain 383
Life!®
I did not know how to write and I told His Majesty, Lord, I am hard-set,
for obedience commands me to learn how to write; 1 cannot, nor is it possible
to learn how to do it; you. Lord, do know how many years 1 have been
laboring and persisting at wanting to be able to write, and now that it is
time, 1 cannot set down one single thought.
Lord, for you nothing is impossible, you can do whatever you wish, and
thus you certainly may cause me to obey by making me learn to write and
seeing to it that 1 have no consolation from it, but rather that 1 suffer,just
as 1 suffer in not knowing how to write.
And His Majesty did this, that 1 might write as much as 1 please; but the
effort and fatigue it costs me, only His Majesty knows.
[My confessor] commanded me to write during every minute of the time

1 had at my disposal, taking no more than one hour at night and sleeping
only for that hour, and all the rest of the time 1 was to spend at my writing.
1 obeyed him in this and set about writing by day and by night. As soon as
our Mother Prioress heard of this order from Padre Cárdenas, which occurred
some time later when 1 could no longer set one foot before the next with
such hard labor, she spoke to him and told him to release me from this
obedience, for it was a thing impossible to do.
When some months had passed, after this incident, he came one day into
the confessional and ordered me to write nothing at all, nor should 1 so much
as take the pen into my hand, nor keep any books in my cell, and 1 obeyed
him in this matter also, without a word of protest. 1 spent many days without
writing a thing, nor speaking a single word to him. Later he was pleased to
command me to continue writing. Later he determined that he could neither
read nor know what was written in the papers 1 delivered to him, and sealed
as they were when he received them, as he took them to his confessor, a
priest of the Society [of Jesus]. 1 do not know what has become of those
papers. (376)
Great were the joys, so full of sweetness and delight, that the Lord now
gave my soul to feel: all my strength failed, and my outward breath did faint
away, unable to suffer such joy. 1 did not perceive the darkness of night, nor
could anything in this life cause me pain. This lasted three or four days, and
although at the same time 1 suffered all the more acutely, my joy was so great
that 1 did not feel it; sometimes it was more, other times less; and one
afternoon when 1 was sewing in my cell, the flame of this fire leapt so high,
that 1 began to sing, without thinking that they would surely hear me. When
the bell rang to signal the time for sweeping, 1 went out with the broom in
my hand, singing away with my bad voice; 1 met a Sister and, when she
heard me sing, she turned and said to me: “Sister, Pm surprised to hear you
singing so.” 1 laughed, and said nothing in reply. (390)
19. Translator’s note: the Spanish text reads “padecen,” for “padezca” [?].
384 UNTOLD SISTERS
Who is this, whom all my faculties thus obey? Who is this, who in such
great darkness, brings light? Who is this, who in a moment softens and melts
the heart that seemed to be made of stone? Who is this, who does give and
cause to spring forth the rain of gentle tears, where for so long it seemed
there should be nothing but thistles and aridity and thorns?“ Who instills
these desires? Who gives me this courage? This is the Lord whom 1 desire to
serve. I intend nothing else, but to please Him. 1 want no happiness, nor
rest, nor any other good, but only to do His will; for if this Lord is indeed
powerful, as I see, experience, and know Him to be: then why should I not
trust in this Lord, who shall remove me, for my good, from all these trials?
(390-91)
... I came to receive communion on this past Saint Petet’s day, so afflicted;
and this both without, on account of my poor health, and within, a good
deal more so; both the one and the other were a great burden. 1 was almost
beside myself and could follow the community only with great effort, for I
had feeling only to feel what I suffered. . . . Once His Majesty was on my
tongue, I wanted to swallow the host but the Lord did not permit it; rather
He stayed there a long while, bestowing a thousand caresses and favors upon
my soul. I began to complain to His Divine Majesty, asking Him why he
had left me so abandoned and desolate, delivering me into the hands and
the power of my enemies, there to be most cruelly tormented, and suffering
terrible and exquisite martyrdom. The Lord answered this, saying to me: “My
daughter, [this torment] can be no less, for if you are to be in union and
conversation with me you must become like the most refined gold, and thus
it is necessary that you suffer as you do, in order to purge away and repay
the faults and imperfections into which you have fallen.” (391)
One afternoon I left my mother’s chamber and went out to the patio,
where I set about grinding flour. There 1 was joined by other girls my age,
for it was our custom, most afternoons, to amuse ourselves by grinding flour.
I was the one doing the grinding. We were all leaning against the wall which
surrounded the patio. One of the girls near me did me some sort of a bad
turn. 1, being a girl of bad habits, cursed her, and before the words were out
of my mouth, God petmitted a lightning bolt to strike. And although it
appeared to be but an ordinary bolt of lightning, for me it was nothing less
than a bolt of light that the Lotd Himself aimed at my very heart. The
lightning struck in the midst of those of us gathered there, and although it
threw all of us to the ground, it did no one any,harm. But it broke through
the comer of the wall, and through the opening it had made it leapt out
and killed a poor beast that was standing in the field near the same wall.
Once we had recovered from this terror and fright, which were dreadful.
20. Translator’s note: these three terms could imply as well: abrojos, thistle-shaped
devices of metal, fastened to the whip used by a flagellant; sequedades, periods of
spiritual dryness; espinas, acute long-standing griefs or sorrows (also suggesting Christ’s
crown of thorns). Thus, her figurative imagery of desert harshness could more spe¬
cifically suggest penitence unalleviated by grace.
New Spain 385
we arose from where we had fallen, stunned and bewildered by the lightning.
Without tending to any of the girls or speaking a word, 1 walked back to the
room where my mother and sisters were. And as 1 passed the staircase, I
encountered the devil, who was seated on the bottom step in human form,
like a naked mulatto. He was gnawing at one of his hands. Just as 1 saw him,
he raised a finger as if to threaten me and he said to me: “You are mine. You
will not escape my clutches.” 1 saw this more with inward vision than with
my bodily eyes. The words he said to me sounded in my ears; 1 heard them
spoken. But, comforted and aided by Him who can do everything, who is
God, I managed to enter the chamber where my mother was. (1, 126-27)
My mother’s house was very fine, but quite small, because it had only three
rooms, a parlor and two bedrooms,^' and so 1 had no place where 1 might
retire to be alone, save with great discomfort and effort, in the way I shall
now tell. There was a very large garden where there grew many trees and
other plants. In order to enter this garden, one went through a shed which
was set against the wall of the garden. This shed was thatched with straw or
hay, as is the custom in the countryside on the working haciendas. This shed
was used to store old castoffs and at other times it had served as a hencoop.
Now it will be understood how uncomfortable it was to stay there. Well,
there 1 seated myself, filthy as it was, because 1 had no other more decent
place to go. The garden was my only consolation, although 1 was exposed
to all the rough weather under heaven, having no place to go that wasn’t
out in the sun, and the wind, and the rain. (1, 142)
Well then, as I was saying about the nuisance of having no chamber

or nook anywhere in the house where 1 might go to be alone and away
from the noise and hubbub of all the family in the house—for it was quite
large—: I decided to make a hut of wooden planks propped against a tree,
in that garden I mentioned. 1 couldn’t build it all alone. I called Polonia,
the Indian woman, for as 1 have said, my mother allowed me to take her
with me on this or other occasions when 1 was unable to do what 1 wanted
all by myself. Between the two of us we built the little hut, with planks that
were so narrow that 1 could not fit inside unless 1 got down on my knees,
and in order to get in through the door it was necessary to bend double or
go in on my knees. This little hut served just for the times when there were
people in the shed of which 1 spoke, for then I could not stay in it, or do
my [spiritual] exercises. ... (1, 143)
.... It IS my habit to ponder and bring to mind all the things 1 am to

write; but when I take up my pen to write what I had planned, though I
know not why or how, all that is erased from my mind, and 1 write down
something quite different, which 1 had not thought to write, and which was
far from my mind. Something more, too, has befallen me, which is that I
have written down certain things just as it seemed to me they did occur; and
some time later 1 have been obliged to read them over, so as to continue
21. She most probably refers to the main house; the kitchen, for example, would
have been in a separate stmcture.
386 UNTOLD SISTERS
with the subject. And I have found that some of the sentences that I had
put down, so fixed and familiar to my mind, have been changed about, and
others put in their place, and some have been taken out altogether. It may
be that I am mistaken in this, but to me it seems that the truth is just as I
say. ... (I, 208)
Time went its way. My mother, seeing me so desirous of becoming a nun,

arranged that I should be received in the Convent of the Capuchine Mothers
in Mexico, and the trip was prepared and everything in readiness that I might
go to Mexico to receive the habit of the Capuchines, but as the Lord meant
me to become a Recollect, all this was overturned, and I was left just as I
had been. When my mother saw that she had not obtained what she sought
in this matter, she began to make new inquiries, and arranged for me to take
the habit as a nun in Arrisco, where there is a convent of the [Order of|
glorious Saint Clare. So many hindrances and difficulties stood in the way
of this plan that it could not be done, and so my mother and I thought it
best to close the book on the subject and never to speak of it again, so as
to have some rest and peace.
The Bishop, Don Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz, had word of my
mother, and how she was a poor widow burdened with seven daughters who
had no position, nor hope of any, save for the Carmelite, my sister Leonor
de San Joseph. . . . Well then, when his Lordship had heard about how not
a one of us had a position, he wrote my mother a letter, asking that he might
have all of us, to enter a school which he had established and had now
founded.
My brother Tomás was always most upright in all his affairs. When he saw
what the letter proposed, he grew angry, saying that so long as he should
live, it would be to his discredit for his sisters to enter any such school; if it
were a matter of entering a convent of nuns, in such a case we might enter,
but failing that, in no way would he consent. ... (I, 209-10)
. . . [My confessor] was by nature a very upright and stem man, and
therefore he insisted on treating me with severity and aloofness, because my
path was most unusual. His manner of speaking to me was as if he were
speaking to another nun and not to me. When he would tell me that I should
do such and such a thing, he used the phrase: “Madre María will do this,”
or “she shall not do the other. ” One day it so happened that he was saying
something or other to me, and as he was speaking to me in the way I have
said, it was my understanding, and it seemed to me quite clear, that it was
another and not myself that he was naming. And I said to him: “Father, who
is that Madte Maria?” And he answered me: “The Madre María with whom
I am speaking.” He never said a word to me about the notebooks I sent him,
save on some rare occasion when it was necessary to ask me something [about
them], and that only in passing. And if I wished to tell him something, he
would attack me, and then answer me with something quite different from
22. This was the Colegio de Santa Monica, later the Convento de Santa Monica,
which Maria de San José did, indeed, enter.
New Spain 387
what I had asked. In the seven years he was my spiritual Father 1 never heard
him say a single word by which it might be thought that I was his Daughter
in confession. (V, 2)
.... [Once] I was hearing the conventual Mass, which was chanted.
The Blessed Sacrament was exposed.^'' I was completely recollected in the
mystery that was being celebrated. . . . Then, while in this state, I happened
to see a carved statue of the glorious Saint Teresa de Jesús which is on an
altar in the choir. I saw this image entirely bathed in a most brilliant light
and full of cheer. Then I heard these words which, it seemed to me, the
holy Mother addressed to me, and they are these: “I promise to care for your
writings, so long as you remain firm in fulfilling what you have promised the
Lord, which is never to ask for or desire anything in this life with eagerness
nor longing, but rather with great conformity [to God’s will]. For, if it is
suitable and pleasing to His Majesty, it may be done as you desire, if you
always seek before all else that His will be done, and not your own.” (V, 6)
As I was saying: when the criollas from these parts saw that our Mother
Prioress was bringing girls from Puebla to be nuns here,^^ they began to speak
out in such a way that the opposition or faction of the nuns from these parts,
against those who had come from Puebla, spread not only here within [the
convent], but also to the outside. Our Mother’s sole reason for doing this
was that she knew by experience that the natives of this place—because it
is a very warm region—are unable to withstand the rigors of our institute. . . .
It has been eight years since this great travail began. In all these eight
years we’ve had not one day of calm or pleasure, for there is neither peace
nor unity; nor, in sum, is there in the community the slightest charity for
one another, nor can there be, where unity and brotherhood are lacking. It
has all been and continues to be a continuous battle and a struggle with each
and every Sister to set them on the right path and to achieve peace and
unity, which is why we first came to religious life. (X, 2)
Maria Anna Agueda de San Ignacio
Mar de gracias que comunicó el Altísimo a María Santísima, Madre del

Verbo Humanado en la leche purísima de sus virginales pechos.^^
... se dice ser María Santísima Madre de Dios, Reina y Señora de todo
lo criado, elegida, escogida y criada ab initio, ante saecula, que salió de la boca
del Altísimo, como primogénita de todas las criaturas, ganando la primacía
23. Translator’s note: i.e., it was a high Mass.

24. For veneration, as in Benediction. This was a common practice until Vatican II.
25. Maria de San José was one of a group of nuns sent by her Order to Oaxaca to
found a convent there.
26. All selections from Madre María Anna Agueda’s writings are taken from those
in Josefina Muriel’s Cultura femenina novohispana. Page numbers refer to that volume.
388 UNTOLD SISTERS
a los ángeles y a los hombres; porque fue ideada en la mente divina ante
todas las demás obras de sus manos, empleando en María santísima todo su
poder, delineando o dibujando una imagen en que resplandeciera toda la
Santísima Trinidad, poniéndola por puerta y entrada al conocimiento de Dios
y puerta para entrar a Dios, como elegida Madre del Verbo Eterno, y desde
entonces, como madre, se le concedió, no sólo concebir en su tálamo virginal
al Hijo de Dios, vistiéndolo con su carne purísima, para que Dios verdadero
fuera Hombre verdadero, sino que también sede concedió leche purísima,
acendradísima y virginal, para sustentar al Criador y Conservador, que da
escam omni cami. ¡Oh prodigio! ¡Oh privilegio único de María, que nutra y
sustente con su misma sangre, convertida en cándida leche, a Dios Hombre,
y el que como Dios todo lo sustenta y cría, como Hombre es criado y sustentado
de María!
Bien pudo Dios sin nacer, ni tener madre, ni ser sustentado, como los
demás niños, aparecer en el mundo hombre y Dios, pues a Adán lo formó,
y sacó de sus manos perfecto; pero como todas las obras de Dios tienen dos
fines principales, que son: gloria suya, y provecho de sus criaturas; así en esta
obra de la Encamación miró a estos dos fines, porque de tener el verbo, como
hombre. Madre Virgen; así como tiene en cuanto Dios Virgen Padre, tuvo
el Padre la gloria de tener tal hija como María, y el hijo la gloria de tener
Divina Madre, y el Espíritu Santo tan perfecta, y única Esposa, y los hombres
todo su refugio, amparo, consuelo, y remedio, abogada y madre, que lo es,
y se precia de llamarse madre de pecadores. Este orden y hermosura, que tan
maravillosamente resplandece en la obra de la Encamación del Hijo de Dios,
nos descubre, no sólo la Sabiduría de Dios, sino su amor; porque naciendo
de Madre Virgen, gozamos el incomparable beneficio de tener derecho a ser
hijos de la que es Madre de Dios y Reina de los Cielos, y que en sí encierra
la perfección criada, y se asemeja a la Divina, y como hijos tenemos derecho
para ser criados y sustentados con la leche de sus castísimos pechos, de la
que tenemos mucha necesidad para dejar y desechar las miserias, que de ser
hijos de Eva nos quedaron.
En su leche purísima comunica María santísima a sus hijos fortaleza, para
obrar conforme a los que la fe nos enseña, en que-consiste el creer. (443)
De aquí se colige cómo obró María santísima con la fe, que en grado tan
alto gozaba, obró como ninguna criatura, y más que todas juntas, porque en
cierto modo obró por fe como gloriosa. Dice de esta señora el profeta David
una cosa singularísima, y es: Omnis gbria filiae Regis ab intus, toda la gloria
de la hija del Rey está dentro de ella, como escondida, porque de tal manera
obraba por fe, como si fuera gloriosa; así amaba perfectísimamente, así daba
el culto a la majestad increada, así tenía su soberanía, así le servía, en su
presencia se deshacía, y aniquilaba, en este modo de grandeza de fe y de
obrar con ella fue única, como retrato de su hijo Jesucristo nuestro Señor,
que juntamente era viador y comprensor y aunque su madre virgen no era
comprensora, como había de ser tan parecida a su hijo, tenía tan altísimo
conocimiento del ser divino por fe, que le causaba esta gloria oculta, y secreta
en su alma, de obrar por fe con tan rara perfección, que podían tomar de
María los ángeles lección. Era conveniente esta fe en la señora, para que su
Hijo Dios, y hombre tratara con ella tan altos y profundos misterios, ya que
New Spain 389
no era con igual, a lo menos con quien en sí tuviera cuanto en pura criatura
pudiera adecuadamente entenderlos, y en esta compañía no se hallara el
verbo humanado, como solo entre todas su criaturas, sin tener alguna con
quien comunicarse y que fuera capaz de tal comunicación, y así sola María
santísima entendía y conocía las obras de su hijo hombre y Dios y el Señor
confió de ella su corazón.
Esto baste, por apunte de esta virtud de María santísima madre, y señora
nuestra: Ahora vamos a la imitación. Dice el esposo divino de esta señora,
que son sus pechos mejores que el vino, dando a entender, que la leche es
mejor que el vino, porque éste no es tan al propósito para todos como la
leche, y porque la leche necesitan para tomarla de los pechos ser pequeños,
y el que quisiere esta leche, aunque sea viejo, hágase niño para llegarse a los
pechos de María santísima, y recibir místicamente la sustancia de tal madre
en su leche; aprendamos y gustemos el modo de obrar con la fe, que sin duda
recibiremos fortaleza para obrar lo que esta luz nos enseña, y para mejor
entenderla. . . . (445)
Cartas
... Se me representó la Santísima Trinidad por un modo de especies

espirituales,^^ y sentí que pasó mi alma a un nuevo modo de amor: el padre
imprimió en mí esta locución: yo hiero los corazones con saeta poderosa con
mi hijo unigénito; el hijo me decía, yo hiero las almas y corazones con las
saetas de todas las finezas, que ejecuté por los hombres, en todos los misterios
de mi vida, pasión y muerte; el espíritu santo me decía, yo hiero con flechas
de luz y de fuego. Cada día se me aumenta este conocimiento, y no puedo
menos que confesar al mismo Dios, a todo el cielo y tierra, y a Vuestra Merced
[su director] que me hallo toda herida, llagada y penetrada con tan divinas
saetas y flechas de amor. ¡No amo, ni quiero más que a Ti sumo y único bien
de mi alma, toda me tienes rendida, así mi amor fuera un infinito de amores!
¡Oh si mi voluntad fuera infinitamente mayor, que todas las voluntades, y a
todas las comprendiera y a todas las que son posibles para amaros Dios mío,
amor mío, dueño mío! Nada soy, menos que nada soy; pero sólo para amaros
quisiera ser más que todos los ángeles y hombres, y todo es nada, nada:
¿Señor, cómo te amaré? Eres mi Dios y yo tu criatura, ámate a ti por mí,
amado dueño mío, esposo amantísimo de mi alma: ese infinito amor te ofrezco,
pues no puedo tenerlo, y desde el abismo de mi nada, clamo y pido amor
para amar; Jesucristo Dios y hombre verdadero, como cabeza mía, ama por
mí, y úneme a ti para amar contigo. María santísima, ángeles, santos, criaturas
todas, amad por mí a mi solo y único amado y amador. ¡Oh amador verdadero!
Oh amor, amor, repite las heridas más y más, hasta consumir la vida, y vuelva
a vivir, para volver a morir de amor. Después de este paso, a un nuevo modo
[de] amar se siguió otro, y fue pasarse a vivir con su vida: estaba después de
comulgar abstraída de los sentidos, y en este recogimiento, me dijo amoro-
sísimamente mi dulce amador: Ya no vives tu vida; porque mi vida es tu vida.
¡Oh palabra suavísima, regaladísima y poderosísima! Al punto me hallé en
27. That is to say, she had an “intellectual vision” of the Trinity.

390 UNTOLD SISTERS
aquella vida, vida verdadera; pero lo que vi, sentí y gocé, no es posible que
lo diga, ni cabe en palabras, ni cupiera en mi deseo antes de experimentarlo;
porque ni para desearlo, lo podía llegar a pensar . . . Me sucedió después de
esto, que encendida en deseos de amar más y más, daba mi alma voces con
grande afecto y decía: quién me dará amor para amaros Dios mío, y diciendo
esto, me mostró mi Señor su corazón divino abierto todo, hecho un divino
incendio, y me dijo: Aquí hallarás el amor, metiéndome en aquel fuego, fue
para mí como una mina de infinito amor. Yo meto en las almas y corazones,
deseando que todas ardan y arder yo con todas y en todos. Oh amor que
nunca satisfaces, nunca dices que se ha llenado tu deseo, mientras más sientes,
más deseas, más ansias tienes de amar, pero no es mucho, pues eres limitado
y el objeto del amor es infinito; no puede saciarte el amor de todos los coros
de los ángeles y santos y el de todas las criaturas. No me admiro que San
Agustín deseara ser Dios, sólo por amar a Dios: porque sólo su infinito amor,
con que se ama dignamente, saciará y dejará descansar mi amor; me gozo
que te ames Dios mío, como mereces ser amado, y este mismo amor te ofrezco
pues no puedo tenerlo: dame Señor mío, que todas las almas se abrasen en
esta mina, dame que todos los corazones se unan al corazón de mi Jesús. ¡Oh
fuego! ¡Oh llama! ¡Oh incendio! apodérate de todas las criaturas, arrebátanos,
y llévanos en tus alas de fuego. Ay Dios, por qué no te aman todos, amante
Señor, ámente más y más: venid almas que abierto tiene su corazón mi Jesús:
patente está la infinita mina del amor, a todos convida, gocémosle todos:
atraed dueño y Señor, atraed todas las almas, ardan todas en la fragua del
amor. (461-62)
Me dijeron en lo secreto íntirno de mi alma, el Hijo vive en el Padre: aquí

tuve yo inteligencia de que viviendo yo la vida del Hijo, había de vivir con
él en el Padre: en esto me vi dentro del santísimo Hijo, y en el mismo Padre
y el Espíritu Santo causaba aquella unión tan divina; me parecía verme como
transformada en ella, contemplándola con una delicadeza o delgadeza, no sé
qué nombre darle: Oí otras palabras que decían: date prisa, sal de ti, que es
cumplido el término de tus días. Yo entendí en aquel punto, si esto se me
decía, porque llegaba mi muerte, o en otro sentido, mas toda me resigné en
la voluntad divina, y aunque deseaba que se acabaran mis días por muerte,
era con un total dejación de mi voluntad en la divina; pero luego entendía,
que se acabaron los días de mi vida, porque entraba en aquel día entero de
la vida de Dios, por ayuntamiento de mi vida en la de Jesucristo, que ya mi
vida era de todo punto acabada; porque Jesús la vive. (462-63)
. . . !Oh santo Dios liberahsimo dador! ¿Como te agradeceré este beneficio

tan apreciable, y estimable? ¡Oh fe divina, que me guiaste y me pusiste a la
vista el inmenso piélago del ser divino! Tú me das noticia de su grandeza
interminable, de su sabiduría, de su hermosura, bondad, e infinitas perfec-
ciones. Del misterio admirable de su ser, uno, y trino: de todos los misterios
y artículos que debo creer: de los sacramentos, de que me he de valer, y usar
para participar de este ser divino por medio de la gracia, que comunican; de
los mandamientos y doctrina, que debo guardar, y virtudes, que necesaria-
mente debo ejercitar. Con la cual noticia abrasada mi alma en el amor de
tan sumo bien, mediando tu, ¡oh fe santísima! y guiándome entré a navegar
en este infinito abismo, en este mar sin suelo, en este golfo, que no tiene
New Spain 391
término; en mi Dios digo, asegurada y estribando en ti, que sola tú tienes

este poder en este destierro. Quien no te sigue peligra. Quien te deja se
pierde. Oh fe, fe amable madre mía, ¿quién pudiera decir lo que me enseña?
Muy bien lo dicen, los que con tu luz han hablado como hijos tuyos gtandes.
Yo soy pequeñita, yo no sé hablan Sólo me gozo de ser hija tuya, andar en
tus brazos y ser sustentada con tu leche regaladísima. Tú me consuelas en las
ansias de gozar al que por ti conozco, y me dices me regale y me entretenga
en este destierro con su amor; mirando que si es poderoso, con su poder me
creó, y creó todas las cosas para mi bien, conservándome y conservándolas.
Creó los cielos, para que en ellos le goce. Creó los ángeles y para mi guarda
los destina. Creó el sol para que me alumbre. Creó las estrellas, para que
goce sus influencias. Creó los elementos, y cuanto hay en ellos; para que me
sustenten, me sirvan y aun me recreen. Si es sabio, con esa sabiduría trazó
mi remedio, estando perdida por la culpa. Si es santo y justo, me santifica y
justifica. Si es bueno[,] con su bondad me perdona. Si es hermoso, esa
hermosura te comunica, por la gracia. Si es clemente, contigo usa de esa
clemencia. Si es caridad, con ésa te ama. Si es fortaleza, con ella te defiende.
Si es inmenso, con él vives, eres y te mueves y puedes gozar en todo lugar
y tiempo de su amable presencia. Si es comunicativo, mira cómo comunica
a ti, por medio de los sacramentos, especialmente por él de la eucaristía, que
como es sacramento de amor, todo se da en él. Mira cómo te regala, y
comunica por la oración, mira cuántas señas te da en ella, de quién él es y
de lo que te ama. Estas cosas me enseña tu Fe Santa, y todas las que por no
alargarme no digo; pero en todas me enseña, que mediante ella las conozco
y las confieso. Y mediante ella te conozco a ti, te amo y espero gozarte en la
vida eterna. Haced, Bien infinito de mi alma, que todas las naciones, gentes
y generaciones gocen este bien de ser hijos de tu iglesia, que todos te conoz¬
camos y amemos en esta vida y te gozemos en tu gloria por toda la eternidad.
(465-66)
Yo confieso, que estas cosas las creo por la santísima fe; peto no sé, qué
es, cuando Dios da ésta como nueva luz que añade a la fe causa tales efectos,
que no se pueden decir; sino que por último se me quedan escondidos y me
enferma el cuerpo, que me parece ando con calentura, como desmemoriada
y desatinada, con un temblor interior que parece a cada paso me he de caer,
y así trastabillo y ando como si estuviera tomada del vino; la cabeza padece
mucho y esto que escribo dudo lo pueda leer usted; porque no puedo llevar
la pluma con concierto. (466)
Sea of Graces Which the Most High Gave to Most Holy Mary, Mother
of the Word Made Human with the Most Pure Milk of Her Virginal
BreastsT®
. . . therefore she is said to be Mary Most Holy, Mother of God, Queen

and Lady of all creation; elected, chosen, and created ah initio, ante saecula
28. All selections from Madre María Anna Agueda’s writings are taken from those
in Josefina Muriel’s Cultura femenina novohispana. Page numbers refer to that volume.
392 UNTOLD SISTERS
[from the beginning, before the world existed], who issued from the mouth
of the Most High, as the first-born daughter of all creatures, winning primacy
over the angels and over all mankind; because she was conceived in the
divine mind before all the other works of His hands, as He exercised all His
power in creating Mary Most Holy, delineating or drawing an image in which
all the Blessed Trinity might shine forth, setting her as a doorway and entrance
to the knowledge of God and as a door by which to go in to God Himself,
as the chosen Mother of the Eternal Word; and from thenceforth, as a mother,
it was given to her, not only to conceive the Son of God within her virginal
nuptial chamber, vesting him with her most pure flesh, that the true God
might be true Man, but also to possess the very purest milk, entirely spotless
and virginal, to nourish the Creator and Sustainer, who does give escam omni
cami [food to all living things]. Oh, great wonder! Oh, privilege given solely
to Mary, who nourishes and sustains the God-made-Man with her own blood,
changed into pure white milk; thus He who, as God, sustains and nurtures
all things, as Man is nurtured and sustained by Mary!
Full easily could God have appeared in this world as man and God without
being bom, nor having a mother, nor requiring nourishment like other chil¬
dren; for He formed Adam and loosed him from His hands already perfect.
But, as all God’s works have two principal ends, namely His own glory and
the good of His creatures, therefore in His work of the Incarnation He was
mindful of these two ends; so, to produce the Word as man. He did have a
Virgin Mother, and so, as God, did He have a Virgin Father; thus the Father
received the glory of having such a daughter as Mary, and the Son received
the glory of having a Divine Mother, and the Holy Spirit such a perfect and
singular Bride; and so did men receive all their refuge, shelter, consolation,
and remedy, their advocate and mother, who is Mary, and she is pleased to
be called the mother of sinners. This harmonious order and beauty which so
wondrously shines forth in the deed of the Incarnation of the Son of God,
shows us not only God’s Wisdom, but also His love; because as He was bom
of the Virgin Mother, we thus enjoy the matchless benefit of the right to be
children of she who is Mother of God and Queen of Heaven, and who within
herself encloses all perfection ever created, and resembles divine perfection;
and as her children we have the right to be suckled and sustained with the
milk flowing from her most chaste breasts, of which we have great need in
order to quit and rid ourselves of that wretchedness, which fell to us as
children of Eve.
In her most pure milk, Mary Most Holy conveys strength to her children,
that we may act according to all that faith teaches us, which is what con¬
stitutes belief. (443)
From this we may deduce how Mary Most Holy acted with respect to [the
virtue of] faith, which she possessed in such a high degree that she acted as
did no other creature; indeed, she possessed more than did aU other creatures
together, because in some respects she acted by faith like a creature of glory.
The prophet David says of this Lady a most singular thing, namely: Omnis
gloria filiae Regis ab intus, “All the glory of the daughter of the King is within
her,’’ as if hidden, for so did she act by faith, as if full of God’s glory; and
h¡ew Spain 393
thus did she love most perfectly, thus did she worship the uncreated Majesty,
thus she held her sovereignty, thus she served Him; in His presence she undid
and annihilated herself. In this manner of the greatness of her faith and her
way of acting she stood alone, as an image of her son Jesus Christ Our Lord,
who was at the same time both aspirant to, and possessor of heavenly bliss.
And although his Virgin Mother did not yet possess that bliss, yet because
she was to be so like her Son she did possess such a high degree of knowledge
of the divine being through faith, that it caused within her soul this hidden
and secret glory, which was that of living by faith with such rare perfection,
that the very angels could learn by Mary’s example. This faith of our Lady’s
was most fitting, that God her Son-made-Man might reveal to her such lofty
and profound mysteries, if not as with one equal to Himself, at least with
one who in herself should hold all that in one pure creature might adequately
understand these mysteries; and in such company the incarnate Word would
not then find Himself alone among all His creatures, without so much as
one with whom to communicate who might be capable of such communi¬
cation; and thus only Mary Most Holy did understand and know the works
of her Son as man and God, and the Lord confided His heart in her.
Let this suffice, as a notation of this virtue of the Most Holy Mother Mary,
and our Lady; now let us turn to our imitation of her. The divine Bridegroom
says of this Lady, that her breasts are better than wine, meaning by this that
milk is better than wine, because wine is not as beneficial for everyone as
milk is, and too because in order to take milk from the breast one must be
a little child; and anyone who desires this milk, though he be old, let him
become a child to approach the breasts of Mary Most Holy, and receive
mystically the nourishment found in the milk of such a mother. Let us learn
and take delight in the way of acting by faith, for undoubtedly we will receive
strength to do whatever we are taught by this light, and to understand it
better. (445)
Letters
. . . The most Holy Trinity appeared to me by way of spiritual images,

and 1 felt my soul move to a new manner of loving: the Father impressed
upon me this phrase: “I wound hearts with a powerful arrow, with my only
begotten Son”; the Son said to me, “1 wound souls and hearts with the arrows
of all the courtesies that 1 performed on behalf of men, by all the mysteries
of my life, passion, and death”; the Holy Spirit said to me, “1 wound with
arrows of lighT° and fire.” Every day this knowledge grows in me, and 1 can
do no less than to confess to God Himself, to all heaven and earth, and to
Your Grace [her spiritual director] that 1 am entirely wounded, stricken, and
pierced with such darts of love and divine arrows. I do not love nor do 1
desire anything but You, the supreme and only good of my soul; to You have
29. That is to say, she had an “intellectual vision” of the Trinity.
30. Translator’s note: the word in Spanish is “luz”; literally “light,” it carries layers
of meaning connoting comprehension and understanding.
394 UNTOLD SISTERS
I wholly surrendered, as though my love were an infinity of loves! Oh, that

my will were infinitely greater than all other wills, and encompassed them
all, all that do exist and all that are possible, in order to love You my God,
my Love, my Master! Í am nothing, I am less than nothing; but only so as
to love You I wish to be more than all men and angels, yet all this is nothing,
nothing: Lord, how shall I love you? You are my God and 1 am your creature,
love Yourself on my behalf, do so for me, my beloved Master, most loving
Bridegroom of my soul: this infinite love 1 offer You, since 1 cannot possess
it; then from the depths of my nothingness, 1 cry out and beg for love so as
to love; Jesus Christ, God and true man, as my head. You must love for me,
and unite me with Yourself to love with You. Mary most holy, angels, saints,
and every created thing, love for me my one and only beloved and lover. O
true Lover! Oh love, love, wound me over and over again, until my life is
ended, and I live again to die again of love.
After this stage,there followed another, and this was my going on to
live with His Life. Once after Holy Communion my senses were absorbed,
and in this state of recollection, my sweet Lover said to me most lovingly:
“Now you no longer live your own life; for my life is your life.” O sweetest—
most exquisite and powerful word! At once 1 found myself in that life, the
true life; but what I saw, felt, and enjoyed, it is impossible for me to say, nor
can words express it, nor could I desire it before I experienced it; for I could
not have imagined it even in order to desire it . . . Afterwards it came to
pass that, aflame with desires to love more and more, my soul shouted with
great passion and did say: “Who will give me love with which to love you,
my God?” And while my soul said this, the Lord showed me His divine heart
all opened and become a divine blaze, and He said to me: “Here you will
find that love”; and as 1 plunged into those flames, it seemed to me a deep
mine of infinite love. I place all souls and hearts within that holy mine,
desiring that they all may bum and 1 bum with them and in them all. O
love which never satisfies; never do you say that your desire has been fulfilled;
the more you feel, the more you desire, the more you long to love, but it is
not much, for you are but limited while the object of your love is infinite;
the love of all the choirs of angels and saints and of all created things cannot
satiate you. I am not surprised that Saint Augustine should want to be God,
only so as to love God; only His infinite love, with which He is loved worthily,
will satisfy and give rest to my love; 1 rejoice that You love Yourself, my God,
as You deserve to be loved, and this same love I do offer you since 1 cannot
possess it: grant me, my Lord, that every soul may bum in that mine, grant
me that every heart may be united with the heart of my Jesus, O fire! O
flame! O conflagration! Take power over all creatures, seize us and carry us
off on your wings of fire. Ah God, why do all creatures not love you, most
loving Lord, may they love you more and more: come, oh souls, my Jesus
has opened wide his heart. The infinite mine of love is revealed, it invites
us all, let us all enjoy it: draw unto Yourself, Master and Lord, draw to Yourself
all souls, may they all bum in the furnace of love. (461-62)
31. That is, of mystical union—the passage to a new manner of loving.

Neif Spain 395
They said to me in the innermost secret quick of my soul that the Son
lives in the Father: hence 1 understood that as 1 lived the life of the Son, I
must live with Him in the Father. Then 1 saw myself within the most holy
Son, and in the Father Himself, and the Holy Spirit brought about that
union so divine; 1 seemed to see myself as though transformed by it, con¬
templating it with delicacy or subtlety, 1 know not what name to give it. I
heard other words which said; “Now make haste, leave yourself behind, for
your days have reached their end.” At that 1 understood that if these words
were said to me, it was because my death was upon me, or perhaps they had
some other meaning, but 1 resigned myself entirely to the divine will, and
though 1 desired that my days might end through death, this was with an
utter abandonment of my will to the divine will; but later 1 understood that
the days of my own life were coming to an end, because 1 was entering into
that full and perfect day of the life of God, through the union of my life
with that of Jesus Christ, for already my own life was in every way finished;
for Jesus is living it. (462-63)
. . . Oh holy God, most generous giver of gifts! How can 1 thank you for
this most valuable and worthy gift? O divine faith, which guided me and
placed me within sight of the boundless ocean of the divine being! You give
me news of His unending grandeur. His wisdom, beauty, goodness, and
infinite perfections. Of the wondrous mystery of His being, which is one,
and threefold; of all the mysteries and articles [of faith] which 1 must believe;
of the sacraments, upon which I must rely and which 1 must use so as to
participate in this divine being through the grace which they bestow; of the
commandments and doctrine, which I must obey; and the virtues, which 1
must needs practice. With this news, my soul bums with the love of such a
great good; with you, O most holy faith! as mediator and guide, 1 began to
navigate in this infinite abyss, this bottomless sea, this gulf which has no
end; which is to say, in my God, while 1 am secure and firmly founded in
you, for you alone have such power in this exile. Whoever fails to follow
you is in danger. Whoever leaves you is lost. O faith, faith, my own kind
mother, how shall 1 tell all that you teach me? They have spoken well, all
those who with your light have spoken as great sons of yours. 1 am but a
little girl, and don’t know how to speak. 1 rejoice only to be your daughter,
to be carried in your arms, and nourished by your most exquisite milk. You
console me in my desire to enjoy the One whom you make known to me,
and you tell me that 1 must take delight and dwell in His love in this exile;
considering how powerful He is, for with His power He created me, and He
created all things for my good, preserving me and them. He created the
heavens, that in them 1 might enjoy Him. He created the angels and destines
them to be my guardians. He created the sun that it might shine upon me.
He created the stars, so that 1 might enjoy their influence. He created the
elements and all that they contain, to sustain me, serve me, and indeed
refresh me.^^ If He be wise, with that wisdom He plotted my salvation, lost
32 . Translator’s note: literally, “re-create me.

396 UNTOLD SISTERS
as I was through sin. If He be holy and just, He sanctifies and justifies me.
If He be good, with His goodness He pardons me. If He be beautiful. He
conveys this beauty to you by grace. If He be merciful. He has mercy upon
you. . . . See how He bestows favors upon you and communicates with you
in prayer, see how many signs He gives you in prayer, of who He is and how
much He loves you. These are the things your holy Faith teaches me, and
all the rest which, so as not to go on too long, I do not mention here; but
in all these things it instructs me, and through it do I know and confess
them. And through it do I know You, love You, and hope to enjoy You in
eternal life. Grant, infinite Good of my soul, that all nations, peoples, and
generations may come to enjoy this good, being sons of your church, that
we all may know and love you in this life and enjoy Your glory through all
eternity. (465-66)
I do confess, that I believe these things through most holy faith; but I
know not how it is, that when God gives this as a new light and understanding
which adds to faith, it causes such effects as cannot be described; rather in
the end they are hidden from me and my body falls ill, so that it seems I go
about feverish, as if forgetful and stupefied, with an inward tremor so that it
seems at every step I shall fall; and thus I stumble and go about as if I had
drunk too much wine; my head hurts me greatly, and indeed I doubt whether
you will be able to read these very words that I am writing; for I cannot
manage the pen properly. (466)
Teodora de San Agustín
Cartas de Teodora de San Agustín al Virrey Martín de Mayorga^^
Abril 16 de 82
La Madre Abadesa de Descalzas de Oaxaca
Excelentísimo Señor:
Amantísimo Padre y Señor: A quien debido a las repetidas insinuaciones

de la generosa caridad de Vuestra Excelencia (que breve disfrutaré por la
indecencia de este templo y pobreza de su sacristía, extremo que consternaría
al más irreconocido a Dios) y en reconocimiento de la paternal atención que
le merezco, participo a Vuestra Excelencia que esta nueva Fundación y sagrada
comunidad, ha determinado a beneficio de los bienhechores, y de cuantos
sujetos les sea asequible, celebrar hermandad espiritual, con esta condición:
33. The text of these letters is in a manuscript in the Franciscan Archives in

Mexico City. The copy we have is cut off in places on the side of the page. Our
thanks to Dr. Edgar Knowlton of the University of Hawaii for his help in deciphering
the manuscript.
New Spain 397
que en falleciendo alguna religiosa es obligado el Hermano de mandar decir

tres misas a favor de su alma, cuya caridad en su fallecimiento se compensará
en comunidad con tres estaciones, tres comuniones y tres disciplinas, y con
que vea participante de todos nuestros espirituales ejercicios a fin de que no
se dilate su alma en ir a gozar de Dios. Y si fuere de el agrado de Vuestra
Excelencia numerarse en ella, le suplico sirva manifestármelo para lograr en
esto obedecedir [sic].
Aprecio mucho el restablecimiento de la salud de Vuestra Excelencia y
pido a Dios se la continúe felices años para nuestro amparo. Convento de
Descalzas de Nuestra Señora de los Angeles de Oaxaca. Abril i6, 1782.
Excelentísimo Señor
B. L. P. de Vuestra Excelencia
Su hija y sierva de Jesucristo
Sor María Teodora de San Agustín, Abadesa
Excelentísimo Señor Virrey Don Martín de Mayorga
Señor;
Puestas a los pies de Vuestra Excelencia con la debida veneración esta

humilde comunidad de Capuchinas indias de esta ciudad. Decimos que me¬
diante nuestra recomendación se sirvió la notoria caridad del Excelentísimo
Señor Don Matías de Gálvez digno Padre Vuestra Excelencia de haber aten¬
dido y favorecido en todo lo posible en el tiempo de su gobierno a nuestro
ahijado Don Lorenzo José Cabrera, uno de los agentes de negocios del número
de ese superior gobierno, y único indio americano que será exaltado mediante
su parte en el presente siglo, a costa de un ingentísimo trabajo por haber
entrado a ésa a buscar su fortuna desde la hedad Isic] pueril. Por tanto
suplicamos muy rendidas resucite en la notoria generosidad de Vuestra Ex¬
celencia aquel mismo abrigo para que mediante él viva con el consuelo de
que en la grandeza de Vuestra Excelencia tiene el mismo padre que perdió.
Esperamos recibir esta gracia que reconocemos con pedir al todo Poderoso
llene a Vuestra Excelencia de felicidades y le dure su importante vida los años
que deseamos para el amparo de estos reinos. Convento de Capuchinas Indias
de Oaxaca y Julio 6 de 178-.
A. L. P. de Vuestra Excelencia
sus humildes y atentas servidoras
que en Jesucristo le aman
Sor María Teodora Sor María-

de San Agustín ra de Santa Gertrudis!?]
abadesa indigna indigna vicaria
398 UNTOLD SISTERS
Teodora de San Agustín
Letters from Teodora de San Agustín to the Viceroy Martín de

Mayorga^'*
April i6, 1782

The Mother Abbess of the Discalced Nuns of Oaxaca
Most Excellent Lord:
Dearly beloved Father and Lord: To whom, due to the repeated intimations
of your Excellency’s generous charity (which 1 myself shall soon enjoy, on
account of the indecency of this temple and the poverty of its sacristy, so
extreme that it would shock even the most irreverent) and in recognition of
the paternal attention which you bestow upon me, I do make it known to
your Excellency that this new Foundation and sacred community has deter¬
mined, for the benefit of its patrons and as many individuals as they may be
able to prevail upon, to celebrate spiritual brotherhood, with this condition:
that when a nun dies, the Brother shall be obliged to have three Masses said
for her soul, which charity shall be recompensed by the community at the
time of his death by three Stations [of the Cross], three communions, and
three disciplines, so that he may be a participant in all our spiritual exercises
and his soul shall not delay in going to God. And if it were your Excellency’s
pleasure to count yourself among those belonging to this brotherhood, 1 beg
you to let me know of it, that we may obey your will in this matter.
I am most grateful for Your Excellency’s return to health, and 1 ask God
that you may continue to enjoy it for many happy years, for our succor.
Convento de Descalzas de Nuestra Señora de los Angeles in Oaxaca. April
16, 1782.
Most Excellent Sir

I kiss your Excellency’s feet
Your daughter and servant in Jesus Christ
Sor María Teodora de San Agustín, Abbess
Most Excellent Lord Viceroy Don Martin de Mayorga
Most Excellent Lotd
Sir:
At your Excellency’s feet, with all due veneration, this humble community
of Capuchine Indian nuns of this city. We declare that, upon our recom¬
mendation, the renowned charity of the most Excellent Lotd Don Matías de
34. The text of these letters is in a manuscript in the Franciscan Archives in

Mexico City. The copy we have is cut off in places on the side of the page.
New Spain 399
Gálvez, worthy father of your Excellency, was served the entire time of his
governance by attending to and favoring in every possible way, our godson,
Don Lorenzo José Cabrera. He is one of a number of business agents of this
excellent government, and the only Indian of the Americas who shall be
extolled by his own merit in this century, by dint of his prodigious labors,
having entered that position to seek his fortune from the age of boyhood.
Therefore we most humbly beg you, to renew with your Excellency’s own
renowned generosity that same protection so that by these means he may
live with the consolation that in your Excellency’s grandeur he enjoys the
same father that he lost. We hope to receive this favor which we do ac¬
knowledge by asking the All-Powerful to fill your Excellency with happiness
and that your momentous life may last the many years we do desire for you,
for the aid and succor of these kingdoms. Convent of Indian Capuchine
Nuns of Oaxaca, the sixth of July, 178-
Most Excellent Lord
At Your Excellency’s feet

your humble and obedient servants
who do love you in Jesus Christ
Sor María Teodora Sor María-

de San Agustín ra de Santa Gertrudis[?]
unworthy Abbess unworthy Vicaress
Anónimo
Las indias caciques de Corpus Christi
. . . Llegaron a Guadalajara las noticias del nuevo convento que para indias
caciques se erigía en México, a expensas de la piedad del excelentísimo señor
virrey marqués de Valero.
Era como connatural el que Magdalena luego, al instante que tuvo el
informe de la nueva fundación, prorrumpiese en una resolución absoluta,
firme y última de ser religiosa; comunicó ésta con la madre Cierva, la que
no pudiendo dudar de ser aquella vocación legítima y verdadera, aprobó su
santa determinación y ambas sin perder tiempo, dieron sus cuidados a la
pretensión. La distancia y el copioso número de pretendientas que de México
y sus contornos habían concurrido a pedir el hábito, pudiera impedir o retardar
la pretensión de Magdalena, pero Dios que la quería para que honrase con
sus virtudes, los principios del nuevo monasterio, le facilitó todo, ayudando
mucho al buen éxito de la petición, el tener ésta autorizada con el mismo
interesarse la madre Cierva, de cuyas grandes virtudes ya se tenía noticia en
esta ciudad. Eue admitida por último . . . (225)
... Se mostró el padre de Magdalena muy gustoso de la elección de su

hija, la que no sólo miraba como útil a ella sino también como de sumo
honor suyo. Se celebró entre los parientes y aun en la ciudad, la novedad de
que hubiesen llegado las indias a alcanzar el estado religioso, teniendo todos
400 UNTOLD SISTERS
por felicidad el que tan en los principios comenzasen a hacerlo las de aquel
partido. Dispuso el padre el viaje y como era acomodado en bienes de fortuna,
quiso que fuese conducida la hija con toda seguridad y lucimiento, contem¬
porizando al que juzgaba desempeño de la manifestación de su nobleza y
haberes, en lo mismo que disponía, para que la niña transitase por aquellas
vastas y desiertas tierras, sin los peligros que son ocasionados con la cercanía
de los indios bravos. Asalarió una competente comitiva de indios mecos,
mansos, que armados de arco y flecha, hacían escolta para la defensa, llamando
al mismo tiempo la atención para averiguar el motivo de aquel extraño
acompañamiento, tan extraño que pareciendo resguardo, tenía visos de triunfo.
Pero en una comitiva que se componía de tantos, no iba un buen conductor,
por lo que ofreciéndose pasar por tierras montuosas y quebradas, vinieron a
perder todos el camino, del que tanto más alejaban cuanto con mayor empeño
procuraban hallarlo. Discurrieron por varias partes venciendo dificultades y
precipicios, en los cuales se vio la niña en peligro de despeñarse. Afligida
Magdalena levantó su corazón a Dios y pidiéndole con humilde confianza el
que los apartase de tantos riesgos, disponiendo su providencia modo de de¬
volverlos al camino. Y cuando más errantes andaban por aquellos riscos,
repentinamente se les presentó a la vista un hombre de venerable aspecto,
que traía atadas las sienes con una venda, el cual encarándose a la niña le
dijo con agrado qué a dónde iban, por allí, sin haber escarmentado de los
peligros en que se habían visto, que se devolvieran, y prosiguió dándoles
buenas y claras señas para que tomasen el camino que llevaba al destino que
tenían.
Agradeció Magdalena la noticia primeramente a Dios y después a su bien¬
hechor, que en aquellas circunstancias le pareció un ángel del cielo. Prosi¬
guieron todos su caminata sin que se les ofreciese otro susto o embarazo, hasta
que llegaron a esta ciudad de México, en cuya entrada repitió la curiosidad
de sus requisiciones, hasta satisfacerse con saber el motivo del nuevo acom¬
pañamiento. Y como estaba todo dispuesto, a pocos días de llegada la niña
fue recibida en el convento para vestirla el santo hábito, haciéndose su entrada
muy ruidosa, así por lo que había precedido, como por las demostraciones
que en ella misma hizo el padre de su regocijo. (257, 259)
... A pocos días de haber entrado en el convento hallándose en el coro

en compañía de otras religiosas, observó una imagen de Cristo crucificado
que está en él y reparando el que tenía (como hoy también se halla) vendada
la cabeza con un lienzo blanco aplicó mas su curiosidad para observarlo, lo
miró todo con atención y luego se acordó de aquel hombre [que] la había
encaminado en los extravíos de su viaje porque se le parecía en las facciones
y fisonomía de la cara, fuera de la semejanza que mostraba con las sienes
vendadas. Y no pudiendo dudar de que aquel tan oportuno avisador, fuese
Jesucristo crucificado, dijo: Este Señor fue el que nos enseñó el camino que
habíamos perdido cuando veníamos a México. . . .
Se apoderó de su corazón tan apretadamente el amor a la santa pobreza,
que llegó a ser ésta su virtud predilecta. Los remiendos los reputaba como
diamantes de su hábito . . . (261, 263, 265)
. . . En una ocasión, reconociendo el poco espíritu de una novicia a quien

había sobrellevado con mucha caridad, hizo dictamen de que debía ser ex-
h¡ew Spain 401
pelida, no dejó de costarle dificultad el que se ejecutase pero al fin a sus

instancias se hizo, y pasados pocos días le dijo la abadesa; Hermana Maestra,
el padre cura (era éste un religioso que había favorecido a la novicia para su
ingreso), dice que vendrá acá a que su caridad le dé los motivos porque
echaron a la novicia. A que respondió pronta: Señora, si viniese el prelado
yo se los daré, pero al padre cura no hay para qué, no se apure su reverencia,
que no estamos ya en estado de que el padre cura nos mande moler al
Teneculi.” (351, 353)
Discurría para sí que esta felicidad le había venido por haberse efectuado
la conquista de estos reinos, por lo que daba gracias a Dios. Pero, al mismo
tiempo atendiendo que según causas naturales dependían la gracia de ser
cristiana de aquella contingencia, se llenaba de pavor y miedo, lloraba la
infelicidad de los gentiles sus antepasados y se decía a sí misma: Yo soy cristiana
por la gracia de Dios y hará trescientos años, ¿qué eran mis abuelos, mis
ascendientes? ¡Ay, de los que me libró Dios! (357)
Cuando la hicieron presidenta de él por muerte de su abadesa la reverenda

madre sor María Teresa, luego que pudo desembarazarse de aquellas precisas
atenciones que observa la comunidad con las preladas recién electas, se retiró
a donde ninguno la viese y poniendo de rodillas delante de una imagen de
la Santísima Virgen le dijo con afectuosa y sencilla confianza: Señora, tú eres
la prelada y yo tu vicaria y así, tú has de gobernar el convento porque todo
que hiciere ha de venir de ti, y eligió al mismo tiempo por patrón del
monasterio, para que cuidase de lo temporal, al gloriosísimo arcángel San
Miguel. Repetía esta diligencia todas las mañanas, tomando desde entonces
esa práctica por uno de sus espirituales ejercicios. (369)
... En otra ocasión estaba una religiosa enferma con una inapetencia tal
a la comida, que hastiada de sólo verla, no podía pasarla. Conoció Felipa
esta miseria y como madre que estaba siempre atenta a las necesidades de sus
religiosas, le dijo con amorosa compasión que qué comería, que si se le
antojaba algo. Ella respondía que nada, pero a sus instancias hubo de decirla
que quizás podría comer con menos dificultad unas tortillas calientes. Pues
voy a hacer que las busquen [respondió], y saliendo presurosa de la enfermería
se fue al tomo a solicitar cómo se las hiciesen a la enferma. Llegó a él y al
ir a tocar de parte de adentro, le previnieron el llamamiento de parte de
afuera, diciéndola que recibiese aquellas tortillas que le enviaba una india
cacique de Santiago. Las tomó y se fue apresurada y enternecida a la enfermería
y presentó a la paciente el regalo, teniendo el nuevo gusto de vérselas comer.
Lo que más ponderaba su agradecimiento, en este caso, era el que decía que
venían tan calientes como si las acabaran de apartar del comal. . . .
(373. 375)
35. No such word as teneculi is Usted in the dictionaries. Texomni and texilizdi,
however, mean “mill” (Molina 86); textli and teztoc mean “flour commeal” and “she
is grinding,” respectively (Andrews 469). This is likely an attempted Spanish tran¬
scription, possibly by the author of this account.
402 UNTOLD SISTERS
Cuando sus hermanas las religiosas caían enfermas allí se hallaba pronto
para servirlas y consolarlas, dejando con gustoso desembarazo las dulzuras de
la oración, por estos ejercicios, sabiendo bien el orden que deben tener las
virtudes. Nunca faltaba con sus consejos cuando le patecía oportuno y de
esto dio muchas pruebas hacia las personas de afuera, los tiempos que fue
totneta, en los cuales no omitía el hacer el negocio que podía, para el bien
espiritual de sus prójimos, produciendo sus amorosas y oportunas amonesta¬
ciones muchos y buenos efectos. (383)
The Cacique Indian Women of Corpus Christi^®
. . . News came to Guadalajara about the new convent for cacique Indian
nuns which was being founded in Mexico, the expenses to be paid by the
piety of his Excellency the Lord Viceroy, the Marqués de Valero.
It was almost innate in Magdalena that, upon receiving word of the new
foundation, she should burst out in an absolute, firm, and final resolution to
become a nun; she conveyed this to the Madre Cierva, who, unable to doubt
that this vocation was legitimate and authentic, approved her holy deter¬
mination; and losing no time, they both turned their attentions to this plan.
The great distance, and the profuse number of applicants from Mexico [City]
and its environs who had joined at once in competition to tequest the habit
might have prevented or set back Magdalena’s aspitation; but God, who
desired her that with het virtues she might honor the beginnings of the new
monastery, did expedite everything for her; the success of this petition being
greatly aided by the authotity it bore thanks to the interest shown in it by
the Madre Cierva, whose virtues were already well known in the city. Mag¬
dalena was at last admitted . . . (255)
. . . Magdalena’s father was most pleased to see his daughtet chosen, an

event he viewed not only as useful to her but also as a great honor for himself.
The news that the Indian woman had at last achieved the opportunity to
enter the religious state was celebrated not only among her family but also
throughout the whole city; as all considered it good fortune that the women
of that party should begin to do so at such an early date. Het father arranged
for the journey, and as he was rich in worldly goods, he wished his daughter
to be ttansported [to Mexico] with every pomp and in complete safety, com¬
plying with what he thought to be the fulfillment of his obligation to display
his nobility and estate, at the same time assuting that the young girl would
cross those vast and desett lands without the dangers posed by the proximity
of wild Indians. He hired a competent patty of tamed Meco [Chichimeca]
Indians who, armed with bow and atrow, served as an escort fot het defense,
at the same time attracting attention and cutiosity regatding the motive fot
that strange cavalcade, so strange that while it looked like a guard for pro¬
tection, it had all appearance of a triumphal procession.
But in all that numerous entourage, there was not one good guide so that.
36. All selections are from Josefina Muriel’s edition by the same title; page numbers
refer to her volume.
New Spain 403
as they were obliged to pass through mountainous and rugged terrain, they
all lost their way, and the more they endeavored to find it, the further off
from it they went. They roamed through various parts, scaling obstacles and
precipices down which the young girl was in danger of plunging headlong.
Magdalena, much afflicted, raised her heart to God and begged Him with
humble confidence to free them from all these dangers, giving them by His
providence a way of returning to the right path. And when they had most
gone astray as they wandered upon those cliffs, there suddenly appeared to
them a man of venerable countenance, his temples tied up with a bandage,
who, looking directly at the child, questioned her affably as to “Where might
they be headed, in those parts, without having taken heed of the dangers in
which they found themselves, and that they should turn back”; and he went
on to give them good and clear directions that they might find the road
which would lead them to their destination.
Magdalena gave thanks for this information first to God and then to their
benefactor, who in those circumstances seemed to her to be an angel from
heaven. They all continued their weary march without encountering any
further fright or hindrance, until they arrived here in the City of Mexico,
where with their entrance great curiosity was again stirred by their retinue,
until this was satisfied by learning the reason for such an unusual escort. And
as everything was now arranged, just a few days after the young girl arrived
she was received into the convent to be vested with the holy habit; her
entrance was made most clamorous, as much on account of what had gone
before, as because of her father’s demonstrations of joy, at the ceremony
itself. (257, 259)
... A few days after entering the convent, while she was in the choir in
the company of other nuns, she saw an image of Christ crucified which is in
the choir, and noticing that its head was wrapped with a white linen cloth
(as it still is today), she looked at it all the more curiously and fixed her
attention upon it; and then she remembered the man who had shown her
the road in her wanderings upon the journey; because it resembled him in
the features and structure of the face, apart from the similarity it showed
because both had their temples bandaged. And unable to doubt that their
most timely helper had himself been Christ crucified, she declared, “This
gentleman was the one who showed us the way which we had lost when we
were traveling to Mexico.” . . .
Love for holy poverty so took hold of her heart that this virtue came to
be her favorite. She regarded her patches as diamonds in her habit. . . .
(262, 263, 265)
. . . Once, having recognized the lack of spirit of a novice whom she

[Madre Felipa] had most charitably endured, she determined that the novice
should be expelled, and it cost her no little difficulty to have this carried
out, but finally at her insistence it was done, and a few days later the Abbess
said to her, “Sister Mistress [of Novices], the priest (for he was a religious
who had favored the candidacy of this novice) says he is coming here so that
you may give him the reasons for the novice’s expulsion.” To which Magda¬
lena replied swiftly: “My Lady, if the Superior were to come 1 would explain
it to him, but 1 need not with the priest: . . . your Reverence need not be
404 UNTOLD SISTERS
troubled, for we are not yet come to such a turn that the priest can order us
to go grind com.”” (351, 353)
. . . She used to ponder how this happiness had come to her as a result
of the conquest of these kingdoms, for which she gave thanks to God. But
being aware, at the same time, that by all natural causes the grace of being
a Christian depended on that one contingency, she was filled with dread and
fear, bemoaning the unhappiness of those gentiles who were her ancestors,
and she would say to herself: “I am a Christian by the grace of God, and
three hundred years ago, what were my grandparents, my forebears? Alas,
from what trials has God freed me!” (357)
When they made her president of the convent upon the death of the
reverend Mother Sor María Teresa, as soon as she could free herself from
those compulsory attentions which a community bestows upon newly elected
Mother Superiors, she retired to a place where none might see her, and
kneeling before an image of the Blessed Virgin, said to her with loving and
simple confidence: “My Lady, you are the Superior and 1 your Vicaress, and
thus you are the one who is to govern the convent, for all that I shall do
must come from you,” and at the same time she chose the archangel Saint
Michael as patron of the monastety, that he might watch over its temporal
affairs. Every morning she repeated this practice, adopting it from that time
onward as one of her spiritual exercises. (369)
. . . On another occasion there was a nun who was ill with such a lack
of appetite that, feeling repulsion at the very sight of food, she could not
swallow it. Felipa learned of her wretchedness and as a Mother who was
always attentive to the needs of her nuns, she asked her with loving com¬
passion what she would eat, if anything appealed to her. The nun replied
that she wanted nothing, but when she insisted, she had to reply that perhaps
it would be easier for her to eat some hot tortillas. “Then, I’ll go see to it
that they find you some,” [Felipa responded,] and hurrying out of the infirmary
she went to the turn to request that they might be made for the sick nun.
She arrived at the turn and was about to ring from the inside when she was
stopped by a call from the outside, telling her that she should accept these
tortillas sent to her by a cacique Indian woman of Santiago. She took them
and with haste and tenderness returned to the infirmary and presented the
gift to the patient, enjoying the unusual pleasure of seeing her eat them.
What she most reflected upon in her gratitude, in this case, was that she
said the tortillas arrived as hot as if they had just been taken off the comal
[griddle]. . . . (373, 375)
When her Sisters the nuns fe]l ill, she was quick to serve them and console
37. No such word as teneculi is listed in the dictionaries. Texouani and texiliztli,
however, mean “mill” (Molina 86); textli and teztoc mean “flour commeal” and “she
is grinding, respectively (Andrews 469). This is likely an attempted Spanish tran¬
scription, possibly by the author of this account. Translator’s note: i.e., that the priest
can order us around.
New Spain 405
them, freely and happily setting aside the delights of prayer in favor of these
duties, knowing full well what the correct order of the virtues should be.
She never failed to give advice when this seemed right to her, and of this
she gave many proofs to people outside the convent, when she stood on duty
at the turn, on which occasions she took every opportunity to work some
spiritual good for her neighbors; and her loving and opportune exhortations
produced many good effects. (383)
Maria Marcela
Vida de la Madre María Marcela Religiosa Capuchina del Convento de

Querétaro. Año de 1844. Copiado por [la] M. de las hermanas para el
Sagrado Convento de Sta. Brígida en Méjico.^®
Síguese otra peor, y fue que inventaron un [sic] función ciertos señores.
Yo me obligué a costearla, como lo hice cuando de mis liberalidades en ocasión
que también estaba mi padre ausente; llegó el día de la fiesta a la que fuimos
seguras de que no había de llegar entonces, mas en el instante en que entramos
nos fueron a llamar; fuimos y lo hallamos tan enojado que un pobre mulato
se lo pagó que lo desolló a azotes y le duró el sentimiento muchos días por
que era enemeguisísimo [sic] de que saliéramos. De esto había mucho que
decir, lo omito para no alargarme, y sólo digo que siempre me acibaró los
gustos del mundo (f. 25-26)
En el sagrario tenía todas mis delicias porque el Señor Sacramentado me

ha llevado siempre el corazón, en él tenía mi descanso en especial cuando
estaba manifiesto era imposible apartarme, salir del coro me era intolerable.
En estando expuesto me ponía junto a la reja y me ofrecía unas veces como
lámpara encendida en viva fe, otras como vela ardiendo en amor, otras como
ramillete con las flores de los continuos afectos en que el alma se engolfaba:
en esto perseveraba [?] todo el día si me lo permitían, (f. 101-02)
Ya queda dicho, que lo primero que se manifestó y quedó permanentemente

en el alma fue el augustísimo misterio de la Santísima Trinidad, el cual aunque
siempre estaba manifiesto con claridad, pero en los días dedicados a este
misterio se manifestaba con mayor claridad como de un resplandeciente Sol
y juntamente con un ardiente fuego en que se abrasaba la voluntad: y quedé
asentada que siempre que había alguna manifestación había esta luz y este
ardiente fuego y no sólo en el dicho día se manifestaba este misterio sino en
los días de la Inmaculada Concepción y en otros muchos, porque fue el que
más frecuentemente vi y luego volvía a quedar manifiesto como siempre. Yo
me disponía para todas las festividades con mayor ejercicio de virtudes y hacía
para cada una los atavíos y adornos que le correspondían.
... y en llegando el día estando en oración se inflamó la voluntad, se
38. The manuscript is in the Biblioteca Nacional in Mexico City. Some words are
illegible in our copy.
4o6 untold sisters
ilustró el entendimiento y con él vi todo el misterio. Lo primero se manifestó

la Santísima Virgen hermosísima. Luego el Arcángel refulgente y bizarro:
después el Espíritu Santo en forma de blanca y graciosísima paloma en un
riquísimo y resplandeciente trono. Con aquella vista se enardeció más el
alma, se ilustró mucho más el entendimiento y vi al Verbo en el vientre de
la Señora como en una cuevecita muy linda adomadísima pero no podía
dicemir [sic] si lo que le hermoseaba eran flores o piedras preciosas; ello era
bellísimo, pero no hay en lo criado con que compararlo. El niño lo vi del
tamaño de una almendra pero perfectísimo y agraciado en extremo y de nada
pendía, solo como manteniéndose en el aite en medio de la cuevecita, y en
un rinconcito de ella vi a mi alma muy encogidita como una palomita de las
que se crían en el maíz, y sin quitar los ojos del niñito el cual le llevaba todo
el afecto. Pasado el día se volvió a manifestar otro lo mismo y después
quedaron efectos superiores, quedé toda interiorada y humilladísima agra-
decida, y en un sosiego y gozo indecible y con ansias insaciables de amor y
servir con perfección a aquel Señor que por sólo nuestro amor se hizo hombre;
y otros muchos efectos que por no detenerme no refiero. ¡Bendito sea Dios
por todo! (f. 126-29)
Se siguió a esto disponerme para el Domingo de Ramos, día a que siempre

he tenido gran devoción y afecto: siempre le he dispuesto al Señor una comida
muy espléndida y un vestido el cual hago de esta fotma. Una túnica blanca
de pureza de conciencia bordada con oro, éste era el amor de Dios; le ponía
unos encajes muy finos, éstos eran no faltar en nada a la guarda de los divinos
preceptos: otra túnica morada, ésta hacía de amor del prójimo; la bordaba
con diamantes, éstos eran continuos actos de fe; un manto o capa azul de
celo de la honra y gloria de Dios bordado con rubíes, estos eran actos de
resignación; un cíngulo, esto era el ceñirme a todas mis obligaciones con lo
[sic] votos religiosos los guarnecía. Se seguía la comida, era la mesa la oración;
los manteles la pureza del corazón; la servilleta la pureza de intención; la sal,
la prudencia; el cuchillo la justicia; el tenedot la fortaleza; la cuchara la
templanza; la fruta eran actos de adoración; la silla para sentar al Señor, la
firme esperanza; la [sic] agua la contrición; el pan las comuniones; el vino el
fervor; el palito de dientes el simple y sencillo conocimiento de Dios con
tres flores: éstas son tres presencias de Dios; la una dentro de mí, la otra en
todas las cosas la otra la unión de las dos naturalezas divina y humana; el
ante el propio conocimiento: cuatro potajes, uno la humildad, otro la pa¬
ciencia, otro la mansedumbre, y el otro la pobreza; el dulce la obediencia;
el jumentillo soy yo, y así que comulgaba entraba el Señor triunfando en el
alma . . . (f. 132-34)
... Me he llevado siempre mal con las mudanzas y de verme ya confiada

ya desconfiada; ya desamparada ya favorecida; ya en tinieblas ya en luces y
de esto mil diferencias: el cuerpo unas veces ligero como una pluma y esto
era lo más continuo y lo que más me apuraba otras (y eran las menos), tan
débil que parecía daba ya el último aliento: los dolores sí eran continuos de
día y de noche; pero era cosa que me admiraba ver que siendo tan generales
y fuertes no me impedían ninguna de mis obligaciones; antes sí me estimu¬
laban . . . (f. 149)
Neuj Spain 407
En esta ocasión me vi en unos dilatados campos en los cuales no había ni

árbol ni piedra ni cosa alguna, sólo el Señor en forma de pastor y mi alma
como una blanca oveja andando a su pie por aquellos campos y por detrás
algo retirado y solo como a una vista nuestro Padre el Señor Don Diego al
cual volvió Su Magestad a mirar con unos ojos tan sumamente hermosos
alegres y resplandecientes que con ellos me robó el alma—tanto que muchos
días después ni pensaba en otra cosa ni deseaba más que volverlos a ver; era
de manera que a deshora de la noche y hasta a las dos de la mañana me salía
a ver el cielo para ver si en él veía algún lucero que se les pareciera y como
no lo conseguía crecían más las ansias. Dando yo cuenta de esto a nuestro
Padre el Señor Don José me dijo despídete que no los volverás a ver y así
ha sido que ésta fue la última vez que vi la humanidad de Nuestro Señor,
(f. 166-67)
... de dentro nada sale fuera: los sentidos están en su natural integridad,
el campo sin novedad ninguna, hay expedición y viveza para todo, conocer
lo que es bueno y lo que es malo, nada de lo que es de mi obligación se me
olvida, nada de lo que me puede dañar ejecuto, las pasiones no se mueven,
los tres enemigos no combaten, nada me estorba nada me inquieta, juicios
malos de mis prójimos no se me ofrecen, todo lo echo a la mejor parte,
escrúpulos no me afligen—sólo sí me atormenta parecerme que éste es un
estado de ociosidad y de perdición de tiempo . . . (f. 169)
. . . me manifestó el Señor como en un mapa cuántos misterios y atributos

me ha manifestado y quedan escritos y al mismo tiempo me dio esta inteli¬
gencia, que, conocidas todas aquellas verdades no queda otra cosa que des¬
cansar en ellas que ése era el estado presente y no lo que yo pensaba. Esta
manifestación me sirvió de dos cosas: la una consolarme y asegurarme de los
temores de que pierdo tiempo, y lo otro de facilitarme el escribir porque esto
es lo que puse al principio cuando me resistía a la voz interior y luego se
juntó la pregunta de Nuestro Padre repetida por tres veces, esto es: ¿Qué me
callas Marcela? Y ahora digo ya que nada he callado de lo que se me ha
acordado, todo queda dicho tan a mi satisfacción que ni el más mínimo
escrúpulo me queda en que deje de ser cierto cuanto va explicado por lo que
digo que si algunas cosas parecieran increíbles me obligo a dar juramento
dentro del tribunal de la confesión, o fuera de él así de parte como del todo
lo que aquí he referido y también de lo que voy a decir y de cuanto dijere
adelante, (f. 170-71)
Life of Madre María Marcela Capuchine Nun of the Convent of

Querétaro. Year of 1844. Copied by [the] Mother [Superior] of the
Sisters of the Sacred Convento de Santa Brígida in Mexico City.
A worse thing follows, which was that certain gentlemen planned a cele¬
bration. I took it upon myself to pay for it, as 1 did on my own account on
another occasion when too my father was absent; the day of the fiesta arrived
and we went to it, certain that he would not have artived by then, but the
moment we went in, we were summoned; we went and found him so enraged
4o8 untold sisters
that a poor mulatto, whom he flayed with the lash, was made to atone for
it; and he stayed angry for several more days, for he was most fiercely opposed
to our leaving the house. There is a good deal more to be said about this,
but I leave it out so as not to go on too long, and 1 will say only that he
always made the pleasures of the world bitter for me. (f. 25-26)
I took all my delight in the tabernacle because Our Lord-made-Sacrament

has always stolen away my heart; in Him 1 took my rest, especially when He
was displayed^’ it was impossible for me to go away, for leaving the choir was
unbearable to me. When He was thus exposed I used to place myself near
the grille and offer myself, sometimes as a lamp aglow with living faith, other
times as a candle aflame in love, others as a branch with flowers of the
constant affection that engulfed my soul; 1 remained like this all day long if
they allowed me. (f. 101-02)
1 have already said that the first thing that appeared to me and remained
forever in my soul was the majestic mystery of the Most Holy Trinity, which
always showed itself clearly, but on the feast days dedicated to this mystery
it was shown all the more clearly like a radiant Sun together with a burning
fire in which my will was consumed: and 1 noted that whenever there was
such a vision, there was this light and this burning fire, and not only on the
feast day did this mystery appear to me but also on the feast of the Immaculate
Conception and many others, because it was the one I saw most often, and
later it was shown again just as before. 1 readied myself for every feast day
with a greater exercise of the virtues and 1 prepared the corresponding dec¬
orations and adornments for each one of the feasts.
. . . and when the day arrived and I was in prayer, my will was inflamed,
my understanding illumined, and with it I saw the mystery entire. First the
Most Holy Virgin appeared all beautiful. Then the archangel, radiant and
valiant; then the Holy Spirit in the form of a white and most graceful dove
upon a most rich and shining throne. At that sight, my soul grew all the
more ardent, my understanding was the more illumined, and 1 saw the Word
in the womb of our Lady as in a very lovely little cave most beautifully
adorned, but 1 could not spy whether what embellished it so were flowers or
precious stones; it was most beautiful, but there is nothing created to compare
with it. The Child 1 saw no bigger than an almond; but completely perfect
and charming beyond all measure, and He was suspended by nothing but
seemed to hold Himself in the air in the middle of the little cave, and in a
little comer of the cave 1 saw my own soul all timid like a little dove, like
the ones that nest in the com, all this without taking my eyes off the Child
who commanded all my affection. When the day was over, another [vision]
of the same thing appeated and afterwards higher effects remained, as 1 was
left completely withdrawn within and most humbled and grateful, and with
unspeakable peace and joy and insatiable desires to love and serve with
perfection that Lord who for our love alone was made man; and many other
39. Translator’s note: i.e., upon the altar, for veneration.

New Spain 409
effects which I shall not relate so as not to tarry. May God be blessed for
everything! (f. 126-29)
After this 1 prepared myself for Palm Sunday, a feast day for which 1 have
always felt great devotion and love; I have always prepared a most splendid
meal for the Lord and a dress which 1 prepare as follows: A white tunic of
purity of conscience, embroidered with gold; this was the love of God; 1
added to it some very fine pieces of lace-work; these signified, never to be
remiss i^ observance of the divine precepts. Another tunic of purple, this
stood for love of one’s neighbor; 1 embroidered it with diamonds, which were
continuous acts of faith. A blue shawl or cape of zeal for the honor and glory
of God, embroidered with rubies; these were acts of resignation. A cingulum
this was my binding myself to all my obligations. 1 decorated them with my
religious vows. There followed the meal: the table was prayer, the cloths
were purity of heart, the napkin was purity of intention; the salt was prudence
and the knife justice; the fork was fortitude and the spoon, temperance; the
fruit was my acts of adoration; the seat where our Lord would sit was steadfast
hope; the water was contrition, and the bread, our holy communions; the
wine, fervor; the toothpick was the plain and simple knowledge of God with
three flowers, which are the presence of God; the first one within me, and
the next in all things, and the third, the union of the two natures, divine and
human. The first course is self-knowledge. Four stewed dishes follow: one is
humility, the next patience, the next meekness, and the fourth poverty; the
dessert, obedience; 1 am the little donkey,'*' and thus when 1 received com¬
munion, the Lord entered triumphant into my soul . . . (f. 132-34)
... 1 have always suffered from my inconstancies and from finding myself
at one moment trusting and at the next lacking in trust; now abandoned,
and then favored; with light one moment and darkness the next, and a
thousand variations upon this. Sometimes my body was light as a feather and
that was most frequent; but what most troubled me at other times (and they
were few), my body was so weak that it seemed I was about to breathe my
last: my pain indeed was continuous, by night and day; but it astonished me
to see that although these pains were so strong and general, they never
hindered me in any of my obligations, but rather spurred me on . . . (f. 149)
On that occasion 1 found myself in far-spreading fields in which there was

neither tree nor rock nor any other thing except our Lord in the form of a
shepherd, and my soul like a white sheep walking at his feet through those
fields. And far behind, rather remote and solitary as though seen from a great
distance, was our Father Don Diego, upon whom our Lord turned back to
gaze with eyes so wonderfully beautiful, shining, and gay that they stole my
heart—so much so, that for many days afterwards 1 could think of nothing
else nor did 1 desire anything but to see FLs eyes again. My longing was such
40. Translator’s note: cingulum: technical term for a girdle of a priest’s alb (white
tunic, surplice).
41. Translator’s note; the donkey on which Christ rides into Jerusalem.
410 UNTOLD SISTERS
that at all hours of the night and even at two in the morning I would go out
to look at the sky, to see if there 1 might see some bright star that resembled
them, and as I could not, my longings only increased. When 1 told our Father
Don José about this he told me to dismiss it, for I would never see them
again, and so it has come to pass, for that was the last time I ever saw Our
Lord’s humanity, (f. 166-67)
. . . From within me, nothing emerges; my senses remain in their natural

entirety, the countryside remains unchanged; there is dispatch and alacrity
for all things and a knowledge of what is good and what is evil; I neglect
not a one of my obligations, nor do I perform anything that might be harmful
to me. The passions are still, the three enemies wage no battle, nothing
disturbs or disquiets me; 1 think no bad thoughts of my neighbors, I put
everything in the best possible light, I am not troubled by scruples, but I am
sometimes tormented by the thought that this is a state of laziness and of
wasted time . . . (f. 169)
. . . The Lord showed me as if on a map, how many mysteries and [divine]

attributes He has shown me, and I have written them down. And at the
same time. He gave me this understanding, that, knowing all these truths,
nothing else is to be done but to rest in them, for such indeed was my present
state and not what I thought. This vision served me in two ways: first, by
consoling me and relieving my fears of wasting time, and second, by making
it easier for me to write, for this is what I set down at the beginning, when
I was resisting my inner voice, and then there was added to it our Father’s
question, repeated three times, namely, “What are you concealing from me,
Marcela?” And I now declare that I have concealed nothing of what I have
been able to recall; all has been said so completely to my satisfaction, that
there remains to me not the slightest scruple that all 1 have explained should
fail to be true; and therefore I declare, that if some things should seem
unbelievable, I bind myself to swear under the seal of confession"*^ or outside
of it, whether of a part or the whole of what I have related here and also of
what 1 am going to say and of anything I may ever say from this day onwards,
(f. 170-71)
42. Translator’s note: literally, in the tribunal of the confessional.

Conclusion
It is in front of tfie blank page that the old and young

nuns, with the tXbbess herself sink into the deepest
thought. (Isak ‘Binesen, "The ‘3lank ^Tage”?
Q conclusion is inconclusive in a feminist critical sense

(Meese 133). We see our work as the beginning of explorations into a few
of the uncounted manuscripts and early editions that tell of the lives and
dreams of women of the past. Although most did not call themselves writers,
these authors enriched the Hispanic literary heritage in ways we have only
begun to decipher. We find ourselves at the end of this project with new
questions and considerations, new thematic and stylistic evidence that will
stimulate further study. We hope others will take up the challenge of con¬
tinuing to excavate what has been hidden for so long. The body of work we
have uncovered will, we expect, help scholars substantiate speculations re¬
garding the means by which women, however dominated or co-opted by
those officially in power, have consciously and unconsciously strategized to
organize systems of support, to express themselves, to gain access to the
written word.
Because the religious world view under which these women and all their
contemporaries lived is no longer dominant, it is easier to apprehend the
junctures of power/knowledge^ and the ways powet impinged on being/body/
tongue. Through the manipulation of Mary in the Hispanic world, the Mother
retained a power which was subverted and reconverted by women. The
Church itself displayed a certain pluralism. While maintaining God the Father
and its androcentric structure, it allowed some mobility in terms of gender,
race, and class.
By entering the convent, nuns evaded the gendered structure of society.
They were the only group of females who did not belong to anybody but
God, and they were dedicated to the soul, which was said to be genderless.
When these women wrote that they wanted to be “not like women” but
“virile,” they were at once engaging in institutionalized misogyny, criticizing
the sex-gender system, and pointing out the respected sexual and spiritual
412 UNTOLD SISTERS
values they aimed to embrace. Their voices speak from a de-centered place,
at orrce irrside (enclosed in) and outside (disclosed from) the realm of dom¬
inant literary language.
The relationship between “genre” and “gender” is in Spanish highly sugges¬
tive, since both concepts are expressed by the same word. The manner in
which sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century Hispanic women
cultivated certain forms, particularly spiritual autobiography and theater, may
restore to the modem era some of the literary production left in silence
because the activities and thoughts of women religious were considered a
mere appendage to the male monastic tradition. Writing nuns used the ex¬
amples of the Virgin Mary and especially Saint Teresa of Avila to justify their
authorship. They adapted the religious figure of Saint Teresa into a literary
muse, as we have seen. Women combined the vernacular and Christianity
differently than did religious male writers in the vernacular such as Fray Luis
de León. Their social and cultural roles tended to make them closer to
traditions that conserved older views. Then, having no literary reputation
to lose, they used those traditions in new ways.
Presenting the mundane and the spiritual in conjoined sentences, convent
women introduced their own form of stylistic flexibility. The syntactic shape
of their writing frequently reveals their social and spiritual situation. In
dialogues with other Sisters (Maria de San José, María de San Alberto) and
with Jesus, Mary, the saints (Isabel de Jesús, Antonia Lucia del Espíritu Santo,
Maria Marcela), variations of speech and subversive uses of language emerge.
The range of their discourse encompasses polished theological or mystical
poetry and prose (Cecilia del Nacimiento, Anna Agueda, Marcela de San
Félix); stylized reproduction of dogma learned through sermons and icon¬
ography (Maria Marcela, the cacique nuns, Maria Magdalena Lorravaquio);
colloquial, vernacular rhythms (Ana de San Bartolomé, Isabel de Jesús, the
Mexican Maria de San José); stylized literary forms (Cecilia del Nacimiento,
Marcela de San Félix, María de San José), and deliberately subliterate imi¬
tations (María de San Alberto), âny women worked in collective or semT
collective modes, reading the day’s writing to each other and to the community
or participating in recording each other’s extraordinary piety (Josefa de la
Providencia, Mariana de la Encamación). This patchwork method of pro¬
ducing texts also calls for further study. The implications of such stylistic
fluidity for later female writing remain to be explored.
The work of these untold Sisters contributes new pieces to the puzzle of
women’s history. Their texts invite critical analysis, particularly with the
application of a cross-grid of disciplinary and interpretative approaches. Con¬
tinued gathering of material is needed. The study could be amplified to include
lay religious and, for later centuries, active as well as contemplative Orders.
More must be learned about the connections among women of different
countries, orders, and convents, their networks and support systems, their
competitiveness and rivalries.
We had originally envisioned writing a final chapter to offer the voices of
other women religious writers, but we soon realized that that would be another
volume rather than another chapter. There were too many. We want to
mention, however, a few of the women whom scholars have treated, even
if some appear only in arcane sources. Mariana Alcoforado (1640-1723) of
Portugal is well known for her “illicit” love letters. The “Nun Ensign” (early
Conclusion 413
seventeenth century) of Spain attracted attention as a renegade.^ Maria de

Agreda (1602—1665) Spain, whose major work was examined for possible
heresy at the Sorbonne, advised a king. Madre Castillo (1671-1742) of
Colombia wrote accounts of mystical experiences which have been frequently
anthologized, making her one of the few women to have achieved an au-
dience, however minimal, in the twentieth century. Juliana Morel (1594-
1653) of Cataluña received a doctorate at Avignon at the age of thirteen and
translated the work of Saint Augustine into French. Luisa Carvajal y Mendoza
(1566—1614) of Spain set herself the project of reconverting the English to
Catholicism. The lives and works of these women also merit further study.
Historically, a monosexual discourse has dominated the social and critical
institutions of Hispanic literatures. The literary establishment has selected
and commented on literary texts with a univocal orientation that ultimately
reduces the canon. The texts of women religious have been obscured, for-
gotten, ignored, or trivialized. Nevertheless, the reality of their experience
transcends the control exercised over written discourse. Convent authors
wested a space for life and nairative from a society which, allowed little room
for the independent pursmt of either. As they resurface in the late twentieth
cenfury,”fEey may teach us about the past, but also about how we may seek
new directions for our own time and place.
•i?-.
i-.
chotes
Introduction
1. In Manuel Serrano y Sanz, Apuntes para una critical essays edited by Stephanie Merrim.
biblioteca de escritoras españolas, the vast majority 4. We first heard this expression, now com¬
of the sixteenth' and seventeenth-century women monly employed, used to characterize women’s
authors presented are nuns. A recent bio-biblio¬ writings in a public lecture by Sandra Gilbert and
graphic survey of women writers of Madrid during Susan Gubar at Barnard College.
the same period by Maria Isabel Barbeito Cameiro 5. Saint Teresa spent a good part of the first
also includes a very large number of women re¬ fifty years of her life in Avila, the city of her birth.
ligious. See also Julio Caro Batoja, Lms formas One woman of Avila famed for religious exem-
complejas de la vida religiosa; Antonio Domínguez plarity at this time was Maria Vela. See The Third
Ortiz, Las clases privilegiadas en la España del An¬ Mystic of Avila. For further study of this tradition
tiguo Régimen; and Josefina Muriel, Cultura fe¬ in Avila, see Jodi Bilinkoff, “The Eloly Woman
menina novohispana. and the Urban Community in Sixteenth Century
2. In the last fifteen years or so, Maria de Zayas Avila.”
y Sotomayor (b. Madrid, 1590, d. 16—) has gained 6. There is a large bibliography on this subject.
recognition as a significant prose writer. Among A classic study is Juan Augusto Marichal, “Santa
other merits, her Novelas amorosas y ejemplares Teresa en el ensayismo hispánico.”
(Novels of Love and Morality) (1637) and Desen¬ 7. He reports that a census taken in 1625 reg¬
gaños amorosos (Disillusioned Love) (1647) have istered almost 9,000 men’s convents and suggests
won praise as forceful responses to the truculent that there were an equal number for women.
misogyny of the period. “Siglo de Oro,” or “Golden 8. Essays on the daily life of women in the
Age," is the term traditionally ascribed by his¬ sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are included
torians and critics to a period that runs approx¬ in the two-volume Nuevas perspectivas sobre la mu¬
imately from the middle of the sixteenth century jer. For a discussion of Latin American women
until t68r. During that time, despite political during the colonial period, see Lavrin 1978. John
decadence, the literary and fine arts flourished. It C. Super devotes a chapter to women in his close
is the era of Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Quevedo, study of colonial Querétaro.
Góngora, Gracian, and Calderón de la Barca. See 9. Nominally at least, nuns of most orders took
López Estrada’s and Wardropper’s volumes of the a vow of poverty that forbade their having any
Historia y crítica de la literatura española for an possessions. Nevertheless, women religious played
excellent overview of critical issues and genres in an active role in business affairs.
the Golden Age, and Rivers, chapters 3 (“Ren¬ to. Our attention to divergent periodicity in
aissance Experiments”) and 4 (“Baroque Age of women’s history is inspired by Joan Kelly-Gadol’s
Gold”) for a view of the period in English. With now-classic essay, “Did Women Have a Renais¬
the exception of Luisa Roldán, the sculptor, and sance?” See also Gónzalez et al., Los orígenes del
the three writers already mentioned, women in feminismo en España, especially 67-71.
the arts of the period have generally been un¬ 11. For further information, see Brink. Also,
known, ignored, or forgotten. an anthology edited by Patricia Labalme contains
3. Some recent studies of Sor Juana from a several articles about learned women of the Eu¬
feminist perspective include a special issue of Le¬ ropean Renaissance. See especially the articles by
tras femeninas, a special issue of the University of Bainton and King.
Dayton Review, and a forthcoming anthology of 12. See especially the chapters concerned with
415
4i6 Notes to pp. 6-15
writing and learning, such as Chapters IV, V, and tantes que estaba en su mano poner; la pureza de
costumbres, comerrzando por la propia casa” [Santa
IX.
13. Among convents’ functions was the Teresa, modelo de feminismo cristiano 81] (The vir¬
schooling of young girls, many of whom subse¬ gin of Avila . . . placed against the advances of
quently professed as nuns. See, for example, Mar¬ Protestantism the only containing wall that was
iana de la Encamación (Chapter 6 of this study). in her power to erect: a life of purity, beginning
14. For a view of her life and influence on the with her own home).
Spanish court, see T. D. Kendrick’s biography. 24. The major English-language scholar of Saint
15. Luther lambasted what he saw as rampant Teresa is E. Allison Peers. See, for example, his
idolatry and spiritual laxity within the Church. Saint Teresa of Jesus and Other Essays and Addresses.
When he broke away from the Church and mar¬ The bibliography on Saint Teresa is, of course,
ried a nun he became a satanic figure in the eyes enormous. A good introduction in Spanish, with
of the orthodox. extensive references to other sources, is the an¬
16. See, for example, Antonio Márquez, Los thology of essays edited by Montalva and Bar¬
alumbrados: Orígenes y filosofía (1525-1559). There rientos.
is an extensive and useful bibliography on pages 25. Labarge briefly considers some of the in¬
sights that a modem reader might learn, as well
295-315-
17. These patterns of thought and behavior as the importance of visionary experience to fe¬
must have been similar to what we would today male medieval mystics, in her chapter titled
call psychoanalytic processes. “Women Who Prayed: Recluses and Mystics. ” See
18. The printing press was first introduced into especially 129-42. Although her study refers to
Spain in the late fifteenth century. It appeared in an earlier historical period, many of her conclu¬
Valencia in 1474 and in Seville in 1478. sions seem valid for the time and place we discuss
19. A standard history of the Spanish Inquis¬ here.
ition in English is the study by Henry Kamen. 26. During the Middle Ages, self-inflicted pain-
20. The Immaculate Conception was fervently and illness were ways of being close to God (Bynum,
taken up by Spanish ecclesiastic officials and kings Holy Feast . . .). In the Spanish-speaking world,
in the early seventeenth century, as the treatise this view inspired behavior throughout the period
on the subject by Cecilia del Nacimiento (Chap¬ we study.
ter 2) demonstrates. Suzanne L. Stratton recently 27. “. . . una noche, que me parecía verlo des¬
studied artistic depictions of the Immaculate Con¬ nudo y arrodillado sobre la cmz, y que una nu-
ception in Spain from the late fourteenth to the becita muy leve le iba enlazando y subiendo por
eighteenth centuries. She emphasizes the con¬ el cuerpo, y mi alma, deshaciéndose en afectos
nection between artistic and doctrinal purposes, de su Señor, entendía que ella era aquella nu-
especially during the reigns of Philip III and IV, becita ...” Our translation. For further discus¬
when the Hapsburg monarchy became personally sion, see Stacey Schlau, “The Discourses of
and politically involved in an even more intense Orthodoxy Subverted: Madre Castillo as Spiritual
manner in the campaign to declare the Immac¬ Autobiographer. ”
ulate Conception official dogma. The efforts were 28. Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza (1566-1614)
unsuccessful; the Immaculate Conception was not is a fascinating figure. Daughter of the highest
declared official dogma until 1854. aristocracy, she lived in utmost austerity, emu¬
21. For a full discussion of Erasmus’s influence lating the dress and prayer life of nuns, without
in Spain, see Bataillon. ever professing. In keeping with the missionary
22. This was true well into the twentieth cen¬ spirit of the Jesuits, to whom she served as a ben¬
tury. Efrén de la Madre de Dios and Otger Steg- efactor, she traveled to England in order to re¬
gink, authors of Saint Teresa’s official biography, convert the British to Catholicism. She wrote a
admit in their 1968 edition that they knew of her Life and many religious poems.
Jewish lineage in their 1946 edition but suppressed 29. In Chapter 2 of The Madwoman in the Attic,
mention of it “to mitigate the moral effect of the “Infection in the Sentence; The Woman Writer
news on many surprised readers” (4, n. ii). Our and the Anxiety of Authorship. ”
translation. 30. For further study of this writer, including
23. In one twentieth-century Catholic ac¬ the passage cited above, see Chapter 3 of this
knowledgment of this role, P. Silverio de Santa study.
Teresa states: “La virgen de Avila . . . puso el 31. For a discussion of popular religion in Ren¬
único dique de contención a los avances protes¬ aissance Spain, see Christian. See also Chapter
Notes to pp. 15-25 417
3 of this study on Isabel de Jesús for an example 33. For a discussion of the visual relationship
of this phenomenon. between the arts and religion, see Miles.
32. We argue that for the spiritual autohiog- 34. See Chapter i of this study for the Spanish
raphers of whom we speak, Saint Teresa’s Vida of this quote and for further discussion of this
became a far more cogent model to imitate than writer.
Augustine’s Confessions. For a discussion of how 35. See Chapter i of this study for the Spanish
her Life fits into a woman’s tradition of writing of this quote and for further study of this writer.
autobiography, see Jelinek 18-20.
Chapter i
1. Although the Order’s historians, such as P. 8. Saint Teresa dubbed her with the epithet,
Silverio de Santa Teresa, often sing her praises repeated in the chronicles of the Crder. Ana de
and recognize her unjust persecution in footnotes San Bartolomé first entered Carmelite iconogra¬
and brief passages, she has never taken her place phy in this role. A painting by Victor Villán de
along with the men in the annals of the Order Ara depicts Saint Teresa on her deathbed in the
and in the canon of literature of the period. arms of Ana de San Bartolomé. Even today, Car¬
2. In this and in the sharply developed irony melites speak and write of Madre Ana first as the
of her literary style, she is a significant precursor woman who held Saint Teresa as she died. See,
of the Mexican nun and famous seventeenth-cen¬ for example, Egido 87.
tury writer. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. 9. Kendig and Flutton make general estimates
3. All citations in our text are from the edition of life expectancy, based on gravestones, legal
of Maria de San José’s writings prepared by Si¬ documents, and skeletons. Their figure for seven¬
meón de la Sagrada Familia, which we have teenth-century man [sic] in Europe is fifty-one
checked for accuracy against the manuscripts. The years old, excluding those who died before sixteen
“Elegía,” “Ramillete de mirra,” and other poems years of age (8). Nevertheless, at least one demo¬
and writings are in MS 2176 and the Libro de graphic scholar, James C. Riley, claims that any
recreaciones in MS 3508, Biblioteca Nacional, estimate for life expectancy before the eighteenth
Madrid. “Instrucción de novicias” can be found century is dubious at best, because there is a prob¬
in the archive of the Discalced Carmelite Con¬ lem with reliable knowledge (e.g., 41—42).
vento de San José, Seville. 10. As Rosa Rossi points out, the term “obe¬
4. “Cne of the most characteristic aspects of dience” has at least three meanings, but Saint
religious life is, in fact, an ever-increasing ten¬ Teresa used the phrase “por obediencia” (for the
dency toward ostentation ... in the fifty years sake of obedience) almost always to mean either
following [the reforms] exterior and visual expres¬ an order or a permission (license) given by a (male)
sion of religious sentiment becomes increasingly religious superior. She never used it in the sub¬
important” (Defoumeaux 113). Cur translation, jective sense of bending one’s will to that of a
from the Spanish translation of the French. superior (Rossi, n. 19, 48-49).
5. “[Mjérite, dans I’histoire de la restauration 11. One of the first Reformed Carmelites to be
catholique en France, une place que les historiens approached regarding the establishment of con¬
ne lui ont pas encore donnée.” Cur translation. vents in France was Maria de San José. Father
6. This statement is part of a shorter version Juan de Quintanadueñas de Bretigny, translator
of an episode of dissatisfaction with a preacher. of Mother Teresa’s works and principal architect
The longer version appears in our selections at of the Carmelite expansion to France, visited her
the end of the chapter. In his edition, Urkiza in Seville in 1583 and formally invited her to
labels the later and briefer autobiography “B” and found French Reformed Carmelite convents. She
the earlier, longer one “A.” accepted with enthusiasm, but the transfer never
7. Francisca de Jesús (Cano) professed as a lay materialized, according to Simeón de la Sagrada
Carmelite nun in Medina del Campo in 1578. Familia (18), who does not document either the
Julián Urkiza claims that the short relación was reason or his sources for this information.
probably dictated between 1597 and 1604 (I, fn. 12. The nuns of Bourges, unhappy with Bé-
30, 228). The two women were baptized on the rulle, were forced to leave the convent in 1623;
same day and died in the same year. they founded a new convent under the Order’s
418 Notes to pp. 26-37
jurisdiction in Ypres, Flanders. Eleven nuns from 21. Beginning in the early thirteenth century,
Bordeaux left their convent in 1624 and even¬ the medieval Beguinages offered women of all
tually founded a convent in Port-a-Mousson in classes a communal space with other women to
r627 (I, 397-98, n. 2). lead a spiritual, ascetic life. Unlike nuns, Be-
13. Bérulle had undertaken the supervision of guines were under no formal rule, were not at¬
an oratorio—a circle of dwellings for the pious tached to any Order, and did not take perpetual
surrounding a monumental cathedral. Madre Ana vows. Although initially supported by the Church
wrote many letters over a number of years, as¬ hierarchy and aristocracy, possibly because there
suring him of success. were not enough places for all the women who
14. The convent register in Malagón where wanted to enter convents, the Beguines were
she professed (1570) gives her father’s name as gradually restricted by an increasingly conserva¬
Don Sebastián Salazar and her mother’s as Doña tive Church policy and had all but disappeared
María Torres. by the fifteenth century (Labarge 115-20 and Ray¬
15. Although not yet a founder and reformer mond 75—77). For a contextualized treatment of
of monasteries, Madre Teresa was already re¬ the Beguines, as refers to women’s writing during
nowned for her piety. She had been sent to con¬ the European Middle Ages, see Wilson, “Intro¬
sole doña Luisa, whose confessors were afraid that duction.”
grief over her husband’s untimely death would 22. Julián Urkiza, editor of the Obras complex
cause her to die as well. tas, gathers these texts under the title, “Forma¬
16. Madre María witnessed the first meeting ción de novicias y ejercicios de piedad” [I, 641-
of Madre Teresa with the man who, as confessor, 58] (“Education of Novices and Exercises of Piety”).
confidant, and collaborator, was to be the spiritual 23. According to Urkiza, it is impossible to
love of her life: (. . . “encuentro verdaderamente determine the exact date of composition, but the
trascendental para ambos, no menos que para la autobiography does seem to include texts written
historia de la entera Reforma carmelitana. María during the three periods cited above, with an
de San José vivió con emoción aquellos días y nos additional final paragraph written in 1625 (Urkiza
dejó una relación interesante de ellos en su Libro I, 280).
de recreaciones ...” [Simeón de la Sagrada Fami¬ 24. She describes devils vividly in many situ¬
lia 14] (a truly transcendental encounter for both, ations. Usually they cause terror or torment, but
and no less for the history of the entire Carmelite on two occasions they are made the object of
Reform. Maria de San José lived those days with derisive laughter, as when she says: “. . . vi en
emotion and left us an interesting chronicle of una visión en el aire unas manadas de demonios
them in her Book of Recreations . . .). que hacían alegrías y danzaban unos con otros. . . .”
17. In his chronicle of Saint Teresa and the [I, 431] (. . . in a vision 1 saw hordes of demons
foundation in Seville, Piñero Ramírez cites Libro in the air cavorting and dancing with each
de recreaciones (Book of Recreations) by Maria de other. . . .).
San José. See, for example, p. 33. 25. The letters take up all 941 pages of Volume
18. Unfortunately, only part of Saint Teresa’s II of the Obras completas.
side of the correspondence survives, and none of 26. The only other likeness of Saint Teresa
Maria de San José’s. All but a few of her letters which is considered realistic is a portrait for which
were destroyed, although Simeón de la Sagrada Maria de San José and Father Gracián convinced
Familia’s claim that “ha llegado a nosotros gran her to sit. It is by Fray Juan de la Miseria, an
parte” [ 16] (a large portion of them has come down Italian painter and lay Carmelite who had been
to us) awakens curiosity about their whereabouts. commissioned to paint the cloister of the Seville
19. Until recently historians of the period, as Convent. The portrait is dated June 2, 1576 (Cano
well as Carmelites, have considered Doria a hero Novas 25, 158-60).
in the establishment of the Reform. New studies 27. The diálogo form has a long history in
document the full extent of his divisive and Spanish literature, of course, dating from the
treacherous policies and actions. See, for exam¬ Middle Ages through the first third of the sev¬
ple, Egido 43-44. enteenth century. In a discussion of the diálogo in
20. “. . . la rica personalidad religiosa, espir¬ the later Spanish Golden Age, Alan Trueblood
itual y literaria de la Madre María de San José . . . identifies the dialogue with Renaissance human¬
y [d]el puesto que le corresponde en la complicada ism, as opposed to a baroque mentality. Maria de
historia de los treinta primeros años de la Reforma San José certainly knew the form; she was well
teresiana” (our translation).
educated. In addition, one of the most famous
Notes to pp. 38-133 419
diálogos, published in 1583—De los nombres de 29. “Angela” had been Saint Teresa’s pen name
Cristo (Of the Names of Christ)—was written by in her correspondence with Gracián.
Fray Luis de León, a coauthor of the famous Papal 30. Withholding of confession, infrequently
Brief and first editor of Saint Teresa’s writing. Fray mentioned, is noted in a few of the nuns’ writings,
Luis’ work, which takes place in the pastoral set- which leads us to assume that it was more common
ting of an Augustinian retreat, consists of a series than is supposed.
of conversations among three fictionalized monks. 31. The title is a metrical form consisting of
28. For a fuller discussion of this issue in Eu¬ quartets of eight-syllable lines, usually with a rhyme
rope, see Joan Kelly, 1984. scheme of a-b-b-a.
Cfiapter 2
1. J. H. Elliott suggests that the court’s short¬ writing to the king, and the other to his sisters’
lived move to Valladolid was an attempt by the convent, where it remains. José, the second brother,
king’s favorite, the Duke of Lerma, to remove his was also appointed by the king to serve in various
monarch from the influence of his grandmother, ecclesiastic offices. While serving as secretary to
the Empress Maria. The empress had been a nun a cardinal in Lisbon, José befriended Maria de
in the convent of the Descalzas Reales in Madrid San José, Saint Teresa’s confidante and compan¬
since 1576 (301, n. i). Elliott gives the date of ion (see Chapter r). Before she died. Madre Maria
1601 for the court’s transfer to Valladolid; other entrusted José with fifty-five letters written to her
authorities we have consulted use r6oo (see, for by Teresa, the beloved Mother-Founder. José in
example, Rodriguez and Urrea 335). turn gave them to Francisco, who delivered them
2. No biography describes the lives of the two to the Carmelite convent in Valladolid in 1614,
sisters between the year of their mother’s death, the year of Teresa’s beatification. Despite gifts to
when Maria was thirteen and Cecilia eleven or convent benefactors over the centuries, forty-one
twelve, and the year of their profession. letters remain in the same archive.
3. All manuscripts cited in this chapter are Another brother, Antonio, was a well-known
from the archive of the Discalced Carmelite Con¬ mystic, who wrote many letters of spiritual guid¬
vento de la Concepción in Valladolid, except where ance to Cecilia. After his death, his sisters and
otherwise noted. Manuscript identification num¬ brothers contributed to the unsuccessful campaign
bers are those of the archive. We are deeply grate¬ for Antonio’s beatification. (His spirituality is dis¬
ful to the Mother Superior and Sisters of the cussed in Sainz Rodriguez.) Another brother,
convent for allowing us to consult manuscripts Diego, became the family chronicler. The former
and for their help in locating and verifying doc¬ secretary to a cardinal, Diego was convinced to
uments. turn to a more austere life as a Discalced Carmelite
4. Although Diego de San José copies out a by his sister Maria, whom he called “my Monica,”
petition for a coat of arms sent to Lisbon by one recalling the conversionary efforts of Saint Au¬
of his cousins, other particulars of Antonio Sob- gustine’s sainted mother.
rino’s (the father’s) family background remain ob¬ 6. The r982 editor of an anthology of the po¬
scure thus far, except that Alonso-Cortés suggests etry of the nuns entitled Libro de romances y coplas
that theirs was an illustrious family from Braganza. del Carmelo de Valladolid dates compilation of this
The children’s attraction for the Discalced Car¬ work in the last decade of the sixteenth or first
melite Order, an intellectual and religious haven decade of the seventeenth century (Garcia de la
for New Christians at the time, as well as, for Concha I, p. XXV). Although he hypothesizes
example, their brother José’s friendship with Maria that Isabel de Sacramento brought together eighty-
de San José (Chatper i) lead us to wonder whether five percent of the poems (p. XXII), he also states
they were not of Jewish lineage. that Maria de San Alberto and Cecilia del Na¬
5. Erancisco, the oldest brother, was appointed cimiento “debieron ser animadoras del colectivo
Bishop of Valladolid. Earlier, Philip II had con¬ ambiente poético” [XXII] (must have inspired the
ferred upon him the task of gathering all of Teresa collective poetic milieu).
of Avila’s works in Valladolid in order to deposit 7. During the first term (1602-1605), ill health
them in the Escorial’s archive. Erancisco gave one forced her resignation. In the second term (1608-
copy of The Way of Perfection in the Saint’s hand¬ 1610), the same ecclesiastic official who had con-
420 Notes to pp. 133-48
demned Fray Tomás, her confessor, suddenly or¬ activities extramuros despite official sanctions.
dered Madre Cecilia back to Valladolid, claiming Convent writers frequently took advantage of such
that she would harm “matters here pertaining to opportunities by using figurative language to alter
our Order” (Cecilia del Nacimiento 484). the traditional patriarchal constructs in subtle ways.
8. She bought the building which still houses 15. Despite its vulnerability to censorship, their
the convent (1608) and assured the foundation writing offered Maria de San Alberto and Cecilia
of a male Carmelite monastery there (1603). del Nacimiento obvious strength and consolation.
9. The supportive, collaborative, and loving Maria de San Alberto claimed that writing poems
relationship between the two sisters is well doc¬ to Saint Teresa had even alleviated her grave ill¬
umented in their own writings. The importance ness (MS 94 f. 4r).
the two sisters place on their mutual support of 16. For a concise summary and analysis of this
their writing and their literary collaboration has text, see Kaufman. She argues that Vives em¬
not been recognized in scholarship about them, phasized the value of education and not the ca¬
however. Blanca Alonso-Cortés treated them sep¬ pabilities of women (896).
arately, and no other critic has addressed the lit¬ 17. For a discussion of womanist and “wom¬
erary production of Maria de San Alberto in anish,” see Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Moth¬
conjunction with that of her sister. er’s Gardens.
10. Although we have found only a single ex¬ 18. Although she was not officially declared a
change of letters between the two from Valladolid Doctor of the Church until the twentieth century,
to Calahorra and back, Cecilia del Nacimiento the designation was popularly employed as soon
mentions subjects about which her sister had writ¬ as she became a saint. For a history and analysis
ten to her in her biography of Maria de San Al¬ of papal policy regarding Saint Teresa’s title as
berto. See selections at the end of the chapter. “Doctor,” see Luti.
11. This is one of Saint Teresa’s legendary say¬ 19. This quotation is from Maria de San Al¬
ings. The original Spanish is; “También entre los berto’s notebook of poems about Saint Teresa.
pucheros anda el Señor.” Subsequent reference to the manuscript will carry
12. “Descripción de nuestro desierto de San only folio numbers, which are ours. Poems for
José del Monte de las Batuecas” [Cecilia del Na¬ which the manuscript version is not available are
cimiento 601—10] (“Description of our desert named cited from Alonso-Cortés.
Saint Joseph of the Mountain of Batuecas”) is a 20. Our folio numbering.
detailed botanical description of the landscape 21. In her study of Islamic influence on Saint
surrounding one of the Order’s male monasteries, John of the Cross, Luce López-Baralt suggests that
where her brother Diego and her confessor Tomás Cecilia del Nacimiento’s mystic verses, less erotic
de Jesús had spent time. The poem reflects her and more rational than his (111), remain within
own and her brother Diego’s interest in the de¬ a more purely Christian tradition. She claims that
veloping science of classification. Madre Cecilia, like Fray Luis de León, explicates
13. We cite Cecilia del Nacimiento’s works rather than recreates language (107).
from the edition prepared by Diaz Cerón, which 22. Thomas B. Hess, in his essay, “Great Women
we have found to be accurately transcribed into Artists,” gives examples of great paintings by re¬
modem Spanish from the manuscripts and easily nowned male artists which were found to be by
obtainable. Diaz Cerón used the utmost caution (great) female artists, a situation analogous to that
in deciding what to include in the Obras comple¬ of both Cecilia del Nacimiento and Maria de San
tas. Scholars agree that many more of Madre Ce¬ Alberto.
cilia’s poems are in the convent archive in 23. Another version of the poem has an ad¬
Valladolid, where most manuscripts in her hand¬ ditional stanza, written by her brother Antonio
writing are still to be found. Only some of Maria (Diaz Cerón 63).
de San Alberto’s works have been published, on 24. The tercet, “Nada busca y nada quiere,/y
the other hand—and in abbreviated form, by en sólo Dios se quieta/la contemplación perfecta,”
Blanca Alonso-Cortés. We therefore cite manu¬ while different in idea, echoes Saint Teresa’s fa¬
scripts, except where Alonso-Cortés is absolutely mous “Nada te turbe ...” (“Let nothing disturb
accurate. you . . .”).
14. They were among the small but significant 25. Our folio numbering.
percentage of women religious who circumvented 26. For one view of changes in policy regarding
the letter of the law and took part in literary theater, see Cotarelo y Mori, “Las comedias en
Notes to pp. 149-201 421
los conventos españoles de Madrid en el siglo aciones, and it could even have a Cervantine in¬
dieciséis. For another, see Deleite y Piñuela, Lm. fluence.
vidú religiosü bajo el cuarto Felipe. For a general 30. The treatment of atropelb (violation) of
history of the theater world, see Hugo A. Ren- the Betrothed in this Fiestecilla is unusual com¬
nert. The Spanish Stage in the Time of Lope de Vega. pared to its customary handling in dramas of the
For studies of popular and short theatrical forms, time. In some plays, women are relegated to con¬
see Ronald E. Surtz, Birth of a Theater: . . . and vents as punishment.
El teatro menor en Esparta a partir del sigh XVI. 31. In real life the theme of honor constantly
For the development of Spanish religious theater, preoccupied all but those who had nothing to lose
see Bruce W. Wardropper, Introducción al teatro in an empire whose crumbling had been so pro¬
religioso del Siglo de Oro: .... For proof of con¬ foundly understood by Cervantes and so elo¬
vent theater activities in Italy, see Elissa Weaver, quently summarized by Quevedo. Among those
“Spiritual Fun: A Study of Sixteenth Century Tus¬ who covered traces, bought titles, and changed
can Convent Theater. ” identity were the grandfather and father of Saint
27’ The tradition of the auto was developed in Teresa. Horrified by this unjustness and indignity,
the Renaissance by Juan del Encina, Gil Vicente, she strove for a redefinition of “real” honor, find¬
Lucas Fernández, and others, including the two ing it in a realm above earthly power, money, or
most famous dramatists of the Spanish Golden titles. Although we do not yet know the two
Age, Lope de Vega and Calderón de la Barca sisters’ full family history, they cannot have writ¬
(García de la Concha XXXVII). ten innocently. They grew up in stormy times of
28. This script furnishes further proof that the accusations and persecutions even in their own
vihuela was used in convents in the sixteenth and Order. Most of their work—and all of the poems
seventeenth centuries. to Saint Teresa—have some point of contact with
29. It could also reflect the influence of Maria a reformed religious practice in which a revised
de San José’s pastoral use in the Libro de las recre^ concept of honor was a foundation stone.
Chapter 3
1. “Choir nuns,” also called “nuns of the black biography (Villerino 372-406). There, several
veil,” were (according to church rules), the only episodes of Madre Isabel’s life appear that are not
women religious who had full status in the con¬ found in the dictated autobiography. A twentieth
vent. Ordinarily, since a dowry and literacy were century Augustinian, writing about the history of
required, they came from privileged families. Augustinian Recollect convents in Spain, con¬
2. In an earlier essay (“The Convent as Cat¬ siders “ardent mysticism” to be authentic to the
alyst for Autonomy”), Arenal examined the sty¬ Order (Ayape 335).
listic characteristics of the narrative; quoted and 5. This and other formulas appear frequently
analyzed some of her extraordinary visions; showed in both men’s and women’s religious prose of the
how a protean Christ becomes the protagonist of period. Given women’s marginalization and lack
her Vida; and discussed how in Madre Isabel’s of access to literacy, however, their formulas carry
autobiography, as in her life, inner reality takes more ciphered meaning.
center stage. 6. Experts divide medieval and Renaissance
3. For excellent studies of Spanish popular re¬ ' romances into several categories, hut the group
ligiosity in the Renaissance, see William A. whose language Madre Isabel appears to appro¬
Christian, Apparitions in Late Medieval and Rem priate are those with a lyrical quality, especially
aissance Spain and Local Religion in Sixteenth Cen¬ the “romances novelescos” (epico-lyrical songs of
tury Spain. See also Caro Baroja, Las formas novelistic subject matter), which circulated widely
complejas de la vida religiosa española. after the first quarter of the sixteenth century. For
4. The final section of Isabel de Jesiis’ Life is a a summary of the romances and their character¬
collection of testimonies by church men and women istics, see, for example, Alborg 219-43.
to her extraordinary spiritual gifts. Also, a history 7. The tradition of love poetry in the sacred
of the nuns of Madre Isabel’s Order, published mode goes back to the Song of Songs but also has
fifteen years after her Vida, contains a lengthy roots in the Provengal love lyric. With the
422 Notes to pp. 203-37
squelching of the Albigensians and the curtaih from that of men. A parallel of Isabel de Jesús’
ment of women’s economic and cultural power view may be found in Artemesia Gentileschi’s
came injunctions against troubadour poetry, which 1610 painting on the subject. For further discus¬
deified women, and insistence that love literature sion, see Mary D. Garrard, “Artemesia and Su¬
have a religious cast. See Bogin and Brenan. sanna.”
8. The privilege of taking wine-blood was re¬ 10. This is a pagan folk motif. In her Immodest
served for male clergy. Acts, Judith Brown discusses similar origins of a
9. Women’s representation and interpretation vision of Mother Benedetta (176, n. 12).
of the story of Susanna and the Elders is different
Chapter 4
1. Private conversation, Madrid, summer 1973. 8. Lope claims to have treated Marcela more
like a courting caballero (galán) than a father, in
2. This manuscript, whose first line is “En uso
his famous poem about Marcela’s pomp-filled mar¬
de Sor Marcela de San Félix” (“For the use of Sor
riage to Christ: “. . . y la que yo tan tiernamente
Marcela de San Félix”), may be found in the
Convento de las Descalzas Trinitarias de San Il¬ amaba,/ que más galán que padre, en oro y seda/
defonso in Madrid. We have obtained a microfilm su persona bellísima engastaba,/” [Guamer 231]
(. . . and she whom I loved so tenderly/that, more
copy and publication rights. Hereafter, all cita¬
tions of Marcela de San Félix’s writing, except suitor than father, in gold and silk,/I set like a
her biography of Catalina de San José, will be gem her exquisite beauty).
from this volume. 9. Because there were so many competing or¬

ders, churches, and monasteries, conflicts be¬
3. This manuscript, of which we have obtained
tween patrons and the Church were commonplace.
a microfilm copy and publication rights, is in the
10. This was a popular ballad form, often used
convent archive.
in humorous verse. The accentuation on the an¬
4. We owe the access to so much detail to
tepenultimate syllable of each line provided an
Lope’s fame.
exaggerated rhythmic pattern.
5. This garden is the subject of Marcela de San 11. When the manuscript was bound, possibly
Félix’s romance “Otro al jardín del convento” [“En in the eighteenth century, the top verse on twenty-
uso de . . .” 370—77] (“Another [Bailad] to the
six pages was lopped off. On two pages, the verse
Convent Gatden”).
was only truncated.
6. Sometimes it was Lope who gave the set- 12. The 1762 biography states that Madre
mon. See refetence in Fundación 2. Marcela’s confessor ordered “que escribiese toda
7. Two or three years elapsed from the time su vida interior ... lo hizo así ... y cuando ya
Marcela stated to Lope her intentions until she tenía su tarea concluía a costa de mucha fatiga la
became a Bride of Christ. See Lope’s long and mandó que la quemase ... y al punto, entregó
detailed desctiption of the teligious marriage fes¬ los papeles al fuego, con tanta complacencia, que
tivities in his poem, “A don Ftancisco de Herrera se dio por muy pagada del trabajo que había tenido
Maldonado,” in Guamer 227—35. His description en esctibir algunos meses” [17] (that she record
of the event conttibuted to the legend of a pious all her inner life . . . she did as ordered . . . and
and impeccable daughtet, grieved for, yet cele- when she had completed her task, by dint of wear¬
btated as she was “lost to the world.” Neverthe¬ isome labor, he ordered her to bum it . . . at
less, Marcela’s ambition was also served. Nonroyal once, she gave her papers to the fire, with great
women, certainly those of illegitimate birth, could satisfaction, as if well-paid for the months of writ¬
rately earn this kind of honor. But illegitimacy ing) and “. . . este libto sólo se guarda en el con¬
gave such women opportunities fot self-evolve- vento que otros cuatro que escribió con su gran
ment of which othets could not avail themselves. talento y espíritu, su humildad y modestia la ob¬
Marginalization released illegitimate daughters from ligó a quemar. . .”[14] (. . . this is the only book
the exigencies of honra: silence and circumspec¬ kept in the convent because four others that she
tion, economically motivated marriages, domes¬ wrote with her great talent and spirit, her humility
ticity. and modesty obliged her to bum . . .).
Notes Co pp. 2^y—gg 423
13. In his St. John of the Cross: His Life and 18. That image was of course elaborated in
Poetry, for instance, Gerald Brenan claims that studies of Lope de Vega, for the most part. See,
had certain materials not been burned, Saint John for example, Castro and Rennert 163.
of the Cross might nevet have been canonized 19. Private convetsation, Madrid, summer 1982.
(108-09). See also her article, “La ingeniosa provisora Sor
14. Most of Lope’s critics, including all those Marcela de Vega.”
we have cited here, have tended to whitewash 20. There is, nevertheless, a reference to the
his egotism and personal life. “pecadores corsarios” (sinful corsairs) in The Death
15. Saint Teresa inherited these ideas of elo¬ of Desire, which alludes to the pirate ships that
quence indirectly from the Platonic-Christian tra¬ plagued Spanish coasts at the time. It is partic¬
dition of the “voice of God.” According to this ularly pertinent to Madre Marcela’s Order, be¬
line of thinking, one does not have to learn the cause the Trinitarians and the Mercedarians were
rules of art to be able to write well; one only has the two religious groups engaged in ransoming and
to know God well. Saint Teresa was an avid reader rescuing prisoners. In her convent, the sculptured
of such early Church Fathers as Saint Jerome and images of the infant Christ are to this day called
Augustine, both of whom contributed to this tra¬ “niños cautivos” (child hostages).
dition. 21. The manuscript section of which we are
16. The Vida of Sor Marcela speaks of songs speaking (in the Fundación) has the title, “No¬
shecomposed, sang, and had others sing (201-02). ticias de la Vida de La Madre Sor Catalina de San
17. We understand “subversion” as Roland José. Religiosa Trinitaria Descalza” [f. 195-209]
Barthes defines it in The Pleasure of the Text. On (“Events from the Life of Madre Sor Catalina de
page 55, he writes: “(By subtle subversion I mean . . . San José. Discalced Trinitarian Nun”).
what is not directly concerned with destruction, 22. For important historical discussions of
evades the paradigm, and seeks some other term: women’s relationships with each other, see Fad-
which is not, however, a synthesizing term, but erman and Raymond.
an eccentric, extraordinary term . . . ).”
Chapter 5
1. In the essay on colonial Latin America that America. Lavrin suggests that this was partly for
she contributed to Women and Religion in America, protection and partly so that they could be closer
Asunción Lavrin included a translation of Madre to the financial resources available only in cities
Mariana Santa Pazis’ prologue. (“Female Religious” 165-66).
2. Madre Mariana praises this man, Don Ma¬ 6. “Nine out of thirteen convents founded in
teo Amusquibar, for his “edification” of Lima as Lima between 1561 and 1732 were either inspired
Inquisitor of the Realm on the second page of her or promoted by women” (Lavrin, “Female Reli¬
“Pastoral Letter.” gious” 170).
3. Madre Antonia Lucia, Madre Josefa, and 7. For a discussion of how Spanish rule dis¬
Madre Mariana call the beaterio and Institute an rupted and attempted to destroy Andean culture
Order. While the beaterio became a full-fledged and social structures, particularly as they affected
convent, it did not formally became a separate women, see Silverblatt. For a useful summary of
Order, although it had its own rules and consti¬ the role of Indian women in colonial Peruvian
tution. In Rome, it was registered as part of the society, see Burkett.
Discalced Carmelite Order. 8. For a fuller explanation of the intricacies of
4. The Viceroyalty of Peru included what is social power in the conventos grandes, see Martín.
now Peru, Chile, Ecuador, and Bolivia. Lavrin 9. Lavrin, for example, emphasizes the multi¬
cites an example of a conflict over jurisdiction in faceted economic activities of nuns in America
a convent in Santiago, Chile, which was even¬ (“Female Religious” 179-83).
tually decided by the audiencia and Viceroy in 10. Her mother, however, did become a lay
Lima (Lavrin, “Female Religious” 184). religious. She took the name of Maria de la Pu¬
5. Convents, unlike male monasteries, were rificación and joined her daughter’s beaterio.
essentially an urban phenomenon in Spanish 11. Just as, years later, her successor secured
424 Notes to pp. 2gg-3io
the aid of Doña María Fernández de Córdoba, a motivation to join religious life. The possibility
woman of enormous wealth and social status who for such mobility only existed in the new society
became the principal patron of the beaterío before forming in America, not in Spain.
and after it achieved official canonical recognition 15. The Prioress-Elect, who is to replace Josefa
as a convent (Martin 295-96). de la Providencia, is accompanied by the Viceroy’s

12. Brother Sebastián’s impetus to buy the wife; another nun is accompanied by the principal
chapel at a shrine site, together with its surround¬ patron—Doña María de Cordova. All four of the
ing land, derived from a vision he experienced Viceroy’s carriages, each drawn by six mules, are
while praying in Madrid in 1670. Not yet wealthy, pressed into service. Both ecclesiastic and tem¬
he had been informed then that he would be poral officers participate in this great pageant.
charged with “una obra de mucha honra y gloria Three images are carried on extravagant silver
de Dios” [126] (a work of great honor and glory platforms—Saint Joachim, Jesus the Nazarene, and
for God). Fourteen years later, praying before an Saint Teresa. Those of rank carry candles.
image of Christ of the Miracles, he suddenly 16. Since the mle had to meet with official
understood what he was to do. Church approval. Madre Antonia Lucia del Es¬
13. The other holy woman, Angela Carranza, píritu Santo most probably wrote the document
exemplifies what could happen to those judged as with the collaboration of her confessor.
false beatas and how fine the line was between 17. For an interesting discussion of the rela¬
heterodoxy and orthodoxy in colonial Peru. tionship of clothing to reinforcement of Spanish
Carranza had declared herself a doctor of the Im¬ cultural values in colonial Peru, see Femenias.
maculate Conception and had written thousands 18. See Marina Warner, Joan of Arc, for a dis¬
of pages of religious treatises on this subject and cussion of the impact of Saint Joan’s refusal to
others. The Tribunal found her writings full of change out of male clothing on the men who were
doctrinal errors, and she was brought before them. judging her and its significance in swaying opinion
She had also apparently developed a thriving busi¬ against her. See Judith C. Brown, Immodest Acts,
ness in religious objects, all of which were con¬ for a review of condemnations of women who
fiscated after her conviction (Martin 298-99). wore male dress (n.4 and 5, 204—06).
Madre Antonia had perceived her mistakes ear¬ 19. For a general introduction to seventeenth-
lier. Her confessor had given her Angela Carran¬ and eighteenth-century Spanish-American art,
za’s work to read and then asked her opinion of see Kelemen.
it. She responded, “. . . esto que está escrito aquí 20. Gold was the material available and fa¬
es una ley, y la que yo sigo es otra” [89] (“. . . what vored by mestizo and Indian artists of Peru for
is written here is one law, and the one I follow their original elaborations of sacred images, im¬
is another”). It is easy to see why, under the cir¬ ages which nourished Madre Antonia’s imagina¬
cumstances, Antonia Lucia del Espíritu Santo tion. See Leopoldo Castedo, The Cuzco Circle
would bum what she had written. 129—38. This catalog provides a thorough list of
14. The steps to be taken to found an officially “Bibliographical, Documentary and Iconical
recognized convent began with obtaining local Sources.”
clerical approval for the formation of beateríos. 21. This was the name given to panegyric ser¬
These were establishments in which pious women mons preached at the funeral mass of a revered
lived apart and followed religious rules without spiritual figure, a wealthy personage, or an aris¬
taking formal vows. The next steps were to pro¬ tocrat. They were generally printed in pamphlets
cure official permission from the Archbishopric, and distributed widely. For some examples, see
the Viceroyalty, the heads of temporal and reli¬ Muriel, Cultura femenina novohispana 29-36.
gious colonial affairs in Spain, and finally from 22. Asuncion Lavrin points out Madre Mari¬
the Holy See. All fully cloistered convents re¬ ana’s sense of women’s history. In her emphasis
quired licensing under the constitution and rule on the importance of women’s writings and rec¬
of a recognized Order, or, less frequently, of a ognition of their worth, despite their failure to
newly formed one. Achieving convent status meant meet standard criteria of literary excellence. Madre
validation from Rome and social prestige. For poor Mariana prefigures contemporary feminist literary
and nonaristocratic women, like Antonia Lucia criticism, which has amplified, refocused, and re¬
del Espíritu Santo and Josefa de la Providencia, defined the canon. Some important studies of
the desire for upward social mobility increased the women’s writing, although by and large dealing
hlotes to pp. 311-38 425
with the twentieth century and primarily in the the miraculous occurrences caused by the person’s
Anglo tradition, are Abel, Donovan, DuPlessis, death as a climax to the Vida.
Gaudin et al., Kolodny, Meese, Moers, Moi, Mora 24. See chapter i, “Odysseus’ Scar,” in Auer¬
and Van Hooft, and Showalter. bach for the contrast between classical and Old
23. Some of the first miracles reported after Testament heroic figures.
Madre Antonia Lucia’s death, for example, re¬ 25. The diagnosis demonstrates how a dual
semble medieval and early Renaissance polyp- interpretation of phenomena characterized that
tychs, with scenes of the death of saints attended era. Throughout the text, ordinary and spiritual
by supernatural occurrences. Depictions of these realities run parallel or in juxtaposition to each
scenes included witnesses; ecclesiastics, holy other. In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
women, and sometimes crowds of the faithful. Peru, while empirical reasoning was gaining ad¬
The depiction of Madre Antonia’s death repli¬ herents, even medical practitioners respected the
cates parts of this imagery. All biographies of saintly influence of the sublime. For a discussion of some
persons (such as Madre Antonia Lucia) include of these issues, see Trabulse.
Chapter 6
1. “Cocoliztli” means sickness, pestilence, and critical scrutiny and enough people reject its ten¬
plague (in plants). The related words cocolU and ets that we are able to authoritatively point to its
cocoUate denote, in addition, anger and hate (An¬ assumptions and injustices (see, e.g., Beauvoir,
drews 428, Molina [23 b]). Boulding, Carroll, Hartman and Banner, Lemer).
2. For one view of the effects of conquest and 8. The Aztecs, a warrior tribe with imperialist
colonization from 1550 to 1820 on one indigenous aims, were relative newcomers to the Valley of
population—the Yucatec Maya—see Farriss. Mexico. They first entered the area in the twelfth
3. Spain’s foundation and development had century; within a hundred years they controlled
been based on the interaction, in the “Old” World, all the other inhabitants. Fierce rulers, they gov¬
of Christians with Moslems and Jews (see, for erned through fear and bloodshed and were hated
example, Castro). In the “New” World, Spanish by the subject tribes. Cortés therefore found it
Catholics predominated but they also interacted relatively easy to win leaders to a war against
with polytheistic indigenous and African groups. Moctezuma. An intellectually invigorating his¬
4. “Franciscans such as Fray Bernardino de Sa- tory of the conquest is that of Robert Padden,
hagún conducted exhaustive researches into the The Hawk and the Hummingbird; for an Indian
Aztec past and subsequently compiled some im¬ view of the conquest, see Miguel León Portilla,
pressive works, Sahagún’s Historia general being a The Broken Spears.
towering landmark of early anthropology and Fray 9. Personally, as doña Marina, Malintzin es¬
Toribio de Benavente Motolinia’s History of the caped the destiny of most; Indian noblewoman,
Indians of New Spain a eulogy of their morals and mother to one of Cortés’ offspring, and wife of
customs” (Israel 8). another conquistador, she was endowed with
5. Francisco de Vitoria was another important property and lived to a ripe old age. Symbolically,
advocate of Indian welfare (Liss 36-43, 148). her name came to represent betrayal, or more
6. For some recent treatments of Malintzin (La complexly, her names came to represent ab¬
Malinche), see Castellanos, Fuentes, and Phil¬ stracted and contradictory projections of woman;
lips. “Goddess, Malinzin; whore, Marina, mother,
7. Although it seems anachronistic to select Malinche” (Fuentes 13-14).
and underscore but one example, in the case of 10. A recent dissertation of Kathleen Ann Ross
Malintzin (doña Marina/la Malinche) we meet explores the complicated relationship among the
with intersecting prejudices—racism and sex¬ various texts of Parayso Occidental. Sigiienza y
ism—and with problems of historicity. Women Gongora was a friend and literary competitor of
have been historically maligned as women. Since Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, whose convent quarters
misogyny is built into patriarchal ideology, how¬ he frequented.
ever, it is not until this ideology comes under 11. In her study of women in Mexico City from
420 Notes to pp. 338-50
1790 to 1857, Silvia M. Arróm suggests that the icle written by Madre Inés, making innumerable
importance of cloistered life was declining by the additions (46).
first years of the nineteenth century, as the “no¬ 21. This is one of the works on which Sigüenza
tion of women’s social utility gradually supplanted y Góngora based his portrayal of the Western Par¬
the older ideal of female seclusion” (47). She gives adise. His appropriation attests to the distorting
a figure of 1,983 nuns in Mexico in 1828 (49). oversimplifications accepted even by sages when
12. The eight Orders were: Augustinians, Cis¬ they see (especially women) through a symbol¬
tercians (Order of Saint Bridget), Conceptionists, izing lens. For a comparison between Sigiienza’s
Company of Mary, Discalced Carmelites, Domin¬ citations and interpretation and the texts them¬
icans, Franciscans (Capuchines, Clarissas, Ur¬ selves, see Ross.
banists), and Hieronymites. 22. “Gachupín” was a contemptuous term used
13. Unprecedented economic growth took place for Spaniards during the colonial period, espe¬
in New Spain between 1590 and 1620. Silver cially by criollos resentful of their power and ar¬
mines at San Luis Potosí and Zacatecas produced rogance. “Criollo” indicated the children of
huge amounts of the ore. Textile mills flourished Spaniards bom in America. This manuscript proves
in several cities. In some years, fifty percent of an earlier use of these terms than has been rec¬
shipping between Spain and the New World was ognized until now. Scholars had claimed they were
bound for Mexico (Israel 20—21). not employed until at least a century later (Lav¬
14. For a historical review of the foundation rin, personal correspondence).
and patronage of colonial convents and their lo¬ 23. In Cultura femenina novohispana, Josefina
cations, numerical growth, social milieu, daily Muriel (319—20) mentions another, earlier copy,
routines, economic underpinnings, and relation¬ written in beautiful Italian calligraphy, the capi¬
ship to other female institutions, see Lavrin, “Fe¬ tulares in red and black ink, adorned with flowers,
male Religious.” leaves, and birds, in imitation of the medieval
15. Pilar Gonzalbo has gathered several doc¬ tradition of preserving special copies of the mem¬
uments that define the purposes and methods of oirs (a word Muriel uses) of exemplary women for
female education during the colonial period. future generations of nuns. This manuscript was
16. Josefina Muriel and Asuncion Lavrin, con¬ sold in London in 1970. The one we use is found
temporary pioneering scholars of Mexican nun¬ in the Perry Castaneda Library of the University
neries, have located, rescued, and described of Texas, Austin (MS 1244).
hundreds of works by and about nuns, opening 24. There is a discrepancy between Madre María
up the field for further research. Magdalena’s claim that she entered the convent
17. In her discussion of Sor Juana Inés de la in 1590 at the age of fourteen (4V) and the age
Cruz’s triumphal arch of Neptune, Georgina Sa- of fifteen she gives in describing this incident as
bat-Rivers speaks of the interest in novelty and having occurred at home.
the belief in the solubility of crises and cites other 25. Madre María Magdalena had probably in¬
sources that discuss the baroque arts in New Spain. itially suffered a streptoccocal infection that de¬
Of Sor Juana she says, in a sentence that might veloped into Sydenham’s chorea, popularly known
apply to some of the nuns discussed here: “En el as Saint Vitus’ dance. Mistreatment led to Chorea
mundo barroco novohispano de su época se of¬ major, which is accompanied by wild muscular
reció a sí misma como asombro, especulación, action (Taber C-64-65).
maravilla, misterio” [70] (In the Baroque world of 26. She cites the author as the Jesuit Padre
New Spain of her time she offered herself as as¬ Gaspar Loarte. Muriel spells his name Loartes and
tonishment, speculation, marvel, mystery). claims that Madre María read him even as a child
18. Arenal noted this theme in Sot Juana Inés (Cultura femenina novohispana 321).
de la Cruz in Her Own Image: A Dramatic Reading 27. In Cultura femenina rxovohispana (375),
and in her play. This Life Within Me Won’t Keep Muriel claims the alumbrados were responsible for
Still. See also Bénassy-Berling, Cinquiéme partie, the fear (rather than as we see it, the persecution
“Fratemité humaine et pacifisme chez Sor Juana” of that sect). Generally, those women accused of
295-368. being hysterial or heretical did not write; they
19. Both page numbers appear in the folio of dictated under duress before the Inquisition au¬
the manuscript. thorities. We base our biographical information
20. In Cultura femenina novohispana, Muriel and texts on her discussion of Maria de San José
claims that Madre Mariana used the earlier chron¬ in Cultura femenina (375-98) and on Meyers.
Notes to pp. 350-60 427
28. This sort of substitution seems to be a fairly lands. There, they developed a “culture of resis¬
common occurrence in the history of religious tance” (Silverblatt 176—80).
life. As seen in Chapter 2 of this study, Maria de 41. With little ideological distance from the
San Alberto had heard a similar offer from Mary. Spanish colonial system, Muriel and others state,
29. In this expression of ambivalence and fear for instance, that Indian women had not been
about writing, and in other passages, we hear educated enough to be nuns before the eighteenth
echoes of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, her contem¬ century. Of course, the colonial system did not
porary, who was also a friend of Bishop Fernández favor the men either. No Indian men were or¬
de Santa Cruz. dained priests until the late eighteenth or early
30. This is similar to Sor Benedetta’s experi¬ nineteenth century.
ence (faked, it would seem) as recounted in Im¬ 42. Doña Luisa was the daughter of one of the
modest Acts. only cacique families that had amassed a fortune.
31. In 1597, Maria de San José was ordered to She professed as Luisa del Espíritu Santo in the
assist in founding a new Augustinian convent in Convento de Santa Clara de Jesús of Querétaro
Oaxaca. Her narrative recounts the trials and trib¬ in 1607, which she and her father Diego Tapia
ulations of a northern Mistress of Novices who had endowed. Don Diego, who had helped the
doesn’t quite understand her southern charges, Spaniards to subdue the Indians of Querétaro and
nor is quite understood by them. San Luis Potosí (Gallagher 197, n.9), refused en¬
32. We base our summary of Madre Maria An¬ try to any other Indian woman (Gallagher 180).
na’s life on and excerpt her texts from Muriel’s 43. Muriel affirms that the foundation and suc¬
work. cess of the Convento de Corpus Christi, reserved
33. “Womanist” here and elsewhere follows Al¬ for caciques, proved wrong those who claimed
ice Walker’s usage in In Search of Our Mothers’ Indian women were not intelligent enough to pro¬
Gardens: Womanist Prose. Walker offers four def¬ fess (Las indias caciques 64). To Gallagher, the
initions of “womanist” on pages xi—xii. flourishing of the convent proved that despite
34. Muriel claims that the theme of Mary’s contrary opinions, Indian women were suited for
milk is not important (468). She is probably religious life (201).
thinking exclusively of the attempt to curtail Mar¬ 44. Josefina Muriel has published a facsimile
ian beliefs in the Middle Ages. edition of this volume, entitled Las indias caciques
35. Marina Warner has suggested that milk is de Corpus Christi, from which we draw our cita¬
the ideal symbol of untainted nourishment; al¬ tions.
though raw it tastes cooked, and all human life 45. We use “false consciousness” here to mean
needs it to survive infancy (Alone of All Her Sex the internalization of the hegemonic ideology.
194). 46. This passage, in a different translation, ap¬
36. Her analysis of mystical milk falls squarely pears in Asunción Lavrin, “Women and Religion
into the Dominican tradition. The Dominicans in Spanish America,” in Ruether and Keller, eds.,
were the last Order to capitulate to the dogma of Women and Religion in America II, 55—57.
the Immaculate Conception; they were also the 47. Chosen to govern his people, he refused
most fervent defenders of the mystical benefits of the post because his salvation was more important
Mary’s milk. to him, according to the biography. Behind this
37. We have discussed elsewhere the impor¬ stated reason, there must have been other, si¬
tance and particular cast of the Marian cult for lenced ones—a conflict between loyalty to Indi¬
some women religious and especially the use of ans and identification with Spaniards and a
Mary by Sor Juana. See Electa Arenal, “Sor Juana recognition—perhaps Christian—of how power
Inés de la Cruz; Reclaiming the Mother Tongue.” led to corruption (297, 299).
38. “. . . a woman is never far from 48. Mexican Mariology popularized the notion
‘mother’. . . . There is always within her at least that the conquest was a means of preparing for
a little of that good mother’s milk. She writes in the appearance of the Virgin—in the aspect of
white ink” (Cixous 251). Guadalupe—in Mexico (Maza 57).
39. After she spent many years as Cortés’s con¬ 49. María de Agreda (1602-1665), as we men¬
cubine and mothered a son. Cortés gave doña tioned in the introduction, achieved considerable
Marina to one of his lieutenants. fame. She defended herself before a panel of Doctors
40. In Pern, by the seventeenth century, groups of Theology at the Sorbonne in Paris, was consulted
of Indian women had fled to the remote high¬ by kings, and her Life of the Virgin Mary, Mystical
428 Notes to pp. 360-413
City of God (1670), is one of the most popular noting the importance for the Church of the day
Catholic mystical treatises ever written. it takes place, a day on which “hasta en los pueb¬
50. No such word as teneculi is listed in the los de indios” [144] (even in Indian villages) the
dictionaries. Texouani and texiliztii, however, mean image of Mary is paraded through the streets.
“mill” (Molina 86); textli and teztoc mean “flour Here, Madre María Marcela unselfconsciously re¬
com meal,” and “she is grinding,” respectively flects the racial attitudes she brought with her
(Andrews 469). from the hacienda.
51. She prefaces a description of this vision by
Conclusion
1. This story, about a Carmelite convent, is an incisive analysis of the relation between access
the subject of a perceptive essay on female crea¬ to education and to power (156).
tivity by Susan Gubar. 3. Her autobiography has received attention
2. With all due credit to Foucault, Ruth Bleier in an unpublished dissertation by Rima Valbona.
demarcates women’s subordinance in history by
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^Permissions
Selections by Ana de San Bartolomé reprinted Selections from the manuscripts by Mariana de
by permission from the Editorial de la la Encamación and Maria Magdalena
Espiritualidad (Madrid) and Edizioni Lorravaquio Muñoz are used courtesy of the
Teresianum (Rome). Nettie Lee Benson Collection of the General
Libraries, University of Texas at Austin.
Selections by Maria de San José reprinted by
permission from Postulación General (Rome). Selections from the manuscript by Maria de
San José are courtesy of the John Carter Brown
Selections from the manuscripts by Maria de Library and Kathleen Meyers. Published
San Alberto are used courtesy of the selections and selections from Maria Anna
community of Carmelitas Descalzas of the Agueda de San Ignacio are reprinted by
Convento de la Concepción (Valladolid). permission of the Press of the Universidad
Nacional Autónoma de México and Josefina
Selections from the manuscript by Cecilia del Muriel.
Nacimiento are used courtesy of the community
of Carmelitas Descalzas of the Convento de la Selections from the manuscript by Teodora de
Concepción (Valladolid). Published selections San Agustín are used courtesy of the Archivo
are reprinted by permission of the Editorial de Franciscano (Mexico City).
la Espiritualidad.
Selections from Los indias caciques de Corpus
Selections by Isabel de Jesús are used courtesy Cristi are reprinted by permission of the Press of
of the Biblioteca Nacional (Madrid). the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
(Publicaciones del Instituto de Historia) and
Selections from the manuscripts by Marcela de Josefina Muriel.
San Félix are used courtesy of the community
of Trinitarias Descalzas (Madrid). Selections from the manuscript by Maria
Marcela are used courtesy of the Biblioteca
Selections by Josefa de la Providencia and Nacional, Mexico.
Antonia Lucia del Espíritu Santo are used
courtesy of the Biblioteca Nacional (Madrid).
439
Index
abstinence, 244; virtue of, 246 Anna Agueda, 412 Augustinians, 343
aesthetic, of Marcela de San Antonia Clara (daughter of authority; of male ecclesiastics,
Félix, 239-40 Lope de Vega), 232-33 26; male secular, 301
Albert, Cardinal-Prince of Antonia Lucia del Espíritu authorization: divine, ix, 16,
Portugal, 29 Santo, 14, 294-95, 297-303, 248, 306, 350; for leadership,
Albigensians, 42208 309-15, 412; death of, 311- 142; for nuns’ writing, 14,
Alfonso X, 293 12, 324-25, 334-35; imitado 136, 412; from Saint Teresa,
alienation, of cacique nuns, of, 303—8; marriage of, 298, 38, 303
357 316, 326; portrait of, 289; as autobiography: of Ana de San
allegory; in drama, 150; use of spiritual advisor, 320, 330; Bartolomé, 31, 46—65; of
243-45, 361- See also drama, writing of, 323-24, 333-34 Antonia Lucia del Espíritu
allegorical Antuñano, Sebastián de, 292, Santo, 313; of Cecilia del
alumbrados, 6-7, 39, 426027; 299—300; portrait of, 288 Nacimiento, 135; of Isabel de
persecution of, 349-50 Antwerp, 20, 25, 35 Jesus, 195-208, 208—27; of
American baroque. See barocco “anxiety of authorship,” 14 Marcela de San Félix, 231; of
de Indias Apolonia de la Santísima Maria de San José
amiga, 353 Trinidad, 343, 357-58 (Mexican), 349-52, 378-87;
Amusquibar, Mateo, 310 apóstolas, use of term, 303—4 of Maria Magdalena, 346—52,
Ana de Jesús, 24 architecture, of New Spain, 374-78; of Maria Marcela,
Ana de la Ascensión, 24-25 337 360—62, 405-10. See abo
Ana de San Bartolomé, 14, 21— art: colonial, 341; mestizo, 351; biography; Vidas
27. 45. 138, 412; of New Spain, 337; religious, autonomy: for Carmelite
Autobiografía, 46-65; 8, 134, 196-99, 307, 424; women, 20; of nuns, 28,
background of, 19—21; in and spirituality, 239 337; women’s, ix, 30, 229,
Carmelite iconography, artists, influence of, 197-99 296, 302
41708; Cartas, 34, 65-79; asceticism, 3, 229; of Antonia autos, 148-49, 42in27
chronicles of, 34-35; Lucia del Espíritu Santo, auto sacramental, 243
Conferencias, 31; Defensa de 304, 319-20, 329; and Avila, 9, 24, 4i5n5
la herencia teresiana, 20, 25, Carmelite Reform, 21; of Aztecs, 425n8
31; Obras completas, 25, 3t; Catalina de San José, 271-
portrait of, 120; and Saint 72, 276-77; of Corpus Cristi ballads. See romances
Teresa, 22-23, 26, 35; and convent, 356; of Marcela de Báñez, Domingo, 138
theatrical activities, 148; San Félix, 231, 239—40, Barca, Calderón de la, 42in27
Ultimos años de la madre 241-50; of Maria de San barocco de Indias, 340, 352,
Teresa de Jesús, 23; as writer, José, 27 426ni7
30-36 Aslin Hulme, Edward, quoted, beaterío, Nazarene, 295, 298—
Ana de San Pedro, 35 5 300, 302, 310, 312
analogy: as mode of thought, “Atanasia,” as literary device, Beaterío de Santa Rosa, 353
308; use of, 342 37 beatification: of Ana de Jesús,
Angela de Foligno, 8 audience, for nuns’ writing, 5, 24; of Ana de San
Angel de Salazar, 29 240 Bartolomé, 21; of Saint
angels, 197-98, 214, 218, 223, Augustine, Saint, 6, 39; Teresa, 23, 134-35, 138,
406, 408 Confessions, 15, 4i7n32 141, 166
440
Index 441
Beguines, 3, 297, 4i8n2i Carvajal y Mendoza, Luisa de, childhood: of Ana de San
Belgium, 20 12, 413, 416028 Bartolomé, 46-47, 55-56; of
Bénassy-Berling, Marie-Cécile, Castañeda Guzmán, Luis, 357 Antonia Lucia del Espíritu
297 caste system, in New Spain, Santo, 316, 325-26; of
Benedict, Saint, 3 340 Marcela de San Félix, 230; of
Benjamin, Jessica, 12 Castilian, as language of Maria de San José
Bernini, Giovanni Lorenzo, 242 monastic life, 293 (Mexican), 380-81, 384-86;
Bérulle, Pierre de, 21, 24-26, Castillo, Francisca Josefa de, of Maria Magdalena, 347; of
33, 41701, 418012 12, 413 Maria Marcela, 361
biography, 246; of Antonia Catalina de San José, 237; “Child Jesus” (painting), 119
Lucia del Espíritu Santo, biography of, 246-48, 273- Christianity, 38; power of
294-95, 297-301. 303-15; of 77 women in, 140—41; women’s
cacique nuns, 357—60; of Catherine of Siena, 5, 8 participation in, 2
Catalina de San José, 246- Catholicism: conversion to, Christians, “New,” 9, 20,
48; of Cecilia Morillas, 132; 338; in New Spain, 338-41; 4191^5
of Marcela de San Félix, 235; in Peru, 302; theatricality of, “Christ of the Miracles”
of María de San Alberto, 8 (painting), 292
136; of María Magdalena, Cecilia del Nacimiento, 45, Christ. See Jesus Christ
374—378; of Sobrino sisters, 131-43. 412; art of, 125; Church, Roman Catholic; and
134; survival of, 340. See Autobiografía, 167-71; destruction of native
also, autobiography; saints’ Canciones de la Unión y religions, 338; opportunities
lives, books of; Vidas Transformación del alrrm en for women in, 356; pluralism
Bias de Suares, 303, 306 Dios por la niebla Divina de of, 411; position of women
blood; imagery of, 203, 362; as pura contemplación, 183-84; in, 135; and publication of
motif in Mexican texts, 340— “Definición de Amor,” 145; nuns’writings, 151
41 De la madre María de San Church Fathers, and
books, creation of, 309—10 Alberto, mi hermana, 171-75; intellectual culture, 4—5
Brest, 27 exile of, 133; Fiesta a una Church of the Nazarenes,
bureaucracy, colonial, 295, profesión, 149-50; FiesteciUa Lima, 290
301, 345 para una profesión religiosa, civilization, Aztec, and
Bynum, Carolyn Walker, 203 185—89; Fundación de Mexican culture, 362
Calahorra, 176-79; Niño de Cixous, Héléne, 355
mis ojos, 182-83; plays of, Clark, Elizabeth, 203
Calahorra, 133, 136, 176-79 150-51; as poet, 143-46; class: in frontier society, 293; in
Calderón de la Barca, Pedro, 8 Primera Relación de Mercedes, Mexican convents, 339; of
Callao, 298 179-81; religious vocation nazarerms, 295; privileges of,
canonization, of Saint Teresa, of, 167-71, 169-71; “Sin 4; and religious vocation,
2, 45, 135, 138 figura en la memoria,” 144- 151; women’s, 191; in
Capuchines, 339 45, 181-82 writing of Ana de San
Caraaca, 28 celestina, 241 Bartolomé, 30
Carmelite Reform, 9—10, 19— censorship, 10, 220, 300; of clergy, male: and admission to
21, 30; and Ana de San books, 7-8; by Church convents, 192; and
Bartolomé, 23; betrayal of, authorities, 135, 237-38; opposition to Teresian
43; celebration of, 140-41; male, 38; of texts, 311; of reforms, 10
declared independence of, women’s visions, 9 cloister, and women’s
29; rules of, 235; and Cerda, Luisa de la, 27 independence, 3
Sobrino sisters, 138 certámenes, 13, 134—35, 146— Colegio de Santa Mónica, 351
Carmelites, 339; male, 25—26, 47.151 collaboration; of nuns, 194—95,
33 Cervantes, Miguel de, 7, 230, 344; of Sobrino sisters, 133,
Carmelites of Mitigated Rule, 237, 42in3i 142
35 Charles V, Holy Roman colonies, Spanish, government

Carranza, Angela, 424ni3 Emperor, 6 of, 293
cartas. See letters; names of Charles 1, King of Spain, 6 colonization, 337; role of
individual authors chastity, 297 Church in, 362—63
442 Index
coloquios, 148, 240. See also Capuchine, 360; at Caraaca, Cuerva, 27

names of authors 28; colonial, 293-94; 423n5; cults: of Christ of Pachacamilla,
comedias, 147, 150 Conceptionist, 338; conflict 292; creation of, 6; of Mary,
communion, as sensual act, 12 in, 5; in Cuerva, 27; daily 193, 341, 353-54; of Virgin
Conceptionists, 343 life in, 38, 148, 245-46; of Guadalupe, 341
confesor. See confessors design of, 294; drama in, Cultura femenina novohispana,
confession, injunction to, ii 148-51; as escape, 233; 353
confessors, 214,216-17, 224, finances of, 195, 301-2; in culture; Andean, 423n7;
226-27; Ana de San France, 20, 24; functions of, convent, 2, 133, 137-38,
Bartolomé, 48, 54, 57, 64, 3, 339, 416013; and fund' 151, 293; criolla, 337; female,
69-70, 76-78; antagonism raising, 344; and Hispanic 8; feminine secular, 137;
of, 193; of Antonia Lucia del women, 297; importance of humanistic, 131; Indian,
Espíritu Santo, 306, 309—10, food in, 244—45; in Lima, 357; intellectual, 4-5;
313; authority of, 26; and 302; in Lisbon, 20, 27, 29; literary, 13; mestiza 337;
censorship, 16, 237—38, 379, living conditions in, 3-4, Mexican, 362; Mexican
383; cruelty of, 351; and 35. 233, 235-36, 238, 243; Christian, 358; and
interpretation of visions, ii; in Madrid, 283; at Malagón, monasticism, 3; popular, 148;
of Isabel de Jesús, 192-93; 28; in Mexico, 148—49, 338- profanity in, 201; religious,
nuns’ choice of, 25 39. 343. 356; as microcosms 150, 191; of seventeenth-
conflict: and Carmelite Reform, of colonial Pern, 295; century Lima, 296; Spanish,
24-25; between Church and Nazarene, 294-96, 313; 243; trilingual, 294
state, 33; in convents, 345 numbers of, 41507; in
Congo, 133 Oaxaca, 343; in Ocaña, 24;
consciousness; of cacique nuns, in Peru, 9; in Pontoise, 24; Dagens, Jean, 21
357; Mexican national, 356; protests against, 28; in daily life; in convents, 2, 38,
women’s, 2 Seville, 27, 28, 37, 82, 90— 148, 245-46, 250; perils of,
Constitution and Rules: of 92, 95, 106—7; slaves in, 3; of women, 4i5n8
Carmelite Reform, 23; 148; social expectations of, Daughters of the Conquistadores,
Teresian, 19 241; in Toledo, 193; in 297
conventions, literary, 15 Valladolid, 128, 133, 135; death: of Ana de San
Convento de Corpus Cristi, wealth of, 136 Bartolomé, 31; of Antonia
355-59 conversos, 6, 9 Lucia del Espíritu Santo,
Convento de jesús María, 338, conversion; of Catalina de San 305, 308, 324-25, 334-35;
344- 45 José, 247; of Indians, 359; of of Isabel de Jesús, 194; of
Convento de la Concepción, Maria de San José Lope de Vega, 234; of
Mexico City, 338 (Mexican), 351 Marcela de San Félix, 236; of
Convento de la Concepción, Córdova, María de, 301 Maria de San Alberto, 136;
Valladolid, 131, 133-35, 4^9 Cortés, Hernán, 338, 341 of Maria de San José, 29; of
Convento de la Encamación, costuming, in Nazarene Nicolao Doria, 29; in poetry,
9. 47. 56 community, 306-7 144-45; of Saint Teresa, 23-
Convento de San Ildefonso, Council of Trent, 7, 9, 10, 85, 24, 36, 49-50, 59, 121, 138
234, 244 99. 137-38, 205 “debates,” medieval, 243
Convento de Querétaro, 360- Counter-Reformation, destmction: of native culture,
61 Catholic, 6—7, 10 337; of texts, 294. See also
Convento de San José, 346 court, Mexican, 340 texts, destruction of
Convento de Santa Teresa, creativity: barriers to, 4; detachment, as virtue, 352
345- 46, 363-74 women’s, 151, 232 devils, II, 197-98, 207, 210,
Convent of Las Huelgas, 133 Creoles, resistance of, 355-56 213, 220, 223, 4i8n24
Convent of Saint Joseph of criolla, defined, 426n22 devotion, of Antonia Lucia del
Avila, 22 “Cristo Yacente” (statue), 129 Espíritu Santo, 323, 333
convents; admission to, 192- criticism: of male ecclesiastics, dexamiento, doctrine of, 6
94; in Antwerp, 25; in 82, 95; of male violence, diálogo. See dialogues
Belgium, 20; in Calahorra, 341; in texts, 39, 42, 193, dialogues, 412, 418—19027; as
133. 135. 176-79; 204, 237 literary form, 20, 36-37, 41,
Index 443
43; preceding plays, 230; use eloquence, Saint Teresa’s ideas gender; and genre, 412; hidden
of, 313-14 on, 239, 423015 assumptions of, x
Diego de San José, 134, 41904; enclosure, 139, 349; of Gertrude the Great of Helfta,
portrait of, 123; Relación, 132 Mexican nuns, 346; of nuns, 137
diplomacy, of nuns, 356-57 7; sanctity of, 9; and Gilbert, Sandra, 14
Discalced Carmelite Order, 19, women’s independence, 3. God; and Antonia Lucia del
24 See also seclusion Espiritu Santo, 300, 308,
Discalced Carmelites; in Lima, encoding, as literary device, 7— 311, 313; direct
302; in Mexico, 343-45, 8 communication with, 9; and
363-74 endechas, 237 Isabel de Jesús, 204—207; as
discourse, public, lack of access entertainment, in convents, 37. lover, 201; and Maria Anna
to, 15 See also recreaciones Agueda de San Ignacio, 353—
dissension; in Carmelite Erasmus, Desiderio, x, 6, 8 55; in poetry, 146; and
movement, 113—17; in eroticism, religious, 11-13, possessions, 3; as sculptor,
convents, 5, 233, 243, 345 146, 201—3, 242, 248 198; union with, 13, 145; in
divine will, importance of, 136 Escorial, the, 132 visions, 136, 191, 193. See
documentation, as authority, ethnic issues, discussion of, 151 also Jesus Christ
303 exile, of Cecilia del Góngora y Argote, Luis de, 8
“domestic theology,” tradition Nacimiento, 133 gossip, evils of, 214—15, 224-
of, 199 25
domination, monosexual, of Falcon, Roque, 299 “Gracia,” as literary device, 37—
Hispanic literature, 413 famine, in Castile, 151 41. 43-44
Dominicans, 339 Feliciana (daughter of Lope de Gracián, Jerónimo, 24, 28—29,
Doria, Nicolao, 24; policies of, Vega), 231 40. H9
418019 feminism; of Maria de San José, grammar, and class, 15
“Dorotea,” as literary device, 37 37, 43; of Sobrino sisters, Granada, fall of, 6
dowries, and entrance to 138 Gregory, Saint, 6
convents, 3, 353, 355, Fernández, Gregorio, 127, 129 Guadalajara, New Castile, 6
42ini fervor, religious, 151 Guadalcázar, Marquesa de, 345
drama; allegorical, 150, 156- fiestas, 148 Guayaquil, 297
59, 185-89, 250-68; in fire, imagery of, 352, 362 Gubar, Susan, 14
convents, 148—51; of Golden first person, use of, 310—12,
Age, 244 314 hagiography, 2, 192, 247-48,
dramatic conventions, 150 Flanders, 33 303, 308, 310, 357, 362
food; imagery of, 38, 40; as heresy, 311; accusations of, 49,
motif, 244-45 58—59; dangers of, 216, 226;
Eckenstein, Lina, 5 formulas, literary, 2, 15, 41, as scapegoat, 6; vision of,
ecstasy; and heresy, 10; 132, 136, 246, 248, 310, 315; and visions, lo-ii
mystical, 145-46; religious, 357. 42105 heterodoxy; accusations of, 135;
199 Foucault, Michel, quoted, ii suspected, 7
education; and Church, 356; of Founding Mother. See Teresa de hidalgos, 297
Marcela de San Félix, 234; at Jesús, Saint hierarchy; Church, 16;
Mexican convents, 339; for France, 20, 24, 33; convents colonial, 297; convent, 339,
religious life, 43; of Sobrino in, 417011 345; male-female, subversion
sisters, 133; through visions, Francisca de Jesús, 41707; of, 202-3; religious, 30;
198-99, 204-5; women’s, 4- Relación de Francisca de Jesús social, X, 293; social, and
5, 20, 38, 131-32, 137. 353; sobre la infancia y juventud de language, 340
women’s right to, 342 Ana de San Bartolomé, 22 history; Carmelite, 29, 39-41;
Efrén de la Madre de Dios, friendship, between nuns, no, sacred dimensions of, 305;
416022 194-95. 314-15. 42009 Spanish, 194; women’s, ix,
El Almendral, 21 I. 37
“El entierro de Lope de Vega” games, poetic, 147 “holy ignorance,” for women,
(painting), 284 Garcia, Hernán, 22 7. 10
El Greco, 197 Garcia Lorca, Francisco, 229 honor; as dramatic theme, 150—
444 Index
51; as literary theme, 246, of, 242; of war, 143 Isabel de Jesús, 193-94, 208-
421031; Teresian concept of, images: of Saint Teresa, 141; of 27; as writer, 193—99
151, 246 Virgin Mary, 141 Isabel de la Cruz, 6
homos fúnebres, 309, 424021 imitado: of Antonia Lucia del Isabel de los Angeles, 34
humanism: Christian, 8; Espíritu Santo, 303-8, 318-
Erasmian, 137 19, 328; use of, 295—96 jaculatorias, 237
humility: of Antonia Lucia del Immaculate Conception, Jerome, Saint, 6, 250
Espíritu Santo, 321—22, 331- 4i6n20, 424ni3; as dogma, Jerónima del Espíritu Santo,
32; ideal of, 4; of Isabel de 141,193; images of, 8 234. 244
Jesús, 214, 224; literary, 41, imprisonment, 108—12 Jesuits, 416028
200, 232, 341; of Maria de independence: of female Jesucristo. See Jesus Christ
San Alberto, 153-55; of monasteties, 24; women’s Jesus Christ, 305; androgynous
nuns, 356-57; as virtue, 246, 297. 302 portrayal of, 140; as
269-70, 274-75 Indians: Chichimeca, 358-60; Bridegroom, 137, 234, 249;
humor: in convents, 148; of exploitation of, 338; as nuns, identification with, 200—206;
Marcela de San Félix, 234, 355-60, 399-405; repression as lover, 201—3, 211, 220; as
236-39. 240-41, 243, 244- of, 296 Mother, 142—43, 203; in
45, 250; of Maria de San individuality, expressed in recreaciones, 40; as shepherd,
Alberto, 139, 146-47; of writing, 2 190; and visions of Ana de
Maria de San José, 38—39, Inés de la Cruz, 8, 343 San Bartolomé, 32-33; in
43; in Relación of Josefa de la Inés del Santísimo Sacramento, visions of Isabel de Jesús, 192
Providencia, 304, 314 194-95. 205 Jews, 143; converted, 6, 27;
inflamado, used to describe expulsion of, 6; as targets of
iconography: Carmelite, 41708; mystical union, 12 Inquisition, 238. See abo
religious, 8; of Spanish Inquisition: and censorship, 10; Judaism
Catholic Reformation, 143; and enforcement of Jiménez de Cisneros, Francisco,
Mexican, 338, 340-41. See orthodoxy, 6—8; fear of, 300— 8
also art, religious 301, 311-12, 358-59; and John of the Cross, Saint, 27,
ideals, religious, 4 Gregorio de Quezada, 310; 150, 249; as literary model,
identification, with Jesus and Maria de San José, 20, 143. 145-46
Christ, 200-206 28; in Mexico, 342; targets “Josefa,” as literary device, 37
ideology: Catholic Reformation, of, 238; and visions, 8 Josefa de la Providencia, 148,
137; feminist, 341; of New Instituto nazareno, 298, 310; 299-301, 303-6, 308-10,
Spain, 362-63 functions of, 302 412; Relación del origen y
Ignacio de Loyola, Saint, 8 Instruction of a Christian fundación del mortasterio del
illegitimacy, 229-30, 42207; of Woman, The, 137 Señor San Joaquin de Religiosas
Marcela de San Félix, 230— intellectuality: female, 135, Nazarenas Carmelitas
32, 239 139; feminist, 37 Descalzas, 294-315, 315-35
illiteracy, and women religious, Invincible Armada, prophesied Juana Inés de la Cruz, ix, 1—2,
7 destruction of, 6, 26 36, 42, 149, 341-42, 354;
illness, 35, 48-49, 57-58, 374- irony: and Marcela de San “Respuesta a Sor Pilotea,”
75. 376-77. 404-5; and Félix, 246-47; of Maria de 341
closeness to God, 416026; San José, 36, 42; use of, 4, Juárez, Benito, 339
treatment of, 347-48 139. 341 Judaism, 6, 38. See abo Jews
imagery: of Ana de San Isabel Cierva, 358 “Justa,” as literary device, 37-
Bartolomé, 34; biblical, 361; Isabel de Jesús, 7, 15, 151, 412; 39. 43-44
of blood, 362; erotic early life of, 191-92, 210- justification, of women’s
religious, 12; of fire, 352; of II, 220-22; marriage of, writing, 136
Isabel de Jesús, 198; of Maria 191-92, 197, 208-9, 212,
de San José, 38-39; 217-18, 221-22; mysticism kidnapping: of Antonia Clara,
maternal, 21, 137, 141, 203, of, 199-208; names for, 200; 233; of Maria de San José,
353-55; militant, 40, 140; religious vocation of, 216, 29; of Maria Felipa de Jesús,
military, 83, 96; religious, 226; as spiritual advisot, 207; 359
340-41; sexual, 201; sources Vida de la Venerable Madre kindness: of Antonia Lucia del
Index 445
Espíritu Santo, 321, 331; on haciendas, 361; Indian, 77; “Ofrecimiento que hacen
toward inferiors, 35 356; in Mexican convents, las religiosas al Niño Jesús
339. 356; women’s, 233 recién nacido,” 237; “Otro a
Laca, Ramón, 231 Llanos, Suárez, 284 la miseria de las provisoras,”
Lady, The: Studies in Certain loos, 229-30, 237; censored, 244—45; “Otro Romance: A
Significant Phases of Her 238; as prologues, 240 una soledad,” 248-50, 278-
History, 5 Lope de Vega. See Vega, Lope 81; plays of, 243-46; as poet,
“La Inmaculada Concepción de 235-42, 248; portrait of,
(statue), 285 Lope Félix (son of Lope de 282; prose of, 246-48; and
language: Aztec, 340; Vega), 230 relationship with father,
colloquial, 294; of New López-Baralt, Luce, 420021 233-34. 239; “Romance a la
Spain, 340, 346; of rural Lorravaquio, Francisco de, 346 soledad de las celdas,” 236,
Spain, 30, subversive uses of, Lorravaquio Muñoz, María 240; “Romance a un afecto
412 Magdalena. See Maria amoroso,” 242; “Romance a
Las Casas, Bartolomé de, 338 Magdalena Lorravaquio una soledad,” 234, 236
Latin, as language of monastic Muñoz marginalization, of Isabel de
life, 293 love: in monastic environment, Jesús, 207
“La Virgen del Carmelo” 246-47; religious, as literary Maria. See Mary, Virgin
(statue), 121 theme, 241 Maria Anna Agueda de San
Lauring, Asunción, 423n, love poetry, sacred, 421-2207 Ignacio, 343; De los misterios
424n22, 426n, 427n, 434 Low Countries, truce in, 27 deLSantísimo Rosario, 354;
law, Teresian, 19 Luis Vives, Juan, 137 Devoción en honra de la
leadership: intellectual, 137; of Luján, Micaela de, 230 Purísima Leche, 353—54; Mar
Saint Teresa, 139-41; Luther, Martin, 6, 416015 de gracia, 353-54. 387-89.
spiritual, 137 Lutheranism, 6 391-93. 412; cartas, 389-91,
León, Luis de, 24, 145, 249, lyrics, troubador, as literary 393-96
412 source, 146 María de Agreda, 360, 413,
Leonor de San Bernardo, 24, 427049
34 Madrid, 24, 141 María de la Visitación, 5
letters, of Mexican nuns, 393- Malagón, 27-28 María del Sacramento, 35
99 Maldonado Quintanilla, María de San Alberto, 45, 131-
licenciado, as literary device, Antonia Lucia. See Antonia 43, 412; Breve relación de la
232, 240—41 Lucia del Espíritu Santo, 298 vida y virtudes de Nuestra
life expectancy, 4i7n9 Maldonado y Mendoza, Beata Madre Cecilia del
Lima, 295; population of, 296; Antonio, 297 Nacimiento, 155-56; Favores
religious life in, 298-99 Malintzin, 338, 355, 42509 recibidos de Nuestro Señor,
liras, 144, 237. See also names manners, Mexican, 346 152-55; Fiesta del
of authors Manzano, Maria, 21 Nacimiento—II, 160—63;
Lisbon, 20, 27, 29 Marabatio, 361 Fiestecicas del Nacimiento,
Liss, Peggy, quoted, 293 Marcela de San Félix, 229-41, 149; Fiestecilla del
literacy: and entrance to 412; “A la Pasión,” 237; Nacimiento—I, 156-59; Lira a
convents, 42ini; of Spanish ascetism of, 241-50; la soledad, 164; Otro pie del
society, 8 “Coloquio de la Estimación certamen, 165; as poet, 139-
literary activity, religious de la Religión,” 237-38; 43, 146-48; portrait of, 124;
women’s, i Coloquio espiritual intitulado Romances a nuestra Madre
literary tradition: male, 143; “Muerte del Apetito, ” 244, Santa Teresa de Jesús, a su
women’s religious, 2 250—68; Coloquios espirituales, beatificación, 166; theatrical
literatura de testimonio, 13, 20 229, 236, 243-44; early life writing of, 148-49; virtues
literature: church, 237; of, 230-34; education of, of, 171-75
Hispanic, 413; mystical, 240 234; illegitimacy of, 230-32, María de San Jerónimo, 23-24,
Lives. See Vidas 234; “Loa a la soledad de las 35
living conditions: in beaterios, celdas,” 235-36; Hoticias de la María de San José, 24, 27—30,
318, 327-28; colonial, 295; vida de la Madre Soror 36, 412; background of, 19-
in convents, 3-4, 35, 243; Catalina de Sant. Joseph, 268- 21; “Carta de una pobre y
446 Index
presa descalza,” 29, 41-43, prevention of, 134 mysticism, 135; of Ana de San
108-12; “Elegía,” 44-45, Menéndez y Pelayo, Marcelino, Bartolomé, 22, 26, 32, 35; of
112—17; Instrucción de 229 Isabel de Jesús, 199-208;
novicias, 43-44; Libro de Me tepee, 359 language of, 134; of Marcela
recreaciones, 37-41, 80-108; Mexico, 293-94, 337; conquest de San Félix, 239; of Maria
as poet, 44-45; Ramillete de of, 6. See also New Spain de San José (Mexican), 350;
mirra, 29; portrait of, 120; Mexico City, 338, 355, 356-57 of Maria Magdalena, 347-48,
“Redondillas,” 45; and militancy: imagery of, 140; 358; of Maria Marcela, 361—
theatrical activities, 148 spiritual, 140—41, 143 62; in poetry, 143—44; of
María de San José (Mexican), milk: imagery of, 203; and Saint Teresa, 235; Spanish,
343, 412; portrait of, 291; mysticism, 353-55, 387-89, 8; suspicion of, lo-ii
Vida, 349-52, 378-87 391—93; as symbol, 427036
María Felipa de Jesús, 343, Miller, Beth, quoted, 14 Náhuatl, 340
359-60 mimicry, symbolic, of nazarertas, 295; use of term,
María Magdalena de Jesús, 343, nazarenas, 306-8 303-4
357-58 miracles, 425023; as proof of Nevares, Marta de, 232-33

María Magdalena Lorravaquio sainthood, 23 New Spain, 337; map of, 287.
Muñoz, 341, 343; Vida, 346— Miseria, Juan de la, 119, See abo Mexico
49. 374-78 418026 “Niño Peregrino” (statue), 190
María Marcela, 341, 343, 412; mismanagement, monastic, 237 “Niños cautivos” (statues), 284
Vida, 360—62, 405-10 misogyny: of Carmelite Reform, Nogarola, Isotta, 4
Mariana Alcoforado, 412 36; ecclesiastic, 137; in novel, early Spanish, 241
Mariana de la Encamación, patriarchal ideology, 42507 novices, training of, 35
343, 412, 4i6ni3; Relación Mohammedanism, 6 nuns: cacique, 343; childhood
de la fundación del Convento Molina, Miguel de, 8 experiences of, 191-92, 344;
Antiguo de Santa Teresa, 343- monasteries. See convents cloistered, 134;
46, 363-74 Monastery of San Joaquin, contemplative, 137-38;
Mariana de Santa Pazis, 303, history of, 294-95 Creole, 294, 345; criolla,
308; “Pastoral Letter,” 294, monasticism, and women, 2—6 356; dress of, 307; duties of,
310 marianismo. See Mary, Monja Coronada, 291, 294 134. 235. 339. 342; as fund¬
Virgin, cult of Moors, expulsion of, 6 raisers, 302; male treatment
Marina, doña. See Malintzín Morel, Juliana, 413 of, 25; as Mothers, 137-38;
marriage: of Antonia Lucía del Morillas, Cecilia, 131-32, 137- in New Spain, 338; as
Espíritu Santo, 298, 316, 38, 141; portrait of, 122 nurses, 358; self-
326; and illegitimacy, 230; of mortification, 12 allegorization of, 242-43;
Isabel de Jesús, 191-92, 197, Mother: power of, 411; as and social problems, 151,
208-9, 212, 217-18, 221- symbol, 16. See also imagery, 207; as spiritual mothers,
22; as literary theme, 241; of maternal 241; wealth of, 294; as
nuns, 192 “mother tongue,” 16; defined, 2 writers, 1-2, 13-17, 19, 40,
Martín, Luis, 297 Mount Carmel, history of, 39— 45. 137. 309. 340. 342, 350,
Mary, Virgin, 14, 305, 341; 41, 86-90, 101-6 41501
cult of, 193, 341, 353-54, Muriel, Josefina, 353, 356
427048; image of, 336; Murillo, Bartolomé Esteban, Oaxaca, 343, 355-57
manipulation of, 411; in 119 obedience: criolla nuns’
Mexico, 341-42; milk of, music: in convents, 13, 344; of rebellion against, 356;
353-55; in recreaciones, 40; Maria de San Alberto, 130; enforcement of, 35; ideal of,
sculpture of, 198; and and poetry, 149; and religious 4; to male confessors, 70, 78,
Sobrino sisters, 141; as calendar, 148; and religious 237; meanings of, 417010;
symbolic mother, 137, 141; celebration, 244; in Spanish and religious office, 136; as
and vision of Ana de San society, 8 Teresian doctrine, 24-26; as
Bartolomé, 32 mystical union, 183-84, 389- virtue, 246-48, 270, 275;
matrimony, spiritual, 249 91. 393-96; as heresy, 10; as vow of, 195
meditation. See recogimiento literary theme, 241-42, 248- Ocaña, 24
melancholy, monastic. 50 octavas, in plays, 149
Index 447
oral history, i Jesús, 199, 207; of male recreation, of Carmelite Order.

oral literature, 13 ecclesiastics, 25, 300; of See recreaciones
oral testimony, 20 Mary, 411; of Mother redemption, spiritual, 144
oral tradition, influence of, x symbol, 16; through refectory, illustrated, 127
orthodoxy, enforcement of, 6-7 mysticism, 10; women’s, 135, Reformation: Catholic, 6-7;
Osuna, Francisco de, 8 140-41; and writing, 16 Catholic, dogma of, 8;
prayer, 90, 106. See also Protestant, 6
pain: and closeness to God, 47- recogimiento Reformed Carmelites, 19, 29,
48, 56—57, 416026; as printing, requirements of, 294- 144, 308
rebirth of soul, 145 95 relación: of Cecilia del
Pantaleón Alvarez de Albreu, printing press, introduction of, Nacimiento, 133; of María
Domingo, 353 416018 de San Jerónimo, 24. See also
Par ay so occidental, 338 procession, religious, illustrated names of authors
parody, 240; use of, 246 detail of, 129 religions, native: assimilation
pastoral mode, use of, 150, profession, of nuns, 148, 185- of, 341; destruction of, 337-
160-63, 185-89 89. 355 38
patchwork: as method of Protestantism, 19; simplicity of, religiosity: inner, 10; of Isabel
textual structure, 14, 295, 8 de Jesús, 192-93, 198;
309—10, 412 Protestant Revolution, 6 Mexican, 355, 358; Spanish,
patronage, 299 publication, of texts, 7 243
Paul, Saint, 5 public domain, limited female religious retreat. See
peasants, depicted in Vidas, 33- access to, 139 recogimiento
34 Puebla, 343, 345, 351; map of, Renaissance, sexual politics in, .
persecution: of Ana de San 290 4
Bartolomé, 21, 33, 52-54, “purity of blood,” 151, 337, Restoration, Catholic, 21
61-65; of Maria de San José, 361; as requirement, 9-10, retribution, concept of, 305
20, 28-30, 36-37, 39, 41-43 24; reversal of suspension, Reuther, Rosemary, 203
Peru, 293—94; conquest of, 6; 356 rhetoric. Renaissance, 352
convents in, 9; map of, 286; Putnam, Emily James, quoted, Richardson, Herbert, 203
social fluidity in, 295 5 Roldán, Luisa, 285, 4i5n2
Petroff, Elizabeth, quoted, 203 romances, 13, 15, 201, 229,
Philip IV, King of Spain, 6 236-37; categorized, 42106;
Querétaro, 343, 360
Philip II, King of Spain, 132 in plays, 149. See also names
Que vedo, 8
Pilgrim Child. See “Niño of authors
Quezada, Gregorio de, 295,
Peregrino” Rosa, Sor, 343, 357
309-10
plays, religious, 236. See also Rules: for Nazarene convent,
drama, allegorical; names of 308; Teresian, 134, 235
authors race: in convents, 297; hidden
poetry: anacrostic, 147; mystic, assumptions of, x; in
135; on Saint Teresa, 135 Mexican convents, 339; sacrifices, as path to fame, 247
poetry contests. See certámenes privileges of, 4 saint'lore, 308
political influence, of Ana de racial issues, discussion of, 151 saints’ lives, books of, x, 7, 243
San Bartolomé, 26 Ramirez, Gerónimo, 347 “Saint Teresa, writer,” 18, 127
politics: Church, 133; Church, rapture, and convent culture, Salamanca, 193
and Ana de San Bartolomé, 151 Salazar, Maria de, 27. See also
24—26; European, and Ana reality, spiritual, 424n25 Maria de San José
de San Bartolomé, 26-27; iri rebellion: of English Salazar, Sebastián de, 27
Lima, 300; sexual, 2; sexual, Carmelites, 25; religious, 6, Sánchez, Juan, 347
and women’s learning, 4 10 Santa Cruz, Manuel Fernández,
Pontoise, 24 recogida, 214, 22302. See also 351
poverty: ideal of, 4; as virtue, enclosure; seclusion santorales. See saints’ lives,
270-71, 275; vow of, 41509 recogimiento, 8, 296—97. See books of
power: inside Church, 136; of also spirituality satire, 240-41
Church, 339; of Isabel de recreaciones, 37-39, 72046, 148 scholarship: of Maria de San
448 Index
José, 40; patristic, 5; Sobrino Morillas, José, 41905 310, 412

women’s, 4 Sobrino Morillas, María. See style, literary: of Ana de San
Schüssler Fiorenza, Elizabeth, María de San Alberto Bartolomé, 19—21, 30; of
203; quoted, 304 social mobility, and church, Antonia Lucia del Espíritu
seclusion: decline of, 426011; 356 Santo, 313; of Cecilia del
as escape, 192; as literary social mores, and language, 340 Nacimiento, 136—37, 144—
theme, 236. See also social order, enforcement of, 46, 420021; effect of
enclosure 337 Inquisition on, 7—8; of Isabel
seguidillas, 237 social structure, hierarchical, 4 de Jesús, 195, 198-99, 206;
self: abstraction of, 249; sense society: colonial, 294, 337; of Josefa de la Providencia,
of, 14 gendered structure of, 411; 310—12; of Juana Inés de la
self'Censorship, 229, 300, 322, role of women in, 135 Cruz, 341; of Lope de Vega,
332; need for, 7 soledad. See solitude 229—30; of Marcela de San
self-criticism, 341; as literary solitude, 5, 179—80; celebration Eélix, 229—30, 234—35, 239,
device, 42 of, 134-35; and eloquence, 248; of Maria de San
self-direction, female, 30 239; as literary theme, 228, Alberto, 136—37, 139, 146—
self-expression, through 248-50; and Marcela de San 48; of Maria de San José,
mysticism, 10 Félix, 235—36, 239, 240; 20-21, 37-38, 41-44, 4702;
self-knowledge, of Maria de San personification of, 249; of Maria de San José
José, 39 poetry on, 164, 279-81 (Mexican), 352; of Maria
self-legitimation, 229-30, 309; Song of Songs, 145, 202, 240— Magdalena, 349; of Maria
of Marcela de San Félix, 41, 42in7 Marcela, 361-62; of Mariana
230, 232, 234-35 soul, genderless, 12 de la Encamación, 345; of
self-recognition, 232 sources: cited in texts, 309; for nuns, 14; of nuns of New
sensuality: in poetry, 144; nuns’ writings, 20, 196—98; Spain, 340; of Relación of
profane, 201; sublimated, of nuns’ writing styles, 241— Josefa de la Providencia,
229 42 310—12; Renaissance, 248; of
sermons: influence of, x; Spain: imperial mission of, 294; Saint Teresa, 30; of women,
sources for, 309 map of, 118; medieval 412
Serrano y Sanz, Manuel, 238 Christian view of, 293 subculture, female, 3, 5
servants, depicted in Vidas, 33 spirituality, 2; aesthetic of, 351; submission, as virtue, 304
Sessa, Duke of, 231—33 and Carmelite Reform, 21, subversion: of Council of Trent,
Seville, 27, 28, 29, 37 37; of Cecilia del 7; defined, 423ni7; female
sexuality, transformation of, Nacimiento, 179-84; religious, 203; in literature,
11-13 interiorized, 8; literary 343; in nuns’ writings, 20,
Sigiienza y Góngora, Carlos, presentation of, 314; of 240; of writers, 16
338 Marcela de San Félix, 237, Susanna, Saint, 206-7
silence: as virtue, 246-47, 272, 239; of María de San José, symbolism: and inversion of
277; women’s, 16 36; and nuns’ destiny, 141; Church hierarchy, 202-3;
Simeón de la Sagrada Familia, women’s, ix—x. See also maternal, 137; of milk, 353-
28; quoted, 29 recogimiento 55; mystical, 145-46;
slavery: in convents, 297, 339; spiritual matrimony, 249 religious, 12; syncretistic,
in Spanish society, 148 spiritual redemption, as poetic 361-62; in work of Ana de
Sobrino, Antonio (father), 132; theme, 144 San Bartolomé, 33
portrait of, 122 status: of Isabel de Jesús, 199; syntax: and class, 15; of nuns’
Sobrino, Antonio (son), 143; women’s, 191 texts, X
portrait of, 123 Steggink, Otger, 4i6n22
Sobrino Morillas, Cecilia. See structure, literary: of Ana de Tapia, Luisa, 355
Cecilia del Nacimiento San Bartolomé’s Vidas, 31- technique, literary, 14
Sobrino Morillas, Antonio, 32; of Isabel de Jesus, 195- tedium, of convent life, 148
41905 96; of Maria de San José temptation, as literary theme,
Sobrino Morillas, Diego, 41905 (Mexican), 352; of nuns’ 231
Sobrino Morillas, Francisco, writing, 14; patchwork Teodora de San Agustín, 343,
41905 approach to, 14, 295, 309— 356; cartas, 396-99
Index 449
Tepeaca, 359 theology, liberation, ix “virility”: of dress, 306; of

Teresa de Jesús, Saint, ix, 1-2, Toledo, 27, 193, 344 virginity, 12
9, 20, 35, 119, 144; and Ana Tomás de Jesús, 25-26, 133, virtues, of Catalina de San
de San Bartolomé, 22—23, 135 José, 268-77
26, 35; androgynous image Tonantzin, 341 visión. See visions
of, 138-40; as “Angela,” 80- Torres, Maria de. See Salazar, visions: of Ana de San
86, 90-101, 106-7; Maria de Bartolomé, 22-23, 32-33,
beatification of, 23, 134-35, translations: of religious works, 46-47, 48-49, 50-51, 55-
138, 141, 166; canonization 6; by Sobrino sisters, 134- 56, 58, 59-61; of Antonia
of, 2, 45, 135, 138; death of, 35. 142 Lucia del Espíritu Santo,
23, 49-50, 59,121; as tropes, medieval, 142-43 306—8, 329—30; of cacique
“Doctor,” 138-39, 42oni8;
nuns, 400, 403; as education,
Fundaciones, 10, 346; Valladolid, 135, 355-56 4, 199, 204-5; of heresy,
influence of, 8-11, 19, 38; as Vega, Garcilaso de la, 150 315; interpretation of, ii,
inspiration, 344; in Vega, Lope de, 8, 229-34, 237, 203; of Isabel de Jesús, 191—
Instrucción de novicias, 43; 239, 249, 421027, 4220, 92, 195-96, 198-99, 209-
Interior Castle, 10; Jewish 423014; funeral of, 284 lo, 212-14, 2i8-2o, 222-24;
lineage of, 416022; Las Vela, Maria,41505 of Maria de San Alberto,
Moradas, 235; letters of, 36; Velasco, Pedro de. See Salazar, 133-34. 136, 142, 152-56;
and Maria de San José, 27- Sebastián de of Maria Magdalena, 375,
28, 39; as metaphor, 142-43; Velásquez, Diego, 18, 197 377-78; of Maria Marcela,
as model, 133, 138, 235-36, Venius, Otto, 120 361-62, 405-10; recording
241-42, 303, 342, 412, Verdugo Gaitán, Maria, 298 of, 135-36; of Saint Teresa,
417032; in poetry, 44-45, vernacular, in literature, 30, 147; and status, 191;
112-17, 165-67; portrait of, 196, 294, 310, 412 women’s, 8
126; as reformer, 8—10; viacrucis, reenactment of, 298, visual tradition, influence of, x
represented in art, 18, 126, 307-8 Vitorio, Francisco de, 425n5
127; as symbolic mother, Vicente, Gil, 150 vocabulary: and class, 15;
137-39; visions of Ana Vidas, 1-2, 13, 131, 148, 300; invented by Sobrino sisters,
de San Bartolomé, 32; Way of Ana de San Bartolomé, 134
of Perfection, 10 30—34; of cacique nuns, 357— vocation: artistic, 230; literary,
Teresa of Avila. See Teresa de 60; colonial, 340; loss of, 234; spiritual, 36; Teresian
Jesús, Saint 340; of Saint Teresa, 138; demand for, 10. See also
Teresian reform, influence of, style and structure of, 15-16. vocation, religious
10 See also names of authors vocation, religious, 21, 151; of
territories, Spanish vihuela, 421028 Ana de San Bartolomé, 22;
administration of, 296 Villa de Arenas, 193 of Cecilia del Nacimiento,
texts: circulation of, 5, 240, villancicos, 149, 237 169—71; of Indian women,
360; destruction of, 16, 135- Villán de Ara, 121 356; of Marcela de San Félix,
36, 138, 237, 244, 294, 339, violence: in colonial society, 231; of Maria Anna Agueda
424013; patchwork, 295; 296; and colonization, 337; de San Ignacio, 353; of
production of, 412 in convents, 5; male, 341; in Maria de San José, 27-28; of
theater: 4, 5, 13, 37-38, 40, Mexican convents, 348, 351; Mariana de la Encamación,
148-51, 156-63, 185-89, and Mexican texts, 340-41; 344; of Maria Marcela, 361
232-33. 234-35. 236-39, and sublimated sexuality, 12- von Bingen, Hildegaard, 137
240-41, 243-44, 245-46, 13
250—68, 418027, 420026, “Virgen de la Soledad” war, imagery of, 140
421028, 30; Golden Age, (painting), 228 Warner, Marina, quoted, ii
239; medieval, 150; popular, virginity, 12, 151; of Ana de wealth: of Church, 339; of
197; secular, 240 San Bartolomé, 22 colonial convents, 294; of
theatrical activities, and holy Virgin Mary. See Mary, Virgin convents, 136
days, 244 Virgin of Guadalupe, 338, 341; Western Paradise, 338
theological exegesis, as illustrated, 336. See also witches, and Inquisition, 238
proscribed activity, 141 Mary, Virgin womanhood, stereotype of, 132
Ij á U 1 0
450 Index
“womanist,” use of term, sources for male sermons, 136-37
427^33
309; as writers, 1-2, 81-82, writing: as act of defiance, 16;
women: in biblical narrative, 94-95, 311 benefits of, 14; confiscation
304; and colonization, 355- Women Under Monastidsm 5 of, 135-36; effect of Saint
56; and cults, 6; and work, as virtue, 271, 275 Teresa on, 138-39;
destruction of autochthonous works, literary: of Ana de San justification of, 80—84, 93~
societies, 338; in European Bartolomé, 30-31; of 98, 136, 412; as obedience,
medieval tradition, 137; Marcela de San Félix, 236- 14, 16; religious women’s, ix,
Indian, 296—97; and 37; of nuns, 13; of Sobrino i; as Verbo eterno, 134;
Inquisition, 6—7; and sisters, 134-35 women’s, 294
obedience to higher laws, worldview: Hispanic Catholic,
306; in Peruvian colonial 411; of Isabel de Jesús, 197; Zayas y Sotomayor, Maria de,
society, 297; as preachers, medieval Christian, 293; 4i5n2
205-6; in religious drama, patriarchal, ii; Spanish, Zumárraga, Juan de, 337
148; social status of, 301; as 293, 338; woman-centered.
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UNTOLD SISTERS
Hispanic Nuns in Their Own Works
Electa Arenal and Stacey Schlau
The writings of Old and New World Hispanic nuns of the sixteenth to
eighteenth centuries have, like those of other nun writers, been inaccessible
and unknown to the reading public until now. The eloquent voices included
here demonstrate that many religious women were prolific, skilled, and sen¬
sitive writers. Although a few, such as Saint Teresa of Avila and Sor Juana
Inés de la Cruz, were published authors, most of the sisters’ autobiographies,
histories, letters, and poems remained in convent archives. Arenal and Schlau’s
dilligent research now restores them to the canon of women’s literature.
The nuns’ works, often assigned by male confessors and subject to constant
scrutiny by the Inquisition, are elaborately worded to render ambiguous and
acceptable the feelings of women who chose the relative freedom and auton¬
omy of the convent over the restrictions of family life. Avowedly humble,
these courageous women frequently participated in the political and religious
life of their time, skillfully manipulating the male hierarchy and sometimes
suffering for their words. Even more fundamental to their writing is the
visionary, often ecstatic relationship to the Divine that they cultivated
ceaselessly. The reader is also offered glimpses of daily life in the convent,
including the literary “recreations,” dramas that entertained and instructed,
which the nuns wrote to relieve lives of rigorous discipline.
Arenal and Schlau provide an informative description of the turbulent times
and the personal lives of the writing nuns, as well as an insightful feminist
literary analysis of their works. The works themselves are presented in modem
Spanish and are followed by English translations. The whole will prove
invaluable to all readers of Spanish and Latin American literature and history,
women’s studies, and religious studies.
“The informative essays by Arenal and Schlau, in addition to the original texts
and English translations of little-known writing by Hispanic nuns, make
Untold Sisters a significant introduction to Hispanic convent culture and a
valuable contribution to feminist scholarship.”—^Jean Franco, Columbia Uni¬
versity
Electa Arenal teaches Spanish and Women’s Studies at City University of

New York, the College of Staten Island. STACEY SCHLAU is director of
Women’s Studies and teaches Women’s Studies and Spanish-American litera¬
ture at West Chester University.
Cover design by Susan Gutnik

Cover Illustration: Costumes of the nuns of the convents of Mexico, from Artes de Mexico.
Courtesy of the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia.
University of New Mexico Press ISBN; 0-8263-1106-7

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''^::|9

Translations by Amanda Powell

THOMAS J. BATA LIBRARY

electa '^iZrenal Stacey Scfilau

The publication of this book was supported by a grant

University of New Mexico Press

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

© 1989 by the University of New Mexico Press.

To my son and daughter Marcial and

To Lester, verdadero compañero

To Gabriela, who will, 1 hope, tell her

Note on the Translations xiii

Sexual Politics and Humor: Censorship and SelhCensorship 236

Works Cited 429

Our usage of capitalization and of Spanish attempt to be faithful to the

many years that have gone into writing this book

Albertson, Maria Elena Balzola, Stephen Bomstein, Graciela Castro de Are-

text is unique, and cannot be

in 1977 I arrived in Madrid and began searching card cat-

I. Nelly Furman, “Textual Criticism," in Women and Language in Literature and

‘Xedaimin^ the Mother ‘Tongue:

-ncounted Hispanic nuns wrote their Lives from the

Women in Cfiristian Monasticism

communities of women strengthened the tradition of female spirituality. The

In the monastery, educated nuns were warned by ignorant, timorous, or

bition against book learning, therefore, virtually eliminated their participa¬

example. In Spain, Maria de la Visitación became a cause célebre when she

n^fie Jiispanic Religious Context

saintly in the eyes of a church leadership and a monarchy threatened by the

de Vega, Quevedo, Góngora, Calderón de la Barca, and other Renaissance

Saint ‘Teresa and the Visionary Model

Sexuality, Jianguage, and H^ower

Under the authority of a language that had been carefully expurgated

The injunction to confession in a manual for confession of the period illus¬

Some of what we can only consider masochistic and sadistic practices—

CHuns Writing and Writing C^uns

of everyday existence. They domesticated the imagery of religious myth and

conformity. They could be used to express ironic flattery, to place responsi¬

“I admit,” answered Justa, “that . . . there have been many [women]

Although members of women’s religious communities obeyed confessors’

n Movement of ‘Religious ‘Women

l-na de San Bartolomé (1549—1626) and Maria de San

Sina de San 'Bartolomé: ^de Making of a

sin tener quién me dé luz del caso, no es Dios, ni su condición . . . , y esto

While involved in internal Carmelite conflicts. Ana de San Bartolomé

such events as the Protestant attempts to conquer Antwerp, the escape to

Maria de San José: T)ialogue of a

institutionalization of the Carmelite Reform, dangerously independent in

iXna de San Bartolomé: H^iie Making of a

Ahora no puedo yo decir las gracias de Dios como yo las sentía

Yo estaba con la pena posible y dije al Señor; “Mi ad, Señor, lo

(1 was as miserable as could be and I said to the Lord; “Look, Lord,

Madre Ana had an unassailable reputation as a great mystic. Her intense

Y un día yo dije al confesor una cosa de mi alma, y él no lo tomó

alzó un lado de la capa el lado del corazón, y me mostró la Santa

Teresian righteousness fueled Madre Ana’s courage as she developed her

Fui muy confortada el tiempo que estuvimos juntas y con mucho

(I was very comforted during the time we were together and

Praising the French manner of enforcing obedience—through kindness and

Maria de San José: T)ialogue of a

“Vuestra reverencia lo dice tan bien todo que, si mi patecer se

(Your reverence says everything so well that, if my wishes were to be

Carmel—its origins, characteristics, martyrs, and leaders. Woven into the