Rebeldes con Pausa: Teresa de Jesús, Cervantes, Fray Luis, and the Curious Path to Holiness

Abstract

Early modern theologians often cast female curiosity as both a moral flaw and an epistemic transgression. Aware of this suspicion, Teresa of Ávila professed to have renounced such dangerous impulses in her youth. Yet the persistent presence of curiosity in her writings suggests a strategic redeployment—one that fosters attentiveness and subtly renegotiates ecclesiastical authority as she actively advances reform within the Carmelite order. Through life-writing and scriptural exegesis, Teresa cultivates a disciplined appetite for knowledge: an appetite that outwardly conforms to, yet quietly subverts, doctrinal anxieties surrounding women’s intellectual desires. Her use of curiosidad moves fluidly between sacred and secular registers—sometimes connoting superficial fascination, at other times signaling a deeper, interior restlessness. Resisting reductive interpretation, Teresa reveals a sophisticated and self-aware engagement with a disposition both morally ambiguous and intellectually generative. The same culture that once feared her intellect would ultimately aestheticize it. After her death, Teresa’s relics were fragmented and displayed in Philip II’s Wunderkammer, transforming her once-condemned curiosidad into curiositas, an imperial collectible. Reading Teresa alongside her posthumous interpreters—Fray Luis de León and Miguel de Cervantes—this essay explores how her radical epistemological ambition reverberated through Spanish intellectual culture. Spanning this cultural arc—from sin to spectacle, from forbidden desire to sanctified display—Teresa emerges as a masterful theorist and activist reformer of spiritual authority. In these expansive roles, she reveals the immense and often contradictory power that curiosity wielded in the early modern world.

1. Introduction

In 1701, the Franciscan moralist Antonio Arbiol y Díaz (1651–1726) launched a pointed critique against what he regarded as a growing moral peril: curiosity. Condemning this “impulse to knowledge” as a “most ugly and pernicious vice,” he found it especially dangerous when embodied by women (Arbiol y Díaz 1789, pp. 112, 137)1. To Arbiol, female curiosity was not a benign inclination but a spiritual liability, one that left women particularly vulnerable to deception and error. He was especially troubled by women who sought to frame their spiritual experiences through theological study—an ambition he dismissed as both presumptuous and doomed to failure. Such efforts, he argued, produced nothing but “arrogant theories” (bachillerías), born of texts that women inevitably “mispronounced” and “misunderstood.” (Arbiol y Díaz 1789, p. 138).

As caustic as this invective was, it was hardly novel. Centuries earlier, Augustine had famously classified curiosity as concupiscentia oculorum—a seductive “lust of the eyes” that drew believers away from divine truth (Augustine 2025).2 This appetite for knowledge continued to be regarded as especially pernicious in women, who continued to be cast as both morally suspect and epistemologically unstable. By the sixteenth century, theologians—drawing on Tertullian, John Chrysostom, and Thomas Aquinas—had escalated these warnings into a form of moral censure, aimed specifically at women’s engagement with textual interpretation and spiritual writing (Tertullian 1994, vol. 4; Chrysostom 1994, Series 1, vol. 13; Aquinas 1947, II–II, q. 167, a. 1–2). Beneath these strident condemnations lay an implicit acknowledgment: that the curious woman, merely by questioning and articulating spiritual knowledge, posed a potent threat, capable not only of challenging but also of destabilizing entrenched hierarchies of gendered authority and doctrinal orthodoxy.

Whether Arbiol y Díaz had Saint Teresa specifically in mind is impossible to determine, yet his censure of female curiosity sheds light on the fraught intellectual and spiritual terrain she had to navigate. Teresa’s autobiography, The Book of My Life (Vida), offers a striking rejoinder: a woman who not only demonstrates curiosity but deliberately negotiates its place within the moral framework of her time. Through the act of narrating her life and interpreting the Scripture said to guide it, Teresa articulates a sustained appetite for knowledge—one that both conforms to and quietly subverts the doctrinal suspicion surrounding women’s epistemological desires.

Aware of the dubious reputation attached to curiosity, Teresa nonetheless speaks of—or confesses—her inclination with notable caution. Early in the Vida, she admits that even as a child, she was “curious about everything” (era curiosa en todo cuanto hacía), recalling how she once believed this impulse to be “a virtue” (me parecía virtud) (Teresa of Avila 2001, p. 23).3 Acknowledging her “mistake,” she claims to have largely overcome the tendency—“I have greatly improved the curiosity that used to afflict me” (me hallo mejorada de curiosidad que solía tener)—only to concede, in the very next breath, “not completely, which is the reason why I am always doing penance” (aunque no del todo, que no me veo estar en esto siempre mortificada) (Teresa of Avila [1588] 2001, Obras completas de Santa Teresa de Jesús, p. 734). This dance of asserting, erasing, and reasserting her intellectual drive underscores Teresa’s gift for simultaneously affirming and denying a trait that could be deemed spiritually hazardous.

The tension intensifies when we consider the polyvalent semantics of curiosidad in the early modern world. Moving fluidly between sacred and secular registers, Teresa deploys the term in multiple contexts: sometimes referencing appearances—her own or others’—and at other times evoking a deeper interior restlessness, a yearning to understand. Her usage resists neat categorization, signaling a sophisticated, self-aware engagement with a term whose moral and theological contours remained unsettled.

While the transparency of Teresa’s rhetorical posture may be open to debate—whether in terms of motive, strategy, or spiritual sincerity—the primacy of curiosity as both an intellectual and emotional force in her writing is undeniable. Even when her inquisitiveness appears formulaic, it fuels a sustained epistemological quest. At a moment when feminine virtue was defined by silence and enclosure, Teresa’s desire to know—and the understanding it yields—emerges as a potent force. Although she sometimes disavows the impulse (“I’ve never, glory to God, felt the desire to know things, since I gain nothing by knowing [anything],” jamás, gloria a Dios, fui curiosa en desear saber cosas, ni se me da nada de saber más), she offers many other instances affirming it: “the great desire I have to know—how is your Excellency’s health and the rest” (Tengo mucho deseo de saber; cómo le va a vuestra excelencia de salud, y lo demás) (Teresa of Avila [1588] 2001, Obras completas de Santa Teresa de Jesú, pp. 759, 38). Or again: “I received your letter—it always gives me great joy to know from you, to see how our Lord keeps you aligned with His great design, which is no small favor, living in this Babylon” (me da mucho contento saber de vuestras mercedes y ver cómo las tiene nuestro Señor en sus buenos propósitos, que no es pequeña merced, estando en esa Babilonia) (Teresa of Avila [1588] 2001, Obras completas de Santa Teresa de Jesús, p. 166). Even when claiming to focus solely on divine intent, Teresa repeatedly reveals an insistent wish to know “the rest”—how worldly matters, especially those involving her allies and the court in Madrid (her “Babylon”), unfold around her.

Taken together, these expressions of curiosity—whether aimed at Scripture, correspondence, or worldly affairs—suggest a mode of knowing that exceeds mere introspection.

In Teresa’s writing, curiosity frequently prompts action, emerging not as passive reflection but as a performative gesture with tangible spiritual and material consequences. Her “impulse for knowledge,” in other words, exceeds the traditional framing of a “passive” mystic condition. Scholars often argue that the danger of Teresa’s mysticism lies in its interiority—its proximity to Reformation-era individualism and heterodox movements such as illuminism. Yet perhaps the perceived threat resided elsewhere: not solely in her introspection, but in her capacity to merge cognition, volition, and action within her mystic practice. Teresa’s “rebelliousness” may stem less from contemplative withdrawal and more from an active spirituality that seamlessly intertwines thought, desire, and movement.

Within the charged moral and theological climate of the late sixteenth century, Teresa de Jesús dared to infuse her autobiographical and mystical texts with her own, unnamed curiosidad—an impulse whose early modern meanings ranged from vanity to intellectual transgression. This essay traces how such curiosity shaped not only the composition of Teresa’s works but also their complex afterlife. Transformed into relics and objects of public devotion, Teresa’s body of work—and, quite literally, her physical body—was fragmented and dispersed across the Spanish empire, sometimes consigned to royal collections like a curiositas in a Habsburg Wunderkammer. While these guarded spaces remained accessible to only a privileged few, her texts and testimonies—both direct and mediated—circulated widely, becoming regular touchstones for readers within and beyond the cloister. Writers as diverse as Cervantes and Fray Luis de León eulogized her intellect and public example, reframing her paradoxical figure for an imperial stage of contested Catholic piety.

Teresa’s quiet yet rebellious journey is examined here, particularly through the lenses of these two writers. While Fray Luis’s evolving admiration for her expansive devotion remains insufficiently explored, Cervantes’s lesser-known poem—composed for her beatification in 1614—centers not on her saintly aspirations but on her secular epistemological gifts. Each writer, in his own way, pays homage to the path forged by the resilient and curious Teresa de Cepeda y Ahumada. Most crucially, the dynamic concept of curiositas illuminates Teresa as a study in contrasts: at once “possessed and saint,” viewed through Augustine’s “lustful eyes,” yet ultimately venerated by Philip II’s envious royal gaze in his Wunderkammer. Spanning this cultural arc—from sin to spectacle, from forbidden desire to sanctified display—Teresa emerges as a masterful theorist-practitioner and one of curiosity’s most emblematic relics. In so doing, she reveals the immense and often contradictory power that curiosity wielded in the early modern world.

2. Curiosity in Word and Deed

Perhaps it was this real-life side of mysticism that made Max Aub wonder, fifty years ago, “who is more active than our most prominent female mystic [Teresa]?” (Aub 1966, p. 233) For Aub, Saint Teresa and Saint John of the Cross were no otherworldly dreamers but rather “activists” (“nuestros místicos son ‘activistas’” emphasis is the author’s) (Aub 1966, Manual, p. 233). In his view, mysticism and asceticism differ not in their yearning to know God but in what they do with that knowledge: mysticism translates insight into reform and transformation, while asceticism turns inward, privileging renunciation. While both religious practices aim to “know God,” he concedes, only mystics use this knowledge to bring about some form of action (i.e., reform) in the real world. Aub reminds us that after the death or castigation of Erasmists in Spain in the 1500s, mystics were the only reformists left on the Spanish ground determined to fight for a more genuine view and practice of Christianity. Aub describes these mystic figures, Saint John and Saint Teresa, as “battered errant knights that lost many battles but ultimately were able to leave behind an undeletable footprint [in Spanish cultural history].” (Aub 1966, Manual, p. 234).

Aub’s metaphor of mysticism as embodied resistance resonates with the ethical vision of other thinkers of his time. Especially relevant for the purposes of this essay is Simone Weil, a twentieth-century philosopher and activist who likewise challenged the binary between contemplation and action. Weil, who also fought on the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War (as Aub), saw mystical insight as inseparable from ethical engagement, see (Weil 2002, p. 117; Weil 1973, p. 63).4 For her, mysticism demanded a radical commitment to suffering and justice. Like Teresa, she saw divine knowledge not as a retreat but as a summons—a call to intervene in the world, even at great personal cost.

Though separated by centuries, both women pursued transcendence not as escape but as ethical intensification—a means of reshaping both self and society. In this light, Teresa’s curiosidad—and her mystical praxis more broadly—can be read not only as interior piety but also as a form of “spiritual activism,” grounded in an epistemology of attention and a politics of reform. Whether in sixteenth-century Ávila or twentieth-century France and Spain, mysticism—far from evading the world—emerges, for these figures, as a deliberate way of moving within it.

Yet in sixteenth-century Spain, such ideas placed women, especially religious women, on precarious footing. Few environments were more suspicious of female intellectual agency than the convent, where inquiry was usually tolerated only within narrow devotional confines. The Holy Office regarded practices like mental prayer and contemplation with suspicion, worried they might be linked to “illuminated” heresies. At a time when the Inquisition was prosecuting alleged alumbrados and punishing so-called “false visionaries,” Teresa stood on volatile ground.

As Roland H. Bainton observed, “the Inquisition never ceased to distrust mysticism”—a distrust that loomed especially large over female contemplatives (Bainton 1977, p. 33). Alison Weber has further illustrated the stakes of Teresa’s position, showing how she lived “under the shadow of Magdalena de la Cruz,” the infamous false mystic whose legacy of disrepute lingered over other “alumbradas” like María de Cazalla and Francisca Hernández.5

Teresa’s identity as a mystic thus complicated her relationship to curiosity. On one hand, mystical vocation allowed her to disclaim personal agency in acquiring new insights, since mystics were supposed to receive “truths beyond the understanding.” (Hoad 2023)6. On the other hand, any woman’s active, analytic pursuit of theological truth could be cast as heretical. As the Bishop of Puebla reminded Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz almost a century later, there is a difference between scholastic and mystical theology: the former is learned through acts of understanding, the latter through the loving affections of the will.”7 Tolerating Teresa’s “affective” knowledge, then, did not necessarily make room for her active, searching intellect.

Teresa deftly navigated this predicament by emphasizing the ineffability of her mystical encounters. “One cannot understand [the mystic trance], much less describe it,” she wrote, “since [the soul or reason] cannot comprehend what it is understanding; it understands by not understanding it.”8 Revelation, in her telling, is an event beyond the bounds of ordinary cognition (Ramírez 2015, p. 302). Her claim might be slightly modified by modern theological perspectives, which hold that revelation requires the recipient’s acceptance—an implicit acknowledgment of some volitional dimension. Teresa admits being halfway there when she famously underscored her understanding that God’s words “are deeds” (Sus palabras son obras), perhaps suggesting that although divine knowledge may be a gift, it also demands a human response (Teresa of Avila [1588] 2001, Obras completas de Santa Teresa, p. 144). Max Aub and Simone Weil would call that response “action,” though Teresa had little freedom to make such a claim openly, lest she appear willful and risk accusations of heterodoxy. Consequently, the reformist rarely admits that her understanding may have been sharpened by these divine encounters and translated into real action.

Revealing how easily a woman’s claim to knowledge—even if divinely bestowed—could be construed as overreach, she admits in El libro de las fundaciones that “I later understood what it was, but did not dare to say it, since we live in a world where one must think what others think of oneself.” (Teresa of Avila [1588] 2001, Obras completas de Santa Teresa, p. 591). Like the notion of curiosity itself, this private form of understanding could only be acknowledged covertly. In this sense, Teresa’s carefully veiled “activation” of knowledge resonates with Weil’s insistence that spiritual insight demands both contemplation and action. In an era that required Teresa to mask the volitional side of her mysticism, she nonetheless chose action beyond this private understanding—lest she be seen as crossing from “affective” devotion into the realm of scholastic “acts of understanding,” which male authorities guarded so vigilantly.

3. Fray Luis’ “Forgotten Apology” and Teresa’s Veiled Activism—Across Centuries

By the 1590s, Teresa of Ávila was increasingly recognized not only as a mystic but also as a figure of spiritual reform. Her frequent expressions of humility and self-effacement may have offered some protection from direct condemnation during her lifetime. Yet, the deeply involved nature of her spiritual practice, along with the meticulous attention given to her writings after her death, only heightened the uncertainty surrounding her status as an intellectual and theological authority. Contemporary critics—including Alonso de la Fuente, Francisco de Pisa, Juan de Lorenzana, and Juan de Orellana—viewed her repeated claims of “ignorance” and “inadequacy” with suspicion, interpreting them as rhetorical strategies that concealed a deeper engagement with knowledge traditionally denied to women. To these men, even her constant appeals to “obedience” seemed less like genuine submission and more like a calculated front for doctrinal ambition.

No accusation haunted Teresa more persistently than the charge that she had overstepped her place as a woman by assuming the role of a teacher and reformer.9 Despite her insistence on obedience and humility, her visibility as a founder, writer, and spiritual director stood in uneasy tension with Saint Paul’s long-invoked injunctions against women teaching (1 Cor. 14:34; 1 Tim. 2:12). Alonso de la Fuente invoked Pauline doctrine in his denunciation to the Inquisition: “Esta mujer se mete a enseñar, contraviniendo la palabra de San Pablo.”10 Indeed, in and beyond the canonization process, multiple witnesses testified to Teresa’s desire for her nuns to “learn and understand Christian doctrine and the mysteries of faith,” hiring teachers and encouraging critical engagement—quietly forming a community of seekers, even as she disavowed formal authority.11

In this fraught context, an unlikely defender emerged in Fray Luis de León—a poet, theologian, and towering scholar. He was commissioned in 1588 to edit Teresa’s writings for publication, an apparently routine task that took an unexpected turn, becoming one of Teresa’s most consequential advocates. Although he had written La perfecta casada (1583), a text championing patriarchal ideals of female modesty and silence, his encounter with Teresa’s works revealed a profound shift in perspective. The woman who might once have appeared irreconcilable with his idealized vision of Christian femininity came to embody, in his later view, a vessel of divine wisdom and ecclesial renewal. Editing her works thus became, for him, a theologically significant act—culminating in a compelling preface (the so-called Apología) that not only defended Teresa’s right to write and teach, but also functioned as a deliberate gesture of theological rehabilitation.

In the Apología, Fray Luis argued that Teresa had not transgressed by offering instruction. He compared her revelatory experiences to those of canonized male saints, finding her teachings orthodox and transformative. “Look at the nuns and monks of the Discalced Carmelites,” he urged. “Formed under her doctrine. Are they deluded? Mad? Or are they, in fact, the clearest example of pure religion?” In this flourish, Fray Luis positioned Teresa’s mysticism not as a questionable innovation but as a force for authentic renewal (León 1944, p. 919). Rather than confining her to personal piety, he emphasized and praised the tangible fruits of her ministry: the communities shaped by her guidance. By defending Teresa’s spiritual authority, he effectively legitimized the activist dimension of her mysticism.

Over four centuries later, the Church formally affirmed what Fray Luis had intuited. In 1970, Pope Paul VI declared Teresa a Doctor of the Church—the first woman to receive the title. Reflecting on this elevation, Paul VI highlighted her unique blend of spiritual and intellectual depth. Yet he also repeated the enduring tension by attributing much of her insight to divine “initiative,” an echo of the standard framing of women’s knowledge as a gift rather than a product of active study:

¿De dónde le venía a Teresa el tesoro de su doctrina? Sin duda alguna, le venía de su inteligencia … de su correspondencia a la gracia acogida en su alma … Pero ¿era ésta la única fuente de su ‘eminente doctrina’? … Nos encontramos … ante un alma en la que se manifiesta la iniciativa divina extraordinaria, sentida y posteriormente descrita llana, fiel y estupendamente por Teresa con un lenguaje literario peculiarísimo.

(Paul VI 1970)

While the title of Doctor seemingly resolved questions about Teresa’s orthodoxy, it renewed debate about whether women’s theological authority is best accepted when framed as passively received rather than actively pursued. Male theologians like Aquinas are rarely portrayed as mere vessels; in Teresa’s case, her curiosidad is often sanctified only through a language of humility and submission. Teresa’s rhetorical balancing act—between deference and discernment—remains not merely a historical posture but a model for the compromises still often demanded of women who speak with spiritual or intellectual authority.

4. From Curious Woman to Canonized Curiosity

If Fray Luis de León’s 1588 edition of Teresa’s works—and his robust defense of her orthodoxy—did not entirely dispel theological reservations, it nonetheless set a precedent in which her mystical knowledge could be publicly acknowledged, if not fully embraced.12 Among those who bore witness to this reframing was Miguel de Cervantes, who dedicated a poem to Teresa in 1614, the year of her beatification.13 By then, she was officially numbered among the blessed, even as tensions remained between the humility she invoked and the autonomy she exercised.

While Fray Luis made Teresa’s works theologically palatable, Cervantes rendered her spiritual journey intellectually resonant. In the poem “A los éxtasis de la Beata Madre Santa Teresa de Jesús,” he focuses not only on her mystical raptures but on how her pursuit of understanding shaped her path to holiness. A superficial reading of Cervantes’s poem might see only the elevation of Teresa’s mystical experiences. On deeper inspection, however, it highlights the intellectual rigor behind her mysticism and critiques a culture that often reduced holy women to mere symbols. In an era prone to aestheticizing, politicizing, and domesticating sanctity, Cervantes refuses to cast her ascent to glory in conventional terms. For Cervantes, sainthood becomes a mystery grounded in knowledge—a sacred pedagogy where divine ecstasy instructs as much as it inspires:

• Fue su espíritu alzado a las estrellas,
• y en su pecho dejó Dios estampadas
• de su sabiduría las señales.
• (Her spirit was lifted to the stars,
• and on her breast God stamped
• the signs of His wisdom)14

Divine union here serves as an epistemological gateway—God is Teresa’s teacher, and she is a strikingly “greedy” (codiciosa) student—an explicit allusion to a kind of epistemological fervor typically regarded as dangerous in women.15 By framing her intellectual pursuit not as transgression but as sanctification, Cervantes echoes Teresa’s own sentiment in Vida 40.1: “No hay saber más alto que el de Dios, y a él se encamina mi alma” (“There is no knowledge higher than that of God, and to it my soul strives”).

Cervantes’s poem to Teresa, in sum, celebrates a female saint who, through these instructive ecstasies, became “humbler,” but also “wiser” [more knowledgeable], and more “obedient” [though it remains unclear to what or to whom] (emphasis added, más humilde, más sabia y obediente). This is as close as one could come, in the early 1600s, to celebrating the knowledge or understanding of a woman, holy or not. Strikingly, in a religious poem, Cervantes dedicates great space to describing the process by which Teresa’s soul and intellect are elevated, while saying relatively little about the more traditional virtues that supposedly earned her mystical enlightenment in the first place.

The novelist’s sensitivity to Teresa’s journey may have stemmed from personal rather than devotional proximity. Cervantes’ sister Luisa joined the Discalced Carmelites in Alcalá de Henares in 1567 (just before Teresa’s residency at that convent for a few months), and Cervantes himself was present when his sister professed vows.16 Books that Teresa “constantly read” still remain in the same convent, attesting—through witnesses like Luisa—not only to her devotion to prayer, but also to study and writing. Perhaps for Cervantes, Teresa was no remote or abstract saint, but a quiet—yet dissonant—presence, felt both in life and in text, close at hand. Aware that her image was celebrated, contested, and even reified across both religious and secular spheres, he subtly emphasizes that her quest for knowledge could not be confined to the spectacle of relics and royal pageantry.

Yet while Teresa’s influence may have lingered quietly in Cervantes’s imagination, her legacy beyond the cloister would take on a far more visible and politicized form. As her sanctity gained institutional momentum, the mystic who once dwelled among books and sisters became a symbol mobilized through relics, ritual, and imperial display. As saints were canonized, their relics became prized emblems in both courtly rituals and ecclesiastical pageantry. Teresa’s body of work—and literally, her body—would be dispersed throughout the empire, some parts finding their way into Philip II’s showcase at El Escorial, alongside bones, robes, and other saintly relics.17 The reformer who once declared, “¿Qué se me da a mí de los reyes y señores, si no quiero sus rentas…?” (“What do I care about kings and lords, if I do not want their riches?”) was not blind to the uses of wealth—she sought it when necessary to found and sustain her convents (Teresa of Avila [1588] 2001, Obras completas de Santa Teresa, p. 283). Yet she consistently cast such efforts within a larger spiritual resistance to the trappings of worldly power. It is thus a profound irony that the woman who navigated courtly networks out of necessity should, in death, be absorbed into the very spectacle of empire she once held at a distance. Her sanctity—rooted in reform, prayer, and mystical authorship—was ultimately reframed through the gold-leaf optics of imperial veneration.

While Cervantes began to explore the concept of sanctity in 1614, readers would have to wait until the 1615 publication of the second part of Don Quixote for a fuller insight into his vision. There, in Chapter 9, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza debate the relative merits of knights and saints in a memorable exchange that may offer the clearest Cervantine meditation on holiness. Sancho praises humble, healing saints—those whose miracles and relics inspire tangible devotion—above emperors and knights, claiming their “fame,” both worldly and eternal, surpasses that of any earthly conqueror.

What appears at first to be a contrast between secular and sacred renown in fact operates as a coded reflection on grace and spiritual authority. Within the doctrinal constraints imposed by the Inquisition, Cervantes deftly recasts “fame” as a metaphor for sanctity and divine favor. Through Sancho’s voice, he affirms a form of embodied holiness linked to healing, suffering, and relics without directly challenging ecclesiastical power.

The fame of those who raise the dead, give sight to the blind, heal the lame, and cure the sick… is better, for both this world and the next, than the fame left behind by all the gentile emperors and knights-errant who ever lived.

(Cervantes Saavedra 2005, chap. 2.9, pp. 507–8)

(Cogido le tengo… luego la fama del que resucita muertos… mejor fama será, para este y para el otro siglo.)

(Cervantes Saavedra 2011)

This reframing of fame elevates the miraculous over the martial, and the spiritually efficacious over the politically grand. The saint’s “fame,” reinforced through chapels, relics, and royal reverence, gestures toward a deeper form of power—one rooted not in domination, but in devotion.

Cervantes also underscores the irony of relic culture: that saints’ remains—some adorned with wigs, prosthetic eyes, and carved limbs—are carried in solemn processions by monarchs themselves. Sancho continues:

The bodies and relics of the saints… have lamps, candles, shrouds, crutches, paintings, wigs, eyes, and legs, increasing devotion and enhancing their Christian fame. Kings carry their relics on their shoulders, kiss the fragments of their bones, and decorate their private chapels and favorite altars with them.

(Cervantes Saavedra 2011)

(Los cuerpos y las reliquias de los santos… tienen lámparas, velas, mortajas, muletas, pinturas, cabelleras, ojos, piernas… los cuerpos de los santos o sus reliquias llevan los reyes sobre sus hombros, besan los pedazos de sus huesos, adornan y enriquecen con ellos sus oratorios.)

(Cervantes Saavedra 2011)

This layered irony was not lost on Erasmus of Rotterdam either. In De cultu sanctorum, he lamented the Church’s obsession with “drivel-stained napkins” while ignoring “the books [the saints] wrote.”18 For Erasmus, it was the animorum reliquiae—“relics of the mind”—that carried enduring value, not the spectacle of bodily fragments.

Cervantes echoes this sentiment in his poem dedicated to Teresa, where he celebrates a sanctity rooted in her intellectual and spiritual legacy rather than in relics or outward displays of devotion. In that 1614 poem, he offers both homage and critique—revealing a Teresa whose thirst for knowledge is as defining as her mystical raptures, a saint not merely to be venerated, but also to be read. His reflections anticipate the Church’s eventual recognition of her as a Doctor of the Church, even as they expose the enduring tension between revering her memory and containing her radical potential.

By bringing Teresa into his creative orbit, Cervantes exemplifies the contradictions that continued to haunt her legacy. On one hand, her beatification (and later canonization) seemed to resolve ecclesiastical anxieties about her mystical practices; on the other, her advocacy for an educated faith—especially among her nuns—remained suspect in a Church still inclined toward docile, devotional models of female spirituality. Cervantes’s verses, together with the ironies voiced in Don Quixote II.9, thus illuminate a Teresa whose holiness is inseparable from her hunger for knowledge—an insight often obscured by the grand pageants that, in parading relics such as her famous arm, simultaneously celebrated and commodified her sainthood.

5. Conclusions

While Teresa’s legacy has been the subject of considerable scholarly attention, the explicitly social and political dimensions of her mysticism—as a form of lived activism—remain underexplored. We are only beginning to assess the elusive yet far-reaching influence of “activist mystics” like Saint Teresa—Teresa de Jesús, de Ahumada, de Cepeda—on her ostensibly secular contemporaries, including Cervantes. For some, her words and actions offered a new model of religious experience, one that operated at the margins of both orthodoxy and social convention. Others have seen in her singular mastery of subversive rhetoric a blueprint for writers of various spiritual persuasions—showing how to cloak epistemological ambition, such as intellectual curiosity, beneath modest, carefully fashioned narrative personae rendered with an air of pious credibility. Yet most would agree that Teresa’s life beyond the page, her tireless travels and community foundations, was no less transformative. It constituted a radical gesture of defiance against the injunctions of silence and enclosure that shaped early modern expectations of women.

“She did not write everything,” Fray Luis de León observed, “nor was she able to say many things, or talk about what happened after she published that [Life], as I found out in her papers and from the trustworthy people who knew her well” (no la escribió toda [su vida], ni dijo muchas cosas… ni pudo decir las que le sucedieron después de aquella escritura que yo he buscado y recogido, informándome de sus papeles y de personas de mucho crédito que la trataron y conocieron) (León 1944, p. 921). In other words, Teresa’s legacy was always larger, and, at times, riskier, than her written record. Her teachings could never be fully contained in text, even when they were widely and emphatically recognized by contemporaries, both supporters and detractors.

Teresa’s relentless drive for knowledge and expression expanded the personal and collective horizons of female spirituality and agency in an era largely hostile to such growth. Did this perilous yet astonishingly effective journey begin with her often-confessed, half-repentant desire “to know”? If, as Vladimir Nabokov once claimed, curiosity represents “insubordination in its purest form,” then Teresa’s own curiosity may have fueled, from the very beginning, her life story and the inexorable momentum of the Discalced reform (Nabokov 1947, p. 47).

With humble—and almost barefoot—steps, Teresa de Cepeda’s determined epistemological ambition left an unmistakable imprint on Spanish cultural history. Much like the unruly idea of curiosity in the early modern age, her “fame,” as Sancho dictated, soon acquired a life of its own in ways that no single narrative, institution, or orthodoxy could fully reify or contain.